After having sued my foster parents for emancipation 6 months prior, my best friend’s parents have helped me move into what would become the one and only trailer I ever lived it. That night I would spend the first night alone of my adult life. And I would have that realization at the exact moment I slipped into sleep.

I thought I wanted to be a game developer back then and was making a bunch of hobby projects with Game Maker, had taught myself C++ (to a mediocre level), was writing (not very good) music, and generally burning myself the fuck out. -.-

The programming turned into a career (not in gamedev though). Everything else turned into an anxiety disorder.

I was 18 in the year 2000.

I’d just started university and spent every waking moment going out clubbing with my mates and making questionable decisions with women.

Had an amazing time. And thank fuck there is zero evidence of anything I ever did. No photos (except a few prints), no videos, no social media.

I feel sorry for kids nowadays. You can’t get away with anything.

On my birthday I took my practical exam in motorcycling and got my drivers license and the first drive I did was 800 km from Germany to Poland on vacation with a friend who didn’t have a drivers license yet. My family already went there a couple of days earlier but I wanted to drive myself.

Trying to survive after 9months military training that cost me lots of money, mental health and turned my life even more into the destructive directions than it would have without. (Sorry, but you asked : )

Working my ass off just to get nowhere.

I joined the army because I had no idea what to do with my life.

35 years later I still have no idea what to do with my life.

Any other year that long ago would probably be full of difficult to remember details, but I spent most of that year in military training. Left on the evening on my 18th birthday. Guess you could say I was involuntarily into health and physical fitness. Fashion, not so much.

Then I came back home and started a 2 year degree in electronics. I’d say that was a poor choice, vocationally, but I don’t really have any regrets about the path my life has taken. I never really have known who I wanted to be when I grew up. As I approach retirement, I hope to get it figured out by then.

World of warcraft was big back then

Starting an online community, being disinterested in my studies following a lack of academic direction at Oxford/Cambridge, finding the dating pool and friend pool at my school insufficient to make many meaningful connections, playing a few 2004/5 video games, drinking at our sixth form bar, and ultimately running out the clock on a way of life I was tired of.

In the autumn nothing much happened and the next year I’d go to university in Scotland mostly to get my parents off my back. In hindsight I don’t think I could have done much else with the options and knowledge available to me.

It was pretty bleak, emotionally.

2009: I was playing League of legends a lot and starting to smoke weed. I was working at a supermarket as a cashier. Had no plans for the future etc.

… flailing around a bit until I went to Uni for computer science 2018.

2025: Programmer 6 years, wife, baby, healthy, not smoking weed

Mostly staying indoors and skipping (read: sleeping thru them) a bunch of online classes in 12th grade due to the pandemic. Due to family circumstances I started living alone at 18.

Second half of 12th grade was spent preparing for the Baccalaureate

I was in my first year of college, and pretty much doing exactly what you do, except we were playing Pokemon and Goldeneye.

Same thing I’m doing now, nothing

It was 2000 and I was working as a stablehand: mucking out horse stalls, feeding, watering, turning out horses into the paddocks, tacking/untacking/grooming lesson horses from 7 AM to 4 PM six days a week for 5 bucks an hour under the table. January & February were the worst because the water buckets in each stall would freeze solid overnight and I had to bash the ice out of every single one in the morning (the barn didn’t have hot running water to melt it with).

Then I got burnt out and got a job at a video store.