38 year old school boy

16 Dec 2022

I was in the fortunate situation that I could afford to take a break from my professional life. And so I did. I quit my job to go back to school! For the past two months, I’ve been living on savings and have been going to school every day, rather than to work, like a normal adult.

The school I go to is called Codam, which is a Computer Science school in Amsterdam.

Some reflections:

  • 38 year is a perfect age to learn, the brain still works.
  • Many of my fellow students are just over half my age. So that means I’m old. But I don’t really mind, it’s a role that suits me well.
  • I had hoped I would be older and wiser compared to when I was 18. But alas, motivation and self-discipline are very much still a thing, at times.
  • Being a student means I don’t have a boss, and I don’t have customers. It’s a privilege I share with the king, the retired, and the dead. Also: I have no meetings. It’s like I found a magical place where the rules of the universe don’t apply.
  • So far, living on savings does not cause stress. I thought it would be scary to see the numbers in the bank go down every month. But it’s fine. It’s a controlled descent. It also helps the study is progressing according to plan, more or less.
  • People tend to respond very positive when I tell them I’m a full time student now. Often calling it a good investment. But it’s not about the money. I had a good income before, so I don’t think it will make much of a difference. I just wanted to learn something new. Or maybe I was looking for an alibi to quit my job.
  • On a more personal note: it sometimes saddens me that I’m not in a relationship and don’t have children. The flip side is that I have the ultimate freedom to make bold life decisions, like this. There are probably some nice proverbs about that.

Note that this is not the first time I dip my toe in the world of programming. Somehow, I worked as a web-developer for a year and a half. Three years ago, I made Tetris with JavasSript, as a hobby project. Feel free to play it here. It took me months.