Four decades
I just turned 40 and since we are culturally bound to make these round numbers significant, even though it is arbitrary as your life don’t follow these sort of milestones anyway, I still felt inspired to make a retrospective of my now four decades.
First years
Obviously I don’t remember a whole lot of details of my very early years. At least not much before the age of 5 or so. Had a normal middle class childhood, grew up in the capital of Denmark, Copenhagen. My parents got seperated when I was around 7, but they still got along pretty well, so it didn’t affect me in any negative way of what I remember. I just had two homes, stayed a week at each, and it was close enough I could still bike between them. When I was around 8, I got an IBM PC in my room running DOS. This was the starting point for a lifelong enthusiasm and later career involving computers. I played various shareware games such as Wolfenstein 3D, Shooting Gallery and Winter Challenge. Some of them were likely not just shareware version. I also had a GameBoy which I used plenty, but I didn’t have a gaming console until much later. Nothing really stands out in my memory from the first 10 years, as memories tend to muddle together. In general a happy childhood, with plenty of summers spend in my father's summerhouse.
Teens
The next 10 years are obviously mostly about school and later high school. The computer got upgraded from a 386 to a 486, and my massive timesink with Sid Meier’s Civilization increased tenfold with Civilization II. At 14 I got a Nintendo 64 and a PlayStation, and me and my friends often went to my place to play various multiplayer games. GoldenEye and Tekken 3 was among the favourites.
I also acquired other healthy nerdy interests, such as astronomy - I bought my own telescope, which led to me to science fiction. Seeing the movie Contact in 1997 made a huge impression on me. Later I would discover Star Trek, which I would come to spend a great deal more time with in my 20s. I got into Magic The Gathering, which my mother helped me learn and we played a lot together.
As I recently wrote about, I started to spend a lot more time online as well. At 15 I started chatting with a girl who is now my wife, and we had a long distance relationship through high school until we moved in together at the age of 19 where we both enrolled at Copenhagen Business School studying business and computer science.
It is no wonder those years are often described as the very formative years, as I can see most of who I am today as a person and the things that interests me, had the groundwork laid in my late teens. There are very few things I have abandoned to this day. The exception being Magic The Gathering, though I still have some of my old cards including my goblin based deck.
Twenties
The twenties was mostly about finishing my education, and then living the free life of two working adults without kids. We travelled a lot, went frequently out to eat at fancy restaurant or simply stayed at home with our computers. In hindsight probably too much time was spent discussing with random strangers online.
Gaming wise, I had a Xbox 360 and a PlayStation 3. I remember especially spending a ton of time with Forza Motorsport 4 on the Xbox. I had recently discovered Top Gear, which gave me an increased interests in cars and motorsport. I started watching Formula 1 and in 2014 we went to Singapore to see the Grand Prix there. In my later twenties, I would pick up PC gaming again and of the things I have been weirdly attached to since, was Euro Truck Simulator 2 and later American Truck Simulator.
I started trying out Linux in my late teens but became a full blown Linux user in my twenties. I started with Debian and later dived into Gentoo. Later I would switch to FreeBSD on my main computer and OpenBSD for my server. I learned a lot on my own, which gave me a way into an IT-career. I got my first part time student job as a Linux system administrator, later I got a job as a Python developer which made my career path to this day. In my spare time I was also casually involved in a Danish open source community. I attended Linux install parties, summer camps with other Linux and BSD nerds and I volunteered at the LinuxForum conference in Copenhagen for a couple of years. All of this was driven by pure interest and not something I intended to help me in my professional career, though it has likely played a big part by simply being knowledgeable in Linux and various open source software tools.
My interest in science fiction was firmly established when I watched Contact at the age of 12, and it followed strongly into my twenties as I started to read a lot more and also getting involved in the Danish science fiction fandom. I volunteered for Eurocon in 2007 and have since also been a cashier and webmaster for Science Fiction Cirklen, a Danish fan community of amateur science fiction fans where we have a physical member magazines, hold meetups and do a lot of work with publishing science fiction books in Danish. Either translated or original, mostly short fiction. I am less involved now than I was then, but it is still a thing I make the time for whenever I can.
Thirties
As our first daughter was born when I was 31, my 30s have obviously been a lot about being a parent. We bought a house in 2017 where we still live and I have also stayed in the same job since 2017. I think the last 10 years can be summed up as stability. I basically still do all the things I have written about, just somewhat less. In the last couple of years I have devoted more of my free time to watching movies, which has given me less time to play games and read books. During the pandemic lockdown I had a brief but intense (and expensive) time with sim racing, mostly iRacing, and I still have the equipment - though that is mostly used for the truck simulator games.
I expect, and hope, the next ten years to be more of the same. I value stability and generally don’t like things to change too much, and the kids will likely still be living with us for the next ten years, so they will of course still have major priority.