I love those weekends, the ones where you do so much stuff that you wonder how the hell you managed to put it all in two days.

It's not until now that I realized "growing up" is not really a thing.

Some years ago I took on an office summer job, working full time as the only one under 25. I'm quite good at adapting to new social situations, and it didn't took long (two hours, to be precise) before one of the people I worked with informed me about all the office gossip. That woman is really stuck up, the new manager doesn't know what he's dealing with, there's a new guy handling data who's having a hard time adapting - he came from a government job, y'know, and they basically told him exactly what to do, and we don't do that around here... You know what I mean. I was a temp so I could easily sit next to people I only knew tangentially at lunch, and thus I had quite some fun following the office drama, being a yes man to all.

Then I realized - these are supposedly all 'adults', who are chatting about each other not much different from highschoolers. The same dynamics, backstabbing and rumours. And most of all: I could effortlessly fit in. It made me understand that being grown-up is only really different in the number behind your age.

She mentioned that no matter how rewarding a career can be, being a mother is more rewarding.

Do you agree with that statement? Or, to put it differently: has it affected your view on motherhood?

Finally, I learned how much I've learned at my job. I'm way more of an engineer than I know. I can talk (and enjoy talking) about tech specs and the future of certain technologies in the same way I can talk creative shit / design.

I still hang around friends from high school sometimes, and it always amazes me how much different each of them has become after only some years of studying. We did a Jargon Game a while ago: come up with a definition from your field, and the others have to guess what it is.

I'm convinced that what you expose yourself to heavily affects how you think. It's one of the reasons I like geography / urb. planning: since it is such a wide field, I get exposed to lots of different ways to think about reality, and thus I understand people better. For instance, I had a course on economics and an engineering course, and I find it very interesting to look at the differences in reasoning / rationale between them.