It was never really an option to me to take an easy road, I was blessed/cursed with an excessive work ethic. A quick story first..
I started a paper-round at age 11, when I think legal working age was 14. I lugged papers around on my back for hours. When my parents moved but we couldn’t change the paper round I wanted to still work, so I prepped at night, went to bed early, woke at 4am, rode my bike the 8km each way to the next town to site, delivered for 2hrs, rode home and got to the school bus for 8am. Two of those mid week and a longer weekend session was enough to get the round done.
This has carried through most of my life.
I had kids young, worked my butt off, sacrificed a lot of time. There were plenty of times moving up the corporate ladder where I worked a ton of overtime. Promoted rapidly, learned a lot. Did a lot of travel and got paid well, received plenty of experience. And had a lot of fun doing it too, going all sorts of places, lots of time partying in Asia.
Costs: I’m fatter than I should be, not super heavy, bmi 28, but I do neglect my health a bit. One thing that was surprising is about the kids; lots of my peers in school groups and work are older, often by a decade, so sometimes they have different life experiences to me. And now that my kids are in high school my uni friends are having their kids, so it’s a little weird. I don’t have a super strong friendship community in one spot due to that and travelling a lot, but have built good friendships with people in different locations. I did miss a bunch of time with my kids really young, 2-4yo. I’m trying to recover more of that now and so we take a lot of breaks, but I’m not sure what the consequences of that will be. It’s been stressful on my marriage at points, and I’ve been blessed my wife has a similar attitude in a lot of ways.
Key learnings: yes I think I’d do it again. We are very well set up now. I’m paid beyond socially acceptable amounts to do a super niche craft that I love and I’m not even 40. I think the main thing to change is i might have spent more time with my family, but that’s really hard to say honestly given my work attitudes. Probably what I’d do more of is fully relocate and live within 10 mins of work instead of do fifo-like travelling. This has given me a LOT more time to spend with them.