Sparked by a random song lyric, I've spent a fair amount of the past few days reading back through various text archives I have from 1997-8, the second half of my time as a student. Online diaries, messages exchanged with friends; that sort of thing.

I understand it's traditional to look back on one's time at university and see it as the best years of one's life, and indeed that's what I find myself thinking. So I thought I'd muse a bit about how and why that's the case.

The most obvious thing I notice in the day-to-day conversations with people is the huge amount of freedom I had. As somebody with natural aptitude for the two subjects I studied, I was able to take a pretty relaxed attitude to my actual work: I did do some, but it happened as and when I felt like it and I was able to give most other things priority over it provided I made time for it at some stage. So there wasn't this rigid roping-off of thirty-seven hours of every week as Work Time and the need to fit everything else into a few fixed evening and weekend slots; I could wander out to visit a friend or to shop or to eat at the slightest whim, and I frequently did.

Accompanying that temporal freedom was a corresponding spatial freedom, arising from everything I ever needed being within walking distance of my college room, including the college rooms of my friends. Today, if I have a sudden desire to shop for something, I have to either climb in the car and faff about with car parks, or face a half-hour walk into town. Neither is conducive to whim-shopping: these days I tend to delay trips into town until I've got enough things to do there to make the journey worth the effort. But at college, none of this was an issue; if I wanted to buy (say) a CD, HMV was two minutes' walk away and I could be back in my room with the new CD in my stereo within ten. Visiting friends was just as easy then and is at least as much effort as shopping now, complicated further by the fact that one of my choices of transport is incompatible with drinking when I get there.

In addition to all that, there was a freedom of food which I probably wouldn't have remarked on before being diagnosed as coeliac this year. I'd get messages saying ‘I feel like a sausage roll, meet me at the shop’, and I'd jump out of my chair and say ‘good idea’ and off I'd go. Three minutes later I'd be cramming something into my mouth which I hadn't so much as thought about moments earlier. This contrasts sharply with my post-coeliac eating habits, in which food simply isn't something I can do on a whim because of the hassle of getting hold of the right ingredients; it all has to be planned days in advance. If I wanted to eat pizza right now, for example, I'd have to start by going into town and visiting a doctor, for goodness' sake, to get a repeat prescription for non-useless gluten-free pizza bases. Which would take a few days to arrive, and I'd have to go into town again to collect them. And then I'd have to cook the pizza myself, and by that time I can pretty much guarantee that my momentary pizza craving would have long since evaporated.

That's kind of the obvious thing, though. None of it seems very surprising in retrospect, but it felt depressingly wrong to imagine myself doing things like that now. I just read back over a load of suggestions for things to do which were sent to me in 1997, most of which I accepted; almost every one of them was something to which I'd now say ‘sorry, I can't’, followed by one of a range of excuses such as ‘I'm at work’ or ‘I'm driving’ or ‘I can't eat that anyway’ or ‘I need to get up early tomorrow’ and so on. It's not just that I had more freedom as a student; it's how much more freedom I had as a student.

(Which is not to say that there weren't downsides too. I just about remember the sense of new freedom I had after starting a full-time job, when I realised that my evenings and weekends were wholly and inalienably mine. As a student, they'd been potential working-time just as much as the week; the feeling of separation between work and life that enabled me to leave my entire job on the hook at 5:30 felt very liberating. And although I've muttered above about the hassle of needing to use a car to go places, it's also unquestionably the case that the car also gives me the freedom to randomly go to places which would otherwise have required considerable planning.)

There was another thing I've noticed about my studenthood, though, which is an attitude thing more than anything else: I cared about stuff more. I seemed to have more brain-space, more concentration, more emotion and more enthusiasm to spare for random things that crossed my path.

I'm not sure I can produce any particularly good examples of that, which is worrying to my own detailed-example-oriented mind. It was lots of little things, more than any one big thing. Anything from random quirks of software, through casual remarks by people in their online diaries, down to exchanges of silly messages such as impromptu word ladders: I had the time, the energy and the inclination to analyse, to speculate, to play, and most of all to feel. It seems to me now that in those days I found a lot more things interesting, or fun, or worth spending time on, whereas now I'd just sigh in a world-weary (or possibly just plain weary) way and save my strength for the things that really mattered to me.

The phrase ‘youthful idealism’ is lurking in my mind when I say stuff like this. That's interesting in itself, because I didn't feel youthfully idealistic as a student about any of the things I've just mentioned. What I did suspect of being youthful idealism at the time was my devotion to writing free software to help other people, and I remember feeling a little worried that I might lose that devotion as I got older and become a corporate drone with no purpose to my life that wasn't derived from someone else. In spite of that, or perhaps because of it, that devotion is one thing I do still have eight years later; but a lot of other stuff I hadn't realised I had seems to have gone.

So what I wonder is, were these two things unrelated? Because now I've written about them in quick succession, it seems to me that the sense of caring, of having the time and effort and energy spare to lavish on any even marginally interesting thing that crossed my path without regard for whether there was something it could be better spent on, might actually have been a result of all that freedom. It probably counts as a freedom in itself, in fact: freedom from the constraint of having limited energy, to go with the above-mentioned freedom from the constraints of time and space.

Of course, I'm currently (as in this week specifically) feeling particularly tired, so I don't doubt that I'm seeing my past in an especially rose-tinted fashion when it comes to the specific issue of how much energy I had then compared to today. Perhaps in a few weeks' time, once I've had some proper rest, the difference won't seem so big.

I think that's probably enough wittering for now. I'd like to bring this piece to a triumphant conclusion and present some great insight or (better still) something I can do to improve my present life, but I haven't got any; all I've got is a general sense of wistfulness and nostalgia, and sorrow for a lost sense of playfulness and enthusiasm which these days I only feel in isolated moments. So I'll just have to say that, and then shut up.