I repeatedly hear people calling 2020 the worst year of their lives. I can relate to the sentiment in principle: it's certainly been a bad ten months to date. But those statements also tripped some self-reflection: how has 2020 stacked up versus other years in my life?

1998, 1999, 2000, 2001, and 2002 were all fairly nightmarish-- for personal reasons I won't go into here. The past fifteen years have also been rather poor for me generally, lowlighted by 2010 and a maddening 2016, which was the most stressful professional year of my life by a wide margin.

Personally then, I would rate 2020 as the eigth worst year of my life: it's been bad, but things could definitely be worse.

By contrast and to put a positive spin on things, the best years of my life were 1989, 1995, 1996, and 2003: those were glorious times. Generally speaking, my elementary school years were the best, culminating in junior high. 2003 was the year I got married, and wifey and I got our first apartment together.

On the balance then, I've lived for 38 years so far. 16 of those years I'd rate as "A" and "B"-- childhood; 14 of those years I'd rate as "C". And 8 of those years I'd rate as "F". That gives me both an average and a median yearly quality of "C".

Fortunately, I've structured my life so that it really begins at age 50: both houses will be paid off, the kids will be independent, and I will be completely debt free-- which means I'll be able to quasi-retire into a super low stress, low paying job. That will give me, let's say, twenty five years to relax and fiddle with computers for fun, like I used to.