This article and thread reminds me of how lucky I was for being a stubborn idiot after graduating high school. I, too, was told I was too smart to skip college

This article and thread reminds me of how lucky I was for being a stubborn idiot after graduating high school. I, too, was told I was too smart to skip college and that I'd be wasting my life. And since I graduated HS at seventeen, my insistent immigrant mother was able to dump me into the local university regardless of my feelings about taking a year off. And, so, I partied my ass off every day and dropped out after the first semester. Mom wasn't happy, so I was allowed temporary quarters until I found a job, and then I was off to find an apartment, and that semester was all mine to pay off. A year later I found myself with a shitty job downtown (back room at a clothing store) and art school (graphic design). I lucked into a job doing IT and on-site tech support (managing DOS servers and clients), and by nineteen I decided all the adults were full of shit, dropped out of art school and moved to NYC. It was hard. Lots of work; Lots of hustle; Lots of failures and bad days; All along with the occasional fear that I'd made the wrong choice by skipping college, as I saw a few of my friends who had gone to college get to about where I was in my own career. They'd caught up. My head start was over; But rarely surpassed. At any rate, I'm 38, back home in Chicago where the price of housing is far more reasonable than the cities I've lived in (NYC, Seattle, Los Angeles), working 100% remotely, and just bought a house. As for the stats mentioned in this article, my wife really made the cut as a 36-year-old bartender who also didn't finish college. I definitely feel like I missed out on something important by skipping school. But my career hasn't suffered for it, and I'm not sad I missed out on paying for it. And I'm pretty sure spending my twenties in NYC made up for whatever I might have missed, socially.