time of one's life

The second experience was watching my children enter their 20s, allegedly the best time of one’s life; observing and trying to support them in their struggles has brought back the memory of my own 20s more intensely, and how terribly hard those times are; and how much harder we make them by telling them to savour the best years of their lives.

By describing what is usually the hardest time of one’s life as the best one, we make the time harder for those who are going through it.

You might like to know that Patti Smith is in the house: she’s the vatic crooner on the discursive final track “Blue,” in which Mr. Stipe performs a stream-of-consciousness poem, voicing the concerns of a certain time of one’s life.

“Work takes up most of the time of one’s life,” she said.

Clubs and gigs may be remembered as great because they coincide with a heady, hormonal time of one’s life, or they may truly have been great.