The past 4 months of my corporate sabbatical/"start up" has been one of the happiest times of my life. I'm learning the technologies I WANT to learn by applying them to solving real problems in my (still in stealth mode) product . When I see my past early twenties colleagues posting the " time of my life" weekend pics to the social networksphere, I laugh inside. I see past the distractions they engage in to make themselves feel like they've made it because, I remember the conversations we had daily about how much we hated the low quality work, stale tooling, and sometime poisonous corporate enviorments in which we worked.
I have no kids (I do have a dog that eats better then some people) and am only responsible for my self right now. I'm spending this time exploring and learning, not producing value for some clueless middle manager. 9 Months clean off corporate and hacking daily to keep it that way.