preferred lifespan?

Usually normal but after DU released, I tried long since the degrees take some time. I have to say that the journey of my sim attending university and climbing up the ranks in their career really made me connect to them and like them more, so I kept the long lifespan and eventually turned ageing off completely!

I can see myself switching back to normal on other saves though eg legacies.

Aging off.

I use normal for legacy families/challenges, long for a challenge I gave to myself where I raise a child from toddler to YA ONLY controlling the child, and OFF for my OC (original character) save where I just make sims and let them do whatever.

Aging is off for my sims, keeping them together like little dolls in a imaginary world makes me happier

I play on normal as I find long to be too long. It is too easy to max everything on long and for the most part I like to keep the majority of my Sims at a low or middle career level to keep the game somewhat challenging. Haven't quite figured out what I'm going to do with University though.

I have custom normal lifespans, that are about double the normal lifespan on everything but the baby stage. But I'm not against resetting ages, turning aging off for certain sims, or whatever I need to do to ensure my sims do what is needed - like graduate from DU before they're old lol.

I've played with the idea of aging off but figured I'd forget about it and I actually want my sims to age up. I have settings on long lifespan with aging only for active households I'm playing. NPCs age normally on long lifespan but most of my sims are supernaturals so they're automatically immortal. o:)

Since I rotate I have ageing off most of the time. About twice per sim year I switch it back on normal lifespan for a few sim days so that the population ages a little.

I have adjusted the lifespan to be roughly double of normal (or half of long, if you want) with the length of each stage to be closer to reality (especially the comparative length of child and teen stages compared to YA/adult).