You've studied many notable builders, but have you studied the great dads? How much time does one have to spend to be a great dad? Do they get to pick the times when they can spend their focus on being dad, or do they have to be present at times they'd rather be doing other things? I think being a great dad might involve a lot of taking your children to sports practice, music lessons, play dates, libraries, and tons of other activities until you discover what clicks with them, and then there's many years of supporting those interests. I don't think you can just put it on pause during the week. To be a great and present dad, I think you can only count on being able to spend maybe 55 to 60 hours a week on work (with a lot of that being after bedtime and/or starting very early).

Looking at the great builders, I think the common element is that they picked the right thing to work on at the right time, in the right place, executed better than their peers, and also had a ton of luck.

* Zuckerberg was in the right place at the right time with ample luck and he chose to drop out of Harvard to spend a few years doing the hardcore startup house thing working exclusively on building Facebook, and nine years later he had his first kid. Right place, right time, strong execution, and much luck.

* Bill Gates was in the right place (a high school where he got extensive access to a mainframe computer, then in a local company that gave him and his friends unlimited computing time in exchange for them finding and fixing bugs) at the right time (when mainframe computers were an extremely rare and expensive thing and before operating systems existed) and he dropped out of Harvard to go all in on building Microsoft, then 21 years later he had his first kid. Right place, right time, right skills, great execution, and much luck.

* Paul Graham was in the right place (a Harvard CS Ph.D. who studied design at RISD living in NYC) at the right time (during the Internet 1.0 boom and before both the bust and before anyone else had brought a site building cloud application SAAS offering to the market), and he brought a great idea to market in time to sell it to Yahoo in 1998 for $49M of stock and he correctly elected to cash out his stock before the bubble burst in March 2000. And then he leveraged his great technical and business faculties to identify and develop great business ideas via YCombinator (2005-present). Then he had his first kid in 2009). Right place, right time, right skills, great execution of a novel great idea, and much luck.

* John Carmack is probably the platonic ideal of focusing and getting things done. His work ethic and habits are legendary (8 hours of sleep a night, 10 hours of focused work a day, and 60 hours of work a week) as is his output (Doom, Commander Keen, Wolfenstein 3D, Quake). In 1978 he discovered video games and in 1982 (at age 12), his family bought an Apple II computer and he quickly learned BASIC to start making games before digging deeper to learn assembly code. He gained deep and extensive knowledge of how computers work, motivated by his drive to make games, and this enabled him to make the limited PC hardware of the time do things comparable to purpose-built arcade machines. He came up at the right time, had sufficient interest, drive, and vision that motivated him to deeply explore and master computing as well as design and develop many iconic games of the 1990s. Then in 2004 he had his first kid, at which point he started working less, although still a 50+ hour per week workload. Luckily his children are interested in programming, which makes it easier for him to get quality time in. Still, right time, great skills, great ideas, much luck.

* etc.

Having a child already, you might be a bit constrained. But if you can manage getting into the right place to seize upon a great and novel idea that you are uniquely positioned to execute on, you might be able to build the idea out while the market and need is unserved.

Another potential strategy is to work on an established business model that someone else came up with, and spend your evenings and weekends with your children. The best dad I knew growing up did this (he was/is a database administrator and was the dad of three of my friends I knew through my boy scout troop who have all grown up to do incredible things and also be deeply happy people) and is still one of the coolest, most interesting and well-rounded people I've ever met.

Being ambitious on both fronts means you are running at 200%.

Life will normalise that for you whether you like it or not.

They will be gone soon. Stop optimizing for both. It's dada time.

It’s selfish, unnecessary, consumes immense amounts of resources, increases unfair social policies against those who are intelligent enough to avoid it, and almost universally induces a delusion in the parents that they have done something meaningful, helpful, world-changing, or profound, without affecting their ability to notice the plainly obvious fact that humans have evolved this delusion to keep them bonded to the incredible amount of time and inconvenience caused by children so that the species will continue.

Pro-natalists will of course dismiss this view as abnormal, simply because they themselves have succumbed to this delusion. There is no objective benefit to society or others caused by reproduction, and the harms are well-documented (increased resource consumption, crowding, increased need for resource redistribution, etc).

Kids are nothing but a burden to anyone other than their parents, yet society is so biased toward children that everyone in society is forced to accommodate and pay for the poor choices of parents. Parents are encouraged nonstop to have children they cannot afford to fully care and provide for.

It is a nonstop tragedy from all angles.

Children are a luxury option, like buying a Porsche or taking regular vacations to the Greek isles. You probably can’t afford to do it well, it burdens everyone around you for your own pleasure, and after you’re done you haven’t meaningfully improved the world for anyone.

Most people have children by accident, or out of motivations formed exclusively from fear, selfishness, narcissism, or greed. Societal traditions allow and encourage them to paper over these motivations with noble illusions.

Do not in any way confuse the good that human beings have accomplished with the need to produce more of them.

In two generations, we've gone from that to most dads constantly asking themselves "Am I a good enough dad? How could I be better?" Fathers feel that they aren't good enough if they merely provide for a good life for their family and set a good example. They try to find a way to, while of course not dropping the ball at all on the provider role, also be a 'fun dad' and a friend to their kids and be deeply involved in their lives.

I would say this is also kind of a mirror image to women's very real struggle post-1980 or so -- before, you were absolutely acknowledged to be a success if you cared well for the next generation of children and taught them to be good people. Some would say (and still do) that's one of the most important callings. Now women worry that they're not good enough unless they - without missing a beat on that first mission - also have an impactful and meaningful commercial career.

This isn't arguing to force people to perform only one sex-prescribed role or anything. And I don't want any parents to just be absent, because frankly being there for your kid is incredibly rewarding. I'm just saying, I think it's an insane amount of pressure we put on mothers AND fathers to be everything to everyone both within the family and in the professional world.

Good luck :)

I’d look outside Silicon Valley for examples of how to do this well.

Outside of the big coastal cities, raising kids and building a career aren’t treated as competing ambitions. They’re just what people do.

I love my parents. They are not perfect, but as much as they could afford, they never stood in my way. I love my children and I will strive to provide for them the resources, space, and freedom to grow and become who they are as individuals with infinite potential. I will never treat them as extensions of myself.

I'm writing this for the log, so I can remember my ideals. I'm sure everyone here has disagreements, opinions and wisdom that they wish to impart, but I frankly don't care. A culture that condones keeping dysgenic inbred mutilated wolves in one's house to satisfy the pleasure of "caring" for an animal weaker than oneself has no lessons to teach me about raising children. Whatever lessons I could distill from it for myself, I have already done so.

Fame? Status?

And then his company is an AI slop no-code website generator...

Possibly true, but who knows. Especially Zuck, who does not lead a remotely ordinary life (imo).

Dad of 2 girls. 8 and 4. Maybe this should be titled “being ambitious because you’re a dad”

I am better than ever post kids. Always great, no. Always amazing, no. Not sure I agree with the post otherwise, especially quality vs quantity. High quality interactions are the best.

"I do not believe the quality time theory. I firmly believe in maximizing the quantity of time spent with them."

Because I think that among highly motivated workers there's a falsely held belief that you can make up for missed time with your children by planning "exclusive time" with them, either over a nice vacation, or special night in a month, or whatever. And, don't get me wrong, any time is better than no time. But I think that strong relationships might be made best in the down moments, the "bored" time, the random stuff, the drives to school, picking up the house, mealtimes, random crap, that those are the times that you discover the little nuances of your children's personality (and your own personality).

Before kids, I frequently defined myself by my work or my hobbies. Meet someone new and you're chatting with them, and I'd say "Oh, yeah, I'm a software engineer, yeah, I like to fish, I play basketball, I love watching football and drinking beer, I'm from [X] city, I want to this college and studied this subject." And that's how I defined myself. It's pretty normal, I think. Since having kids so much of my identity has changed and how I identify myself has changed. That "I Think You Should Leave" sketch from Season 2 or 3 resonated with me, the "DONT TALK ABOUT YOUR KIDS" sketch because it's so hard not to, especially with other people who have kids, it's like ... what else can I talk about? The hobbies I had before kids seem utterly pointless and valueless in retrospect.

After our second, my wife got sick, she was diagnosed with ALS when he was just over a year old, though she had undiagnosed symptoms going back to before she was pregnant with him. She physically can't care for him, and so I've been my son's sole caretaker, and my daughter's primary/default caretaker though she's 8 years old, so my wife is able to contribute more evenly with parenting for her. As he gets older, depending on the progression of the disease, that can increase with my son as well, but for a newborn, infant, baby, and toddler, there's just so much physical care for those ages that it's hard for someone with a neurological, degenerative disease to contribute in the same way.

Kids truly changed everything with me. Every single way that I define myself. I don't define myself by my work at all anymore, and I sometimes define myself by my hobbies, but I feel entirely defined by my kids. If I was answering some general inquiry about myself, and if I was allowed to be frank, I'd lead with my kids, it's how I see myself.

When I saw the Bob Odenkirk line from Mike Birbiglia's podcast/interview, I legitimately cried, because it hit me right in the throes of parenting hell. I have a wife who I'm taking care of, I had a ~7ish year old who I was trying my best to help through adolesence, and I had a 1.5 year old who I was completely and wholly responsible for keeping alive, keeping healthy, and keeping happy. And this quote just hit me like a ton of bricks.

Birbiglia: "Who are you jealous of?"

Odenkirk: "Anybody who has little kids at home, growing up. ... Yeah, there's no question I knew what I was doing when I had kids growing up, I was being a dad. I mean, that was my job, and I didn't have to ask myself, 'What am I doing here? How can I be a part of this world? How can I be meaningful today?' I didn't have to ask that question, because the fucking answer is 'Pick up everything between here and the door, and make sure they get to school, and have a laugh with them.'

I understood my purpose."

And god, that fucking resonates with me so, so hard. It still makes me cry when I hear that or see the clips of it, because I realized that when I was answering that question every other time trying to describe myself, and when I answered with what I do, and what I studied, and where I'm from, or what my hobbies are, those were all bull shit. And now when I think of who I am, I know who I am, I am dad.

I am a bad software engineer. I'm a mediocre project lead. I think I'm a good colleague. But I know that I'm a great dad.

Claude Code fits my lifestyle.

Just believe! And accept constant stress as a good thing.

He 'loves' building. Building what? Crypto thing when crypto is hot and AI thing when AI is hot? Is there a word to describe this behaviour that we may be familiar with?

I still believe that having passionate and driven parents is good for kids.

In ways, it really crisped up my time working on work. My wife and I have some bottom lines, we're invovled, we have dinner as a family every day. We go to school events, all of them. We go to sports and activities, all of them (although there have been some times we had to split up and each to a different one.) I'm at the table when my kids have breakfast, every day except when I travel for work which is a week or two per quarter. It's great for the kids, it's great for the family but suddenly it feelds like your day is shorter. Personally, I have tried to find other "thought time" and that has resulted in much better execution when I get to writing code or plans or whatever. I used to sit at the blank editor and start to compose but now I am forced to think more before hand. I've built a few things I honestly don't think I could have built before kids, just out of necessity, I've had to be more efficient and effective.

There are also times of utter exhaustion but I had those before kids. I'll also went through the process of sort of cutting out extras to make time, once your kids are in that 10-11 age, they'll have friends and interests, I've added some of those extras back because they are busy on Sunday afternoons or whenever.

Nobody's going to give a shit that you founded an AI company and sold it to Meta for $600 million. Sure you can enjoy the material benefits while you're here. Maybe you can even pass some of that onto your children.

The Good Place was one of the best TV shows of the best shows of the last decade (IMHO) and it brought up a relatively recent (1998) book "What we owe to each other". It makes the point that it's not a question (ie "what do we owe to each other?"). You're only meaningful impact is on the people you affect around you, positively or negatively.

Personally, I have no opinion on whether people should or shouldn't have children. That's none of my business other than this: you have to make a choice between having and raising those children and chasing material "ambitions". Bringing people into the world without their consent and then neglecting them makes you an objectively terrible person. Pick a lane.

And if you do choose ambition instead, at least ask yourself why. Studies have been done on this. Money does buy happiness but only to a very limited point. Beyond that it's isolating. So why are you doing whatever it is you're ambitious about, really?

—Jiddu Krishnamurti, Think on These Things

You will likely feel at times like you missed out on career opportunities, and as an ambitious person that will always nag at you. But I believe ambition is a bit of a selfish drive to achieve instead of to serve.

I guess I am just trying to say—you will regret it at times. But you will end up having achieved something for them and yourself that is far more important than anything you could have built in your career. I hope you will look back on your post one day and realize what a great choice you made!

Beat that

Will there come a time when these are more complimentary than in conflict? Maybe! But while the kids are young, not often. And while I feel the conflict, it’s helpful to have somewhat pre-decided what I’d regret more, and it would be not having connected with them.

If there’s time later to do great things, especially with them, so much the better.

He told me once that his work was his passion and his legacy. No kids, no wife. And he was brilliant and hard working. But he was running from something in his mind. There was a shakeup at the top and he got pushed out in the ensuing politics.

His legacy is a cautionary tale. But I don’t remember his last name.

Having kids is easily and by a huge distance the very best thing you can “build”. It’s the best project you’ll ever make.

If you can find a way to run a cool thing on the side then great. I’ve been lucky, or something, and I have. And I love it.

But my kids are a trillion times more important. And now they’re 21 and 19 I can live knowing that I’ve launched the best couple of projects in the world.

The IPO in my parental project arrived and stocks are doing well :-)

Edit: I have realized my original comment/rant might have come off as a negative sentiment towards the post author. While generally, I sympathize with the author and agree with the original post. My rant has been focused exclusively on the current market trends and double-speak of AI productivity gains, layoffs and increased workload.

My working hours are 6-9 most days. Wish I had more hours in the day.

If you can stick to this you are most likely spending more time with your kids than a normal non-ambitious parent anyways.

Replace having kids in this article with rebuilding a vintage engine from scratch in your garage to see how ridiculous this attitude is.

Do one thing and do it well.

Also, let's just not ignore that Musk is wildly successful in having shown you an example that you don't have to choose one thing

I don’t know, my goals are more and more about cool stuff I can do with my kids, and far less about business stuff? I’m not less ambitious but my ambitions have changed?

Are these examples or an exhaustive list? Eating dinner during the week is.. not a lot. So I assume it's about setting time limits for these activities?

I would only add that if increasing general family cohesion is one of your goals, I think having lots of kids accomplishes that. Having a large family and multiple automatic life long best friends brings me so much joy.

They both concluded (not quickly, they discussed it) no, because it forced both of them to level up their time management game, quit whining and learn to get on with it, to the point where they generally got more done a couple of years in.

I have found this to be true. Our little one is turning 3 in November, and while the first two years were a bit slower (I took half a year of work while my wife finished up her Master's, etc.), in 2026 I've so far had a fantastic year and find myself much more capable of juggling more balls at the same time, finally learned the skill of grabbing sleep where I can, etc. I'm pretty sure I already "had my act together" (as per the article) and was doing well career-wise, but raising the stakes on the family side has definitely only improved things.

Got a whole lot of Open Source work done, reverse engineered an old cult video game I used to play, wrote HMI and firmware for a robot used in the Great Pyramid of Egypt for a scientific mission, taught myself GPRs and built a new radar control system, spent a week rolling around in the dust of millenia inside Khufu's Pyramid, etc., all next to the day job.

The most unexpected professional/skills growth and fun year I've had in a while, and it's all so much more meaningful when I get to share it with the little one.

How do you balance that?

Here's my 2 cents: In life, like in economy, everything's about marginal utility. If you work 5 days a week and you reduce by one, you gain 50% (free/family/hobby) time, while reducing 20% of work time. In the lost 20% work time, would you have produced the corresponding amount of output? Or are you even more productive because you avoid unnecessary meetings etc.?

It's clear that being an involved parents doesn't allow you pulling all nighters all the time or work through weekends and doing additional sideprojects. Though I agree that without full involvement and ambition one will not achieve a top position or become a tennis superstar, I think a good mixture of all aspects (family/work/sports/friendships) makes everything much more worthwhile. And in my opinion, all involved parent parts should have their fair share of those aspects.

- Parent with partner both working part time, living in a country that allows for that, equally sharing child care for two that regularly make them crazy, but it's soo worth it.

That doesn't mean you don't have something to offer, you do. You're better off teaching and guiding others to carry on the work as you get older. They'll appreciate you for it rather than you selfishly doing it all yourself. Raise your children as if they are your most important project because they are. The work will carry on without you.

* Your amount of "lost" time with kids is often less than you think. On one side, you very likely socialized more, traveled more, were less disciplined about what you worked on, etc. On another side, some things that you are going to do anyway (dishes, maybe calling your parents, groceries), you can often do with kids, and so this time isn't really "lost"

* If you are fortunate enough to have some means, you might consider not outsourcing parenting, but outsourcing "life admin" work. Specifically things like laundry, dishes, buying groceries, picking up around the house, etc. I recently got someone to come to our house 3x / week for 3 hours and it's a game changer for me and my wife (who also works). (I know my point above says you can do some of this with kids, and that's kind of true, but not always, and it still lets you do other things with your time)

* Assuming you have a partner, and the premise here is you still want to be a very active parent, then I recommend being very deliberate about almost never parenting together. As in, one of you take all the kids, and the other can do what they want for 1-4 hours at a time.

Lastly, while I'm a pretty active dad myself, I reject the premise put forth here that your job is to maximize the time spent with your kids, as if this is the main metric by which parenting success should be judged. Just no. Actively no. Kids having time alone and with their own friends outside of the eye or ear of their parents is a really important part of growing up. Kids having time with various caregivers who are not their parents (be that grandparents, aunts, uncles, friend's parents, camp counselors, babysitters) is also good and healthy.

The struggle is real though. There's no easy answer. Hope these thoughts help!

On the other hand, there is a lot of moral ambiguity when it comes to judging someone else's parenting - and lack of ambition clearly does not make one a better parent. The history of women in science and mathematics and literature illustrates the tradeoffs among talent and opportunity and ambition that have persisted for centuries and continue to this day. Two of my favorite examples are that of George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans), who was supported in her studies because her father considered her lacking in beauty and Emmy Noether (referred to as essentially the most intelligent woman of all time by Einstein), who demonstrated no prodigious talent in her early education but due to persistent and opportunities shaped in part by having a father who was an Algebraist, is remembered as an intellectual giant.

Ambition may or may not be the right word to use, as others have commented. One thing I have reflected on is not if I should be making a compromise with one or the other, but why in our modern society the easiest path is to only pick one. The more I read about how to bring up healthy strong children, the more I think we've just gone backwards as a species.

There is a lot of research about the bad effects of screens and constant dopamine on long-term mental health and resilience (read The Anxious Generation by Jonathan Heidt). In reality, until just maybe 50 years ago, it was socially accepted for parents to be raising children with a support network around them. That had both good and bad sides - fewer rights for moms/women, dads less involved in parenting. But instead of fixing that, we threw out the whole idea that you need a village to support you as a parent and replaced it with career maxxing as the only prominent virtue to speak about.

I have believed in individual freedom and liberalism forever, but these days I think there is such a thing as too much individualism and we've taken that to an extreme. This makes it really hard to want or be able to raise children, and our society's long-term health suffers as a result, despite all of our scientific progress. Individual parents shouldn't be forced to have the internal debate that the author is having and pick between them - we should fix our social systems and institutions to not need that choice. But that's an even harder problem.

* Jimmy Carter * Bill Clinton * Barak Obama

Easier said than done, I mean, what I am doing here?

There’s also the simple fact that it’s much better for your productivity to play a round of tag than it is to attend another stupid meeting.

Does that count as ambition? Doesn't really matter. The basic tension described here is strong, in any case, between work and family.

Time, energy, & your age are finite. That’s all there is to it.

However, if the metric of career/financial success is reduced to just net worth gaining at X% rate consistently, then it is possible to spend as little time as possible on career success and maximum time to be the best dad possible.

I retired after realizing and choosing this path.

Actually I am hearing ambitious Moms saying it. From a different baseline though.

If parenting and building are both truly aspirations, why not have people you admire that are great parents as well? I guess they don’t have many biographies for great moms and dads.

I admire the ambition. I wonder how many people out there are chasing both of these things, thinking they are being great parents and great builders, but are failing at one, or both.

I'm working harder again even if i have less time, because i want to build a legacy for him and want to show and make make him an exceptional life.

It can make you stronger.

This is something that should be self evident to any parent, no need to write or read a piece to establish that truism.

Time to close the laptop and spend time with the kids...

I think this was mostly a matter of temperament; he liked to work and he didn't really care much about the operation he was funding, which is unfortunately why he has no contact with most of his adult children today.

All that to say, I didn't mind that he worked a lot, but it was pretty damaging that he almost never spoke to me other than for urgent logistical or disciplinary reasons. Just, you know, don't do that.

Where did the "progress" go wrong? Why did it take us backwards in the very basic goals of human life and why is it still called progress?

In fact, I was sharing with my wife the other day that now that my kids are older I am finding myself able to give more to my work in a way I didn't/couldn't before. So my perspective is that, if you abandon the retirement mindset, you can have a fruitful and abundantly productive career later on after having prioritize your family. Especially in this early years when time spent is the most important. This post is right about that.

The choice is there. It's sad how many people choose to not spend time with kids. But the fact that more people have this choice now than they did in the past makes me conclude that it is not as bleak.

I don't know if they need it or not, but I do see that they benefit from it. And it feels good too.

They'll figure it out and we will be right back to the same pressure we had before, but for a short time at least, if your field is competitive, you have a huge edge.

Someone on X, don't recall who, but it resonated.

At my age, you start to understand the trajectory aspect of life and how changing circumstances put the lie to the illusion of stability and permanence. You start to glimpse things in the context of centuries, with decades as fundamental units rather than years, or months. Even things that happened before you were born begin to seem recent, and things evolving half a decade or more in the future are fairly clear and immediately relevant.

Being dad is really hard joyful, you watch they grow from a tiny one to some big one which argue with you also sometimes care you when you sad

I quit from a high pay job because I want to enjoy more time with kids because I feel not get enough in my childhood

I like to read philosophy and settled with existentialism, this helps with the stress of low earning compared the previous time

Life may all about trade off, we may not lucky to get everything we want

My kids are active in about 12-13 hour period between 6.30am and 7.30pm. The rest of the time they're asleep. On school days, window of time in which I can actually be present with them narrows right down to two blocks: 6.30-8.30, and 3.30-7.30. That's only 6 hours in a business day in which I can be active and present with them, leaving me with 18 hours to get everything else done.

There's obviously more to being a dad than just being actively engaged with your children when they're at home and awake. There's all this supplemental work that needs to happen to support them as well. But it's not _that_ much.

The problem is that this I spend with my children actively overlaps the time in which my peers and co-workers are working. Not being available to my teams for synchronous communication slows down their execution, and not having my team available to me while I'm working slows down my own execution. When my team or I need answers or collaboration to unblock us, communicating asynchronously means we can potentially be blocking for half a day or more on a task.

At that point you can either just wait and be unproductive, or start/continue a different task, maintaining multiple active work streams. The latter is problematic for a number of reasons, such as the increased cognitive load of regular context switching, an inability to work on dependent tasks, etc.

So ultimately for me, I don't think the issue is that there's not enough time to do both, it's just that both work and family generally need you at the same time.

To have a life that will feel successful to you, you need to have your ambitions aligned with what really matters to you. Whether that is being a great parent, having great community, building a great company, creating amazing works of art, etc.

There isn't necessarily one "right" balance, but there are certainly many examples of people who went all in on one thing (Einstein, Steve Jobs, etc) to the detriment of anything else, even though they brought children into this world. It doesn't necessarily mean they were wrong, but they were probably crap fathers to have.

Ambition and drive are important but there's an important "so what" there as well. Am I aimlessly ambitious or am I ambitious for the sake of being able to support my family and make a significant impact on the world? If you are lucky enough to have the second orientation then I think there's less conflict between these things.

I have plenty to tech and finance friends who are successful and in our mid 40s, and unfortunately for those who neglected to have the family side of the equation, the shine is wearing off. What's the point of making the next level promotion and making the next 200k pay bump when what you do with it is come back to your apartment by yourself? Sure it's more comfortable and could still be fun to be ambitious and successful but it's lacking the goal piece.

The other half of my friends have family and then the financial etc success feeds directly into it. Can you give your family a good home, a good education, good experiences? It's easier for me to call a "success" a friend with a 4 bedroom house with 3 kids on it, than one with a Manhattan penthouse with no kids in it, even if the homes cost the same. It's just a different dimension.

The other thing is - making the world a better place for the future. The kids you raise and the work you achieve both feed into that. And also the future you are building is something that will benefit your kids - so all the things are aligned.

Then it becomes a "simple" balance - what's the thing that maximizes what I actually want to achieve. I want to be a good father and that takes both being with the kids, and working to make money - and also to set a good example for them of what work looks like. So yes in a simple sense you become less productive because you are going to work fewer hours, but I don't feel less productive in the grand total of life because all the things I am doing across work and family add up to what I want to accomplish.

I am curiosit - I bet many people will read this and think "of course, I feel the same way and what other way to feel is there" and others will say "I disagree at the root" which goes back to this being something with how your family raised you and the perspective you have from it.

If you look beyond the narrow sphere of technology and founders, you'll find many of humanity's greats had kids, or more broadly, family responsibilities, at some point. Their ability and involvement as parents varies widely, but this idea that kids are some kind of an inevitable death-knell for "being successful" or renowned whatever that means, isn't true.

An alternative lens would suggest that having kids reveals a lot about life that you can use in your other pursuits.

Your kids also eventually become adults, at which point the demands likely lower significantly.

Just like the "starving artist" myth, it's mostly baloney hyperbole that people promulgate because there's some obvious basic truth to it, but it isn't a law of the universe by any means.

Bryan Cantrill (inventor of DTrace and cofounder of Oxide Computer) comes to mind as someone who seems to do both. It’s hard to know somebody’s parenting quality from the outside, but he talks about his kids a lot.

In his case, I think he didn’t start his company until his kids were older. I’m not sure what the early childhood years were like for him.

Steve Jobs is also a criminal. See the court cases where he underpaid developers and conspired with other companies to avoid hiring people away. That is criminal.

See https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/jan/23/steve-job... and many similar reports. It is time to stop idolizing this guy. The "time was not right" is not surprising by someone who steals money from developers, which Steve did here. Apple owes people money.

For great parents, if you can think on your own, don't look further than your own parents. Did they something right.

Always had ideas to build things before, and they kinda fizzled out, but recent developments have made me realise that I have to be ambitious right now, that doesn't mean taking time away from them, just time away from me.

So in a weird way, they have encouraged me to be ambitious by just being themselves.

I had a conversation about this topic yesterday with a colleague of mine. We both found some kind of career-family balance, and are continually honing it. However, we both lamented the loss of hobbies.

Numerous other options to solve those problems existed.

The return on their mechanical investment and abandonment of their kids, from a STEM context, was meaningless; it's all been superseded by better modern solutions. They were engaged in meager iterative improvement and social moat building.

Einstein is the only one whose contribution will be discussed in another century.

The trick is not making it about being very productive, but productive "enough".

Elon and many others act like if not everyone is giving it their 110%, the world will be doomed, however the world is full of communities that otherwise were living happily getting destroyed by 110ers.

If you accept your (and everyone elses) insignificance, focus on your community, and just try to be compatible with your kids or colleagues or random people on the street , while at the same keeping your ability to reject judgement, life gets much easier.

Sure, not Steve Jobs level, but pretty good. We both worked 4 days a week most of that time (I a bit more consistently than my wife), and took plenty of time off to do stuff with the kids.

but having a child actually rejuvenates me to do more. yes I probably staring at the screen less number of hours per day, becuase I have children. But I wouldn't say I was doing 10X as much as when I was a bachelor. there is only so much effective work you can get done in a day before you're out of ideas and need sleep or break. playing for 2 hours with my kid gets me fresh and kicking no matter how badly my day sucked.

When he dies, I while track the titles of news articles about the inheritance fight with mild amusement. I won't read the articles however...

Maybe it is. But there's still something to be said for breaking out of that and trying to see your own way in the world. Until it beats you back down and biology takes over and you start to understand life. Kids can only be taught so much; they have to burn their finger on that stove in their own way and time. Millenials still had that connection to and context of the old world that the younger generations now do not; (my wife and I have expressed that we want the life our grandparents had together, to the bewilderment of our Boomer/GenX parents), so maybe we have a bit of leg up in that regard. But I think the ones who didn't will come around naturally as well as the social media driven hustle culture burns itself out.

in tech we like to overwork on nonsense problems ie working on problems that change or are non permanent. literally if 98% of the software went away today it won't be missed, just like shit that came before.

if people listened to Jeff Bezos - who said - focus on things that don't change - you will realize - you can live your life - without overworking. because guess what - if you don't do something today, the problem Will exist tomorrow & the day after.

certain problems never get fully solved, just tiny bits of progress.

but I guess zero sum thinking has taken over.

If you have kids and you prioritize your career to the point you never see your kids, and you will have huge and legitimate regrets later in life. Especially if you don't achieve Jobs / Musk level of financial success. That's pretty common knowledge.

But the opposite is also true. As parents, we're always examples for our kids, for better or worse. Do we want our kids to see us abandon our dreams 'because of them' or do we want them to see their parents showing them how to go after their dreams, because that's what life is about ?

It really depressed me at the time, realising there was a class of entrepreneurs and backers who were genuinely stop-at-nothing, even if it meant their three-year-old at day care was wondering why he was the only nappy-wearer, and carrying that subliminally into later life.

What I learnt from that and host of other experiences over time was that a young family and running a venture-backed, high-growth trajectory business aren't very compatible, but...

What I've also learned is that your first venture's going to be imperfectly executed anyway, so get the learnings out of the way anyway, with kids in the picture, then go again when the kids are school-age, and hope they get to enjoy the fruits of venture number two as teenagers.

Also, I never saw consistency from the people who put venture before family. They'd be buying shots for young staff at 11.00 at night on a week night, checking their crypto-balance continously, micro-managing, taking unnecessary business trips, etc. There are some absolute time-management machines out there, who never seem to waste a moment of their working days (I know two, and they both combined successful startups and young families), but in reality everyone needs some downtime/respite and family time is a better restorative than anything else except pure rest.

On that point, there's the famous adage, 'Startup, sleep, parenthood. Pick any two.' I picked startup and parenthood. Sleep deprivation means I look 10 years older than I am, but no regrets.

Finally, I think kids give you a second wave of competitive determination after your initial ambition wanes. Problematic investors, cheating competitors, over-demanding enterprise customers, careless execs, etc. could leave a lone individual feeling sorry for themselves, and defeatist. It's amazing how creative and determined one becomes when it feels like these different personas are causing setbacks that, rathervthan just interfering with your personal ambitions, might be stealing your kids' future opportunities and financial security.

I have many similar thoughts, but one thing that worries me is also trying too hard to do the optimal thing. I often find that my own expectations collide with reality (kids’ moods, random events necessitating change of plans etc). So it’s important to switch from “rationally making shit happen” mode during work time to “vibe and see what happens” during family time. This mental switch is hard.

I've been working on something similar at Mox (the effective altruism coworking space in the mission) as part of my (joyful parenting efforts but it won't be ready until winter when their 1st floor renovations are done.

Others who feel the same way may also be interested in this old post i wrote about how to be productive before your baby turns one on the EA forum https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/xocdNsa8At3bmQKm3/...

https://joyfulparentingsf.com/

The bad news is that the day still has 24 hours, and that means that your career needs to adapt.

For example I had to turn down an opportunity that would require me to be putting 70 hours per week and I stayed at a job that I could do 9-5. That opportunity went sideways (the startup failed) so overall my career is fine.

When I was growing up I thought everyone had kids (I guess I only socialized with families with kids). This was my future. As a young adult making the jump to having kids seemed like a big decision, but with hindsight that looks like following the default path. Now that there is growing amount of people like me with no kids I am wondering what life should look like. I lack the rolemodels.

I have witnessed my friends grow a lot in short time period when they have a kid. At first it’s a bit jarring how baby takes over their life. I think it is super cool and all of them say that it is an unique experience they can’t really explain.

By the time kid hits maybe 10 years old they have adjusted and interaction with them is pretty normal again from my perspective.

At the same time I feel I have also grown at my own pace. I don’t feel totally out of sync with my grown up parent friends although I must say I can be bit more lighthearted and experimental with my life. The stakes are low. It is not like I think life is about career or hedonistic pursuits anymore. I don’t want to live the life of a 30 year old. I value being part of society, socially present and giving. Enjoying simple things and seeing beauty in the world.

In a way my life looks like that of an empty nester, but without the prospect of seeing my child building a life for themselves, having grand children etc. Feels like a big decision I have done for my future self.

Then AI got good. I've always been able to solve problems fast in my head, but was bottlenecked by fingers and dumb infra.

AI gave me my time back honestly. Nix solved infra. backlog CLI kept the work clear. Good engineering, in spurts.

Now I have more execution power than ever, and I can steer my minions. Yes, I don't get to code and there is little flow state, but I always better liked to solve a problem and go to the next than actually typing it out.

From my phone, wireguard and aVNC to my homelab, I conduct ralph loops on my architecture and principles. This is so powerful, that my brain poops out even more ideas - and so I find myself fully immersed - another kind of flow state.

Consequence: Brain fry and less sleep, so sometimes I just crash out and sleep for 10 hrs. Usually get 5-6 hrs nowadays.

I think the author is spot on about ruthlessly optimizing the time you do have, though. That seems to be the only way to keep up.

One thing I’ve noticed is that, yes, to make it into the history books you likely have to pursue your career at the cost of everything else (and be insanely lucky).

But right below that degree of one in a billion success is a much larger group of very successful people who manage to achieve admirable balance in their lives. Their spouses love them, their kids want to spend time with them, and rhey might even have a hobby or two.

The thing is, these people tend to be quieter - a few I know are downright secretive. They aren’t constantly online or in the press seeking validation because they have achieved fulfillment at home and work.

The people I have known who were the most grounded, happiest, productive, and fulfilled all understood their lives on some level to be in service of something that has value to more than just themselves. That can be being a mom or dad, furthering the knowledge of humanity, serving your community, it can be anything that you recognize as greater than yourself.

It brings you into contact with other people who share the same goal. It is a stronger fuel than personal ambition, and one that doesn't leave you empty along the way.

One "superpower" from being married with kids is that your life becomes a lot more predictable. Like, having sex regularly and spending quality family time is probably a healthy part of a balanced, productive lifestyle, and is a good counterbalance to the stresses of a demanding career - it's nice not to always be thinking about how you're going to get laid, or in the event that you do become successful, whether or not your partner is just gold digging you or something. Although a lot of that depends on who you marry and making sure you're both doing good maintenance.

My partner and I are considering paying for a weekend nanny to look after the boy when he turns one on Sunday- so again we have free time to work on our passion projects. Its great to be a dad but it is so time consuming with young children.

In college, I burned out on normal coursework and dropped out to teach myself how to code instead. To support myself, I worked in restaurants. I found that working as a dishwasher was quite complementary to learning to code. It was tiring physically, but I ended each day in need of mental stimulation, so went home and coded all night.

Now, as a father, I've found there's a similar complementarity in some ways but not others. There's a huge physical component to parenting, and this is perfectly complementary. There's also an emotional aspect (sometimes 2 or even 3 cry at once). This can be complementary or not depending on how much emotional labor work required (usually very little).

The one area where both work and kids is exhausting is attention. A toddler demands a huge amount of attention, and performing at work does too.

That is a weird statement. Most people eventually have kids, so obviously the average ambitious person has kids.

My experience is actually that there is a bias towards more ambition among the childless. Not because of laziness of parents, mind you. But in the decision whether to have kids or not, ambition may play the decisive role, everything else being equal. It goes so far that I have heard otherwise reasonable people resent childless colleagues because of course those workaholics can afford to push overtime while those with kids are pushed into carreer disadvantages, so they say.

Parenting gives to access to a part of the world you never knew existed. The school events, sports, Cub Scouts, neighbors down the street. You meet people who are trying to create a great world for their children. Your interests align, so you end of working together on it. You actually become part of the community.

I used to be Mr. Career, and maybe someday I'll get back to it. But right now my job plays such a small role in my life compared to my family.

His main job was to fly around the world and train salespeople on how better attract and retain clients.

One year, he was traveling for 180 days aka half of the entire year.

For many years I was somewhat conflicted about this b/c on the one hand he wasn't around much but on the other hand my mom didn't have to work, we had a great life and got to take international vacations every year.

As a father now, I appreciate the sacrifice my dad made to not see us as much but to provide a great life for his wife and kids.

Is a bit harsh to me. You might be ultra competitive but it could also be how you define it. But in my opinion sometimes “time wasting activities” are needed for recharging your own batteries and this kind of phrasing sounds like burnout.

Like if I said fishing someone would justify it as not being time wasting etc or meditating or something you would justify as health work but that justification is even contradictory to meditation at all.

time wasting is an odd phrase and stressful wording to me I don’t like. “wasting time” can sometimes be a productive and useful endeavor.

Note that I am not talking about earning a living and thus necessarily sacrificing time doing that and showing your kids that sometimes you have to work hard to survive in a decent way. I am talking about the parents who outsource their children to childcare to work to pay off the loan on their third car and newest iphone and tell you that they have no choice.

I used to think this way, and then I realised that I actually want to be famous and respected. After some time, I realised that I just wanted the approval of people. And finally I realised all I wanted was to feel loved and cared for.

Doesn't matter either way, though, once you realize you're just a blip like the other 8,000,000,000 people on this earth.

Why is this nihilist lens applied selectively to one pursuit and not others?

Not sure what the solution is other than putting in some deliberate effort to maintain those relationships (which I didn't do).

> It's time-consuming and exhausting, but I haven't found it to be _hard_ yet.

I think this is exactly what people mean when they say "hard": time-consuming and exhausting, not hard as in "I cannot figure this out". Usually you figure it out as you go.

This is excluding children with serious health problems, etc. I'm thankful I won the lottery in this regard, I know some situations can destroy families.

> I still, and unfortunately kind of frequently, miss what I have effectively sacrificed to have her. I am slower at staying on top of emerging trends, hobbies have been left by the wayside

Also rings true for me. Especially my hobbies, I barely have time for them now; and when she grows up who knows whether I'll be able to resume them. But in my case, this is balanced by this thought: would I be happier if I had more time for my hobbies, but she wasn't in my life. And the answer is very clearly that I prefer her to be in my life 1000000%, and if I cannot do my hobbies all that often that's an acceptable loss.

For example nurses (both male and female) during WWI - worked themselves to mental breakdowns because there was endless stream of properly suffering people to help or even save. One can't have much more noble goal. Yet hard burnouts kept happening.

I don't want to sound all gloomy since I know nothing about your situation. Just listen to your body and mind, it keeps telling things in subtle ways, not a good idea to ignore that.

Also, the first thing I work on is usually a high leverage project that excites me. Reading news or answering emails (things that can affect my emotions) are usually avoided during that time. Usually.

I had a week where the kids were with Grandma and Grandpa. I got more done on a Wednesday after work than I did in the previous few weeks including weekends.

I don't think everyone needs kids and I don't subscribe to the 'moral high ground' of having kids, BUT I have zero sympathy for childless peers that think their life is too busy.

That said, you say "it's normal to look forward to the weekend being over so you can sit down and work on the thing you're good at and know how to do" - this isn't what I'm getting at. I look forward to the weekend being over so that I can spend time away from my kids. I trudge through work for the week while trying to regain mental energy to tackle the after-school pickups and the next weekend. I'm just always running at a mental energy deficit. I enjoy my work, but I just have no energy to apply myself - the kids suck it out of me.

Age 20: About 1 in 500 (0.2%) Age 30: About 1 in 270 (0.37%) Age 35: About 1 in 80 (1.25%) Age 40: About 1 in 60 (1.66%) Age 45: About 1 in 20 (5.0%)

Which actually kinda refutes me because 1 in 500 is still a lot.

> “I thought I knew what was important until I had kids”

I wouldn't doubt this, obviously in the mind of the parent their children are going to be an almost spiritual experience. But it seems like the most important thing children -actually do- is make their parents happier.

People usually talk about children in terms of how it makes them feel I guess, "my children give me meaning" etc. With the children being more of an abstraction of "potential".

I can sympathise more with the idea that humans are destroying everything and life won't be worth living for my descendants. But that feels like giving up on the possibility of humans. I don't want to do that.

In any case, it turns out that global fertility rates are in freefall and we're facing population decline faster than anyone predicted.

Try watching The Dawn Wall or Free Solo, keep notes, and fill in the blanks on how long they were gone from family. It’s a canned example of how it gets glossed over.

The same attitude as towards gear in weightlifting is appropriate. They tell you it’s natty all day long, but you know delts don’t get that round without gear.

That doesn't translate that much into say teens but it lays a solid foundation.

Taking a job at Palantir in order to make an extra few hundred K… yeah, maybe that’s morally piss poor.

So the ones I keep coming back to are Lord of the Rings - The Card Game, Legendary (mostly Marvel since it has so many expansions you can mix and match, but I also have and like DC, James Bond, and Alien), Ashes Ascendancy (also Ashes Reborn), Marvel Champions, Aeon's End, Arkham Horror - The Card Game.

Memoir '44 would be in that list too if you could play that solo. I love that game, but I haven't had a buddy to play it with in a long time. BoardGameArena has a great implementation but I don't like playing against random people on there as much. Supposedly there's a new app coming that will let you play solo, so I'm looking forward to that.

I've also tried the following recently and they're pretty high up too, they might eventually join the games above: Primal: The Awakening, Star Trek Captain's Chair, Marvel United, Boss Fighters QR, and Bullet.

Smaller, shorter games I enjoy include Cursed!?, Rove, Hoki, Fliptoons, D-Day Pocket, All is Bomb, Palm Island, and Harmonies

So we can dismiss opinions of non-parents as well.

like there isn't a correlation on more resources being used or explored in a bigger population?

I realised it was a lost cause when I realised that literally everyone I knew had some sort of "my parents are imperfect and it's broken me somehow" story. I think it might just be part of the human condition to grow up and realise your parents were flawed humans who made mistakes raising you.

Maybe you could argue that’s a lightweight version of “approval of others”

It is such an extreme social taboo to admit you regret having your children that even if you find someone that does you would never know.

I'd recommend everyone try fasting and figure out what their bodies really need (preferably over the holidays, because the adjustment period can be a bit rough and could interfere with work.) I suspect most of the developed world is over-eating by quite a lot given our largely sedentary lifestyles.

"Winston Churchill would recall the floggings, done until pupils “bled freely” and screamed loudly. In “Such, Such Were The Joys”, George Orwell writes of being beaten so violently that his headmaster broke his riding crop and “reduced me to tears”."

Sad little boys: the backlash against Britain’s boarding schools https://economist.com/britain/2023/05/28/sad-little-boys-the... from The Economist

No: fasting has not been proven to extend lifespan in humans.

Also no: exercise has been far more provably correlated with healthspan improvements than fasting.

Anyone who drives risks their life more than they risk having a special needs child at reasonably non-late age.

We just brush off most such gambles because:

1. People have a terrible intuition for probabilities.

2. If it were better, they would go insane.

But the idea of having physical cards that you split up and assign does sound really helpful. I might look into that. I would say in my experience breaking out household chores even amongst roommates, some tasks that seem even aren't remotely so once you get into it (I have been the advantaged and disadvantaged party in different apartments) and some are simply different such that some are trivial for one person and not so for another person. But that's a part of dealing the cards, even when splitting evenly. (now I'm wondering if I can see where people are getting into arguments.... ^_^')

Yeah, no wonder given that it starts with an unrealistic view that the average man is a lazy slob that sits around playing video games while his wife has to handle everything with children and the household. You keep waiting for her to mention that anything else might be possible throughout the book, but that never happens. I think gay couples were mentioned maybe once.

Not sure how to apply a legal framework, but in my area this is often enforced by the lack of daycare options for <2yos (the threshold might be lower, but about that much).

Very rare to see parents around me take their parental leave at the same time bc they'd be risking still being on a waitlist when they're done.

I watch a toddler all day so my wife can do her best to not get let go too along with household work that other people pay people to do. I'm not building a business that can pay my mortgage with 2 hours of free time at night.

not designed, evolved

Social behavior and the actual behaviors themselves evolved through populations as, among other things, an information storage mechanism that survives generations.

What the author is at risk of doing, in my opinion, is pretending to a certain extent that he can have his cake and eat it too. As I wrote in my original comment, "you can't have it all."

Please don't take this to mean that you have to choose between your family and career (or a business). That's not what I'm saying. What I'm saying is that, at a certain point of "ambition", there is no perfect balance possible between all the the things you're trying to maximize.

The wise person accepts that sometimes you have to make choices, and choices always require that you give something up to get something else.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rationalism

And yes, I could in fact give you multiple logical arguments for why winning an Olympic gold is a "grander" accomplishment than having children:

- Logically, this is a way more difficult achievement than having kids by at least some measure of difficulty. One way to measure difficulty is that fewer people are able to achieve it. Everyone (literally almost everyone) can have kids. But only a select few can win a gold.

- By winning a gold medal you leave a bigger legacy than by having kids. You will be in a lot of history books, and a ton of people will look after you. You will inspire the next generations. By having kids, you will also change the next generation but I would argue by way less than by winning gold in the olympics.

See? Those are logical arguments. They are based on measurable input/outputs. You could argue with similar arguments as to why having a kid is such a grand achievement, but yet, no parents did that. They all come back to hormones and feelings.

>>> In another comment you said there's "inherently nothing very special, unique or difficult about" having children. I'm saying that's an illogical, hormonal/emotional statement. Not that it's wrong, but that it's irrelevant to whether having children is a "grand accomplishment". Something being special/unique/difficult is only relevant to you because of how you feel about the world.

No, again: those words have measurable meaning: Having children is neither special/unique (as it is literally the normal outcome for most people), neither difficult (at least to HAVE children is not difficult, raising them well has probably some level of measurable difficulty). How can you disagree with this logically?

It should also be noted that the birth rates in China are not increasing, either, despite the end of the One Child Policy. Partly it is also because the younger generation feels immiseration from higher costs of living and fewer opportunities- see the concept of involution.

Finally, during the Great Depression, fertility rates in the U.S. dropped to all-time lows. Not unlike the Great Recession, which has triggered a nonstop decline. We all live in the shadow of 2008.

And I do wonder if this is about the engineer mindset ('I've reduced this to a previously solved problem, I just let the subroutine handle it') or about the way that men are socialized in my culture (just take her out to dinner twice a year- Mother's Day and Valentine's- and remember her birthday and you're meeting social expectations) or what. But it's the biggest threat to my (and I'd hazard a guess most other) marriages.

surely the natural response here will be about how important, healthy, and real this particular fad is. same as all the other health fads everyone would talk about for the last hundred years

This may sound somewhat reductive, and please correct me if that is the case, but I find that I can be around and play with my nephew and experience all of this wonder and how he progresses through life, while not being around for the sleepless nights and tantrums that I feel are the "work" part of being a parent.

My parent's goal was to get me to go to college. My goal for my kids is to teach them the importance of having kids early. The fact it might help in having a grandkid or two before I kick the bucket is just a wee bit of icing on that cake. I think the ideal time to start is probably in your 20s. This also maximizes the amount of time you'll get to spend with your kids. I'm quite 'jealous' (sans the negative connotations) of those who will get to see their kids live til retirement, but hey - they made wiser decisions, so hopefully I can help encourage my children to do the same.

My goal is to keep up with her mountain biking, snowboarding and hiking for as long as I can. Hopefully I’ll be on the game well in my 60s and her 20s

Can confirm that starting at 30 makes it relatively easy to keep up. Still not early enough though. Wish I’d started at 25.

It’s mostly a matter of effort though. You’ll become very good at it out of sheer need if you genuinely want to keep up. In far better shape now than I was at 30, mentally and physically.

another thing i think about is grandparents. having kids earlier would mean longer time with grandparents! (heck, maybe one day my time with potential grandkids)

off topic - i understand my parents so much more now that im a parent. i think being a parent has helped heal my relationship with them. grandparents are awesome and i wish i had more time with mine.

> when my youngest will be 21, then I can die. ;-)

which I thought was a funny way to put.

But, am sure there is an evolutionary reason for dying after your children leave the nest. It's all good:)

(I’m halfway through our main parental fase.)

Before I would waste so much time engaging on video games / internet-browsing / TV-youtube / etc and just not enjoying the time I spent. It felt very meaningless, like why even bother working? I have (had) savings to go take several years of sabbatical if I wanted.

When I actually boot up a video game today I actually enjoy it. And that is all on top of normal stuff you hear about having kids.

Not disputing you either—I once said I will never have children, too—but indeed and as with other life decisions, you should stay childless while you find the meaning of it incomprehensible. It’s not for people who are not ready to stop thinking about themselves.

Although there is an evolutionary reason why our brain would make our offspring significant to us.

I don't think it's something to think or reason about. You feel it (or don't, in some cases). As an atheist, I suppose this is how truly religious people feel about their religion: it brings them joy and meaning. (And much like in some religions, you sometimes feel you're beholden to a demanding, whimsical god!).

You can ask that question about a lot of things whether it's one entrepeneurial baby or their nature conservation effort which reveals it to be somewhat meaningless question.

Its because they are more important than anything else to a parent. You are invested in their outcome more than anything else. I don’t see how this isn’t obvious.

Similar, all invocations of "calm down" should be in all caps with exclamation points. Never in history has telling someone whose upset to "calm down" actually led to them calming down.

I completely agree with you. But I can't say around me, people, movies, society ever sent the message that parenthood is terrible. The way I interpret the message was always "this was hard, this was grueling, but I wouldn't change it for the world". I didn't get this apparent contradiction until it was my turn.

I think the people who miss almost all of these "tickboxes" and can somehow link it to the kids become unhappy with parenthood. If they ever feel their personal time, romance, career, success suffered because of the focus on the children, they will end up in the "disappointment" camp.

I never personally met anyone who was willing to admit regret of having children but I did meet people who were disappointed and put a veiled blame for their failure on the children.

What's so easy to miss is the immense feeling of love, of being needed, of being loved, that words can't describe. I frequently tell people I feel like the grinch after he discovers Xmas - my heart is three times bigger. But you can't really see that it's just a feeling I carry with me.

However, even though I also think nothing comes even close to parenthood for me, my perspective is that society strongly encourages —I'd even say strongly pressures— people to have kids, to feel that if you don't, it's almost like something is wrong with you. Maybe we're just different generations? :-)

Lately I frequently find myself wondering if every philosopher who pondered the meaning of life was childless, because it feels to me like the answer must be pretty obvious to any parent.

That’s…unhealthy and unusual.

Uh? I feel it's the opposite. Society constantly judges people that don't have kids. Having kids has always been the norm. It projects you as a grown up mature adult. In fact I think a ton of people have kids simply because they want to give that image of being a well established mature person.

Maybe I just wasn't paying attention, but this isn't at all what I remember. I frankly can't think of a single movie or TV show that paints parenting as bad, let alone the worst thing in the world. I can think of only one celebrity who I can recall extolled his child-free life. That was within the past year-- and I think the guy is a total dipshit man-child.

And I have no idea where you grew up, or whether that's actually a factor, but my teachers, when they had kids, seemed like loving parents. When they didn't have kids, I don't think they ever spoke badly or parenting.

And yes a lot of interaction, but it doesn't guarantee anything further down the line - when long time adults youngest is still spoiled and selfish and not really a pleasant person to be around with for anybody, including siblings and their own mom. Middle one is scared to have kids, a decision that she may end up regretting later easily. And my wife is also carrying her part of the burden, won't bother you with details.

The grass is always greener behind the fence and all that.

On a personal note, I never had much positive interactions with either of my siblings, certainly not as children as not now that we're in our 40s either. Lots of fighting, absolutely zero closeness or positive feelings.

I understand that kids carry a long responsibility above just memories though.

Furthermore I don’t need to shoot heroin to know that shooting heroin feels extremely good and that the people that do it really enjoy the feeling. I also don’t need to shoot heroin to see the harms it causes to the people that do it, and those around them.

You are trying to make a logical argument for the observed preferences of an evolved system that only evolved to perpetuate itself, not to benefit anyone or anything outside of a sequence of DNA. It’s a shame that so many people are blinded to that by instinct and emotion.

If I were developing nanotech grey goo in my basement, everyone would rightly point out that it’s a risk to society. Yet, humans doing the exact same thing (just more slowly) are praised.

People get unreasonably defensive when confronted with these facts, as you have demonstrated.

Can you name one thing that benefits from people creating more selfish and self-replicating creatures other than the emotional state of people who share some of their DNA?

PS: No mother “earns” the love of a one or two year old. It’s automatic and meritless. To assert otherwise to bolster your argument is obviously silly and should clue you in to how shaky the logical foundation for your claims is.

Implicitly, I think, yes. It builds on all of the other social pressures, big and small. I'm sure an entire humanities thesis could be written about how it all adds up over time.

I wrote another comment elsewhere in the thread talking about polarized opinions broadcasted on social media and how that also adds to the stress of it all. Nobody ever wants to talk about the "it was/is... fine, actually. kind of whatever. not great, but not horrible." possibility of pregnancy (and parenthood). It's always either the most wonderful, miraculous thing ever and you're insane for not wanting it, or it's the most horrible, irreversibly damaging thing ever and you're insane for wanting it.

And the thing is... it COULD be any of those outcomes! It could ruin your life. It could also make your life so much more fulfilling. There's simply no way to know for sure what it will be like for you without doing it. It is an enormous gamble, especially when you are the person who has to endure the pregnancy, and it is a gamble that you can't really walk away from. (Of course, you can give a child up for adoption, but there's a lot of social shame involved in that, especially if it is a wanted child that you're quite literally giving up on rearing.)

However, why is pregnancy scarier than it used to be when it is safer than it has ever been? It seems to be more scary in developed countries than in poor ones too.

I wonder whether the loss of the "village" might be part of the reason for this. it certainly is for a lot of other things around having kids.

I'm sorry to hear you never wanted kids. I guess it's more complicated if you were sure beforehand that it's not for you. I hope you're able to balance the love with the effort.

Especially if we try to rationalize the choice. If you talk about "feelings", then fine. But be aware that "feelings" could simply be your hormone levels changing after having kids.

Yes, they should. We are, after all, replying to the initial assertion that (and I quote) "you don’t need children to have these sorts of feelings [love, being needed, needing someone]".

> But if you make a claim that having a kid is the most important thing in the world

That wasn't a claim anybody made in this thread, and specifically everyone was talking from a personal perspective about parenthood, not making universal claims. Certainly not the person who wrote this (and to whom you indirectly replied):

> What's so easy to miss is the immense feeling of love, of being needed, of being loved, that words can't describe. I frequently tell people I feel like the grinch after he discovers Xmas - my heart is three times bigger. But you can't really see that it's just a feeling I carry with me.

If you don't like talking about feelings, fine. But this discussion was about feelings, not about some universal "most important thing in the world".

Unfortunately - and this is kinda related to your comment about it being rare for the kind of person who worries about being a good parent to be a really bad parent - we often see opposite patterns play out... people that would probably make good parents seem less likely to reproduce, and vice versa. I know "Idiocracy" is a bit of a meme these days and is arguably classist, but I can't help but think about it. It's probably a far larger socioeconomic issue than can be feasibly hashed out in an internet forum, and I certainly can't solve it.

Ultimately, I think where I'm at these days, is that we need the village back, and I would love to be a part of it. How? Well, currently, it's that "Fun Auntie" role, as I've no kids of my own, nor do I plan to change that. I've long "wanted to want" bio-children, but so far, I don't. I'm mid-30s now, so there is still time, especially thanks to fertility technology continuing to improve. I'm probably not gonna change my mind, but I'm far too autistic to speak in absolutes, so I cant 100% rule anything out.

Regardless: the village is a beautiful thing. It's an honor to be a part of it in the ways that I am and have been throughout my life. More people should be a part of it. We should all (within reason) be a part of it. It should be celebrated and supported each and every day, to the point where parenthood isn't so much of a burden on the individual family unit, and is instead a shared responsibility of the local community. How do we best go about doing that? Obviously governmental and institutional support is critical, but we also need societal/cultural support, and that will be a lengthier project... we owe it to ourselves to try, though.

I appreciate the conversation and insights in this conversation; thanks for the well-thought out responses in these threads.

Also, the context of this conversation was replying to this assertion:

> You don’t need children to have these sorts of feelings

So it's about feelings, not about "rational discussion". Not a "fallacy" like you claimed, but the actual topic of discussion.