171–180 of 226 posts
I am always somewhat puzzled by the focus on free time without taking into account the energy balance of a person. I find often that when someone says “I don’t have the time”, what they really mean is that they don’t have energy left to take on something else. In my case, I find that there’s often enough hours, but I don’t always have the energy to be active 100% of that time and just end up taking some rest.
If you have less than 24hrs a day for fully-expendable time, at your own leisure, you are doing something wrong. Let the mexicans work, man, you are doing something wrong. 24 hour club. All day every day!
Damn I only got 116. How do you avoid sleep completely?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I try to make it a point to do all the chores when the kids are awake. When they are asleep is time to relax; not do mundane tasks I don't feel it's my duty to entertain my kinds every waking hour, so if they have to settle with watching me fold the laundry or unload the dishwasher, so be it. This probably won't win me the father-of-the-year award, and it is parenting-style me and my girlfriend don't always agree abo…
It's really not about entertaining my kids constantly. It's that a baby and a toddler are a lot of work even if they do spend hours entertaining themselves.
There are parents who live life to serve their kids needs, perceived needs, future needs and every fantasy they project on their kids.
Some feedback about the formula from a parent: The formula needs to account for the reality that with young children your "parental duties" expands to occupy all free time when kids are awake. And also shifts other chores into any free time slots when kids are asleep. Kids are asleep. Time to clean the kitchen, do the dishes, switch the laundry, cut some veggies for tomorrow's dinner, and then find somewhere softer t…
I try to make it a point to do all the chores when the kids are awake. When they are asleep is time to relax; not do mundane tasks I don't feel it's my duty to entertain my kinds every waking hour, so if they have to settle with watching me fold the laundry or unload the dishwasher, so be it. This probably won't win me the father-of-the-year award, and it is parenting-style me and my girlfriend don't always agree abo…
The key to making this work is our parenting style. We promote autonomy _a lot_. For example, my youngest was eating on her own at ~10-11 months. Sure, she was making a mess at first, but now she's 1.5 yrs and she's pretty good at this. Then you see the "exhausted-parent" type spoon-feeding their 3yo toddler, and wondering how we manage.
This translates to a lot of other areas (dressing up, housekeeping, hygiene, schoolwork), and while it's still a ton of work, it's much more manageable. The bonus is that we're raising confident, independent women as a result (because they know they can do it themselves).
I believe the current trend of helicopter-parenting / parents as slaves to their children is actually harmful to society, and that we're currently raising a generation of children who won't know what / how to do anything on their own. People don't magically become independent at 18; it's a process that starts at a very young age.
Try talking to your girlfriend along these lines, you might manage to convince her. And for what it's worth, showing the kids that the laundry doesn't fold itself _is_ father-of-the-year material in my opinion.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It is solved. Everybody can choose a job where they works less hours or become a freelancer and work as many hours as they want. This doesn't work on a global scale, but as an individual, that choice is possible. The problem is that people want to buy more than they can afford from doing less work. There is no way to resolve this. As long as there are status goods like sneakers for $1000, people will have to work the…
I don't agree, humans worked for 80 hours a week and then together reduced to 40 hours a week. I don't see why they could not reduce it to 30 or 20 hours a week. Everyone worked on a Saturday then suddenly most of the people stopped working on the Saturday, I don't see why it would be impossible for most of the people in the society to stop working on Friday too.
In the US, the government is supposed to create and reinforce individual liberties and property rights. That means creating a legal framework around personal property. It should be protective of peoples’ time as well.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I’m in the middle of a four day weekend. I’ll probably get absolutely nothing extraordinary done in it. Despite there being plenty of things I could be doing. The 40 hour work week is tyrannical.
> The 40 hour work week is tyrannical. If you are stating this seriously, I often wonder why there isn’t a great movement toward a reduction in working days/hours in the modern workplace. It’s kind of mind boggling to me why we have to trade most of our waking hours for the majority of the prime of our life to make a living wage. Modern society should be solving for this.
There’s a lot of hand-wringing over UBI and other suggestions because the economy will change dramatically if a lot of people suddenly work less. As much as I agree that it seems like we shouldn’t need to be working this much, I have to admit that when I think about how completely fixed into our core the ideas of work and jobs are, I feel like reducing them quickly could have massive and unintended consequences for our economy.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I live in Tanzania and here any kid that is above the age of 2 has free rein to go wherever they want. Maybe it's not a better way (though I suspect it is), but it is certainly easier (assuming you don't have 8 children like most people here though).
I think it boils down to the trade off between convenience, cost, and safety. I'm convinced that kids in the developed world are so safe and so likely to see adulthood that in order to move the needle on safety even the slightest, we have to dump a huge amount of time and money into it. Okay so the infant mortality rate in Canada is at about 4 per 1000 (about 38 per 1000 in Tanzania). How do we improve that? Well let…
When I was 6, my parents took us to Mexico and let me and my two younger siblings wander around on our own. They also barely registered any idea of possible danger. The closest they got was when my little brother was petting a horse from behind more than a mile from home and got lightly kicked in the head. They told us to be more careful and watch out for each other, and we were wandering around the next day. It could have gone bad, but it didn’t, we survived. Other memories of my childhood include things like bouncing around in the back seat of their Buick without seatbelts.
My wife had a hard time letting our own two boys wander around on their own in safe middle class neighborhoods until they were both over 12. I was pushing for more autonomy, but I have to admit I’d never have given my kids as much autonomy as I got.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Did you make all 12 with your S.O. or are you like those guardian-angel foster parents from _Shazam!_?
It's 100% natural with 1 wife. Homeschooling takes time. I almost bought a house that had been used as a foster home. It was disturbing. Everything everywhere had locks. Even the drawers in the kitchen had individual key-based locks. You needed a key to open the drawer. There were camera feeds all across the house. The windows were secured against exit.
https://www.quora.com/How-do-you-make-children-not-eat-all-o...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The trick seems to be to identify your various different out-of-energy states and what activity is consistently restorative for each. Then, get experience with those activities when you’re fresh so that you have less of a hurdle to jump over when you really need them. The biggest issue, of course, is that it requires you to experiment with new things when you’re dead tired in order to figure out what helps in the fir…
I think there are two problems. Tiredness and boredom. TV's sweet spot is when you are mildly bored and pretty tired. It tires you even more but alleviates boredom a bit. I had after-school routine. When I was comming back from school I was bored and tired but too bored and not tired enough to go to sleep immediately. So I watched TV for an hour or two becomming slightly less bored and completely tired. After that I…
My last year was terrible, and I had developed the habit of watching video as way to self-soothe. I wasn't really enjoying it or getting anything out of it, so when my major source of stress ended, I decided to kick the TV/Netflix/Prime habit. For all of June, I eliminated it and video games.
It was hard at first, but it has been great. When June ended I was curious to see if I'd pick those back up. So far, nothing. It turns out if I let myself be bored, it will drive me to do something more interesting.
While I think it's good to take stock of "where does my time go??", the calculations here are pretty misleading IMO. For example, I think, for most people, if you had absolutely no other external obligations (e.g. you are independently wealthy, no kids, etc.) and you had exactly 5 years left to live, I think most people would consider that you have "5 years of free time left". By taking out things like sleep, eating,…