391–400 of 802 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
As much as I sometimes wonder what life would have been like as DINKs, the feeling of my 7 year old girl sneaking up behind me to give me a cuddle outweighs all of the fast cars and long walks on the beach I personally could ever have.
Kids love beaches!
YC reject so I bootstrapped and was thankfully able to hit profitability before my first kid showed up. I’ve now got two. I also have dreams bigger than ever. In fact, writing this while sitting on the couch with the kids watching Muppet Treasure Island while my kids are wearing pirate hats and waving foam swords. I’m still extremely productive and prolific. Probably less compared with before. But before, I had frien…
I'm shocked by the amount of time people who don't have kids waste. So while PG may believe that people may have their "act already together" pre-kids, I sort of look at the amount of time people without kids waste and think "if only I had that much free time..."
Yes. Before I became a dad, I didn't realize how physically and financially constrained people are with regards to number of kids that they have. For me and my wife, our first child took all our time, resources and energy. This was a shock to me because my parents had 4 children and never seemed to struggle. Also, they were much better off than me financially and could afford to hire help. My biggest achievement as a…
If it's any consolation he would have to figure out that himself anyway, because the world is currently changing faster than ever.
I was on vacation a while ago, where I had to explain to my kids the concept of not being able to pause a TV broadcast.
They live in a world of entertainment on demand and LLMs. My values were coined way before all that.
As for myself I'm wearing the skin of that young man I was 10 years ago and don't understand what was the big deal with some of those things he cared so much for.
If we are talking about points people don't make, how about this: your life is going to get harder and worse as you get older. Your dreams will very likely die. Having kids will make that more clear, but honestly I know plenty of people with and without kids and they all struggle with the not fulfilling their ambitions (or realizing those ambitions and finding they weren't what they imagined), the fading of youth, di…
Even after that, I think being there for major life events is important too; college graduations, weddings, birth of grand babies.
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.
First, I respect anyone’s choice not to be a parent. It’s constant, demanding work, far more intense than any job I’ve ever had as a baseline. Second, this is the third time in two days I’ve seen some variation on “I dreamed of doing something significant and never wanted kids.” That’s a wild construction. Having kids is incredibly significant, and more world-changing than most of us will ever do. Having kids didn’t…
This wasn’t a sentiment I took away from the post
On my end, becoming a dad didn’t make me less ambitious, just more focused. I was vp of engineering at a Series A startup when my kid was born. It was a challenging job, but one that felt increasingly devoid of any meaning for me (maybe also because I'd been there for 5 years). I was compensating by working on side-projects at night and on weekends. I even wrote a novel that took me 4 years to finish. Then my son was…
I did start two businesses: One brick and mortar and one app. The brick and mortar has the biggest drain on family time since with the app I can grind at night and only miss out on sleep.
The chance of validation from others is not a good reason for making one choice or another and a life made of choices of that kind will eventually leave you spiritually bankrupt.
Make decisions based on what you're passionate about, based on what will bring and keep meaningful relationships into your life, based on what will leave you with habits that take you outside, into the sun, moving your body and eating healthy, and, sure, that will afford you the ability to pay for those things.
Focus on the process, not the outcome.
Making decisions based on what will make you more "successful" will make you a slave to others approval. And those others will use you up and waste your life to achieve their own objectives.
Also, if you pick the right partner, having kids does all the good things in life at once. It is the most efficient way to get yourself into the good life possible.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Perhaps, but that often means selecting a partner more quickly, which is another gamble with potentially terrible consequences.
Life is full of such gambles and it's inevitable. 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.