Comment by cryptonector | Hacker News Reader

Comment by cryptonector | Hacker News Reader

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The measure of life is happiness. For many this involves parenting (probably, one imagines, biology drives this, no?).

Some people will choose to be stay-at-home parents. There is nothing wrong with that. That is a career. The household income... is the household income, not the wage earner's, because for a couple with children the family is their life project, and the stay-at-home parent's "service" is "paid for" by the wage earner.

If we really want to compare apples to apples then we have to allocate a fraction (say, half) of the wage earner's income to the stay-at-home parent for the purpose of analysis. Alternatively compare singles' income to singles and childless couples' individuals, and separately analyze married-with-children-and-both-working couples, and then separately analyze married-with-children-and-one-stay-at-home-parent couples.

People take stock of their lives in many different ways: using happiness as the unit of measurement is called hedonism. Pursuing hedonism is a defensible position to take but I'm alarmed by its rise as the default system of value in the educated/cosmopolitan world that most HN readers presumably inhabit.

Things like raising children well, championing unfashionable but important positions, fighting injustice and poverty - the really worthwhile things in life - are often extraordinarily difficult and can cause more despair than pleasure. But I choose to believe that they are nonetheless important, and not only because there is the promise of the glow of contentment in the case of a possible future triumph.

Many in the tech industry achieve extraordinary success in modern society. But when someone rises to that position, the single-minded pursuit of stimulating one's own reward circuits can look quite callous in the eyes of those who haven't been able to rise to wealth and power. In the days of the hereditary aristocracy, there existed the idea of "noblesse oblige", or the obligation of the upper classes to be a positive force for all those who lived in their society. It might do us some good to revive that idea.

Are you saying one cannot take pleasure in / derive happiness from things like raising children well??

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