Hacker News Reader

If you have kids, this kinda changes for a lot of people. You'll still have these feelings, but the little monsters change your view points a fair bit. Being on top, or really comparing yourself to others that are far far away, kinda drops away. I'm talking from a male perspective here, as I know the mommy-bloggers are demon spawn in the comparisons regard. But when something that REALLY is super important comes along and keeps bugging you to play monster trucks, that hierarchy urge transforms from 'me me me' to 'them them them'. Sure, parenthood is hectic as all get out, and providing for the puke machines is NOT easy. But there is a personal existential calmness that smooths out the ambitions of self towards an ambition of family (and 8 hours of sleep!).

> I'm talking from a male perspective here, as I know the mommy-bloggers are demon spawn in the comparisons regard.

What do you mean by this? Can't men can be "demon spawn" too in this regard?

Not the OP, but I think what he means is that mommy-bloggers provide a very visible, high-bar point of comparison. Many of these mommy-blogs (though certainly not all) show perfect lives, perfect activities, perfectly photogenic children, perfect this and perfect that.

The reality is that (especially early) parenthood is very harsh, and very hard to do alone -- doing it while achieving this "perfect life" as displayed on these blogs is basically impossible for working parents, but it's portrayed as being easy.

Naturally, many mothers feel that their own efforts fall far short in comparison, and feel like they're failing their children as a result. As a new dad, I can tell you this is one of the biggest fears and one of the most painful feelings I have ever experienced.

Could there be similar daddy-bloggers with daddy-blogs showing perfect daddy lives? Absolutely. But somehow it's not very prevalent.

Noting right at the beginning, I'm a father.

I suspect that part of the reason why insecurity inducing daddy blogs are comparatively rare is that the bar for fathers is traditionally very low compared to what is expected of mothers in regard to caring for children.

The standard for being a great mother is high verging on impossible. Be available to your children 24/7, be patient, kind, and caring 24/7, be interested in every detail of your children's lives, prepare fresh nutritious meals and snacks, keep the house clean, oh, and get a part time job.

The traditional standard for being a great father is relatively modest. Earn enough to pay the bills, spend a non-zero amount of time with your children, show some modest level of interest in your children's lives, don't get drunk and hit your wife and kids. Simply being physically present and not being abusive gets you points as a dad.

Mothers can pretty much never do enough. Meanwhile fathers like myself get praised for doing relatively trivial things like going to a playground on the weekend or making the effort to NOT work late so as to be home before the kids go to bed.

> The traditional standard for being a great father is relatively modest. Earn enough to pay the bills, spend a non-zero amount of time with your children, show some modest level of interest in your children's lives, don't get drunk and hit your wife and kids. Simply being physically present and not being abusive gets you points as a dad.

Sort of. I definitely feel guilty about not spending enough time with my kids doing hobbies, imparting knowledge and skills, etc. I feel very selfish because I want my own time.

Then again, I feel that quite a lot of current children are coddled and over parented.

But how much of that is me rationalizing my own guilt, and how much is justified? I definitely don't do a lot of research on what parenting is best (partially because I'm not sure how trustworthy any of that is, but again, confirmation bias...).

Parental imposter syndrome is real too. :/

Such an appropriate post for this article. It seems that we could expand the argument supporting mediocrity beyond the scope of hobbies and include parenthood as well.

Exactly! I'm certain daddy-bloggers exist out there, but the mommy-bloggers are on a whole other level. Early childhood is just ... fluids ... everywhere. Having time for perfect makeup and lighting design is hysterically funny in it's unreality, but nonetheless, make MANY women feel terrible all the same. I can't count the number of ladies I know that deal with PPD.

What I tell my younger friends and colleagues is: "You don't want to see what people my age post on Facebook." The endless bragging on top of bragging, about their wonderful luxury vacations, home cooked meals, and brilliant children.

And yes, men can be demon spawn too.

Yeah, sure. Mommy bloggers is just a group prone to coplmparing, oneupmanship, and being “perfect”. Not all of them of course, but it is a thing. Just call them hyper-perfectionist parent bloggers

As a counterpoint, most US Presidents and also most billionaires have children. I don't see much historical evidence for children being a damper on ambition.

The wealthy have always had children. They are able to afford to pay other people to raise their children for them.

Outside of the privileged few, having children is about having family. For those privileged few who trade money for someone else to handle any and all steps that come along with child rearing it is largely about bloodlines and passing on the family name, typically to children whose mother had world class genetic makeup.

A personal example for me is computer games. I used to play for a good amount of time during high school (my parents would argue too much), and I really did enjoy it. Losses would be annoying and sting a little, but it was easy to brush them off and play another round of the original DotA. Getting into university, I had a whole lot less time, but the people I came across were much better, and wins spread farther and farther apart. Still I had hope that after I graduated, I'd have more time to get back into it. I ended up switching to World of Warcraft after I graduated because there were things to do outside of competing all the time. A few years after I graduated, Twitch arrived on the radar, and the having all that knowledge of that many people that were better than me became obviously apparent. I still had a feeling of hope, but now it was coupled with the beginnings of what I would say is a realization that I'm not at all that good to the point that I avoid playing certain games to avoid being reminded of that within a game.

It's not simply enough to avoid multiplayer for me: I try to look for things that I can both grok, but is more of a niche game / less popular to avoid being exposed to a constant source to compare myself against.

Twitch is what made you realize you weren't good enough? VODs in the 90s for Starcraft or CS were more than enough to convince me that being competitive was nigh impossible.

That's a fair point, which is why I avoided playing those games in the first place.

Another option is to specialize to a very large degree. It's possible for almost anyone (assuming sufficient motivation) to become a leading expert in a field or the one of the best at some activity, as long as it's sufficiently niche. You may have to go in a subfield of a subfield of a subfield in many cases, but it's much more realistic to be in the top 10 of something with just a few hundred practitioners than something with a few million.

Take music, becoming one of the top 100 pop musicians on the planet in terms of popularity is incredibly unlikely, but top 100 of some more obscure genre (such as synthwave) is more achievable. You can add more qualifiers - (e.g. Italo-disco inspired synthwave) until you feel comfortable with the pool of competitors, and you'll be far less at risk of feeling insignificant and overshadowed.

Please tell me Italo-disco inspired synthwave is not something you made up on the spot. I need links :)

Try “Vincenzo Salvia”, “Andy Fox”, and “Evanton”. Each represents their own sub genre of italo-disco synthwave.

Sally Shapiro - disco romance.

There's also this:http://media.beatsinspace.net/audio/bis-08-07-18-part1.mp3

https://youtu.be/5ziInu6xglE

That's super cool, but in my amateur opinion that's just covering/redoing proper Italo Disco, it's not synthwave.

Or, instead of narrowing your niche, you can hone a combination of skills. Think of any of the multisport competitions (biathlon, triathlon, winter quadrathlon). The more exotic the combination, the more likely you are the best in the world.

In other words become a big fish in a small pond.

> ow globalization and the sheer amount of information we have available requires you to either drastically increase your expectations of yourself or drop them all together.

As someone who grew up and studies in a third world country, seeing kids younger than me doing impressive things in Stanford for example is depressing as hell but compared to my peers, I am doing extremely well.

As someone who grew up in Northern California an hour from San Francisco and works in the tech industry in that area, besides that difference I could have written your comment myself.

If it makes you feel any better 90% of those achievements are crap and the other 10% depend heavily on older mentors who've spent their lives studying the topic.

I completely agree. I would even go on to add that what is held at high regard in culture is often, may I say always, not that great. What makes something great, regardless of what it is, is the state of your inner self - which might sound like hogwash but to which I firmly hold to be true. And anyways, your life is so inexpressibly your own that to be mournful because someone has something you don't have, is on a path you would like to be, etc, is to render your life and your path not true and not fruitful to the greatest extent possible. As naive as all the above may sound.

Related: my university started supporting students in doing all the things I dreamed of (drones, rocketry, rovers) a few years after I graduated. Trying hard not to be, but I'm really jealous.

Very well said, thank you.