Hacker News Reader

>I agree that this is bad advice. I'm 35. I've got a wife, two kids, and a weird house with tons of maintenance projects. My parents live five minutes away, and I spend most weekends at Home Depot or hanging out in my parents' living room with the kids. I work too much and don't sleep enough. And I'm blissfully happy.

Something that seems to come out in what you're saying is personal growth. To be a decent spouse, to be a decent parent, to work through home maintenance projects, and find new ways to interact with your parents as you both age, all of these require you to push yourself to learn and grow. It may not seem like it over 3 months, but over years of ups and downs you realize you've changed and grown a lot, hopefully with purpose.

With jobs and moves, it's easy to change jobs and places just because you get bored. But change isn't equal to growth. Sometimes it's just change and it feels meaningless.

I don't mean to say family is better than career or vice versa. But lots of people (me included) can wander through different jobs without feeling there's any thread of continuity or purpose to those changes - it's just a change. Maybe it's easier for people who can actively manage their career and always have their next move/job be another way for them to grow.

>I say this is bad advice not because I think what makes me happy will make everyone happy.

Agreed it won’t intrinsically make everyone happy, but ignoring the suburbs/kids aspect, what you are really describing, I think, is stability and that is a prerequisite for mental health and happiness.

Lack of stability, at any age, but particularly for children is significantly damaging to mental health.

I used to work briefly in dependency court (where the state intervenes when children are abused, abadonded and neglected). These children are subjected to psychiatric evaluations and they all say the same thing, lack of stability in the home devastates a child’s mental health (but also does the same to adults).

Travel/adventure are great in the context of a stable life, but on its own suggest a likelihood instability and thus mental health problems that make happiness damn near impossible. On the other hand if this person were to have sacrificed their travels early on to plant roots, that doesn’t really guarantee stability either, especially in this day and age where even if you do everything right odds are you might face the instability of employment, income, health, relationships, etc...

What if those who travel and live a nomad life aught not have kids?

He literally said "I know lots of people would find a life with kids in the suburbs stifling."

I guess the point, in general, is not to follow somebody else's story or the story that society narrates to most. The point of life is to go with your true will, whatever that is.

For the comment above, it seems like he is blissfully happy because he has funded and followed is true will(as personal and empiric as it is).

In the case of the author in the article, seems like root is the unsatisfied purpose in her life. The depression for the past, the anxiety about the future doesn't help with the present and like a snowball, it just gets worse with time.