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Comment by ascendantlogic | Hacker News Reader

I had a relatively good relationship with my mother but in my 20's and 30's I had a bad habit of being too busy for her. Either working or playing I was off doing things and not returning her calls. I lost her about 18 months ago and now I beat myself up for it.

I'm posting this here because this site caters to a crowd of people who tend to be workaholics. I've read comments here from people saying their mothers came to see them but they were too busy working to spend any time with them. At the end of your time on this planet it won't be the code you wrote or the marketing materials you worked on that you will remember. It will be the family and friends you spent time with.

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I lost her about 18 months ago and now I beat myself up for it.

I am sorry to hear that :(.

The thing with parents is that they were always there (maybe not always there for you, but I mean present in your world) since your birth. For a long time in my life I didn't even consider that there would be a time without my parents. Obviously, you know rationally. But it does not feel that way.

Both my parents have now passed 65 (which was traditionally the retirement age in my country, and therefore sort of a milestone) and I have recently really started pondering that statistically they will only live for another 13-18 years.

We have been abroad for 5 years, but the age of our parents has been one of the important reasons to move close to our families again. We now see my parents weekly again (which our 6yo daughter also thoroughly enjoys) and my father in law every 1-2 months (outside COVID-19 times, because he lives across the border).

I am very happy that we made this choice regardless of what happens, so far we have had 1.5 years of much more regular visits and doing things together.

> At the end of your time on this planet it won't be the code you wrote or the marketing materials you worked on that you will remember. It will be the family and friends you spent time with.

But that's exactly why I'm working so hard on my side projects. I want desperately to be free from my 9-5 so I can have my 40 hours per week back...

And you might get it!

At the same time, being free later won't give you back the time you don't have today. Neither my friends nor my parents will last forever.

A few things have driven that home for me recently. The world won't hold still while I try to change my life. And I have to work with that limitation, rather than race against it.

This. It is all about the right balance. Here is a good analogy that makes sense to me.

Going full-on penny pinching in the first half of your life, hoping to enjoy it later, is going to rob you of a ton of experiences that you won’t be able to experience later in life.

On the other end of this spectrum, throwing money around and living just for today, without long-term plans and savings, will rob you of a ton of experiences in the second half of your life. Mind you, very different experiences than the ones you were missing out on in the penny-pinching scenario.

So it all boils down to a solution that sounds really simple, which is what makes it really difficult to act on and execute. You just gotta balance those two approaches in such a way, that your experiences are maximized across the board.

But saying that isn’t really solving the problem for anyone, as that’s akin to the famous joke tutorial on how to draw an owl. Saying “just gotta balance is right” is like saying “ Step 1: draw 3 circles. Step 2: draw the rest of the owl.”

So in the end, there is no real concrete solution. The best we can get is a solid guideline of “balance things in order to maximize your overall experiences”, but the actual answer to how to properly balance things is different for every individual and is left for self-discovery.

Seconding this - I’ve heard plenty of people talk about how they were going to be financially independent early. I think it’s worked for exactly one of them and even they didn’t get that missed time back.

Please don’t work countless hours so you’ll get some free time later in life. Work hard for today for a vision you truly believe in.

I am a workaholic who also loves his mother and has tormented himself with guilt for not calling her enough. Now 42, I've sort of come to terms with that guilt and realized there's a reason I keep mom at a distance. Talking to her is like groundhog's day, the same conversation every time. I do not look back and wish I had been having that conversation once per day instead of once per month.

I'm pretty sure on my deathbed I'm going to be glad I spent so much time working, because that's what makes me happy. When I look back on my life now, my most cherished memories are of times spent on my computer enthralled by a challenging project. Most of my memories involving family involve feeling bored and/or trapped, even though I do love them and have a good relationship with them.

Do you ever stop to consider what those conversations mean to her? I'm 43 and only started calling my parents more than once every couple weeks in the last 2 years. They tell me the same stories but that doesnt matter; their happiness is rooted in us sharing time together. I imagine they tell the same stories because as they are older they have fewer new things to share and they dont want our conversations to end. So they repeat something we talked about the week before.

But hey, if your feelings about your time and what's important to you trump having perspective on how someone else feels...

Would you be shocked to hear that I do stop to consider what the conversations meant to her? They mean she gets to vent about all the problems in her life she's had decades to fix, but has chosen not to, because it feels so much better to just complain about them to anyone who will listen. If you want to let your parents bring you down out of some sense of cultural obligation, good for you. I don't regret my choice to stop their cascade of misery before it reaches me.

I talked a lot with my mother, and as a result we could talk about pretty much anything, including stupid prototypes ^^ I think if I had only talked to her once or twice a year, she wouldn't have become as much of a friend and confidant as she was. If either of us repeated themselves a lot, the other would simply call them out on it.

Don't take this as me guilt tripping you though. People are different, and I'm not saying it's your fault that your family made you feel trapped. But where you can, be generous and patient. We'll all get old and find out why old people repeat themselves so much, if we get lucky.

The number of times you say "I" and "me" in this sentence tells me all I need to know about you and your priorities. Maybe think about your mother more than once a month.

If my comment implies I only think of my mother once a month, then I certain failed in writing it. I think of her constantly - I spent decades trying and failing to be a positive influence on her life, at great emotional cost to myself. It reached a point where I concluded I could not help her, and trying was self-destructive, so now I keep her at a distance. I've seen far too many people failing to thrive because they are chained to an obligation of selflessness. Given the spiteful tone of your comment, I sense you have probably left a lot of happiness on the table and wish to guilt others into doing the same. Sounds like my mother!

There’s a good story about the jar and the sand out there.

Fill the jar with sand and it’s full. No room for rocks and gravel.

But fill the jar with rocks and it’s full, yet you can still pour the gravel. It goes into tiny holes between the rocks. The now even fuller jar still has room for the sand finding those tiny crevices between the gravel and the rocks.

The rocks are your family and your health. The gravel is your job and other pursuits. The sand is social media and netflix.

Now here’s the kicker: You can still go and pour a glass of beer in the jar. It saturates the sand and gravel and finds room.

Because there’s always time for a beer with friends.

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