Comment by corry | Hacker News Reader

Comment by corry | Hacker News Reader

Kudos to people who go FIRE without state-provided healthcare - from a "typical brainwashed Canadian" POV you're one health mishap / one ambulance-ride's worth of unexpected medical costs to kill the entire dream.

Also - no kids - huge variable for FIRE obviously, but perhaps less obviously ALSO a huge variable for life's purpose.

Something I've seen in my friend and family group is that a lot of couples hit a point where the answer to the "what's the point of all this?" is to create a family. Sorry if that sounded crushingly heteronormative - but this also includes gay folks in our life.

Not suggesting that everyone should have kids, or that the childfree people are somehow bad, or even that it's not a rational choice to go childfree. All good to those thinking that way.

But. If your conclusion is that love and connection is what life is all about (assume Maslow's lower levels are covered), then having children is possibly the magical thing missing. Not necessarily for everyone. But it's a game-changer for many of us and provides some incredible direction and purpose (as well as very low low's and constant anxieties).

Having children also can change your priorities in how you spend your own life. For me personally, I'd want my children to see me working hard at something; having adventures; building things; changing things for the better. All of that can happen inside the typical FIRE life. But as he points out, your life gradually disconnects from things if you're truly independent and separate. And unless your wealth is large enough that your children will also be FIRE, you really want them to learn from you in how to navigate "the typical world" of jobs, managing finances, etc.

I don't know, as a freelancer high deductible health care plans are not that expensive. Like $100-200/mo. If you have kids that price would be higher, but then it's going to be a lot harder to FIRE anyways.

At FIRE levels, exposure to healthcare-related bankruptcy is basically none, as long as your rising-with-age insurance premiums don't price you out. It's still not great, but insurance does do its job. (especially when you have the free time to chase down billing mistakes)

As someone who is about to get a first child - what kind of low lows should I brace myself for?

Every low you have now, but dealing with it while responsible for the life of a tiny person you inexplicably love more than anything else in the world, on zero sleep.

Well, first let me say that being a parent is the best thing in my life (and there is a lot of very good stuff in my life), so don't over-index on what I'm about to say next. You'll be fine and better for it!

You might have heard the quote "To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken."

YMMV but the lowest of the low are the times when you feel the reality that you have become utterly, completely, impossibly vulnerable in a way that you've never felt before. Speaking for myself, I haven't loved anything in my life even remotely closely to how I love my kids. Closest thing is my wife (and I really love her).

You go from... not wanting your plane to crash because, you know, it would suck to die and your spouse would be wrecked... to... my kids will grow up without me there to teach them, keep them safe, show them love. The angst I feel towards that is about 10000x worse than in how I thought about dying before kids.

Heck even your understanding of "my parents would be sad if I died as a 30-year-old man" changes. No parent should ever have to outlive their child.

Every headline that right now seems like a "sad story" - a parent losing a child, a child losing a parent, kids in cages, a daughter and father who are estranged, etc -- becomes an absolutely wrenching sadness if you even FLIRT with the idea of "what if that happened to me/my child"? You develop sensitivities that you are surprised at. You realize you have inherited an impossible and awesome responsibility of providing for, protecting, loving little blank slates of humanity... in a chaotic and dangerous world.

There's no answer to it except to do your best, and hope/pray that you never have to face the unfaceable.

That feeling isn't always present. But that's the dark shadow that occasionally crosses the sun.

Oh and BTW - this love doesn't just magically appear for everyone right away. I know lots of fathers especially who don't feel much right away, but as you see your children go from blobs to little people, you fall in love with them. So don't sweat asking yourself if you're feeling it. Just let it happen. :)

If this deep connection is the bad stuff, what is the good stuff?

The bad stuff is just a consequence of loving someone in a very deep way.

I don't think I can define the "value of love" beyond saying that the upside is fairly basic stuff - fulfillment, joy, affection, pride, self-discovery, character building from not putting yourself first and from serving others, etc.

This deep connection is the good stuff. The really bad stuff is learning to let go of your kids, watching this connection change and hoping that it changes into something even deeper.

> Every headline that right now seems like a "sad story" - a parent losing a child, a child losing a parent,

> kids in cages, a daughter and father who are estranged, etc -- becomes an absolutely wrenching sadness if

> you even FLIRT with the idea of "what if that happened to me/my child"? You develop sensitivities that you

> are surprised at. You realize you have inherited an impossible and awesome responsibility of providing for,

> protecting, loving little blank slates of humanity... in a chaotic and dangerous world.

This was something I was not prepared for when I had my son. I cannot watch media or news stories where kids suffer or get hurt.

Agreed 100%. Occasionally my wife and I will be watching something that features some violence or threat to children and we just look at each other like "why are we voluntarily watching this and vicariously feeling these things?" and shut it off.

Clearly people get desensitized to it, both as viewers and as writers. Christopher Nolan, for instance, is a parent but all of his movies have tough child dynamics (e.g. Inception and Leo's character trying to see his kids again).

Maybe by writing stories like that you can exorcise the demon a bit?

Hell, we just adopted a kitten 4 months ago, and the realization that he'll die in 15 years or so absolutely devastated me to the point that I started crying. He ate a (plastic) feather from one of his toys last week and I couldn't sleep that night (and kept checking on him) because I was afraid it would rupture his stomach or intestines and he'd die. I imagine these sorts of feelings are magnified a thousandfold when it's a human child.

- Any health problems for anyone concerned in the first couple months (which is when it's most likely, for the mother and baby in particular, obviously) will be really, really bad, as far as making those weeks much worse than they'd otherwise be.

- If you get very unlucky (sometimes) or suck at sleep training (way, way more often) get ready for years of bad sleep, yourself. If you're good at this the dreaded "sleep zombie" stage of parenting is only ~2-3 months long, though, so no big deal in the scheme of things, and even better if you've got a spouse who isn't the kind of person to "punish" their partner any time they have to be awake by making them also be awake (lots of people truly are like this, and I think it's nuts, if you do some good trading-off with one another, then the first couple months are actually really easy and you'll only be sleep-deprived like half the time, at worst)

- If your kid is sick, at all, then sleep in those early weeks will be exceptionally terrible, as kid illnesses tend to manifest in frequent waking & crying that can't always be assuaged with milk or rocking or whatever. Even a mild illness can make those early nights damn dark, and you may have trouble figuring out what's wrong (may take shopping for a doctor to find one who won't just rudely brush you off as a newbie parent with a "colicky" baby and actually listen to you and try to figure it out)

- They can be incredibly expensive, for all kinds of reasons, including but not limited to healthcare expenses (in the US), damage (ours have done over a thousand dollars of damage to stuff around our house in some years, more if we counted the rate of wear on e.g. flooring or the cost to pay for repairs on all kinds of things that we were able to do ourselves very cheaply), education (paid directly or, more commonly, in much higher housing expenses than you'd otherwise have). Oh and as they get older, food. (clothes and toys are negligible expenses compared to the rest, unless you don't want them to be)

Basically if no-one gets sick and you take sleep training seriously, they're just expensive and everything else is barely a problem... until they get old enough to start going places on their own, and then you get a whole new set of worries :-)

Immediately it’s the sleep deprivation which is basically a form of torture, remember. Then there are anxieties about their well being and their health on occasion. Later in teenage years about how they are starting to run their own lives and are they maybe veering into dangerous areas (eg hard drugs). Then there are worries about how their life is turning out as adults. The anxiety doesn’t stop but it’s also the most important adventure in your life that no amount of traveling, home improvements, social media bragging can match despite what the child-free crowd seems to believe.

The individual freedoms that you've taken for granted your entire adult life will disappear overnight, and you'll experience a months-long grieving process while also exhausted from lack of sleep.

You'll get over it after a few months, though, and then there is your beautiful baby smiling at you.

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