Hacker News Reader

Comment by silicon2401 | Hacker News Reader

> It also helps to remember that "they grow up so fast" is cliche, but it's true. The most demanding early years of child raising fly by quickly.

It blew my mind when I heard someone say "kids are only toddlers for a couple of years". As a kid you feel like childhood lasts an eternity, and their developmental stages are so significant, but in comparison they spend less time at each phase (infant, toddler, little kid, etc) than most people spend on a bachelor's degree. I can't imagine how fast the time must feel as a parent, and it helps put into perspective for me why it's difficult for them when kids grow up, since it's not necessarily intuitive to think of their growth in terms of quantitative time.

View on HN

The phrase "the days are long, but the years are short" has taken on a new meaning for me after having a child.

Some days are quite long indeed.

And nights as well for that matter.

Years of having a cat made it relatively easy for me to adjust to the odd hours, but nothing could have prepared me against the erratic behaviour of an underdeveloped digestive system.

Nights are merely day minus light. The days are just ... long.

> It blew my mind when I heard someone say "kids are only toddlers for a couple of years"

In your early 20s, a couple years of hard work sounds like an eternity.

In your 30s and later, you realize a couple years is barely a blip on the radar.

The infant/toddler phase is only a couple percent of your overall lifespan. Yes, it's work, but it's not subscribing to a lifetime of sacrifice and misery.

It still fascinates me as to how things look from the outside. I'm turning 40 this year, and have no kids of my own, but I have a 5-year-old nephew and 1.5-year-old niece. Unfortunately I haven't seen the niece in person since before the pandemic, when she was only a couple months old.

But as for my nephew, I keep forgetting that he's still so young. It feels like he should be much older, and much more capable and independent, just based on how long it feels since I spent a few weeks at my sister's house when he was a month old. But if you ask my sister, she'll of course agree that time has passed so quickly.

Relative feelings about the passage of time is just such a weird topic.

>In your early 20s, a couple years of hard work sounds like an eternity.

>In your 30s and later, you realize a couple years is barely a blip on the radar.

Another way to look at this is that when your youth is rapidly diminishing you really care about how you spend it but once that ship has sailed you rationalize whatever path you took.

Yet a third way is that the younger you are, the greater the percentage of your lived life is represented by a year.

When you are 5, a year represents a full 20% of your life. (And even more of the amount of life you are capable of fully aware of).

When you are 20, a year is 5% of your life.

When you are 50, it's 2%.

Imagine asking someone to commit to what is effectively seen as 25% of their life to a project. But that's what we do when we tell teenagers to start thinking about college.

That's a good insight but I think you're underselling things - most folks don't really have experiences of any sort from their <3 years. I think it's also pretty common for teens to consider themselves five or so years prior to be different people due to how fast you're maturing. When you're making a decision to choose which college to go to I think it's fair to view that as deciding what to do with the next third of your life from a teenager's perspective.

Once it's spent, it doesn't really matter how, except insofar as it's left you with something afterwards. Three people standing side by side, one of them partied their whole twenties, the other focused on career, the last had kids. They're all thirty, so that's the same, but one of them clearly is worse off.

Extend your analogy out in time: Three people in their 90s, laying side by side at their deathbeds. One filled their life with friends and experiences, the other did nothing but work, the other raised children, grandchildren, and great grandchildren.

Now who is the winner and who the loser?

The one with kids has visitors so probably them. Old people can get pretty lonely if they don't have descendants. It's not talked about often but it's a really important part of not being miserable when you're 90.

When your body isn't good for anything anymore and you can't even enjoy spending money, being happy about the people you created is more or less the only thing left - and you can really be happy about it. But that's only if you have a good sense of empathy for the happiness of people you care about.

Huge assumption that someone has visitors just because they had kids.

More likely your kids visit than your party buddies from decades ago.

Honestly it's a tiny assumption, nobody's perfect but it takes being terrible for your kids to avoid saying goodbye on your deathbed.

I guess you could call it a necessary but insufficient condition.

> Now who is the winner and who the loser?

Depends on who's awarding the points.

Could be either one of them. Could be all of them. It's not like they were competing, or even playing the same game.

The point of the example is to show that there is no objective measure of success in life

None of them is winning; they're all dying.

Winning is a category error at this point.

It seems like you're firmly on the side of the one with kids, but outside the rhetoric this is an interesting personal question to ask yourself. It puts the opportunity cost of working into perspective and makes you re-evaluate the importance of your work.

As someone who partied away my teens and early twenties, then spent seven years working 14/7/365 founding a successful company, and finally got married and had 2 kids a couple of years ago, I can tell you that the family is by far the most meaningful and important. I regret the drinking and partying. I wish I had prioritized family sooner.

> It seems like you're firmly on the side of the one with kids

Not really. I think it's an interesting mental exercise and can see the pros and cons to all paths.

I think the optimal path is a mixture of all three. Work hard enough to afford the life you want to live (ideally at a job that is itself gratifying and meaningful) and then fill the rest of the time with experiences shared with friends and family.

The only thing it can leave you with that truly matters is fulfillment. It couldn't be any less clear which of the three — if any — is worse off.

I guess it's possible to slip in to the geriatric backward-looking phase of life at 30, finding fulfillment in memories, but that sounds pretty bad to me, to be honest. That's like, 12 good years in your whole life.

Which one?

I assume the one who focused on their career since they likely didn't actually accumulate any significant wealth while missing out on all the fun due to the way we compensate workers.

Hiring and compensation is also quite ageist (this time not in the normal bad way!) where being thirty generally entitles you to a higher salary expectation than someone in their twenties.

However, I think there are just as valid arguments to be made for each of the people noted - some people would view the person with kids as having a burden to deal with through their thirties and other folks will consider the person who partied to have wasted their time possibly killing off brain cells and doing nothing "productive".

I think overall this is a really personal and opinionated question - I'd favor the career oriented individual as "failing" purely from a philosophy focused on enjoying and expanding the non-vocational portions of life, but we've all got different wants and needs - I hope the third paragraph helps explain the trade offs all three folks are making. The key thing is that nobody gets to live all lives - unless you're talking about The Egg[1].

1. http://www.galactanet.com/oneoff/theegg_mod.html

It's horrifying as a parent who used to think and act like a child, to see someone who used to be completely dependent upon you, give you unconditional love and beg for your attention, suddenly transform into an independent human being capable of all sorts of things, without your approval even. The older they get the faster they progress. Soon they'll even host their own diner parties.

And the constant worries of becoming your own parents. Kids really mess you up.

Kids are the only people in your life the longer you know them, the less you know them.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com