Comment by fatnoah | Hacker News Reader

Comment by fatnoah | Hacker News Reader

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> I can't imagine what it would have been like if I had spent the week out commuting between the hours of 7am to 7pm

I can, because I lived that life. My wife and I moved from 1 bedroom apartment in the city to a house in a suburb ("only" 10 miles away) and the only time during the week I was able to spend much time with my child was 7am-8:30am before school. By the time I got home, he was going to bed. Generally, one weekend day had to be devoted to home/yard maintenance in the summer.

Before he started kindergarten, my wife and I decided that's not how we wanted to live our lives, so we sold the house and went back to renting w/a 2 bedroom apartment back in the city. My commute was 30 minutes, if I walked, with my son's school about at the halfway point of the commute. I was able to walk my son to school daily, and leave my office at 5pm and get to the sports fields at 5:15pm to coach sports. As a bonus, no house or yard to take care of meant both weekend days were also free. No regrets.

Not having to take care of a home sounds great. I can't imagine the Sisyphean task of mowing a lawn every weekend. At least raking leaves can be a peaceful thing - lour mowers can't be peaceful!

I lived in North Carolina for a summer. From 7am - 9pm everyday you can hear leaf blowers. It’s absolutely ridiculous how loud those machines are.

I later bought an electric blower and lawn mower. They are super quiet. No exhaust. It helps to have a small yard.

My (NC) property has too many pine trees to maintain with an electric blower and rake, although I've tried! Running the gas blower pains me - I hate the noise it creates, so I try to at least minimize running it and restrict it to afternoons / early evenings. However I have successfully transitioned to an electric mower, which has been great.

Not all mowers are loud and mowing can be quite therapeutic.

Perhaps try a reel mower or an electric mower?

https://www.homedepot.com/b/Outdoors-Outdoor-Power-Equipment...

fwiw I'd take lawn mowing over most kitchen cleaning, bathroom cleaning and dusting are worse too but are much less frequent. Vacuuming might be slightly worse as well because I don't have to empty a lawn mower bag unless I chose to put it on. At least you get a guaranteed 3+ month vacation from yard work.

I find yard and housework to be relaxing. I get a lot of background thinking done during them. And it's all good exercise to be on your feet. And the more you do it, the better and faster you get at it. And the more you clean, the less you have to clean.

For instance, I can vacuum and mop my whole 3k sq ft house in a solid hour or so (including the stairs). Do that 2-3 times a month with spot vac in between and the entire place is always super clean and I barely spend any time. It doesn't even kill an afternoon.

In fact, I'd take it over my precious 800 sq ft city apartment. That place got way dirtier way faster due to size and location. And a full mop and vac of it would still take a solid 30-45 min (there are fixed costs involved). And it would need it weekly due to aforementioned proneness to dust and dirt.

My kid loves joining me on the riding mower.

Now imagine if you had been able to have it all, the only cost being management not being able to see your bag of mostly carbon water physically respirate.

I love having a house and yard, and never having to pollute the environment to shift my bag of carbon water to do the same work worse somewhere less adapted to my being. There will come a time when passions die about RTO and companies stop paying for real estate simply to improve profits for those that don’t need to be collocated. “Culture” and other malarkey will matter not at all once passions die, the current management retires, and the bulk of workers went to college and high school online.

Then children will have their parents again.

> Then children will have their parents again.

In most developed countries, parents already spend more time with their kids than at any point in the past fifty years:

https://ourworldindata.org/parents-time-with-kids

(What they've sacrificed, at least in the US, seems to largely be non-work social connections and group participation.)

And yet, there’s plenty room to improve - especially for fathers.

I find it interesting that you feel the need to say that. At probably no point in US history are fathers spending more time with their kids than today. And yet our parenting culture is so toxic that we still feel the need to tell parents they aren't doing a good enough job.

The leap from "we must stop working people to death" into "telling parents they aren't doing a good job" is quite large.

I'm not sure where you got anything to do with work from the parent comment. All they said was, "there’s plenty room to improve - especially for fathers." Which is simply saying that fathers aren't doing enough.

Less than that - I don’t blame fathers for the society they live in. Some of that might be attitudes about fatherhood being away from home all the time and mothers are the person at home. But I suspect it’s more society expects fathers to be at work, where work is away from the home, and by in large fathers have little choice. Regardless I don’t blame the fathers for doing enough or not - it appears from the graphs fathers are increasingly spending more time at home which means they’re doing as much as they can - presumably the upper ward pressure is coming at the will of the father. Presumably given the continuous upper pressure there’s some upper limit fathers prefer that’s not been reached. Further it’s likely above where Denmark is, which is much rather than the US. It’s hard to blame someone who seems to be working their way towards a desired state, slowly but surely, for not yet being able to attain their desired level. That’s what I meant - I hope society continues to loosen its grip on parents and let them live the life they prefer. For some it’ll still be working all the time. Others it’ll be working what they need to, where the need to, to give their family the most time. I don’t qualitatively think one is superior to the other, there are ever present parents that are horrible and distant parents that are wonderful. But as long as that slope points upward and is accelerating, we haven’t finished the apparently desired progress to be made.

I don’t think I said that at all, and it’s a little offensive to make that assumption. It’s like saying global poverty is at its lowest in history and saying it could be better is blaming poor people for not working hard enough. The parents aren’t to blame, and in the context of this overall thread, it’s the society that puts a premium on collocation over cohabitation, when it’s been demonstrated unnecessary to collocate to work effectively together in many fields. How you got to blaming parents for not doing a good enough job I have literally no idea.

I will bet you, furthermore, that pre industrial America parents, fathers included, spent way more time with their children than post industrial and more likely post war America. The data linked only extends to the start of post war American history though, and I’ll wager there’s no quantitative source to back me up. But the commuter culture started with the highway and interstate system, and before that factories brought parents away from the home en masse for the first time. Frankly I see the breaking down of the commute and office culture as a reversion to a more historically natural state where families are generally together most of the time.

> At probably no point in US history are fathers spending more time with their kids than today.

That seems very unlikely, if going back more than a few decades. When parents used to work on the family farm one could be around the kids all day.

> tell parents they aren't doing a good enough job

It's not about not doing a good job, it's about wanting to be near the kids when they're young.

For a grand total of 2.5 hours every day for the top of the scale.

Yeah, coming from a horrible situation, everything is an improvement. The article isn't very clear on what qualifies as "kids", but if teenagers aren't pulling the average down, that is still a very bad number.

> suburb ("only" 10 miles away)

This is odd to me. This is not a long distance. Is there zero transport infrastructure where you live?

Public transport vs single unit transport usually incurs a 80-200% time penalty in most US scenarios.

Some of the more dense urban areas(US Northeast and west coast population hubs) have somewhat effective transport in the locality but due to living where it's affordable most workers who would want to leverage this have problematic commutes crossing multiple travel systems. Things change from county to county and city to city.

Look at the cluster that is determining where the California High Speed train corridor will stop along the way and the complications from interests and that. Same story, different protagonist and perspective.

> This is odd to me. This is not a long distance. Is there zero transport infrastructure where you live?

There is, in fact I lived a 5 minute walk from a bus stop and worked near a subway stop. My commute was:

  1)  5 minute walking    
  2) 15 minutes bus to end of subway line  
  3) 25 minutes subway to transfer
  4) 10 minutes subway to stop near the office 
  5)  5 minutes walk

Driving with no traffic would be close to 20 minutes, but 45-75+ minutes during rush hour. Taking transit ends up being reasonably time competitive, but far more enjoyable.

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