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Comment by toasterlovin | Hacker News Reader

Optionality has costs. If you live your life like it's going to go astray, then you miss out on a lot of the upside if it doesn't go astray (such as by being a stay at home mom, if that's what you actually want to do). The statistic that 50% of marriages end in divorce is often bandied about, but it also means that 50% don't. Which means that going all-in on your marriage is a completely reasonable thing to do.

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what you say is true. But consider, the “cost” of going back part time is not very big. It’s not very stressful, and _greatly_ reduces long term risk.

Your take is a bit like saying in the year 2000 “i believe Apple is an amazing company, i’ll go ALL IN with my life savings”. If you’re right the you think you’re a genius. But what if you were wrong? What if apple turned out like IBM? Then you’d look back and think “how could i have been so stupid? so naive”.

It's a really bad analogy. And the "cost" of working part time for someone who doesn't want or need to work is literally every single hour they spend working. If they're working 20 hours per week, that's 20 hours per week spent doing something they don't want or need to do. It's a huge cost.

and the cost IF you become a single mom at 40, and you’re unemployable? How would we quantify that cost?

We can agree to disagree. :) Hope you at least appreciated my different perspective.

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