I have kids, but I don’t think having kids or even a lack of money is necessary to experience the type of burnout you’re describing.
While everyone and every situation is different, my personal experience is that having kids led to less burnout for me over time. I expected the opposite after reading comments online, but it turns out that for me the time spent caring for the kids was energizing and purpose-providing. The job no longer felt like some isolated drudgery without purpose because it played a clear role in my family’s well being. I also learned how to manage time and prioritize better after having kids.
But I will never gatekeep burnout or try to differentiate burnout based on having kids or money. I can even think of someone who was clearly experiencing burnout despite having neither kids nor a job and while not having to worry about money. Burnout isn’t a simple function of life circumstances, personal circumstances and mental well being play a large role. In some cases, certain personality types can seemingly become burned out under any circumstances. It’s a heavily personal reaction.
Though, to be fair, you gain a whole new set of much scarier things to worry about.
And work = highest purpose!
Depends. At 3am it's not.
Before having kids I read so much about this difficult period and thought it was going to be the defining feature of having kids.
Then you go through it and one month you realize they’re sleeping through the night. Then you have an entire lifetime.
So yeah, it’s not fun. But it’s also such a tiny segment of parenthood that the emphasis on it feels pretty excessive.
I would say hang in there, and once in a while give yourself permission to prioritise the "care for myself" over the "maintain a household".
Do things in little increments and don't torture yourself about not being full of energy all the time
Many of my posts and most of my book were written in either the first two hours after they go to school or the first two hours after they sleep.
I got a rare Sunday afternoon off, which is why we got this post now!
Totally agree that work only to pay for a household is a tough life. I'm trying to connect more people with work that can give more meaning now and maybe more money long-term. People chasing their highest potential tend to create greater projects!
Now, empty nested, I can see that I was both rudderless and identity-less before the kids. I'm wandering now (and retired) trying to find a replacement identity.
I'm still a father of course (and husband) but with less input and less to do. In fact I feel inclined to step back and let the girls have their lives now. So I road-trip, come up with projects to keep me busy, try to be an "educator".
It was a revelation to find out how little one needs materially to feel happy.
But a basic income or something is mandatory IMO as it's the only thing that can remove us from the rat race and free us from the zillionaires. Oh, sorry. We need to get rid of the zillionaires first, the last thing they want is normal people who aren't hungry and desperate for pennies.
But sadly the people I know who made enough money to be able to retire young are workaholics that will hire people to raise their kids. Because their workaholism is what made them rich in the first place. See Elon for an extreme example, I doubt he can even name all his biological children.
It’s never quite as much time as expected, though. Each is a marginal addition of free time that brings its own complications (like my friend who did an alarming amount of DoorDash and is now investing a lot of time into dropping weight and managing cholesterol and blood sugar)
My parents buy groceries delivery what is really useful and time saving on other hand. House cleaner is difficult topic, they do seldom a good job even when offered more money. Typical example: there is dirt under edges of carpet after vacuuming.
This really bothered me when I was in social situations with college students who would alternate between bragging about how much they spent on DoorDash and complaining about how they’re always struggling with money.
It was only a handful of people out of a larger group of mostly rational students, but it drove me crazy.
Of course this has always been a thing with prepared restaurant food (just listen to various comments Anthony Bourdain made over the years about restaurants and butter use) but I'm somewhat convinced the friction removal of having these foods delivered at nearly any time of the day is going to cause an uptick in middle age heart disease in a group of people who are going overboard in trading money for time without thinking of the long term consequences.
The American Heart Association’s narrative is based in observed clinical relationship between saturated fat intake, LDL, and coronary events.
There’s been a big social media push to turn saturated fat into a good thing, but everything I actually read in the research still points to excess saturated fat being a bad idea.
It is about spending your time doing what you want (including doing nothing if that's your thing), and outsource the things that you don't want to do.
> and call a contractor for every small thing that needs to be done. They’re buying time.
I _really_ wish I could find a contractor that didn't suck up more time than they save every single time!
I burned out basically because I'm stupid and decided to work a demanding full time job while also remodeling my house by myself. Like all renovation jobs, it ended up being bigger than planned (I actually expected it to grow from us discovering something that had to be done during the renovation, I just never expected the thing we found to be as large as it was: we had to redo the whole foundation of our 1840 house, and because a machine wouldn't fit through the doors, we ended up digging out around 16m3 of hard packed dirt by hand and carrying it out of the house, also by hand)
What was supposed to be a kitchen upgrade turned into roughly half our house looking like something out of tomb raider for a year. 8 hours of intellectually demanding office work followed by 8 hours of grueling digging in "the mine" as came to nickname the ground floor really did a number on both me and my wife.
She crashed out first, which left me with no choice but to keep pushing long past what I felt I could handle. Saw a doctor who diagnosed me with burnout and told me to rest for 6 months,I instead held out for another ~6 months until my wife was back on her legs before allowing myself to rest.
The 6 months of sick leave the doctor prescribed wasn't nearly enough.
But hey, my kitchen is fucking gorgeous, so there's that, at least!
I also took on a remodel under similar conditions and I think that the decision they undertook was likely very reasonable at the time. The outcome, in retrospect, would be obvious as well. But sometimes you have to grit your teeth and finish something.
You're right, one shouldn't DIY the foundation of ones house, unless you really know what you're doing(and honestly, not even then: it's too much work!)
I'm not sure it was clear in my original comment, but the 1840 I wrote in there is the original construction year of the house. The technique my foundation was built with hasn't been used for a little over a century: Not a lot of construction firms around with experience in it! And it's not easy to replace a foundation, because, well, it's under the house! Luckily repairing turned out to be possible(simplifying again, sorry!), and not particularly difficult in technical terms. It just wasn't easy either, but in physical terms.
I did have a professional "building conservationist"(rough translation) over for consultation. Basically he looked over what was, I told him my plan, and then he told me what to do instead. (I actually wasn't far off - I had spent a lot of time reading up on it before he came - he just added a few (possibly vital) details I hadn't thought of)
The conservationist did have a construction firm and offered their services, but we had budgeted for a kitchen upgrade, and while we had some margins in the original plan, with the extra work we got surprised with, we were strained to afford the materials. Just the ground insulation material cost almost as much as the new IKEA kitchen furniture!
The good thing in all this is that the new construction should, in theory, according to the conservationist who actually does know these things, probably last a couple of centuries!
Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, the planned changes, combined with the unplanned ones (which were like 90% of the work), put the project well outside our budget unless we did it ourselves.
But yeah, in the end even my budget was stretched to it's limits! Not that I was in any way poor, pulling around 3x the average salary in my area. Shit just got crazy expensive. Had I known the condition the house was in when I bought it, I would've lowered my offer by around 25%. But it was impossible to inspect the foundation without first breaking up the floor, and I don't blame the seller for not wanting to do that. I don't think they knew the condition either tbf. Based on the bottled message I found, nobody had looked under those floorboards since shortly after Kennedy's assassination!
Healthy Minds https://hminnovations.org/meditation-app
It’s a missed opportunity for posts like the link to also mention and reinforce the importance of family planning. Many go into setting up a family because of peer pressure without assessing that it’s a very long term commitment. I’m sure you’re doing the best you can, of course. Maybe raising awareness that having kids is no longer an imperative for humans living in the 21st century could be something we do more of.
If you want to have kids do it when you're in your early 20s.
Which is also OK. It's financially smart to realize you don't have the resources and not have kids.
If {some subset of the government, rich people, people who control the economy} want more people to have kids, which is something I keep hearing from that class of people: They need to collectively figure out how to put more money into the pockets of people. Higher salaries, drastic tax cuts, cheaper housing, more people will be financially ready and more kids will happen as a result. Also, work hours need to be standardized at 4 hours/day per person OR costs of living need to be designed that 1 parental income is enough.
the problem is lifestyle and career demands.
The upper class is financially smart, AND has the resources (20+ years of child rearing costs already secured upfront, ability to hire night nannies, ability to take a few years away from work without income, own a home and not at the mercy of rent increases), so they have kids.
The lower class is often not financially smart, is not health smart, and systematically poisoned to sacrifice themselves and buy things they cannot afford. They are given insufficient resources and told that they should have kids, so they do.
i don't believe that is true.
raising kids is not that expensive. what is expensive is the high expectations for what you should spend on your kids with that middle class and high earners have. like sending kids to college.
Huh? In a world where people have zero job security, could get put on some layoff or 15%-per-year PIP quota any time and lose their income at the whim of some politics 5 levels above, and any random health issue could cost hundreds of thousands due to insurance not paying, I'd say as a self-proclaimed financially literate person, that you'd need to save up a couple million in cash and set it aside to even begin considering kids.
I could be on the chopping block tomorrow at work and then have to downsize my lifestyle next week, but I'm prepared to downsize as a child-less person. If I didn't have the entire course of child-rearing costs saved up in cash I wouldn't consider starting the process. If children cost $2 million over the entire course of their life, I need to have $2 million now. In cash. That's the financially smart way in an income-uncertain world; you don't ever assume things that you don't already have.
20 years ago, job security was pretty good, you could relax and saving up the full cost in cash was not a prerequisite. You could throw your money into a mutual fund and get rich, because the US had sane economic leaders. You were virtually guaranteed a job if you had skills. None of this is guaranteed anymore. Nowadays, you either have it or you don't; the system guarantees you nothing about the future.
And if one wants to avoid that chopping block in today's corporate work environments, working nights and weekends is a good start, but then you'd have no time for kids.
food, clothes, school materials, a bike. maybe a computer. also a bed and a few square meters of space in your home. everything else is optional. that doesn't cost 100,000 per year. not even 10,000.
sure, with less money you have less to offer or your kids. no or only cheap vacations, no expensive toys. no fancy brand name clothes. no expensive extra curricular activities. and certainly no money for college. but none of these things are necessary to have and raise kids. and it is not irresponsible to have kids and raise them that way either.
Start with housing. A few more square meters costs ~$1000 more on top of what I pay now, per month.
That's $200K in today's dollars or $500-700K over their childhood (0-18 years) if you include inflation, rent increases over the next 20 years.
If you want to sleep 8 hours a day AND work demands 12-15 hours a day, you absolutely need nannies, add $500K for that.
Because today's work environments demand that many hours a day, you evidently don't have time to cook anymore so you need to buy all your food, add $20K/year for that, or $350K.
Costs add up pretty quick.
and your math only works for middle to high income earners.
2k/month for a nanny to compensate for 5 hours lost per day means that you have to earn 20$ per hour extra. in a minimum wage job that only pays $15 per hour you would be financially better off to work less, so you don't need that nanny.
so you simply aren't going to work 15 hours per day. same for the food. 20K per year is more than $50 per day. again, you are going to work less in order to make the time to cook because the extra money earned does not make up for the higher expense of eating out.
are you suggesting that there are no jobs that demand less than 12 hours per day? so your choice is either work 12-15 hours or be unemployed? i do not believe that.
It's sad to see people so deep in the consumerist rat race that giving life is seen as a cell in their life's financial excel sheet.
Weirdly enough people who actually don't have money are the one having the most kids. And people who lived pretty much from 300k years ago until the ~1950s had it worse than you yet they had more kids. People making 1m a year have less kids than people working in fucking coal mines 100 years ago.
We don't have less kids because we're poorer than 50 years ago, we have less kids because we drunk way too much capitalist kool aid and put traveling, buying shit, careers, money in front of everything else on our list of priorities: https://www.wsj.com/articles/americans-pull-back-from-values...
It is, though. My own food, water, housing, heating, hobbies and things that make me happy, are all cells on that sheet as well. The numbers add up now. Money for kids would absolutely obliterate all the other cells on that sheet, and the numbers wouldn't add up.
on the contrary. global population growth will plateau in a few decades, and negative population growth is already a problem in many countries, like all western countries, south korea, and also china.
https://assets.ourworldindata.org/uploads/2016/03/ourworldin...
https://population.un.org/wpp/graphs?loc=900&type=Probabilis...
The problem at hand is not growth rate slowing down, it’s humans divided in tiny pockets of countries burning through what little we have left of natural resources.
People who have kids today, do so knowing that their children will most certainly be displaced by natural disasters.
what is the evidence for that? if that were true then we would have lot's of people going hungry, but that's simply not the case. poverty is getting reduced world wide. if we could not sustain the current population, we should have lots of people dying from hunger and the population should stop growing. but the reason why population is growing especially in africa is exactly because the growth is still sustainable. if it wasn't, then it could not be growing.
Often times ourselves get the short end, but others find a way to give each their due including themselves
good luck to you though