His family might disagree.
a) Fewer expensive toys, a smaller/no TV, a small house, cheap clothes, and public school?
b) A father and husband so busy repressing his pain, so trapped in the anguish of seeing his identity drowned, that he cannot express his true love and strength to them?
His family will benefit infinitely more from the joy of his liberation, and his children from the example of a father fully passionate about his life and theirs. Anything less is a disservice - and the money is utterly inconsequential in comparison.
I'm not as accomplished as the OP, but he may be in a similar financial state. Another big difference is that I don't have a difficult boss, and my commute and working hours do allow me a couple hours with my kids in the evening, along with weekends mostly free. So I'm definitely, definitely, definitely not saying he shouldn't feel this way, or suggesting that he's complaining. I'm just saying, I get it, I understand why his situation is a very difficult one.
If you compare yourself to your peers in SF you'll never feel good about that. Too many kids who got lucky in this town walking around with zillions.
What if you moved to one of the more decent parts of the East Bay? Easily cut your rent in half, or if you prefer, you could have twice the space.
And going the entrepreneurial route isn't exactly a way to spend more time with your kids.
I agree that escaping the rat race is a good thing overall for the family, I just disagree with the dichotomy you're presenting here.
How is that not pain?
If anything, our original poster should consider psychiatric care. This kind of seething misery isn't often fixed by dickering around your professional life.
But you are right, the OP is in a lot of pain right now. And I myself have the same fears as the OP, and even taken the route that the poster wonders about, of taking time off to do some wildly impractical and creative things. It taught me a lot about myself.
I don't have a family at the moment, so it's a lot easier for me. I'm not sure what the solution is, for him, but it could just be downshifting rather than a clean break. Or, maybe he thinks he needs to do something radical.
Kids aren't as dumb as adults think they are. Treat them with respect, explain things to them, and they will understand. Treat them as dumb consumers, and what do you get?
It's more a matter of perceived fragility, both in the physical sense (safety hysteria) and the emotional and psychological sense (provider hysteria). This is constantly reinforced by other people behaving as though their children are fragile, and falling into the hysteria themselves.
No one wants to be at the bottom of this pile. It would be the same, in a coarse sense, as being at the bottom of the pile in a high school or in a clique of society wifes. Social ostracism, harassment with and by child protective services, and honest to goodness psychological damage of everyone involves can result from such petty bullshit. That you have to deal with such pettiness is a sign not that you should try to win harder, but that perhaps you should just stop playing the game.
In all of this squabbling, it is possible that, in an absolute sense, the child's life could be awesome. They could be comfortable, psychologically stable, and totally happy with life. But it doesn't matter, because all of this social in-fighting is a local phenomena, and being on the bottom in any locality makes you a "bad parent" almost by axiom.
BTW, not arguing at you so much as using your thoughts as a basis for my own. :-)
Having a family changes all the goalposts.
As I've commented on here before, I and a lot of the people I know seem to have gone through childhoods where the parents believed this trade-off was really binary. I got it less than many people, but I still would have liked to see my parents, and their parents as well, not suffer through existence so much because of "needs" they thought we had. The only reason they thought we had those needs is because all the other parents in the neighborhood reinforced that children have those needs by catering to their own children thusly. It almost seems like the same force that drives parents to obsess about the safety of their children. They don't want to seem like the parent who cares the least.
The problem is that the goalposts you allude to in a higher-level comment are defined by this mechanism. I agree that goals will change -- any life change will result in resetting of goals --, but I think we absolutely suck as a collective on evaluating where those goals ought to reset to, and just let blind oneupmanship against other families guide us to local maxima.
- I should clarify that we didn't live anywhere near poverty. My father wasn't putting us in a bad situation to keep the job he loved. We were just significantly lower than the people around us, and as a result he didn't have many friends among his peers (by that I mean parents in our suburb) because they looked down on him. So that situation may not have any real bearing on this discussion since he didn't seem to be facing a hard decision: give up the respect of a bunch of career pushing suits or hate his life and his job, hmmm.
My family was completely nomadic growing up. While it was kind of a constant uncertain adventure, I see, as an adult, how it made me a better and stronger person.
Look at people with a small zone of comfort, people who are so incredibly attached to their physical manifestations of "success" and they are some of the most unhappy people ever. Living the nomadic existence more or less teaches people to value their relationships with people over things or those things that 9-5 drudgery provides.
Besides, children are resilient. I would never trade the memory of the time with my parents & family -- moving, camping, learning and adapting all over the freaking place -- for memories of what most adults would call a "stable" childhood.
You have no duty to provide "stuff" and failing to give them stuff is not deprivation.
If you can't buy your kids lots of fancy things, maybe you can teach them to be entrepreneurial early on.
If you can't buy them expensive education, maybe they can try to win grants. Besides, if you are struggling now, you probably can not buy them good education anyway.
(Ironically, I think channels like Cartoon Network I would recommend more for adults, both for the creativity of some of the shows and for the nostalgia of the old stuff. But I don't think the irony of many of these cartoons translates for many children, who are still naive enough to take them at face value.)
BTW, like someone else said, I hate to have thousands of episodes of tv trash like Gilligan's Island in my head.
We don't have video games either, and I'm starting to think that's where I would "compromise" first (although I would have to convince my wife). In general, though, I think it's easier to take a pretty hard line to start and then find points to compromise on. We have Netflix, too, so there's lots to choose from as far as things to watch. But we know some of their peers can turn the TV on at any time and watch whatever they want, which I find to be pretty scary. That whole "turn the TV to a 'kids' channel and mindlessly absorb whatever comes on for hours everyday" is the scenario we really want to avoid.
I don't care for new TV shows, but I sometimes wonder about cutting kids off from a source of pop-culture for their generation. It may not seem like it to us, but for them, the crap that's on now will be the stuff they watch on Cartoon Network in 20 years and laugh about or turn into surreal parodies.
Maybe moderation is a better solution?
From about the time my son was three years old or so, my reply to "can I have $shiny_thing_on_TV?" was "don't ask for stuff you see on TV, it's mostly junk." That simple!
Now he's nine and asks for stuff on TV, but he understands that there's a very high probability he won't get it, so he knows better than to whine about it. Instead it's "maybe I can get it for my birthday" or "how long do I have to save so I can buy that with my own money?" Either of which I think is infinitely better than the kids who nag their parents until they get what they want!
Follow your heart! I did that and led me to a low maintenance but very happy life. The less you have to more you gain.
Happiness == Success
I was a military brat. I went to 10 public schools in 18 years, mostly in poorer areas. By all accounts my education should have been terrible. It wasn't.
I got a lot out of my education, not because I went to the 'best' schools.. but rather because my parents instilled in me a love of learning. They laid down an expectation (not a demand) that I learn and continue learning throughout my life.
I didn't go to an Ivy league school (we simply didn't have the means). I went to a division II school in central Arkansas. None of that matters. I still learn something new everyday. I've parlayed my love of learning into an entrepreneurs life. I'm on my third startup. One has been wildly successful, one not so much. The third is going well so far:)
More importantly I have a great wife and live in a place I absolutely love (Denver). We have a nice house, but not too nice. We have great friends. Really, at 30 years old I just couldn't ask for more.
All of this not because I had fancy toys, private school, or even much stability growing up (moving around every year or two impedes that). Nope, I've been blessed by having parents who where adventurous and chose not to live life in a conventional way. They freed me to walk my unconventional path to happiness. That's a far greater gift than money can buy.
To the OP: Don't be afraid to step out and find your happiness. Your kids need a role model just as I had.
Or it might turn out that there is some third option between continuing the current drudgery or pushing everything into the pile on some new venture. Again, there's little to be lost and much to gain from starting the conversation.