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I married very young. My wife and I had very little, both were working jobs for close to minimum wage with no marketable skills between us. So we sat down and d

I married very young. My wife and I had very little, both were working jobs for close to minimum wage with no marketable skills between us. So we sat down and decided what we wanted. We both wanted kids, she wanted to stay home with them when they were young. We both wanted a house of our own. We both wanted to live somewhere with family and friends that we could rely on to help us lay down roots and build that home. So the first thing we did was move to the place we wanted to try and stay forever. The second step was to go to school and get a skill. We both worked while I went to college for computer science. I'd been building computers since I was a little kid, was always good at math, decided it would be an easy way to get into the job market at a decent salary. I was right. Next, we paid off all that student loan debt. Stayed in our tiny apartment with next to nothing and just put that new tech salary into the debt until it was totally gone. Then we bought a house where the mortgage wouldn't be much higher than our tiny apartment. We could afford something three or four times bigger on my salary, but we didn't do that. Stayed small. Maintenance costs are low, cleaning it up is easy, and we don't even have an HOA to bother us (and I don't care, because it's not like I bought my dinky little house as an investment). Next came the kids. Started having one after another. She stays home, I work, we spend time together as much as possible. We have friends and family nearby that make life so much better in a million ways. Honestly, I have all these roots and commitments and still...zero stress. Life is great. And now all our extra money is going into long-term investments and traveling. We've started going all sorts of places. We'll be doing a tour of Europe in the next few years and I am in my early thirties at this point. So here is my message to anyone that read the person above and is reading this post now and hasn't yet spent their twenties and thirties having hobo adventures: Life is so much better if you just do what you evolved to do. There's no way to hack life and make it better in any real way. Pair up, get a trade, build a home, and enjoy that for what it is.

vernie 8y ago
That's great, I'm so happy for you.
LeifCarrotson 8y ago
> So we sat down and decided what we wanted. How did you know that's what you wanted? What gives you the authority to say that's the best path for everyone? Consider an analogy for me - you mentioned travel. Have you ever driven through the mountains? Hiked up a few? Even from the road, it's easy to look up and see spectacular peaks calling out your name, begging to be climbed. And coming from a flat, midwestern state, you may need to recalibrate your eyeballs for distance: You can't park the car for lunch and walk up most of them if you start in the afternoon...it's likely to take most of a vacation to hike in and up one or two peaks, so you need to plan your route before you arrive at the park. The tragedy of the story is that there's no better viewpoint from which to gaze at a distant mountain and imagine a climb up it than from the path up the adjacent one you're climbing up. I'm not yet thirty and have a family, a home, savings, a degree, and a career. I've got life-long commitments and am building solid roots like I thought I should, but now that I've got that all checked off it's not what I thought it would be. I've just got to continue trudging up this mountain I picked as a 17-year-old applying for college and dating one of the girls from high school. It's time to work my 40 hours, enjoy a few weeks vacation every year, and wait for retirement until eventually dying. It's quickly starting to feel unfulfilling and stifling. The author of the article has spent her twenties and thirties bouldering up dozens of smaller cliffs and clambering over foothills all over the place. You denigrate them as "hobo adventures" but it sounds magnificent to me. I won't get to spend my thirties adventuring like that because I have a wife and a kid and a trade and a home, and it's just not all it's cracked up to be.
- camelNotation 8y ago
  Sounds like your perspective involves an omniscient ideal that does not and can not exist. Tradition exists for this very reason. We pass on what works, we do what works, and we don't presume to know what is better. That is what makes human beings so good at learning - we have the ability to hyper imitate one another. I see you doing something successfully, I don't need to know the actual process behind it, I just need to do it the way you do it. Gratitude for what you have is a critical component of the formula. You seem to lack that. I hope you find it. You won't last long without it. I recommend church. It helps. You evolved to do that too.
77pt77 8y ago
> Life is so much better if you just do what you evolved to do. > Pair up, get a trade, build a home You have evolved to reproduce. Getting a trade, building a home are very recent constructs and certainly not what you "evolved to do"
- camelNotation 8y ago
  Contributing to the resource needs of your social group and establishing a safe location to live and raise your young is exactly what you evolved to do. You aren't an amoeba, you're the most advanced mammal species on the planet. When you say "you evolved to reproduce" as if that doesn't include the other things I mentioned, you're kind of missing out on what gave you a survival advantage to begin with.
- seatdrummer 8y ago
  There are different reproductive strategies, but for the majority of men, raising a child to adulthood has been the way to go.
prism19 8y ago
> do what you evolved to do I agree you can't fight your nature and win. However, the counter argument would be: 1. Evolution is not concerned with your happiness, it's concerned with successful survival and reproduction - and keeping you just happy enough to do so. 2. Building a stable relationship and career in one place is quite counter to the thousands of years of itinerant hunter-gatherer, questionably-monogamous lives of our evolution lineage.
- camelNotation 8y ago
  I said life is better, not happy. I am not happy all the time, but my life is extremely meaningful. I'm leaning in to what evolution expects from me because that is the only thing that makes any sense at all. What real, meaningful purpose do I accomplish by struggling against the things I am most suited to do? I would also point out that thousands of years of itinerant hunting and gathering is not the same as evolving to be itinerant. We are a highly adaptive species and we can live many different ways - we often do - but that doesn't mean we are ideally suited to all of them. The vast majority of people, including those in under-industrialized nations, are not itinerant and of those that are, it's not often by choice. There are clear advantages to staying in place. The fact that most people, in their current evolved state, choose to remain where they are, is just as valid evidence that we are suited to be stationary as the existence of itinerant hunter gatherers in the past is evidence that we are suited to move around.
  - prism19 8y ago
    Onboard with meaning > happiness in general. However, you could argue that we evolved to optimize our reproduction in one of several strategies. For some, it means their best bet is to settle with one family, for others it means profligate mating with dozens of partners. If so, by your logic, neither lifestyle would have any more inherent meaning than the other. And, well, the 400,000 years of itinerant existence with much stronger evolutionary selection pressures vs. 10,000 years of agrarian society with less intense selection pressures doesn't seem commensurate. You're arguing very hard for your chosen lifestyle, which includes some sunk cost bias. Personally, I've done the settled-down thing and the hobo life and neither is more inherently meaningful than the other. Perhaps you could argue that a pair-bond and a single location and community makes climbing Maslow's hierarchy of needs easier in our current society - that I might buy.
curuinor 8y ago
we evolved to get a trade building and using computers and build a home?
- camelNotation 8y ago
  You evolved to contribute to the resource needs of your social group and establish a safe location to live and raise your young. If selling vacuum cleaners door to door paid the most and I was good at it, I would have done that instead of computer science. The point was to have the resources I needed to build something meaningful, not to work on computers.
csomar 8y ago
> Pair up That could be challenging for many people for multiple reasons. Have you considered the possibility that you found (by luck) a rather exceptional partner and thus your model could not be replicated on the society at large.
- camelNotation 8y ago
  It is very true that many people can't and won't be able to pair up, but they can group together other ways. You can build a family many different ways. One of the major problems with modern society is that the only reliable companionship any of us ever really find is in our romantic partners and that's a sad byproduct of our alienation from family, community, and work in general. You can find others like yourself, commit to one another, care for one another, and build a home together that has meaning in its own way. I have an aunt like that who never married, but she has close friendships even into her old age that mirror a marriage (maybe she is gay, I don't know or care). But she found a way to build a home like that.
- TheBeardKing 8y ago
  Nah, the notion of holding out for "the one" is overrated and just makes you pass over plenty of acceptable candidates. Everyone has flaws and overlapping interests isn't really necessary either. Just find someone you find attractive, who's in your league, and who shares your values and work at it, you'll be fine. I hear the divorce rate of arranged marriages is pretty low.
  - enimodas 8y ago
    Maybe because the cultures that have arranged marriages also have stigmas about divorce.
    - TheBeardKing 8y ago
      So do protestant churches, but you don't see them divorcing any less.
- deogeo 8y ago
jonknee 8y ago
> Life is so much better if you just do what you evolved to do. There's no way to hack life and make it better in any real way. Pair up, get a trade, build a home, and enjoy that for what it is. That's where we differ. It's great that you enjoy your life, but it sounds horrible to me. "Pair up, get a trade, build a home" ends up going very badly for some people, there is no single path to an enjoyable life.
- camelNotation 8y ago
  It sounds terrible to me too. That's the weird thing about doing what you are most suited to do - even if you dislike the idea of it, it still works.
smallgovt 8y ago
>> There's no way to hack life and make it better in any real way. This is a very close-minded statement. You've found happiness in your personal life by successfully aligning your actions with a traditional value system, and that's great! But, it's apparent you haven't fully considered other walks of life that align with different value systems. Take, for example, a man I know who is paralyzed from the neck down, has no family to call his own, yet is probably the happiest man you'll find around. He has found meaning in his injury and its ability to help others grow. The mind is extremely resilient and adaptable. I would argue that your life path is the EASIEST path to long-term fulfillment in modern western society, but it is NOT the ONLY way. Making such a claim is doing a huge disservice to people like the woman in the article.
glitch003 8y ago
I'm really glad that this worked out for you. You have a great partner and are very lucky for that. This won't be the case for everyone that follows your path. I can't help but be reminded of this quote: "Realize that sleeping on a futon when you're 30 is not the worst thing. You know what's worse, sleeping in a king bed next to a wife you're not really in love with but for some reason you married, and you got a couple kids, and you got a job you hate. You'll be laying there fantasizing about sleeping on a futon. There's no risk when you go after a dream. There's a tremendous amount to risk to playing it safe."
trentonshell 8y ago
Reading this comment struck me more than any HN comment has before. This seems to mirror my own life pretty well (married at 22 and finishing up a CS degree). I've been experiencing some anxious feelings in the past few weeks about whether I've made life decisions too hastily, seeing as it's such a normal/traditional path. Spending substantial time on this site tends to give me those feelings, like having a normal family life is antithetical to meaningful work as a programmer. Seeing such a similar situation played out in a fulfilling way was of great encouragement. So thank you for sharing!
- camelNotation 8y ago
  I'm glad! Don't give up. Stick with it. Make smart choices, and don't be afraid to commit to things like family, home, and children. You gain the most meaning from the things that demand the most of you.
hipjiveguy 8y ago
So, you got lucky and found your soul mate when you were young, correct? Not everyone is so lucky. For some, they don't find them til they're in their 30s, 40s, or sadly never. You wouldn't have been the same without her, so once again - lucky ;-) Many modern men, I'd estimate at least 65%, need to settle down (happily of course) to truly become men, and civilized human beings. Seemingly unrelated, but what was your relationship with your parents like?
- drageth 8y ago
  i was thinking the same thing.. alot of these comments seem to be coming from people who married their highschool/college gf

vernie 8y ago

That's great, I'm so happy for you.

LeifCarrotson 8y ago

> So we sat down and decided what we wanted. How did you know that's what you wanted? What gives you the authority to say that's the best path for everyone? Consider an analogy for me - you mentioned travel. Have you ever driven through the mountains? Hiked up a few? Even from the road, it's easy to look up and see spectacular peaks calling out your name, begging to be climbed. And coming from a flat, midwestern state, you may need to recalibrate your eyeballs for distance: You can't park the car for lunch and walk up most of them if you start in the afternoon...it's likely to take most of a vacation to hike in and up one or two peaks, so you need to plan your route before you arrive at the park. The tragedy of the story is that there's no better viewpoint from which to gaze at a distant mountain and imagine a climb up it than from the path up the adjacent one you're climbing up. I'm not yet thirty and have a family, a home, savings, a degree, and a career. I've got life-long commitments and am building solid roots like I thought I should, but now that I've got that all checked off it's not what I thought it would be. I've just got to continue trudging up this mountain I picked as a 17-year-old applying for college and dating one of the girls from high school. It's time to work my 40 hours, enjoy a few weeks vacation every year, and wait for retirement until eventually dying. It's quickly starting to feel unfulfilling and stifling. The author of the article has spent her twenties and thirties bouldering up dozens of smaller cliffs and clambering over foothills all over the place. You denigrate them as "hobo adventures" but it sounds magnificent to me. I won't get to spend my thirties adventuring like that because I have a wife and a kid and a trade and a home, and it's just not all it's cracked up to be.

camelNotation 8y ago
Sounds like your perspective involves an omniscient ideal that does not and can not exist. Tradition exists for this very reason. We pass on what works, we do what works, and we don't presume to know what is better. That is what makes human beings so good at learning - we have the ability to hyper imitate one another. I see you doing something successfully, I don't need to know the actual process behind it, I just need to do it the way you do it. Gratitude for what you have is a critical component of the formula. You seem to lack that. I hope you find it. You won't last long without it. I recommend church. It helps. You evolved to do that too.

77pt77 8y ago

> Life is so much better if you just do what you evolved to do. > Pair up, get a trade, build a home You have evolved to reproduce. Getting a trade, building a home are very recent constructs and certainly not what you "evolved to do"

camelNotation 8y ago
Contributing to the resource needs of your social group and establishing a safe location to live and raise your young is exactly what you evolved to do. You aren't an amoeba, you're the most advanced mammal species on the planet. When you say "you evolved to reproduce" as if that doesn't include the other things I mentioned, you're kind of missing out on what gave you a survival advantage to begin with.
seatdrummer 8y ago
There are different reproductive strategies, but for the majority of men, raising a child to adulthood has been the way to go.

prism19 8y ago

> do what you evolved to do I agree you can't fight your nature and win. However, the counter argument would be: 1. Evolution is not concerned with your happiness, it's concerned with successful survival and reproduction - and keeping you just happy enough to do so. 2. Building a stable relationship and career in one place is quite counter to the thousands of years of itinerant hunter-gatherer, questionably-monogamous lives of our evolution lineage.

camelNotation 8y ago
I said life is better, not happy. I am not happy all the time, but my life is extremely meaningful. I'm leaning in to what evolution expects from me because that is the only thing that makes any sense at all. What real, meaningful purpose do I accomplish by struggling against the things I am most suited to do? I would also point out that thousands of years of itinerant hunting and gathering is not the same as evolving to be itinerant. We are a highly adaptive species and we can live many different ways - we often do - but that doesn't mean we are ideally suited to all of them. The vast majority of people, including those in under-industrialized nations, are not itinerant and of those that are, it's not often by choice. There are clear advantages to staying in place. The fact that most people, in their current evolved state, choose to remain where they are, is just as valid evidence that we are suited to be stationary as the existence of itinerant hunter gatherers in the past is evidence that we are suited to move around.
- prism19 8y ago
  Onboard with meaning > happiness in general. However, you could argue that we evolved to optimize our reproduction in one of several strategies. For some, it means their best bet is to settle with one family, for others it means profligate mating with dozens of partners. If so, by your logic, neither lifestyle would have any more inherent meaning than the other. And, well, the 400,000 years of itinerant existence with much stronger evolutionary selection pressures vs. 10,000 years of agrarian society with less intense selection pressures doesn't seem commensurate. You're arguing very hard for your chosen lifestyle, which includes some sunk cost bias. Personally, I've done the settled-down thing and the hobo life and neither is more inherently meaningful than the other. Perhaps you could argue that a pair-bond and a single location and community makes climbing Maslow's hierarchy of needs easier in our current society - that I might buy.

curuinor 8y ago

we evolved to get a trade building and using computers and build a home?

camelNotation 8y ago
You evolved to contribute to the resource needs of your social group and establish a safe location to live and raise your young. If selling vacuum cleaners door to door paid the most and I was good at it, I would have done that instead of computer science. The point was to have the resources I needed to build something meaningful, not to work on computers.

csomar 8y ago

> Pair up That could be challenging for many people for multiple reasons. Have you considered the possibility that you found (by luck) a rather exceptional partner and thus your model could not be replicated on the society at large.

camelNotation 8y ago
It is very true that many people can't and won't be able to pair up, but they can group together other ways. You can build a family many different ways. One of the major problems with modern society is that the only reliable companionship any of us ever really find is in our romantic partners and that's a sad byproduct of our alienation from family, community, and work in general. You can find others like yourself, commit to one another, care for one another, and build a home together that has meaning in its own way. I have an aunt like that who never married, but she has close friendships even into her old age that mirror a marriage (maybe she is gay, I don't know or care). But she found a way to build a home like that.
TheBeardKing 8y ago
Nah, the notion of holding out for "the one" is overrated and just makes you pass over plenty of acceptable candidates. Everyone has flaws and overlapping interests isn't really necessary either. Just find someone you find attractive, who's in your league, and who shares your values and work at it, you'll be fine. I hear the divorce rate of arranged marriages is pretty low.
- enimodas 8y ago
  Maybe because the cultures that have arranged marriages also have stigmas about divorce.
  - TheBeardKing 8y ago
    So do protestant churches, but you don't see them divorcing any less.
deogeo 8y ago

jonknee 8y ago

> Life is so much better if you just do what you evolved to do. There's no way to hack life and make it better in any real way. Pair up, get a trade, build a home, and enjoy that for what it is. That's where we differ. It's great that you enjoy your life, but it sounds horrible to me. "Pair up, get a trade, build a home" ends up going very badly for some people, there is no single path to an enjoyable life.

camelNotation 8y ago
It sounds terrible to me too. That's the weird thing about doing what you are most suited to do - even if you dislike the idea of it, it still works.

smallgovt 8y ago

>> There's no way to hack life and make it better in any real way. This is a very close-minded statement. You've found happiness in your personal life by successfully aligning your actions with a traditional value system, and that's great! But, it's apparent you haven't fully considered other walks of life that align with different value systems. Take, for example, a man I know who is paralyzed from the neck down, has no family to call his own, yet is probably the happiest man you'll find around. He has found meaning in his injury and its ability to help others grow. The mind is extremely resilient and adaptable. I would argue that your life path is the EASIEST path to long-term fulfillment in modern western society, but it is NOT the ONLY way. Making such a claim is doing a huge disservice to people like the woman in the article.

glitch003 8y ago

I'm really glad that this worked out for you. You have a great partner and are very lucky for that. This won't be the case for everyone that follows your path. I can't help but be reminded of this quote: "Realize that sleeping on a futon when you're 30 is not the worst thing. You know what's worse, sleeping in a king bed next to a wife you're not really in love with but for some reason you married, and you got a couple kids, and you got a job you hate. You'll be laying there fantasizing about sleeping on a futon. There's no risk when you go after a dream. There's a tremendous amount to risk to playing it safe."

trentonshell 8y ago

Reading this comment struck me more than any HN comment has before. This seems to mirror my own life pretty well (married at 22 and finishing up a CS degree). I've been experiencing some anxious feelings in the past few weeks about whether I've made life decisions too hastily, seeing as it's such a normal/traditional path. Spending substantial time on this site tends to give me those feelings, like having a normal family life is antithetical to meaningful work as a programmer. Seeing such a similar situation played out in a fulfilling way was of great encouragement. So thank you for sharing!

camelNotation 8y ago
I'm glad! Don't give up. Stick with it. Make smart choices, and don't be afraid to commit to things like family, home, and children. You gain the most meaning from the things that demand the most of you.

hipjiveguy 8y ago

So, you got lucky and found your soul mate when you were young, correct? Not everyone is so lucky. For some, they don't find them til they're in their 30s, 40s, or sadly never. You wouldn't have been the same without her, so once again - lucky ;-) Many modern men, I'd estimate at least 65%, need to settle down (happily of course) to truly become men, and civilized human beings. Seemingly unrelated, but what was your relationship with your parents like?

drageth 8y ago
i was thinking the same thing.. alot of these comments seem to be coming from people who married their highschool/college gf