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I empathize with how hard it is for a female founder in particular and for a woman in general when it comes to mixing children with a career. That said the adv

I empathize with how hard it is for a female founder in particular and for a woman in general when it comes to mixing children with a career. That said the advice to freeze your eggs (ie work now, live later) rubs me the wrong way. I wish we could live in a society where people would not have to work themselves to death and were able to... you know... enjoy life

umanwizard 6y ago
Our society doesn't force or even encourage people to be startup founders -- they choose it for themselves. There are plenty of examples of classes of people who have to work harder than they should in an ideal society, but I'm not sure what point you're making with this particular one.
- beaconstudios 6y ago
  being a founder is glamourised. Being rich is glamourised. What more encouragement do people need? Wealthy businesspeople are basically the symbol of social success.
- kapp_in_life 6y ago
  I think the overarching point they were making was about the difficulty women have with balancing a career with having a child(which is further exacerbated for women founders due to the increased workloads founders face). I do agree though that choosing to be a founder then complaining about a poor, usually self imposed, work life balance is a bit silly.
- tmpz22 6y ago
  There is an imperative to be a high earner due to skyrocketing housing, medical, and education costs in the United States. At the same time popular media like Wolf of Wall Street, The Social Network, and Shark Tank, show how life affirming and beneficial it is to gain wealth. To many start-ups seem like a short cut - even if they are laughably not.
asdfasgasdgasdg 6y ago
For highly skilled technical people and business leaders, we already do live in that society. There are many companies that will happily pay you entirely unreasonable amounts of money to work a 9-5 job. However, you can opt in to lifestyles where you work yourself to death in the hopes of getting even more excessive riches and fame than you would get by living a more relaxed lifestyle.
- fastball 6y ago
  I don't want fame or riches. I just want to build something nobody else has built.
  - grillvogel 6y ago
    have a kid then
  - asdfasgasdgasdg 6y ago
    You can do that as a hobby, or you can do it as a startup but treat the startup as a 9-5. (Your leisurely pace of work might hurt your chances of staying ahead of your competitors, but that's only important if you want the wealth and fame part.)
    - fastball 6y ago
      Hmm I don't think that's quite right. In order for me to continue building something nobody has built, I need it to be generating revenue. And in order to generate revenue I need to stay ahead of the competition, which probably requires not treating it like a 9-5. So yes I'm pursuing money, but not to achieve vast personal wealth, but rather to ensure my (hopefully) novel business is long-term viable.
      - asdfasgasdgasdg 6y ago
        Ok, I guess for some founders keeping their business viable at all requires a very large commitment. I think that's going to depend on how saturated is the market you're entering, and various other factors. I still believe that most founders could work much less if they were not in pursuit of vast wealth/fame.
mountainb 6y ago
If you live anywhere with cheap cost of living you can have a pretty chill lifestyle and raise kids. If you want to live in a tournament zip code you have to live a tournament lifestyle. The US is a gigantic country that is mostly empty.
dehrmann 6y ago
> wish we could live in a society where people would not have to work themselves to death and were able to... you know... enjoy life While I do agree, this is where I draw a distinction between "job" and "career." A job is something you do to make money. A career is an end in itself. Balancing a career and parenthood is incredibly hard because they're both large time commitments. Despite what the 90's told women (though this applies equally to men), you can't have it all, and you have to decide what's important to you.
- tobib 6y ago
  There are societies where a woman can have both, a career and a family. And that usually comes with maternity leave, parental leave, child benefits, child care, etc. I hope I don't misunderstand you but what you said sounded to me like it's either or, and I don't think that has to be true.
- bengale 6y ago
  It's true. Telling people they can have everything does them such a disservice, because it strips them of the knowledge that these decisions exist. We all have to pick and choose where we apply our energies based on what we value most, pretending that isn't the case just means those decisions are made for them.
- munificent 6y ago
  I think the initial intent of feminism was that "have it all" meant "here is a buffet of life paths and each individual is free to pick which ones they want in order to live a meaningful life." But somehow that's turned into, "we put all of the life paths on your plate and if you don't eat them all, you're a failure". We went from "you can" to "you must". Maybe there's something fundamental in the nature of esteem and prestige that leads to this. We don't see to be good at building cultures that understand there can be many entirely disparate ways to live that are equally successful.
  - rantwasp 6y ago
    offtopic: Hey munificent! Great fan of your books. Keep up the great work!
dheera 6y ago
Potentially controversial thought here, but I'd like to bring it up for discussion. I feel like the work ethic I see throughout the industry is extremely toxic to society, and leads to some of this. In China for example there's a so-called "996" work schedule (9am-9pm, 6 days a week) which is basically expected of everyone in tech, unfortunately, and it seems Silicon Valley is heading that direction as well with all the off-hour meetings, weekend work, and on-call requirements. Many SV companies also demand 72 hours or more of work per week, in my adecnotal observations. What I'm often observing is: (a) such toxic work ethic is largely set by male founders who don't care about other important things than work e.g. family plans (b) others in the industry are forced to compete with those ridiculous standards, including females, those with disabilities, those already with family, those taking care of a family member, etc. (c) this results in those groups being consequently disrespected by investors because they can't match up to the workaholic male founders who don't care about anything but work. I've heard several investors talk negatively about females behind their back because "they might want to have kids". (d) this results in more workaholic male CEOs rising to the top (e) the cycle repeats Are my observations and inferences correct, or am I off? Open question here.
- asdfasgasdgasdg 6y ago
  I'm not sure if you've got the details right, but it is definitely true that if you are taking part in any elite competition, you are probably going to be competing against people who are working very hard. I don't think that this is specific to male cofounders. Even in the counterfactual world where all founders are women, some will work harder than others, and if there is a perception that the harder workers are more likely to succeed, there will be pressure on everyone else to work harder as well.
  - dheera 6y ago
    > specific to male cofounders I guess what I was trying to say is, male founders have a few biological choices that female founders don't, and I'm suggesting that it should be considered unethical to set industry work-hour standards to a level that only males can achieve because males are able to de-prioritize biology. An article about one of the most widely acclaimed male founders today: "As an Apple employee in the early 1990s, he almost walked out of the delivery room when the impending birth of his first child threatened to disrupt a presentation he was scheduled to give. As president of Google China from 2005 to 2009, he had a special table installed on his bed so that he could sit directly up from sleep and immediately begin responding to emails, without having to waste time standing up or reaching for a laptop." I'm hypothesizing that behavior like this, at different scales, is quickly becoming both romanticized and expected of founders, and that is marginalizing all groups except single males. https://qz.com/work/1488217/a-former-symbol-of-silicon-valleys-crush-it-culture-now-regrets-working-so-much/ https://qz.com/work/1488217/a-former-symbol-of-silicon-valle...
tobib 6y ago
I feel the same way. So often we optimize for situations that many of us feel shouldn't exist in the first place.
drakonka 6y ago
I think in some places society does work with this at least reasonably well, at least from the perspective of employees - I'm sure this is harder for startup founders. But I think that startup founders are in the minority, whereas the child-raising discourse usually touches on all kinds of professionals, including normal employees. Where I live it is common for both parents to take long stretches of leave to be with their children for the first few years of their lives, and later it is common to take special childcare days off if your child is sick, has school events, etc etc. I _think_ the government pays for most or all of this time, so I am thinking there is a way for startup founders to claim it too, but I'm not 100% sure how that works. I don't know all the ways that it affected each person professionally, but as someone on the team working closely with quite a few of these people I never got the sense that it hindered their position at the company. I've had a TD go on 6-month paternity leave for kid 1, then go back on another 6-month leave less than a year later for #2. He went on leave leading a project and came back leading another project. Another anecdotal example: when I was joining my first project at the place, our lead producer had just left for maternity leave. Another producer was hired to temporarily fill her role. When the original producer came back, there was no question of her position: of course she was coming back to the team she'd been leading. The replacement producer was simply moved to work on another project. I often hear in online discourse that it can be disruptive to the project when this type of thing happens, but personally I just never experienced it like that (from the perspective of the teammate who has experienced many people at the company going on parental leave, not from the actual parent perspective). I think when taking these amounts of parental leave is the norm and not the exception, we find that it isn't really as hard or scary as many companies seem to think it is. It also has the benefit of fostering a culture where no one person is absolutely pivotal to the project (or has to work themselves to death lest their project falls apart since everything depends on them...) They _will_ go on leave to spend time with their child, and you as a team/company/management have no option but to be prepared for that.
- cutemonster 6y ago
  What's a TD? > The replacement producer was simply moved to work on another project. I wonder about the theoretical situation when the replacement did a significantly better job, and you needed just one person for that job role. Then, I wonder if there could be some resentment when the original less talented person returns and "kicks out" the more talented one. Maybe a solution is to not be too attached to the company and how it's going, and have a life outside work, hmm. And just not care > fostering a culture where no one person is absolutely pivotal to the project That sounds good. Maybe could even be a good thing to practice project leader rotation, without anyone going for parental leave
kgybcehbx 6y ago
Well we used to have a society with a division of labor and stable institution of marriage so that women didn't have to work themselves to death through the child rearing years but we decided as a society that in order for women to be truly free, they need to be trapped in the same work to death life that men have been in since prehistoric times, to the detriment of their lives and the lives of our children. But it'll be OK because the village can raise the children; just send them off to the tax subsidized day care to be raised in a 1:20 adult: child ratio (they'll be fiiiiiine) and then you can have your career and your "motherhood" (no matter that the child trusts the nanny more than you because you were always at work) too
- sokoloff 6y ago
  "We" didn't decide as a society. Rather individual people (and couples) in society decided that they'd prefer to have additional income [and stimulation] by choosing to work outside the home. Collectively, that dramatically increased the labor supply as compared to 100 years ago as well as increased the demand for goods and services. I don't want to have us go back to the old way where it was looked down upon or judged for women to participate in society as free and equal agents in deciding how they want to spend their one precious life. "Men should work and women should tend to the household and children" is way worse than "Adults should be able to make free choices about their lives [and accept the consequential outcomes resulting from those choices, both beneficial and detrimental]"
  - yomly 6y ago
    But now I have to be twice as financially successful to provide the equivalent level of support my parents did while my wife opts to be a full time parent. We both made free choices, but the environment has now made that considerably more expensive. Don't get me wrong, this isn't a value judgment but, sadly, being a stay at home parent isn't economically "valuable" and so the incentives have shifted over the years.
    - sokoloff 6y ago
      On the economic value point, my spouse elected to stay home when our second was born as we calculated that with their (well above median pay, PhD required) science job, that with two in daycare or paid pre-school, we were just breaking even on an after-tax monthly cash basis and so they’d be working full-time and the only headway we’d be making from their work and missing our kids’ development was maxing out another 401k account. For us, that was an absolutely economically valued choice to stay home. Now that they’re in school, freelance science consulting adds to the household retirement savings in a very significant way (when self-employed, you can squirrel away about 92% of the gross income up to mid-five figures), which by now has probably filled in the gap from several years of no 401k contributions and growth and provides them with the intellectual stimulation and contribution in their field that is also desired.
artificialLimbs 6y ago
A young Buddhist monk went to a temple one day to renounce his worldly life and find enlightenment. He found the eldest member of the temple to be a very wise man and good friend. This elder also scrubbed the toilets and cleaned up the bathrooms every day. Seeing this, the new monk spoke with the other monks in the monastery. "This is terrible! The elder should not have to do such a lowly chore. He is a great man and has already helped me to realize many things. I believe we should help give him time to do more relaxing in his old age. Let's take his cleaning supplies and hide them so that he won't have to clean the bathrooms every day." The other monks agreed, and they hid his supplies. The elder said nothing about the new state of affairs, but instead began fasting. He did not eat for 2 days, then 3, then 5. Concerned, the monks asked him "Why do you not eat?" The elder replied: "No work, no food."
vmception 6y ago
> That said the advice to freeze your eggs (ie work now, live later) rubs me the wrong way. That seems to be based on a lot of assumptions. I consider working a fulfilling job to be living. Whereas raising children seems to be the fulfilling... life role.. to you? I don't view them as separate delineated things. I think freezing eggs should become cheaper, more viable, and covered by insurance, and there are a couple ways to improve the process. A lot of times I find dating 28-33 year old women to be predictably annoying because many stigmatize options like freezing eggs while still rushing to check the boxes on various rites of passage, as if freezing eggs is a form of defeat. Whereas older women have just gotten over it, already done it, or something else. And younger women haven't gotten around to "wondering where this is going". My experience, corroborated by some other men. I wonder if that contributes to Leo's age limit. I don't have experience dating men, so I wouldn't know if they do something similar at certain age ranges.
jimbokun 6y ago
> I wish we could live in a society where people would not have to work themselves to death and were able to... you know... enjoy life Compared to almost everyone else who ever lived, if you live in a Western Democracy (and increasingly for many in some non-Western countries), that time is now. People from past centuries, and people from many poor nations around the world, would be baffled that people living with the opportunities we have available to us complaining about not being able to "enjoy life". Things certainly aren't perfect, but seize the opportunities already being afforded to you for enjoyment.

umanwizard 6y ago

Our society doesn't force or even encourage people to be startup founders -- they choose it for themselves. There are plenty of examples of classes of people who have to work harder than they should in an ideal society, but I'm not sure what point you're making with this particular one.

beaconstudios 6y ago
being a founder is glamourised. Being rich is glamourised. What more encouragement do people need? Wealthy businesspeople are basically the symbol of social success.
kapp_in_life 6y ago
I think the overarching point they were making was about the difficulty women have with balancing a career with having a child(which is further exacerbated for women founders due to the increased workloads founders face). I do agree though that choosing to be a founder then complaining about a poor, usually self imposed, work life balance is a bit silly.
tmpz22 6y ago
There is an imperative to be a high earner due to skyrocketing housing, medical, and education costs in the United States. At the same time popular media like Wolf of Wall Street, The Social Network, and Shark Tank, show how life affirming and beneficial it is to gain wealth. To many start-ups seem like a short cut - even if they are laughably not.

asdfasgasdgasdg 6y ago

For highly skilled technical people and business leaders, we already do live in that society. There are many companies that will happily pay you entirely unreasonable amounts of money to work a 9-5 job. However, you can opt in to lifestyles where you work yourself to death in the hopes of getting even more excessive riches and fame than you would get by living a more relaxed lifestyle.

fastball 6y ago
I don't want fame or riches. I just want to build something nobody else has built.
- grillvogel 6y ago
  have a kid then
- asdfasgasdgasdg 6y ago
  You can do that as a hobby, or you can do it as a startup but treat the startup as a 9-5. (Your leisurely pace of work might hurt your chances of staying ahead of your competitors, but that's only important if you want the wealth and fame part.)
  - fastball 6y ago
    Hmm I don't think that's quite right. In order for me to continue building something nobody has built, I need it to be generating revenue. And in order to generate revenue I need to stay ahead of the competition, which probably requires not treating it like a 9-5. So yes I'm pursuing money, but not to achieve vast personal wealth, but rather to ensure my (hopefully) novel business is long-term viable.
    - asdfasgasdgasdg 6y ago
      Ok, I guess for some founders keeping their business viable at all requires a very large commitment. I think that's going to depend on how saturated is the market you're entering, and various other factors. I still believe that most founders could work much less if they were not in pursuit of vast wealth/fame.

mountainb 6y ago

If you live anywhere with cheap cost of living you can have a pretty chill lifestyle and raise kids. If you want to live in a tournament zip code you have to live a tournament lifestyle. The US is a gigantic country that is mostly empty.

dehrmann 6y ago

> wish we could live in a society where people would not have to work themselves to death and were able to... you know... enjoy life While I do agree, this is where I draw a distinction between "job" and "career." A job is something you do to make money. A career is an end in itself. Balancing a career and parenthood is incredibly hard because they're both large time commitments. Despite what the 90's told women (though this applies equally to men), you can't have it all, and you have to decide what's important to you.

tobib 6y ago
There are societies where a woman can have both, a career and a family. And that usually comes with maternity leave, parental leave, child benefits, child care, etc. I hope I don't misunderstand you but what you said sounded to me like it's either or, and I don't think that has to be true.
bengale 6y ago
It's true. Telling people they can have everything does them such a disservice, because it strips them of the knowledge that these decisions exist. We all have to pick and choose where we apply our energies based on what we value most, pretending that isn't the case just means those decisions are made for them.
munificent 6y ago
I think the initial intent of feminism was that "have it all" meant "here is a buffet of life paths and each individual is free to pick which ones they want in order to live a meaningful life." But somehow that's turned into, "we put all of the life paths on your plate and if you don't eat them all, you're a failure". We went from "you can" to "you must". Maybe there's something fundamental in the nature of esteem and prestige that leads to this. We don't see to be good at building cultures that understand there can be many entirely disparate ways to live that are equally successful.
- rantwasp 6y ago
  offtopic: Hey munificent! Great fan of your books. Keep up the great work!

dheera 6y ago

Potentially controversial thought here, but I'd like to bring it up for discussion. I feel like the work ethic I see throughout the industry is extremely toxic to society, and leads to some of this. In China for example there's a so-called "996" work schedule (9am-9pm, 6 days a week) which is basically expected of everyone in tech, unfortunately, and it seems Silicon Valley is heading that direction as well with all the off-hour meetings, weekend work, and on-call requirements. Many SV companies also demand 72 hours or more of work per week, in my adecnotal observations. What I'm often observing is: (a) such toxic work ethic is largely set by male founders who don't care about other important things than work e.g. family plans (b) others in the industry are forced to compete with those ridiculous standards, including females, those with disabilities, those already with family, those taking care of a family member, etc. (c) this results in those groups being consequently disrespected by investors because they can't match up to the workaholic male founders who don't care about anything but work. I've heard several investors talk negatively about females behind their back because "they might want to have kids". (d) this results in more workaholic male CEOs rising to the top (e) the cycle repeats Are my observations and inferences correct, or am I off? Open question here.

asdfasgasdgasdg 6y ago
I'm not sure if you've got the details right, but it is definitely true that if you are taking part in any elite competition, you are probably going to be competing against people who are working very hard. I don't think that this is specific to male cofounders. Even in the counterfactual world where all founders are women, some will work harder than others, and if there is a perception that the harder workers are more likely to succeed, there will be pressure on everyone else to work harder as well.
- dheera 6y ago
  > specific to male cofounders I guess what I was trying to say is, male founders have a few biological choices that female founders don't, and I'm suggesting that it should be considered unethical to set industry work-hour standards to a level that only males can achieve because males are able to de-prioritize biology. An article about one of the most widely acclaimed male founders today: "As an Apple employee in the early 1990s, he almost walked out of the delivery room when the impending birth of his first child threatened to disrupt a presentation he was scheduled to give. As president of Google China from 2005 to 2009, he had a special table installed on his bed so that he could sit directly up from sleep and immediately begin responding to emails, without having to waste time standing up or reaching for a laptop." I'm hypothesizing that behavior like this, at different scales, is quickly becoming both romanticized and expected of founders, and that is marginalizing all groups except single males. https://qz.com/work/1488217/a-former-symbol-of-silicon-valleys-crush-it-culture-now-regrets-working-so-much/ https://qz.com/work/1488217/a-former-symbol-of-silicon-valle...

tobib 6y ago

I feel the same way. So often we optimize for situations that many of us feel shouldn't exist in the first place.

drakonka 6y ago

I think in some places society does work with this at least reasonably well, at least from the perspective of employees - I'm sure this is harder for startup founders. But I think that startup founders are in the minority, whereas the child-raising discourse usually touches on all kinds of professionals, including normal employees. Where I live it is common for both parents to take long stretches of leave to be with their children for the first few years of their lives, and later it is common to take special childcare days off if your child is sick, has school events, etc etc. I _think_ the government pays for most or all of this time, so I am thinking there is a way for startup founders to claim it too, but I'm not 100% sure how that works. I don't know all the ways that it affected each person professionally, but as someone on the team working closely with quite a few of these people I never got the sense that it hindered their position at the company. I've had a TD go on 6-month paternity leave for kid 1, then go back on another 6-month leave less than a year later for #2. He went on leave leading a project and came back leading another project. Another anecdotal example: when I was joining my first project at the place, our lead producer had just left for maternity leave. Another producer was hired to temporarily fill her role. When the original producer came back, there was no question of her position: of course she was coming back to the team she'd been leading. The replacement producer was simply moved to work on another project. I often hear in online discourse that it can be disruptive to the project when this type of thing happens, but personally I just never experienced it like that (from the perspective of the teammate who has experienced many people at the company going on parental leave, not from the actual parent perspective). I think when taking these amounts of parental leave is the norm and not the exception, we find that it isn't really as hard or scary as many companies seem to think it is. It also has the benefit of fostering a culture where no one person is absolutely pivotal to the project (or has to work themselves to death lest their project falls apart since everything depends on them...) They _will_ go on leave to spend time with their child, and you as a team/company/management have no option but to be prepared for that.

cutemonster 6y ago
What's a TD? > The replacement producer was simply moved to work on another project. I wonder about the theoretical situation when the replacement did a significantly better job, and you needed just one person for that job role. Then, I wonder if there could be some resentment when the original less talented person returns and "kicks out" the more talented one. Maybe a solution is to not be too attached to the company and how it's going, and have a life outside work, hmm. And just not care > fostering a culture where no one person is absolutely pivotal to the project That sounds good. Maybe could even be a good thing to practice project leader rotation, without anyone going for parental leave

kgybcehbx 6y ago

Well we used to have a society with a division of labor and stable institution of marriage so that women didn't have to work themselves to death through the child rearing years but we decided as a society that in order for women to be truly free, they need to be trapped in the same work to death life that men have been in since prehistoric times, to the detriment of their lives and the lives of our children. But it'll be OK because the village can raise the children; just send them off to the tax subsidized day care to be raised in a 1:20 adult: child ratio (they'll be fiiiiiine) and then you can have your career and your "motherhood" (no matter that the child trusts the nanny more than you because you were always at work) too

sokoloff 6y ago
"We" didn't decide as a society. Rather individual people (and couples) in society decided that they'd prefer to have additional income [and stimulation] by choosing to work outside the home. Collectively, that dramatically increased the labor supply as compared to 100 years ago as well as increased the demand for goods and services. I don't want to have us go back to the old way where it was looked down upon or judged for women to participate in society as free and equal agents in deciding how they want to spend their one precious life. "Men should work and women should tend to the household and children" is way worse than "Adults should be able to make free choices about their lives [and accept the consequential outcomes resulting from those choices, both beneficial and detrimental]"
- yomly 6y ago
  But now I have to be twice as financially successful to provide the equivalent level of support my parents did while my wife opts to be a full time parent. We both made free choices, but the environment has now made that considerably more expensive. Don't get me wrong, this isn't a value judgment but, sadly, being a stay at home parent isn't economically "valuable" and so the incentives have shifted over the years.
  - sokoloff 6y ago
    On the economic value point, my spouse elected to stay home when our second was born as we calculated that with their (well above median pay, PhD required) science job, that with two in daycare or paid pre-school, we were just breaking even on an after-tax monthly cash basis and so they’d be working full-time and the only headway we’d be making from their work and missing our kids’ development was maxing out another 401k account. For us, that was an absolutely economically valued choice to stay home. Now that they’re in school, freelance science consulting adds to the household retirement savings in a very significant way (when self-employed, you can squirrel away about 92% of the gross income up to mid-five figures), which by now has probably filled in the gap from several years of no 401k contributions and growth and provides them with the intellectual stimulation and contribution in their field that is also desired.

artificialLimbs 6y ago

A young Buddhist monk went to a temple one day to renounce his worldly life and find enlightenment. He found the eldest member of the temple to be a very wise man and good friend. This elder also scrubbed the toilets and cleaned up the bathrooms every day. Seeing this, the new monk spoke with the other monks in the monastery. "This is terrible! The elder should not have to do such a lowly chore. He is a great man and has already helped me to realize many things. I believe we should help give him time to do more relaxing in his old age. Let's take his cleaning supplies and hide them so that he won't have to clean the bathrooms every day." The other monks agreed, and they hid his supplies. The elder said nothing about the new state of affairs, but instead began fasting. He did not eat for 2 days, then 3, then 5. Concerned, the monks asked him "Why do you not eat?" The elder replied: "No work, no food."

vmception 6y ago

> That said the advice to freeze your eggs (ie work now, live later) rubs me the wrong way. That seems to be based on a lot of assumptions. I consider working a fulfilling job to be living. Whereas raising children seems to be the fulfilling... life role.. to you? I don't view them as separate delineated things. I think freezing eggs should become cheaper, more viable, and covered by insurance, and there are a couple ways to improve the process. A lot of times I find dating 28-33 year old women to be predictably annoying because many stigmatize options like freezing eggs while still rushing to check the boxes on various rites of passage, as if freezing eggs is a form of defeat. Whereas older women have just gotten over it, already done it, or something else. And younger women haven't gotten around to "wondering where this is going". My experience, corroborated by some other men. I wonder if that contributes to Leo's age limit. I don't have experience dating men, so I wouldn't know if they do something similar at certain age ranges.

jimbokun 6y ago

> I wish we could live in a society where people would not have to work themselves to death and were able to... you know... enjoy life Compared to almost everyone else who ever lived, if you live in a Western Democracy (and increasingly for many in some non-Western countries), that time is now. People from past centuries, and people from many poor nations around the world, would be baffled that people living with the opportunities we have available to us complaining about not being able to "enjoy life". Things certainly aren't perfect, but seize the opportunities already being afforded to you for enjoyment.