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Another difference is between suburbian adult lives and high-desity city adult lives. Compare an adult life in NYC or Chicago (or many European cities) and thos

Another difference is between suburbian adult lives and high-desity city adult lives. Compare an adult life in NYC or Chicago (or many European cities) and those people have easier access to visit with friends, stay out after work, see exhibits, try new restaurants. Suburban adults go home and tend to stay home. Also having children changes things quite a bit for all adults. I wish this article was longer.

Yhippa 4y ago
> Also having children changes things quite a bit for all adults. > I wish this article was longer. Agree on both accounts. To the first point, I had a lot of friends and hobbies before having a kid and it feels that I'm slowly losing control of my time to the point where most of it is gone and I only have like 2 hours to myself. 4 if I want to be sleep deprived the next day.
- burntoutfire 4y ago
  Did you expect more free time? Judging by the parents I know, 2 hours of free time for yourself every day is not bad.
  - oweiler 4y ago
    The problem is not having two hours of spare time, it's that you feel so drained at the end of the day that you don't have the energy left to to anything meaningful.
    - TimPC 4y ago
      For a long time for me the problem wasn’t the amount of time for myself so much as that it wasn’t blockable time. 15 minutes 8 times a day is very different from one two-hour chunk.
      - Cerium 4y ago
        I used to wonder why many older people in the office would find a productive use of the 10 minutes between meetings while younger people would just grab a drink or get distracted. Now I'm a parent and I have learned that you can do something in 10 minutes.
        TimPC 4y ago
        You can certainly do many things in 15 minutes but for most hobbies, partaking in that hobby requires a longer block of time.
  - HWR_14 4y ago
    > 2 hours of free time for yourself every day is not bad. Two hours of free time to yourself is horrible. The fact that it's expected doesn't change that it's a horrible answer. We need to reduce the amount of time we spend at work. Ironically, the best way to do that is to spend your early years working 24/7 to try to get wealthy enough that you can spend 4 hours a day doing meaningful work.
    - BeetleB 4y ago
      Two hours of free uninterrupted time is actually pretty good. One can accomplish fairly significant things with that if they're disciplined and don't spend that time goofing off. I doubt most parents get two hours of free time though.
      - HWR_14 4y ago
        Spending time "goofing off" is invaluable. People need time for that too. There's no point in being mindlessly productive at all times.
        BeetleB 4y ago
        Two hours a day gives you plenty of time to goof off during the week. If you need to goof off every day then you are likely compensating for things that should be addressed. Saying as someone whose been there
        HWR_14 4y ago
        Maybe you are using "goof off" differently than I am, but I see no reason not to goof off every day. But you actually said "2 hours is plenty to get stuff done if you don't goof off". Now you're changing it to "2 hours a day gives you plenty of time to goof off."
        BeetleB 4y ago
        You misinterpret. 2 hours a day is 14 hours a week. What I'm saying is that goofing off for 2-4 hours a week still gives you 10-12 hours a week to get a lot done. But if you need to goof off for an hour per day (as many do feel they need to), then there are likely underlying reasons - problems in your life causing distraction, procrastination, etc. If you can address those reasons, you'll get more time to do fun work. The book The Now Habit addresses similar themes.
  - DannyBee 4y ago
    For a lot of people (IMHO), it's one of those "walking the path is different than knowing the path" kind of things. 2 hours also seems like a lot more than it is, in part because people severely underestimate how much "free" time they had before. For example, they think they are working from 9-5, but really, most people do lots of little things during that time - browse reddit, whatever. That time also now can get eaten by kid stuff - scheduling, signups, etc, especially if you have 2+ kids. It's also rare that it's a single block of 2 hours.
  - Yhippa 4y ago
    I didn't expect more free time. I will say that a lot of people told me what it would be like but it was hard for me to believe how hard it is to be a new parent until it actually happens.
- oweiler 4y ago
  Honestly I'm glad I'm not the only one. With one kid it was still possible to have some hobbies but with two it became almost impossible.
- freedom2099 4y ago
  How is one single kid cared by 2 adults so time consuming?
  - random42_ 4y ago
    When they are born it’s really chaotic. All the stereotypes apply: sleepless nights, etc. after they grow, it gets easier. After my kid was past that phase it was really smooth. My wife and I got our hobbies, had time to do stuff we liked, etc. It all comes down do partnership. We had our second after our first was in his early teens and all the chaos is back and it’s a bit harder now because its 2 but we still manage to have our private time, although it’s been limited. tl;dr: it shouldn’t be time consuming.
  - tomp 4y ago
    At first, kids need basically 100% attention & surveillance, except when they’re asleep. So between two people, one is occupied with a kids almost all the time.
    - freedom2099 4y ago
      This is obvious untrue… unless parents are not entitled to sleep! Are parents not sleeping at all (aside from when they are woken up by a cry ofc)? Newborns can’t even move from where they are!
      - tomp 4y ago
        I meant "almost all the time except when they're asleep". Fortunately newborns sleep a lot but they also feed every 4 hours (if you're lucky) so whatever sleep you're getting isn't "quality sleep" because of interruptions. > Newborns can’t even move from where they are! You're right, I was implicitly assuming that you wouldn't leave the baby to just cry because that just sounds cruel to me.
        freedom2099 4y ago
        On the other hand also running every times it cries it might be wrong (there are studies on this regard)
tclancy 4y ago
Definitely felt like the thesis statement to a longer piece, but I suppose if the answers were obvious we’d already be doing them.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
t6jvcereio 4y ago
So go live in a city? Why are we having this discussion? Nice things cost money, that's well known.
- rglullis 4y ago
  > Nice things cost money, that's well known. Isn't there a quote from Sir Roger Scruton that goes like "Beauty was taken away from the people and now it's being sold back again as a luxury"?
  - t6jvcereio 4y ago
    Beauty is free. Urban infrastructure is not. Now, what was your point again?
    - rglullis 4y ago
      Even small villages in southern European countries offer a better life than American suburbia. The point is exactly that: nice things (especially in the public arena) don't have to cost much - and this cost doesn't have to privatized.
      - EUROCARE 4y ago
        Are you really sure about that? Southern Europe is not Germany, it doesn't have that famous high quality universal healthcare. Not even countries such as Italy are able to guarantee consistent quality - what you get in southern Italy will resemble Mexico or Thailand much more than Germany. Real estate costs a lot there compared to the US, and finding well paid work (or any work at all) is much harder. Anything you heard about EU public transit mostly doesn't apply in the south, you will need a car; but the roads aren't prepared for today's amount of traffic, and there's not enough money for maintenance nor construction.
      - dgfitz 4y ago
        What a bullshit comment. Define “better”
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
chrisseaton 4y ago
> Suburban adults go home and tend to stay home. Is this genuinely how you imagine life in the suburbs? You don’t think anyone socialises here or takes part in any culture?
- marssaxman 4y ago
  That's what life in the suburbs looked like when I was a child growing up there. I got out as fast as I could, and I will never, ever go back. Your experience is different, I take it?
  - iso1631 4y ago
    The kids factor changes things far more than the location
  - chrisseaton 4y ago
    We have coffee shops, bars, restaurants, museums, historical sites, theatres here in the suburbs as well. We even have a Michelin-starred restaurant in my suburb. Plenty of cities don’t have one of those. It’s obviously not as fast-paced or cutting-edge, but people don’t just sit at home in silence.
    - marssaxman 4y ago
      Where do you live that you can have such a mix of uses in a suburb - and what suburbs are old enough to contain historical sites? I can't imagine you are describing anywhere in the USA... from my California-raised perspective, suburbs are a largely post-WWII creation: sprawling miles of relatively recent construction, with residential, retail, and commercial purposes all so strictly separated that there is virtually no reason to leave one's house by foot. There were coffee shops, bars, restaurants, and the occasional movie theater among the suburbs I grew up in, sure, but they were all spread out and far away, tucked into little strip malls along the main roads - not really part of the neighborhoods people lived in.
      - 4y ago
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
galfarragem 4y ago
> I wish this article was longer I submitted the link because it was the first time I saw this "elephant in the room" clearly defined and identified - not because the article proposed great solutions. Anyway, the author will see the traffic spike.. Let's wait for a longer article.
- drewcoo 4y ago
  > I submitted the link because it was the first time I saw this "elephant in the room" clearly defined and identified Really? Is there such a medical condition as "elephant blindness," because I can't see it. It's unclear to me what the author thinks adulthood is, why we need it, why people aren't (or don't want to) be adults, whether we suffer some kind of societal adult deficit, etc. This article's message is effectively "you kids get off my lawn - and stop being kids, too!"
  - Cpoll 4y ago
    > This article's message is effectively "you kids get off my lawn - and stop being kids, too!" I'm not reading that at all. My reading of the article is: "Being an adult sucks." It doesn't really talk about kids at all, and if anything seems like a defense of youth being 'stuck in prolonged adolescence'. The important paragraph (imo): > For many, adulthood means trading a life entirely devoted to learning for one in which you only read (maybe) two books a year. It means swapping a full schedule of sports, clubs, and music lessons for having exactly zero hobbies (unless watching Netflix counts). It means going from hanging out with peers for the bulk of each day to (maybe) seeing friends a few hours a month. It means shifting from experiencing plenty of firsts to being stuck in a hamster wheel of thousandths.
  - shswkna 4y ago
    I can‘t second your critique. The author describes a valid “problem” in many western societies: That many youths are not eager to take over the reigns and responsibilities of adult life. Arguably “western” society suffers from a lack of generational “handing over” of the many important roles and functions that a complex society requires to persist and build a successful future. That however, is probably a whole debate on its own.
cshokie 4y ago
The author does brief weekly “deep thought” type posts and this is one of them. There is plenty of long form content on that site, just not this particular series.
mensetmanusman 4y ago
NYC is brutal for having kids in.

Yhippa 4y ago

> Also having children changes things quite a bit for all adults. > I wish this article was longer. Agree on both accounts. To the first point, I had a lot of friends and hobbies before having a kid and it feels that I'm slowly losing control of my time to the point where most of it is gone and I only have like 2 hours to myself. 4 if I want to be sleep deprived the next day.

burntoutfire 4y ago
Did you expect more free time? Judging by the parents I know, 2 hours of free time for yourself every day is not bad.
- oweiler 4y ago
  The problem is not having two hours of spare time, it's that you feel so drained at the end of the day that you don't have the energy left to to anything meaningful.
  - TimPC 4y ago
    For a long time for me the problem wasn’t the amount of time for myself so much as that it wasn’t blockable time. 15 minutes 8 times a day is very different from one two-hour chunk.
    - Cerium 4y ago
      I used to wonder why many older people in the office would find a productive use of the 10 minutes between meetings while younger people would just grab a drink or get distracted. Now I'm a parent and I have learned that you can do something in 10 minutes.
      - TimPC 4y ago
        You can certainly do many things in 15 minutes but for most hobbies, partaking in that hobby requires a longer block of time.
- HWR_14 4y ago
  > 2 hours of free time for yourself every day is not bad. Two hours of free time to yourself is horrible. The fact that it's expected doesn't change that it's a horrible answer. We need to reduce the amount of time we spend at work. Ironically, the best way to do that is to spend your early years working 24/7 to try to get wealthy enough that you can spend 4 hours a day doing meaningful work.
  - BeetleB 4y ago
    Two hours of free uninterrupted time is actually pretty good. One can accomplish fairly significant things with that if they're disciplined and don't spend that time goofing off. I doubt most parents get two hours of free time though.
    - HWR_14 4y ago
      Spending time "goofing off" is invaluable. People need time for that too. There's no point in being mindlessly productive at all times.
      - BeetleB 4y ago
        Two hours a day gives you plenty of time to goof off during the week. If you need to goof off every day then you are likely compensating for things that should be addressed. Saying as someone whose been there
        HWR_14 4y ago
        Maybe you are using "goof off" differently than I am, but I see no reason not to goof off every day. But you actually said "2 hours is plenty to get stuff done if you don't goof off". Now you're changing it to "2 hours a day gives you plenty of time to goof off."
        BeetleB 4y ago
        You misinterpret. 2 hours a day is 14 hours a week. What I'm saying is that goofing off for 2-4 hours a week still gives you 10-12 hours a week to get a lot done. But if you need to goof off for an hour per day (as many do feel they need to), then there are likely underlying reasons - problems in your life causing distraction, procrastination, etc. If you can address those reasons, you'll get more time to do fun work. The book The Now Habit addresses similar themes.
- DannyBee 4y ago
  For a lot of people (IMHO), it's one of those "walking the path is different than knowing the path" kind of things. 2 hours also seems like a lot more than it is, in part because people severely underestimate how much "free" time they had before. For example, they think they are working from 9-5, but really, most people do lots of little things during that time - browse reddit, whatever. That time also now can get eaten by kid stuff - scheduling, signups, etc, especially if you have 2+ kids. It's also rare that it's a single block of 2 hours.
- Yhippa 4y ago
  I didn't expect more free time. I will say that a lot of people told me what it would be like but it was hard for me to believe how hard it is to be a new parent until it actually happens.
oweiler 4y ago
Honestly I'm glad I'm not the only one. With one kid it was still possible to have some hobbies but with two it became almost impossible.
freedom2099 4y ago
How is one single kid cared by 2 adults so time consuming?
- random42_ 4y ago
  When they are born it’s really chaotic. All the stereotypes apply: sleepless nights, etc. after they grow, it gets easier. After my kid was past that phase it was really smooth. My wife and I got our hobbies, had time to do stuff we liked, etc. It all comes down do partnership. We had our second after our first was in his early teens and all the chaos is back and it’s a bit harder now because its 2 but we still manage to have our private time, although it’s been limited. tl;dr: it shouldn’t be time consuming.
- tomp 4y ago
  At first, kids need basically 100% attention & surveillance, except when they’re asleep. So between two people, one is occupied with a kids almost all the time.
  - freedom2099 4y ago
    This is obvious untrue… unless parents are not entitled to sleep! Are parents not sleeping at all (aside from when they are woken up by a cry ofc)? Newborns can’t even move from where they are!
    - tomp 4y ago
      I meant "almost all the time except when they're asleep". Fortunately newborns sleep a lot but they also feed every 4 hours (if you're lucky) so whatever sleep you're getting isn't "quality sleep" because of interruptions. > Newborns can’t even move from where they are! You're right, I was implicitly assuming that you wouldn't leave the baby to just cry because that just sounds cruel to me.
      - freedom2099 4y ago
        On the other hand also running every times it cries it might be wrong (there are studies on this regard)

tclancy 4y ago

Definitely felt like the thesis statement to a longer piece, but I suppose if the answers were obvious we’d already be doing them.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

t6jvcereio 4y ago

So go live in a city? Why are we having this discussion? Nice things cost money, that's well known.

rglullis 4y ago
> Nice things cost money, that's well known. Isn't there a quote from Sir Roger Scruton that goes like "Beauty was taken away from the people and now it's being sold back again as a luxury"?
- t6jvcereio 4y ago
  Beauty is free. Urban infrastructure is not. Now, what was your point again?
  - rglullis 4y ago
    Even small villages in southern European countries offer a better life than American suburbia. The point is exactly that: nice things (especially in the public arena) don't have to cost much - and this cost doesn't have to privatized.
    - EUROCARE 4y ago
      Are you really sure about that? Southern Europe is not Germany, it doesn't have that famous high quality universal healthcare. Not even countries such as Italy are able to guarantee consistent quality - what you get in southern Italy will resemble Mexico or Thailand much more than Germany. Real estate costs a lot there compared to the US, and finding well paid work (or any work at all) is much harder. Anything you heard about EU public transit mostly doesn't apply in the south, you will need a car; but the roads aren't prepared for today's amount of traffic, and there's not enough money for maintenance nor construction.
    - dgfitz 4y ago
      What a bullshit comment. Define “better”

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

chrisseaton 4y ago

> Suburban adults go home and tend to stay home. Is this genuinely how you imagine life in the suburbs? You don’t think anyone socialises here or takes part in any culture?

marssaxman 4y ago
That's what life in the suburbs looked like when I was a child growing up there. I got out as fast as I could, and I will never, ever go back. Your experience is different, I take it?
- iso1631 4y ago
  The kids factor changes things far more than the location
- chrisseaton 4y ago
  We have coffee shops, bars, restaurants, museums, historical sites, theatres here in the suburbs as well. We even have a Michelin-starred restaurant in my suburb. Plenty of cities don’t have one of those. It’s obviously not as fast-paced or cutting-edge, but people don’t just sit at home in silence.
  - marssaxman 4y ago
    Where do you live that you can have such a mix of uses in a suburb - and what suburbs are old enough to contain historical sites? I can't imagine you are describing anywhere in the USA... from my California-raised perspective, suburbs are a largely post-WWII creation: sprawling miles of relatively recent construction, with residential, retail, and commercial purposes all so strictly separated that there is virtually no reason to leave one's house by foot. There were coffee shops, bars, restaurants, and the occasional movie theater among the suburbs I grew up in, sure, but they were all spread out and far away, tucked into little strip malls along the main roads - not really part of the neighborhoods people lived in.
    - 4y ago

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

galfarragem 4y ago

> I wish this article was longer I submitted the link because it was the first time I saw this "elephant in the room" clearly defined and identified - not because the article proposed great solutions. Anyway, the author will see the traffic spike.. Let's wait for a longer article.

drewcoo 4y ago
> I submitted the link because it was the first time I saw this "elephant in the room" clearly defined and identified Really? Is there such a medical condition as "elephant blindness," because I can't see it. It's unclear to me what the author thinks adulthood is, why we need it, why people aren't (or don't want to) be adults, whether we suffer some kind of societal adult deficit, etc. This article's message is effectively "you kids get off my lawn - and stop being kids, too!"
- Cpoll 4y ago
  > This article's message is effectively "you kids get off my lawn - and stop being kids, too!" I'm not reading that at all. My reading of the article is: "Being an adult sucks." It doesn't really talk about kids at all, and if anything seems like a defense of youth being 'stuck in prolonged adolescence'. The important paragraph (imo): > For many, adulthood means trading a life entirely devoted to learning for one in which you only read (maybe) two books a year. It means swapping a full schedule of sports, clubs, and music lessons for having exactly zero hobbies (unless watching Netflix counts). It means going from hanging out with peers for the bulk of each day to (maybe) seeing friends a few hours a month. It means shifting from experiencing plenty of firsts to being stuck in a hamster wheel of thousandths.
- shswkna 4y ago
  I can‘t second your critique. The author describes a valid “problem” in many western societies: That many youths are not eager to take over the reigns and responsibilities of adult life. Arguably “western” society suffers from a lack of generational “handing over” of the many important roles and functions that a complex society requires to persist and build a successful future. That however, is probably a whole debate on its own.

cshokie 4y ago

The author does brief weekly “deep thought” type posts and this is one of them. There is plenty of long form content on that site, just not this particular series.

mensetmanusman 4y ago

NYC is brutal for having kids in.