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If it makes you feel any better I delayed having kids and spent my 30s dating and hanging out and going to bars -- and it was terrible. I was never more depress

• Panzer04 4y ago
  This feels a lot like a more extreme version of what I'm doing now (especially the camping thing), and I'm a lot younger.. Thanks for the perspective.
  • dalyons 4y ago
    Just don’t take it as a rule though - I had a kid late also and I don’t regret the camping, brunches, career and travel at all. Some are memories I’ll keep forever and all those experiences make me feel like I’ve had a fullish life already, which can make it easier to deal with the no-life of having kids :)
    • dionidium 4y ago
      For sure. Maybe these anecdotes are useful; maybe not. I don't know. Everybody has to figure it out on their own, in the end.
    • nmcfarl 4y ago
      There’s 1000 places in this conversation to say this, but I thought here would work. I too had a kid late and do not regret the camping, but wanted to say the no-life is time limited^, or can be if you are lucky. My kid is now 9, and while a fancy brunch is beyond him, he can do a sit down sushi dinner. We've done a couple of international trips with him, and we've settled into a friend group with similar interests so we are constantly doing camping, backcountry backpacking, and in the winter skiing - all with him and his friends. It is pretty good, and certainly not a no-life. --- ^ And we knew what we wanted, so even though many of the early trips where miserable, the kid can say he’s been backpacking and xc-skiing every year of his life.
  • cossatot 4y ago
    Camping is also a great activity with kids, for what it’s worth. Backpacking 20 miles into the wilderness is not going to be an option at least until they are older, but car camping can still be pretty fun even when they are itty bitty especially if there is some fun and accessible terrain to explore—water to throw rocks into, mossy rocks and tree trunks to check out and stumble over, etc.
    • stickfigure 4y ago
      Kids make camping even MORE fun.
• natnatenathan 4y ago
  This is exactly my experience, probably from age 28 until I met my wife at ~34. My friends and I would go to all these bars, clubs, rock climbing trips. While I loved my friends and generally enjoyed doing those things, I felt this long-term malaise of meaningless. The loss of freedom getting married and then greater loss when having kids was unexpected and a jarring change. But it has made me such a better person. And even though it sucks going through the same chores every day or when my 4 and 6 year olds are in maximum procrastination mode. I wouldn't trade my worst day with them for my best day of freedom when I was younger. I've never been more happy.
  • RamblingCTO 4y ago
    Thank you and also the parent for the perspective. That's also what I experience. Not sure kids will fix that, but it always feels better knowing you're not alone.
  • kanahanin 4y ago
    You've just described my life. Thanks for the perspective, That empty feeling was very confusing for me. I've something to look forward too!
  • Defitio 4y ago
    In my opinion plenty of people just use kids as a scapegoat for meaning of life. My question would be why you value your kids time more than bouldern? Because you made them? Because they consume so much time with them? Or because you are just better in being a parent and biological getting satisfaction out of it? Unfortunately for me I'm not sure if I would end like you or the other poster who regrets it sometimes. Also I'm not sure if I want to force another/new human through my experiences like going to school etc. In dune the king new/realized that he can't do what is necessary but has to prepare his son to do so. I have the opposite though: perhaps I need to not to have kids to stop the cycle of creating meaning through procreation. Yes I overthink stuff and one way or the other I still think becoming a parent would be a life changing experience but besides all of the normal thoughts climate change comes on top of it.
    • 4y ago
• ChaitanyaSai 4y ago
  "Brunch is not life." This phrase is going to stick with me.
  • obruchez 4y ago
    I don't know what it's supposed to mean, though. I like brunches. My son likes them as well. I mean: any part of life is not life. Kids are not life. Or am I missing something?
    • ChaitanyaSai 4y ago
      I take brunch and life to be stand-ins for two notions. Brunch as the ability and desire to wish for a lazy day spent as one wishes, desultory consumption of something nice and/or new while in control of our time. Life is the sum-total of all meaning we accrue along the way, including our experiences from events we are thrust into.
      • McBeige 4y ago
        It's lightness and weight, as in Kundera's 'Unbearable Lightness of Being'. Lightness is nice, it's comfortable, but vertigo inducing. So we also long for weight sometimes.
• watwut 4y ago
  > realizing at the end of it that all three weekends were exactly the same. Nothing new happens. You're not missing anything if you just stay home. To be honest, I felt exactly like that when kids were small, especially when being at home with them. Every day same as one before, with only minor variation. Going for vacations meant doing exactly same things as at home, except in harder setup. Nothing ever ever happens either. And plus, you are isolated from other adults, falling into depression and loosing ability to socialize. Genuinely, I am glad I have kids. But I am so glad that period ended.
  • novok 4y ago
    IMO that adult isolation is a bit of a choice. What I've seen happen is other parents socialize with other parents with kids of a similar age. Two moms who both have babies visit each other and hang out, etc.
    • watwut 4y ago
      > What I've seen happen is other parents socialize with other parents with kids of a similar age. Two moms who both have babies visit each other and hang out, etc. That does not make isolation choice. That makes some people finding friends despite suddenly seriously limited pool of options. You are starting from zero, not knowing anyone and loosing both actual existing friends and actual related hobbies. The only thing you have in common with most of those people is the similar age kid. You need to be seriously extroverted to be able to create friendship out of nothing after you have seen each other twice on playground while also supervising the toddler. People here complain about loneliness while having incredibly easy situation compared to that, seriously.
    • BeFlatXIII 4y ago
      My parents tried that and were fairly lonely during the early childhood years. They hated trading inane poop stories with other parents and longed to return to real adult conversations. If they wanted to discuss the specifics of child-rearing, they’d talk to each other or ask their own parents for advice.
• bluecalm 4y ago
  If you try to build your life around brunch (or bars or camping trips) then it's not a surprise getting some structure and something to care about makes you happier. Many people find happiness having kids but there is no denying other life pursuits will suffer. There is less time and less energy no matter how you cut it. The priorities will change as well as they should - why have kids if they are not very important part of your life. Someone with less time, less energy and different things to prioritize will never get as far in creative pursuits, business, sports, scientific research. It's fine but it's a trade-off. Don't pretend the child free option is just a bar night or brunch with friends. If it is, you really haven't even started figuring it out.
• Ayesh 4y ago
  I turned 30 last month, and I gotta say I can totally see how easy it is to fall into the state you mentioned. I can already see through getting wasted on weekends with friends, hikes, trips, etc that seem to "normalize" as I age. Though, I don't see kids as the only "fix"; far from it. Perhaps it's just that we get saturated from experiences, and how much new things we can experience is limited by where we live, expendable income, physical fitness, etc. So it's natural to not have the same level of novelty in experiences. In the same vein, my uneducated and inexperienced guess is that raising the third or fourth kid wouldn't feel as much as mentally rewarding as the first kid or two.
• poisonarena 4y ago
  37, almost 38 and no kids, doing what you are describing right now all over the world, and it is absolutely amazing. I think your depression and feeling of everything being overrated is a you thing, and not everyone feels that way. This has been the best decade of my life and I have been poor the whole time, just hustling and making things work how i can with jobs and money and exploring the world and the people
  • saiya-jin 4y ago
    Been there, done that (and tons of adrenaline/extreme sports on top of that), it feels amazing when you discover it and few more years, but novelty wears off a bit eventually. Had kids, and those years brought some nice memories and personal growth, but otherwise they were shallow. There is no more depth in life than raising kids properly, the good and bad combined. If you are up to it.
  • Shocka1 4y ago
    I'd agree with you. As a sidenote, I held an American professional Superbike racing license through most of my 20s and did a whole bunch of crazy stuff I won't mention here on top of it. Watched several people die and get maimed in one of the many races I competed in. Before that I spent some time in the Marines, including time in a warzone. I have a few regrets from a couple bad decisions I made, but I enjoyed every moment of that absolutely crazy life and never felt more alive looking back at it. It seems like an old dream I had at this point - In my 30s I slowed down, got married and had children. It's much different than my previous life, but it's been a wonderful and powerful experience as well. I feel like I've had my cake and ate it too, and you bet ya I feel blessed every single day to be here taking my share of fresh air. It would be interesting to see my thoughts if I had never had kids, but I feel as though it would be positive either way because I choose it to be. That being said, I do feel personally like there is more to life than living for yourself. Whether that transfers to having kids or volunteering somewhere to help others, etc., I'll leave that decision to the reader.
• dragonwriter 4y ago
  > If it makes you feel any better I delayed having kids and spent my 30s dating and hanging out and going to bars – and it was terrible. I didn’t have kids until my 40s – didn’t delay, it just worked out that way – after getting married in my late 20s, spending…very little time dating or hanging out in bars, and it was wonderful. So was having kids. And once I had them, I certainly wouldn’t have minded having more of the energy of youth with them, but I also don’t mind the life experience that I had first. > I had a nice career and could go anywhere and do anything I wanted, but it turns out none of that made me even a little bit happy. […] Happiness is extremely overrated. Happiness isn’t overrated; as you yourself explicitly note, you didn’t find it and were miserable because of that. > Now I’m tired and busy and I don’t go out and do “fun” stuff very often, but I’m much more satisfied. My biggest regret is that I waited so long to start my life. Brunch isn’t life. Brunch (both literally and, as I understand the use, metaphorically) very much is life (not all of life, but, in its slice, as much “life” as anything else), for many people. So can kids be, for many people. So is anything you have a passion for, whether its the activity, or the companions, or the mission motivating the activity. (Bonus if it is a combination of all of those.) Doing things merely because you’ve got the idea that it is socially expected that they will provide happiness, though, usually isn’t going to be it.
• hhmc 4y ago
  > Happiness is extremely overrated This seems like a strange conclusion to draw, it doesn’t sound like you were happy
  • gonehome 4y ago
    Somewhat disputing definitions - he’s talking about the low stakes idle hedonistic “happiness” from commonly thought of as pleasurable things (brunch, camping, food/drinks with friends, etc.) vs. the type of more difficult stuff that while maybe less pleasant in the day to day moment is often more fulfilling over longer time horizons. Not worth arguing about the word meaning rather than just taking the underlying argument for what it is (imo). One take away I had from Tim Kreider’s “I Wrote This Book Because I Love You” was that everyone he met who was older and unmarried had a certain aloofness about them or continued search for meaning. This largely wasn’t present in those that had families. We have a strongly selected source of fulfillment baked in as part of the human experience, it may not be for everyone but it’s probably not something that should be dismissed lightly. Looking at old people and what they regret (and what they value) at the end of their life can be a way to help make fulfilling life decisions, or at least try to steer things in that direction.
    • hhmc 4y ago
      > he’s talking about the low stakes idle hedonistic “happiness” from commonly thought of as pleasurable things (brunch, camping, food/drinks with friends, etc.) But it doesn't sound like they were happy even by this definition..
      • dionidium 4y ago
        This is a mistake in my original comment above. My first use of "happy" should have been replaced with "satisfied" or "fulfilled." My sloppiness confused the message a bit.
• erfgh 4y ago
  I don't really believe happiness exists without kids. Happiness can exist when you are a kid and it can exist when you have kids. It cannot exist otherwise. You can be satisfied at any point of your life, with or without kids, but you can never be happy. I remember being happy --- I was a kid. I remember when it stopped --- gradually when I became a teenager and completely when I became an adult. I had a career, I had money, more than I could spend. I had a loving wife, better wife than I ever expected to have. I lived in a free country. I was passionately interested in a myriad of subjects: Films, books, sports, programming, science, I had a lot of hobbies, never stopped being busy. All those hobbies I had since I was a kid. But I realized that I don't see them the same way I saw them when I was a kid. Sports, I hated long-distance running as a kid, found it tedious and grueling. As an adult, I would run and run and run, run through pain, through exhaustion, became sick with over-training, developed anemia, had multiple injuries, had pain almost every day, ran through injuries because I didn't want to lose fitness, reached almost 20 BMI, was frail and weak. What for? Nobody cared, not even me. It was just an obsession, looking for something that wasn't there. Science, it was no longer the wonderful curiosity-satisfying endeavor that it was when I was a kid. It had become stressful research, anxiety to learn as much as possible, guilt and feeling of worthlessness when I couldn't really understand something after studying it for a period of time. Films, I would watch 100-150 per year. Had a film-club subscription and watched pretty much everything they put on. Went to film festivals and watched 30+ films in a week. Watched something at home regularly. When you watch so many films they become tedious and you hate 90% of what you watch but I had to keep doing it because, what else would I do with all the free time I had? I realized that there's nothing wrong with all those activities, what's wrong is what I expected from them. I wanted too much from them. I wanted them to give meaning to my life which was at a point when no meaning could be extracted by such activities. And then I had kids. It was stressful, yes, it was tiring, yes, but oh boy --- no doubt about it, I was happy. I wanted to run out on the streets screaming from my happiness. I could not get angry any more. Everything that happened to me I just smiled and went on. And 6 years later I miss every time I awoke at night, every time I held them screaming. I am absolutely and positively sure that there can be no greater happiness in this world than the one I felt back then. I realize that I can have another kid now but it won't be the same. And it all feels like it was one second ago. It all passed me by in an instant. Now my kids are old enough to do almost everything by themselves. Soon they will know how to read. I now do all the activities I mentioned above. But no obsession. I run enough to stay fit. I started weight-training which made me feel and look better than ever. I study science with a smile and with an understanding that I will never understand everything. Everything has meaning now.