Mostly I just think that there are certain places where it's socially acceptable to give up all your time, like to a career. But if you're a smart young person, you're considered to be giving up your future (at least by your peers) if you have kids too young, and I think whether that's true depends a ton on the person in question. I'm of the perspective that a lot of people trade their 20s for a paycheck and weekends getting drunk when they might be happier doing... whatever else, but it's socially acceptable to work and party away your twenties.
Everyone has different priorities for what they want out of life. My wife and I were really profoundly unhappy with the whole 9-5 employee thing, so we started doing web design on the side and eventually started earning enough to quit our jobs and we've sinced moved on to other things that we find more fulfilling than web design.
I mostly take care of the kids, supporting my wife in business when she needs it. I used to be a lawyer, and I can tell that when I tell people I'm basically a stay at home dad that they think I'm not achieving my potential.
But I know how being a lawyer made me feel and I know how dadding makes me feel and even though I still have a lot I want to accomplish from a business perspective, this is by far the best use of my time right now.
That is, I'd much rather do this than work 40 hours a week in order to pay for childcare and have some extra spending money. I'm trying to soak up parenthood while the kids are small and need me constantly and try to let them be independent so that I can reclaim my time as they get older and hopefully in 6-10 years, I'll be back to focusing on interesting business stuff without having to worry about starting a family.
And once again, I'm not suggesting that everyone would be happiest taking care of their children. My wife is much happier running the business.
We've just gotten a ton of mileage out of questioning assumptions about what makes a good life and ruthlessly pushing our life toward what we feel works best for us at the expense of social convention and so far it's worked really well.
We've ended up with a whole life that is really, really weird to a lot of people.
We work together from home (a lot of people like the office and that's cool, but not us) and spend basically all of our time with each other (a lot of couples tell us that they couldn't spend that much time together, but not us) and the kids and we're confident in our abilities to educate our kids in a way that hopefully achieves a better outcome than public schools (lots of people are sure that public school is better than homeschool, but we think technology offers some really cool opportunities). Our kids are still quite young but so far we're doing well, we'll see. We're also not opposed to shifting gears and putting the kids in school if we all think that would achieve better outcomes, or shifting gears in anything to move closer to what we want.
A lot of our friends are getting really embedded into their companies about now, and while the security seems enviable sometimes, it's a lot more important to us to be able to live where we want, and even when work is crazy, it's on our terms, and we think we're going to have a lot more control over our lives in our 40s and 50s than our friends who consider themselves "more free" than us right now.
Time will tell who ends up being right, but it's quite interesting and enjoyable right now!
Thanks for the detailed response! My wife and I are contemplating some large life changes and also feel like the way we've set up society is not actually the best way to live. How much of your work exists to make your boss' boss' boss, and your landlord, wealthier? Why can't I work half as much for half as much money? I never want to buy anything but the odd vacation anyway.
