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Comment by checkyoursudo | Hacker News Reader

My problem is def that I do not have enough alone time. I used to have enough alone time before I had kids.

Between work, wife, kids, friends, family, and various drains on my time, squeezing in some quality alone time has become increasingly difficult.

Therefore, I have had to turn my stoicism onto detaching from my former desire for alone-ness (not the same as loneliness, I know).

If anyone knows how to make more time for being alone when you have young kids, let me know! :) I suspect I will mostly have to look forward to that some time in the future.

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Figure out what you need and trade off with your partner. You get one evening a week off, and she gets a different evening a week off. On your evening off you can go to a cafe or hackerspace to work on something, or sit and read at the library, or go for a drive, or bike ride, or a walk in the park.

Note that depending exactly what it is you need (or think you need), certain lifestyle changes may be able to get you parts of it "for free". For example, I choose year-round bicycle commuting, which is a hardship in the winter, but it does mean that almost no matter what, I get 5hrs/week of time to myself for fresh air, thinking, and physical exercise.

If you have somewhere you're comfortable cycling with them, stick them in a bike trailer and pull them around behind you.

My son just zones out for an hour or more when I do this with him. We're together of course, but I also have most of the feeling of freedom and solitude that cycling gives me, and he generally has a great time.

One day I realized that for most of my life I had been looking forward to some better future time. I’m trying to appreciate my life in the now instead, since that’s the only time we really have.

As far as finding solitude, I’ve found that a few solo camping trips a year help. They don’t solve the problem and it almost feels hopeless to take a couple weekends out of the year to solve a weekly problem, but it actually helps enough that I wouldn’t want to go without it.

My favorite task is now doing the grocery shopping by myself. A whole hour of wandering the aisles filling up the trolley in (relative) peace and quiet. One of the highlights of the week and its supposed to be a chore.

Haha, and I take the kids to do it in order to give my partner her hour or so off on a Sunday afternoon.

Comments like this make it seem like it's absolutely miserable to have a family.

Nah. I miss single life while knowing perfectly that my life is better with my partner. I miss getting lost in video games and having a wide circle of low-stakes friendships, while knowing perfectly well they my life is richer and more rewarding now than it was then. I'm exhausted by the little humans in my life but I wouldn't give them up for anything. Such is life.

It is miserable having a young family.

The first two years of having a child have been 70% crap, 20% sleep, 10% rewarding moments.

There are a couple of up-sides:

- The rewarding moments are pretty cool, and there are more all the time.

- You don't appreciate free time until you have none. I no longer procrastinate and overall I think I get more things done than I did with unlimited free time.

lol, reading it again now does look really depressing. I wouldn't want it any other way, just that the house is always full, its like living with roommates all the time except noisier.

It's incredibly rewarding but it's not easy.

Raising the kids is actually the easiest part.

Going into work less productive because you are exhausted and having your boss yell at you for missing deadlines is the hard part.

Struggling with money is the hard part.

Etc.

Our culture is a lot less family friendly than it was 50 years ago.

>Going into work less productive because you are exhausted and having your boss yell at you for missing deadlines is the hard part. Struggling with money is the hard part.

TIL I have it easy...

Can’t have highs without lows.

> I suspect I will mostly have to look forward to that some time in the future.

You will miss them when they grow up and move away. Ignore your longing for "alone" time now. You're going to get plenty of it.

Oh, I'm with you there. I do not wish for them to grow faster, at all.

I would suggest getting into endurance sports. Going for long runs or bike rides is an awesome way to clear mental space and no spouse would argue against your personal fitness.

You're being sarcastic maybe? I would interpret it as really selfish if my partner put his personal fitness as a priority above our family functioning.

No, I'm not being sarcastic, nor did I suggest that he put his personal fitness above his families functioning.

That said, I wouldn't enter a partnership with someone who did not respect my need for an hour or so of exercise 3-5 days a week and of course I would make the same effort to provide them that time as well, if they wanted it. In fact, I would argue that a persons physical fitness(to a certain level, of course) is crucial to a partnership and a healthy family. Full disclosure: my wife and I don't have kids- but these are my values and I'm proud enough of them to hope to bestow them on my kids if we ever have them.

I have a 2yr ol, and me and my spouse have the exact same way of functioning. We haven't quite figured out how to get 3-5 days but 1-3 days of exercise each is what we aim for. Or thinking it's the same: you can't have a happy family if your vitals (sleep, exercise, healthy food) are low. We try to combine 1 exercise (running) with going to a playground all of us and then one runs a round while the other cars for our son.

Oh! 3-5 hours a week. You said "extreme sports" or some such, and I was imagining several hours a day!

Endurance - not extreme. Middle distance running covers sprint type runs up to 3 miles. 5k runs (3.12 miles) take about a half an hour to complete for someone who is averagely slow (no offense to anyone who runs 5ks in 30 minutes). That means a 10k run takes about an hour to run. Cycling takes a bit more time to burn the same amount of calories, an equivalent ride to 10k(6.24 miles) would be about a 20 mile ride and would take the same person about an hour and fifteen minutes to ride. I really think this is a healthy way for someone to buy alone time within a family if you can't tell and I think that it's good for all parties involved.

If you're not attending to your personal fitness then the situation you're in is dysfunctional, regardless of whether or not it's a family, a childless relationship, or single life. So it's not possible to sacrifice personal fitness for family function because that is a core part of it.

If you're taking care of others to the exclusion of yourself, you're going to end up in a downward spiral of resentment. Nothing good will come of that.

I can't say i've found a solution. But I have improved the situation. I work remote now, cutting out 2-3hrs a day of commute time. Though we had to move states (CA -> TX) to get a larger home so I could have an office.

I have 3 kids, one of them in diapers. I stay up late and work on side projects / watch dumb shows alone after the family goes to sleep. No matter how later I still get up early to get the older kids ready for school. I'm tired all the time but it's worth it to get that alone time.

Sounds like you're killing yourself by shortchanging your sleep.

Here's what I do: take a day off from work when I know everyone will be gone. Then, I have the house to myself to listen to music loud, read, whatever.

If you have really young kids, you'll need to wait until they are in school. Then, do the day-off trick.

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