Becoming a 20-Something Family Man: with a PhD and a Startup

That's insane,

I've spent 5 years on my PhD and still haven't finished it working on it mostly full time to such such a degree of dedication that my girlfriend of 6 or so years packed it all in and left.

PhD and Startup and marriage+kids on one income? (Yet, one of you is doing a PhD and one is doing the mothering - who is actually earning money?) And building a family on top of the shaky foundations that startup life provides?

How? Stranger that the tips included with dealing with such an insane choice of lifestyle seem to consist entirely of very thin dating/relationship suggestions. I mean - there is a world of potential insanity involved in doing just a PhD alone - but with kids/wife/startup? I'm gonna need a whole lot more than just palliative cliches to help me deal.

Back in the optimistic quarter century after WW II, this was probably quite common. A women with an expensive degree from a good school got to keep a household running, maybe typing theses for income, while a man, not necessarily better equipped for academic work, got a Ph.D. I suspect that it was part of what gave the emerging feminist movement such a fund of well-educated, articulate, and pissed-off women to draw on.

I guess the writer is fortunate, and I hope that his good fortune will continue. I seem to know an awful lot of folks who married at 21 and divorced before 30.

The variation in people absolutely amazes me. I'm only able to arrive at an intelligible conception of how the author has pulled this off by concluding that his lifestyle expectations, workflow assumptions and cognitive habits are vastly different from my own. As someone who struggles with deep practical motivational problems working on things in which I am theoretically, conceptually very interested (call it burn-out on coding if you like) and sometimes go days or even weeks without moving the kind of mountains that the author consistently moves in an hour or two every day of his life, I am awed.

Of course, sometimes there's something you don't know. I don't mean to impugn the author's credibility or authenticity in any way (how would I know?), but some of the people I have encountered who claim Herculean feats like this turn out to have mixed up the variables differently than they say, even if their omissions are unconscious. That is, I've seen people who, in the author's shoes, are 1) getting a PhD in something fluffy and not particularly rigourous, or perhaps in an institution that fits that description, 2) have grandparents who take care of the kids most of the time, 3) are doing startup work that is also not overly intensive, or move at a glacial pace. Even then, it would still be an impressive accomplishment to consistently pull through on #1 and #2 whilst complicated slightly by #2 without losing motivation, interest or focus!