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Comment by BlazingFrog | Hacker News Reader

> My first obligation on this Earth is to my family

No disrespect but to what was your first obligation before you had a wife and kids?

I'm always tempted to interpret this kind of statement one of two ways: either your life before your family was so miserably empty that it gave you a purpose (nothing wrong with that) or you're borderline schizophrenic that you can fool yourself (or worse, truly believe) that your personality suddenly morphed and you're now a different individual who will be just as content with a lifestyle radically different from what he ever had, obligations as well as satisfactions that cannot be possibly imagined until you actually cross that line and have kids.

I personally have a hard time believing people can change that much...

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> No disrespect but to what was your first obligation before you had a wife and kids

Obviously something else... ?

Life has a way of changing whether you want it to or not. So, maybe whatever was #1 got bumped down to #2. That doesn't mean that their life was meaning-less and empty before having a family. Nor does it mean that their lives really had to change all that much with a family.

I don't understand the false dichotomy here.

This is exactly it.

You don't prioritise your life around things that aren't relevant to you - to have your number 1 priority as kids when you don't have kids clearly makes no sense.

It's like suggesting that someone who gets a new hobby had an empty life before that hobby. Nope, they just filled it with different things. When something they wanted to do more came along, everything else got shuffled about a bit.

> I personally have a hard time believing people can change that much...

On the day my kids were born, I felt my priorities and what was important actually change. Things that I had emphasized as important before they were born became entirely unimportant. Literally, felt it.

But here's the thing: call it schizophrenia or miserable emptiness or whatever label you'd like to assign, I don't care. I care about my kids more than things I did before I was a father, and the third-person observation that tries to impart some logic that doesn't include my perspective is, well, wrong. No fooling was involved, no tricking myself into believing anything. It just happened.

From observing other people (I consider myself to be the least important person on the planet): It is usually the self that matters the most until you become part of a family. At that point:

Some people mature into people who put their family first.

A lot more people mature into people who put their family last.

The latter never achieve inner happiness.

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