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Comment by burntoutfire | Hacker News Reader

Did you expect more free time? Judging by the parents I know, 2 hours of free time for yourself every day is not bad.

> 2 hours of free time for yourself every day is not bad.

Two hours of free time to yourself is horrible. The fact that it's expected doesn't change that it's a horrible answer.

We need to reduce the amount of time we spend at work. Ironically, the best way to do that is to spend your early years working 24/7 to try to get wealthy enough that you can spend 4 hours a day doing meaningful work.

>get wealthy enough that you can spend 4 hours a day doing meaningful work

Sadly, for the absolute majority even a partial "early retirement" is unachievable regardless of how much or how hard they work

Even as someone with a decent job, I'm starting to doubt I can have an early partial retirement at 60. I think the majority of people aren't going to be able to retire at all, at least not above the poverty level.

Yep, I agree. Parenting in modern world while not being wealthy just sounds terrible. It's one huge regression from how it was done before we started civilization, and especially since we started modern living (with atomic families, mass loneliness, rootlessness, jobs devoid of meaning, spending most of the day at the job instead of at the house, jobs so complex that your child can't understand them and can't learn them from you). Amenities and state help such as free kindergardens are just a drop in a bucket and will not help with falling reproduction rates in any meaningful way.

To be fair, yesteryears' solutions to that for the typical non-rich people were to outsource parenting to grandparents and family friends, which are still applicable now.

... And have the elder siblings help take care of the younger, but I don't know if that's acceptable at all nowadays in the West or if that's one way to get the CPS involved.

> To be fair, yesteryears' solutions to that for the typical non-rich people were to outsource parenting to grandparents and family friends, which are still applicable now.

It's way less aplicable because people move so much. Nowadays, not many people live around (say within 1 km distance) their extended family, whereas in pre-modern times it was the absolute norm. What's more, grandparents often lived in the same house and children were raised by multiple adults and not just their parents. The burden on parents was way lower.

Two hours of free uninterrupted time is actually pretty good. One can accomplish fairly significant things with that if they're disciplined and don't spend that time goofing off.

I doubt most parents get two hours of free time though.

Spending time "goofing off" is invaluable. People need time for that too.

There's no point in being mindlessly productive at all times.

Two hours a day gives you plenty of time to goof off during the week. If you need to goof off every day then you are likely compensating for things that should be addressed.

Saying as someone whose been there

Maybe you are using "goof off" differently than I am, but I see no reason not to goof off every day.

But you actually said "2 hours is plenty to get stuff done if you don't goof off". Now you're changing it to "2 hours a day gives you plenty of time to goof off."

You misinterpret.

2 hours a day is 14 hours a week. What I'm saying is that goofing off for 2-4 hours a week still gives you 10-12 hours a week to get a lot done.

But if you need to goof off for an hour per day (as many do feel they need to), then there are likely underlying reasons - problems in your life causing distraction, procrastination, etc. If you can address those reasons, you'll get more time to do fun work.

The book The Now Habit addresses similar themes.

To anyone who thinks two hours of free time is horrible - don’t have kids and don’t do anything big or great.

I went to a pretty intense university to study computer science with a baby. I had zero free time. It was 100% class, study, kids, and barely any sleep - for FOUR years!

All the people I know who do great things? Zero free time. They work like animals to fulfill dreams and responsibilities.

In that case those great things they’re doing is probably fulfilling their innate desires.

> All the people I know who do great things? Zero free time.

The people I know who do great things? Seriously, they have free time. They have kids and don't feel bad about spending time with them.

Maybe college isn't the best example for what the real world is like.

I think raising kids is meaningful work. Having raised 3 kids I can tell you I rarely had 2 hours of free time for myself, let alone having that kind of time every day! It's just not going to happen.

Now that I've become an empty nester I have more time to myself than I probably ever had in my entire life! And I have great kids who've turned into awesome people that I can visit and enjoy doing things with.

I would argue you reap what you sow. Put the time and work in now and enjoy the fruits later in life. Don't worry about silly things such as "free time."

For a lot of people (IMHO), it's one of those "walking the path is different than knowing the path" kind of things.

2 hours also seems like a lot more than it is, in part because people severely underestimate how much "free" time they had before.

For example, they think they are working from 9-5, but really, most people do lots of little things during that time - browse reddit, whatever.

That time also now can get eaten by kid stuff - scheduling, signups, etc, especially if you have 2+ kids.

It's also rare that it's a single block of 2 hours.

The problem is not having two hours of spare time, it's that you feel so drained at the end of the day that you don't have the energy left to to anything meaningful.

For a long time for me the problem wasn’t the amount of time for myself so much as that it wasn’t blockable time. 15 minutes 8 times a day is very different from one two-hour chunk.

I used to wonder why many older people in the office would find a productive use of the 10 minutes between meetings while younger people would just grab a drink or get distracted. Now I'm a parent and I have learned that you can do something in 10 minutes.

You can certainly do many things in 15 minutes but for most hobbies, partaking in that hobby requires a longer block of time.

I didn't expect more free time. I will say that a lot of people told me what it would be like but it was hard for me to believe how hard it is to be a new parent until it actually happens.

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