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Comment by ido | Hacker News Reader

All of the above is true...And yet I (39 years old, father of 2 boys- aged 4 & 6) used to have existential crises routinely and I really don't anymore. Despite often being huge pains in the ass my kids make me so...Content? Happy? I don't know.

Whatever it is I don't have existential crises anymore.

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Kids provide a VERY easy answer to “why am I doing this inane shit” - because they would literally die if you don’t.

And people will naturally go through lots of pain if there’s hope their kids will have a better life than they did, and there’s almost always that hope, even in total societal collapse.

And a second side effect is kids force you to get to know the parents of other kids, even if only accidentally. Many people are quite starved for general human conversation, even if it is just about the immense number of diapers encountered per annum.

I thought this was common understanding but the comments here seems to indicate otherwise. It is surprising. People’s behavior changes after having kids, and in the main this generally means they become more ‘responsible’ modulo ‘bad parents’. There is powerful biological machinery to make this regenerating process work for both sexes and it operates at a more fundamental level than higher level (‘conceptual’) processes.

For me it was trauma from long past. I didn't get existential so much beforehand, because I had learned that looking too hard wasn't awesome. The complete life-upending force that is a slug in a onesie forced me to look at a lot of things. Further, keeping my relationship / career / everything else afloat required me to then do something about what I saw.

I think existential crises often come because people have too much time to think. That's certainly the case with me. Perhaps you just don't have enough time to overthink things now! Kids, if you let them, also keep you in the moment pretty well - there's not much time to chew over previous mistakes when you're in the middle of a play fight.

Agreed. Every time my kid naps, I find myself with an hour of "free time", but right around the time the existential questioning would begin, he's screaming for a diaper change.

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