Children have the nice effect of cutting the fat out of your day. When you don't have children, it is very easy for most people to piss away their time on social media, reading useless news (99% of it is sensational dreck at the level of gossip), and so on. Children remind you that time is a very limited resource. Parkinson's law. You have less time, so your use that time more intensely meaningfully. I am willing to bet that much of the problems with focus and mental illness (rumination and all that) that people report would be resolved by taking on more responsibility. The knowledge that you don't have time to fritter away on garbage is enough to mobilize, organize, prioritize, and motivate you, dashing any temptations or even desires to indulge in worthless things. It's the same reason why people suddenly become motivated closer to a deadline or expected delivery date. Nothing focuses the mind more intensely than immanent death.
I've been paralyzed by the fear of imminent death since I was about seven years old, and I believe that is about the time I decided I could never have children since they would face the same fate. Perhaps for you it is focusing, but for me it is quite the opposite.
I have had a similar existential crisis since I was 13 which greatly affected my ability to focus for half my life. When I hit middle age I finally realized this self inflicted trauma was keeping me from living the life I wanted which was creating a feedback loop that amplified my existential crisis. Consider talk therapy, it works. Fear is the mind killer, as they say. Take your power back and live the time you have at your best.
I appreciate the encouragement and I can say that I have made some effort there. I've also faced chronic pain throughout life and am trying to face the surgery that can probably alleviate it, so I'm working on it.
Good for you! Just keep showing up, and eventually emotional momentum compounded over time will lead to emotional escape velocity. The more processing done in therapy, the lighter the load, the higher you’ll fly. You can do it.
I am so sorry to hear you have chronic pain. I hope your surgery goes well and that it provides some relief.
I guess having a baby OR starting your own company can have similar effects.
The only advantage you have as an early startup is an execution moat, so you have to be relentless in your focus and prioritization.
My unexciting but very effective productivity stack: A website blocker and a single large txt file for notes and todos
The title reminds me of the Work Smarter loop in "Nobody Ever Gets Credit for Fixing Problems that Never Happened", but that's more about management than organic growth of efficiency.
Addiction finds a way. I can relate. I blocked everything at different levels: DNS, browser plugins, router. I can still undo that for a quick shot, but it's just not worth it.
Perhaps it's just mistitled. "How to Work" might be more apt instead of "Working Smarter, Not Harder". After all, the second half of that title is also incorrect- you are in fact working harder since you are no longer doing leisure activities during work time.
It does feel a bit odd. A better title might be "Work Faster, Not Longer".
Probably also ties into the fact that this person's job seems very deliverable based. Maybe content creation? That is just a completely different set of requirements than most people's "keep butt in seat for 40 hours" jobs.
Oh I agree, it is the smart thing to do. But to me it is not working smarter - if you check facebook at work you don't work more hours, you just spend more time at work
The "smart" part is no longer interrupting your workflow with an addicting dopamine trap. Fewer interruptions → more deep work → more progress with less total time spent.
Similar idea to work "theming". It lowers context switches and let's you accomplish more.
Capitalism has self-destruction baked into it, but not necessarily the global warming. Capitalism really feeds off of the double-impact of industrialization and urbanization. But urbanization (currently) leads to a sharp drop in fecundity, to the point that you can basically project a negative growth rate as a result.
The US being so massive combined with lots of legal/illegal immigration has staved it off, but Japan, Germany, China, Russia, and Korea are all in various stages of demographic collapse.
Because, simply, capitalism and the economic yes-men that underpin it can't properly incent women to have kids when the economic payoff for the elite-in-charge is a nebulous 20-30 years down the road. What current economics/accounting DOES tell every corporation in the world is that female workers having kids imposes a substantial cost in providing benefits. Corporations are about imposing costs on society while reaping profits, NOT the other way around.
Sustaining the population across generations isn't the luxury that current capitalism and politics around worker rights and healthcare view it. It is pretty demonstrably a key pillar to keeping the entire thing running. Capitalism in America croaks along obsessing over 2-4% "economic growth" per year, but how does that seemingly necessary growth occur if the population, especially the working/productive ones, SHRINK?
The US, again, can stave this off with immigration. South Korea? I think North Korea will collapse and they will see a demographic infusion that way, otherwise they are REALLY up shit creek. Japan was the first to deal with it, they are hobbling along with negative interest rates. Germany/Europe? Immigration is a bit more problematic, although Russia's demographic and authoritarian collapse and the Ukraine refugees might produce a large infusion.
> Because, simply, capitalism and the economic yes-men that underpin it can't properly incent women to have kids
Since most "capitalist" countries are really mixed economies (combination of state intervention and free market), I wonder what in your mind would explain the same pattern of population decline in the following places: China[1], Cuba[2], Italy[3]?
Even Norway's population is only increasing due to net migration[4].
Interesting stuff, and I doubt the reason is simply "capitalism does not incentivize women to have children". I suspect the reasons are more complex and interesting than that.
It's the same incentives for the leaders of those countries. Get women into the "workforce", i.e., paid employment that isn't bringing up their own children and those of their neighbours.
Capitalism's insidious genius is that it forces its way of thinking on its competitors.
I lament that women return to their jobs so quickly after giving birth (I mean mostly women in marriages and families of sufficient means, as working class women rarely have a choice today; these aren't the 1950s when a working class man could support a large family on his income alone). Children require a couple years with their mothers at least. I can understand the desire to do things other than raise children, but small children are a full-time job. Sadly, it's one that no longer has the esteem it once had and that it truly deserves. Even the phrase "stay-at-home mom" is kind of an underhanded slight against motherhood, as if it's something worse or inferior, less desirable. Motherhood is the bosom, the nursery of humanity! What contempt for humanity to look down on motherhood!
Not everyone is fortunate enough to have a mother, or a mother who raises them, but to intentionally deprive children of motherhood is criminal. Think about what the child might internalize about their importance.
Some talk about not wanting to be treated like baby-making machines. Well, procreation is not just about giving birth, but raising the child, and so if you delegate the responsibility of raising your children to someone else and not out of dire necessity, then does that not make you like the very thing you sought not to become?
In the last 50 years or so, we've become extremely narrow-minded in this respect. It's "career or nothing!" Life is far richer, and never mind that careers are in the service of something and someone. If all is career, then what good is a career? If motherhood is lesser than, then humanity is lesser than, and where does that leave careers?
Now, I don't think capitalism, industrialization, or urbanization are the problem here. It's a bit like using "inequality" as a proxy for other things (income inequality is not a problem as such, but people often use it as a proxy for other things). We also tend to look for external causes, like systems, when the problem is spiritual and from which systems emerge, and people lose interest as soon as you say that because it involves taking stock of your own corruption. And these corruptions manifest as and are transmitted through culture. Consumerism is one example. We have made the primary purpose of life to spend. Now, I like variety and material wealth, but I detest consumerism, this awful religion that worships material wealth, divinizes commodities, turns sex into a commodity, a medium of exchange, and an "experience" instead of a procreative act. What do children do? They eat into your budget, which means you can buy less stuff. They are antithetical to consumerism. And when sexual intercourse becomes commodified, then it become sterile. There is your demographic decline.
I also don't especially like putting bandages on the status quo that supposedly make staying at home longer possible or easier, certainly not as a long term solution, as this only serves to reinforce and preserve the root of corruption and the consumerist system. It's like going into debt because you live beyond your means because you have a warped sense and priority of value, and then saying "We've got a problem: we're out of money. Let's borrow more to cover these debts and have more to spend." We're engaged in a spiritual Ponzi scheme, a death spiral, and the only way out is to bite the bullet and face our corruption. Only then, with a lot of spiritual bone breaking and pain, will we manage to get to a better place. People don't want to hear that. They want to close their eyes to the oncoming train. They want to keep going down the path of destruction either because they're addicted to it, they don't know any better, or they fear the pain of switching tracks.
But a reckoning will happen, and is already happening. We can either start migrating to a new way now, or suffer the course correction (possibly extinction) later, but it will happen.
I think the root cause of this is feminism being hyper-focused for decades on getting women enfranchised in a male-dominated society which naturally overvalues traditionally-male archetypes, roles, and values like ‘the high achiever’, etc, and undervalues traditionally-female archetypes, roles, and values. So you have both women AND men all striving for masculine success.
What if feminism, from the start, had been about getting feminine archetypes, roles, and values raised to an equal level of esteem in society to male archetypes, roles, and values? So something like a great maternal figure would be valued like a great high-achieving male. Two different kinds of excellence. What a different world that would be.
Instead feminism actually perpetuated and added to the devaluation of the feminine (not of women, but the feminine) by getting all of the women to try to become like men on male terms.
> Not everyone is fortunate enough to have a mother, or a mother who raises them, but to intentionally deprive children of motherhood is criminal. Think about what the child might internalize about their importance.
Quite. The day will come when daycare is seen as child abuse.
Or, we can go back to the wonderful society we had where a mother of young children didn’t have to work, and the husband with a high school education could still buy a nice house and provide for the whole family.
But class warfare and the useful idiot feminists took that away quickly. Instead we get this mother trying to hyper optimize her own life like a robot, to try to solve the systemic issue on a personal level.
Depending on many aspects of your life in particular where your supporting family members are, it might be hard to "parent-smart" your kids out of your free time.
