Okay. That was very clever. I like that one.
vonbaronhans
joined 2 years ago
You don't relax on vacation with small children. You're always on alert, unless you got another family member or someone to look after your kids for a while.
You go because the kids have fun and enjoy it, but they're also small enough they might not remember it at all anyway, so it can feel like a waste in that regard.
Another big part is that so many people have virtually zero support. It's just them and their kids. For the first few years, we lived a 4.5hr drive from any family support. I don't even know how you find and vet babysitters these days.
It doesn't help that we're atheists, so we don't even get the built in community support that a lot of churches provide.
It's definitely partly not being in the US. Economically... it's just really rough. Childcare for our one kid is nearly as much as our monthly mortgage. We make decent money but still have only enough savings to survive 2, maybe 3 months without income.
I still have plenty of hobbies, but like, because finances are tight, we only have one car in a very very car dependent area. There's simply no public transit where I live. So all of my hobbies have to be at home, or after when my kid goes to bed, which is usually close to 9:30pm, leaving an hour, maybe two, for time to myself during the week.
As a parent to a little one right now... I can say that I rarely felt the "drive" to have kids. My SO was really let down that my initial reaction was anxiety over finances, for example.
That said, I don't know if anything else could ever give me the kind of joy and happiness that just being able to love on my kid has brought me. If something happened to her I would be devastated.
But I also recognize that I've had to sacrifice a lot of personal freedom to be a good dad. I would never downplay that to "trick" people into wanting to be parents. It's definitely a tradeoff, and especially difficult financially these days.
What do you mean by "lost in pornography"? Like, do you mean developing unrealistic expectations for IRL sexual partners? Or something else?
Honestly, same. Mastodon is fine if you like the Twitter format, but I never did. Lemmy works for me, largely cuz Reddit also worked for me, until the API debacle.
At that point, wouldn't making an OnlyFans be easier and more likely to attract paying customers?
Well, I think this is twice in the same thread where my intuition was considerably off base. Lesson learned, I suppose.
Just read that, and it says they've only issued 453 million numbers so far. Huh. I really thought it would've been a lot more than that.
We have 335 million people in this country literally right now. I don't think "350 million born since 1933" makes sense. There gotta be a lot of churn just from early deaths alone.
Edit: number fixin
Wait there are no babysitters in Japan? I was only there for a year as a very much childless young adult, but for some reason I assumed there would be babysitters. Thinking back, I don't think I ever knew someone who babysat unless it was an older sibling looking after younger siblings. Heck, I don't even know the Japanese word for it. Wow, for some reason I really thought that was only a modern American problem.