Getting professional help for everything. Speaking, singing, powerlifting, acting, etc. I enjoy learning on my own but having a good coach can accelerate my progress and catch bad habits.
Tim Ferris talks about this problem. His solution was to look up the 'Silver/Bronze' people, not just the 'Gold' people, in an event and just email them. I think he went to a 'silver medalist' in some surfing competition for lessons and claimed that 3 hours skype sessions were only $120. Ferris' reasoning was that the silver person was only 0.1% 'less' than the gold, so the price differential is totally worth it for private lessons. Also that most 'silver' people have never done private lessons in their expertise so they are very willing to help. It takes like 5 minutes of googling for this and writing some emails, maybe 30 minutes in total including negotiations for payment.
To explain: savings is great and smart. But I never evolved past university frugal living. I recently realised that I was living like a student despite a good salary. So I bought some nice furniture and other things. I didn't realise I was missing out on reduced life friction.
That makes sense. Until I started tracking it, I was surprised at how much I was spending that I really didn't need to be. That's more the kind of spending I was talking about.
I was up late finishing a large programming assignment for class, when inexplicably at 3 am, my code stopped compiling with a super generic error message.
Turns out I had somehow added a random character at the top line, but it took me the next 1-2 hours being dumbfounded, confused, over-tired and frustrated before I found the problem.
It would have been a 60 second fix with a simple diff against the repo version.
After that day, I learned how to use svn and always start every project (no matter how small) inside some type of version control system.
Accepting that I was an introvert. I remember the exact moment: I was traveling, had just settled down with a good book at a hostel, and then heard some folks heading to the bar. I remember thinking "gosh, I should be social," and then "nah, I'd rather be here."
Y'all should go have a drink and be social! Oh, wait...
I kid. I'm in the same boat. People exhaust me. I often tell people who ask me to come do something "I'm peopled out." After a while they get it. My better extraverted friends never stop asking, though, for which I am thankful because I occasionally do like to be social and who better to be social with than an extrovert[0].
[0] They get me and fill in all the awkward silences.
A thing I've learned on top of that is that people can interpret the lack of care about social functions to be lazyness or harshness. Even introverts can enjoy certain social functions if they become more accustomed to take the edge off. I say this myself as an introvert - staying home all the time and fulfilling ones' comforts often makes one their own worst enemy when it comes to fulfillment. Comfort makes one weak. I should know, I regret being my own best servant of solitude. Be better than me. Push yourself outside of the meager boundaries of who we think we are. Or we can never be great, legendary.
But it can be slightly more complicated. Personally, I want the invites to keep coming, but I also want to reject 75% or more of them (due to having accepted the fact that I'm an introvert). If people invite you out, and you always say "no", then at some point they'll stop inviting you.
It's a bit like the story (Dr Jordan) Peterson tells about rats. If a big one invites a small one to play, the small one will only continuously accept the invitations if the big one lets it win 25% of the time, IIRC. Being social is an iterated game, so you have to say "yes" enough to satisfy the other(s). That is, unless you live in the mountains and want to be by yourself.
It would be nice to look back at a decade of blogging, but I only started like ~3 years ago. It has many, many benefits: Practicing written communication, organizing one's thoughts, build up credibility, learn things in-depth by teaching etc.
Now that I think about it, actually, publishing anything in general. Working out in the open. I often kept side project to myself. I should have just open sourced that (did that for some projects after the fact).
Turning off email notifications on my phone. Finally pulled the trigger when I was relaxing on a Friday night and getting work emails. It’s usually more efficient to deal with email only once per day anyways.
Solid advice. So glad I did this a few years ago. I was spending way too much fragmented time pulling my phone out every time I got an e-mail. Then if it wasn't something I needed to deal with right now, I often forgot about it (and never responded).
Now I only use e-mail on my laptop. I do have it installed on my phone, but it is only used when a real priority comes up.
I've never understood why people started subscribing to work email on their personal phones to begin with. Why would you want to get work mail when you're not at work, and why would you want to use your own hardware to do it? I've never done that and nobody I've worked for has ever asked me to do that; my personal phone is for my personal communication.
I organise an event for people who run agencies in London (www.agencysummit.co.uk). I use bots to find relevant people on LinkedIn, and then pay somebody on Fiverr to find their email addresses. Then, I put them into Reply.io and send short two sentence emails asking people if they'd like to check out the event.
It works. Two or three times a day, I get push notifications telling me somebody I've never met has bought a ticket.
Without a cold outreach system like this, there's no way I'd be able to run this business.
Same here. I thought budgeting was only for when money is tight, but it is amazing how much clarity and overview a budget gives you over your financial situation, and how it helps in attaining even larger goals.
It’s just a shame that desktop YNAB isn’t developed anymore. I will hold onto YNAB4 until it falls apart.
May I ask if there are any limitations for the untimed, free trial as provided on your site? If none, what is stopping from any of your users from using the trial indefinitely?
But at $20 for a unlimited lifetime license, it seems affordable enough for me to want to try using it with my SO.
No limitations. After a few months, you'll get nagged a bit, but the trial version has every feature the full version has. There's nothing but your penchant for honesty stopping you from using it indefinitely :)
I wear earplugs when commuting in the bus. I take a city bus that drives 80 km/h on the highway and the noise is deafening. If you'd work in that environment, ear protection would be mandatory.
I can't imagine how awful it feels to wear cheap earbud headphones in that noise, yet most passengers do.
I dropped out of the software industry and moved to Greece. Now I go fishing in the morning, read in the backyard in the afternoon and play saxophone at the local taverna at night. I make all my money committing cybercrime.
Yeah, but remote work is also a thing. This is why I'm planning to move to a country with a stronger currency and retire to somewhere where it's weaker. I could live a very good life with the same amount of money that would afford me an OK life in other parts of the world. Without having to fear being persecuted by LEO.
I think I am just shocked someone is okay with saying they make a living off screwing others
yes, that is a low amount of money in the US but in a place like greece, you would be doing pretty well. (only know because I visited this past summer) I just cannot fathom how any of that money can be 'taken' and spent with any conscious at all. but I suppose he/she is not alone...
I figure it's along the same lines of being a sex worker or something like that. I would gladly be one if it weren't for the fact that I (probably) wouldn't be able to work in tech and would have to live with social stigma attached.
Same goes for cyber-crime. I want to be on the good side of cyber, and I can't do that if I'm a criminal. I also don't want to live my whole life looking over my shoulder over fear of something I did in the past. This happened to malwaretech and they're not even sure he actually committed the crime.
Stopped thinking that working harder at what others think I should be doing is the key to my success and start evaluating what should I do rather than only how do I do it better.
Stopped eating added sugar and refined carbohydrates.
I've got two: buying a house and going back to grad school.
For buying a house, I latched onto the idea that I needed a 20% down payment so I wouldn't have to pay for mortgage insurance so I was trying to save like crazy. Meanwhile, the property values were going through the roof and I realized that I'd always be chasing that 20%. I sat down and ran some numbers with a mortgage lender and that made everything a lot clearer. I could have bought a place two or three years earlier and been making money on the property value with essentially the same amount of savings. Probably not true in every area though.
Kind of the same thing with grad school. I needed a break from school after undergrad, so I took a few years. Work experience is great, but I hit a career ceiling in terms of being seen as "qualified" for certain opportunities. I should have just gone back and started taking classes much sooner.
My undergrad is in EE and I'm going back to grad school for embedded systems. Even as a EE, I found myself doing lots of software work - writing little C# apps, C++, data processing code in python, matlib scripts, and once in a blue moon writing firmware for microcontrollers
With embedded systems, I can still use my EE background to get my hands on hardware and I'm learning enough software skills to deliver much more professional software whenever I need to.
As a EE, I knew how to code but never got a lot of formal software training so learning git, focusing on my modular code, etc. has been really nice.
For me, buying a house wasn't so much about house values going up, as rents started going up faster than mortgages in my area. That's why I finally bought.
That said, I might have bought sooner had I realized the mind shift that happens with ownership. Want to do something about storage space? Drop a grand at ikea and put in semi permanent shelving. I would never think about dropping that kind if money on a rental.
One was when I realized I should try to do something that I can do to push my boundaries and instead do something I can right now. I'm writing down more koans like this and I might sell it as a deck of inspiration cards.
Another was Quitting Facebook. I tried a bunch of times but wasn't successful but I have been Facebook free for a few months now. I might turn it back on just to get a backup of my data for my own data science projects but I would immediately turn it off.
Yet another keeping a paper notebook with a pen with me at all times. Some notes are better written.
More specifically for me: podcasts while I'm walking to/from transit or driving, and reading a BOOK (not HN, Reddit, etc) if I'm sitting on a bus or train.
Music. Music has such mathematical undertones - classical music especially speaks to me.
I wished I started learning music, especially reading music and music theory when I was a child. Now that I'm old, I realize that neuroplasticity is a bitch to fight against. Thank God I learned another language as a child, and a tonal language at that.
1: Kids. My wife and I waited to get married, and then were part scared after we got married, and part selfish and wanted freedom to play and travel, so we waited more. I don't regret our adventures at all, but after we had kids, I realized my fear was unfounded and we still had a lot of freedom to play and travel.
2: Startup. I wanted to start my own business my whole life, and I waited to try until I had enough of a plan, enough personal savings for a runway, and until the kids weren't toddlers anymore. I wish I had done it a lot sooner, before having kids, and with someone else's money.
Yes, those two kinda contradict each other. :) I don't know how I'd resolve it, were I to do it again. Not sure I would do it any different, my takeaway is just that in both cases I waited because of fears that turned out to be only fear.
Only if you don't like your kids. If you like them, having them around is a lot of fun. :)
Side note that kids start spending time away from parents when they become teenagers. That's happening to me now, and I am slowly gaining extra free time. Half the time I still want to spend my free time with the kids. But I'd assume that the younger someone is post-kids, the more energy and options they have for starting new things with that free time. I'm just entering my forties and glad I'm not starting to have kids right now. It might have been a little nicer to start earlier just so we could have hit this point while we were younger.
Thanks, that’s reassuring. For some time, I rather settled on not wanting children, but my SO is convincing me otherwise. It’s always nice to read that I won’t have to completely give my life up, or at least not forever. :) I understand that that depends a lot on the situation, but I think we might be financially stable enough, and also potentially moving to a country that gives much more support to parents, that it might be the case for us.
For me it hasn't so much been that I can still travel, it's just that the source of life's deep joys has shifted. It's hard to describe. Kind of feels like telling an alcoholic that smoothies can taste just as good as a cocktail -- there's just no way to describe it until experienced.
It's just indescribable to be able to share something new with your child. Taking them to a local park or into the city brings me more joy than traveling the world once did. The joys feel less fleeting.
I still hope to get back to traveling, but I really don't feel like it's been a sacrifice as much as a trade where the thing I got was secretly worth well more than what it cost.
It's a mix of factors, but part of it was examining what freedom means to me. It was never a specific set of goals I had or specific things I wanted to do, it was a general idea that I still want to be able to go out on Friday night, or go hiking on a whim Saturday, or lounge around at night and hack on my pet project or record some music or something.
The answer came in many parts:
- We bring the kids with us a lot. Some of the fear was mental friction about the difficulty of hauling kids around. Yeah, it takes a little more work, but as long as I do that work, I bring them along and can still go where I want.
- We sometimes take turns parenting to allow each other some freedom. I can buy time to work on my hacking projects and music tomorrow by watching the kids today. For me, this didn't change that much from my relationship with my wife, where we would make similar choices to invest some time with each other.
- We hire babysitters sometimes. (But movie night did go from a very cheap date before kids to a very expensive night after kids...)
- I take more stock of how much time I waste. For example, watching TV/Netflix is fun, but I can choose to sacrifice that here and there and buy time to do other more meaningful things.
- My motivations changed after having kids, and I have the freedom to spend time with them. Certain kinds of socializing became less important to me, which frees up some time.
- We plan ahead more often. Not a bad thing, what freedom meant in some cases was the freedom to not plan, but if I plan ahead and commit to things, I can still do what I want.
>my fear was unfounded and we still had a lot of freedom to play and travel.
Be careful generalizing - this really depends on your life situations (including income/savings) and preferences.
For example, out of both our sets of parents there is only one (my MIL) that I'd ever want my hypothetical children to be around for any more than maybe an hour visit once a year, and she lives a 4 hour drive away. So there is pretty much zero family support for childrearing for us, which is a big factor in our choice to avoid childbearing.
I feel I have to preemptively defend my choice to keep my hypothetical children from their hypothetical grandparents - they are domestic emotional and physical abusers, substance abusers, mentally ill, reckless and drunk drivers, conflict seekers, emotionally unstable, behave socially inappropriately, don't respect boundaries, and create a toxic environment to be in. I grew up with that shit - I would only subject my worst enemy to it.
That's awful, in your situation I'd be afraid to have kids too. You can live far away from them or not have kids or both. I hope you can find peace and not feel like you need to defend your choice to anyone, you have all the right in the world to deal with the family that was inflicted on you in any way you see fit and without worrying what other people think.
To be clear, the question was about personal experience, and I'm only sharing my own experience and not suggesting mine works for anyone else. Clearly your personal experience is very different from mine, and different choices are in order.
FWIW, I was a 12 hour drive from all grandparents when my first was born, and living in San Francisco. We didn't have any grandparent support, and even after moving closer, we haven't had a lot. What we have done is hire babysitters now and then, and also play and travel with our kids a lot. The realization that my fears about freedom before kids was unfounded didn't really depend on having family support.
You misunderstood my comment, I'm not afraid to have children, we choose not to and fear is not a factor in that choice. Practicality is, as well as personal preferences. A lack of family support is only a single factor, I was just giving it as a single example.
There's a reason I included income/savings specifically in life situations.
>not feel like you need to defend your choice to anyone, you have all the right in the world to deal with the family that was inflicted on you in any way you see fit and without worrying what other people think.
We live in a very judgemental society when it comes to childbearing, child rearing, and parenthood. Parents always get the benefit of the doubt, pretty much no matter what. Denying access to grandchildren is considered extremely cruel. If I didn't give a good reason then people think negatively of me. That's just the society we live in and what we value as a society. Our culture of valuing parents to martyr themselves plays into it. Even the word you used in the GP shows this - "selfish."
Sorry about that. I understand your comment and your choice, my wording just wasn't sensitive to fear vs choice. I agree this is an especially touchy subject, and that many people are judgemental. I have several close friends who've chosen not to have kids and they also struggle with people judging them negatively. The friends of mine who best deal with it are the couple who just don't give a shit what people think of them. I aspire to be at peace that way with all my choices, but I am currently not. I hope you can find that peace too.
I see why you think so, but I hope you can accept that my use of "selfish" was not a judgement on parenting vs not parenting. I think a lot of the freedoms I want are selfish on their own without respect to my family. I am okay with being selfish, and most of what I do is selfish. My top point was I still get to be mostly selfish, with or without children.
You're absolutely right that there is some collective narrative around parenting, and even if my language was part of that narrative, I would encourage not framing it that way if you're worried about what people think. I don't think of myself as a martyr in any way, but it's a true fact that I do make some personal sacrifices to have kids. I also make personal sacrifices to have a job and to own a house. Each of my choices come with their own consequences. I was overly worried about those personal sacrifices with kids, and I'm saying that they were less burdensome than I anticipated. If anything, my experience supports the idea that society's narrative is over-stated.
Anyway, using fairly extreme language like "martyr" to push back on that subtle built-in prejudice I may or may not have seems designed to escalate feelings and unlikely to result in a cultural shift or to the kind of sensitivity you want. I'm absolutely not trying to hurt your feelings by sharing my experience, and so I hope you can give my language the benefit of the doubt rather than think my motivations are biased against you, intentionally or unintentionally.
Deleting the twitter, reddit, and facebook apps from my phone. I still access FB through the browser when I want to check something, and I check strava and instagram daily, so I'm not totally free, but it feels better.
I use that free time for reading, coding, cleaning, cooking, and running.
Seems this particular extension is very upfront about the fact that they gather quite a lot of data from your tab history/usage/habits and then pass that to 3rd parties.
137 comments
[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 62.4 ms ] threadFor example: getting a mortgage or paying taxes are relatively complex processes with alot of moving parts: tasks, documents, deadlines, etc.
You make a Kanban and divide it up into tasks and a pipeline and notes for each tasks status.
Trello is what I use but there's other tools as well.
Holy crap it makes your life easier.
To explain: savings is great and smart. But I never evolved past university frugal living. I recently realised that I was living like a student despite a good salary. So I bought some nice furniture and other things. I didn't realise I was missing out on reduced life friction.
I was up late finishing a large programming assignment for class, when inexplicably at 3 am, my code stopped compiling with a super generic error message.
Turns out I had somehow added a random character at the top line, but it took me the next 1-2 hours being dumbfounded, confused, over-tired and frustrated before I found the problem.
It would have been a 60 second fix with a simple diff against the repo version.
After that day, I learned how to use svn and always start every project (no matter how small) inside some type of version control system.
Self acceptance of that was a big change for me.
I kid. I'm in the same boat. People exhaust me. I often tell people who ask me to come do something "I'm peopled out." After a while they get it. My better extraverted friends never stop asking, though, for which I am thankful because I occasionally do like to be social and who better to be social with than an extrovert[0].
[0] They get me and fill in all the awkward silences.
But it can be slightly more complicated. Personally, I want the invites to keep coming, but I also want to reject 75% or more of them (due to having accepted the fact that I'm an introvert). If people invite you out, and you always say "no", then at some point they'll stop inviting you.
It's a bit like the story (Dr Jordan) Peterson tells about rats. If a big one invites a small one to play, the small one will only continuously accept the invitations if the big one lets it win 25% of the time, IIRC. Being social is an iterated game, so you have to say "yes" enough to satisfy the other(s). That is, unless you live in the mountains and want to be by yourself.
EDIT:
It would be nice to look back at a decade of blogging, but I only started like ~3 years ago. It has many, many benefits: Practicing written communication, organizing one's thoughts, build up credibility, learn things in-depth by teaching etc.
Now that I think about it, actually, publishing anything in general. Working out in the open. I often kept side project to myself. I should have just open sourced that (did that for some projects after the fact).
Now I only use e-mail on my laptop. I do have it installed on my phone, but it is only used when a real priority comes up.
I organise an event for people who run agencies in London (www.agencysummit.co.uk). I use bots to find relevant people on LinkedIn, and then pay somebody on Fiverr to find their email addresses. Then, I put them into Reply.io and send short two sentence emails asking people if they'd like to check out the event.
It works. Two or three times a day, I get push notifications telling me somebody I've never met has bought a ticket.
Without a cold outreach system like this, there's no way I'd be able to run this business.
https://ico.org.uk/for-organisations/guide-to-pecr/electroni...
I believe that my quality of life would have been significantly better if I had started those habits earlier in my money-earning years.
It’s just a shame that desktop YNAB isn’t developed anymore. I will hold onto YNAB4 until it falls apart.
Why yes that is how you can make me try it out!
But at $20 for a unlimited lifetime license, it seems affordable enough for me to want to try using it with my SO.
I've tried giving copies to friends who live paycheck to paycheck but no one can bite the bullet of manually tracking everything.
I can't imagine how awful it feels to wear cheap earbud headphones in that noise, yet most passengers do.
> I make $3000 a month committing cybercrime
EDIT: AFAIK a decent threat hunter or RE can earn about 3x that legally in the US.
yes, that is a low amount of money in the US but in a place like greece, you would be doing pretty well. (only know because I visited this past summer) I just cannot fathom how any of that money can be 'taken' and spent with any conscious at all. but I suppose he/she is not alone...
Same goes for cyber-crime. I want to be on the good side of cyber, and I can't do that if I'm a criminal. I also don't want to live my whole life looking over my shoulder over fear of something I did in the past. This happened to malwaretech and they're not even sure he actually committed the crime.
Stopped eating added sugar and refined carbohydrates.
For buying a house, I latched onto the idea that I needed a 20% down payment so I wouldn't have to pay for mortgage insurance so I was trying to save like crazy. Meanwhile, the property values were going through the roof and I realized that I'd always be chasing that 20%. I sat down and ran some numbers with a mortgage lender and that made everything a lot clearer. I could have bought a place two or three years earlier and been making money on the property value with essentially the same amount of savings. Probably not true in every area though.
Kind of the same thing with grad school. I needed a break from school after undergrad, so I took a few years. Work experience is great, but I hit a career ceiling in terms of being seen as "qualified" for certain opportunities. I should have just gone back and started taking classes much sooner.
With embedded systems, I can still use my EE background to get my hands on hardware and I'm learning enough software skills to deliver much more professional software whenever I need to.
As a EE, I knew how to code but never got a lot of formal software training so learning git, focusing on my modular code, etc. has been really nice.
That said, I might have bought sooner had I realized the mind shift that happens with ownership. Want to do something about storage space? Drop a grand at ikea and put in semi permanent shelving. I would never think about dropping that kind if money on a rental.
Another was Quitting Facebook. I tried a bunch of times but wasn't successful but I have been Facebook free for a few months now. I might turn it back on just to get a backup of my data for my own data science projects but I would immediately turn it off.
Yet another keeping a paper notebook with a pen with me at all times. Some notes are better written.
I wished I started learning music, especially reading music and music theory when I was a child. Now that I'm old, I realize that neuroplasticity is a bitch to fight against. Thank God I learned another language as a child, and a tonal language at that.
2: Startup. I wanted to start my own business my whole life, and I waited to try until I had enough of a plan, enough personal savings for a runway, and until the kids weren't toddlers anymore. I wish I had done it a lot sooner, before having kids, and with someone else's money.
Yes, those two kinda contradict each other. :) I don't know how I'd resolve it, were I to do it again. Not sure I would do it any different, my takeaway is just that in both cases I waited because of fears that turned out to be only fear.
Side note that kids start spending time away from parents when they become teenagers. That's happening to me now, and I am slowly gaining extra free time. Half the time I still want to spend my free time with the kids. But I'd assume that the younger someone is post-kids, the more energy and options they have for starting new things with that free time. I'm just entering my forties and glad I'm not starting to have kids right now. It might have been a little nicer to start earlier just so we could have hit this point while we were younger.
It's just indescribable to be able to share something new with your child. Taking them to a local park or into the city brings me more joy than traveling the world once did. The joys feel less fleeting.
I still hope to get back to traveling, but I really don't feel like it's been a sacrifice as much as a trade where the thing I got was secretly worth well more than what it cost.
The answer came in many parts:
- We bring the kids with us a lot. Some of the fear was mental friction about the difficulty of hauling kids around. Yeah, it takes a little more work, but as long as I do that work, I bring them along and can still go where I want.
- We sometimes take turns parenting to allow each other some freedom. I can buy time to work on my hacking projects and music tomorrow by watching the kids today. For me, this didn't change that much from my relationship with my wife, where we would make similar choices to invest some time with each other.
- We hire babysitters sometimes. (But movie night did go from a very cheap date before kids to a very expensive night after kids...)
- I take more stock of how much time I waste. For example, watching TV/Netflix is fun, but I can choose to sacrifice that here and there and buy time to do other more meaningful things.
- My motivations changed after having kids, and I have the freedom to spend time with them. Certain kinds of socializing became less important to me, which frees up some time.
- We plan ahead more often. Not a bad thing, what freedom meant in some cases was the freedom to not plan, but if I plan ahead and commit to things, I can still do what I want.
Be careful generalizing - this really depends on your life situations (including income/savings) and preferences.
For example, out of both our sets of parents there is only one (my MIL) that I'd ever want my hypothetical children to be around for any more than maybe an hour visit once a year, and she lives a 4 hour drive away. So there is pretty much zero family support for childrearing for us, which is a big factor in our choice to avoid childbearing.
I feel I have to preemptively defend my choice to keep my hypothetical children from their hypothetical grandparents - they are domestic emotional and physical abusers, substance abusers, mentally ill, reckless and drunk drivers, conflict seekers, emotionally unstable, behave socially inappropriately, don't respect boundaries, and create a toxic environment to be in. I grew up with that shit - I would only subject my worst enemy to it.
To be clear, the question was about personal experience, and I'm only sharing my own experience and not suggesting mine works for anyone else. Clearly your personal experience is very different from mine, and different choices are in order.
FWIW, I was a 12 hour drive from all grandparents when my first was born, and living in San Francisco. We didn't have any grandparent support, and even after moving closer, we haven't had a lot. What we have done is hire babysitters now and then, and also play and travel with our kids a lot. The realization that my fears about freedom before kids was unfounded didn't really depend on having family support.
There's a reason I included income/savings specifically in life situations.
>not feel like you need to defend your choice to anyone, you have all the right in the world to deal with the family that was inflicted on you in any way you see fit and without worrying what other people think.
We live in a very judgemental society when it comes to childbearing, child rearing, and parenthood. Parents always get the benefit of the doubt, pretty much no matter what. Denying access to grandchildren is considered extremely cruel. If I didn't give a good reason then people think negatively of me. That's just the society we live in and what we value as a society. Our culture of valuing parents to martyr themselves plays into it. Even the word you used in the GP shows this - "selfish."
I see why you think so, but I hope you can accept that my use of "selfish" was not a judgement on parenting vs not parenting. I think a lot of the freedoms I want are selfish on their own without respect to my family. I am okay with being selfish, and most of what I do is selfish. My top point was I still get to be mostly selfish, with or without children.
You're absolutely right that there is some collective narrative around parenting, and even if my language was part of that narrative, I would encourage not framing it that way if you're worried about what people think. I don't think of myself as a martyr in any way, but it's a true fact that I do make some personal sacrifices to have kids. I also make personal sacrifices to have a job and to own a house. Each of my choices come with their own consequences. I was overly worried about those personal sacrifices with kids, and I'm saying that they were less burdensome than I anticipated. If anything, my experience supports the idea that society's narrative is over-stated.
Anyway, using fairly extreme language like "martyr" to push back on that subtle built-in prejudice I may or may not have seems designed to escalate feelings and unlikely to result in a cultural shift or to the kind of sensitivity you want. I'm absolutely not trying to hurt your feelings by sharing my experience, and so I hope you can give my language the benefit of the doubt rather than think my motivations are biased against you, intentionally or unintentionally.
And blocking the shithole site Reddit until I didn't have the urge to check it.
I use that free time for reading, coding, cleaning, cooking, and running.
Followed by less interest in work/money, more interest in family.
Money still matters, of course, but I'm much more in tune with how much I really need.
[0] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/block-site/eiimnmi...
https://yourblocksite.com/privacy.html