These are another "Jacob" and another "Felix", not the ones in the post, but there are so many similarities and such a terrible lesson learned that it needs to be written.
The Felix I know is still happy; still going out in the long summer days or camping during the winters, playing minecraft sometimes, discovering that life has yet so much to give. Felix has so many ideas in his head that any given day it's a miracle he finds the strength of spirit to prioritize and keep the focus. People at work like Felix because he only compromises on the right things and never throws anybody under a bus so that he can run because they called from the school.
Felix dances in the mornings, and takes catnaps, and tries to keep away the sadness. Sadness not of his life, but because his Jacob died a month ago the most terrible dead possible, that Jacob caught after his immune system was reduced to shreds by regular sleeplessness caused by his kid's iterative flus, family stress, excess alcohol (caused by immediate and extended family stress), and the never ending procession of viruses the kid kept bringing home. For all that saying that family is so that you don't die alone, Jacob never wanted his family for that he could die surrounded by them, and Felix is pretty sure Jacob would have preferred to die alone rather than suffer so much and give so much suffering to those he loved.
Felix thinks often of the urn of ashes that is all that is left of Jacob, and about how the family Jacob loved has been left with no choice but to forget and to keep going, one feet in front of another, after the husband that did everything was eaten alive by a metastasis. Felix knows in his bones that he will find the time to compose and sing a song for Jacob. It'll probably be called "Sex toys are underrated."
I think people fall into the trap of thinking things are too good to be true (so they must not be true). This results in abandoned relationships that would have been better than 99% of those from pre-online-dating times.
This has been true for me, anyway. Every time I've entered the online dating scene, I've invariably realized 3 months later that one or two of the women I turned down for second dates were great matches.
Absolute fucking juice, mate. Pure gold. Really nailed that feeling of early 2000s/early 2010s web entrepreneurship of the failed young entrepreneur hahaha.
For anyone reading this story as a cautionary tale on having children, you should know that this is not my lived experience of parenting (or the described experience of many of my peers). The way he describes it is the exact opposite of my experience:
> "if you feed me a BIG tablespoon of shit every day and then switch to just a little teaspoon daily, I won’t suddenly start liking the taste of shit."
I genuinely love time spent with my child. I had a similar experience to him and Felix in my 20s and am glad I did, but I'd never want to go back there. That was right for me then and I deeply feel that parenting (alongside a software engineering career I love) is the most joyful, rewarding place to be in my 30s.
It ended up being a story about regretting having kids, glorifying in grass-is-greener fashion the alternative, when author should consider themselves lucky to have the option.
I wonder if the author realizes some people work and start companies out of necessity - because there is no other path to personal freedom.
He says he misses the freedom but he already has what many work their lives for. Just spoiled IMO
I don’t have kids but I imagine it would only make entrepreneurship more interesting - someone to build the dream for, or around, or at least someone to leave it all to.
I decided to go ahead and click through, since this looks like it's just an expired certificate. It's a really great piece of creative nonfiction that evoked all sorts of emotions, some of which even managed to be positive.
And I'm going to go with my gut and not give my thoughts on love, and instead simply reflect on the fact that in the early days, there was no "swipe culture" -- you got shown the girl of your dreams, on paper. (In reality, there's looks, social class, and of course, the foundations of geopolitics.)
I don't get why the sleep deprivation continues. Seems like eliminating that would make a big difference. I have a six year old son, and since he was four it was perfectly fine for him to do his own thing for a little while if I needed a bit of extra sleep. I could see why you'd resent kids if they were constantly needy, didn't sleep, and you didn't actually enjoy their company. But for kids with typical development, this resentment maybe means that the parents aren't setting the right boundaries past age 3.
Hot take: dissatisfaction will always find its level.
Also? My dude, check in with "Felix" when you're both 45 and 55. Where is the source of value in a life? There is no right answer but I can tell you from observation that whatever combinations work for people, they are almost always not premised on stasis.
Popular culture, night life, preoccupation with the finest examples (or most trendy) of things like croissants, most especially, drinking drugs and the drive of libido—all of these are ephemeral pleasures.
Here in the Bay Area it's very easy to see the whole spectrum of life-choices and make a survey of the outcomes that results from different investment in career, pleasure, parenting, community, etc.
There's a subtext in writing like this: that what the author really wants, is to be frozen in a moment they regret is behind them; to forever be full of potential and on the cusp: well, it don't work that way I'm afraid, and neither your potential nor your youth nor the twinkle that come from being Young and Bright and Attractive last.
What I can say having made my own survey of outcomes is this: to the extent that your anchor sense of self worth and satisfaction in life on those ephemeral things (or worse, their pale social-media social-politics echos), you're gonna have a Real Bad Time getting older.
That does not mean you need to learn to love the bomb that is your kids. It does mean that you need to have insight and perspective on your own and other's psychology and manage to it.
Lots of traditions and cultures have evolved pretty solid ways for managing this shit. Insight meditation and investing in your community through volunteering and even hobbies are rightly popular. But family and friends (i.e your actual not online social network) are almost irreplaceable.
Stop chasing what was, no matter how eloquently you lament, you're not getting back to it or holding on. The river of aging and accumulating memory and the cummulative consquences of your behavior and decisions are inexorable, as they are for all. Even the rich. The young who are actually 24 just generally don't realize that yet. That's why they are who they are, as they should be.
If you can get a cautionary tale on having children out of this article, your powers of interpretation are immense or you didn’t read the article at all…
“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times” why bother reading the rest of the story
I feel like I read a different piece than everyone else?
I didn't interpret any of this piece to be about regretting having kids, or anything else. And sure, there is a sort of glorifying of Felix, but the writer is very aware of that. He points out that in his mind, Felix is forever 25. The most important part of the piece, IMO, is the end:
I often think about Felix’s freedom.
But my memory plays tricks on me. I never told you about it being so lonely
in that apartment that I cried ...there was
nobody there but me... When I think of that time, it’s a Forever Summer.
I don’t remember the Winters. I bet they sucked...Cufflinks! Horse Bridles!
I think the most honest thing we can do for our Felixes is to
dive further into the fantasy. To flesh out the details of their life.
Make them concrete.
When I think about Felix’s partner or children,
I can’t help but picture a life similar to my own.
Because he also wanted children. He wanted a partner.
He wouldn’t have stayed in that neighbourhood.
And anyways, that place is not the same as it was sixteen years ago.
Felix probably made choices akin to my own. Made compromises.
The only alternative I can imagine to compromise, accommodation,
negotiation is to never allow yourself to love.
It’s 5:30am now. The sun is beginning to rise.
M had gone to sleep 3 hours ago and I am all alone.
Sometimes I sit there and think that I am lucky. So very very lucky.
I feel it in my weaselly little bones.
This piece is to me, ultimately about loving your life while acknowledging that every decision you make closes off other opportunities, and sometimes you grieve them. All decisions come with a tradeoff, and it's not unfaithful to your life to acknowledge them. You can love your child and not love parenthood itself. You can choose your partner simply because they feel like a better bet and you can see building a life with them, even though someone else more viscerally lit your fire once upon a time. You can feel sorrow at having lost total independence, even though you feel the satisfaction of connection and responsibility. I have conversations like this with friends all the time.
Modern life tries to sell to us that if we're being "authentic", we can have it all and give up nothing. I simply don't think that's true. The truth is that every significant decision closes 100 doors, and refusing to acknowledge that we would have liked to have walked through some of those doors... to me, that's just fear of facing the weight of our choices.
I have two kids. They are very very different in their needs, sleep patterns, self security, and have been since their first days. Parenting is mostly hard for anyone getting serious about it, but i can vary tremendously from you kid personnality, the support system you have, etc... I suspect some parents (usually fathers) don't know it because they do not put in the works (and then give some advices on boundaries). Still, some have "easy" kids in the sense that they are not demanding a lot from the parent, and that can be fine or the sign of a troubled personnality. I completely understand the author here, as this has been also my experience - parenting is unbeleivably hard but _also_ beautiful and _also_ an experience that should change you to the core and make you grow. To me, however hard it can be, it beats the alternative. But I could unserstand that only once I've been through abandonning my former self govern by individualist values and goals to become a new person taking care of someone else, however hard and painful it might have been.
I would have loved to know more about how the business ended. It could have flown naturally with the rest of the story. Same for D’s journey!
Even if most comments felt like there was envy at Felix’s life I think that’s because we only see the negative aspects of Jacob’s life and only the nice ones of Felix’s. Deep down I know that Felix is a bit lonely on a treadmill trying to keep up an entrepreneurial journey and that he might wake up at 45.
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[ 0.21 ms ] story [ 26.3 ms ] threadThe Felix I know is still happy; still going out in the long summer days or camping during the winters, playing minecraft sometimes, discovering that life has yet so much to give. Felix has so many ideas in his head that any given day it's a miracle he finds the strength of spirit to prioritize and keep the focus. People at work like Felix because he only compromises on the right things and never throws anybody under a bus so that he can run because they called from the school.
Felix dances in the mornings, and takes catnaps, and tries to keep away the sadness. Sadness not of his life, but because his Jacob died a month ago the most terrible dead possible, that Jacob caught after his immune system was reduced to shreds by regular sleeplessness caused by his kid's iterative flus, family stress, excess alcohol (caused by immediate and extended family stress), and the never ending procession of viruses the kid kept bringing home. For all that saying that family is so that you don't die alone, Jacob never wanted his family for that he could die surrounded by them, and Felix is pretty sure Jacob would have preferred to die alone rather than suffer so much and give so much suffering to those he loved.
Felix thinks often of the urn of ashes that is all that is left of Jacob, and about how the family Jacob loved has been left with no choice but to forget and to keep going, one feet in front of another, after the husband that did everything was eaten alive by a metastasis. Felix knows in his bones that he will find the time to compose and sing a song for Jacob. It'll probably be called "Sex toys are underrated."
I think people fall into the trap of thinking things are too good to be true (so they must not be true). This results in abandoned relationships that would have been better than 99% of those from pre-online-dating times.
This has been true for me, anyway. Every time I've entered the online dating scene, I've invariably realized 3 months later that one or two of the women I turned down for second dates were great matches.
Gold standard nostalgia.
> "if you feed me a BIG tablespoon of shit every day and then switch to just a little teaspoon daily, I won’t suddenly start liking the taste of shit."
I genuinely love time spent with my child. I had a similar experience to him and Felix in my 20s and am glad I did, but I'd never want to go back there. That was right for me then and I deeply feel that parenting (alongside a software engineering career I love) is the most joyful, rewarding place to be in my 30s.
It ended up being a story about regretting having kids, glorifying in grass-is-greener fashion the alternative, when author should consider themselves lucky to have the option.
I wonder if the author realizes some people work and start companies out of necessity - because there is no other path to personal freedom.
He says he misses the freedom but he already has what many work their lives for. Just spoiled IMO
I don’t have kids but I imagine it would only make entrepreneurship more interesting - someone to build the dream for, or around, or at least someone to leave it all to.
And I'm going to go with my gut and not give my thoughts on love, and instead simply reflect on the fact that in the early days, there was no "swipe culture" -- you got shown the girl of your dreams, on paper. (In reality, there's looks, social class, and of course, the foundations of geopolitics.)
Also? My dude, check in with "Felix" when you're both 45 and 55. Where is the source of value in a life? There is no right answer but I can tell you from observation that whatever combinations work for people, they are almost always not premised on stasis.
Popular culture, night life, preoccupation with the finest examples (or most trendy) of things like croissants, most especially, drinking drugs and the drive of libido—all of these are ephemeral pleasures.
Here in the Bay Area it's very easy to see the whole spectrum of life-choices and make a survey of the outcomes that results from different investment in career, pleasure, parenting, community, etc.
There's a subtext in writing like this: that what the author really wants, is to be frozen in a moment they regret is behind them; to forever be full of potential and on the cusp: well, it don't work that way I'm afraid, and neither your potential nor your youth nor the twinkle that come from being Young and Bright and Attractive last.
What I can say having made my own survey of outcomes is this: to the extent that your anchor sense of self worth and satisfaction in life on those ephemeral things (or worse, their pale social-media social-politics echos), you're gonna have a Real Bad Time getting older.
That does not mean you need to learn to love the bomb that is your kids. It does mean that you need to have insight and perspective on your own and other's psychology and manage to it.
Lots of traditions and cultures have evolved pretty solid ways for managing this shit. Insight meditation and investing in your community through volunteering and even hobbies are rightly popular. But family and friends (i.e your actual not online social network) are almost irreplaceable.
Stop chasing what was, no matter how eloquently you lament, you're not getting back to it or holding on. The river of aging and accumulating memory and the cummulative consquences of your behavior and decisions are inexorable, as they are for all. Even the rich. The young who are actually 24 just generally don't realize that yet. That's why they are who they are, as they should be.
“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times” why bother reading the rest of the story
I didn't interpret any of this piece to be about regretting having kids, or anything else. And sure, there is a sort of glorifying of Felix, but the writer is very aware of that. He points out that in his mind, Felix is forever 25. The most important part of the piece, IMO, is the end:
This piece is to me, ultimately about loving your life while acknowledging that every decision you make closes off other opportunities, and sometimes you grieve them. All decisions come with a tradeoff, and it's not unfaithful to your life to acknowledge them. You can love your child and not love parenthood itself. You can choose your partner simply because they feel like a better bet and you can see building a life with them, even though someone else more viscerally lit your fire once upon a time. You can feel sorrow at having lost total independence, even though you feel the satisfaction of connection and responsibility. I have conversations like this with friends all the time.Modern life tries to sell to us that if we're being "authentic", we can have it all and give up nothing. I simply don't think that's true. The truth is that every significant decision closes 100 doors, and refusing to acknowledge that we would have liked to have walked through some of those doors... to me, that's just fear of facing the weight of our choices.
Makes me think of the famous Fig Tree section of Sylvia Plath's "The Bell Jar": https://www.favoritepoem.org/poems/plath-the-fig-tree/
Jacob, if you see this: it spoke to me, and gave me some peace as I've been ruminating over similar things. Thanks for writing :)
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edit: quote formatting
I would have loved to know more about how the business ended. It could have flown naturally with the rest of the story. Same for D’s journey!
Even if most comments felt like there was envy at Felix’s life I think that’s because we only see the negative aspects of Jacob’s life and only the nice ones of Felix’s. Deep down I know that Felix is a bit lonely on a treadmill trying to keep up an entrepreneurial journey and that he might wake up at 45.