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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 21st, 2023

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  • It’s such a huge and personal decision. You shouldn’t really make a decision based on how other people describe their experience. I saw this on reddit ages ago and this is is probably the single best summary of the experience I’ve seen.

    I can describe my experience, but you need to understand people’s biases. My bias is that I always liked kids. I enjoyed playing with nephews and nieces. I now work with children and have 2 of my own kids. The decision for children doesn’t come about in a vacuum. I had a wife who wanted kids too. I had a stable job and felt ready. Even then I had no idea what I was in for. Kids put major demands on your time, money, energy, patience and marriage. I have one child which some might call “a difficult child” and one who is very demanding (as expected for a “normal” child). This is definitely life on hard-mode. Children really force you to face your own issues and get over yourself. It has been great for me. I wouldn’t change a thing about my “difficult” children. Giving them a good life and catering to their needs is an undescribable satisfaction and fulfilment in itself. I’m learning more than I’m teaching them. I wish work didn’t take so much of my time and energy so I had more for them. I asked my wife if she wanted to work full-time, because I would happily stay at home or work part-time and spend more time with the kids. I can’t get enough of my kids and the time you get at each stage of their life flies by in an instant.

    That’s starkly in contrast that with large proportions of Lemmy (and Reddit) which have quite vocal child-free populations with a very individualist ideology. Everyone’s circumstances and biases are different.

    Edit: People also tend to be more open about defending their current position rather than expressing regret (i.e. had children and hated it, or didn’t have children and regretted it); both of these populations exist and tend to be quieter because of social stigma.




  • Talk about yourself (or to yourself) in the second or third person in your mind. We’re usually far more critical of our own actions than we would be good a friend. We would never be negative to a friend in such an unkind way, as we are to ourselves. A change in language to the third person for you inner dialogue prompts you to take an external observer’s point of view and to talk to yourself in the way you would talk to others.

    If you’re into podcasts, then 2 podcasts that are great for learning about things like this are Happiness Lab and Hidden Brain.









  • Heavily filter what you consume. Following all news is not the morally correct thing to do, and you can cut back on it.

    I’m fighting against this by staying off all social media other than Lemmy. All my news comes from a small number of curated sources, and only in RSS feeds (so I get them in time order rather than bullshit news site headlines prioritisation). I use a lot of keyword filters on Lemmy and in my RSS news (Covid, Trump, Biden, most American news, anything that is meaningless to me is blocked before it can show up on my screen).

    TLDR news is a particularly good YouTube channel. They have really well presented news and pick out a few important events to report on. I find that’s more than enough for me for news consumption.