Paul Graham: Children and Startups

I was afraid to have children until I had them. Up to this point, I treated children like young Augustine to a virtuous life. I would be sad to think that I will never have children. But did I want them at that moment? No.

If I had children, I would become a parent, and parents, as I knew from childhood, were cool. They were boring and responsible, and they had no time for fun. And although there is nothing surprising in the fact that the children believe in this, to be honest, I have not seen so much to change my mind. Whenever I noticed parents with children, children seemed terrible, and parents seemed pathetic tormented beings, even when they dominated.

When acquaintances brought up children, I enthusiastically congratulated them, because it seems that was exactly what everyone did. But I didn’t feel it at all. “Better with you than mine,” I thought.

Now that people are having children, I congratulate them with enthusiasm, and I am sincere. Especially with the firstborn. I feel like they just got the best gift in the world.

What has changed is that I have children. What I was afraid of turned out to be wonderful.

In part, I will not deny that this is due to serious chemical changes that occurred almost instantly when our first child was born. As if someone had flipped a switch. I suddenly felt like a defender, not only in relation to our child, but also in relation to all children. When I drove my wife and newborn son home from the hospital, we drove up to a pedestrian crossing full of pedestrians, I caught myself thinking: “I have to be very careful with all these people. Each of them is someone’s child! ”

So, to some extent, you cannot trust me when I say that having children is great. To some extent, I look like a religious sectarian who tells you that you will be happy if you also join this cult (but only because joining this cult will change your consciousness in such a way that you will be happy to become a member of this cult ) But not really. But there were some things that I perceived incorrectly before I had children.

My observation of the parents and children are very susceptible to cognitive biases " selection bias“(Selection bias). Some parents probably noticed that I write“ Whenever I noticed a parent with a child. ” Of course, when I noticed that children were doing something bad. I only noticed them when they were noisy. And where was I. When did I notice them? As a rule, I don’t go to places with children, so the only cases when I I come across them, these are public places, such as an airplane. Which is not a typical case. Flying with a child is something that parents don't like much.

What I did not notice, because those moments, as a rule, were much quieter than all those wonderful moments when the parents were with their children. People don’t talk about it very much - magic is hard to put into words, and all other parents know about it in any case, but one of the great things about having children is that for a long time you feel that you don’t want to be anywhere except as with them, and there is nothing else that you prefer to do. You should not do something special. You can just do something together, or put them to bed, or swing them on a swing in the park. But you will not exchange these moments for anything. No one associates children with the world, but this is how you feel. You no longer need to look beyond that moment in which you are now.

Before I had children, I had moments of such peace, but they were rarer. With children, this can happen several times a day.

Another source of information about children was my own childhood, and this was also misleading. I behaved rather badly, and constantly got into trouble because of something. Therefore, it seemed to me that parenthood is, in fact, law enforcement. I did not suspect that there are also good times.

I remember once, when I was about 30 years old, my mother said that she was happy to raise me and my sister. Oh my god, I thought, this woman is a saint. She not only endured all the pain that we subjected her, but also enjoyed it? Now I understand that she was simply telling the truth.

She said that one of the reasons she liked talking to us was that it was interesting to talk with us. It came as a surprise to me when I had children. You do not just love them. They also become your friends. They are really interesting. And although I admit that young children are sorely fond of repetition (all that is worth doing once has to be done fifty times), it is often really fun to play with them. That surprised me too. Playing with a two year old child was fun when I myself was two years old, and definitely not fun when I was six. Why did it become fun again later? But it is so.

Of course, there are times when this is a pure routine. Or, worse, horror. Having children is one of those intense types of experiences that are hard to imagine if you did not have them. But children are not just your DNA bound for lifeboats, as I had imagined before the birth of the children.

Although some of my concerns about children were correct. They definitely make you less productive. I know that having children makes some people act together, but if you have already acted together, you will have less time to do this. In particular, you will have to work on a schedule. Children have a schedule. I'm not sure if this is because these are children, or because this is the only way to integrate your life with an adult, but when you have children, you usually have to work according to their schedule.

You will have many lengths of time to work. But you will not be able to let work fill your whole life, as I used to do before the advent of children. You will have to work at the same time every day, regardless of inspiration or “flow”. And there will be times when you have to stop, even if you are already in the “stream”.

I managed to adapt to work in a new lifestyle. Work, like love, finds its way. Even if the crumbs of time can be found, I use them all for fruitful work. And although I do not do as much work as before I had children, I do enough.

It is not pleasant to say such a thing, because I have always had ambitions, but the appearance of children will diminish your ambitions. It hurts to see it written. I painfully avoid this. But if there wasn’t something serious, why should I avoid it? The fact is that when you have children, you care about them more than about yourself. And attention is a zero-sum game. Only one thought per unit of time can be “in the top”. And if you already have children, most likely it will be a thought about them, and only then the project you are working on.

I have some hacks to balance on this path. For example, when I write an essay, I think about what I would like to tell my children. And it makes you look at things more correctly. When I wrote Bel, I told the children that I would take them to Africa as soon as I finished this work. When you say this to a small child, he takes it as a promise. That is, I had to either finish, or leave them without a trip. And if I’m lucky, such tricks will propel me very forward. But the problem still exists, no doubt.

On the other hand, what are these ambitions, if they do not survive, after the appearance of children? You have so few options?

And although the appearance of children may distort my current perception, it did not erase my memory. I remember very well what life was like before. Good enough to miss many things, such as being able to fly to another country at any time. It was so great. Why have I never done that?

See what I did there? The fact is that most of the freedom I had before the children I never used. I paid for it alone, but I never used it.

I had many happy moments before I had children. But if I count the happy moments, not just the potentially possible happiness, but the real happy moments, after the appearance of the children, there will be more of them than before. Now I often fall asleep with this thought.

Everyone has experience of parenting, and I know that I was lucky. It seems to me that the anxiety that I felt before the advent of the children should be commonplace. And judging by the faces of other parents when they look at their children, it should look like the happiness that children bring.

Note

[1] Adults are already too sophisticated to see a complex and charming character in two-year-old children, while for most six-year-old children they are simply “inferior” six-year-olds.

• A selection of 143 translations of Paul Graham's essay (from 184)

Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/undefined/