[Blarg]

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the time spent with family seems so appealing. There has to be more advantage to being a poker pro right

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You don't sound all that convinced about how much you like spending time with your family. I don't blame you! Lots of people are lousy parents and their kids are horrible little monsters. Just kidding!

I like this line of thinking:

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I must say though that i truly enjoy the freedom i have now, and the time i get to spent with my toddler kids, they won't be this small forever and i'll cherish and remember these times more than any additional office time i would have otherwise spent.


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It's true. You'll remember the look on your 3-year-old kid while he's running around under a tree, doing anything or nothing at all strangely enough, till the day you die. Maybe even on the day you die, it's just that good.

We lose a major part of our lives, especially men, who typically are expected to work far from home, while our children grow up. In most of human history, it was much easier to have a tremendous impact on our children because most people worked on farms and were with their kids hour after hour. They didn't have to worry about creating some sort of hyped up "quality time" to make up for the fact that they never really saw their kids and maybe even didn't want to see them. They were right there in your face for better and worse. The better part was that they were a much deeper part of your life, and you didn't miss all the wonderful things about their growing up, or the chance to influence them for the better, comfort, teach, and scold them into being their best selves.

Now, we work all the time and don't even see our kids grow up. We come home and see them at the dinner table(maybe), or maybe we just all eat dinner numb as robots in front of a t.v. set. How was their day? How was yours? Nobody knows and it gets increasingly harder to care or communicate it when your parent or kid seems so tangential to your life. Then there's maybe a couple of hours you spend in the same house before bedtime.

And then when we're old a huge percentage of us wind up in old-age homes even if it's well within our means and our kids' means to keep us at home in relative comfort amid the things, habits, sights, atmosphere, and people we love in our old age instead of in an industrial setting with little privacy among strangers -- and we wonder why.

Children growing up in the abscence of their fathers pay a very high price for it, and so do their fathers. The same can be said more and more often of mothers now too, since more than half of them work outside the home too. You can never replace later the time you lose with your kids now, and can't have memories of things you haven't shared.

Work, and the way we work now, is a necessity for most everyone. But though it provides, it does so at a very high price, especially if we have children.