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cousin_it comments on How to Be Happy - Less Wrong
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What's disappointing to me about this overlapping proportion of your life is that the kids are small (and most demanding) exactly over the same period of time when your work is most demanding (when you're trying to get tenure). I'm disappointed because I'm not the best parent or the best scientist that I could have been if they were staggered even by just 5 years.
At the moment, I feel more critical of the tenure system and -- to be honest -- am jealous that I am juggling parenting and trying to get tenure while my single colleagues have potentially an extra 20 hours a week to work on their research. While I know that having children is a choice that I made, the biology is such that I should have kids now ... and the tenure system, which requires your most productive work in your thirties, is not sympathetic to this biological fact.
I only recently began feeling dissatisfied. Until recently, I instead felt somewhat guilty and greedy about trying to have it 'all' -- a family and a career. This is because I see that many women in academia chose not to have children. But lately, my self-esteem has been more vigorous and I feel that choosing between a family and a career is not a sensible choice for society to insist upon.
I also recently read the following sentence in Psychology Today, which catalyzed my stance:
Incidentally, I went to a similar panel of female scientists about 10 years ago and I felt they were overly negative about balancing the demands of small children and research. I'm glad that your panel was more supportive. The balancing act makes me grouchy sometimes, but I think it's OK. For psychological support, I rely a lot on my female colleagues that did have children as role models. (I do not have the psychological makeup to have been a pioneer with this, so I am grateful to them.)
Just chiming in to say that "wanting to have it all" is good and absolutely not something to feel guilty about, as long as it doesn't make your failures more painful. Whenever people around you say or imply that you "ought" to be "humble", they're wrong and you're right.
Yes, I needed to first consciously recognize and then reject the meme that trying to optimize beyond what others are doing will be punished by fate.
There is the story of the greedy monkey that is an example of this meme. There's a grain of truth to the parable, so I would have to think about the distinction to be made about when to apply it and when not to.
The fate does punish, through improbability of unusual success. One would be guilty for not taking this improbability into account, and correspondingly for not heeding the heuristics that point it out. Sometimes the heuristics are wrong, and the plan is solid regardless of what they tell (for other reasons), which is where one shouldn't feel guilty for disregarding them.