Ambition may or may not be the right word to use, as others have commented. One thing I have reflected on is not if I should be making a compromise with one or the other, but why in our modern society the easiest path is to only pick one. The more I read about how to bring up healthy strong children, the more I think we've just gone backwards as a species.

There is a lot of research about the bad effects of screens and constant dopamine on long-term mental health and resilience (read The Anxious Generation by Jonathan Heidt). In reality, until just maybe 50 years ago, it was socially accepted for parents to be raising children with a support network around them. That had both good and bad sides - fewer rights for moms/women, dads less involved in parenting. But instead of fixing that, we threw out the whole idea that you need a village to support you as a parent and replaced it with career maxxing as the only prominent virtue to speak about.

I have believed in individual freedom and liberalism forever, but these days I think there is such a thing as too much individualism and we've taken that to an extreme. This makes it really hard to want or be able to raise children, and our society's long-term health suffers as a result, despite all of our scientific progress. Individual parents shouldn't be forced to have the internal debate that the author is having and pick between them - we should fix our social systems and institutions to not need that choice. But that's an even harder problem.

Someone on X, don't recall who, but it resonated.

Claude Code fits my lifestyle.

Just believe! And accept constant stress as a good thing.

In fact, I was sharing with my wife the other day that now that my kids are older I am finding myself able to give more to my work in a way I didn't/couldn't before. So my perspective is that, if you abandon the retirement mindset, you can have a fruitful and abundantly productive career later on after having prioritize your family. Especially in this early years when time spent is the most important. This post is right about that.

Bryan Cantrill (inventor of DTrace and cofounder of Oxide Computer) comes to mind as someone who seems to do both. It’s hard to know somebody’s parenting quality from the outside, but he talks about his kids a lot.

In his case, I think he didn’t start his company until his kids were older. I’m not sure what the early childhood years were like for him.

In college, I burned out on normal coursework and dropped out to teach myself how to code instead. To support myself, I worked in restaurants. I found that working as a dishwasher was quite complementary to learning to code. It was tiring physically, but I ended each day in need of mental stimulation, so went home and coded all night.

Now, as a father, I've found there's a similar complementarity in some ways but not others. There's a huge physical component to parenting, and this is perfectly complementary. There's also an emotional aspect (sometimes 2 or even 3 cry at once). This can be complementary or not depending on how much emotional labor work required (usually very little).

The one area where both work and kids is exhausting is attention. A toddler demands a huge amount of attention, and performing at work does too.