Is Raising Kids Part of the Deep Life?

00:00:00.000 | [MUSIC PLAYING]

00:00:03.400 | We got a question from Sarah.

00:00:09.120 | Oh, another parent question.

00:00:11.800 | Sarah says, do you view raising children

00:00:15.080 | as something that can be part of the deep life

00:00:16.960 | or something that is mostly an obstacle to the deep life,

00:00:20.800 | though valuable in a different way?

00:00:25.160 | So Sarah, when I think about the deep life,

00:00:27.680 | as you know from the show, I often

00:00:30.560 | think it's useful to break up the aspects of your life

00:00:33.640 | in the different areas that, for historical reasons

00:00:36.480 | on this show, we call buckets, even though that might not

00:00:38.900 | be the best terminology.

00:00:40.200 | And what you really want to make sure

00:00:41.760 | is that in each of these buckets, each of these areas

00:00:44.000 | that's important, you're putting energy, real energy,

00:00:49.160 | into things that are really important, things

00:00:50.880 | that are really important in that bucket,

00:00:52.620 | and not wasting too much energy on things that are not.

00:00:55.440 | One of those buckets that's probably, I would say,

00:00:57.760 | the most important bucket is what I often call community.

00:01:01.440 | But community is family, friends,

00:01:04.680 | and the people around you.

00:01:07.240 | That's the key one.

00:01:08.840 | I mean, I've said this before on the show.

00:01:10.840 | If you neglect that one, the other ones don't matter.

00:01:15.840 | You might be OK for a while neglecting

00:01:18.880 | what's in that community bucket, neglecting family,

00:01:21.000 | neglecting friends, neglecting the people around you,

00:01:23.220 | but you have no resilience.

00:01:25.200 | And when you hit hard times, that bottom is going to fall,

00:01:28.240 | and you are going to plummet.

00:01:29.480 | Homo sapiens are very social beings,

00:01:32.960 | sacrificing on behalf, time and energy on behalf of others

00:01:36.760 | that are important to us is at the absolute foundation

00:01:39.960 | to living a deep life.

00:01:41.200 | So no, it's not an obstacle to a deep life.

00:01:44.160 | It's a bucket you have to take care of first

00:01:46.320 | before you think about the craft bucket, for example,

00:01:50.320 | where your work might be, or before you

00:01:53.120 | think about the constitution bucket, where

00:01:57.280 | exercise and fitness and health might be, for example.

00:02:01.680 | Now, the reason why I think this is an important question

00:02:04.000 | is you know that.

00:02:06.640 | So I think the issue is there's a semantic thing

00:02:09.680 | we should clarify.

00:02:12.200 | So when you say valuable in a different way,

00:02:14.320 | I think what's happening here is that you are defining

00:02:17.520 | the deep life too narrowly.

00:02:20.160 | You're probably thinking of the deep life

00:02:22.000 | as meaning I do deep work in my job.

00:02:28.160 | And so a deep life does a lot of that.

00:02:30.400 | And anything else that gets in the way of that

00:02:32.280 | is an obstacle to that.

00:02:33.800 | That is not the deep life.

00:02:35.080 | And this is why I actually introduced

00:02:36.320 | the notion of the deep life, which I coined

00:02:38.120 | the term in March of 2020.

00:02:41.320 | The historians among you will look at your calendars

00:02:43.880 | and realize there were some important things happening

00:02:46.360 | during that month.

00:02:47.280 | And the whole point of actually coining

00:02:49.280 | the term the deep life and starting

00:02:50.800 | that thinking in March of 2020 was

00:02:54.200 | to make sure that we were considering the whole picture

00:02:56.440 | of what matters in life.

00:02:57.720 | That was a time period, at least that month,

00:02:59.760 | where people did not care much about exactly how much deep work

00:03:04.360 | they were doing on their job.

00:03:07.480 | Because if you're in the type of job that you do deep work,

00:03:10.840 | what you really were doing was being on Zoom all day

00:03:13.000 | and just panicking.

00:03:15.600 | So it was a time period where we said, OK, the whole life

00:03:17.920 | matters, this disruption makes that clear.

00:03:20.920 | If you do not have all of the buckets firing what

00:03:23.080 | happens when there's huge disruption,

00:03:25.480 | your bottom falls out.

00:03:26.880 | You plummet.

00:03:27.440 | We don't want that to happen again.

00:03:28.960 | All parts of the deep life matter.

00:03:30.400 | So no, your kids are critical to it.

00:03:33.200 | My whole professional life is built in part

00:03:36.440 | around making sure that that bucket of my deep life

00:03:39.440 | is serviced.

00:03:41.440 | It's why I do the work I do.

00:03:44.520 | It's why I really prioritize.

00:03:46.600 | And I built my entire career trajectory

00:03:48.280 | around this, autonomy and flexibility,

00:03:51.560 | control over my time.

00:03:53.200 | I want to be on the short scale.

00:03:55.640 | I want to be able to, though I can't do it every day,

00:03:57.840 | have days where I'm just take the whole afternoon off

00:04:00.200 | and I pick the kids up and spend time with them.

00:04:02.680 | I want to be able to take them to their practices.

00:04:04.760 | On the bigger scale, I want to take summers really quietly.

00:04:07.520 | I want to just be around.

00:04:08.920 | I want to have long breaks.

00:04:11.560 | The academic life gives you long breaks.

00:04:13.200 | The writing life gives you full autonomy.

00:04:15.280 | I'm really big on having huge flexibility and seasonality,

00:04:19.240 | busy periods and not busy periods,

00:04:20.640 | so I can be around and deeply ingrained in my kids' life.

00:04:23.960 | We decided where we moved.

00:04:25.120 | We're in Tacoma Park because a family is the right place

00:04:27.520 | to raise a family, et cetera.

00:04:28.800 | So Sarah, that's all to say, no, your kids

00:04:31.360 | are key to your definition of the deep life.

00:04:33.520 | But you've got to look at all the buckets

00:04:35.240 | and then come up with a configuration of life

00:04:36.960 | that serves all of them.

00:04:38.000 | [MUSIC PLAYING]

00:04:41.360 | (upbeat music)

Is Raising Kids Part of the Deep Life?

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