We got a question from Sarah. Oh, another parent question. Sarah says, do you view raising children as something that can be part of the deep life or something that is mostly an obstacle to the deep life, though valuable in a different way? So Sarah, when I think about the deep life, as you know from the show, I often think it's useful to break up the aspects of your life in the different areas that, for historical reasons on this show, we call buckets, even though that might not be the best terminology.

And what you really want to make sure is that in each of these buckets, each of these areas that's important, you're putting energy, real energy, into things that are really important, things that are really important in that bucket, and not wasting too much energy on things that are not.

One of those buckets that's probably, I would say, the most important bucket is what I often call community. But community is family, friends, and the people around you. That's the key one. I mean, I've said this before on the show. If you neglect that one, the other ones don't matter.

You might be OK for a while neglecting what's in that community bucket, neglecting family, neglecting friends, neglecting the people around you, but you have no resilience. And when you hit hard times, that bottom is going to fall, and you are going to plummet. Homo sapiens are very social beings, sacrificing on behalf, time and energy on behalf of others that are important to us is at the absolute foundation to living a deep life.

So no, it's not an obstacle to a deep life. It's a bucket you have to take care of first before you think about the craft bucket, for example, where your work might be, or before you think about the constitution bucket, where exercise and fitness and health might be, for example.

Now, the reason why I think this is an important question is you know that. So I think the issue is there's a semantic thing we should clarify. So when you say valuable in a different way, I think what's happening here is that you are defining the deep life too narrowly.

You're probably thinking of the deep life as meaning I do deep work in my job. And so a deep life does a lot of that. And anything else that gets in the way of that is an obstacle to that. That is not the deep life. And this is why I actually introduced the notion of the deep life, which I coined the term in March of 2020.

The historians among you will look at your calendars and realize there were some important things happening during that month. And the whole point of actually coining the term the deep life and starting that thinking in March of 2020 was to make sure that we were considering the whole picture of what matters in life.

That was a time period, at least that month, where people did not care much about exactly how much deep work they were doing on their job. Because if you're in the type of job that you do deep work, what you really were doing was being on Zoom all day and just panicking.

So it was a time period where we said, OK, the whole life matters, this disruption makes that clear. If you do not have all of the buckets firing what happens when there's huge disruption, your bottom falls out. You plummet. We don't want that to happen again. All parts of the deep life matter.

So no, your kids are critical to it. My whole professional life is built in part around making sure that that bucket of my deep life is serviced. It's why I do the work I do. It's why I really prioritize. And I built my entire career trajectory around this, autonomy and flexibility, control over my time.

I want to be on the short scale. I want to be able to, though I can't do it every day, have days where I'm just take the whole afternoon off and I pick the kids up and spend time with them. I want to be able to take them to their practices.

On the bigger scale, I want to take summers really quietly. I want to just be around. I want to have long breaks. The academic life gives you long breaks. The writing life gives you full autonomy. I'm really big on having huge flexibility and seasonality, busy periods and not busy periods, so I can be around and deeply ingrained in my kids' life.

We decided where we moved. We're in Tacoma Park because a family is the right place to raise a family, et cetera. So Sarah, that's all to say, no, your kids are key to your definition of the deep life. But you've got to look at all the buckets and then come up with a configuration of life that serves all of them.

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