“One day you’ll wake up and you’re no longer their favorite person.”
I looked down at my daughter who was tirelessly gnawing on a rubber giraffe. She had a thin strip of strawberry blond hair and her tiny mouth was producing buckets of drool. At barely four months, she was my favorite person. And Lisa and I were her favorite people too.
A colleague from Blackrock had shared this pithy quip about parenthood. And even though we were still measuring my daughter’s life in weeks, those words hung over me with a heavy sadness. He called this period the Magic Window, which lasted ten years. Twelve, if you were lucky.
During this Magic Window, Lisa and I would be the center of Soriya’s universe. She would want nothing more than to spend that time with us. She would cry when I left for a business trip — even if it was just one night. On Saturday mornings she would barnstorm our bed and wedge her little body in between us as the middle spoon. And whenever we left the house, she’d wait patiently by the door like a wistful puppy waiting to smother us with hugs and kisses upon our return.
And then, things would change. Slowly. And then all of a sudden.
Friends would play a bigger role in her life. Then independence. Then phones. Love interests.
“Savor it,” he admonished me. “Because I got teenagers and that shit is totally gone for me. It happens faster then you think.”
I was barely a dad and wanted to bottle up those precious years and savor them for the rest of my life.
Unfortunately, corporate America had different plans for me. My peers were mostly urban professionals in their early 30s and this was a special time of life. We were drinking from the firehose of early parenthood. Yet at the same time, we were hitting our professional stride. We were in our Peak Earnings years*,* where we were no longer rewarded for sheer output. We managed teams and had built up professional capital.
This left our cohort a stone’s throw away from major milestones — becoming a partner in Big Law or Consulting, a Managing Director on Wall Street or a practicing surgeon. And of course, significant pay increases.
But there was also a big problem. The Peak Earning Years were on a collision course with the Magic Window.
This binary choice was completely unappealing to me. At 35 years old, I was way too young to walk away from my Peak Earnings. But I also didn’t want being a father to be some side activity that got squeezed into the air pockets of a demanding job.
As I looked at my peers who were 10 years ahead of me, I couldn’t deny that they had a great exterior life. They had what I called the Managing Director’s Starter Pack: A 5 bedroom house in a posh suburb (like Summit, NJ), his-and-hers BMW X5s and their kids went to elite private schools that placed 25% of each class in the Ivy Leagues. If they didn’t have a second home (ski house in Park City or beach house out East in the Hamptons) they vacationed exclusively at the Four Seasons and would fly business.
I like material stuff and there were certain elements (staying in 5 star hotels and the prospect of owning a house next to a surf break) that were appealing to us. But what really attracted me to their situation was that these older colleagues didn’t seem to worry about money. Yes, they definitely worried about keeping up with their peers. But when it came to paying for college, covering unexpected medical expenses or supporting a nephew who totaled his car — they never really had to think twice. Even if they did have to dip into their savings, the deficit would easily be recouped by a few paychecks or their year-end bonus.
However, this financial peace of mind came at a steep cost. You had to make a deal with devil. And fully surrender your time freedom. Every iota of your mind space would be owned by your boss. One of my most successful friends cracked into the hedge fund industry in his mid-20s and began making a million dollars a year. But he had a maniacal boss, who treated him like a notebook. He would pepper him with one sentence emails every 10 minutes. These emails could be a thought (“buy more IBB”), a directive (“what are The Street’s estimates Bank of America earnings?”), a forwarded message (“how does this impact our position?”), project planning (“update model to include implied vol”), feedback (“speak up during investment committee meeting”) and personal inquiries (“favorite west village Italian?”). He would receive these emails at work, in the middle of the night, when we were wasted on Friday nights and while he was on vacation. (He was never clear on which ones needed a response and just tried his best to stay on top of them.)
While this was admittedly an extreme example it was fully representative of this deal with the devil. We pay you a lot, but whenever we need you, your time is ours.
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The Long-Term Cost of Always Putting Work First
It’s hard to fully capture the trade-offs between prioritizing career over family, friends and your health. This was a private DM from a 32 year old investment analyst at a family office. They were working this hard with the goal of retiring before they turned 40. Here’s the full exchange (edited for clarity and shared with permission):
Your spending will go up. You’ll pay any amount of money to buy back a moment of rest, so suddenly you’re paying for a house cleaner, more Ubers to get around, quick take-out work lunches, fancy restaurants (because you “deserve it,” and because it’s one of the few ways high-income professionals spend time together), expensive vacations to escape the pain. This is an insidious trap because with higher spending, you’ll start thinking to yourself “well I need to make all this money to afford my lifestyle” and you’re at risk of getting stuck on the treadmill.
You lose your ability to think clearly about your life. When you’re that worn down, you stop making rational decisions about what you want out of life in the long term. You just keep plodding ahead and start to forget all the other things (outside of work) that used to be important to you.
You lose your ability to think creatively. Yes, your work suffers – but more importantly, your humanity suffers. You stop solving problems in your life with creativity, and instead try to solve them all with money.
You lose your ability to relax and experience joy. It’s constant survival mode. Even basic things that used to be enjoyable, like a nice walk to the grocery store on Sunday with your partner to cook dinner together, become a frantic scramble to get through as fast as possible. One more item on the to-do list to “get through.”
You lose openness and extraversion. When all of your energy goes into work, you don’t have enough left to give to the important people in your life. You give your best self to work and bring home a shell to your partner.
Over the years, it takes a toll on your friendships, your romantic relationship, your nice well-rounded life that you used to live.
And here’s the real trap: If you do it for long enough, the rest of your life will decay and you’ll have nothing to go back to. You’ll start thinking to yourself “what’s the point of stopping? I have no hobbies, no friends, no other interests. I don’t even know what I’d do with all that free time. At least if I stay here I’ll make lots of money. The company protects me. I’m safe here.”
When and if you do stop, you might be surprised to look up and find that life hasn’t just been waiting there for you. Life has moved on. Your friends don’t text you because you said no the last 10 times they tried. You and your partner have forgotten how to spend time together. You haven’t had a deep meaningful conversation in years, and you’re not sure what you have in common anymore. You remember that you used to play the guitar, or read the classics, or trail run, or mountain bike, but those are just a distant memory. Now they feel like childish pursuits for an adult who’s supposed to be working.
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Parenthood seemed backwards to me.