For me everything changed within 15 minutes of becoming a father. I used to want to change the world. Startups promotions etc. My son showed me a point on the line that was so far out that when I zoomed out, I couldn’t see the career stuff as anything other than a point on the origin. Now the only thing that gives me meaning is my children.
I’m the same way. I used to have grand career ambitions, but now I have a young daughter who has become my sole focus. I have a stable job which pays me enough to comfortably support my family, has a healthy my work/life balance, and gives me interesting projects to work on. That’s all that I need from my career at this point in my life.
That's something else still. But yes, I've become more driven and more focused on ensuring financial safety for my family as well, in addition to not losing much of my interests so far.
I mean, this was probably my biggest fear about parenthood. Observing other parents, I've noticed that a lot of them lost everything that made them interesting. The kids are the only things they care about now. I don't see this as a good thing - not for parents, and not for the children. If a parent's entire self gets consumed by child-rearing, what example do they set for their children? That the point of their adult life is to have a (arbitrary, but hopefully well-paying) job in order to support their own children, perpetuating the cycle of doing nothing but breeding and dying? Isn't that meaningless and boring? To me, it is. And I'd hazard a guess that this is where midlife crisis comes from - when one's children are self-sufficient and the role of a parent is over, one realizes they have a 20 years old hole in their life, into which everything they were disappeared.
(This is my perspective as of right now. But the funny thing with perspectives is that they depend on where you stand - so who knows, maybe I'm wrong now and three years from now I'll be arguing the exact opposite? I don't expect to, but I can't rule it out.)
It (probably) won't. My kids are years older than yours and I have only increased my workload, transitioning from an FTE at a software shop to running a small business (not out of my house).
Home office is a wonderful thing, but now that I'm a dad, I find myself wishing for an actual, external office. Not because I don't like my own home, but because catching even a tiniest fragment of my daughter's cry next door is incredibly, incredibly distracting - even though my wife is taking care of her perfectly, I have to fight myself to not just get out of the study and render assistance.
