Good analysis,
@Will_V.
I agree on fathers needing to be away from children to some extent, though I don't think they need to be away for weeks/months at a time, necessarily. Just having much lower availability than the mother seems to do the trick. If the mother is rearing the children and the father is working on his projects/mission most of the time, that can do it. But the father also needs enough time with the children to properly bond with them and guide them as well.
Every man has a limited amount of time and mental focus in his day. He needs to carefully choose how he'll divide that.
From my observations it's much more reliant on how much the wife/mother of his children respects his time and what he is working on than anything else (or how ably he enforces respect for his time, or separates himself from family affairs).
Elon Musk reportedly spends a lot of time sleeping under his desk at work. So obviously, he is working a lot, all the time, and many nights does not even return to the family home. I don't know the relationship with his wives, but obviously either a.) his first wife accepted this, or b.) she protested it but he ignored her to keep putting his mission first. They had heavy drama at some point and he had enough of it and divorced her. If I had to hazard a guess, it was probably drama about her feeling neglected / feeling like he wasn't around enough / was neglecting the children.
I don't think this is as possible for a guy with a regular ol' 9-to-5. You're not going to have legitimate reasons to be away from family that much, and there's not a clear path there where "If I work this much harder, ultimately I'll succeed." It will be a lot more difficult to maintain an ambitious frame and create that kind of separation from family where the wife understands and champions the husband's immersion in his mission.
Instead, you need your own company, or some kind of project you're engaged in -- something that is your calling, to which you are highly devoted. And that is still going to be tested at times -- do you really need to spend that much time on it? It would be nice if you had more time to spend with the family. Your wife misses you. You are missing your children's childhoods. Etc.
There's probably a cost to the children, having a father who is more focused on his mission than he is on the children. You don't see a lot of Mozarts producing another Mozart, Elon Musks producing another Elon Musk. Instead you get situations like Mozart, where Mozart's father was deeply devoted to training his son and steering him toward greatness. Mozart had kids (6, but only 2 survived infancy), but I doubt he put the kind of investment into them his father put into him.
It's all ultimately this balancing act of "Where do you put your time?" and "Do you have the frame control and justifications to keep it focused on Area A despite pressures to direct more of it to Area B?"
@ph40,
In my experience, most people with extreme stances, especially if they are
emotional stances, have those extremes because they are trying to keep some other emotion bottled up.
For most people, the casual sex period serves as an exploration period, where they are finding out what sort of mates they can get and hang onto. To protect themselves against settling down too early, with an insufficiently superior partner, they use various defense mechanisms against settling down. One is revulsion at the idea... but a lot of times revulsion is used to guard against something some part of the mind desires.
The guys who are likeliest to hold onto "no marriage / no babies" are guys who are firm-but-chill about it: "I'm not interested in that and I know I don't want it." They don't usually need to go barking about it, because they aren't trying to guard themselves against something some part of them deep down wants. They simply have no bone in their body that wants it, so they won't be pushed into it, but neither do they need to protest it.
There are also people who probably do have some drive deep down that want it, but they were scarred too deeply around marriage/children somehow when young, and they simply never overcome those psychological scars, and stick to the area that feels 'safer' to them (no marriage/children). Those people, too, are not usually super vocal about it, because again, not trying to convince themselves -- the loudest folks are often the ones working hardest to convince themselves (and a lot of times they're the ones who flip the most dramatically. Like I always say,
if you have to say it, it isn't true!).
Chase
