Design systems are a means to an end. They’re as much about enabling delivery without requiring a designer to design every feature from scratch each time as they are about ensuring cohesive overall design. I can see this being a viable alternative path to the first if you’re happy with a slight hit to the second.
You and your love for and acceptance of their kids and willingness to show up to family-friendly activities are very likely the key to their ability to do this.
Speaking from the other side, but having been on your side for most of my 20s and 30s and felt exactly how you do, they probably do feel you detached from them.
Their lives fundamentally changed to the extent that as you say, any gathering necessarily must be on terms that allow them to parent.
And the level of last-minute cancellations and apologies increase.
And on top of that, they’re just not prioritising reaching out to you. Mainly because parenting occupies 25 hours of most days and they’re exhausted, but they’re also probably assuming that any activity in reach for them, like simply getting coffee at a playground while they try to make sure their kid doesn’t eat too much sand, is not your idea of a fun time.
So your outreach tapered down in response, but that is ultimately your choice.
The alternative requires you to quite selflessly keep up the outreach and be OK with a lower hit rate, and lean into the fact that you have far, far greater flexibility to meet on their terms than they do to meet on yours.
Not doing that is not an unreasonable choice, but they probably miss you and want you to be part of their kids lives.
Anyway, thanks for sharing this point of view. It’s a hard situation.
I’m not going to comment on whether I think you’re right or wrong, your opinion is legitimate.
But just to note that this and similar opinions in the thread confirm what I’ve experienced, both as a SINK/DINK and as a parent.
More often than not it’s the SINKs/DINKs that disappear off the face of the earth and lose interest in participating in the suddenly very different lives of their new parent friends, and not the other way around.
Something that is not yet known to be an indicator that you’re at risk of a condition.
Perhaps you were given some medication that is later proven harmful. Maybe there’s a sign in your blood test results that in future will strongly correlate with a condition that emerges in your 50s. Maybe a study will show that having no appendix correlates with later issues.
How confident are you that the data will never be used against you by future insurance, work screening, dating apps, immigration processes, etc
> a significant proportion of the people you used to hang out with have kids and disappear off the face of the Earth for two decades.
I’ve been on both sides of this, so I’m going to put this out into the universe:
Your friends with kids still want to see you.
They have a lot to deal with suddenly. They’re exhausted.
But they miss hanging out with you, and will leap at the opportunity to hang out if you take the initiative and make some kid-friendly accommodations.
They may decline more often than before, because the kid is sick or sleeping or not sleeping so the adults just need to lay low. But don’t take that “no” as a “stop asking”.
Yes! Occasionally I try to get it to do something labor-saving for me in a doc or sheet, and every single time “I’m sorry, I can’t do that”
As far as I can tell Gemini in gsuite can do nothing other than summarise text and regular LLM q&a (but with Gemini’s perennially sad, apologetic persona)
Sometimes I feel like I live in a parallel universe to these guys who see value in things like this.
Where my life is mundane shit that most of the time I don’t even need the current generation of tech anywhere near. Walking the dog. Playing with and looking after my kids. Everyday conversations and intimacy with my wife. Barbecues with friends. Work.
And these guys lives are just working out, coding, and cooking on-trend dishes with expensive cookware, all to be relentlessly optimised.
An effective targeted ad platform is also expensive to develop and keep current.
They either build something as effective and invasive as what Google and Meta have, and prioritise ad revenue as much as those companies do.
Or they stay closer to the ineffective ad network they already have in News, App Store, etc, neither putting their money where their cultural mouth is nor becoming an ad revenue behemoth.
You have the budget and growing maturity to experience things a 20 year old backpacker can’t, and the body, freedom, and tolerance for discomfort for experiences that won’t happen if you wait until you’re 40 or have kids.
It’s a waste to only allow week-long sugar hit breaks from work over the next decade to experience it. Decide now when you’ll take six to twelve months to travel without working.
Why do YouTube creators deserve special treatment compared to any other entity whose analytics are impacted by adblockers?
Every publisher on the internet has been bleating for years about how adblockers negatively impact their business and their ability to provide [some value] to customers.
If your ability to generate value is hitched to surveillance capitalism then that’s a choice, whether you’re a folksy mom and pop YouTube creator or a multinational publisher.