i dunno.

Before you have kids you can do things. You go wine tasting or wine festivals, you go for day trips to parks and zoos and aquariums, weekend or week trips to the beach, the odd week long vacation to the beach, weekends in the mountains, concerts, or just a night out with your wife getting shit faced and flirting like you just met. And then of course there's trying the endless array of new restaurants always popping up (and later closing down).

There's microbreweries, there's plays and musicals, comedy shows, museums. And it's all great fun. It is.

But at a certain point - all that stuff is just actively combating (and increasingly poorly) your endless (but necessary) routine. You sit in traffic 40-60 minutes both way twice a day, you sit glued to a desk 8+ hours a day doing the same old shit. Even if you switch jobs, it just takes a couple of months and it feels like the same shit as the last job.

You can't "hang" like you used to. Hangovers start to hurt worse than ever. Monogamy, while it has it's deep rewards - also lends itself to the routine. While there's an argument for depth (one i'd surely make) you have to work just as hard, especially in the sack, to keep things interesting - and this means possibly running into insecurities and emotional walls and all other sorts of shit you don't feel like dealing with after 40 hours of work and some "great news" of some unexpected expense.

You get up at a certain time, you eat a certain set of things for breakfast, your lunch routine becomes mostly static, dinner becomes this revolving short list of items you make over and over again. Because new recipes take time, energy, and the possibility that it's going to go wrong. You try to cook at home so you're health (or at least your weight) doesn't go to shit as you age and your metabolism goes to hell.

Then you start taking what little time you have left and spending it in the gym. You might even enjoy it and get really into it. But that's another 30-60 minutes a day 4-6 days a week, on yet another task part of the "Great Routine".

Your decision making process somewhere in your young to mid 20s starts taking things like "legal liability" into consideration when pondering whether to do illegal drugs, things like "social/professional consequences" pop up when you and your wife talk about going to a swing club or a strip club.

But hey - you can watch whatever movies you want, read books, listen to music endlessly, start a vinyl collection, start saving money, get a house. And bam.. MORE ROUTINE. Now you have to cut grass, lime the yard, seed, fertilize, rake the leaves, shovel the snow, do repairs on the deck and siding, cut down dying trees or troublesome branches, fix your own toilets, replace the broken dishwasher or fridge - b/c hey, this isn't apartment life anymore.

It starts to dawn on you what should have been common sense all along - you need more padding more of a nest egg, more money socked away for a rainy day. So all that stuff i listed earlier that you went out and did for fun? Cut that in half, and save that money because you don't want your little empire of shit washing away.

And then somewhere along the line, you think it's smart to have a child.

And i ..i can't even rant about that. While my child is wonderful and i look at him after 4 months of getting 4 hours of sleep every other night (sometimes not even that ) the little guy melts my heart and i can't describe the love i feel.

But you can walk up to a mirror and you're shocked to see yourself reflected back, because there is no more you. Fuck your tv shows, fuck your movies, fuck your music, fuck eating healthy, fuck going to the gym, fuck fucking your wife. That boring, monotonous job you spend in a cube? Now that place is the only space of sanity and quiet you have left. It becomes the only little corner of the world that you have even the smallest illusion of control over. It becomes the one place you can talk to adults like peers, rather than to your wife where virtually all conversations have become about responsibilities, and if you're lucky one of you'll go "did you see <insert news headline>" to which you'll reply, "he was fussing all night last night and i couldn't even look at my phone for 5 minutes while rocking him to sleep"

No more weekend getaways, no more concerts, no more beach, no more cabin in the mountains, definitely no more intoxication. You can't even get a shit burger at a fucking applebees. You wake up in the morning and look at yourself in the mirror and say "fuck you. fuck you fuck you fuck you" and then get on with your miserable, existence.