Hehe. Not sad. I’m wondering if/when you should walk away from a good job.
No math can help you and no suggestion as well.
Use a dice.
You might get some hints on Monday mornings or after a vacation. I don’t trust those moments though, but my life seems to be in a way worse position than yours.
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I agree with @ma0 , except the “dice” is too easy. 
Listen to your gut-feeling (@ma0 's suggestion re Monday morning etc. is probably quite helpful for this).
I wasn’t in a cosy niche of a niche (let’s say “easy money” for you), but my salary was also good, yet I hated my job, I hated Monday morning, so when my maths seemed safe, I left. And I could probably go back, although this isn’t reliable of course. Seems I had it easy (making the decision).
Sorry, can’t help much.
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Yeah. I went through that phase during covid. Parents were sick, but I couldn’t fly to visit them. At the same time, we moved house and contractors basically stopped working due to covid restrictions so we lived in a building site for a year cooking on a camping stove while trying to work from home with 2 kids (one newborn) while the daycare was also shutdown. At that time I had a new boss and my job was on the firing line. Not surprisingly, I burned out that year but didn’t realise it at the time. Although, I guess it helped in the end as I adjusted roles, and put my head down and went into survival mode and eventually took the chill out route I’m on today. Those days, I also hated working, but had no choice but to continue.
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That’s the strange thing. Before kids, I wanted to retire and do a whole load of stuff. Maybe now I lost some drive or energy. Part of me suspects that I just need to quit and take a year to ‘decompress’ and then I’ll get the same energy and drive to do stuff back. I think part of it is a hangover from burnout/covid which I never fully recovered from.
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wow man, being single and having 3 kids plus working on a side-gig… I could never imagine this mental strength. Chapeau!
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to chip in:
- same here with broken social network after having moved out of my old country
- kid born during covid → complete isolation, friends gone, scaled back to 80% work so I can be more balanced.
- I’ve let my hobbies completely go for 5 years, mostly in order not to let the missus handle everything all the time (it felt selfish to leave her behind for me to go out for drinks, so we got into a deadlock of never going anywhere).
- now it’s slowly getting better, I picked up my sports again
What is hard to negotiate is the free time thing:
- work until 6pm, sometimes later
- do kid things until 8-9pm
- spend 1 hour with my partner (netflix time as we’re usually tired by then to do anything reasonable) - or we just remove the chaos from the flat and prepare for tomorrow
- “me time” after 10pm, but here I’m mentally dead to study/upskill, physically dead to do sports late at night, so it’s already compromised
- fall to bed at 11pm or midnight, only to be tired in the morning
The handcuffs… been trying to move laterally for a while, no chance in Switzerland (seems you need to have done a job for 5 years at least in order to be considered for the same role anywhere else), so now I’m stuck with a relatively comfy role but with a heavy glass ceiling.
I had my mid-life car 5 years ago (it was brutal and awesome fun alone, but mostly it was cruising with a sleeping baby on ECO PRO at 90% of the time 
). Now I know I don’t actually need these things.
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That’s really the million-dollar question, isn’t it? If you’re going to give something up, you have to replace it with something that gives you more.
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Well, that all sounds very familiar and I hope things improve for you. I think you should alternate so you each get some time away. I remember doing that for the first time after a few years of kid/covid isolation and feeling much better for it and enjoyed having adult conversation with different people!
We do get to do stuff. My wife runs every evening while I take care of the kids and maybe she goes and meets friends once every month or two.
For a while I was doing sports once a week - but an injury put paid to that (a wake-up call for me that a seemingly trivial injury can have a massive impact on your life in terms of mobility, activities you can do and general mental and physical well-being - know I know that I really need to prioritise health if I want to enjoy my future years).
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Are you me? I could have written that word for word, down to the timings.
What car? I gave up dreams of cars for a motorcycle and aren’t looking back!
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How does the time till 6pm look like?
Reason I ask:
I love to have the first hour of the day for myself to do strength exercice, read a book or just think.
Right after waking up I’m full of energy compared to the last hour of the day, so I rather go to bed earlier and be much more productive (and happier) that way.
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I’ve always been a night owl so had to adjust when kids arrive (who like to wake up between 6am and 7am).
The day goes like this:
- 6.30am - Wife wakes up and starts getting breakfast ready
- 7.30am - Wife leaves for work, I take over and get kids to actually eat their breakfast instead of messing around, brush their teeth and get their stuff ready for school
- 8.00am - Leave house and drop off kids
- 8.30am - Arrive at work
- 4.30pm[1] - Leave work, get kids, go home to make dinner
- 5.30pm[1:1] - Eat dinner
- 6.30pm[1:2] - Try to get kids to finish their dinner
- 7.00pm - Bath and brush teeth for kids. Start bedtime routine, reading etc.
- 7.30pm - In ideal world kids in bed
- 8.00pm - When kids are actually in bed. Time to clean-up. Check work emails and catch-up on work. Wife goes running.
- 9.00pm - Spend time with wife.
- 9.30pm - Wife sleeps.
- 9.30pm - I either go to bed if tired or go to do my stuff (work, manage investments, side-hustles, hobbies)
- 10.00pm - 2.00am Bedtime. Tends to vary on various factors, but recently, I’ve fallen asleep with wife already at 9.30pm. Sometimes if I get hungry and eat again, I am awake until 2am, but time between midnight and 2am is generally ‘wasted’ on mindless internet stuff so prefer to sleep now before midnight if possible.
In reality can be complicated as kids have activities on Mondays, Wednesday and Thursday which requires shuttling them to different places. Worst is Wednesday for eldest which starts just before 6pm and home by 8pm but requires either dinner prep in-between so he can eat on the way there or back, or getting food on the way back ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎
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This is the only way I’ve found that actually works for me to increase my levels of energy and availability of quality time in my days.
It doesn’t need to be a big workout either, 20min of dumbbells works fine for me to just maintain a positive and energetic mental state (which is my purpose, it doesn’t help much with my roundish belly).
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Have you thought about finding someone to shuttle children to different activities during the day time? If you have good public transportation around, a “mature” teenager can also do it.
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Yes, we are considering this for next school year, but finding someone reliable is not so easy.
I would love that but I’m a night owl, I’m more productive between 5 to 10pm to do stuff alone (usually when the office is empty).
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I tried that once for a week and I had incredible energy in the morning, but completely crashed in the afternoon!
Great hobbies for the post 9:30pm phase:
Warhammer (creative / painting / strategy)
Magic the Gathering (intellectual)
Video games are an infinite domain if you like them
You could also become a niche collector of some kind of thing. Pokemon and MTG are entries - but people also do this with art, cars etc.
You might also start a hobby that connects to being a parent in the future. Fixing cars for example - for future moments with your kids.
Video games destroy your sleep though. Esp. if you end up playing all night and not sleeping
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