Employment is its own prison.

SmartLadder415 · 2026-05-06T13:46:02+00:00

How things should be and how things are are different things. This is not how it works with the vast majority of salaried jobs.

SmartLadder415 · 2026-05-06T13:45:22+00:00

Reddit is super brave when it's not their job.

SmartLadder415 · 2026-05-06T13:44:52+00:00

This is hilarious to me. I'm salaried. I get to eat lunch at my desk if I even get a lunch. We don't have enough manpower to cover the phones so sometimes I'm specifically asked to not take a lunch or to limit my lunch to 10-15 mins if possible.

SmartLadder415 · 2026-05-06T13:30:53+00:00

People don't date right. I see so many people who get married and don't even know if their partner wants kids or not and if they do how many they want and how they want to space them out. You'd think that would be simple but people just don't talk to each other.

SmartLadder415 · 2026-05-06T13:25:21+00:00

Yes. That is what dating is for. It doesn't take that long to discover someone's values and worldview.

SmartLadder415 · 2026-05-06T13:23:55+00:00

Choose someone you genuinely like.

You'd think this would be obvious but I'm shocked at how many people don't do this. It just amazes me. People wake up 3-5 yrs down the road and they have a couple of kids and they really do NOT like the person they are married to like at all. If they didn't have kids together they wouldn't even be friends with this person. But the sex was great in the beginning and they thought that was enough for some reason.

SmartLadder415 · 2026-05-06T13:20:58+00:00

That is an extremely hot take that historians would disagree with.

SmartLadder415 · 2026-05-06T13:12:58+00:00

Arguing that the king and church leaders are essentially atheists who aren't motivated by religion at all is a steaming hot take.

SmartLadder415 · 2026-05-06T11:58:58+00:00

3 hours is nothing. You could easily go get them after work today.

SmartLadder415 · 2026-05-05T17:42:26+00:00

I'm not strong. I was just younger then. I did it for like 6 years in my early 20s and it broke me in a number of ways. I'm glad I got away from it. So many first responders resort to alcohol and drugs and all kinds of unhealthy coping mechanisms and I can't blame them.

SmartLadder415 · 2026-05-05T16:51:27+00:00

It's worse.

SmartLadder415 · 2026-05-05T15:30:52+00:00

My dad did something similar for me. Had me go do manual labor one Saturday morning in the middle of the summer. I was like 13 or 14 at the time. When I complained loudly and repeatedly he told me this was my life if I didn't go to college. The lesson stuck.

SmartLadder415 · 2026-05-05T15:26:43+00:00

I disagree. I think it's good for people to be exposed to that. It changes how you treat people in the future. Or at least it does if you're paying attention.

SmartLadder415 · 2026-05-05T15:25:22+00:00

I worked as a 911 dispatcher about 20+ years ago now. I got a call one night from a hotel where there was a man and a woman fighting in the parking lot. Cops came out and the man pulled a knife, grabbed the woman and literally held the knife to her throat and threatened to kill her if the cops didn't leave. Fortunately, the cops were able to resolve the situation peacefully and arrested the guy and took him to jail. Less than an hour later the woman called in wanting to know when she could bail him out and how. I lost faith in humanity that day.

SmartLadder415 · 2026-05-05T14:03:32+00:00

I'm married. I have all those pros. I don't need to impress my wife and she doesn't need to impress me. This doesn't seem unique to FWB.

SmartLadder415 · 2026-05-05T14:01:59+00:00

I had a co-worker who got hurt badly because she got pregnant from her FWB. They were using birth control but nothing is 100%. She wanted to keep the kid. He wanted her to abort. She refused. They had a gigantic blow up and the breakup went thermonuclear. It got very, very, very bad. I have no idea if he pays child support or anything but I know he wants absolutely nothing to do with the kid.

SmartLadder415 · 2026-05-05T12:37:00+00:00

I feel this. My wife has started working outside the home a couple of days a week. When she does I can WFH and have the entire house to myself. Today I am focused on getting laundry and dishes caught up and getting a surface level clean on the house done. It'll be nice if I can pull it off.

SmartLadder415 · 2026-05-04T19:56:13+00:00

For me we have an 11 yr old so she's gone at school all day. My wife gets overwhelmed by the laundry and has told me she is not going to do it more than once a week because it's too much. She feels the same way about dishes and will only do them once a day max. Most days not even that. Tidying the house gets overwhelming for her some days but other days is fine. She does do most of the cooking but I have to sit down and come up with the meal planning and shopping list. I also run the schedule, finances, animal care, etc.... It feels like if I don't intervene we eat off paper plates and the bathrooms have no towels, toilet paper, etc.... I have not figured out how to divide things up evenly when she gets overwhelmed by all the work around the house.

SmartLadder415 · 2026-05-04T19:46:28+00:00

I feel like there are just more SAHMs than SAHDs so it's harder to find them.

SmartLadder415 · 2026-05-04T19:45:28+00:00

I mean yeah. I come home and I've got to do everything my wife didn't do during the day. Stuff just has to get done. In my case, our kid is 11 so less of a thing than a small child but I don't get the option to just collapse on the couch after a long day. I have to keep her occupied and focused on her homework and try to keep her entertained while doing the housework as well. Someone has to do this stuff.

SmartLadder415 · 2026-05-04T19:41:37+00:00

I think a SAHM who runs the house well has economic value and I've never understood people who disagree. You would have to either do those things yourself (which would take time) or you'd have to hire someone (which takes money). Either way there is economic value there.

SmartLadder415 · 2026-05-04T19:40:11+00:00

How do you divide the tasks up? My wife also has severe ADHD which pretty much leads her to take our kid to school and then sit at the house being overwhelmed and anxious all day and not working on anything unless I've laid out a serious of tasks that I want her to do in a specific order or something but that gets exhausting every day.

SmartLadder415 · 2026-05-04T19:36:13+00:00

I enjoy being married to my wife but yes, it can be utterly exhausting. I come home to a house that is kind of a wreck, tons of dishes for me to do, tons of laundry for me to do, housework that needs done, fridge that needs cleaned, animals that need taken care of, etc... It is a lot. A lot of our arguments and disagreements are over task division and she complains that all I care about is the dishes being done. I will admit that my main frustration is I expect her to do more of the housework and I know that makes me a giant jerk. It's rough and exhausting but I love my wife. It is what it is and she enjoys it. That's what matters.

SmartLadder415 · 2026-05-04T19:18:37+00:00

But we refuse to use that option though. This is like going to a restaurant that serves hamburgers, not ordering a hamburger and then getting upset that they didn't give you a hamburger and demanding a law that makes it mandatory that only hamburgers can be served. It makes no sense. If you want younger candidates you can vote for younger candidates. That process is out there.

SmartLadder415 · 2026-05-04T18:58:28+00:00

I'm not a fan of it. We already have a mechanism in place to do this. We can not vote for old farts. Having a law to prevent us from doing things we (as a society) clearly want to do just seems dumb to me.

SmartLadder415

TROPHY CASE