There’s a conference called Less Online happening at the end of this month. I’ve done a lot of editing for the organization throwing it over the years, and there will be various people there I’d like to meet. Will I be attending? Alas, I will not.
Could I afford it? Probably. But my wife is pregnant, and we’re going to her cousin’s high school graduation out of town just before the conference. If she weren’t pregnant, I could conceivably go straight from the graduation to the conference. And if we weren’t going to the graduation, I could do my best to set her up to thrive without me for a few days. But the combination makes it feel like a little too much - we’ll already be stressed and tired from travel, and I don’t want to either:
Burn myself out from back to back travel and be unable to be a very supportive husband for a while
Leave her alone with an unknown degree of morning sickness
The more direct reason I’m not going, beyond these post hoc (though valid!) emotional considerations, is that we kept putting off getting our plane tickets to the graduation, and when I finally did it it would have been too complicated to consider yet another variable of me going off to a second place rather than coming home. Basically, life was so full on a moment-to-moment basis that the abstract exercise of yet another tradeoff was too much. So I’m missing out on the extra opportunities of such a conference, and leaning more into my role as supportive spouse.
I feel good about this. It’s a little bit of a bummer to see people promoting the conference, and seeing the guest list of attendees. I attended a similar conference on a whim in 2014, and ended up pledging to give away 10% of my income to effective charity until I retired (and started a freelance editing practice that’s made me… well, probably less than 10% of my income since then). Going would be valuable! But there’s a kind of fractal fullness going on - my hours feel full, and my days, and my weeks, and my months. So my planning lives in the realm of the margin: I can add or subtract daily practices that don’t cost too much willpower, but big changes feel out of reach.
This is a really interesting place to be, for someone with a, shall we say, somewhat artistic temperament. Flights of fancy - which for years have provided me with a lot of my joy - feel out of reach. Life has a plodding quality, which is sometimes sad. But I think the bigger feeling is a steady, quavering warmth. My life is full because I’ve filled it with stuff I like and care about. Every day I do math, and write, and take a walk, and do a few minutes of calisthenics, and journal, and do something nice for my wife that she’s asked for. A baby is on the way. My money goes toward helping my family and helping people in need across the world. It’s not a perfect life by any means, and there is something haunting about knowing that, given it’s so full, it probably won’t suddenly become ten times as fun. But it’s good.
And then there’s the biggest fact, the thing more exciting and terrifying than any conference. The thing that will make this post an Ozymandias statue, poking its head out of the sand. If all goes well (please let all go well) I’ll be a parent soon.
I wonder how full my life now will look to me, sleepless and besieged by diapers, then?