For me and my wife, we don’t have children and go out to eat almost every night. Over the past several years, we found this has turned into us staring at our phones and grunting to each other over our dinners and drinks.
While I still miss nights out, I am actually starting to look
forward to us cooking, ordering out or picking up dinner and watching a few hours together with much less being on our phones. We also saved a lot of money doing this.
My job also requires a LOT of driving and travel and shaking hands with a lot of good people, but also a lot of douchebags. That came to a grinding halt, and I found I don’t necessarily have to listen to Howard Stern every morning.
What else did you find you really don’t have to have considering the new life?
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I don’t miss all the time spent home alone, while my husband traveled internationally for work. We’re both home now with plenty of time on our hands, and that’s nice.
I don’t miss arguing with my son about the amount of time he spends on the computer. Now, he has to spend time on it for school, and I can’t carp on him to BE with his friends instead of Skyping or Facetiming. I also don’t limit his videogame or TV time anymore, and he is 13 now, so he is allowed to watch a lot more content than he used to be, and I don’t have to be so vigilant about monitoring his viewing.
Not to mention, that an unexpected side effect of practically unlimited screentime for him, is that 1) he is starting to ask me for recommendations, showing an interest in what I watch, and watching “my” movies with me; 2) it turns out he does have a limit, and looks forward to table top board game time with the neighbors. He voluntarily goes for bikerides just to get out. He is also reading actual books. Sometimes on Kindle, but I caught him reading my old Stephen Jay Gould books the other day. He was a voracious reader as an early elementary schooler, and always reads well above grade level in testing. Looks like the impetus is still there. Wait until I tell him that “Stephen Jay Gould” was on our list of names we considered for him.
Like, I hate teaching from home and I miss my students a ton but lord, 2nd period sucked all year. They just stared at me. It was like teaching a screen. I even liked most if the kids in 2nd period, just hated the class as a whole.
I’m still working so my life hasn’t changed a great deal, but I no longer am constantly beleaguered to set up meetings and luncheons, and I don’t get interrupted by people ninety-five times a day for piddly stupid shit. (Only about twelve times a day). So that’s been nice.
In that same vein - I really don’t miss faculty meetings. We still have them, but they’re on Google Hang-Out and I can have a Bloody Mary as long as I don’t let it get on camera too much.
The Indy 500 has been postponed until, IIRC, August. I am holding out hope it is cancelled altogether. I live in walking distance of the brickyard, and I HATE race day. We hole up at home that day, unless we can manage to get out of town by the Wednesday before, and stay out until the following Monday.
I don’t miss making school lunches or driving teens to their activities.
I’ve only been out once in a month, to restock groceries, and the lack of traffic was exquisite. We normally have heavy and aggressive traffic all day and much of the night in northern VA.
We keep to separate rooms for most of the day. Although that’s because we’re both working most of the day.