Time Bandits

Don’t let them rob you of posterity

As director of graduate placement, my job is to help PhD students develop their application materials, guide them through the job market, and give them the talk.

“Listen up,” I say, in our final meeting. “You won’t succeed unless you follow this advice.” I have their full attention.

“Don’t have children. Get married if you like, but no kids.”

Brows furrow.

“You wrote a dissertation. Congratulations. It means nothing until you harvest standalone articles and get them published. After that you’ll develop a new research program—without an advisor holding your hand, while teaching two or three classes a semester. Then a high-impact book synthesizing a decade or two of intense study. Unless, of course, you make that fatal mistake.

“You can write,” I continue. “Or you can have kids. It’s up to you.”

I can see I haven’t reached them.

“You’re probably calling to mind great thinkers who had families. Those people produced. They worked every day, well beyond 9 to 5. Ask their kids how they liked having a parent who always chose work over them.

“Children are thieves of time,” I growl, banging the table. “For each one you lose ten top-tier journal articles.”

In the introduction to his slim essay collection on fatherhood, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Michael Chabon recounts a lecture along these lines, delivered in private by an older and more accomplished male writer, months before Chabon’s first book was due to be published. Chabon is a novelist, but the argument extends naturally to other creative or intellectual vocations: poet, artist, philosopher, mathematician, scientist, filmmaker.

Is that you? Listen up.

Your work is a practice. The more you do it, the better you become, and the more you produce. “Excellence plus productivity, that is the formula for sustained success, and time is the coefficient of both.”

One PhD student in my department, currently on the job market, has two children just a couple of years younger than mine (I have two girls, thank God). He and I have both had the experience of realizing newfound efficiency, capitalizing on opportunities for work that, pre-parenthood, we certainly would have squandered. Unquestionably, though, we have less time than we used to.

Of course, it’s much harder for women to combine deep work with parenthood. Pregnancy and early motherhood are brutal, not just on the body but on the brain too. Historically, accomplished women couldn’t do both; they either didn’t have children or abandoned them.

Perhaps Chabon achieved so much only because his wife bore more of the load—though she is on the record denying it. In any case, with four kids and enormous success, he can afford to look back and laugh off the advice. He has it all.

You might not be so lucky. With too little time, your aspirations might turn into failures. Maybe you’re a humanities academic like me, and the world will be deprived only of your magnum opus on some paper-thin slice of reality. But what if your work truly matters? You could have produced a novel that echoes through the ages, a body of art that alters the course of history, a drug that saves millions of lives.

Don’t make that fatal mistake.

Great artists and intellectuals, Chabon observes, will never know whether their work is immortalized or consigned to oblivion. “That’s the problem, in the end, with putting all your chips on posterity: You never stick around long enough to enjoy it.”

From the point of view of the universe, it hardly matters. The value of a great artistic or scientific achievement surpasses all else. But from your point of view? Then what’s at issue isn’t objective value but personal meaning.

What if, in choosing kids, Chabon had never written any more novels?

“In the long run the result would have been the same…I will die; and the world in its violence and serenity will roll on, through the endless indifference of space; and it will take only one hundred of its circuits around the sun to turn the six of us, who loved each other, to dust….

Once they’re written, my books, unlike my children, hold no wonder for me; no mystery resides in them. Unlike my children, my books are cruelly unforgiving of my weaknesses, failings, and flaws of character. Most of all, my books, unlike my children, do not love me back.”

Chabon’s eldest is fully grown; mine is only six, and the bulk of fatherhood is still before me. But even here, near the beginning of this journey, there is so much to cherish: their vocabulary outpacing elocution; their curiosity expanding, ravenous and unbound; their easy forgiveness; all four of us loving each other, in all combinations, compounding.

My life and the lives of other parents I know refute the lectures. It’s not children but work that steals your time.

Singularly focused on my career, I didn’t meet my wife until 35, didn’t have children until 39. I wanted to be a father, in theory, but I had other priorities. Someone should have pulled me aside and warned me that my work was eating into years I would otherwise spend with my children, threatening to preempt their existence entirely. Maybe someone did. I ignored them. (Regret is impossible. Had I listened, my children would not exist and my wife would be a stranger. But it’s different when your future is yet to be written.)

Many peers might pity the PhD student in our program whose offspring compete for time with his dissertation. But he has children; some never will. And he will enjoy extra years with them that others are squandering.

I think of friends and acquaintances who expect to be fathers but continue to prioritize their careers, blind to the urgency. I want to shake them by the shoulders.

“You can write or you can have kids. It’s up to you.”

Well, no. The trade-off, while real, isn’t quite this stark, even for those of us without the talent and drive to do Pulitzer-worthy work. I did finish this essay, after all (despite several interruptions).

A meaningful life doesn’t require children to trump art or inquiry. But your priorities, like mine a decade ago, might be misaligned, by degrees, with what matters to you—what will matter, even if it doesn’t register yet. If you’re betting on posterity, spread your chips evenly.

Thanks to Meghan Nesmith for all this meaning