When is the best point in your career to marry? This “hot take” by Tim Kempton, who advises startups, went viral on Twitter:
Hot take:
Don’t fall in love from 22-29, there’s to much to lose.
Your career will thank you.
— Tim Kempton (@kempton_timothy) May 19, 2023
And there appears to be some logic to it. Your young years are when you have the energy to work long hours and build your career. Having a spouse or children gives you priorities other than work, so of course, you’ll want to devote all your time to work during these years. There’s always time for love later.
And in fact, the current average marriage age seems to show that most people support Kempton’s ideas, with the average age being around 30 for men and 29 for women.
But, Kempton and other men are missing out on something: the marriage career bonus.
To keep reading, click here: Debunking the ‘Don’t Fall in Love’ Hot Take
Another way to think of this is that this person is confessing that the workload their company requires is incompatible with living a normal human life. That he expects his staff to live to work, with all other interests taken off the table.
Think of staff as machines. What machine is going to work better, one that receives routine maintenance and is used properly, or one that’s routinely pushed past its operational envelope and held together by duct tape and zip ties? What would we say about a foreman, let alone a manager, that no only allowed their equipment to be operated in such a way as to destroy it, but in fact advocating destroying machines as a way to get more production out of them? Well, that’s what this person is advocating for his staff. People, like machines, have operational envelopes. We can operate outside of them for a while, but it damages us. We can repair that damage, but if the rate of damage exceeds our capacity to repair it, we break down. This leads to burnout, skyrocketing error rates, and sky-high turnover.
The way we repair ourselves is living normal lives. Family, friends, hobbies–stuff outside of work. Everyone does it differently, but we all require this–in the same way and for the same reason that valuable machinery requires routine maintenance. It is criminal incompetence to deny your employees that which you would require for inanimate machines.
I wouldn’t trust anyone with this man’s attitude to operate a forklift, much less manage people.
Like many men this author continues to believe and promulgate the unfounded urban legend that marriage represents a net cost to men. In fact marriage is good for men’s health (physical and mental), their careers, their social lives, their finances, their relationships with their families — marriage is good for them in many ways.