Husband's demand for ‘me time' after ‘stressful' work day scrutinized by stay-at-home-mom sympathizers: ‘Can you buck up?'
The man, a dad of three — ages nine, six and two — recently spilled his burnout woes on Reddit's AITAH [Am I The A—hole?] forum.
'I work in healthcare, so I can have pretty full-on/stressful days and can often feel very emotionally as well as physically drained when I get home from work and have been feeling increasingly burnt out recently.'
After long, stressful days, he claimed he's running on empty. 'I find I can function at work to get the job done, but once I'm home, I've got nothing in the tank, which leads to having very little patience and really only being present in body only,' he wrote. His only 'me time,' he explained, is the commute home and a rare weekly run, with post-bedtime doom-scrolling and TV binges to recharge.
The real kicker? He's expected to tag-team with wifey to wrestle with his little rascals as soon as he enters the ring.
The man asked bluntly, 'AITAH [am I the a—hole] for wanting some me time when I get home?'
Reddit users were quick to weigh in — and it wasn't a unanimous cheer squad.
'Can you get a sitter or someone to watch the kids for 1-2 days a week?' one practical soul suggested.
Another dropped marriage counselor wisdom: 'The solution was for him to have 10-15 minutes decompression time when he got in from work. But once that time was up, he had to do whatever she needed him to do.'
Some users, however, served a cold dose of reality.
'I'm a physician (F). My ex-wife raised our 2 kids while I did a very stressful job… So I guess you signed up for having kids? Do you want someone else to raise them? Can you buck up and realize you are all in? … You need to understand that it's a sacrifice and it won't be forever.'
Others called out the dad for overlooking his wife's nonstop 24/7 grind.
'NTA [not the a—hole] for now, but leaning towards YTA [you're the a—hole]. What breaks does the stay-at-home Mom get? What adult interaction does she get? Does she have a commute to decompress? Does she get ME time?'
'You get vacation time… when is hers? Not only is she raising kids, she's managing the house, cooking, cleaning and mental load… Grow up and be a partner.'
Still, some offered a middle ground. 'NTA for wanting a little me time, but you also have to think about your wife's me time too. Talk to her… maybe call a sitter, schedule her a spa day during your work hours and let her have her me time that day and have your me time the day after… You guys have to communicate and compromise.'
As previously reported by The Post, today's busy parents are finding creative ways to make every second count with their kids — like millennial stay-at-home mom Sara Martinez, who went viral with the '9-minute theory,' spotlighting three key three-minute windows a day when parental presence matters most.
From Upper West Side entrepreneurs hiring help to moms moving off the grid for quality time, parents are reshaping the rules on how to balance burnout and bonding — proving that sometimes, it's less about quantity and more about making moments count.
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Many therapists are already willy-nilly entering data about clients and patients into off-the-shelf publicly available LLMs. The problem is that there is almost no guarantee of data privacy with these AIs, and you could readily be violating confidentiality and HIPAA provisions. You might also need to certify consent from the client or patient, depending on various factors at play. For more, see my discussion at the link here and the link here. Make sure to consult with your attorney on these serious matters. One approach is to stridently anonymize the data so that the client or patient is unrecognizable via the data you have entered. It would be as though you are simply creating a generic persona from scratch. Whether that will pass a legal test is something your legal counsel can advise you on. Another approach is to set up a secure private version of an LLM, but that, too, can have legal wrinkles. More On Personas As Digital Twins Yet another approach is to merely and shallowly describe the persona based on your overall semblance of the person. This is somewhat similar to my earlier point that you can use personas by simply entering a prompt that the devised persona is supposed to represent a person with depression. That's a vague indication and would seem untethered to a specific person. The downside, of course, is that the surface-level persona might not be of much help to you. What are you going to do with whatever persona you craft? You could try to figure out the emotional triggers of the person, as represented via the persona. What kind of coping style do they have? How does their coping mechanism react to the therapy you have in mind? All sorts of therapy-oriented strategies and tactics can be explored and assessed. In essence, you are trying out different interventions on the persona, i.e., the digital twin. Maybe you are mulling over variations of CBT techniques and want to land on a particular approach. Perhaps you often use exposure therapy and are unsure of how that will go over with the client or patients. This provides a no-risk means of determining your therapy in a simulated environment and prepares you for sessions with the actual person. Don't Fall For The Persona I trust and hope that any therapist or mental health professional going the route of using a persona as a digital twin is going to keep their wits about themselves. Ordinary users of AI who use personas can readily go off the deep end and believe that the persona is real. Do not let that same fate befall you. The persona is merely the persona. Period, end of story. You cannot assume that the persona is giving you an accurate reading of the person. The AI could be completely afield in terms of how the person will actually respond and react. Expect that the AI will almost certainly overrepresent some traits, underrepresent other traits, and be convincing as it does so. Convincingness is the trick involved. Contemporary generative AI is so seemingly fluent that you are drawn into a mental trap of believability. Inside your head, you might hear this internal voice: 'It must be showing me the true inner psyche of my client or patient! The AI is working miracles at modeling the person. Wow, AI is utterly amazing.' You must resist the urge to become over-reliant on the digital twin. Over-reliance is a likely possibility. Here's how. You use the persona. After doing so, you later meet with the client or patient. Everything the AI indicated as to responses and reactions appears to mirror what the person says and does during the session. Awesome. You decide to keep using the persona. Over and over, you use the persona. Voila, you are hooked. The persona has led you down a primrose path. The seemingly uncanny portrayal has been spot-on. The problem is that when the client or patient diverges from the persona, you are going to have your mind turned backward. The person must be wrong, because the persona was always right. In other words, the person is supposed to be acting as the persona does. The world has gone topsy-turvy. But it's you, because you have forsaken your therapist mindset and allowed AI to capture and defeat your real-world acuity. That's bad news. Do not let that happen. Additional Twists And Turns There is a lot more to consider when using AI as a digital twin in a mental health context. I'll be covering more in a series of postings. Be on the watch. One quick point to get your mental juices flowing is this. Suppose that you have gotten written consent from the client or patient, and they know that you are using AI to depict a persona of them. The person comes to one of your later sessions and starts to suspect that you are proceeding as if it is based on what the AI told you. They worry that the AI is portraying them in some unpleasant fashion. Furthermore, they now insist that you let them access the persona. They want to see how it represents them. Mull that over and think about how you would contend with that potential nightmare scenario. It's a doozy. It could arise. A final thought for now. Albert Einstein famously made this remark: 'My mind is my laboratory.' Yes, that's abundantly true. In the case of mental health therapy, besides your mind being your laboratory, it turns out that AI can be your laboratory too. Proceed with aplomb.
