sunstorm
u/sunstorm
One weird trick that worked for me was to imagine that you're trying to communicate with a cat. Cats can't talk to you, but if you live with one long enough, you start understanding what they want and how they feel just by looking at them.
You're not really consciously looking for signs, like hm, arched back, fluffy tail, aha, it's scared. It's more like you just see them, and an idea bubbles up in your mind without you necessarily thinking about it.
If you pay attention to that mental state, and cultivate it, you can then learn to apply it to people. It's obviously more nuanced, but the mechanism is the same. If it helps, you might think to yourself, "if this person was a cat, what would it be trying to say to me?". It will help you pay attention to them in that way.
At some point you can get good enough at it that it will short-circuit into being able to directly feel the emotions that the other person is projecting. At this point you just need too stay attentive and realize that that's an emotion that's being sent to you, rather than one that you feel yourself, and then react accordingly.
At that point you also have to work on understanding what you yourself are feeling, and what your body tends to do when you feel different things. It actually does quite a lot without you realizing it! Once you become aware of it, and become able to read yourself, you'll have a dictionary to understand others as well.
The whole idea that you can hide behind a number that we've socially accepted to be the normal amount of working hours, and check out once you've "done your share", is ludicrous.
Life is not a script that you follow. A family is not something you get just because it's expected of you, and you don't get to put in just "the expected" amount of work.
You are working for yourself. Every bit of energy that you dedicate to growing the organism of your family and making it steonger, you will be grateful to have given away some day in the future.
Your effort might be the difference between raising a successful person or a loser; a happy person or a depressed one. Which one would you rather be the father of?