It is a good way to think about it. There will be a time they don't want to hang out with dad anymore/that often. Then you start to have time for yourself again. Enjoy their attention as long as you got it!
Try and keep some simple hobbies as much as you can, then you can expand time on them when you have less to do for your kid. I actually got back into playing video games after a few years, I just had to play stuff that was "safe" for my kid to look at as well. And of course don't overdo it, screen time for kids and all.
I also got back into reading recently, that happened around the time my kid learned to read. I hadn't read books for myself for a long time and I forgot how much I enjoy that.
If I had an e-mail provider I'd be confident staying with for the next few decades, sure. But I don't feel confident about it and it would just move my problem with old gmail e-mails to the next provider.
And the next provider may not have a "takeout" system. Since Proton has encryption you have to use their client? I remember hearing about Proton bridge to connect to other clients, and it was supposedly clunky.
Not convenient. My computer is actually a docked Steamdeck I only use occasionally in Desktop mode. I know lots of people will frown at that, but I do 99% of anything I do (aside from gaming), on my phone since a long time ago. For work I have a work laptop and I surely wouldn't want to store my mails there.
So having Thunderbird on my Steamdeck for browsing old e-mails is just not convenient for me.
My small homeserver is part of a backup strategy, so putting something on it reachable via a webUI of some sort will also ensure all of that is backed up. Since my Steamdeck is mostly games and many saves are stored in the cloud automatically, I don't back it up as much, not worth the effort.
Would that be simple to do though? Hope I am not starting yet another discussion thread about selfhosting e-mail, I know there are different views how hard/easy it is. I guess here its restricted to just the viewing part, which is maybe the easier bit.
Downside I see for this, I'd like to also be able to access this on my computer, where I use webmail only. So I got no client set up. Yes, can of course do this just for that use case, but its again something extra I don't need otherwise.
Also, on the phone I use Thunderbird, it seems to have an atrocious search function. So that wouldn't feel great to use either.
But definitely a valid idea I didn't consider, thanks!
Funny comment, given that what could easily be 80% of this userbase directly migrated here from Reddit over the past few years. Not everyone behaves like that.
Because OP forgot a link, understandable with how they feel, here is the game on Steam
https://store.steampowered.com/app/4860480/Breadwalk/