Uncertainty #10: Kids and Consequences
Uncertainty #10: Kids and Consequences
Adaam is accused of being a baby hater and he just won't have it.
Hello! We’re gonna talk about babies in a moment, but first... I want to thank our awesome subscribers for engaging with our last two episodes. An extra thank you goes to our paid members. To show our gratitude for your support we’ll be clipping pieces of all our upcoming interviews and sharing them exclusively with you. For starters, you can listen to Nellie Bowles talk a little about her work-kid-life balance running a business with her wife, Bari Weiss.
Speaking of work-life-kid-life balance...
Nellie Bowles was our second guest to extol the virtues of procreation. Last year it was Jacob Siegel who insisted that the right time to become a parent is usually now: there’s no such thing as being ready. I disagreed. I expect a parent to think long and hard on whether they should make the jump, and whether they can afford to — emotionally as well as financially. This decision to me seems daunting. It should be daunting, at least enough to force the would-be childmaker to gut check their motivations and expectations.
Jacob interpreted my reticence as anti-natalism-lite, and he indeed excoriated me for it in a fantastic little blurb on his newsletter, “The Scroll” for Tablet. But my position was never anti-natalist. Though adorned with many koans and syllogisms, anti-natalism, at its core, posits that forcing another into existence is a moral atrocity on the part of the parent, because of the inevitable pain that comes with existing. Though there are certainly pleasures to experience, the argument goes, they are outweighed (or mooted out) by the hardships. But to truly believe this equation requires an assumption that existence itself is at best neutral, which I just can’t follow. Call me a gushing transcendentalist, but I’m firmly on team consciousness and awe over team void.
My concern is less existential than all that. What I care about is responsibility. Bringing a human into the world isn’t an act of cosmic cruelty, as per anti-natalism, but it is a profound pledge to protect the child from spiritual and material want.1 It means love. It means time. It means money. That this pledge is probably broken more often than kept, doesn’t negate it: in fact, that’s my point.
Without accidentally wading into the pro-life/pro-choice debate2, I don’t think it’s controversial to say that pregnancy is best instigated voluntarily. My two cents are that maybe the decision process should raise a touch more friction than it does in the way we sometimes present it. Did you really crunch the numbers? Are you certain you have the means to support another living creature? Are you sure you can be there day after long day after longer day? How much would you be ready to sacrifice for your kid? Your career ambitions? Your romantic life? Your small freedoms?
And you will need to make sacrifices. Which brings me to another thing we talked about with Nellie...
Tradeoffs
The idea of having to make any kind of sacrifice in life is anathema to modern living. Aren’t we suppose to have it all? What are all these apps for otherwise?
With Nellie, this came up in the context of cities: we want cheap cities that have lots of development for housing and business, but also retain the uniqueness we care about; that are dynamic and growing, but also unchanged where it counts.3 But what if we can’t have it all? What if sometimes contradictions, while intellectually delicious, really can’t be reconciled?
With cities as with politics as with child rearing, a devotional attachment to “We Can Have It All” gets in the way of realistic solutions. Why compromise if Heaven is just a few community engagement meetings away? With parenting, what troubles me is a touch of self delusion about how radically things will (or at least, should) change.
That said, maybe my delay tactics are part of the same problem I’m ranting about. “Many of us drifted into our thirties feeling like we had all the time in the world to make such decisions,” Jacob wrote in his response. Indeed, the “all the time in the world” problem is a corollary of the “we can have it all” cult.
More importantly, Jacob and Nellie agree that when it comes to happiness and babies, my calculus is off. As Jacob put it in his newsletter:
We had accepted the superstitious individualism that promised an infinite number of paths to fulfillment depending on how we chose to arrange the puzzle pieces of our own lives. It’s terrifyingly easy to realize too late how false that is—not because no one can be happy without having kids but because on a planet of billions of people, they are still vanishingly few in number and tend to go in with their eyes open about the choices they are making. For most of us, there are not an infinite number of paths to fulfillment, and the odds are overwhelming that you are not one of the exceptions. It’s not as bad as it sounds. Like my rabbi says, “Everyone eats fish on Shabbat, but we all prepare it differently.” The art of living is in how you make the fish.
There’s an evolutionary appeal to this view of happiness. If we could always have approached procreation with the caviling, overthinking, and paralyzing timidity we can now, we’d long have gone extinct. As a friend once told me, God’s a genius for making sex so fun (or, as Nellie joked, contraceptives have gotten too good!). Fair enough.
Moreover, Jacob described my position as “imagining that there is a meritocratic admissions test for parenting, instead of seeing it as one of the essential stages of being a person," which he concluded as a form of humanist vanity. Probably true.
But the flip side is the complacency of taking “the stages of being a person” without honest reflection. The reality of parents abandoning their children, or pouring on them their mediocre frustrations, or just going through their entire parenthood in imperturbable misery, shows that fulfillment is an inconstant bitch.4
But this is not an argument I hope to win. I want the Jacobs and Nellies of the world to be the voices of parenting. All I ask is to rankle would-be fathers and mothers a little to make sure they’re really, really up for it.5
Things Worth Your Time ⏰
This week I traveled to D.C. from New York to produce an important shoot. It’s been a while since my last big production, so I was a little nervous. Luckily, I didn’t forget anything important in my anxious rush to catch the train in time (I caught the bastard at quite literally the very last minute). What I did forget, in my scramble, were my headphones. So on my ride to and from our nation’s capital, and in all my peregrination to and for throughout the day, I had nothing to listen to. No podcast, no music, no nothing. Except, that is, for the world around me. I gotta say, spending hours without other people’s voices speaking in my head (in the non-schizo way) was shockingly refreshing. Liberating. Highly recommended. Really worth your time.
What We’re Working On ⏭
Coming up is our exciting, multifarious, and, yes, quite long interview with the brilliant essayist William Deresiewicz. We covered so much ground. All the ground. Culture wars, creativity, the corruption of the art world, and more, and more, and more... It was one of those hardcore Uncertain Things-y talks. Get ready. We also have some evolutionary biology in the queue, followed, appropriately, by some tech talk. Busy editing days ahead.
One Last Certain Thing…
The inevitable reaction whenever one watches Daniel Roy’s handiwork…
…which you can also take as my recommendation for today, in case you think my “no headphones” musings were but a gimmick that cheated you of precious, precious content.
Also, also, listen to his interview on Uncertain Things, if you haven’t already, you heathens.
Vanessa’s commentary: Yes, but we do tend to rise to the occasion of responsibility. It’s not until it’s thrust upon us that we realize we can make the sacrifices it entails. That said, if you don’t want the responsibility or the sacrifice (no matter the positive tradeoffs), just say no.
Crummy phrase, because 1. both sides believe in life and choice, duh; and 2. it’s never a debate.
Vanessa’s commentary: While I agree with the overall sentiment, I still disagree with the specifics. While our current building systems, incentives, and community engagement processes aren’t currently set up for it, I absolutely believe we can have dynamic, consistent development that retains a neighborhood’s unique character. See our conversation with Vishaan Chakrabarti for the how.
Vanessa’s commentary: It’s interesting to me that this is a new conundrum for heterosexual men. The lack of birth control meant couples didn't have the option to choose before its invention; and the raising of the child just wasn't historically deemed the man's responsibility. We're only now at a moment in time where both of these things have converged. It's now part of the man's responsibility to sacrifice (beyond just the financial) AND there's some (altho certainly not complete) agency to decide if and when to assume that responsibility.
Vanessa’s commentary: To add another layer to the complexity… Many people who initially didn’t want kids find they love it (and thus the sacrifices feel justified/manageable) while others who always wanted kids don’t find it as fulfilling as they’d hoped (and the sacrifice feels acute/draining). The problem is that you’ll never know which side of the spectrum you will land on until you just do it, and then you’re committed to your path of parenthood for (arguably) the rest of your life. Logically, it makes sense to never take that risk. Evolutionarily, you should always take that risk.