The Rise of Parents Who Regret Having Children

This episode dives deep into the sensitive and complex topic of parental regret, exploring why some parents regret having children and the societal pressures and personal expectations that contribute to these feelings.

1. A significant minority of parents openly admit to regretting having children, highlighting issues like loss of personal freedom and unmet expectations.
2. Societal and peer pressures heavily influence decisions about parenthood, often leading to regret.
3. The romanticization of parenting in media and culture clashes with the challenging realities, exacerbating feelings of regret.
4. Modern high-effort parenting styles may contribute to parental dissatisfaction and regret.
5. Discussions around parental regret are still considered taboo, but they are crucial for understanding and potentially reshaping societal norms about parenting.

1. Introduction to Parental Regret

The episode begins by outlining the scope of parental regret through various media articles and personal testimonies, setting the stage for a deeper exploration of the topic.
Simone Collins: "There's a new genre of articles about people who hated becoming parents."

2. Societal Pressures and Expectations

Discusses how societal norms and peer influences drive individuals towards parenthood, often without a clear personal desire or understanding of the implications.
Malcolm Collins: "I think she saw all her friends, classmates, and cousins having kids, so she needed to be in this mummy club."

3. The Reality vs. Romanticization of Parenting

Examines how the romanticized expectations of parenting do not align with the day-to-day challenges, contributing to regret.
Simone Collins: "The kids are a pain. It has gotten to the point where I don't enjoy being home anymore."

4. The Impact of Parenting Styles

Explores the role of modern parenting styles in shaping parental satisfaction and potential regret.
Malcolm Collins: "Effort parenting is what's making everyone miserable."

5. Societal Change and Discussion

Encourages open discussions about parental regret to foster understanding and potentially adjust societal expectations and support systems.
Simone Collins: "It's important to break the taboo. The parents who regret having children."

1. Reflect Deeply Before Parenthood: Consider your motivations and expectations of parenting deeply before deciding to have children.
2. Set Realistic Expectations: Understand that parenting is challenging and often not as idyllic as portrayed.
3. Seek Support: Engage with community support groups or therapy to manage the stresses of parenting.
4. Communicate Openly with Partners: Ensure both partners have aligned expectations and desires regarding parenthood.
5. Focus on Personal Well-being: Maintain personal hobbies and interests to balance the demands of parenting.

In this thought-provoking video, Malcolm and Simone Collins delve into the growing phenomenon of parental regret and its connection to the urban monoculture. They analyze recent articles about parents who regret having children, discussing the potential causes and offering a pronatalist perspective on the issue. The couple explores topics such as high-effort parenting, the importance of objective functions in life, and the psychological impact of the urban monoculture on parenting experiences. They also touch on Eric Holle's piece about the transformative nature of parenthood and offer insights into finding meaning and purpose through raising children. This video provides a comprehensive look at modern parenting challenges and offers potential solutions for those struggling with parental regret.

People

Simone Collins, Malcolm Collins

Companies

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Books

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Guest Name(s):

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Content Warnings:

Discussions on sensitive topics around parental regret and dissatisfaction.

A
This isn't the way that historically, people related to kids. If the point of the kids is modifying either your self perception or your emotional experience of reality, kids are actually bad pets. They're terrible pets. They're terrible pets. Kids are not a good pet.

B
No unconditional love. They are very difficult to potty train, house train, et cetera. Would you like to know more? Hello, Simone. I am excited to be talking with you today.

A
This conversation was actually inspired to me by an Eric hole piece. Oh, I saw that this afternoon. Right. Made me a better person. And in the piece, he linked to this, like, new genre of articles about people who hated becoming parents.

There's a Buzzfeed article, parents who regret having children are making anonymous confessions online, and it's taboo but important. And then there was the Atlantic piece, the two reasons parents regret having kids. And then there's the timepiece, the parents who regret having children, which apparently went viral. And then there's a Business Insider piece, six common reasons parents don't like their kids or something. And then there's the Newsweek piece, I regret having children.

The moms united in an uncomfortable truth. Let's see what this one, so this is Richard Maple, 39, from Ohio, after becoming a mother at 31. And she says, quote, I think about all the things my life would have been if the constant threat, threat of motherhood hadn't loomed over me like a cloud of doom. Maple told nose wake, I'm resolved to being the best mom to them that I can be because it's not their fault that they're here, and they are wonderful small humans who deserve love and guidance. But do I miss my life without children?

Every single day. And then there's the independent piece. I had no choice. The people who regret becoming parents. And then there's the Sunday Morning Herald piece, having kids is probably the biggest life regret.

Wife concurs. It says. And then, so I'm just reading a quote here from this because I think it's useful to get an understanding of what these people are saying. Though I love my son, I now know, a, know myself well enough and b, know the challenges of parenting well enough to say that having kids is probably my life's biggest regret. Wife concurs.

B
Oh, my God. And here's, here's another quote here. Quote, my wife needed to be a mother. I think she saw all her friends, classmates and cousins having kids, so she needed to be in this mummy club. Quote, I went along with the things to please her.

A
I was fine with one, but she campaigned for two. I gave in to make her happy. So here we are with the two toddlers. We're both moody, can't stand each other half the time, and have a borderline dead bedroom life. So much for making her happy.

The kids are a pain. It has gotten to the point where I don't enjoy being home anymore. I dread the weekends. I much prefer the work week where I only have to be a parent for a few hours rather than all day. It's nonstop noise, screaming, whining and fighting.

And this other one says, this is not the life I wanted. My toddler son is a tornado of destruction and will break, tear, rip anything he can get hands on, no matter how much I do to wear him out. And the baby, predictably, is needy because she's a baby. I feel tricked into wanting them by biological urges and the romanticization of the version of kids that isn't close to reality. Do you want me to keep going?

B
I think you have to. Oh, here's another. I love my kids, but I also regret them deeply. Every one of them. I never wanted any of them.

A
Circumstances explain pretty much why I went through with them all. Imagine the guilt and mental weight of having a bunch of kids you love but never intended or wanted. And so the guardian piece, it's breaking the taboo. The parents who regret having children. And then we get a final piece here in time, the parents who regret having children, which shows in various studies, something like seven to 15% of parents regret having children for grabs.

B
Wow. And so first, what are your thoughts on this phenomenon? I think a lot of what seems to be playing out, at least in the poll quotes they're using, is that being dip that happiness dip that men, but especially women, experience when their children, especially, are young, the diaper years, as it were, after having kids. And this shows up in the research fairly consistently longer there. There's other research that shows that longer term contentedness goes up and that men actually are pretty happy in general, and that, if memory serves, if you live in a nation that has more childcare support, you're probably also less unhappy.

So there are all these factors here. I was actually, I was finishing up the book reasons for having kids that we'll talk about in some other podcasts. Maybe we'll have the authors on. And at the end of the book, the author of progressive, highly educated woman herself has a child and then decides to share at the end of this book what it has been like for her. And she sounds absolutely miserable.

Like completely miserable. And she even describes this moment after she had her baby when she said to her husband, what have we done? Like our life before was good. And I think what the most predominant problem is with all of these people who share these reports of being fairly miserable and less happy and more stressed after having these babies, especially while the kids are still on the younger end, is that they are engaged in unsustainable, modern, high effort parenting, which is an aberration. It's not how people, this one woman.

A
Who'S talking about her son, who's this hellion running around breaking everything. I'm like, have you tried bopping him? I know you haven't, but you should think about it. There's a reason why people used to do this. I want candy, dammit.

I hate you. You're ruining my life. Remember our agreement? We have an agreement on candy marshmallows. When he gets like this, I just.

B
Don'T know how to make him stop. Have you ever tried beating his ass?

And one of the co authors of reasons for having children talks about her experience trying to get her child to sleep at night, where they just sit next to her as she screams and cries for a different doll and wants mommy but wants daddy but wants all these things. And they're making it worse because really what the kid is, they're tired and they want to go to bed. And if you just leave them alone, they'll cry for a little bit because they want attention and they're sad because they're tired, but then they'll go to sleep and they'll feel better and they cry. Effort parenting is what's making everyone miserable. But I don't think that this is the core thing that's making them miserable.

A
But I think it is. I think it is. You constantly correct me on this. Like I've come into this from the urban monoculture perspective of the way to correctly parent is to be on them all the time, to pay attention to them constantly, to stress out about every tiny thing, when really just letting them be, letting them figure it out is really both good for them developmentally, better for the parent developmentally. And it often just solves whatever the problem is that you're freaked out about.

John Paulus from zero hour. When I went on his show, one of the quotes that he had that I thought was really interesting is actually after when we were chatting with each other in regards to the whole bop Gates banking controversy, blah blah blah, and I was talking about how there's like these movements to not even listen when you should never say no to a child. You should never put a child in time out, he goes, yeah, I definitely see this idea of children should never experience any negative emotional stimuli. And when you take this mindset with a kid, you are the servant of the kid. It's not the other way around.

You are living under the toddler's tyranny and world perspective. And this is a person one should remember that has no long term thinking, that doesn't understand how to make decisions in their long term best interests. That doesn't have. He's the toddler, not the person saying this. Yeah.

B
When you let a toddler reign, you are letting someone reign who, even if they, who has no ability to actually even get what they want or know what they want. And that's the problem. You know, you have a kid who's really tired and they want and they need to take a nap or go to sleep. The last thing they will ask for is sleep. No, they're going to ask for a billion things and definitely not go to sleep.

And that's why you can't let them rule. They can't establish the. Yeah, you need to establish discipline and boundaries with children. And so I do think that part of this is downstream of that, but I don't actually think that this is the core thing that's causing this. Oh, what do you think is the core cause?

A
If you read the actual quote and you think about what they're saying, it is fundamentally that anyone who has adopted the urban monoculture is their cultural value system. That is, this progressive cultural system should not have kids, like, without significant cultural retooling. Because their core value in life is often their personal emotional experience of reality. And their arguments for having kids typically fall into one of two categories. How those kids will augment their status within their social network, that is.

I saw all the other moms doing it. I wanted to be like them. I wanted to fit in. This is about masturbating a personal emotional need. Or they thought the kids would make them happy and be like toys for them.

Right. That the kids would go play about and that through that, they would feel good around the kids. This is not the way that we relate to kids. This isn't the way that historically, people related to kids. If the point of the kids is modifying either your self perception or your emotional experience of reality, kids are actually bad pets.

That's terrible pets. They're terrible pets. Yeah. Kids are not a good pet. No unconditional love.

B
They are very difficult to potty train, house train, etcetera. Yeah, definitely bad pets. And that's the problem that these people are dealing with is they don't have a higher order moral system other than things that make. I mean, you can look at, like the book you read, and it's constantly about self affirmation. It's constantly about, how does this reflect on myself?

A
Like, how do I fit the kids into this sort of, like, what are the arguments that they use, for example. For having kids or for why they regret having kids? No, for having kids.

B
I may be too low iq for this book. I genuinely am only getting reasons to not have kids from this book. I know it's a prenatalist book. I'm sure. I'm sure it's in there somewhere.

I'm coming up dry. So I've got it. Yeah. And this is the thing, there just isn't a logical reason to have kids if you live for your own emotional state or some sort of socially achieved value system where you're trying to. Because it's just not worth the effort.

A
There are value hierarchies that you can enter where you don't need to have kids to compete, and therefore the ones in which you do need kids to compete, you just need so many kids to even like, really play the game and you're not going to do that. You're not having kids for some sort of external value system that is, you believe that it's God's interest or something like that. Now, God. There was a point I went, oh, yeah. So this actually reminds me of a comment we had on our discord that I thought was just absolutely brilliant.

And it was on socially, the way people relate to kids and this banning of people having kids on social media, and they're saying, a lot of people who are doing this are childless people. Don't put your kids on social media. This point you shared with me last night, that's. Oh, this is funny. One thing that might be motivating this man mandate is the strongest weapon that a parent has in the game of the social media status hierarchy is their cute kids.

And so if you can create a negative externality around sharing that you can remove your opponent's strongest weapon in status hierarchy battles. But this is something I absolutely see. Yeah, definitely concern a lot less from what I consider, like, the people who have a ton of kids and a happy family life, it's mostly people who don't have that and want they've one. Kid and it's a new one and their virtue signal. But yeah, no, I.

B
Of the YouTube influencers I know who people who post their kids online of the ones I have watched content from, only one of them has a kid and others at least seven other. So it's like a seven to one ratio. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That makes a lot of sense. The other reason that somebody was saying that people get mad about that is they are the kids who have converted to the urban monoculture, but were shared by parents who were not in the urban monoculture and don't like that aspect of their identity.

A
But those people don't really matter as humans because they're not going to have kids themselves. And actually, another point that I saw another Collins mother say actually in a YouTube video, this is the Collins family that has eleven kids or something. They're actually more famous than us, which annoys me. We're not. But the mother has this one YouTube video where she talks about corporal punishment.

B
And it's quite a long YouTube video. But one of the points that she leads with, because of course they practice corporal punishment, because, of course she has. How many kids? They have? Seven, nine.

Between seven and eleven. A lot of kids. Some are adopted, some are biologically theirs, their classic pronatalist family, of course. Black dad, white mom. I think so, yeah.

Yeah. So it's a great family. I think they're surprisingly similar to us in their approach to corporal punishment. Not exactly, but like they mentioned that for some kids, they don't do it at all because you don't need to. This is very reasonable, that.

But her point getting into the whole thing was no matter what you do as a parent, no matter what form of punishment or lack of punishment you use, you will have something about your parenting that your kids are going to say was traumatic or horrible or just unexcusable. And so it doesn't like there's nothing you can do as a parent. Be permissive, don't be permissive, be strict, be loose, be happy, be sad, whatever, they'll find something wrong with it. So to use that as, like, your mooring point of, oh, in the future, my kid's gonna hate me for this, or, oh, this kid hated their parents for this thing and therefore I should never do it, is not gonna protect you from being hated by your kids in the future. Yeah, I think it's an important thing to remember as a parent.

A
No, I absolutely agree with this perspective. And, but more broadly, I think, and I want to bring it back to the point I was making earlier because I actually think that this is just a key reason people are failing to have kids, because they don't have developed moral frameworks. Their moral frameworks are incredibly rudimentary. They don't really know why they're living the life that they're living. They don't know why they're doing anything.

B
That's actually the key absence in this book, reasons for having children, is that there is no objective function to any of it. There is no. If you believe in this, then it makes sense. If you believe in that, then it doesn't make sense. If anyone reading that book had an objective function, they wouldn't be reading the book in the first place because they would have had an answer to this question.

You're so right. Yeah. No. And so for people who aren't familiar with our concept of objective function, you can learn about it in the pragmatist guide to life. It's our shortest book, I think our most boring book, from my perspective, but very useful if you don't have a reason for living.

A
Like, it's about going through all of the various reasons, and it's pretty unbiased that a person might want to be alive and helping you think through all of the arguments and counter arguments to all of those various reasons. But hold on, you're underselling this. It is a dry book. It's not a fun read. I totally own that.

B
But there is nothing more powerful you can do in your life in terms of, if you never want to feel fomo again, if you never want to feel cognitive dissonance again, have an objective function that you really. That you can, like, own and really understand that you, like, 100% came to that conclusion on your own. That's the end of it. There is no more ambivalence because you're always asking, where does this fall vis a vis my objective function? And it's very easy knowing what, given your objective function and the resources and knowledge in front of you, you need to do at any given moment, it is one of the most freeing, wonderful things to do in the.

In your entire existence. So don't undersell the power of. Okay, objective function is, by the way, not like a purpose. It's a weighted list of things that you have, think have value in reality. Yeah.

A
And then when you're making a big decision, should I have a child, you can weigh that decision around this weighted list of things you think have value. Yeah. And that's why you like the anime. It's called goblin slayer. It's called.

Yeah, Goblin slayer. Goblin Slayer is so much because it has this one main character in it who's just extremely based in this, like, fantasy like, rpg world where there's all these little side quests, like literally, it's like a video game. And there are a billion things that different bands of groups can do. And there's this one character, and all he wants to do is slay goblins. It's the only thing.

B
And there's all these other like, higher value projects he could do. There's all these other people, there's all these things. And he just always knows. His objective function is kill maximum number of goblins. And he's a very magnetic.

A
Hold on, I'll actually, his objective function is to minimize unnecessary human suffering. And he sees Goblin slaying as an arbitrage opportunity for achieving that objective function because he sees that goblins being considered low level monsters are not being treated seriously enough. And he just over focuses on this one type of threat because it's a ideology that is a lower status threat within this world for eradicating. Yeah. So that's okay.

B
So in our book the Pragmatist Guide to life, once you choose an objective function, you need to form an ideology, which is your hypothesis for maximizing it. And you can look at this from an EA framework. When effective altruists try to think about what they're going to do with their lives, they have to look at what are the big problems. It has to be a big problem. It has to be tractable.

And ideally, it's not something that a lot of people are working on because that's where you can have the maximum impact, obviously. And so that's what he did. And when you have done that, when you combine your objective function with a strong ideology and your personal resources, which is factored into all of that, no cognitive dissonance, you know exactly what to do. And he's a very magnetic character in the show because while everyone else is coming and hawing about things and they don't really know what they're doing, they can be a little bit aimless. He is just, it emanates confidence and sort of this amazing.

A
Yeah. Purpose. He knows what he's doing and why. And that's the problem with the urban monoculture, is it doesn't delineate purpose. Yeah, it delineates preference.

You should have a preference for this. And why is it so bad at delineating purpose? Because it's all downhill of the idea of you should be affirmed for believing anything about yourself that you want to believe. If you're living in a world where this affirmation is treated as a thing of objective value, like, not just that, but also this fear of pain that we always talk about was like, the haze movement, or like, the handing out fentanyl in the streets or the banning of tests. Like, this is all to remove in the moment emotional pain.

That's what trigger warnings are about, fundamentally, a removal of in the moment emotional pain. But if you worship this, and then somebody comes along with a question which is twofold, what if in the moment emotional pain helps you experience less overall pain in your life? Which is like, a very obvious thing that anyone could ask. You can't engage with that question, right? Like, you don't have a framework for engaging with it because it's literally the foundation of your cultural system.

You can't say, oh, actually, trigger warnings are stupid and cause more pain at the end of the day. Oh, the haze movement is stupid, and we should be shaming people for doing things that make them unhealthy. Oh, you can't. You can't even think these thoughts. But then, secondly, if they ask the even bigger question, which is suffering is just negative human emotional states, right?

And we only feel things like that because our ancestors who felt them had less surviving offspring. So they're just like, randomly created environmental signals that don't have any real intrinsic purpose or value. Why would you base your entire, like, cosmology off of this? I don't. I actually don't think that there's a great answer to this.

I always say, like, a utilitarian world perspective is like a group of paperclip maximizers got together and decided that the number of paperclips in the world was the core thing that mattered, because that's what they were programmed to value. Right. We were programmed to feel this way by our ancestral environment. That doesn't mean it's a thing of actual value. Now, the other thing I wanted to know was actually Eric Hoyle's piece, because I think he did a very good job of describing how you change when you do relate to parenting correctly.

Right. So, for example, and he actually makes an emotional argument for becoming a parent. Oh, it will change the way you perceive reality. Right. Oh, so it's then, in other words, a hedonic argument for parenting.

Yeah. He says people would say to him, you could have gone to Paris. Imagine someone saying, you could have done drugs at burning man. Heck, every day of the week, you could have gone out and bought a new expensive scotch. New music was going to be released, new books, new movies, new games.

The actual news itself will always keep rolling. There'll be another beautiful sunset when the gold light comes in through the trees. From the west yet to this reply, ah, but I had seen beautiful sunsets. I had tasted scotches. I had done drugs at burning Man.

I had sat at restaurants in Paris and watched the CN sparkle as I read Hemingway. And I love how you pronounce the CN. What is it? The CN. You hate french people so much.

B
And I love it. I don't want these foreign words on my american time intentionally butcher it. I could return to the city, but it would be grayer than the first time, for I would not have been a young man in his twenties. Paris would be the same, but I would have changed. Over time, the world ceased to surprise me.

A
I saw its machinations and became increasingly unimpressed. I saw my own mechanicians and became equally unimpressed. I watched the talking heads on tv repeat themselves. All the human race began to look like a pack of bickering primates. One side wins, the other side wins.

I turned the tv off. It'd be 09:00 p.m. on a Wednesday. I could go read another novel, but I'd already read 1000. What was the 1001st novel going to give me that I didn't get from the rest?

And this is so like when you approach parenting from a moral standpoint. The emotional rewards are high, but you only get these high emotional rewards. As Simone always says, the only true happiness you'll ever experience is sacrificing to live your value system successfully. And as you get older, this stimuli that used to fully reward you when you were young, stop rewarding both because your biology is changing, because your ancestors, who didn't have the changing biology, didn't have surviving offspring, and because you have done these things a thousand times when people are like, why are you so anti life extensionist? It's because a great book, a novel that you read when you've read a thousand novels, is always going to be less of a thing to somebody who has read a thousand or 10,000 novels.

B
Diminishing marginal return, someone's tense book, someone actually interesting. Kids don't have diminishing marginal returns at all. Yeah, you keep it. Changes in kind. What was that?

Video game dynamic changes in. Yeah. So changes in kind is something called a video, but I don't understand where you're going with the changes in kind concept. Changes in kind means that throughout a video game, you need to totally change the way that the game is being presented. So people are dealing with entirely new gameplay and narrative loops.

A
What is your point here? That's what parenting feels like to me. Not to me. At all. I don't know what.

B
I guess it's because you get the goof patrol and they're more uniform right now. I don't know. Anyway, I don't know. Infants all seem the same to me. But despite infants being the same and toddlers largely being the same, their experience of reality is equally magical every time.

No, I don't think I said it's equally much. It is. But what I'm saying is that they change so significantly. Kids, as they grow up, change so significantly even from week to week. Our kids this week are totally different dynamic from the way that I felt they were, at least.

A
Oh, that is a good use of changes in kind. Yes, the ways that they change as they get older is a good use of changes in kind. But that's just in terms of the larger point here being, is that as you get older, in part because you've experienced it all before, the world just becomes greater. But if you want novelty, you will first have a one year old, and then you'll have a two year old, and then you'll have a three year old. But it's just as soon as you.

Show, it's gonna be different selves that I'm talking about simone here. I'm not talking about the novelty you get from the children. I'm talking about the revitalized perspective of reality. You get from their perspective of reality being blemished and untouched so that you're. Also experiencing the world anew from them.

B
It's like that's a new whole layer of novelty. If you ever. And people are like, as a non parent, I can't imagine this. And I'm like, no, you can. Have you ever had this movie you really like and you want your friend to sit there and watch it with you so you can watch them react to it, and you get very annoyed because they're not paying enough attention to it as you would have historically.

A
And they need to watch it because the real entertainment isn't the movie. This is why you get. So I walk to the microwave in. The middle watching the movie. Okay.

That is what kids are. But for life, okay. Yeah, it is. They make life like it was and not like exactly like it was when I was a kid. It's more.

Oh, my God. Multiplicatively, I am able to give other people better iterations of all of those experiences I had as a child. So by that, I liked playing on the water as a kid. But I remember there were some things I didn't like. I didn't like sitting on a motorboat with my parents driving around where there wasn't really that much connection to the water itself unless I could jump waves.

But that's a different thing. I did anything where I was, like, actively engaged with the water. So now what I do is I take this little go boat thing, which is basically like a floating cylindrical platform. I slap a motor on it, and I go out to the river right next to our house. When I just go up and down, it was the kids, and the kids help kick and throw their hands in and everything like that.

And I'm like, wow. So I have created this interacting with water. And then I go and do I know what I would have loved to do as a kid, which is stop at all of the islands so they can go explore the islands and name them. And I'm like, oh, they'll have so much fun with this, because that's the type of thing that I would have had fun with. Now, as an adult, you just don't get that much fun emotional state from zooming up and down a river in a little motorized flotation craft.

But I can see what I'm creating for them and feel a value from life that I cannot get from the things that these other urban monoculture parents feel like they have lost, which is the fancy scotches or the nightclubs or the travel. They are bemoaning the experiences that they will not get to experience experience because they are looking for the emotion that their kids will create in them. Because they didn't create children for the children. They created children for themselves. I had children for my children.

So when I go and experience something with my children, I am not focused really on how does this make me feel. I am focused on the memories that I am creating for my kids in that moment and the satisfaction, the deep, true form of happiness from effectively sacrificing to live. Your values that I get from that is higher than any form of happiness I can get from a nightclub or going out drinking, playing with my kids on the river is just a higher form of happiness than any of that. Would you, what are your thoughts on this? I agree with you on this.

B
Part of me wonders if, if we were to give these regretful parents objective functions, if we were to help them establish those for themselves. Do you think some could become happy parents depending on what their objective function is? Yeah, they read the pragmatist guide to life. I genuinely think they could reform themselves pretty significantly. I think the urban monoculture is so psychologically unhealthy and sad because it just doesn't have a value system.

I will say this, if you are a regretful parent anywhere watching this, email us@partnersragmatistfoundation.com we will send you a free copy of the Pragmatist Guide to Life. Free audiobook. You like free audiobook? Yeah, just, yeah, free ebook. Actually, a lot of people don't know this, but the books were originally written to be an instruction manual for performing a type of behavioral therapy that would be seen as an alternative to CBT.

A
You can still see this in the way it's written. It's written almost like an instruction manual for somebody to be using as they're interacting with somebody else to help people find a value system in their lives. Because when I look at psychological problems, a lot of the psychological problems in society right now are downstream of people not having purpose. Yep. Or not having a purpose they really believe in.

And I think that's the thing, right? There's all of these. They're like, yeah, I have purpose. It's reduce suffering broadly. But do you really believe that?

Because you seem to be, if you really believed it, you'd be like goblin slave out there actually doing something. You wouldn't be getting your expensive scotch or going to nightclubs or playing video games. That's one of the things that always got me about the FTX collapse guy, Sam Bankman Fried is people were like, oh, he was such a dedicated to this value of reducing suffering. I'm like, the bro was playing video games during board meetings. No, he wasn't.

He had no control over himself. And he didn't see this as a negative thing. And this is the thing we always say about sin is, recognize your sin. Everybody sins. We're man, we're not God.

Recognize that. When I drink, it's a sin. But I'm always choosing which sins I'm fighting and which sins I'm not fighting. And this isn't what I'm interested in dealing with right now because I am healthy and I have dealt with it in the past when it has made me unhealthy, like when it has caused negative externalities in my life that I saw as unacceptable. But I think that's the way that we need to relate to these things.

B
Yeah, I agree. Okay. So I still think high effort parenting is a big problem here, but I also think high effort at parenting is downstream dream of not having an objective function in life and being in the urban monoculture, so touche. You have. Monoculture is just so psychologically damaging.

A
I often liken it to put in your soul. Like, when I look at people who have lived in the urban monoculture and who have adopted it, it's like their soul has been in a sandstorm and it just gets ripped apart. And they don't seem to have light behind their eyes anymore. They don't seem excited to be alive anymore just for the stuff. That's what it is.

It's filling out their house and their collection and their social media feeds, and it's. It's not even for that. It's just, that's so often the message that's presented. So what are you gonna do? They're really just for happiness.

B
They're looking for meaning. And they've been told that if they do certain things, they'll find it. It's just that they can't find it within that culture. They can't find it within that framework. It devastates me.

A
Yeah. And they've also been told, obviously, a culture can't survive if it can't keep people from interacting with more desirable cultural groups. But everywhere where they might actually find meaning, often there's like a big red flag of, don't interact with this, or you're a Yahtzee. These are religious weirdos, or these are. Yeah, whatever might be scary about them.

B
They're odd or uneducated. That's another really big thing. Yeah. You'll be uneducated if you interact with them, which will make you low status. Yeah, or they're just low status.

I don't know. If you are part of the urban monoculture, you start to get really snobby about hanging out with anyone who's not deeply entrenched in higher education and certain prestigious jobs, etcetera. Right. Yeah. That's sad.

A
No, it is sad, but I don't. Think Eric Hole is getting closer in what you're describing of his essay, which, to be fair, I haven't read to. I think the argument that is being presented in reasons for having kids, which is they're trying to restate an argument in favor of pronatalism in the terms of the urban monoculture, which is to say that they're trying to say, in the end, being a parent really will make you happier. It just doesn't seem like that, because what you don't realize is that your life is already miserable, and this is probably going to make it less miserable than it is now. Am I right there?

B
What is his argument, if it's not that? I think what he's really describing here is the way that I often call it the second puberty, the way that both men and women change in terms of the stimuli that give them satisfaction. Once you have kids, and obviously this doesn't happen for everyone. Not everyone literally has a perfectly healthy first puberty. Some people end up same sex attracted and stuff like that.

A
There's obviously all the ways. So you can't know, like, I have kids, therefore I'm going to go through this second puberty and it's going to lead to x outcome for me. But it does happen, I think, to the vast majority of people who have kids, where they have kids, and a number of perspectives that just would have seemed insane to them before. Now the opposite seems insane. For example, life extensionism, I think, is one of those things where a fear of death is the driving thing for biological reasons before people have a lot of kids.

Once you get to four kids or three kids, right? Yeah. It's really hard to be afraid of dying. Fear of death just completely leaves you. You are afraid of your kids dying, but you are not afraid of dying anymore at all.

Like, even a little. And it would make sense from a biological perspective. Now people have one or two kids, they're not going to go through, like, the full parent puberty. They go through like a. An abridged one that doesn't fully transition them to this new state.

But genuinely, I don't know a single person with more than four kids or with four kids or more. That is a. That is pro extreme life extension. Yeah. It just begins to become like, an absurd thing for an individual to want once you have a lot of kids.

But if you don't, obviously for genetic reasons, you're pre coded to be, like, terrified of dying. And when somebody sees that, it could give you, like, a more Zen perspective on reality. Once you're no longer afraid of dying that much, or once you are no longer your primary first concern. I don't think fear of death really features strong in mainstream society now, and I don't think it does. Because we're so separated from death.

B
It's hard to even remember that you're going to die in our world because it's so isolated as a life event, unlike it was in the victorian times when, like, your neighbor was dying. It's like, hey, come over, your neighbor is dying. Let's all hang out. Yeah. Or wear dead people's hair as jewelry, that kind of thing.

A
I don't know if I agree with you. I know a lot of people who live. Yeah, but you're talking about rationalists. This is like a very weird group of people who I think only obsess over death because they are being exposed to it in the form of the potential for health span and lifespan extension. I disagree, and here is my disagreement.

Yes, you see it in the rationalist community, but you go to more Normie communities, and you'll have the christians that will lead a conversion with, oh, you get everlasting life if you accept this. And I think to somebody like us, I mean, why would I want that? Like, everlasting life? That doesn't seem.

B
I've just not heard anyone pitch that with a real conversion. Now, I've heard the conversions that I hear about all the time. When people actually legit confirm it's because they've lived a life of sin, of unhappiness. Maybe they're addicted to drugs. Maybe they're just deeply.

They have a spending addiction or whatever, and then they get God, and they find a hard culture, which gives them the discipline and fortitude they need to thrive as human. That's the only type of lasting conversion I've ever heard of. With people I know and with people that I'm familiar with. I've never met or even heard of someone who converted because they were convinced that they would live forever, gain eternal life, period. That's a.

A
Something I will buy. I know there's one exception, but I think it was a pity convert, which it was a husband of a mormon woman who, for the entire 50 year marriage, did not convert. And obviously, that was devastating to her, because, per the Mormon tradition, if you're proper, like, they probably. They weren't properly married, obviously, because he was not a member of the church, meaning that they couldn't live together forever after death. And then once they reached the end of their lives, he finally converted so that she could die believing that they would be together for all eternity, which is really sweet.

B
And that. I don't know if he actually became a believer. I don't think at all that he converted for eternal life. I think he converted so that she could die in peace. That was it.

Which is really sweet. That makes sense on both ends, that she wanted to spend all eternity with him and couldn't die in peace unless she knew that and that he was willing to convert to a religion that he held off on for 50 plus years. That. That is actually a sweet story, but yeah, no, okay. I hear you, and I'm glad that you're not asking me.

A
I always find, like, our weird religious stuff to be interesting because it really has made it like, it has not driven any sort of a wedge in our relationship in the way that you think it would. I guess because I'm so deferential to your perspectives in our religious quest that I'm not like, okay, here's some new thing. It's. This seems like a reasonable thing to believe. What do you think?

B
Yeah, no, it's more like we're watching our kids play, and you say something like that, and I'm like, yep. And then it becomes canon. I think this would help our kids anyway. I love you to death, Simone. You are spectacular.

A
And I feel really bad for the parents out there who are struggling with parenthood. It is difficult if you are not. When you're like, why am I going through this every day? It's not giving me that much happiness. Like, you're right.

If you're going through it and you're like, oh, my God, I'm giving another person a chance at 100 years of life. Like, with every one of our kids, I'm like, oh, my God, this person's gonna live, like, an entire lifetime, hopefully. That's insane. They just love and experience and learn and build and do. It's so cool, the spark in their eyes.

B
Yeah. I feel bad for the kids, too, obviously, because I know kids whose parents told them this and.

A
Yeah, what's the context here? In school, in high school, there were two girls who told me that their mothers had told them that. Their mothers specifically, which is tough, and they were tough girls, they were going to figure it out. But, like, to know that as a kid or to even suspect it, I think is really not great for the kid either. I think they'd still rather be alive.

And I think that this is so interesting. It's like somebody, the most fundamental, they come to us. They go, why do you have kids? It's so the kid can live, so we can have a life and a good life. Like, from the kid's perspective, in 20 years, why did I have the kid?

That's like asking a person, like, I owe my parents my life so multiplicatively. With each kid we have, we are giving another person that debt, which then they can pay forwards. Yeah, I just. I don't. I struggle with knowing a kid might feel unloved or unwanted.

B
This really makes me. What does that have to do with this context? I guess I don't understand. Hormones is. What does that have to do with this context?

Yeah, I get that. I get that. Like I said, mother, hormones do not work with logic. I'm just like, but a kid's hurting out there. And then the tears come and that's it.

Yeah. You understand? India understands. What do they. They give you positive emotional states, too.

A
For me, these little ones just look like squidgebots. She's cutest squidgebot. She's the cutest squid. You can share the squidgebot as a man, this age range. And I think that, like, men pretending that sub one year old do something.

B
No, I think some guys just love babies and I don't know why most men don't. And I think that men pretending like the one year old is like when it changes instead of the toddler. Kids are when it changes. Creates misaligned expectations in a lot of men. The newborns are when it changes for the mom.

A
The talking toddlers, I think, are when it really changes for the dads. Daddy will love you eventually, but right now you're just. She's mine. That's okay. They're with me 24/7 until they enter the group patrol, so.

B
Works out really well. It reminds me of the press when they're always like, they have kids, but. They don't even love them. You don't love them. They don't have them.

A
Be. Now I'm like, no, what you're missing is we don't have them because we love them. That's the cultural misinterpretation there. Yeah. Anyway, but you do.

Look, she wants. Oh, no, she's happy again or she's gassy. I will figure it out and then we'll make dinner. Oh, yeah. I don't know.

What are we gonna do for dinner tonight? I guess I can reheat one of those slow cooked. Yeah, you gotta cook it down. And I. If we go down right now, I can make biscuits this time.

B
Or the cornmeal muffins. Cornmeal. Oh, I love it when you make cornmeal muffins for slow cooked beef. Do that. That's fantastic.

A
Okay, great. Love. Tally ho. Stop recording here.

B
Stop recording here.