Parents who regret becoming parents are making anonymous confessions online, and it s taboo, but important. What are the reasons behind this phenomenon? And why do they matter? Simone and I talk about it in this episode of the podcast.
00:01:24.080I think about all the things my life would have been if the constant threat of motherhood hadn't loomed over me like a cloud of doom, Maple told Newsweek.
00:01:33.540I'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.
00:01:41.920But do I miss my life without children every single day?
00:01:47.340And then there's the Independent piece.
00:02:00.440And 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.
00:02:06.820Though 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.
00:02:58.680I much prefer the work week where I only have to be a parent for a few hours rather than all day.
00:03:05.720It's nonstop noise, screaming, whining, and fighting.
00:03:10.660And this other one says, this is not the life I wanted.
00:03:13.340My toddler son is a tornado of destruction and will break slash tear slash rip anything he can get his hands on, no matter how much I do to wear him out.
00:03:21.220And the baby predictably is needy because she is a baby.
00:03:24.820I feel tricked into wanting them by biological urges and the romanticization of the version of kids that isn't close to reality.
00:03:44.960Circumstances explain pretty much why I went through with them all.
00:03:48.420Imagine the guilt and mental weight of having a bunch of kids you love but never intended or wanted.
00:03:54.640And so the guardian piece, it's breaking the taboo, the parents who regret having children.
00:04:00.300And then we get a final piece here in time, the parents who regret having children, which shows in various studies, something like 7% to 15% of parents regret having children.
00:04:12.840And so first, what are your thoughts on this phenomenon?
00:04:15.420I think a lot of what seems to be playing out, at least in the pull 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.
00:04:33.960And this shows up in the research fairly consistently, longer, there's other research that shows that longer term contentedness goes up and that men actually are pretty happy in general.
00:04:45.980And that if memory serves, if you live in a nation that has more childcare support, you're probably also less unhappy.
00:04:55.160I 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.
00:05:01.300And 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 had this been like for her?
00:05:12.020And she sounds absolutely miserable, like completely miserable.
00:05:15.940And she even describes this moment after she had her baby, when she said to her husband, what have we done?
00:05:26.400And 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.
00:05:50.900It's not how people, yeah, this one woman who's talking about her son, who's this hellion running around, breaking everything.
00:06:28.580You, for these people, you must have lost your goddamn mind!
00:06:34.420And 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.
00:06:47.520And they're making it worse because really what the kid is, they're tired and they want to go to bed.
00:06:51.940And 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.
00:06:57.480But then they'll go to sleep and they'll feel better.
00:07:00.000And this prayer for parenting is what's making everyone miserable.
00:07:03.480But I don't think that this is the core thing that's making them miserable.
00:07:09.120Because you constantly correct me on this.
00:07:10.980It's 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, good, better for the parent developmentally, and it often just solves whatever the problem is that you're freaked out about.
00:07:33.540John 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 it was after when we were chatting with each other, in regards to the whole bop gate, spanking controversy, blah, blah, blah.
00:07:46.060And I was talking about how there's like these movements to not even listen when you should never say no to a child.
00:07:50.840You should never put a child in timeout.
00:07:52.800And he goes, yeah, I definitely see this idea of children should never experience any negative emotional stimuli.
00:07:57.580And when you take this mindset with a kid, you are the servant of the kid.
00:08:06.000You are living under the toddler's tyranny and world perspective.
00:08:11.500And 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 interest, that doesn't have...
00:08:19.700He's the toddler, not the person saying this.
00:08:21.480Yeah, but when you let a toddler reign, you're letting someone reign who even if they, who has no ability to actually even get what they want or know what they want.
00:08:45.040Yeah, you need to establish discipline and boundaries with children.
00:08:50.280And 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.
00:08:55.160Oh, what do you think is the core cause?
00:08:57.040If you read the actual quote and you think about what they're saying, it is fundamentally that anyone who has adopted the urban monoculture as their cultural value system, i.e. this progressive cultural system, should not have kids.
00:09:12.680Like without significant cultural retooling because their core value in life is often their personal emotional experience of reality.
00:09:23.500And their arguments for having kids typically fall into one of two categories.
00:09:28.380How those kids will augment their status was in their social network, i.e. I saw all the other moms doing it.
00:11:00.260There 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...
00:11:12.620Because it's just not worth the effort.
00:11:14.200There are value hierarchies that you can enter where you don't need to have kids to compete.
00:11:21.740And 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.
00:11:29.340You're not having kids for some sort of external value system.
00:12:00.920And the one thing that might be motivating this mandate is the strongest weapon that a parent has in the game of the social media status hierarchy is their cute kids.
00:12:15.760And so if you can create a negative externality around sharing that, you can remove your opponent's strongest weapon in status hierarchy battles.
00:12:24.220But this is something I absolutely see.
00:13:00.080The 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.
00:13:12.540But those people don't really matter as humans because they're not going to have kids themselves.
00:13:16.500And actually, another point that I saw another Collins mother say, actually, in a YouTube video, this is the Collins family that has 11 kids or something.
00:13:24.520They're actually more famous than us, which annoys me.
00:13:27.140We're not the most famous Collins family.
00:13:29.000But the mother has this one YouTube video where she talks about corporal punishment.
00:13:33.100And 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...
00:13:40.080How many kids do they have? Seven? Nine?
00:14:02.160But 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.
00:14:16.300And 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.
00:14:28.040So to use that as, like, your mooring point of, oh, in the future, my kid's going to hate me for this.
00:14:32.900Or, oh, this kid hated their parents for this thing, and therefore I should never do it, is not going to protect you from being hated by your kids in the future.
00:14:41.400And I think it's an important thing to remember as a parent.
00:14:46.360No, I absolutely agree with this perspective.
00:14:49.440And, 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.
00:15:01.120Their moral frameworks are incredibly rudimentary.
00:15:04.180They don't really know why they're living the life that they're living.
00:15:08.500That's actually the key absence in this book, Reasons for Having Children, is that there is no objective function to any of it.
00:15:16.300There is no, if you believe in this, then it makes sense.
00:15:19.120If you believe in that, then it doesn't make sense.
00:15:21.040If 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.
00:15:29.360Yeah, no, and so if people aren't familiar with our concept of objective function, you can learn about it in The Pragmatist Guide to Life.
00:15:35.300It'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.
00:15:44.360It'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.
00:15:56.060But hold on, you're underselling this, it is a dry book, it's not a fun read, I totally own that, 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,
00:16:10.360have 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.
00:16:21.980That'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.
00:16:28.120And 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.
00:16:34.840It is one of the most freeing, wonderful things to do in your entire existence, so don't undersell the power of it.
00:16:42.800Okay, objective function is, by the way, not like a purpose, it's a weighted list of things that you think have value in reality.
00:16:50.040And 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.
00:17:00.200Yeah, and that's why you like the anime, is it called Goblin Slayer?
00:17:05.020Goblin Slayer is so much, because it has this one main character in it, who's just extremely based, in this fantasy RPG world, where there's all these little side quests, like literally, it's like a video game.
00:17:15.660And 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.
00:17:26.100And 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.
00:17:33.400His objective function is kill maximum number of goblins.
00:17:39.660Actually, his objective function is to minimize unnecessary human suffering, and he sees goblins 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.
00:17:58.080And he just over-focuses on this one type of threat, because it's a more common threat that is a lower-status threat within this world for eradicating.
00:18:10.580Okay, 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.
00:18:17.860And you can look at this from an EA framework.
00:18:19.540When 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?
00:18:24.820It 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.
00:18:34.420And 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.
00:18:43.180And he's a very magnetic character in the show, because while everyone else is having and hawing about things, and they don't really know what they're doing, they can be a little bit aimless.
00:18:50.920He is just, he like emanates confidence and sort of this amazing, yeah, purpose.
00:19:19.780If 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 Hays movement or like the handing out fentanyl on the streets or the banning of tests.
00:19:33.240Like 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.
00:19:41.020But 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.
00:19:55.340You can't engage with that question, right?
00:19:57.920Like you don't have a framework for engaging with it because it's literally the foundation of your cultural system.
00:20:02.520You can't say, oh, actually trigger warnings are stupid and cause more pain at the end of the day.
00:20:06.300Oh, the Hays movement is stupid and we should be shaming people for doing things that make them unhealthy.
00:20:11.020Oh, you can't, you can't even think these thoughts.
00:20:13.260But then secondly, if they ask the even bigger question, which is suffering is just negative human emotional states, right?
00:20:21.300And we only feel things like that because our ancestors who felt them had less surviving offspring.
00:20:26.980So they're just like randomly created environmental signals that don't have any real intrinsic purpose or value.
00:20:34.160Why would you base your entire like cosmology off of this?
00:20:38.400I don't, I actually don't think that there's a great answer to this.
00:20:41.140I 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?
00:20:53.380We were programmed to feel this way by our ancestral environment.
00:20:57.440That doesn't mean it's a thing of actual value.
00:21:00.000Now, the other thing I wanted to note 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?
00:21:13.420So, for example, and he actually makes an emotional argument for becoming a parent.
00:21:19.980Oh, it will change the way you perceive reality, right?
00:21:23.200Oh, so it's then in other words, a hedonic argument for parenting?
00:21:26.840Yeah, he says people would say to him, you could have gone to Paris.
00:21:31.280Imagine someone saying you could have done drugs at Burning Man.
00:21:33.980Heck, every day of the week, you could have gone out and bought a new expensive scotch.
00:21:37.280New music was going to be released, new books, new movies, new games.
00:21:40.300The actual news itself will always keep rolling.
00:21:42.760There'll be another beautiful sunset when the gold light comes in through the trees from the west.
00:21:47.560Yet, to this reply, ah, but I had seen beautiful sunsets.
00:22:42.240I turned the TV off and it would be 9 p.m. on a Wednesday.
00:22:45.660I could go read another novel, but I'd already read 1,000.
00:22:49.080What was the 1,001st novel going to give me that I didn't get from the rest?
00:22:53.560When you approach parenting from a moral standpoint, the emotional rewards are high, but you only get these high emotional rewards, as Simone always says.
00:23:07.700The only true happiness you'll ever experience is sacrificing to live your value system successfully.
00:23:13.680And as you get older, the stimuli that used to fully reward you when you were young stop rewarding you, both because your biology is changing, because your ancestors didn't have the changing biology, didn't have surviving offspring, and because you have done these things 1,000 times.
00:23:31.860When people are like, why are you so anti-life extensionist?
00:23:36.740It's because a great book, a novel that you read when you've read 1,000 novels is always going to be less of a thing to somebody who has read 1,000 or 10,000 novels.
00:25:01.580But 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 grayer.
00:25:13.520But 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.
00:25:18.260And just as soon as you figure it out, it's going to be different.
00:25:20.280I'm talking about ourselves that I'm talking about, Simone, here.
00:25:22.100I'm not talking about the novelty you get from the children.
00:25:45.200Have 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?
00:25:53.120And you get very annoyed because they're not paying enough attention to it as you would have historically, and they need to watch it because the real entertainment isn't the movie.
00:26:01.880This is why you get so pissed when I walk to the microwave in the middle of the book.
00:26:05.220Who hasn't seen the movie, watching the movie, okay?
00:26:08.960That is what kids are, but for life, okay?
00:26:13.780It is – they make life like it was and not like exactly like it was when I was a kid.
00:26:22.220It'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.
00:26:32.540So, by that, I liked playing on the water as a kid, but I remember there were some things I didn't like.
00:26:39.180I 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.
00:26:47.100I did anything where I was like actively engaged with the water.
00:26:49.860So, now what I do is I take this little go-boat thing, which is basically like a floating cylindrical platform.
00:26:55.780I slap a motor on it, and I go out to the river right next to our house, and I just go up and down it with the kids, and the kids help kick and throw their hands in and everything like that.
00:27:06.220And 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.
00:27:18.680And 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.
00:27:22.480Now, 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.
00:27:30.920But 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 monocultury parents feel like they have lost, which is the fancy scotches or the nightclubs or the travel.
00:27:50.760They are bemoaning the experiences that they will not get to experience because they are looking for the emotion that their kids will create in them because they didn't create children for the children.
00:28:11.000So when I go and experience something with my children, I am not focused really on how does this make me feel.
00:28:19.740I 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.
00:28:45.180Would you, what are your thoughts on this?
00:28:49.740Part 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?
00:29:35.620Actually, 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.
00:29:49.280You can still see this in the way it's written.
00:29:50.660It'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.
00:29:59.780Because when I look at psychological problems, a lot of the psychological problems in society right now are downstream of people not having purpose.
00:30:28.880You wouldn't be getting your expensive scotch or going to nightclubs or playing video games.
00:30:35.760That's one of the things that always got me about the FTX collapse guy, Sam Bakeman-Fried, is people were like, oh, he was such a dedicated to this value of reducing suffering.
00:30:44.920I'm like, the bro was playing video games during board meetings.
00:30:59.980Recognize that when I drink, it's a sin.
00:31:02.160But I'm always choosing which sins I'm fighting and which sins I'm not fighting.
00:31:05.420And this isn't what I'm interested in dealing with right now because I am healthy.
00:31:09.340And 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.
00:31:16.460But I think that's the way that we need to relate to these things.
00:32:19.020And they've also been told, obviously, a culture can't survive if it can't keep people from interacting with more desirable cultural groups.
00:32:26.660But everywhere where they might actually find meaning, often there's like a big red flag of,
00:32:30.800don't interact with this, or you're a Yahtzee.
00:32:33.420Yeah, these are religious weirdos, or these are, yeah, whatever might be scary about them.
00:32:52.540If 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, etc.
00:33:12.660But I don't think the urban monoculture 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.
00:33:31.840Which is to say that they're trying to say, in the end, being a parent really will make you happier.
00:33:41.640It 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.
00:33:56.100What is his argument, if it's not that?
00:33:58.160I 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.
00:34:11.280And obviously, this doesn't happen for everyone.
00:34:12.580Not everyone literally has a perfectly healthy first puberty.
00:34:15.140Some people end up same-sex attracted and stuff like that.
00:34:19.360So 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.
00:34:26.100But 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.
00:34:39.240For 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.
00:34:49.040Once you get to four kids or three kids, right?
00:34:51.520Yeah, it's really hard to be afraid of dying.
00:34:53.580Yeah, and fear of death just completely leaves you.
00:34:56.080You are afraid of your kids dying, but you are not afraid of dying anymore at all, like even a little.
00:35:01.120And it would make sense from a biological perspective.
00:35:22.440It just begins to become, like, an absurd thing for an individual to want once you have a lot of kids.
00:35:28.120But if you don't, obviously, for genetic reasons, you're pre-coded to be, like, terrified of dying.
00:35:32.900And 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.
00:35:45.380I don't think fear of death really features strong in mainstream society now.
00:35:49.620And I don't think it does because we're so separated from death.
00:35:52.920It's hard to even remember that you're going to die in our world because it's so isolated as a life event.
00:35:58.480Unlike it was in the Victorian times when, like, your neighbor was dying.
00:36:01.200It's like, hey, come over. Your neighbor's dying. Let's all hang out.
00:36:05.760Yeah. Or wear dead people's hair as jewelry. That kind of thing.
00:36:09.940I don't know if I agree with you. I know a lot of people who live in-
00:36:13.680Yeah, but you're talking about rationalists.
00:36:15.100This 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 healthspan and lifespan extension.
00:36:26.920I disagree. And here is my disagreement.
00:36:29.020Yes, 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.
00:36:40.040And I think to somebody like us, I'd be like, why would I want that?
00:36:43.260Like, everlasting life? That doesn't seem-
00:36:45.640Yeah, but I think this is a straw man. I've just not heard anyone pitch that with a real conversion.
00:36:51.720Now, 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, of maybe they're addicted to drugs.
00:37:02.700Maybe 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 a human.
00:37:14.940That's the only type of lasting conversion I've ever heard of, with people I know and with people that I'm familiar with.
00:37:21.480I have never met or even heard of someone who converted because they were convinced that they would live forever.
00:37:34.420I know. There's one exception, but I think it was a pity convert, which it was a husband of a Mormon woman who, for their entire 50-year marriage, did not convert.
00:37:45.300And 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.
00:37:57.940And 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.
00:38:09.540And that, I don't know if he actually became a believer.
00:38:12.520I don't think at all that he converted for eternal life.
00:38:15.020I think he converted so that she could die in peace.
00:40:03.800In school, in high school, there were two girls who told me that their mothers had told them that, their mothers specifically, which is tough.