Based Camp - The Rise of Parents Who Regret Having Children

00:00:00.000 This isn't the way that historically people related to kids.

00:00:03.340 If the point of the kids is modifying either your self-perception or your emotional experience of reality, kids are actually bad pets.

00:00:14.600 They're terrible pets. 0.97

00:00:15.800 They're terrible pets. 0.97

00:00:17.120 Kids are not a good pet.

00:00:18.900 No unconditional love.

00:00:20.360 They are very difficult to potty train, house train, etc.

00:00:24.680 Would you like to know more?

00:00:25.980 Hello, Simone. 0.69

00:00:27.200 I am excited to be talking with you today.

00:00:30.000 This conversation was actually inspired to me by an Eric Hole piece.

00:00:34.160 Oh, I saw that.

00:00:35.520 This afternoon, right?

00:00:36.400 Yeah, Becoming a Parent to Meet Me a Better Person.

00:00:38.460 And in the piece, he linked to this new genre of articles about people who hated becoming parents.

00:00:45.700 There's a BuzzFeed article.

00:00:47.660 Parents who regret having children are making anonymous confessions online.

00:00:51.320 And it's taboo, but important.

00:00:53.660 And then there was the Atlantic piece.

00:00:55.840 The two reasons parents regret having kids.

00:00:58.260 And then there's the time piece.

00:01:02.120 The parents who regret having children, which apparently went viral.

00:01:05.640 And then there's a Business Insider piece.

00:01:07.780 Six common reasons.

00:01:08.940 Parents don't like their kids or something.

00:01:10.920 And then there's the Newsweek piece.

00:01:12.260 I regret having children.

00:01:13.660 The moms united in an uncomfortable truce. 0.58

00:01:16.480 Let's see what this one is.

00:01:17.540 So this is Richard Maple, 39, from Ohio, after becoming a mother at 31.

00:01:22.220 And she says, quote,

00:01:24.080 I 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.

00:01:33.540 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.

00:01:41.920 But do I miss my life without children every single day?

00:01:47.340 And then there's the Independent piece.

00:01:49.180 I had no choice.

00:01:50.600 The people who regret becoming parents.

00:01:52.840 And then there's the Sunday Morning Herald piece.

00:01:55.220 Having kids is probably the biggest life regret.

00:01:58.780 Wife concurs, it says. 0.61

00:02:00.440 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.

00:02:06.820 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.

00:02:19.180 Wife concurs. 0.98

00:02:21.400 Oh, my God.

00:02:22.860 And here's another quote here.

00:02:24.840 Quote, my wife needed to be a mother. 1.00

00:02:26.560 I think she saw all her friends, classmates, and cousins having kids, so she needed to be in this mummy club. 0.99

00:02:33.000 Quote, I went along with the things to please her.

00:02:36.120 I was fine was one, but she campaigned for two. 1.00

00:02:39.220 I gave in to make her happy.

00:02:41.540 So here we are with the two toddlers.

00:02:45.120 We're both moody, can't stand each other half the time, and have a borderline dead bedroom life.

00:02:51.080 So much for making her happy.

00:02:52.940 The kids are a pain.

00:02:54.020 It has gotten to the point where I don't enjoy being home anymore.

00:02:56.960 I dread the weekends.

00:02:58.680 I much prefer the work week where I only have to be a parent for a few hours rather than all day.

00:03:05.720 It's nonstop noise, screaming, whining, and fighting.

00:03:10.660 And this other one says, this is not the life I wanted.

00:03:13.340 My 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.

00:03:21.220 And the baby predictably is needy because she is a baby.

00:03:24.820 I feel tricked into wanting them by biological urges and the romanticization of the version of kids that isn't close to reality.

00:03:32.180 Do you want me to keep going?

00:03:33.980 I think you have to.

00:03:35.740 Oh, here's another.

00:03:36.740 I love my kids, but I also regret them deeply.

00:03:40.960 Every one of them.

00:03:42.660 I never wanted any of them.

00:03:44.960 Circumstances explain pretty much why I went through with them all.

00:03:48.420 Imagine the guilt and mental weight of having a bunch of kids you love but never intended or wanted.

00:03:54.640 And so the guardian piece, it's breaking the taboo, the parents who regret having children.

00:04:00.300 And 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.

00:04:11.480 Regret.

00:04:12.360 Wow.

00:04:12.840 And so first, what are your thoughts on this phenomenon?

00:04:15.420 I 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.

00:04:33.960 And 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.

00:04:45.980 And that if memory serves, if you live in a nation that has more childcare support, you're probably also less unhappy.

00:04:53.340 So there are all these factors here.

00:04:55.160 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.

00:05:01.300 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 had this been like for her?

00:05:12.020 And she sounds absolutely miserable, like completely miserable.

00:05:15.940 And she even describes this moment after she had her baby, when she said to her husband, what have we done?

00:05:24.420 Like our life before was good.

00:05:26.400 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.

00:05:50.900 It's not how people, yeah, this one woman who's talking about her son, who's this hellion running around, breaking everything. 0.93

00:05:57.940 I'm like, have you tried bopping him?

00:05:59.260 I know you haven't, but you should think about it.

00:06:02.680 There's a reason why people used to do this.

00:06:05.240 I want candy! 1.00

00:06:08.140 Damn it, I hate you! 1.00

00:06:10.000 You're ruining my life! 1.00

00:06:11.080 Please, pervert, remember our agreement. 0.99

00:06:12.420 We have an agreement.

00:06:13.220 On candy marshmallows!

00:06:15.560 When it gets like this, I just don't know how to make him stop.

00:06:19.860 And my spell out! 1.00

00:06:21.640 Have you ever tried beating his ass? 1.00

00:06:28.580 You, for these people, you must have lost your goddamn mind! 1.00

00:06:34.420 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. 1.00

00:06:47.520 And they're making it worse because really what the kid is, they're tired and they want to go to bed.

00:06:51.940 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.

00:06:57.480 But then they'll go to sleep and they'll feel better.

00:07:00.000 And this prayer for parenting is what's making everyone miserable.

00:07:03.480 But I don't think that this is the core thing that's making them miserable.

00:07:06.200 But!

00:07:06.720 I think it is.

00:07:07.920 I think it is.

00:07:09.120 Because you constantly correct me on this.

00:07:10.980 It'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.

00:07:33.540 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 it was after when we were chatting with each other, in regards to the whole bop gate, spanking controversy, blah, blah, blah.

00:07:46.060 And I was talking about how there's like these movements to not even listen when you should never say no to a child.

00:07:50.840 You should never put a child in timeout.

00:07:52.800 And he goes, yeah, I definitely see this idea of children should never experience any negative emotional stimuli.

00:07:57.580 And when you take this mindset with a kid, you are the servant of the kid.

00:08:04.160 It's not the other way around.

00:08:06.000 You are living under the toddler's tyranny and world perspective.

00:08:11.500 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 interest, that doesn't have...

00:08:19.700 He's the toddler, not the person saying this.

00:08:21.480 Yeah, 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.

00:08:30.200 And that's the problem.

00:08:31.120 You have a kid who's really tired and they need to take a nap or go to sleep.

00:08:35.580 The last thing they will ask for is sleep.

00:08:38.260 No, they're going to ask for a billion things and definitely not go to sleep.

00:08:42.220 And that's why you can't let them rule.

00:08:43.520 They can't establish the...

00:08:45.040 Yeah, you need to establish discipline and boundaries with children.

00:08:50.280 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.

00:08:55.160 Oh, what do you think is the core cause?

00:08:57.040 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 as their cultural value system, i.e. this progressive cultural system, should not have kids.

00:09:12.680 Like without significant cultural retooling because their core value in life is often their personal emotional experience of reality.

00:09:23.500 And their arguments for having kids typically fall into one of two categories.

00:09:28.380 How those kids will augment their status was in their social network, i.e. I saw all the other moms doing it. 0.99

00:09:34.020 I wanted to be like them.

00:09:35.060 I wanted to fit in. 0.99

00:09:36.200 This is about masturbating a personal emotional need. 0.99

00:09:38.940 Or they thought the kids would make them happy and be like toys for them, right? 0.98

00:09:43.280 That the kids would go play about and that through that, they would feel good around the kids.

00:09:48.620 This is not the way that we relate to kids.

00:09:51.600 This isn't the way that historically people related to kids.

00:09:54.900 If the point of the kids is modifying either your self-perception or your emotional experience of reality, kids are actually bad pets.

00:10:05.740 They're terrible pets. 0.97

00:10:07.360 They're terrible pets. 0.97

00:10:08.680 Kids are not a good pet.

00:10:10.460 No unconditional love.

00:10:12.280 They are very difficult to potty train, house train, etc.

00:10:16.200 Yeah, definitely.

00:10:17.440 Bad pets.

00:10:17.860 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...

00:10:25.660 I mean, you can look at like the book you read and it's constantly about self-affirmation.

00:10:30.000 It's constantly about how does this reflect on myself?

00:10:33.600 Like, how do I fit the kids into this sort of...

00:10:36.440 Like, what are the arguments that they use, for example?

00:10:39.760 For having kids or for why they regret having kids?

00:10:43.140 No, for having kids.

00:10:46.440 I may be too low IQ for this book.

00:10:48.560 I genuinely am only getting reasons to not have kids from this book.

00:10:53.240 I know it's a prenatalist book.

00:10:54.500 I'm sure it's in there somewhere.

00:10:57.060 I'm coming up dry.

00:10:57.780 Yeah, and this is the thing.

00:11:00.260 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...

00:11:12.620 Because it's just not worth the effort.

00:11:14.200 There are value hierarchies that you can enter where you don't need to have kids to compete.

00:11:21.740 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.

00:11:29.340 You're not having kids for some sort of external value system.

00:11:32.100 I.e.

00:11:32.820 You believe that it's in God's interest or something like that.

00:11:36.480 Now, God, there was a point I went...

00:11:38.400 Oh, yeah.

00:11:38.980 So this actually reminds me of a comment we had on our Discord that I thought was just absolutely brilliant.

00:11:44.060 And it was on socially the way people relate to kids and this banning of people having kids on social media.

00:11:52.260 And they're saying a lot of people who are doing this are childless people.

00:11:56.540 Don't put your kids on social media.

00:11:58.280 This point you showed me last night.

00:11:59.780 That's...

00:12:00.120 Oh, this is fire.

00:12:00.920 And 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.

00:12:15.760 And so if you can create a negative externality around sharing that, you can remove your opponent's strongest weapon in status hierarchy battles.

00:12:24.220 But this is something I absolutely see.

00:12:26.180 Yeah.

00:12:26.480 I definitely see the concern a lot less from what I'd consider, like, the people who have a ton of kids and a happy family life.

00:12:35.320 It's mostly people who don't have that and want to...

00:12:38.940 Or they have one kid and it's a new one and their virtue signal.

00:12:41.680 But yeah, no.

00:12:42.800 Of the YouTube influencers I know, people who post their kids online, of the ones I have watched content from, only one of them has a kid.

00:12:52.300 And others, at least seven of them.

00:12:54.840 So it's like a seven to one ratio.

00:12:56.900 Yeah.

00:12:57.720 Yeah.

00:12:58.680 Yeah, that makes a lot of sense.

00:13:00.080 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.

00:13:12.540 But those people don't really matter as humans because they're not going to have kids themselves.

00:13:16.500 And 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.

00:13:24.520 They're actually more famous than us, which annoys me.

00:13:27.140 We're not the most famous Collins family.

00:13:29.000 But the mother has this one YouTube video where she talks about corporal punishment.

00:13:33.100 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... 0.95

00:13:40.080 How many kids do they have? Seven? Nine?

00:13:42.320 Between seven and 11.

00:13:43.400 A lot of kids.

00:13:44.180 Some are adopted, some are biologically theirs.

00:13:46.200 They're a classic prenatalist family.

00:13:48.040 Of course...

00:13:48.440 A Christian black dad, white mom? 0.94

00:13:49.960 I think so, yeah.

00:13:50.620 Yeah.

00:13:50.940 So it's a great family.

00:13:52.880 I think they're surprisingly similar to us in their approach to corporal punishment.

00:13:56.960 Not exactly, but, like, they mentioned that for some kids, they don't do it at all because you don't need to.

00:14:01.040 This is a very reason of all that.

00:14:02.160 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.

00:14:16.300 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.

00:14:26.480 They'll find something wrong with it.

00:14:28.040 So to use that as, like, your mooring point of, oh, in the future, my kid's going to hate me for this.

00:14:32.900 Or, 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.

00:14:41.400 And I think it's an important thing to remember as a parent.

00:14:46.360 No, I absolutely agree with this perspective.

00:14:49.440 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.

00:15:01.120 Their moral frameworks are incredibly rudimentary.

00:15:04.180 They don't really know why they're living the life that they're living.

00:15:07.460 They don't know why they're doing anything.

00:15:08.500 That's actually the key absence in this book, Reasons for Having Children, is that there is no objective function to any of it.

00:15:16.300 There is no, if you believe in this, then it makes sense.

00:15:19.120 If you believe in that, then it doesn't make sense.

00:15:21.040 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.

00:15:27.780 You're so right.

00:15:29.360 Yeah, 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.

00:15:35.300 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.

00:15:44.360 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.

00:15:56.060 But 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,

00:16:10.360 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.

00:16:21.980 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.

00:16:28.120 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.

00:16:34.840 It is one of the most freeing, wonderful things to do in your entire existence, so don't undersell the power of it.

00:16:42.800 Okay, objective function is, by the way, not like a purpose, it's a weighted list of things that you think have value in reality.

00:16:50.040 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.

00:17:00.200 Yeah, and that's why you like the anime, is it called Goblin Slayer?

00:17:03.740 Yeah, Goblin Slayer. 0.62

00:17:05.020 Goblin 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.

00:17:15.660 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.

00:17:24.700 It's the only thing.

00:17:26.100 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. 0.56

00:17:33.400 His objective function is kill maximum number of goblins.

00:17:37.340 And he's a very magnetic... 0.94

00:17:38.800 Hold on, I'll actually...

00:17:39.660 Actually, 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.

00:17:58.080 And 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.

00:18:09.900 Yeah, so that's...

00:18:10.580 Okay, 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.

00:18:17.860 And you can look at this from an EA framework.

00:18:19.540 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?

00:18:24.820 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.

00:18:32.880 And so that's what he did.

00:18:34.420 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.

00:18:43.180 And 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.

00:18:50.920 He is just, he like emanates confidence and sort of this amazing, yeah, purpose.

00:18:58.120 He knows what he's doing and why.

00:19:00.080 And that's the problem with the urban monoculture, is it doesn't delineate purpose.

00:19:05.120 Yeah.

00:19:05.560 It delineates preference.

00:19:07.760 You should have a preference for this.

00:19:09.800 And why is it so bad at delineating purpose?

00:19:12.500 Because it's all downhill of the idea of you should be affirmed for believing anything about yourself that you want to believe.

00:19:19.620 Yeah.

00:19:19.780 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 Hays movement or like the handing out fentanyl on the streets or the banning of tests.

00:19:33.240 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.

00:19:41.020 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.

00:19:55.340 You can't engage with that question, right?

00:19:57.920 Like you don't have a framework for engaging with it because it's literally the foundation of your cultural system. 0.99

00:20:02.520 You can't say, oh, actually trigger warnings are stupid and cause more pain at the end of the day. 1.00

00:20:06.300 Oh, the Hays movement is stupid and we should be shaming people for doing things that make them unhealthy. 1.00

00:20:11.020 Oh, you can't, you can't even think these thoughts. 1.00

00:20:13.260 But then secondly, if they ask the even bigger question, which is suffering is just negative human emotional states, right?

00:20:21.300 And we only feel things like that because our ancestors who felt them had less surviving offspring.

00:20:26.980 So they're just like randomly created environmental signals that don't have any real intrinsic purpose or value.

00:20:34.160 Why would you base your entire like cosmology off of this?

00:20:38.400 I don't, I actually don't think that there's a great answer to this.

00:20:41.140 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?

00:20:53.380 We were programmed to feel this way by our ancestral environment.

00:20:57.440 That doesn't mean it's a thing of actual value.

00:21:00.000 Now, 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?

00:21:13.420 So, for example, and he actually makes an emotional argument for becoming a parent.

00:21:19.980 Oh, it will change the way you perceive reality, right?

00:21:23.200 Oh, so it's then in other words, a hedonic argument for parenting?

00:21:26.840 Yeah, he says people would say to him, you could have gone to Paris.

00:21:31.280 Imagine someone saying you could have done drugs at Burning Man.

00:21:33.980 Heck, every day of the week, you could have gone out and bought a new expensive scotch.

00:21:37.280 New music was going to be released, new books, new movies, new games.

00:21:40.300 The actual news itself will always keep rolling.

00:21:42.760 There'll be another beautiful sunset when the gold light comes in through the trees from the west.

00:21:47.560 Yet, to this reply, ah, but I had seen beautiful sunsets.

00:21:53.420 I had tasted scotches.

00:21:54.860 I had done drugs at Burning Man.

00:21:56.700 I had sat at restaurants in Paris and watched the CN sparkle as I read Hemingway.

00:22:03.080 I love how you pronounce the CN.

00:22:06.720 What is it?

00:22:07.200 You hate French people so much, and I love it. 1.00

00:22:10.200 I don't want these foreign words on my American tongue. 0.90

00:22:14.140 You intentionally butcher it.

00:22:15.280 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 20s.

00:22:22.220 Paris would be the same, but I would have changed.

00:22:24.580 Over time, the world ceased to surprise me.

00:22:26.880 I saw its machinations and became increasingly unimpressed.

00:22:30.020 I saw my own machinations and became equally unimpressed.

00:22:33.580 I watched the talking heads on TV repeat themselves.

00:22:36.420 All the human race began to look like a pack of bickering primates.

00:22:40.200 One side wins, the other side wins.

00:22:42.240 I turned the TV off and it would be 9 p.m. on a Wednesday.

00:22:45.660 I could go read another novel, but I'd already read 1,000.

00:22:49.080 What was the 1,001st novel going to give me that I didn't get from the rest?

00:22:53.560 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.

00:23:07.700 The only true happiness you'll ever experience is sacrificing to live your value system successfully.

00:23:13.680 And 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.

00:23:31.860 When people are like, why are you so anti-life extensionist?

00:23:36.740 It'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.

00:23:50.080 Diminishing marginal returns.

00:23:51.320 Someone's 10th book.

00:23:52.800 Actually, this is really interesting.

00:23:54.680 Kids don't have diminishing marginal returns.

00:23:57.500 At all.

00:23:58.140 Yeah.

00:23:58.380 Because they keep changing.

00:23:59.740 It's changes in kind.

00:24:01.440 What was that video game dynamic?

00:24:03.540 Changes in kind.

00:24:03.960 Yeah, so changes in kind is something called a video.

00:24:06.760 But I don't understand where you're going with the changes in kind concept.

00:24:09.640 Changes in kind means that throughout a video game, you need to totally change the way that the game is being presented.

00:24:15.700 So people are dealing with entirely new gameplay and narrative loops.

00:24:18.940 But what is your point here?

00:24:20.480 That's what parenting feels like to me.

00:24:23.020 Not to me at all.

00:24:23.920 I don't know what.

00:24:24.820 I guess it's because you get the goof patrol and they're more uniform right now.

00:24:28.720 I don't know.

00:24:29.140 Anyway.

00:24:29.640 I don't know.

00:24:30.200 Infants all seem the same to me.

00:24:32.460 But despite infants being the same and toddlers aren't you being the same, their experience of reality is equally magical every time.

00:24:40.240 No, I don't think it's that it's equally magical.

00:24:42.080 It is.

00:24:42.680 But what I'm saying is that they change so significantly.

00:24:46.120 Kids as they grow up change so significantly, even from week to week.

00:24:49.260 Our kids this week are a totally different dynamic from the way that I felt they were, at least.

00:24:54.840 Oh, that is a good use of changes in kind.

00:24:56.840 Yes.

00:24:57.320 The ways that they change as they get older is a good use of changes in kind.

00:25:01.120 I told you.

00:25:01.580 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 grayer.

00:25:13.520 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.

00:25:18.260 And just as soon as you figure it out, it's going to be different.

00:25:20.280 I'm talking about ourselves that I'm talking about, Simone, here.

00:25:22.100 I'm not talking about the novelty you get from the children.

00:25:24.480 Okay, so what is it?

00:25:25.100 I'm talking about the revitalized perspective of reality you get from their perspective of reality being blemished and untouched.

00:25:35.360 Oh, that you're also experiencing the world anew from them.

00:25:37.800 It's like that's a new whole layer of novelty.

00:25:40.740 If you ever – and people are like, as a non-parent, I can't imagine this.

00:25:44.260 And I'm like, no, you can't.

00:25:45.200 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?

00:25:53.120 And 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.

00:26:01.880 This is why you get so pissed when I walk to the microwave in the middle of the book.

00:26:05.220 Who hasn't seen the movie, watching the movie, okay?

00:26:08.960 That is what kids are, but for life, okay?

00:26:13.560 Yeah.

00:26:13.780 It is – they make life like it was and not like exactly like it was when I was a kid.

00:26:22.220 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.

00:26:32.540 So, by that, I liked playing on the water as a kid, but I remember there were some things I didn't like.

00:26:39.180 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.

00:26:47.100 I did anything where I was like actively engaged with the water.

00:26:49.860 So, now what I do is I take this little go-boat thing, which is basically like a floating cylindrical platform.

00:26:55.780 I 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.

00:27:06.220 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.

00:27:18.680 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.

00:27:22.480 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.

00:27:30.920 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 monocultury parents feel like they have lost, which is the fancy scotches or the nightclubs or the travel.

00:27:50.760 They 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.

00:28:03.800 They created children for themselves.

00:28:07.500 I had children for my children.

00:28:11.000 So when I go and experience something with my children, I am not focused really on how does this make me feel.

00:28:19.740 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.

00:28:45.180 Would you, what are your thoughts on this?

00:28:47.460 I agree with you on this.

00:28:49.740 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?

00:29:07.340 Yeah.

00:29:07.980 They read the Pragmatist Guide to Life.

00:29:09.580 I genuinely think they could reform themselves pretty significantly.

00:29:12.720 I think the urban monoculture is so psychologically unhealthy and sad because it just doesn't have a value system.

00:29:22.400 I will say this.

00:29:23.500 If you are a regretful parent and you are watching this, email us at partners at pragmatistfoundation.com.

00:29:29.700 We will send you a free copy of Pragmatist Guide to Life.

00:29:33.220 Free audiobook.

00:29:34.400 Free audiobook.

00:29:35.500 Yeah.

00:29:35.620 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.

00:29:49.280 You can still see this in the way it's written.

00:29:50.660 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.

00:29:59.780 Because when I look at psychological problems, a lot of the psychological problems in society right now are downstream of people not having purpose.

00:30:08.140 Yep.

00:30:10.420 Or not having a purpose they really believe in.

00:30:12.840 And I think that's the thing, right?

00:30:14.360 There's all of these.

00:30:15.480 They're like, yeah, I have purpose.

00:30:16.700 It's reduced suffering, broadly.

00:30:21.180 I'm like, yeah, but do you really believe that?

00:30:23.340 Because you seem to be, if you really believed it, you'd be like Goblin Slave. 0.63

00:30:27.160 Out there actually doing something.

00:30:28.880 You wouldn't be getting your expensive scotch or going to nightclubs or playing video games.

00:30:35.760 That'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.

00:30:44.920 I'm like, the bro was playing video games during board meetings.

00:30:47.800 No, he wasn't.

00:30:49.040 He had no control over himself.

00:30:51.460 And he didn't see this as a negative thing.

00:30:53.760 And this is the thing we always say about sin is recognize your sin.

00:30:56.960 Everybody sins.

00:30:58.420 We're man.

00:30:58.920 We're not gods.

00:30:59.980 Recognize that when I drink, it's a sin.

00:31:02.160 But I'm always choosing which sins I'm fighting and which sins I'm not fighting.

00:31:05.420 And this isn't what I'm interested in dealing with right now because I am healthy.

00:31:09.340 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.

00:31:16.460 But I think that's the way that we need to relate to these things.

00:31:20.360 Yeah, I agree.

00:31:21.760 Okay, so I still think high-effort parenting is a big problem here.

00:31:24.740 But I also think high-effort parenting is downstream of not having an objective function in life and being in the urban monoculture.

00:31:30.820 So, touche.

00:31:32.520 But the urban monoculture is just so psychologically damaging.

00:31:35.380 I often liken it to putting your soul.

00:31:39.060 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.

00:31:44.720 And it just gets ripped apart.

00:31:46.620 And they don't seem to have light behind their eyes anymore.

00:31:49.600 They don't seem excited to be alive anymore.

00:31:52.160 It's just for the stuff.

00:31:55.500 That's what it is.

00:31:56.320 It's filling out their house and their collection and their social media feeds.

00:32:00.380 And it's...

00:32:01.380 It's not even for that.

00:32:02.500 It's just that's so often the message that's presented.

00:32:05.100 So, what are you going to do?

00:32:06.180 They're really just for happiness.

00:32:07.700 They're looking for meaning.

00:32:09.280 And they've been told that if they do certain things, they'll find it.

00:32:12.240 It's just that they can't find it within that culture.

00:32:15.260 They can't find it within that framework.

00:32:16.880 It devastates me.

00:32:18.740 Yeah.

00:32:19.020 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.

00:32:26.660 But everywhere where they might actually find meaning, often there's like a big red flag of,

00:32:30.800 don't interact with this, or you're a Yahtzee.

00:32:33.420 Yeah, these are religious weirdos, or these are, yeah, whatever might be scary about them. 0.98

00:32:40.980 They're odd or uneducated. 0.91

00:32:44.220 That's another really big thing.

00:32:46.040 Yeah.

00:32:46.340 You'll be uneducated if you interact with them, which will make you low status.

00:32:50.680 Yeah.

00:32:50.880 Or they're just low status.

00:32:52.220 I don't know.

00:32:52.540 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, etc.

00:33:08.640 Right?

00:33:09.580 Yeah.

00:33:10.440 That's sad.

00:33:11.880 No, it is sad.

00:33:12.660 But 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.

00:33:31.840 Which is to say that they're trying to say, in the end, being a parent really will make you happier.

00:33:41.640 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.

00:33:54.880 Am I right there?

00:33:56.100 What is his argument, if it's not that?

00:33:58.160 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.

00:34:11.280 And obviously, this doesn't happen for everyone.

00:34:12.580 Not everyone literally has a perfectly healthy first puberty.

00:34:15.140 Some people end up same-sex attracted and stuff like that.

00:34:17.460 There's obviously all the ways.

00:34:19.360 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.

00:34:26.100 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.

00:34:37.420 Now the opposite seems insane.

00:34:39.240 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.

00:34:49.040 Once you get to four kids or three kids, right?

00:34:51.520 Yeah, it's really hard to be afraid of dying.

00:34:53.580 Yeah, and fear of death just completely leaves you.

00:34:56.080 You are afraid of your kids dying, but you are not afraid of dying anymore at all, like even a little.

00:35:01.120 And it would make sense from a biological perspective.

00:35:03.060 Now, people have one or two kids.

00:35:04.040 They're not going to go through, like, the full parent puberty.

00:35:06.320 They go through, like, an abridged one that doesn't fully transition them to this new state.

00:35:11.020 But genuinely, I don't know a single person with more than four kids or with four kids or more that is pro-extreme life extension.

00:35:22.100 Yeah.

00:35:22.440 It just begins to become, like, an absurd thing for an individual to want once you have a lot of kids.

00:35:28.120 But if you don't, obviously, for genetic reasons, you're pre-coded to be, like, terrified of dying.

00:35:32.900 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.

00:35:45.380 I don't think fear of death really features strong in mainstream society now.

00:35:49.620 And I don't think it does because we're so separated from death.

00:35:52.920 It's hard to even remember that you're going to die in our world because it's so isolated as a life event.

00:35:58.480 Unlike it was in the Victorian times when, like, your neighbor was dying.

00:36:01.200 It's like, hey, come over. Your neighbor's dying. Let's all hang out.

00:36:05.760 Yeah. Or wear dead people's hair as jewelry. That kind of thing. 0.84

00:36:09.940 I don't know if I agree with you. I know a lot of people who live in-

00:36:13.680 Yeah, but you're talking about rationalists.

00:36:15.100 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 healthspan and lifespan extension.

00:36:26.920 I disagree. And here is my disagreement.

00:36:29.020 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.

00:36:40.040 And I think to somebody like us, I'd be like, why would I want that?

00:36:43.260 Like, everlasting life? That doesn't seem-

00:36:45.640 Yeah, but I think this is a straw man. I've just not heard anyone pitch that with a real conversion.

00:36:51.720 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, of maybe they're addicted to drugs.

00:37:02.700 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 a human.

00:37:14.940 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.

00:37:21.480 I have never met or even heard of someone who converted because they were convinced that they would live forever.

00:37:29.140 Okay.

00:37:29.840 Gain eternal life, period.

00:37:31.240 That's something I will buy.

00:37:34.420 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 their entire 50-year marriage, did not convert.

00:37:45.300 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.

00:37:57.940 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.

00:38:09.540 And that, I don't know if he actually became a believer.

00:38:12.520 I don't think at all that he converted for eternal life.

00:38:15.020 I think he converted so that she could die in peace. 0.93

00:38:17.520 That was it.

00:38:19.480 Hmm.

00:38:20.320 Which is really sweet.

00:38:21.220 That makes sense.

00:38:21.820 On both ends, that she wanted to spend all eternity with him and couldn't die in peace unless she knew that,

00:38:26.940 and that he was willing to convert to a religion that he held off on for 50-plus years.

00:38:33.780 That is actually a sweet story.

00:38:36.120 Sweet story.

00:38:37.380 But yeah, no, okay, I hear you, and I'm glad that you're not asking me.

00:38:41.200 I always find, like, our weird religious stuff to be interesting because it really has made it, like,

00:38:45.980 it has not driven any sort of a wedge in our relationship in the way that you think it would.

00:38:50.300 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.

00:38:58.280 This seems like a reasonable thing to believe.

00:39:00.340 What do you think?

00:39:01.620 Yeah.

00:39:02.240 No, it's more like we're watching our kids play and you say something like that, and I'm like, yep.

00:39:06.580 And then it becomes canon.

00:39:09.820 I think this would help our kids.

00:39:11.400 Anyway, I love you to death, Simone.

00:39:13.480 You are spectacular, and I feel really bad for the parents out there who are struggling with parenthood.

00:39:20.620 It is difficult.

00:39:21.520 If you are not, when you're like, why am I going through this every day?

00:39:25.520 It's not giving me that much happiness.

00:39:27.000 Like, you're right.

00:39:28.320 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.

00:39:33.360 Like, with every one of our kids, I'm like, oh, my God, this person is going to live, like, an entire lifetime, hopefully.

00:39:40.000 That's insane.

00:39:41.420 And love and experience and learn and build and do.

00:39:46.360 It's so cool.

00:39:48.060 The spark in their eyes.

00:39:50.980 Yeah.

00:39:51.360 I feel bad for the kids, too, obviously, because I know kids whose parents told them this.

00:39:58.400 And it hits.

00:40:00.000 What do you do?

00:40:00.840 Yeah.

00:40:01.880 What's the context here?

00:40:03.800 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.

00:40:12.880 And they were tough girls.

00:40:14.020 They were going to figure it out.

00:40:15.140 But, like, to know that as a kid or to even suspect it, I think, is really not great for the kid either.

00:40:21.020 I think they'd still rather be alive.

00:40:23.000 And I think that this is so interesting.

00:40:24.500 It's like somebody, the most fundamental, they come to us, they go, why do you have kids?

00:40:29.100 It's so the kid can live, so we can have a life and a good life.

00:40:33.360 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.

00:40:40.600 So, multiplicatively, with each kid we have, we are giving another person that debt, which then they can pay forward.

00:40:48.300 Yeah, I just, I don't, I struggle with knowing a kid might feel unloved or unwanted.

00:40:58.760 It really makes me.

00:40:59.900 What does that have to do with this context?

00:41:01.580 I guess I don't understand.

00:41:03.060 Hormones.

00:41:04.140 What does that have to do with this context?

00:41:06.540 Yeah, I get that.

00:41:07.580 I get that.

00:41:08.160 Like I said, mother hormones do not work with logic. 1.00

00:41:13.800 I'm just like, but a kid's hurting out there.

00:41:16.440 And then the tears come and that's it.

00:41:20.100 Yeah.

00:41:20.640 You understand.

00:41:21.700 And you understand.

00:41:23.200 Well, do they, they, they give you positive emotional states too?

00:41:26.080 For me, these little ones just look like SquidgeBots.

00:41:28.680 She's the cutest SquidgeBot. 1.00

00:41:30.760 She's the cutest SquidgeBot. 1.00

00:41:32.560 You can share the SquidgeBot perspective.

00:41:35.300 You're a SquidgeBot.

00:41:36.680 As a man, this age range.

00:41:38.380 And I think that, like, men pretending that sub one-year-olds do something for them.

00:41:42.180 No, I think some guys just love babies.

00:41:44.200 And I don't know why.

00:41:44.920 I think some guys do.

00:41:46.080 But I think most men don't.

00:41:48.260 And I think that men pretending, like, the one-year-old is, like, when it changes,

00:41:52.380 instead of the toddler kids are when it changes,

00:41:54.340 creates misaligned expectations in a lot of men.

00:41:57.960 The newborns are when it changes for the mom. 0.96

00:42:00.760 The talking toddlers, I think, are when it really changes for the dads.

00:42:05.540 Daddy will love you eventually.

00:42:08.620 But right now you're just a SquidgeBot.

00:42:10.820 She's mine.

00:42:11.520 That's okay.

00:42:11.980 They're with me 24-7 until they enter the group patrol.

00:42:14.920 So it works out really well.

00:42:16.440 It reminds me of the press when they're always, like, they have kids,

00:42:19.860 but they don't even.

00:42:20.940 Love them.

00:42:21.620 They don't love them.

00:42:22.560 They don't have them be.

00:42:24.160 Now I'm like, no, what you're missing is we don't have them because we love them.

00:42:28.880 That's the cultural misinterpretation there.

00:42:31.560 Yeah.

00:42:32.880 Anyway.

00:42:33.460 But you do.

00:42:34.620 Look, she wants. 1.00

00:42:35.600 Oh, no, she's happy again.

00:42:37.140 Or she's gassy. 1.00

00:42:38.500 We'll figure it out.

00:42:39.640 And then we'll make dinner.

00:42:40.460 Oh, yeah.

00:42:41.260 I don't know.

00:42:41.760 What are we going to do for dinner tonight?

00:42:43.320 I guess I can reheat one of those slow-cooked.

00:42:45.860 Yeah, you've got to cook it down.

00:42:47.020 And I, if we go down right now, I can make biscuits this time.

00:42:50.380 Or the cornmeal muffins.

00:42:52.400 Cornmeal.

00:42:52.780 Oh, I love it when you make cornmeal muffins for slow-cooked beef.

00:42:55.820 Let's do that.

00:42:56.200 Oh, that's fantastic.

00:42:56.980 Okay, great.

00:42:57.660 Telly-ho. 0.99

00:42:59.800 I'm going to stop recording here.

Based Camp - June 27, 2024

The Rise of Parents Who Regret Having Children

Episode Stats

Summary

Transcript