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Damn, dude.
I always really liked your posts. Their relative infrequency also made me pretty stoked when I saw a new one. "Oh, shit, Hoffmeister just dropped a new track!"
For a long while, you actually owned the GOAT'ed (quantitavely by upvtoes) Motte post.
But this just doesn't make any sense. Like, srsly bro, whutt?
It's more than anec-data, it's close to a human universal that women (and men, but whatever) tend to go "holy shit, my life changed after I have kids and I won't trade them for the world." It's kind of like, I don't know, wired into us as a species or something.
The thought-piece articles by largely PMC mothers who openly opine about "being better off" if they didn't have kids is exactly the backwards anti-social and hyperindividualistic status games that some of the threads you alluded to were trying to deal with. The women complaining about counterfactuals aren't at all representative of the species or society. Furthermore, they're being incredibly arrogant in their thinking; do they truly believe they're the first women in history to go, "Oh, shit, kids are kind of a big commitment, maybe I should think this through?" It's deeply embedded in the language; going through childbirth can be "traumatizing" - this assumes you make it through childbirth. Up until the 20th century all over the world (continuing in much of it today) pregnant women were aware that they might not make it out of delivery alive. The very assumption that "post childbirth life" could be "worse" is actually a verbal demonstration of how much better and easier than it ever has been to be a mother.
Aside from that, there are real difficulties in raising children that are specific to current society that ought to be address. I agree on the childcare hassle points - a lot of the proposed solutions had to do with massive tax incentives for childbearing couples so that we can bring back a one income household.
Delaying childbirth past 30 is, unfortunately, kind of a risky move even with modern medicine. Again, lots of solutions had to do with incentivizing earlier family formation and having children (side benefit for the dudes out there: being married and cohabitating with wife and children does great things in terms of your "likeliness to get arrested" quotient).
The deeper question that your posts raises by implication, however, is around the costs of childbirth outweighing its benefits on some sort of happiness rubric. Your brother can't hang out with the boys as much - ok, does 10 more years of football and beer really mean a whole lot? Women can't travel and pursue their careers if they have children - do instagram photos in Amalfi and being promoted to associate director of spreadsheets really actualize your inner Girlboss? If life's mission is happiness (side note: I don't think it is) then it stands to reason people should try to find the deepest and most durable source of happiness possible. Wouldn't you know it, for most folks that's close interpersonal relationships, specifically; their family.
The diabolic sleight of hand of modernist pseudo-philosophy was that "following your bliss" and maximizing personal happiness was some sort of self-evident Permanent Truth and Totally Right. Besides being wrong on a moral level, it's wrong in its own terms! The things you think are going to make you happy don't and the one's that really do have been the cornerstones of society forever.
Sorry if you think I fell off.
Is this genuinely true? I had no idea. Do you remember what the post was about?
There is a lot more to be gained from travel than just an album of Instagram thirst trap photos. I’ve found travel to be one of the most enriching experiences of my life, personally. As for your question about careers: You are, I hope, aware that there are some (presumably large) number of women who do actually have fulfilling, important jobs which give them a sense of purpose and self-actualization? Sure, there are plenty of women in bullshit jobs - and plenty of men, myself included! - but the idea that every woman, or even the lion’s share of women would be more fulfilled by motherhood than by a career… that seems like the real “typical mind fallacy” here.
I think I’m just starting to return to my primordial wariness and contrarianism about “what human beings are hard-wired to be like” because of the recent and unrelenting discussion in online right-wing spaces about how “within every man there is an innate and burning desire to conquer, to struggle, to do great violence and to hear the lamentation of the enemy’s women”. I get told that my life is meaningless and empty and degenerate - that I’m a bugman - because I would rather attend classical music concerts than get my arm hacked off in a muddy field, or get blown to smithereens by an artillery strike. And that this should just be instinctively obvious to me as a human man, and that there’s something broken and mutated within me if it’s not. Dealing with that has made me quite a bit more sympathetic to the plight of a woman who is similarly atypical or who dreams of transcending the often unimaginable suffering endured by humans living under traditional models of society.
I think there’s a huge amount to glean from the past, and I recognize the value of respecting time-honored understandings of humanity. I also recognize, though, the extent to which so much of life under those traditions was simply a matter of making the best of the things we had no power to affect or change. But what happens when we do gain that power? When agency can be effectively applied to reducing suffering? Surely nobody here would voluntarily refuse anesthesia during surgery simply because “suffering inculcates virtue” and “sometimes the hard thing needs to be done.” When humans have the opportunity to reduce pain and inconvenience, we eagerly do so, and that’s a great thing! It’s one of the things that elevates us above the beasts, who are mere slaves to their evolutionary programming. And if - I get that this is a very big if - we can figure out a way to carry on the species without subjecting women to the horrors that this author points to, then I think we need to be open to exploring ways to do so.
Yes, it's now the second highest (Trace's Gerard piece beat it out). On asshole filters.
You can see all the comments, and sort as you please, at themotte.org/comments.
Me looking at my magnum opus and immediately noticing multiple typos and a naked link: 😭
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I genuinely don't understand this and I've tried to. Maybe it's just innate human variability and some people are like me and incapable of 'getting it'. I also feel this way about most poetry and a dancing so I may just be weird. But I just don't understand what I'm supposed to find compelling about going to some place that I could already get the gist of in picture. I feel invariably like either a burdensome tourist or a mark for scams whenever I travel. Events or meeting specific people I understand. But I can't shake the feeling that events and meeting people would be strictly better if they came to me without the travel element.
Enh, I consider travel to be the great equalizer.
When you travel somewhere with an alien language, culture, and customs, and you are forced to engage with that culture on its own terms, your world expands. You learn about your preconceptions and biases, you get to challenge your worldview in a way that brooks no defense because you are literally in it. You could do the same at home, of course, or through a picture, but the layers of abstraction and distance that prevent you from doing so act as defense mechanisms.
There's nothing like it. I recommend everyone do it at least once, to spend an extended amount of time where you don't speak the language. Suddenly what is taken for granted falls away, and it's like rediscovering communication from first principles. What are the critical things, the meaningful things? What is helpful and useful, what is not? What is good - and not just good because I deem it so - what does this culture value, and how did they arrive at that belief?
Whether it is compelling or not is not a factor. You may even hate where you go, an experience I've had in several journeys. But it has left me with a greater appreciation for many things around me and an understanding that we were never going to be ready for the destabilizing effect of near-instantaneous global information transmission. It doesn't take a genius to value clean drinking water, but you will not quite look at it the same way as someone who's worn a stillsuit.
This just isn't my experience with travel, but I also haven't had the opportunity to live somewhere totally foreign for extended periods of time. Unless you have some cause, like a job or exchange program, this just kind of isn't practical. What is practical are a week or two of being a tourist which I have zero interest in and also what people are actually talking about when they say they love travel.
I don't quite get your complaint - you're saying you don't get the point of tourism and then you limit the definition of tourism to one that you personally don't agree with. It's entirely practical to spend a week or even a couple of days being immersed in a foreign culture. There are many ways to get immersed in an alien culture, many of which don't depend on any extended period of time, and best of all, they vary widely in price depending on how much you like yourself.
The point of tourism is to be a tourist. If you don't do any touring, then you're essentially paying a premium to fly in the sky and live in a serviced apartment. Granted, I enjoy traveling alone and not having to make allowances for anyone else, but I consider that part of the experience maintenance or work. Many people do indeed pay a premium to fly in the sky and live in a serviced apartment, but spending a tour with that sort of person for any length of time would give me allergic reactions.
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Maybe you're low in Big 5 trait Openness, though I think that's unusual among people who spend their free time on free speech message boards. Apparently they've found two aspects that aren't entirely dependent -- aesthetics and intellect, so maybe you're pretty low on the aesthetics side. Or you just haven't traveled to places that are right for you?
Tomorrow we might try taking the kids to a mountain, a ruin, and a lava field. My whole family gets depressed and angry if we stay near home for too many days in a row.
My understanding is that I'm quite open in that sense. I'm really open to the idea that there is some there there which I'm not getting. But poetry for instance. Mostly it's trying to express views I already basically understand into compressed formats. Cool, I appreciate it in the way I appreciate that certain picture formats take up less space on my hard drive. Instrumentally useful and when communicating very large ideas I will make use of its techniques. I even find some poetry useful as short hand. But I've never really been moved by poetry. Although I often struggle to even define what poetry is.
I'm not hugely into poetry, but my impression from the poetry I do like is that it's more like tuneless song, and that in the ancient world it was often chanted or intoned, and also used to aid memory. I really enjoy Byzantine and Arabic liturgical forms, for instance, traditionally chanted in 8 tones on a rotating schedule. There's an akathist tea I hope to be able to rejoin sometime, where women get together, publicly read an akathist in a circle, and then all have lovely aesthetic tea cakes with pretty cups and loose flowers steeping in glass teapots. Among somewhat modern poets, my favorite is TS Eliot, mostly because the words just sound so good, but even he has to be read aloud. Fundamentally, I think that poetry is more or less liturgical, rather than trying to express views in compressed formats -- it's meant for public ceremonies, and even things like preforming Shakespeare are more that than they are just hearing a story. My favorite Shakespeare class consisted almost entirely of just reading plays about King Henry around the room and then sitting there and letting the sound of the words sink in.
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I was pointing to the memetic desire of travel. A lot of women "like" travel because they think it is the right thing to like. A lot of men "like" sports for similar reasons (or any of a host of other domains, for both men and women).
Here's the thing - No! I am not. That's kind of the point of a lot of these threads. It's the entire point of this Last Psychiatrist post.
Women (again, and Men) may self-report that their job is fulfilling and important. The argument I'm making is that this largely a cope. Most jobs do, in fact, suck. People do these shitty jobs because of the meaning they find elsewhere. That could be a "mission" oriented meaning (i.e. being a public defender because they believe in helping those who cannot afford an attorney etc.). It could be a means-to-and-end motivation (i.e I'll work the midnight shift at McDonalds because I think it'll show initiative and maybe lead to a path to manager). Or, most commonly, family motivation (Homer, from the Simpsons, has a famous episode wherein the camera pans over his desk at the power plant to reveal a photo of Maggie, his daughter, captioned with "do it for her.")
The point is that it is extremely unlikely for either men or women to truly believe that their primary job gives them a superabundance of transcendental meaning. A job can be part of that sense of meaning but there's usually something else.
Family is a really good "something else" for reasons I covered in my initial response. It's a really good something else for both men and women. Gee, wouldn't it be fantastic if there was a way for men and women to start a family and then agree upon a positive sum system for raising that family? That's what these threads are arguing for - that what makes people truly happy is very different from what current ideologies say makes people happy and the downstream negative impacts on society are kind of a big deal (to wit; declining fertility rates).
Childbirth can be dangerous and is always painful. But calling it "unimaginable suffering" or a "horror" seems to be hyperbole to me. Hyperbole caused by motivated reasoning, is my suspicion.
I think I meet you half way on this one.
Evolutionary programming is literally a set of skills that has resulted in evolutionary success. I am very happy that I am a slave to "fire is hot don't touch it" evolutionary programming. I am very happy that I am a slave to "I can run upright for long periods of time because I am a low body-hair bipedal" even though that means I will never, ever, ever bench what a juvenile chimp can. The gift of human insight and introspection is wonderful for humans and a large part of societal organization is used to control unruly evolutionary programming, but that doesn't make or evolutionary programming or instincts fundamentally wrong. If you follow that slippery slope long enough, you get to gender / sex abolition and all of its accompanying WTF-ery.
If we designate childbirth as a "horror" for all of society, we are committing ourselves to eventual species level slow suicide. Sure, sure, "artificial wombs" and Magic Technology Stuff will save us. It won't. Society is social and ideas matter.
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