Babies are weird. If I didn’t know how humans were made, and you told me “we grow them in our abdomens” I would probably laugh. My own kids reacted with a mix of horror and hilarity when I explained where babies come from. One of them figured that if cells from different people’s bodies were being combined of course a doctor would be involved, and was surprised to learn that conception was not typically done under medical supervision. (And I haven’t yet figured out how to explain “A ton of human activity is driven by something related to who gets to do this non-medical activity with whom.”)
If you proposed our current method of reproduction to a medical ethics board — millions of people each year will combine their DNA with someone else’s, possibly after some drinks, and after that night will be responsible for raising the resulting human life to adulthood — I assume they would be horrified.
Of course, the fact that reality seems weird is a problem with my model, not a problem with reality. “There are no surprising facts, only models that are surprised by facts.” It’s the reality of a billion messy generations that brought us from squiggly blob to swimmy thing to mammal to human. And that history is the root of the reality that clashes with what my modern mind expects.
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When I first had a baby, I was surprised at how hard I was willing to work for her.
Even with jobs I really cared about, I was eager to go home at the end of the day. I wasn’t signing up to work weekends. If there had been a version of the job that was 24/7, I would have thought it was too big a burnout risk and would have said no. (At my first real job, the labor union would have prevented that kind of thing, anyway.)
But parenting was all-or-nothing, and even though I expected it to be exhausting, I signed up. And I worked harder than I’d ever worked.
It wasn’t just me. Most of us don’t have the same kind of ingrained motivation around quarterly objectives and key results as we do around our kids being okay.
This prank video offered job applicants a position with requirements like “You must be able to work on your feet most, or really all the time.” “Unlimited hours a week.” “If you had a life, we’d ask you to sort of give that life up.” Oh, and it’s unpaid. Of course applicants respond with things like “That’s inhumane,” and “Nobody’s doing that for free!” Eventually the pranksters reveal who already does this job: moms.
So why do most of the world’s adults take on a role as demanding as parenting?
Of course it’s often not on purpose.1Around 45% of pregnancies are unintended. In the US, around 42% of those unintended pregnancies are aborted. And then 1% of babies born in the US are given for adoption. But most pregnancies go on to produce children who are raised by at least one of their biological parents.
In social work, I saw that people who were not that competent at a lot of their life projects were often a lot more devoted and hardworking when it came to parenting. People who couldn’t hold down a job managed to raise children to adulthood. It was a different kind of motivation.
The reality seems to be: raising children is something people are (perhaps uniquely) motivated by. Which makes sense when you think about the long line of swimmy and mammal-y things we came from.
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Ross Douthat on virtual reality: “There are a lot of experiences — call them “core experiences” — that people still prefer to have in the world of flesh and blood, ranging from the banal (real drinks >> Zoom drinks) to the transcendent (visiting Chartres Cathedral >> doing a virtual tour of Chartres Cathedral) . . . And there are core experiences that just don’t translate into virtuality at all: You can some kind of sexual intercourse on the internet, depending on how elastically defined, but you can’t bear and raise a child.” If virtual experiences become widely available but important real-world goods remain costly, “many more people will be shut out of a core experience, the sex-wedlock-procreation combination, that most human beings still very reasonably desire.”
Maybe that’s temporary, and we’ll figure out how to replicate or surpass those experiences. But currently we’re still mammals, and our sense of reality will be distorted if we lose track of that.