Suomalaisen Päiväkirja

[suomalainen]

@cl and @ bigato Money only solves a very narrow selection of problems, so I don't begrudge my kids for eating into my stash, really. I had a conversation with a guy at work who never had kids and he mentioned that he sometimes has regrets because he sees that men his age (mid 50s to mid 60s) are now happy with their grown children and he wonders if he missed out. He enjoyed speaking with me (I was enjoying a cynical day) as it was a reminder of the cost incurred in your younger years in exchange for the potential benefit in your later years. Overall, perhaps it's a wash. I certainly wouldn't advise anyone to have kids so that they're not lonely in their 70s. We no longer have a culture of elder inclusion/care/reverence/whatever, so it's important to not expect your kids to provide you with anything in 20, 30 or 40 years. You have no idea how they'll turn out or where they'll be, etc. My wife's brothers appear to be giving their parents nothing but heartburn and worse. (See also @sclass's experiences with his mother and siblings).

We're a social species, so no doubt human connection is an incredibly important, lifelong consideration. W/r/t @cL's dad's comment - this is actually precisely why men my age (and older) SHOULD maintain some focus on friends. An older lady work-friend of mine often reminds me that she'll be fine if her husband dies because she has lots of friends and social engagements while if she goes, he's in a heap of trouble because she's all he's got. They both have grown kids from previous marriages, but they're off leading their own lives.

In any event, as @bigato points out, it's not "relationships" that matter, it's "good relationships". And you can create those with genetic relations or with the unrelated. The genetic relations require more effort / commitment, but I'm not sure that, by itself, creates a more satisfying outcome. Funny thing, this idea of choice to create offspring and having "reasons" to do so. It used to just be (and was for me, three separate times) a side effect of being horny.

[classical_Liberal]

Thing is, each person is different regarding to how much social life they need and/or can cope with.

True, but my observations on this are nearly universal. They are not simply preference driven either. Meaning even people who prefer to be alone do not thrive being alone after a certain point. This is all, of course, very US culture centric, but there are certain things that happen in older age outside of our sphere of control. These things are almost always best dealt with through a strong social circle of family or very close, long term friends.

@suo and augustus

Yes, there is definitely a choice wrt taking the time to make and keep friends at any age. Although blood tends to be thicker than water. Spousal and parent/child relationships are probably the strongest in existence. When SHTF, those are the ones you want, if at all possible. I realize people grow apart. I also realize not all of these relationships will be strong, and that a parent can do everything right and still have an ineffectual child. Still, I'm telling you, in 30 years the relationships you have with spouse and kids/grand-kids will be the most important ones in your life. If you don't believe me, next time a family member has a crisis (I hope you never do, but it's a fact of life), look around and see who is there offering a helping hand.

I have no plans to ever have kids, although I'm softening on the possibility of marriage. Seeing what a really good relationship can be like, personally, has helped. My comments were more geared towards encouraging those with family and kids to realize what a great thing they have. I'm certainly not trying to change what you do, I have nothing good to offer in that realm.

[Jason]

6) Added after reading the below: ACCOMPLISH LESS - BE BORED MORE

I just finished this book which addresses the topic.

https://www.amazon.com/Bored-Brilliant- ... 1250124956

There's nothing groundbreaking in it. It's like a well written, two hundred page post-it note on the topic. It does discuss the cognitive significance and personal benefit of allowing oneself to be bored.

[suomalainen]

I hope it's not coming across like I'm arguing, or even disagreeing, with you, because I'm not.

My comments were more geared towards encouraging those with family and kids to realize what a great thing they have.

Understood and agreed on this point. What my comments are geared towards are two things: 1) given some of my family experiences and situations like what @sclass has written about in the 'does one owe it to one's parents to take care of them in old age' thread, just because it's family (up, down or sideways generationally) doesn't mean it's automatically a good thing. There's a bit of luck to it and there's a LOT of work to it. 2) given that many people on this forum are single and/or childless, I find myself to be...let's call it "the voice of reason" when it comes to the reality of marriage and child rearing. My older lady work friend tells me "It's a conspiracy and you're supposed to further the conspiracy. When people get married and have kids, you're supposed to say 'Congratulations, I'm so happy for you! Marriage/Kids are the best!' You're not supposed to say 'You dumb fuck, what have you done?!'" Well, I'm the guy who doesn't bury the bad. And yes, sometimes I go too cynical and I highlight the bad while burying the good. But I'm a lone voice and I get dismissed as a depressed cynic anyway, so, you know: role, played. In other words, I like to encourage those without a spouse or kids to realize what a great thing they have. I need to read more, but I was just pointed* to Kierkegaard's saying that you'll regret either choice. I'm not sure what his punchline is, but mine would be: it's great either way. If you find yourself in one camp, don't pine for the other. Live the life you have to its fullest.

* @clarice's link in her journal, I think, to a Alain de Botton youtube video where he ends with a Kierkegaard quote. I'm too lazy right now to find and create link's to these other threads I've referenced here.

Although blood tends to be thicker than water. Spousal and parent/child relationships are probably the strongest in existence. When SHTF, those are the ones you want, if at all possible. ... If you don't believe me, next time a family member has a crisis (I hope you never do, but it's a fact of life), look around and see who is there offering a helping hand.

Again, I'm not arguing/disagreeing. I guess I'm trying to introduce nuance to generalizations of "tends" and "if at all possible". And my comment does come from experience. We've experienced three crises: 1) water breaking at 22.5 weeks gestation followed by a premature birth at 23.5 weeks, 2) fear of yet another premature birth followed by 4ish months of bedrest, 3) getting hit by a car with a broken neck, etc.

Taking these in order: in #1) my sister and my wife's parents were huge helps to us with visits to the hospital, etc. We also got a lot of practical, every-day type help from members of our church congregation. In #2, one of my wife's friends watched my non-school aged kids for free during the days so my wife could be on bedrest and I could be at work. My wife's sister was a public school teacher at the time and when her summer vacation rolled around, she moved in with us for a couple of months to take care of the kids. We didn't ask. She invited herself. In #3, although I don't remember these visits, I was touched to learn that a work colleague and a friend both stopped by to visit me while I was in the hospital. I also remember a couple of other friends coming by to bring me out to lunch during the couple of weeks I was convalescing at home.

Now, friendships have their limits, but so do marital relationships (see, e.g., divorce), sibling relationships and inter-generational relationships. I understand that you're trying to say that generally speaking the latter three are typically stronger than the former so the limits of the latter are much higher. I guess my point is: it depends. If you find yourself having shitty relationships with family members, there's only so many family members to work with, so you may not be able to strengthen them no matter how much work you put into them since it takes two. So, maybe it makes more sense to put the work into your friendships and/or community (church or neighborhood or bike/run/sports club or whatever). Or, maybe my takeaway is that you should have really great sisters. That's where the luck comes in.

Overall tho, we are in agreement: good relationships are...ummm...good. I feel lucky to have the good relationships I have. I feel sad that some are not as strong as they could have been were that person different and were I different. I hope that you also are lucky and have good familial or other relationships. Maybe neither of us have a relationship where that person would wipe our asses if we're too old / incapacitated to do it ourselves, but that's one thing money is for. Or maybe it's time to move on.

[jacob]

I've found that family bonds are neither sufficient nor required to develop strong relation[ship]s with other people. In general, sharing DNA does constitute a starting point to establish a relation, even if it comes to someone only sharing 1/64th DNA that one has never seen before. OTOH, even as much as 1/2 of DNA is not enough to guarantee that anyone will want to keep seeing or care for the other person. I'm well familiar with family members who haven't talked to each other for decades. Not that they hate each other; the connections have just completely atrophied. Also examples of children who deliberately try to live the furthest away so they're not the one who are left holding the bag (dealing with siblings' or parents' problems.) Being related is no guarantee of great relationships---indeed being related can be the source of something very dysfunctional if people feel obligated by DNA even if they have nothing in common. Some who have children because they always wanted a family or because they never had one and figured they could make their own, or in order to have someone looking after them haven't really thought this through.

I have little in common with my family other than the fact that I have known them for a long time, like since I was born or they were born, so there's a lot of shared history. To test my "I'm probably an alien beamed down from Mars, how else can you explain this?!"-hypothesis, I once asked if there were any ancestors in my lineage that somehow resembled my personality, temperament, intelligence, goals, interests, etc. and they couldn't think of any. Plot those temperamental aspects of each of my DNA relations on a graph, and I would be an outlier in every single dimension. (That's the main reason I chose not to have children. Likely, they would be so different from me that I would not be able to relate them beyond a shared history of parenting/growing up and I have no interest in parenting. Being a competent but disengaged parent is apparently worse than being incompetent but engaged.) I know a couple who moved far away from family. Every year at thxgiving, they would invite their nearest 20 neighbors to their house for a feast. Consistently. They told me they built their own family that way. That seems like a stronger network than the average family... primarily because they lived on the same street. Most modern families don't even live in the same city.

There's some theory of friendship that says that in order for friendships to evolve, there has to be shared interests and multiple recurrent and random encounters. However, given the way humans live now, the overlap between those in the Venn diagram is rare. E.g. if interests are shared, then encounters are not rare ... visits get planned around work, etc. weeks in advance.

The ERE community has provided a completely different experience for me. I find most humans uninteresting (a sentiment I extend to my unborn potential children which is why I don't feel like spending 20 years under the same roof with them) and have a hard time finding anything to talk/relate about. But not the people who have come to the ERE meetups. The compatibility percentage has been at least an order of magnitude higher than career venues and two orders of magnitude higher than random encounters in the rest of the world. I become practically extravert at meetups whereas IRL I'm quite introverted. (I still wonder whether that's innate or a lifelong adaption. When I was 13, I tested as XNTJ.) Ditto meeting random forumites outside the meetups. For me the eremate connection is rather stronger than being someone's dnamate.

However, I also thinks that my opinion (or anyone's opinion) is strongly colored by one's individual family experience. Blood comes with different levels of viscosity relative to water. I'm not convinced the family bonus is all that high and as mentioned, it might also work against you if you get stuck with the wrong family.

[classical_Liberal]

I've also had non-blood friendships that are much closer that sibling relationships. I don't dispute this is possible at any age. However, I'm going to offer a hypothesis regarding personal relationships wrt to @jacobs comments.

I believe that compatibility (ie shared interests, common thought processes) and shared history (ie long term regular random encounters at some point past or present) are both strong indicators of potentially strong personal relationships. However, the compatibility requirement is inversely correlated with age, while the shared history component is positively correlated with age in importance. This is why very long term friends or family tend to be the most important drivers of positive social experience in the elderly (defined as 70+). Not the only factor, but by far the largest. I'm even going to go out on a limb and lump institutional relationships in this as well, hence the support for long standing church members, club members, etc.

[jennypenny]

Family ties can be productive or destructive, and friendships can certainly trump family ties if you're good at forming strong friendships. When it comes to crises and SHTF scenarios however, I think family relationships can sometimes be more desirable, not because they are better but because they are more predictable. Sometimes (not always) predictability is more useful.

[Jason]

People suck. I have a spouse and a friend who lives 1500 miles away. I consider myself fortunate.

[suomalainen]

I feel really weird today. Late Friday night, I got an email from the recruiter for the job I interviewed for in early December. It had been radio silence until then. She wrote that they were cancelling the old position and re-listing it and asking me to formally re-apply (the only change was reducing required experience from 12+ years to 7+ years). I replied that I was withdrawing from consideration because this has been such a clusterfuck of a hiring process (my email was a tad more polite). And besides, they obviously weren't enthusiastic about me. Then, Sunday night-Monday morning I have this dream:

My boss' boss decides to change my job responsibilities, and I get all pissed off and I quit on the spot. I go home and sleep. I wake up the next morning and tell my wife (who had been watching porn on her phone when I snuck up on her and she turned around horrified that I'd caught her. Very weird) and she totally freaks out, like how are we going to survive, etc., and I'm all like, relax, I've got 4 years of expenses in cash, we'll be fine. But then I start to get really nervous, like, what have I done? Did I dream the quitting thing or did I really quit (meta dream!)? Maybe I can call my boss up and say that I need to come in and gather my personal effects and while I'm there I can try to get my job back.

And then I wake up. I have my same old job, etc., but I've felt weird - on edge - all day. I don't think my dream Meant anything; it wasn't a premonition, but I think it probably at the very least is reflective of an underlying fear of losing, or dependence on, my job. I dunno. I guess I don't have a point. Just writing down a weird thing.

[TheWanderingScholar]

Those are the worse dreams/nightmares.

Getting eaten alive while you can do nothing about? No problem, just terrifying.
Fall to you death over several minutes? That sucks.
Real-life clusterfuck of a situation? STOP! NO!

So yeah, no real substance to add besides.

I feel you bro.

[Hristo Botev]

I know absolutely nothing about dreams, or interpreting them, but that's just got to be some sort of reflection of the fear that comes along any time you say no to an opportunity and question whether you made the right choice in closing that particular door. But yeah, that would totally unsettle me for a couple days as well.

[suomalainen]

Apropos to my general disposition and ongoing PSA to enjoy not having kids if you find yourself not having kids (and if you do have kids...hang in there. It's a long 20 years!): https://happify.com/hd/the-science-behi ... ationship/

A few choice quotes/takeaways:

1) Happy couples are engaged - they mirror emotions, they share laughter, they talk more, etc.
2) Happy couples have sex once a week
3) "The people who are happiest with their marriages: have been married five years or less, don't have children, have college degrees plus the man's employed". Two outta four ain't bad! Better not retire tho...
4) But don't worry about the bolding in number 3 because: "Married couples are unhappiest when kids are in preschool...couples' happiness levels increase again once the youngest kid has grown up [with a picture of kid in a commencement cap and gown]". That's a long time for the happiness to rebound! Yikes!

It's science. Probably. At least it cites sources down below.

[Hristo Botev]

What a load of horseshit.

Not trying to evangelize on your page Suo, but a Catholic perspective: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1buybmnQ0nQ

[suomalainen]

@hristo meh. What's horseshit about it? You think people are lying about their subjective experiences wrt marriage and kids? Or that they "shouldn't" be unhappy? Next time your wife is unhappy, reminder her that she shouldn't be, given all the blessings she has in her life, see how that goes for you.

Re: your video, he argues against "private desire" (or freedom or choice), but what is the alternative? Compliance to "higher values"? Whose? If you say "god's", then I will ask you "well, how do I find out about those?" and you will reply "listen to father whatshisname" and I will reply "but then how do I know that what he says are god's values and not his? All I can know is that his brain is causing his vocal chords to vibrate and his lips to move in a certain manner to make certain sounds resulting in words and sentences" and you will be unable to provide me a satisfactory reply. If you reply "you need to have faith", I will ask "in what" and you will say "in god" and I will ask "how do I know anything about god in order to have faith in it?" and you will reply "listen to father...."

In any event, my post wasn't an argument regarding a "should" - I don't think people should or shouldn't have kids. Having kids, if it aligns with your values, is a valid choice. Not having kids, if it aligns with your values, is also a valid choice. What else can you do but act according to some human's private values (yours or your priest's or whoever's)?

What that infographic conveys is that if you do have kids, just know that your happiness, by some measures, will probably go down for a period of time. If that's an important consideration for you in deciding whether to have kids, great, consider yourself slightly more educated; if not, great, it's easy enough to ignore.

@gravy Once they're here, there's nothing else you CAN do. Keep on keepin' on.

[Peanut]

33% are as happy or happier after kids though? Not an insignificant number. (How) do those people overlap with these:

From Forbes 2016: According to a brand new survey from Bankrate.com, just 37% of Americans have enough savings to pay for a $500 or $1,000 emergency. The other 63% would have to resort to measures like cutting back spending in other areas (23%), charging to a credit card (15%) or borrowing funds from friends and family (15%) in order to meet the cost of the unexpected event.

[suomalainen]

@peanut and @aug, I dunno. "Happiness" is a squishy concept, which I think makes it very difficult to study. Hence the "probably" after "it's science." But I'm sure money can make things easier or the lack of it can make things harder. As a friend is fond of saying: "Money doesn't buy happiness, but it sure makes misery bearable."

I agree with @aug tho. Having kids isn't "better" or "worse" (and in a disagreement with @hristo, I don't think it's "more meaningful" or "more godly" or "more virtuous" or "serving a higher value" or anything along those lines). It's just different. I like to complain about the hard parts here, because (1) fuck it, it's my journal, if I need to vent, I'm gonna vent; you can laugh at me or with me, your choice, and (2) I'm in a really hard (for me) stage. My happiness didn't go down immediately after having my first kid. I was in the 33%! (Just let that fact simmer for a bit, but not too long - it might just blow your mind.) Yes, waking up early all the time and changing diapers and all that stuff was hard and exhausting and all that, but, you know, I didn't really care about that.* I LOVED the little pitter-patter of feet that @gravy mentioned in @cmonkey's journal, I think it was; I LOVED reading books while he sat on my lap; I LOVED rolling around on the floor with him; etc. MY happiness (wrt the kids) didn't take a nosedive until the kids became sentient assholes. Non-sentient robotic demanding needy little assholes who inadvertently gave as much as they demanded? Fine, whatever, on balance I was wrapped around their dirty little fingers. Sentient, purposeful, ungrateful, "should know better" princely assholes that deliberately try to fuck you over so that you do absolutely everything for them and they want to give nothing in return and they push back on every. single. request. so you end up fighting/arguing (even if nicely and politely and all that) over every dumb thing because you simply refuse to give in to them and let them become spoiled entitled little shits like every one of their fucking douchebag friends? Dat make daddy sad.

Whew. That felt good. In any event, I wish I could enjoy them more at this stage, but it's just so much mental and emotional work with very little given in return. But, I just can't let it go. I *HAVE* to try to be a good dad to them - teaching them respect for women (their mom), the value of work, that TANSTAAFL, etc., etc., etc.

Anyway, we've actually been doing pretty well at home the last few months, but I get glimpses of being able to turn off that part of my brain that is CONSTANTLY thinking about the kids. And it makes me weep. With grief for my babies who are no more. With joy for the (hopefully) unencumbered future. And yet at the same with grief for my babies who will soon be off on their own annoying their spouses instead of me. Life is change, man. And changing from a fantastic thing (babyhood) to a hard thing (adolescence) is fucking hard. And yet, I still love them. I'm proud of them in a way you just can't be proud of a non-sentient robot. I (sometimes) like to be with them. They are growing into fine young men (rant above notwithstanding).

Damn, this turned into...whatever this was...

* And that's what makes these happiness studies so difficult to interpret. What "happiness" means to me and you can be vastly different. I was exhausted, but would still have described myself as happy with my kids. They were the focus of my life at that time - my pride, my joy, all that. I had a t-shirt with my baby's face on it that I wore proudly to my law school classes for *#$% sake.

[Peanut]

Ah, I wasn’t clear in referring to the article. The 33% is specifically the percentage of people who are evaluating their marital happiness post children. And I was implying that eliminating pressing money worries may help your marital happiness post kids as married people famously fight a lot about... money and kids, often as a unit.

I find the baby years quite difficult compared to the subsequent stage, but I recognize adolescence must present a new set of difficulties. My friend says, “little kids, little problems...big kids...,” well you know how that ends. I also think it’s probably a lot harder to feel like you’re a good parent when you’re the parent of a teen versus an infant, and that self-image can affect your subjective well-being (what the philosophers call ‘happiness’). Perhaps parenting and thus marital disagreements gain more force then too.

[suomalainen]

When I had my first baby, I was fascinated by the child-parent communication structure. When a baby laughs, it's just the greatest thing in the world - the pureness of it just melts my heart. When a baby cries, you *know* with absolute certainty that the baby is crying for a reason, and to get it to stop crying, you just have to somewhat mechanically cycle through the very short list of reasons why it might be crying. First, 'cuz staring down a butt crack is so fun and easy, you pull back the backside of a diaper and peek to see if there's shit down there. More advanced is when you can just feel it by giving the diaper a little squeeze. If it's full, you change it and see if the crying stops. If that's not it, you calibrate yourself to the current time, the last feeding time and the last feeding volume. If the time was long enough ago or the volume small enough, you try feeding it. If that still doesn't soothe the beast, you think about the last napping time and volume and maybe try to get it to fall asleep. Still not it? Maybe you run through other potential discomforts like teething or an earache or whatever and you work through it. Worst case scenario is that you hold/comfort the thing for hours through the night while it wails and wails until the medicine kicks in or it cries itself out and falls asleep or whatever. Everyone's miserable, but at least you know you've tried everything and there's nothing else you can do but comfort the uncomfortable.

TLDR; babies are born "self-aware" communicators. They don't know what's wrong; they can't tell you what it is; but the second they're displeased, they tell you. Mercifully, their list of needs is short, so it's pretty easy to figure out.

Adults, on the other hand, lose this ability - hence, the kick the dog syndrome. Irritability with your wife is clearly due to that one poor interaction today with your boss on this one annoying task that's been taking far too long. Oh wait, no, that wasn't my point. Point is that we sometimes lose self-awareness and act in ways disconnected from an understanding of what's really going on. That's why marriage therapists will tell you to HALT. Never have a "discussion" with your spouse when you or they are feeling: Hungry, Angry, Lonely or Tired. Practice that self-awareness and take care of the underlying basic need before you try to move on to advanced emotional dynamics.

Boy, this is getting long - such a long set-up for such a simple story. Anyway, I've said before that I loved being the parent of babies - there's just something so satisfying about being needed and wanted so rawly and purely, and the bonding that occurs with such pure attachment is so strong. After 8-10 years of babies, however, I was ready for the thing to be able to just tell me what it wanted with words and accurate self-awareness, forgetting, of course, that not even many adults are capable of this much of the time. In other words, it is required to teach kids to be self-aware of their emotions and how to put those emotions into words and requests. We've been working on that with each of our kids in turn and last night, even though I heard rumblings of this for a few weeks, my twelve year old asks me:

Him: Dad, can we go to the community center tomorrow and play racquetball or swim or something?

Me: Sure, buddy, any particular reason why?

Him: It just feels like I haven't seen you for a while and I want to do something with you.

Heart, melted.

[Jason]

You better take him. Because when you die, this will be the memory that causes him to completely lose his shit.

[7Wannabe5]

That's why marriage therapists will tell you to HALT. Never have a "discussion" with your spouse when you or they are feeling: Hungry, Angry, Lonely or Tired.

I thought the "H" was for Horny.

Sweet interaction with your son. Just hang in there for 15 more years and maybe you will even get "Hey Dad, I haven't seen you in a while. How about I buy you a beer."