OracleOutlook
🇺🇸 Fiat justitia ruat caelum
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User ID: 359
OracleOutlook
🇺🇸 Fiat justitia ruat caelum
15hr ago
Agreed. But I would say that people need to pursue these goals, not just expect them to happen. I think most people get the "job" thing. People go to secondary school, study long hours, go to residency, internships, put in a lot of time and effort into getting the right credentials and getting the right job.
The same amount of effort needs to go into getting the girl. And not just dating, but actually discerning marriage with the girl. It shouldn't take more than a year to learn enough about each other to see if you can actually be spouses, and if at any point you think you can't be spouses then break it off.
For some reason people take this part of their lives unseriously when in hindsight it's the cornerstone of all other joys in my life.
OracleOutlook
🇺🇸 Fiat justitia ruat caelum
20hr ago
You're not caught in traffic, you are the traffic. You don't have an obligation to "society" you are society and you have an obligation to yourself.
OracleOutlook
🇺🇸 Fiat justitia ruat caelum
20hr ago
If we all are to die right now in a flaming meteor, then ok. Society doesn't matter that much to you.
If you hope to grow old and die peacefully at the end of a lifespan as long as you can achieve, then you want to have stability as you grow older and weaker. This means able-bodied people younger than you who have been inculcated in a community that values taking care of the weak and elderly. This means having children and educating them.
So that's the selfish case.
The less-selfish case I guess is that human lives are one of the most precious resource in the world, consciousness is rare, sapience more so. A universe without anyone to observe it would be tragic and absurd.
Stable societies produce happier outcomes, better lives for these sapient Earth observers. If you think life sucks, the better thing to do is make it less sucky instead of abandon it, creating more suffering in the interim as society collapses.
My real reason is just that I found someone I loved. And because I loved him, I loved the world. I loved the world that could make such a person, however fucked up his life had been. In my husband I saw that the awfulness of the world cannot mar the beauty of a human soul. And I liked him so much I wanted more of him - more people like him. And he thought I was a good thing, too. He thought it was good I exist and because of that I began to come around on the idea myself. And if it was good that I existed, and it was good that he existed, then it would be great for there to be more people like him and like myself.
And so I embarked on this mission: to make more people who have the best qualities of us both, who are coached on their weak-points by the two people who can empathize the most with them.
OracleOutlook
🇺🇸 Fiat justitia ruat caelum
1d ago
I think the problem is we assumed that the fertility rates would arrive asymptotically at whatever replacement was for the infant mortality of the future/present time, but fertility rates did not stop falling. They were only reversed for a short time by the baby boom before falling again at around the same rate.
OracleOutlook
🇺🇸 Fiat justitia ruat caelum
1d ago
If you are on TheMotte and had the attention span to read the above comment without using GPT to summarize, then please have children. Have as many as you think you can manage and then one more on top of that.
Smart people should build things. What are you building? Code? A 401k? How about a human being? Imagine building one of those. Then stop imagining and get on it! It should be at least as important to you to build a human as it is to build a portfolio.
If you don't like children, ok. But you've never met your children. The children who will be like you and the person you love the most.
It's going to involve sacrifice. Ok, so does everything else worth doing in the whole world.
When smart people stop building things, society collapses. And the best, most important thing a smart person can build is other smart people.
OracleOutlook
🇺🇸 Fiat justitia ruat caelum
3d ago
I have an officially Level 2 Autistic kid who reminds me a lot of myself at her age... but I have not been diagnosed.
OracleOutlook
🇺🇸 Fiat justitia ruat caelum
4d ago
Our director is a very un-PC guy who takes people out to the bar, drops $300 of alcohol on them, and then yells at them. It's definitely not "remember daughter's wedding anniversary" kind of relationship management. He calls everything he doesn't like communism.
OracleOutlook
🇺🇸 Fiat justitia ruat caelum
5d ago
You have to be a real person to them. They have to feel like they're disappointing a real person if they mess up or take too long. You can't just be a customer where a failure is just a business problem, it has to be personal.
OracleOutlook
🇺🇸 Fiat justitia ruat caelum
5d ago
I don't want to give too much away here, but I PM at a company that makes stuff in the US, with an annual revenue for just this product line in the 10s of millions. Our success largely comes from being in a small Midwestern city and forming relationships with dozens of local small-medium fabricators. The kind of relationships where we invite them out to baseball games, when our parts are ready we drive a truck out to them, we stop by every once an a while with something that shouldn't have passed QC and point out to their faces what went wrong, etc.
About 50% of our success is that persistent and somewhat masculine relationship management. Flatter when they do well, reward when they do sufficiently, call out to their faces when they do badly. Call them cowards if they look hesitant. No matter what, never go a month without taking over the phone or in person. Solicit their input if they think there's a better way to fabricate what you're after. Oftentimes ignore their feedback, but in a way that shows you considered their input.
You're going to need to be more concrete than that.
Let's say Social Security goes away before you are 65. Or even total anarchy. Are you better off with one or zero kids, or if you have four+. If you have 4+, at least one is likely to still have a fondness for you and might let you stay with them in your twilight years. If you have 0 kids you get to look forward to working until you cannot and rotting in a ditch after.
From where I stand, having kids is more upside than down. Sure I could afford more things without them. But I had the time of my life playing fetch with my 3 year old yesterday. I
I don't know how to explain it to someone who doesn't have kids. I have taught two little humans how to read. And for one of those humans it was a hard slog, I had to keep changing programs every year, trying to make an inch of progress at a time. I researched, I made schedules and lesson plans and sat down every day with a book and my girl and I persisted.
There's the mental cocaine of having your toddler call you "mamma." But there's more than chemicals. There's the concerted effort to help someone every day become a good adult human, and whoever you are it takes all of you. If you're good at research it takes research. If you're good at meal prep it takes meal prep. Whatever your thing is, you pour it on your kid and it's satisfying. It's climbing Everest, it's running a marathon, it's what life is for, the challenge you are supposed to be doing. The school of love you need to be a whole human being.
If the word society is tripping you up, just do it for yourself.
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