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Do Not Render Your Counterfactuals
There is a particular kind of modern madness, so new it has yet to be named. It involves voluntarily feeding your own emotional entrails into the maw of an algorithm. It’s a madness born of idle curiosity, and perhaps a deep, masochistic hunger for pain. I indulged in it recently, and the result sits in my mind like a cold stone.
Years ago, there was a woman. We loved each other with the fierce, optimistic certainty of youth. In the way of young couples exploring the novelty of a shared future, we once stumbled upon one of those early, crude image generators - the kind that promised to visualize the genetic roulette of potential offspring. We fed it our photos, laughing at the absurdity, yet strangely captivated. The result, a composite face with hints of her eyes and jawline, and the contours of my cheeks. The baby struck us both as disarmingly cute. A little ghost of possibility, rendered in pixels. The interface was lacking, this being the distant year of 2022, and all we could do was laugh at the image, and look each other in the eyes that formed a kaleidoscope of love.
Life, as it does, intervened. We weren’t careful. A positive test, followed swiftly by the cramping and bleeding that signals an end before a beginning. The dominant emotion then, I must confess with the clarity of hindsight and the weight of shame, was profound relief. We were young, financially precarious, emotionally unmoored. A child felt like an accidentally unfurled sail catching a gale, dragging us into a sea we weren’t equipped to navigate. The relief was sharp, immediate, and utterly rational. We mourned the event, the scare, but not the entity. Not yet. I don't even know if it was a boy or a girl.
Time passed. The relationship ended, as young love often does, not with a bang but with the slow erosion of incompatible trajectories. Or perhaps that's me being maudlin, in the end, it went down in flames, and I felt immense relief that it was done. Life moved on. Occasionally, my digital past haunted me. Essays written that mentioned her, half-joking parentheticals where I remembered asking for her input. Google Photos choosing to 'remind' me of our time together (I never had the heart to delete our images).
Just now while back, another denizen of this niche internet forum I call home spoke about their difficulties conceiving. Repeated miscarriages, they said, and they were trawling the literature and afraid that there was an underlying chromosomal incompatibility. I did my best to reassure them, to the extent that reassurance was appropriate without verging into kind lies.
But you can never know what triggers it, thats urge to pick at an emotional scab or poke at the bruise she left on my heart. Someone on Twitter had, quite recently, showed off an example of Anakin and Padme with kids that looked just like them, courtesy of tricking ChatGPT into relaxing its content filters.
Another person, wiser than me, had promptly pointed out that modernity could produce artifacts that would once have been deemed cursed and summarily entombed. I didn't listen.
And knowing, with the cold certainty that it was a terrible idea, that I'd regret it, I fired up ChatGPT. Google Photos had already surfaced a digital snapshot of us, frozen in time, smiling at a camera that didn’t capture the tremors beneath. I fed it the prompt: "Show us as a family. With children." (The specifics obfuscated to hopefully get past ChatGPT's filter, and also because I don't want to spread a bad idea. You can look that up if you really care)
The algorithm, that vast engine of matrix multiplications and statistical correlations that often reproduces wisdom, did its work. It analyzed our features, our skin tones, the angles of our faces. It generated an image. Us, but not just the two of us. A boy with her unruly hair and my serious gaze. A girl with her dimples and my straighter mop. They looked like us. They looked like each other. They looked real.
They smiled as the girl clung to her skirt, a shy but happy face peeking out from the side. The boy perched in my arms, held aloft and without a care in the world.
It wasn't perfect, ChatGPT's image generation, for all its power, has clear tells. It's not yet out of the uncanny valley, and is deficient when compared to more specialized image models.
And yet.
My brain, the ancient primate wetware that has been fine-tuned for millions of years to recognize kin and feel profound attachment, does not care about any of this. It sees a plausible-looking child who has her eyes and my nose, and it lights up the relevant circuits with a ruthless, biological efficiency. It sees a little girl with her mother’s exact smile, and it runs the subroutine for love-and-protect.
The part of my mind that understands linear algebra is locked in a cage, screaming, while the part of my mind that understands family is at the controls, weeping.
I didn't weep. But it was close. As a doctor, I'm used to asking people to describe their pain, even if that qualia has a certain je ne sais quoi. The distinction, however artificial, is still useful. This ache was dull. Someone punched me in the chest and proved that the scars could never have the tensile strength of unblemished tissue. That someone was me.
This is a new kind of emotional exploit. We’ve had tools for evoking memory for millennia: a photograph, a song, a scent. But those are tools for accessing things that were, barring perhaps painting. Generative AI is a tool for rendering, in optionally photorealistic detail, things that never were. It allows you to create a perfectly crafted key to unlock a door in your heart that you never knew existed, a door that opens onto an empty room.
What is the utility of such an act? From a rational perspective, it’s pure negative value. I have voluntarily converted compute cycles into a significant quantity of personal sadness, with no corresponding insight or benefit. At the time of writing, I've already poured myself a stiff drink.
One might argue this is a new form of closure. By looking the ghost directly in the face, you can understand its form and, perhaps, finally dismiss it. This is the logic of exposure therapy. But it feels more like a form of self-flagellation. A way of paying a psychic tax on a past decision that, even if correct, feels like it demands a toll of sorrow. The relief I felt at the miscarriage all those years ago was rational, but perhaps some part of the human machine feels that such rationality must be punished. The AI provides an exquisitely calibrated whip for the job.
The broader lesson is not merely, as the old wisdom goes, to "let bygones be bygones." That advice was formulated in a world where bygones had the decency to remain fuzzy and abstract. The new, updated-for-the-21st-century maxim might be: Do not render your counterfactuals.
Our lives are a series of branching paths. Every major decision: career, relationship, location - creates a ghost-self who took the other route. For most of human history, that ghost-self remained an indistinct specter. You could wonder, vaguely, what life would have been like if you’d become a doctor, but you couldn’t see it.
The two children in the picture on my screen are gorgeous. They are entirely the product of matrix multiplications and noise functions, imaginary beings fished from nearly infinite latent space. And I know, with a certainty that feels both insane and completely true, that I could have loved them.
It hurts so fucking bad. I tell myself that the pain is a signal that the underlying system is still working. It would be worse if I stood in the wreckage of could have been, and felt nothing at all.
I look at those images again. The boy, the girl. Entirely fantasized. Products of code, not biology. Yet, the thought persists: "I think they were gorgeous and I could have loved them." And that’s the cruelest trick of all. The AI didn't just show me faces; it showed me the capacity for love that still resides within me, directed towards phantoms. It made me mourn not just the children, but the version of myself that might have raised them, alongside a woman I no longer know.
I delete them. I pour myself another drink, and say that it's in their honor.
(You may, if you please, like this on my Substack)
Here's some salt for your wounds: Mentally stable young people who have children early tend to enjoy immense personal growth (whether they want it or not), and are going to be more energetic and active parents, than those who wait for a good time. You didn't just lose your counterfactual children, you lost a better counterfactual you.
bro wtf
Do you disagree with the premise or with the lack of tact?
The latter - why'd you have to do me like that
What, you too?
Look, I had my first and hitherto only kid when I was 30, and my wife 29. My brother had his first at 23. My wife's sister on the other side had her first at...hell, 17? The consequences of becoming at parent at various ages and what it does to people under different circumstances aren't some abstract, statistical question to me. It's right there. I see how I struggle to live up to my idea of what a parent should do because I lack the health and energy of my younger self, and because I need to walk back a decade of entrenched non-parent habits that would have been a decade of parent habits instead had I become a dad at 20. I see how those other people I mentioned, and others besides, rise to meet the challenge and become more responsible, more practical and more far-sighted thanks to parenthood. I see how bullshit and bad habits evaporate. And I see how young people are just far more up to the task than those who are already beginning to slide into physical and mental decline. Lower neurplasticity, more bad habits, bodies having had more time to pick up various beginnings of decrepitude, the whole social support network being older and less able to help - it's just worse parenting material.
The only things you gain from being an older parent is more material wealth to throw at parenting issues, and additional life experience (but those experiences being those of a non-parent, so not as valuable as otherwise). But those advantages aren't worth much compared to what you're giving up. It's perhaps a little different if parenthood forces you to become a single dad because the mother dies or runs off or collapses into a pile of mental illness, but if you can become a regular (though young!) couple in which the man does the career and the woman takes care of the kids, then starting as early as possible is, in my view, mostly just the better way. And yes, this implies that women having careers is a tremendous waste of time and effort.
Unless, big caveat, there's preexisting mental illness. That just gets worse with kids. Those women are probably better off safely stowed in some office job.
A lot, and I mean a lot, of men had their first child around thirty, historically speaking. Bret Devereaux:
This did not apparently prevent those fathers raising sons who conquered the Mediterranean. Concerns about women aside, this is pretty weak sauce to serve in arguing that men must have children young.
I’m not arguing that men SHOULD have children older. But history does not support your allegations of dire consequences, and that should give you serious pause about your whole line of reasoning.
I'm wasn't planning to make any sweeping arguments about history, statistics or science.
But there should be some highly visible issues with equating current considerations RE: parenthood with those people historically had; especially people as far back as the Greeks and Romans. I'm not one to argue that we must go with the times, you'll always find me saying that what was good then is not bad now, but OTOH it's somewhat obvious that some things aren't now like they were then.
And I'm not saying that we're turning all our kids into walking catastrophes because we're thirty-year old dads. Just that...in my experience and observation, being a younger dad is superior to being an older one. And the historical argument is not enough to convince me of my eyes lying to me.
Also, completely unrelated to the actual topic - I used to enjoy Brett Devereaux, until I saw a video of him arguing with a youtuber called Lantern Jack about I don't even recall what, and Bret Devereaux just ended up being so very nasally, weaselly annoying, pedantic in the worst way, and willfully refusing to even consider his interlocutor's argument or perspective that from that day on I couldn't stomach to read any more of him.
I mean, the obvious confounder is that the kind of person who gets involved with a serious relationship as soon as able, progresses it aggressively, and takes responsibility for the natural consequences is different from the kind of person who doesn’t. In Rome those people were required to do their military service. Now they aren’t. But I think what’s actually at the heart of what you’re asking of people is not to make different decisions, but to be different people. Failing to recognize that is the source of most unhelpful advice. If a guy who is not really in the mindset of growing up, devoting energy, and so on has a kid, he will find it very unpleasant no matter his age. An older one might enjoy it regardless.
For your points… yep, childcare matters, and I preempted your point on women. The third point seems like a personal problem more than systemic. Happy parents, from what I see, just take it easy. I sympathize with point four similarly to point one (although the younger parents I know seem to spend an awful lot of time working…), and for point 5… I mean, I hate modernity as much as the next guy, but reading through some older memoirs or cultural histories I’m struck from time to time at how familiar the life of the mind can be. If anything is different, it’s a sense of personal responsibility. Those who blame their circumstances on external forces seem to have a hard time with acting, and boy do we have a lot of explanations for external forces these days.
My own experience is a little different from yours. I’ve got one kid, and am around 30, and am very happy with the situation and want more. If there’s anything I regret, it’s that my circumstances are NOT like my (then) 40-year-old father, who was financially better-established than I am and could spend much more time and energy doing cool things with me over working. But I hope to be in a more secure situation some years from now, and at that point, who knows? Could be a pretty comfortable circumstance. On the other hand, if I’m being frank, having a kid at 20 would likely have been a disaster, most importantly for the kid. I’ve changed a lot in the past decade. Would having a kid a couple years earlier than I did have worked? Sure, but there’s definitely a limit there, as far as my own self is concerned. It was only around 25ish that I really started to become the kind of person who could enjoy being a good father.
Of course, it’s your call whether you trust a word I’m saying. I don’t blame you if not.
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