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Notes -
A post is blowing up on my part of twitter where a guy is saying he only wants to spend 10 minutes a day with his kids.. This has a surprising amount of scissor power, with people coming down on all sides.
Relevant quote:
The one straightforward argument is that, well, he's a shitty dad. Especially since he says he wants to be working, accomplishing something, and what is his work? Well, he's a creative director at some random tiny crypto business working on "building digital gold." So... easily mockable.
The other side says that modern parenting norms are fucked, as he aludes to, and that kids used to be a lot more free range. Normally I'm sympathetic to this, but the guy's kids are below five, so idk. I think infants and toddlers definitely need a lot of attention.
Either way I'm curious how parenting norms might break down along culture war lines, and what people here think?
ETA: Also, a great and extremely sassy quote tweet:
So, I agree with (I think) Matt Walsh who said basically:
Why are you anxiety-ing about how you feel about doing something? If it’s good to do, do it.
Why are you vomiting this out in public / on twitter?
Moreover, I assume this is almost certainly a case of poorly trained attention span / boredom tolerance from someone who’s gooned their dopamine with the internet. This is just doing the work of basic conditioning.
Regardless of the kid aspect, if you can’t tolerate more than 10 minutes doing something boring and are in your head about whether it’s appropriately fun, you need to fix this about yourself.
Overall, the idea of over factoring in whether something is good to be doing or virtuous with how much one enjoys it is painfully cringe and just a bad life perspective. Therapizing about it on the internet to strangers is downstream of this.
Whether he needs to be spending more time with his kids and how he ought to be feeling about it, is all very far removed from these more immediate problems of basic task discipline
Yeah I tend to agree with this. I personally find it useful and important to think about and focus on internal states more than the norm, but it's easy to go overboard and pathologize any discomfort as a problem that needs to be solved.
To be clear, I do think it's useful to reflect on internal states, and I do think Matt's bravado is performatively overstated.
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