Parenting is going to be hard.

Yesterday’s piece brought up a lively debate in channel about parenting. Most every perspective was representedi : has children and is happy with them, has children but isn’t happy with them, has children on the way, doesn’t have children but wants them, doesn’t have children and doesn’t want them, and any other possible combination I haven’t considered. As ever, the discourse is diverse and dialectic.

pete_d: BTW I didn’t fully grok your comment on my infanticide article.ii Sarcasm or no ? Not sure that being in favour of baby killin’ makes one more or less attractive to opposite sex, but would guess the latter.
mircea_popescu: I don’t think any woman is going to score the male propensity to infanticide positively. For that matter, any female, of any mammal species. Is the fundamental disagreement between the genders.

pete_d: Females want their children to survive, males want their children to perform.
mircea_popescu: Females strongly wish the offspring to survive. Males weakly wish the offspring to perish. Performance is a byproduct.
pete_d: A byproduct of what ?
ascii_lander: Of the opposite death ray beams.
mircea_popescu: Of that imbalance.
pete_d: Hmm.

mircea_popescu: This is how everything works, incidentally. The sun wants particles strongly energized, thermodynamics wants particles weakly de-energized. As a result, Coriolis storms, rainbows, deep throating and daisies. All epiphenomena of the fundamental imbalance. […] Point being, the strong push weak pull device drives all performance, but performance is a byproduct.
pete_d: Thankfully most Contravex readers have dongs.

mircea_popescu: If it doesn’t make sense to women, it doesn’t make sense to men, either. Whether they’re poorly equipped to figure it out or not, notwithstanding.
pete_d: How so ? are there not differing perspectives ? differing inclinations between the sexes ?
BingoBoingo: Anything younger than 10 is probably too early to cull anyways
ascii_lander: Cheapest infanticide is simply: not making’em in the first place. Just like the ‘best car’.

ben_vulpes: ascii_lander: Just like the ‘best car’ << “Cultures that do not cherish the young mother perish”, and we want this for La Serenissima?
mircea_popescu:  There’s a subtle difference re “young mothers”. Serenissima is an elective thing. You don’t get born into it, quite specifically.

ben_vulpes: No clearly, but the young can be set upon the road much more early can they not?
mircea_popescu: I have no idea. Maybe. You think ?
ben_vulpes: I do intend to run the assperiment.iii

ascii_lander: Assperiment ?
mircea_popescu: How does it go ? “Honey, you’re sixteen now, time to go be a whore in Hong Kong” ?
ben_vulpes: I suspect the odds are something abhorrent like 1/10 in each event. If whoring is what she’s bound to do she’ll go into it well knowledgeable of the various optimizations to be made.

mircea_popescu: How is this bound thing go ?
ben_vulpes: Peonage? You tell me, you actually do the binding.
mircea_popescu: Use numerous words rather than have me guess. Uh… wait, so basically your plan is “Whatever, I’ll feed her, maybe she meets some guy that trains her” ?

ben_vulpes: Why though is going off to whore necessary?
mircea_popescu: For teh experience, I imagined.
ascii_lander: The essential thing to realize is that Mircea Popescu-ine methods only work with Mircea Popescu-ine tech level. And that attempting them elsewhere may disappoint, like trying to create doped diamond semiconductor in Edison’s lab.

mircea_popescu: I certainly do not propose I am in possession of answers to the world’s problems. HOWEVER! I do have some pretty good questions.iv
ben_vulpes: One does not train daughters in the way one trains wives and girlfriends.

mircea_popescu: So then what’s an assperiment ?
ben_vulpes: While there are parallels, they as all must pick their masters. A derpy pun! #bitcoin-assets.

mircea_popescu: Anyway, the “I’ll feed her and we’ll see” plan is not really all that bad.
*: ben_vulpes Shrugs. Worked for me.
mircea_popescu: Anyway, the problem of women, by and large, is that they’re naturally afraid and most environments encourage this and bring them up cowardly. A whore’s just that : a symbol for “fearless woman”.
ben_vulpes: #bitcoin-parenting

 

From the outside, it will rarely appear that you, as a parent, did everything right. From the outside, it’s altogether more likely that you, as a parent, messed up in a considerable and uncorrectable number of ways and that’s it’s entirely your fault. This will undoubtedly prove to be the perspective of your own children, at least the very least, certainly until they have children of their own and come to appreciate the magnitude of the clusterfuck that they’ve embarked upon, and in turn the one that you embarked upon with them.v

For yourself, you’ll never know how well you did as a parent.  There will always be situations you felt you could’ve handled better, there will always be means of discipline you wished you’d chosen instead, and there will always be more you could’ve done for them. You won’t really know if you’ve been successful until long after you’re gone, when the historians write about you. If the historians write about you.

In the moment, you’re just exercising your free will. You see the options you can see at the time, but you can’t possibly see them all. There’s not enough time. And yet you still try to make little girls into fearless women and little boys into warriors because you want them to succeed in this age as well as any other.

You do the best you can for them. No, not the best you can for you. You’re dead the moment they come out of the womb.vi You do the best for them.

It’s all for them.

___ ___ ___

  1. Ok, most every male perspective was represented. This is a forum for political discourse, after all, not a nail salon. It’s pretty self-selecting, though there are certainly a few women whose company we enjoy and who appreciate ours in turn in this most serene republic.
  2. mircea_popescu: Lol infanticide. As time goes by, Petey gets moar and moar eligible bacheloar.
  3. This just in : Lady V is pregnant !
  4. Such a rabbi, this guy ! Probably why I can’t get enough of #b-a..
  5. This, incidentally, is why men and women in their 50’s and 60’s want grandchildren so badly : so that they can finally earn the appreciation of their children for the 20-30 years of thankless life force  they poured into us, so their children can look them in the eye and say “Wow, I had no idea it would be this hard. Thank you for everything you did for me and my siblings growing up.”

    This is, of course, the best possible scenario in the minds of the expecting grandparents. No doubt that your experience may vary.

  6. My mother still tells me that she stopped aging the day I was born. She’ll always be 30, no matter if she lives to be 100.

One thought on “Parenting is going to be hard.

  1. […] place and time you happen to inhabit fails to recognise that parents are anything other than a legally enslaved babysitters, and even if one is able to extract oneself from their former station and hop a notch up or a notch […]

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