advice

Reflections on fatherhood

PNRJ current events, personal, tribal paradigm , , , , , , , , , ,

Jun 24 JDN 2460485

I am writing this on Father’s Day, which has become something of a morose occasion for me—or at least a bittersweet one. I had always thought that I would become a father while my own father were still around, that my children would have a full set of grandparents. But that isn’t how my life has turned out.

Humans are unusual, among mammals, in having fathers. Yes, biologically, there is always a male involved. But most male mammals really don’t do much of the parenting; they leave that task more or less entirely to the females. So while every mammal has a mother, most really don’t have a father.

We’re also unusual in just how much parenting we need to survive. All babies are vulnerable, but human babies are exceptionally so. Most mammals are born at least able to walk. Even other altricial mammals are not as underdeveloped at birth as we are. In many ways, it seems that we come out of the womb before we’re really done, in order to spare our mothers an impossible birth.

And it is most likely due to this state of exceptional need that we became creatures of exceptional caring. Fatherhood is one of the clearest examples of this: Our males devote enormous effort to the care and support of their offspring, comparable to the efforts that our females devote (though, even in modern societies, not equal).

It’s ironic that many people don’t think of humans as a uniquely caring species. Some even seem to imagine that we are uniquely violent and cruel. But violence and cruelty is everywhere in nature; it’s the lack of it that needs explained. Even bonobos are not as kind and cooperative as previously imagined, and eusocial species don’t generally cooperate outside their hives; humans may in fact be the most cooperative animal.

What about war? Is that not uniquely human, and thus proof of our inherent violence? Wars are indeed unusual in nature (though not nonexistent: ants and apes are both prone to them), but the part that’s unusual is not the violence—it’s the coordination. Almost all animals are violent to greater or lesser degree. But it’s the rare ones who are cooperative enough to be violent en masse. And most human societies are at peace with most of their neighbors most of the time.

In fact I think it is the fact that we are so caring that makes us so aware of our own cruelty. A truly cruel species would be far more violent, but also wouldn’t care about how violent it was. It wouldn’t feel guilt or shame about being so violent. The reason we feel so ashamed of our own violence is that we are capable of imagining peace.

And part of why we are able to imagine a more caring world is that (most of us) are born into one, in the hands of our mothers and fathers. When we become adults, we find ourselves longing for the peace and security we felt in childhood. And while caring is largely seen as a mother’s job, security is very much seen as a father’s. We feel so helpless and exposed when we grow up, because we were so protected and safe as children.

My father certainly taught me a great deal about caring—caring so much, perhaps too much. I suppose I don’t actually know how much of it he actually taught me, versus how much was encoded in genes I got from him; but I do know that I grew up to be just like him in so many ways, both good and bad—so kind, so loyal, so loving, but also so wounded, so aggrieved, so hopeless. My father was more caring than anyone else I have ever known. He carried the weight of the world on his shoulders, and now so do I. My father died without achieving most of his lifelong dreams. One of my greatest fears is that I will do the same.

Being in a same-sex marriage has also radically changed my relationship with fatherhood. It’s no longer something that can happen to me by accident, or something that would more or less end up happening on its own if we simply stopped fighting it. It is now something I must actively choose, a commitment I must make, a task I must willfully devote myself toward. And so far, it has never seemed like the right time to take that leap of faith. Another great fear of mine is that it never will.

Life is a succession of tomorrows that turn all too quickly into yesterdays, of could-bes that fade into could-have-beens, of shoulds that shrivel into should-haves. The possibilities are vast, but not limitless; more and more limits get imposed as time goes on, until at last death imposes the most final limit of all.

I don’t want my life to pass me by while I’m waiting for something better that never comes. But I clearly can’t be satisfied with where I am now, and I don’t want to give up on all my dreams. How do I know what I should fight for, and what I should give up on?

I wish I could ask my father for advice.

The radical uncertainty of life

PNRJ core principles, financial advice, futurism , , ,

Jul 31 JDN 2459792

It’s a question you get a lot in job interviews, and sometimes from elsewhere as well: “Where do you see yourself in ten years?”

I never quite know how to answer such a question, because the future is so full of uncertainty.

Ten years from now:

I could be a tenured professor, or have left academia entirely. I could be teaching here at Edinburgh, or at an even more prestigious university, or at a tiny, obscure school. I could be working in private industry, or unemployed. I could be working as a full-time freelance writer.

I could have published nothing new, or have published a few things, or have won a Fields Medal. (It’s especially unlikely to have won a Nobel by then, but it’s a bit less unlikely that I might have done work that would one day lead to one.)

I could be still living in the United Kingdom, or back in the United States, or in some other country entirely.

I could be healthier than I am now, or permanently disabled. I could even be dead, from a variety of diseases, or a car accident, or a gunshot wound.

I could have adopted three children, or none. I could be divorced. My spouse could be dead.

It could even all be moot because the Russian war in Ukraine—or some other act of Russian aggression—has escalated into a nuclear Third World War.

These are the relatively likely scenarios.

I’m not saying I’m going to win a Fields Medal—but I am the sort of person who wins Fields Medals, surely far more likely than any randomly selected individual. I’m not saying we’re going to have WW3, but we’re definitely closer to it than we’ve been since the end of the Cold War.

There are plenty of other, unlikely scenarios that still remain possible:

I could be working in finance, or engineering, or medicine. I could be living on a farm. I could be President of the United States. I could have won a multi-million-dollar lottery and retired to a life of luxury and philanthropy. Those seem rather unlikely for me personally—but they are all true of someone, somewhere.

I could be living on a space station, or a Lunar base. I could be cybernetically enhanced. 2032 seems early for such things—but it didn’t to folks writing in the 1980s, so who knows? (Maybe it will even happen so gradually we won’t notice: Is a glucose-monitoring implant a cybernetic enhancement? It doesn’t seem so unlikely I might one day have one of those.)

None of us really knows what the future is going to hold. We could say what we want, or what we expect is the most likely, but more often than not, the world will surprise us.

What does this mean for our lives now? Should we give up trying to make plans, since the future is so unpredictable? Should we “eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we die”?

I think the key is to realize that there is a kind of planning that’s still useful even if you can’t predict what will happen—and that is to plan to be flexible and resilient.

You can keep your eyes open for opportunities, rather than trying too hard to hold onto what you already have. Rather than trying in vain to keep everything the same, you can accept that your life is going to change and try to direct that change in better directions.

Rather than planning on staying in the same career for your whole life—which hardly anyone in our generation does—you should expect to change careers, and be working on building a wide range of transferable skills and a broad network of friends and colleagues. Maybe sooner or later you’ll find the right place to settle down, but it could be awhile.

You may not know where you’ll be living or working in ten years, but odds are pretty good that it’ll still be useful for you to have some money saved up, so you should probably save some money. If we end up in a post-scarcity utopia, you won’t need it, but you also won’t care. If we end up in a post-apocalyptic hellscape, it really won’t matter one way or the other. And those two extremes are about what would need to happen for you not to be able to make use of savings.

And where should you put that saved money? Stocks, bonds, cryptocurrency? Well, crypto would give you a chance at spectacular gains—but a much larger chance of spectacular losses. Bonds are very safe, but also don’t grow very much. So, as I’ve said before, you probably want to buy stocks. Yes, you could end up better off by choosing something else; but you have to play the odds, and stocks give you the best odds.

You will have setbacks at some point, either small or large. Everyone does. You can’t plan for what they will be, but you can plan to have resources available to deal with them.

Hey, maybe you should even buy life insurance, just in case you really do die tomorrow. You probably won’t—but somebody will, and doesn’t know it yet.