The most precious resource is agency
simonsarris.substack.com
simonsarris.substack.com
The basic life script we all seem to have in western society seems pretty awful when you think critically about it. Essentially we waste all out vitality and youth making other people rich, so that one day when we're old and infirm, we can finally do the things we like with the short time we have left. I think most of us never even think about it because it's too bleak of a reality. I feel somewhat fortunate in that the work I do is something I would generally enjoy doing even if I wasn't being paid for it, but I still have a nagging fear that what I could be is much more than what I am yet I lack the proper tools and perspectives to become that person (and I don't think that just starting my own business, like a lot of people here want to do, is really sufficient, it's just a small part of inventing your own life script).
On the flip side, if you step outside the bubble of comfort that Western society generally affords people, you'll find that life is "nasty, brutish & short" as Hobbes put it.
We've come a very very long way in a short time towards raising our standard of living and our expectations for what our lives can be - especially for regular folk from humble beginnings who aren't born into huge advantages.
Not to say that we can't improve things further for Western society, but just to say that the script we are generally given is pretty damn good compared to historical averages.
Honestly, it’s so good it’s boring. Not much challenge to life if the only thing you need to do to continue existing is plant your ass in the same chair every day.
Life here is beautiful, the sense of community is so much stronger than it is in the west and overall I'd say that people are less stressed. On the flip side, many things are harder for sure - wages are low and working hours are long, good healthcare is hard come by for many people.
Short of living in an active conflict zone, of which there are only a few in the world, thankfully, life is not "nasty, brutish, and short". Perhaps, in future, before making such statements about the lives of people from cultures other than your own, you could take a few moments to try and empathize with them instead?
a) to partake in that lifestyle
b) has the tools to reach that lifestyle when starting outside of it
Doesn't matter if you are talking about North Korea or the United States. And yes, you can find abject generational poverty in the United States as well.
The fact you could post your comment puts you in the top 40% of the world (roughly 60% don't have internet access).
If you have internet from a mobile phone, you are roughly in the top 50%.
Are you really looking outside your bubble of comfort?
What you might be doing I think... is making the assumption that technology, 'things' like gadgets or better cars and modern medical health is central to human life. Yes, life would objectively improve if you have those, but if I have to work 60 hours a week doing something I don't really care about, then is that really a good trade-off? I think the answer is not the same as yours for everyone.
Again, the central aspect of this topic is agency. Do people choose to live that way, where they live it? And how many would choose a different lifestyle if given the same opportunities as everybody else?
Yes, you can live a happy life as a nomad without any access to technology. That isn't the topic of this conversation.
I have by now traveled pretty much to all the continents and at this point smartphones and internet are ubiquitous. They are litterly now throwing away working second hand ones in developing nations.
Interesting: internet-access > no-internet-access
Even living in the poor part of the EU is still a lot worse then living in the good part.
>Life here is beautiful
snort
> the sense of community is so much stronger than it is in the west
the community is precisely why I dislike my country. I can't imagine worse torture then being force to live your life with close-minded ignorant people stuck in the past.
Go and be gay or atheist or just strange in your country then tell me how beautiful your life is.
>overall I'd say that people are less stressed. On the flip side, many things are harder for sure - wages are low and working hours are long, good healthcare is hard come by for many people.
As long as you don't care if you starve or die of illness it's all great. So literally the basics of security.
>life is not "nasty, brutish, and short"
sure, it's just relatively nastier, more brutish and objectively shorter in years of life.
>Perhaps, in future, before making such statements about the lives of people from cultures other than your own, you could take a few moments to try and empathize with them instead?
I don't need empathy when I feel it on my own skin.
Pretty weak all in all.
The Hobbes quote, however, does not apply. Hobbes was comparing life with/without a sufficiently strong Leviathan ('central government') to provide basic protection of property rights, or at least a semblance of such protection.
But the "long way" to which you refer, the physical comfort of modern life, is the fruit of the industrial revolution, roughly 150 years of history.
Hobbes was much earlier, he probably never saw the IR coming.
If you have 150k in the bank you could go to a remote place in the US, take a lowkey job where you work 25 hours a week, and live perfectly fine. No one is stopping you.
The only reason you don't do this is because you like nice things, nice food cooked for you, nice immenities, and want your kids to have material prosperity.
Parent is referencing this joke: https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/avocado-toast
>you have 150k in the bank
>no one is stopping you
>the only reason you don't...
Overall I think your response is not convincing. The problems of materialism are systemic because materialism is baked into the culture and institutions of the US. People are thus motivated to blame the system.
It's like numbers, it exists even if we are ignorant of it.
Even the least prescriptive economist is going to be a part of this cycle.
[1] https://www.investopedia.com/terms/n/normativeeconomics.asp
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normative_economics
[3] https://corporatefinanceinstitute.com/resources/knowledge/ec...
[4] https://marketbusinessnews.com/financial-glossary/normative-...
[5] https://www.soas.ac.uk/cedep-demos/000_P570_IEEP_K3736-Demo/...
[6] https://www.cairn.info/revue-d-economie-politique-2018-2-pag...
This is why I feel that an individual contribution from my life is not enough. No matter how many fires I put out in people's homes, there's still going to be that fucking arsonist.
Raising a family and religion were important, but I don't think people were very different from our times.
To prove this just look at old folk musical instruments and their development. It is fascinating really.
And the military, and politics, and arts, and friends, and philosophy, and sciences, ...
It's a big fat modern-times bias to imagine that our 19th century ancestors were so simplistic. Just read Zola or Dostoïevski, many characters and/or situations could be transposed nearly intact in modern times.
I have no idea what the majority of people in my community do. We simply never discuss work, there's so much more between family, nature, and the goings on in the world. The complete reverse was true in North America - the first question after "what's your name" was invariably "what do you do".
I just applied for a regular job. Because to be honest, it’s gonna be pretty sweet having a fat bank account, even if it’ll take till I’m 50 to have FU money.
My current hypothesis is that the team is all that matters. The work can be the most boring, crud-type work. As long as you’re working with people you like on something vaguely interesting, who cares?
20yo me would be mortified to hear myself say this, but the chances of either of us influencing the world is quite small. I’m happy I threw all of my effort into doing something I wanted, but my honest answer is that you’re not really missing out on much.
Relax and enjoy yourself. Most days, I end up wishing I’d had kids 5 years ago. It was nice to prioritize myself, but you can’t prioritize a family you never focused on building.
(I had no idea I even wanted a family or that it was important to me until about… 29?)
I guess my point is, the “relax and enjoy yourself” mentality isn’t so bad. No one will probably remember us the way they’ll remember pg. But I’ve helped thousands of devs directly, whether in DMs or by contributing code, and I think I only care whether those folks might remember me.
So that’s the area you can really make an impact: on the people around you, in your day to day life.
Maybe I’ll wake up in a few years and realize this is a terrible mistake, but that seems unlikely.
Not a single professional accomplishment is within an order of magnitude of that level of fulfillment. Just help one f*cking person become more than they thought they could be and you’ll die happy—why didn’t they tell us it was this simple?
The sensible model seems rather obvious: One has to organize their own show before one is of [much] use to others. Until that time one should give the others the opportunity to help you with that and be grateful. Its not an embarrassment if you plan to do the same.
I think you can cultivate that in a small way though, by taking part in volunteer programs in your community. I know it's a cliche recommendation but if you are feeling like we lack community then it's probably just because of how easy it is to separate yourself from it.
Possibly the best thing I've ever done in my life, and it was in my late teens. I get satisfaction from my intellectuality and general smarts, but for it really brighten my soul, it has to positively affect other people.
The bottom line is a demanding bitch and no matter how much you give it will ask for ever more. A positive change in a fellow human being is intrinsically, life-affirmingly satisfying; even just a single-serve in a lifetime.
Most depression is the second type. So I’m not surprised giving people purpose shows great results. It would have for me, too.
Maybe just being cynical about it, but if I help out at a soup kitchen I know I'm helping people, when I donate I am just getting a tax credit and boosting a charity's executive bonuses.
Also, overheads like executive bonuses don't _necessarily_ mean that the charity is ineffective [3]
[1] https://www.effectivealtruism.org/
[2] https://www.givewell.org/charities/top-charities
[3] https://www.givingwhatwecan.org/choosing-a-charity/#a-note-a...
I heard his mum giving out to his older brothers for not watching him. There is a good chance that young boy would have run out of energy and slipped under the surface with no one noticing. It's a nice thought that I may have saved his life and also saved his family from all the grief and guilt that would have caused. I doubt he remembers it - not that it matters.
Because it has an intangible effect on GDP. Our culture optimises for creating obedient worker drones who will capitulate to authority. Fostering empathy for others and leading children to a life of fulfilment conflicts with establishment incentives.
I suspect different people probably did try to tell me versions of that, but it’s very hard to learn deep feelings from hearing other people talk or reading their words as compared to living it yourself. You can read about others’ heartbreak but you learn from your first few breakups. You can read about having kids but nothing prepares you for the deep feelings of parenting.
Maybe being doomed to repeat the learnings others have had is part of the point?
Say what you want about the ills that come with it, but religion has been telling us this since the dawn of time.
You will never have FU money working a regular job.
1. Reduce outgoings. It's easier to have FU money if the amount you need to be able to say "FU" is smaller, because you've perfected the art of living on a little less than most. Most people's outgoings grow to meet their incomes: resist that. You don't need to recycle everything you touch and grow your own food to make good headway here.
2. Take your age, halve it. That number is the percentage of your gross income you should be putting away each month into retirement and savings if you haven't started already. Yes, it's hard at the beginning, so have it happen automatically through employer deductions (common in the UK for pensions, not sure about elsewhere), or on payday move a %age automatically into a savings or investment account so you get used to living without it. I still struggle to do this but am getting better.
3. Learn about compound returns a little more. $500 a month at 8% (typical market returns recently), and over 10 years gives you back $92k - a $32k profit on the $60k you put in. Whether that's FU money is dependent on whether your outgoings are $50k/year or $150k/year. Keep going for another 10 years, and you're not far off $300k which isn't bad for the $120k it cost you. Think you can keep going into your fifties and do another decade? $750k off the back of a $180k investment. Is this not FU money yet? You're the problem, not the regular job.
Your chances of having FU money working a regular job are far, far higher than having it any other way. It's just too many people are trying to retire in their 20s and not getting it: that's not a very likely outcome, no matter how hard you work or how smart you are.
I think we have very different ideas of what "FU money" means. FU money is literally enough to be able to do what you want. It's being able to stop asking "Can I afford this?" because you definitely can. It's being able to stop making a choice between two sports cars because you can afford both. It's being able to buy the exact house you want because you can approach the current owner and make an offer they'd be stupid to turn down. FU money is literally the ability to say FU and do something anyway when someone says you can't.
Having enough money to retire a bit earlier if you live a relatively simple life and save a lot is not FU money.
$750k off the back of a $180k investment. Is this not FU money yet?
$750k is barely the down payment on a nice Bay Area family house. Of course it isn't FU money. You're not saying "FU" to anyone if you're also saying "I can't afford the house I want so I'll choose a more reasonable one."
So how much does it cost to travel to Alpha Centauri and back?
There are always things you can't afford, no matter how rich you are. So that's a bad definition.
I always thought FU money was enough money that you can say FU and not do something when someone says you have to. That is, enough money to retire (get fired) on a whim. Of course, even by that definition, 750k isn't FU money unless you're single in a LCOL area (or fairly close to a predictable death, I guess).
My personal criterion for FU money is 3mm. This is fairly achievable, market willing, if you have make six figures.
FU money is being able to say fuck you to anyone (including your boss) without consequences derailing your life.
At the very beginning of my career I worked in the lab for 36 hours straight trying to finish a project on a tight deadline. I didn't have any "FU" money at that point obviously. If someone asked me to do that today, there would be no way! I wouldn't quit over it necessarily, but I would still be OK financially if I was fired for saying "your deadline is ridiculous!"
in the U.S working a regular but relatively high paying job like developer should give you FU money right about the time that you start to experience health problems that will then eat into that FU money leaving you nothing.
There's a reason the song is Birth, School, Work, Death without any FU inside the comma separated list.
You might want to update your models. If interest rates will remain at 0 (or get negative like in Europe), you'd be lucky with 0-1% return.
The recipe is simple. If you spend 50% of what you make, then you only have to work 50% of your life. If you spend 10% of what you make, then you only have to work 10% of your life.
Turn off all sources of marketing and watch your free time and savings swell.
The part people find unpalatable (and sometimes impossible, depending on circumstances) is the "live on half of it" part (but even if half is impossible, it's still worth investing what you can).
I'm not even making US software money and my budget says I can reach FU money (which, to be clear, means matching my current low-budget lifestyle, which is why it's achievable) in 5 years if no other major expenses come up.
I did decide to prioritize charitable giving because of the reasons elsewhere discussed about service being its own reward, but that only pushed it out to ~11, which is still a couple decades earlier than the typical retirement age.
Plus, when I'm gone, I can pass that income generator on to someone else and free them from the rat race, giving the next generation an even better headstart than I had.
To be honest, even your strategy there sounds tremendously flawed because you're assuming that you'll even want to live that life. What happens if you meet someone, get married, and have a couple of kids after you 'retire'? Suddenly your retirement fund is nowhere near enough. A simple example - how do you pay for your kids to go to college? You think you've got "FU money" so surely you can do something as straightforward as saving your kids from college debt. What if they're brilliant and get places at Stanford? Is your 'live on the interest from half the earnings of 11 years as an engineer' going to cover $500k in 20 years time? Of course not. You'd need to dip in to the capital, and then your whole retirement plan falls apart.
Having FU money, as opposed to just plain simple money, means you will be able to afford all those things and more besides because you are genuinely FU rich. You don't get there by having a normal job, even if it pays a lot and you can invest half your income. That just gets you a nice middle-class retirement, which is lovely, but you won't be rich.
Most people won’t ever be able to do that, no matter how much they save of what they earn.
Also, cost of living is another huge factor here. Housing isn’t always as expensive as it is in the Bay Area, and some countries have good (even sometimes great) free education. Heck, in some, you are paid to attend the top schools.
FU money isn’t about being rich. It’s about being able to keep living the life you want even in the event you were to tell your boss or the world to fuck off.
So… in this… everyone’s goal would be different, and yours is not his?
If my kids wanted to go to a half-million dollars university, I’d just burst out laughing and ask them how they expect to pay for that. If they were to reply that they expected me to, I’d probably laugh them out of the room.
Almost nobody in the whole world can afford to send their children off to a $500k college.
Not even after saving up half of everything they’ve earned across their entire life. I don’t care much about holding myself up to such an unreasonable standard.
Noboxy in the world is entitled to expect anyone else to pony up such an amount of money for them either.
If I can
- put a roof over their head,
- clothes on their backs,
- feed them well every day,
- provide them a good health insurance,
- send them to school
- and afford one or two extra-curricular activities
- as well as one or two vacations, preferably abroad, a year,
I’ll have more and be able to provide them with more than most people ever had, have and expect to be able to in their entire lives.
If I can do so without ever needing to work again, it absolutely is enough for me to tell any employer to go find someone else to do the job and please don’t let the door hit them on their way out.
To me, anything more is an extra nice to have that I don’t owe to anybody.
You appear to have a different point of view. That’s fine. To hold yourself to a different standard. That’s okay too. It’s your life.
You also seem to have a hard time grasping that different people have different needs, and to consider that everybody else should abide by your standards.
This, well… is fine too, I guess.
Just to point out, there are some _really_ good college's in the EU that don't cost $$$. eg:
https://leverageedu.com/blog/free-universities-in-germany/ (random page about it)
Which I totally get, but find hilarious nonetheless.
I got zero money from my parents after I turned 17, and the bare minimum before that, and I would have felt inadequate as a young adult if I had taken money from them, which they did not have in any case. Exception exists (e.g. disabilities).
he came to me later and asked me to expound. i told him "the formula is: spend less than you make and invest the left over. you do that long enough and you'll become wealthy."
i also told him "from what i can tell, it will happen so gradually that you'll barely notice a difference in your lifestyle. you will just realize one day that you are part of the maligned upper-crust but noone around you will know that."
he called me 2 years ago to let me know that he took my observation to heart and he's now in the millionaire club. he also said "the books say i'm a millionaire, but i certainly don't feel like it."
his next million will be much easier to get now and he just turned 40.
Also, counting a home’s net worth in assets does not make sense to me unless you can afford to greatly downsize at anytime and the market is liquid.
$6,000 per year is a significant portion of your take-home income if you're making the median income in the US, but it's possible.
Realistically though back when being a millionaire meant 'retire immediately' things were much cheaper. You could get a car for 3-4k. Now a similar car would be 30-40k. You could say 'oh but that car is so much better'. That is true, but this 10x is mostly true across most goods I have found. I think many do not realize what a number inflation did on everyone in the late 70s and very early 80s. So many of these 'sayings' are still around but their numbers off by a factor of 10.
New cars are status symbols or toys. I never understood how people could trade a human's full time salary for a car. People take old cars to work every day for a small fraction of the cost.
American lifestyles have inflated much more than the price of comparable goods. Average home size is way up over time, people prepare less of their own food, people buy fancy big cars with lots of horsepower and unnecessary capability.
I would complain about iphones and big TVs but in reality- the only things relevant to most of our budgets are our insistence to compete for the hottest real estate and new cars
Conspicuous consumption of goods is a interesting argument and probably worth talking about. But my point was scale and inflation.
It's not that simple. If nobody bought new cars, where would the used cars come from? :D
And their prices would go comparatively up.
So basically, they are just like everything else that you can get cheaper (which is, really, everything). Eg. you can get a comparable laptop for 1/2 the price most likely (maybe not with new M1 macs, but in a few years). Or the phone.
There are plenty of them out there.
With her salary covering life expenses, my salary will be going straight into the bank. That means I can aim as high as I want; the higher, the quicker we'll hit that $1M mark. I estimate somewhere in the 10 to 15 year range, which also happens to coincide nicely with the (unfortunate) transition toward management as you get older, since that tends to come with yet more pay boost.
$1M isn't a lot. But it's FU money for us, because we have simple tastes. Fooling around with electronics, traveling wherever we want, having a multi-floor house; these things are doable on much less than a mil.
So you're right. I won't be buying a Tesla on a whim. But I won't want to.
We're immensely privileged as software engineers to have this kind of leverage. Most people -- the vast, vast majority of the world -- don't lead such comfortable lives. I intend to exploit that privilege to the fullest, in order to build the best life possible for my kiddos.
Then watch as they screw it all up, ha. But I'm fine with that too.
The older I get, the more the whole "legacy"/impact issue seems overhyped; pg (and everyone alive today) is not going to be remembered for long either; perhaps 2 more generations, and it's a wrap. No one is remembered forever. That thought keeps me rooted firmly in the present and on the immediate impact I can have.
I have never been into poetry, but both versions of Ozymandias (Shelley's[1] and Smith's[2]) deeply resonated with me. I wholly agree with you, your impact, and your legacy, is with the people around you, in the here and now.
We know him in the very abstract, not all much different to how we know the Ozymandias of the poems.
Does that level of being remembered matter?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kushim_(Uruk_Period)
I didn't find a mention of him making a mistake in this article, but I think I read somewhere a while ago that the numbers he wrote on the tablets had some error somewhere.
I met a traveller from way the hell off
who said: two gigantic, fucked-up rock legs
be out there in the middle of goddamn nowhere
right next to them covered in shit some kinda big face
looked pretty pissed & upset & whatnot
all damn covered in words
“yo ozymandias here, this my shit”
“better than your shit, get fucked buddy”
not much else tho, just sand
shitloads of sand all over the placeThat's me 6 years ago. After having invested too much on the type of work/mission and found that this was not it.
From the past 6 years and 2 companies where I tried this hypothesis, I can say that the work _structure_ (chaos, or hyper-bureaucratic, or anywhere in between, going either way) and the work _mission_ do matter a lot too in the end. It's an intricate balance.
The work _structure_ mandates how your team will jell, or dismantle, over time and tasks. The thousands of paper cuts due to the transformations from start to scale to profitable and compliant can really turn mad the unprepared.
The work _mission_ mandates how much/long you will endure the paper cuts.
But yes, the team and the people is still what you should invest on: that's the only area where your loyalty matters, if only because that's only there that you can find reciprocity.
The company, the structure, the mission are just some paper fiction that pay and pass; and there's thousands of them.
Moreover, these days, most of the missions (in IT at least) are even more ludicrous compared to the existential challenge that's ahead of us.
So yes, we better relax, enjoy the people around us in the settings we have, be nice and do what's sensible to do.
It's probable most people in the world, the majority being Chinese and Indian, would strongly disagree with what you think it should be. If not, it's the africans and the europeans who would.
I have a huge amount of agency in my life, simply because I can live with little money, enjoy obeying and building stuff in teams, can be useful and accept sacrifice, so I moved across the world to work in investment banks and it's striking how similar yet different people are, and hows silly 20-something are in speaking of changing "the world".
Something I hear a lot around me that I also apply a lot is to "pick your battles". There are things that are pointless to fight over, others you can and must. And you see the frustrated spinning around behind you on detail why you slowly but surely build the bigger picture.
Start by changing your hometown, already a feat :D
History is a highly aggressive compression algorithm. Entire industries are forgotten, let alone people.
So, yes, the correct answer is, "relax and enjoy yourself."
If you happen to contribute to the world in a way that escapes the compression algorithm - congrats.
You win “Hacker News Comment of the Day” :)
Man. One of the worst jobs I've ever had was working as a paralegal in a law office, but I had two friends there that made it so much fun. We'd send each other emails making fun of the attorneys (obviously a risk but the IT person was a friend), joking around, talking about the future, sending dumb memes and getting hammered after work.
After that, I got my first dev gig working with one of my closest friends, and it was a blast.
Now I'm working for a company doing really cool stuff, but I don't really know the people I work with and it's sort of a cold environment, and I feel like I'm stagnating. I really, really think there's something to what you said. They're not bad people, not by a long shot, and maybe something will develop, but the camaraderie I had at the law office gig was special, and I miss it.
My goals have narrowed: be a good father and husband, serve my community in whatever way I can, write fiction when I can. I think that's good. I also don't hold it against myself that I had loftier, maybe unrealistic, goals when I was younger. People change.
https://joedator.com/cartoons/what-do-you-want-to-be-when-yo...
I can see mostly disadvantages to having children. Perhaps a nice highlights reel, but the daily grind sounds miserable. Having a cat seems like a much better deal. This sums up my sentiment: https://theoatmeal.com/comics/baby_vs_cat
You seem to have a different opinion, so I wonder if it is just a matter of preference of if your perspective is very different to mine?
Sure, there's low points, but there's also high points every single day.
E.g. I certainly didn't even think of it when I was 16 - I was dreaming of other things. Nothing much changed at 25. In my 30s, I am only considering it because it is part of the 'life script' and 'now or never' kind of situation, not because I can't wait to do it. Was it different for you? In an ideal world, I would maybe do it when I'm retired in my late 50s and 60s. I.e. I would prefer to skip children and go straight to grandchildren.
One thing you become aware of quite quickly when you start seriously looking into kids is that the biological realities are much harsher than society leads you to believe. Having kids when the mum is much over 35 gets really difficult really quickly. Once I realised that, knowing that I did want children eventually, it made the decision to expedite things easier. I decided I'd rather make the leap sooner than regret it.
I don't think it's a very logical decision though - interestingly I think a lot of the people I know with children today were quite impulsive and of-the-moment in their early 20s. The more sensible ones haven't had kids yet - perhaps because it's hard to make a reasoned decision about it.
I mean, were you in your early 20s, grinding leetcode, thinking "can't wait to become a parent"? Or was it more of "I want to have had children when I am 65, so even though I'm not over the moon about it right now it is what it is, I'll just go with it"? Or "all my friends and relatives are doing it, so it never even occurred to me that I had other options"?
In general, I did have an innate plan to reproduce at some point in the future from early on (my 20s), potentially because of social norms (then again, my sister didn't), or maybe because of my ego (I'll be bringing smarter-than-average, decent-physical-specimen humans into the world, even though by the time I had kids, I learned that "reasonable" and "empathetic" are probably more important).
Now if, say, my wife wanted to handle 90% of the work, with me primarily responsible for breadwinning and little else - a 'traditional' family - I could understand making such a big decision on what looks to me as very weak reasoning. Because then it wouldn't even be THAT big a decision to me anymore, as MY life would not be changing all that much.
But assuming a true 50/50 split in responsibilities? And wife feeling the same about all these things as I do? To me, much much stronger reasons are required than what motivated you, as you would be changing your life completely, with no going back, committing for a very long time. Not to mention the HUGE financial commitment (say goodbye to financial independence and therefore being able to do independent research/projects in the future). And that's the best case scenario of healthy, not-too-unreasonable children.
People do a lot of things I consider "romantic": fighting for freedom, fairness, human rights... They only benefit them in the long run, and many not even benefit from them directly. I've done my share as well.
It's the same with kids. You asked about reasons to decide to have them, not about what I am getting out of it (you were very explicit in responses to others about how you didn't care about how they decided on "when", for example).
I fully expected that I will develop relationship with my kids that will overcome everything, and so far I have! Which is why I was willing to dive into the huge time, money and effort investment after the initial reasons! But it was not the reason to have them.
You are perfectly allowed to spend the same effort on building relationship with others, and it might or might not (I have no idea) get you the same satisfaction I get from interacting with my kids.
Thank you for your replies and hope it all goes well for you!
I chose to have kids, but one of my best friends chose not to have kids. I sometimes regret it (though never seriously), he deeply regrets it. He had a lot of cool stuff and got to travel the world for many years, which I always wished I could do too. He was always doing fun stuff, even as simple as going on beer runs on the weekend (literally the club he was in would drink beer and go running. They had a blast). In his early 50s his wife was diagnosed with terminal cancer. During that period both he and her went through profound regret. She would pass on nothing, and he would be completely alone when she was gone.
I also firmly believe that there is a level of growth/maturity that you can't reach without going through the crucible of kids. I have never met a person who didn't say that having kids was one of the hardest things they ever did but helped them grow and see life in a different way like nothing else could.
Also don't forget the Michael Scott reason for having kids: they can't say no to being your friend[1]
[1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/DunderMifflin/comments/20u728/i_wan...
My wife originally wanted to, and like you, I was... reticent. My feelings at the time seem similar to yours here.
All I can say is, having a solid partner -- one that I can absolutely count on, and believe in -- helped me unwind. I was able to set aside my original concerns and think long-term.
Here's where we may differ: I've always loved playing with kids. There's something magical about seeing them learn things, interact with the world for the first time, and to just screw around and enjoy life without the normal adult concerns. After all, when you're a kid, you have endless time and all you want to do is play. Chilling with kids and playing games with them has always appealed to me.
There's also a stigma attached to that, when you're a male. If I was female, lots of people would feel "Oh, that's cute!" but when you're a man, I inevitably felt like I should hide that aspect of myself. After all, everyone knows that it's dangerous or creepy for older men to hang around with kids, right?
It wasn't till my wife's sister had kids of their own that I was able to get over this. Once they got to 2yo or so, it all clicked for me. I remember playing the "colors" game with Eloise -- she was quizzing me about the different crayon colors, and it was so cool to watch her learn about orange. I don't remember exactly what she learned, but it was sort of an "aha" moment of orange being halfway between yellow and red.
From then on, I was sold, and decided I wanted kids of my own. Wiping their butts and being woken up with screams will just be a part of the process for me, and I won't mind at all. (Easy to say that now, I'm sure.) But, for example, you probably feel the same way about cleaning out the litterbox for your kitty; an annoyance, sure, but it's a labor of love.
That labor of love is a strength for me. It's what allowed me to ultimately be fine with abandoning my old (current) way of life and return to "the daily grind," as people might like to call it. My wife and I have been trying to have kids for a couple years, and haven't had success. I always felt like, well, whenever the kids come around, I'll go get a traditional job and be family guy. But then one night, I realized "You know, IVF is hugely expensive. I could go get a job right now, and we'd save up enough to get it done within just a few months."
It wasn't an easy decision, but once I made it, it was easy to follow. I want some kiddos to teach things to, hang out with, and occasionally learn from. My motives are no more complicated than that.
You'll feel differently. If you're young, all I can say is, expect yourself to change over time. The only thing you can count on is that how you feel today probably won't be your feelings forever.
If you're less young, then there's really nothing wrong with not having kids. There's a stigma against that too, which I think is bogus. It's simply a question of what you want out of life.
By the time http://www.paulgraham.com/kids.html came out, I was nodding along with that entire essay. Perhaps it'll help elucidate some of the feelings here. But a simpler way to put it is, "one day something activated in my brain -- some kind of primal instinct -- and from then till now, the desire to have kids has been a source of strength."
I would probably want to 'borrow' some relative kids for 2-3 weeks while they go on holidays, and see how the whole thing works - not just the fun parts - before I would be willing to commit to it. I do not mean you here, but it always surprises me how lightly people - otherwise very careful and responsible - take the most important and consequential decision of their life.
> I do wonder if there is a difference between playing/teaching nieces and nephews that you can hand back any time, and doing it all the time.
I think you're right about this.
Just remember, it's totally fine if you decide you don't want kids. It's usually a bad idea to feel pressured into it.
I'd be curious to hear what you end up choosing. Feel free to shoot me a DM on twitter or email me, even if it's a few years from now. (But only if you'd like to, of course.) Also, if you want to chat more about this sometime, definitely reach out; this topic is quite interesting to me.
Best of luck to you.
It's been tough, but I wouldn't change it. I try to concentrate on helping where I can. I think our mission is to try and make the world just a bit better for at least the people around you. Do good and avoid creating hurt in the process.
Once I realized this it occurred to me that instead of trying to optimize for accomplishment I need to optimize for these relationships. This changes the game.
This also explains an economic paradox. Why does our compensation go up when we switch jobs?
The reason is because each job switch opens us up to new opportunities to build relationships.
Is it a paradox only if you take for true the existence homo or company economicus
I'm in a point of life that I actually long for easy and laid back CRUD-style jobs where one can do everything easily, quickly, be productive and also work a reasonable amount of hours and can stop thinking about work after signing off.
I recently had to start a new front end using just jquery (customer requirement) and oh boy, I felt so much productive compared to react/angular
> One of the leading critics was the philosopher Hubert Dreyfus, who argued that computers, who have no body, no childhood and no cultural practice, could not acquire intelligence at all.
That could only work even in theory if you've programmed in all the innate behaviours/desires human children have. And in practice raising superintelligent children who can clone themselves and rewrite their minds is not a thing we know how to do.
We could learn to. Through trial and error.
Even though a too big mistake means creating a psychopathic superinterlligent child who can clone itself, rewrite turns mind and easily hack the few American ICBMs not protected by the wondrous safety of floppy disks.
I was just musing on the previous comment and noting that one of the things we do best is learn how to do things we previously didn’t how to do.
OK in theory. In practice, that's a bigger project, by perhaps a hundred years and a trillion dollars?
But you've got the right approach. A body is a prerequisite in order to get exposure to the same data humans receive.
"Lyin' Eyes"
by Don Henley and Glenn Frey
City girls just seem to find out early
How to open doors with just a smile
A rich old man and she won't have to worry
She'll dress up all in lace and go in style
Late at night a big old house gets lonely
I guess every form of refuge has its price
And it breaks her heart to think her love is only
Given to a man with hands as cold as ice
So she tells him she must go out for the evening
To comfort an old friend who's feelin' down
But he knows where she's goin' as she's leavin'
She is headed for the cheatin' side of town
You can't hide your lyin' eyes
And your smile is a thin disguise
I thought by now you'd realize
There ain't no way to hide your lying eyes
On the other side of town a boy is waiting
With fiery eyes and dreams no one could steal
She drives on through the night anticipating
'Cause he makes her feel the way she used to feel
She rushes to his arms, they fall together
She whispers that it's only for awhile
She swears that soon she'll be comin' back forever
She pulls away and leaves him with a smile
You can't hide your lyin' eyes
And your smile is a thin disguise
I thought by now you'd realize
There ain't no way to hide your lyin' eyes
She gets up and pours herself a strong one
And stares out at the stars up in the sky
Another night, it's gonna be a long one
She draws the shade and hangs her head to cry
She wonders how it ever got this crazy
She thinks about a boy she knew in school
Did she get tired or did she just get lazy?
She's so far gone she feels just like a fool
My, oh my, you sure know how to arrange things
You set it up so well, so carefully
Ain't it funny how your new life didn't change things
You're still the same old girl you used to be
You can't hide your lying eyes
And your smile is a thin disguise
I thought by now you'd realize
There ain't no way to hide your lyin' eyes
There ain't no way to hide your lyin' eyes
Honey, you can't hide your lyin' eyes
Not if you've studied much history. Modern western society is awesome compared to what nearly all of our ancestors lived through. Wanting more is good, but denigrating things that nearly anyone from history would kill for doesn't sound right.
Any sane person would agree with you in the sense that it's definitely better to be alive in 2021 than 1621.
If you you shorten the timespan and only look at cultural changes since, say, the 1970s, though, it seems we've sacrificed a lot of what makes us human (community, interconnectedness, a sense of wonder about the future etc.) at the altar of free market economics and received little of actual value in return (Uber Eats, iPhones, Netflix etc.).
* The omnipresent nature of sweetened food and drink
* Car-dependent culture
* Mass media culture
* Simpsons-style dysfunctional nuclear families
* The whole array of corrupt policies and programs, cults-in-disguise(e.g. "troubled teen" schools), and ideologically driven movements; while we're hardly free of those things, and there are plenty of new or intensified versions of them, I believe there are also more ways to find a sustainable path outside those frameworks these days.
But if you asked me if life was good in 2000, I would be mostly in agreement, because my life seemed pretty good - I was told it was! But then I look back on it and it's like, nooo, actually, there were all these pieces that traumatized me, removed my agency, were bad for my health or made me settle for less. And I believe the same would be true if I had been experiencing life in 1970's.
Like, sure, in 1621 I'd probably have died at a young age. But I am on the hedonic treadmill with respect to life quality too. It doesn't matter to my feelings that now is the best time, if better is still possible.
Re identity politics, I'm trans and it helps me a lot. It feels like an intermediate between misogyny and the abolition of the categorization of gender. Focusing on the rights of one group (trans rights, trans liberation now) feels essential.
Re the presence of ideology, there is no way to not have an ideology. Liberalism and neoliberalism consistently say that they are neutral, but they are also a story about the world and a way to interpret facts, on the exact same scale as Marxism. It's just that because (neo)liberalism places weight on the individual and discounts systemic factors, it can feel neutral if you don't need to think about systemic factors (this is what privelage is).
Not really relevant to your overall critique, but it's just something that stood out to me reading your comment.
It's possible to engage with nihilism and say "I'm just going to survive pragmatically". It's related to the "state of nature" many philosophers will refer to as a pre-societal world. You can't have a society that's wholly nihilistic, but you can exist within society nihilistically in degrees, with the far end of that being the "off-grid live in a cabin in the woods" sort of disengagement. But even without going that far, it's also possible to engage with philosophical concepts and critiques without being ideologically attached to them.
Ideological attachment is what happens when you start converting all life events into phenomena relative to that ideology, and that's the thing that I see being shaken away from a fully normalized state("this is how the world is, there's no discussion to be had") to a vigorous, even violent argumentation(see: all the concepts you listed). And I can pinpoint that the shift happened almost instantly after the world achieved mass connectivity with smartphones, in the 2008-2012 period. Suddenly the US had its Marxists and anarchist voices emerge; trans rights became a major issue; and the "alt-right" took shape as well. We have a lot of visible ideologues in social media culture that will blame everything on the other ideology, where before those positions were buried by the consensus and relegated to subculture.
To me that makes it a "better" world in the sense of agency, because it's easier to examine the different positions. But it's also more fragmented as a society, more prone to bubbles of extremism. If my experience tracks, we're in a transitional state where many old attachments are being discarded while others are being taken up. (Since 2008, I went from being - to retroactively label things - a vagely cishet liberal, to a nonbinary asexual meta-anarchist, all terms I would have struggled with back then.)
My ideas on this mostly derive from Heather Marsh's philosophical writing, so you could say I am attached in that direction(it's equally true that I haven't been able to critique her work, in the sense that I literally just don't want to); her view coincides with that of the meta-anarchists(itself a newly emerging project of philosophical writings) which is why I now also use that as an identity label. I don't see myself as anti-identity, but I do see myself as anti-politics(despite having some occasional political engagement), because I accept Marsh's idea of there being both healthy attachments and unhealthy ones, and kicking my political attachment is like kicking a smoking addiction; I can try to curb it, but it often roars back to life if I look at the news.
Maybe there's an argument to be made for a decline in quality of life since the 1970s, but it isn't going to be on the basis that technological advancements over the last fifty years have been a net negative for society.
A sense of wonder about the future? Interconnectedness? Community? The 70's were some of the most cynical and violent years in recent American history. The Cold War. Vietnam. Watergate. The oil crisis. Activist riots and radical underground groups bombing universities. The National Guard killing students at Kent state. Even the politics of the last four years seems quaint compared to the last few decades.
Would they? Boomers are famous for being luddites, and a growing minority of millennials now would be more than happy to toss their smartphones if it didn't mean being pushed to the outer of all their social groups.
>Streaming media with access to an entire library of movies and television shows is qualitatively better than three analog tv channels and whatever happens to be showing at the movie theater at the time.
I agree, Netflix has a much better range than the old technology, it is more convenient and the picture/audio quality is fantastic. The more interesting question, though, is whether or not frictionless access to near-infinite vaults of that tailored entertainment actually makes your quality of life better.
>The 70's were some of the most cynical and violent years in recent American history.
I never said it wasn't violent (nor did I say American, in fact!). But kids in that era would play together in the streets, and families had closer bonds.
>The more interesting question, though, is whether or not frictionless access to near-infinite vaults of that tailored entertainment actually makes your quality of life better.
That's the thing - "quality of life" is an entirely subjective measure, one which both of us are tailoring to fit a predetermined outcome.
But even if one dismisses the value of access to media to quality of life, the degree to which online services (any service, including streaming media) democratize that access compared to the limitations of physical media and gatekept broadcasts (VCRs didn't even come around until the late 1970s) improved quality of life substantially. That some or much of that media is pure entertainment is less relevant to my argument than the paradigm shift it represents.
I mean, to invoke the trope, you have a device you can fit in your pocket which allows you access to almost the entirety of humanity's cultural and intellectual output, a GPS system, a camera, a radio, a compass, a calculator, it can answer questions, it can order food, it can allow you to communicate with people around the world without long-distance fees. From the point of view of the 1970s, that's literally something out of Star Trek. That seems like an objective improvement to quality of life in the same way that the printing press, internal combustion engine and indoor toilets were.
> But kids in that era would play together in the streets, and families had closer bonds.
Kids don't play in the streets anymore but they still play - my niece and nephew have a huge backyard they play in, and my nephew also makes games for his friends on Roblox. To me, kids today have richer and more fulfilling lives than I did, stuck in my living room watching TV and reading old library books.
Also, I would argue that due to the advancement of progressive ideals allowing certain demographics to exist more openly than society would have allowed in the 1970s, some familial bonds are stronger now than then. Maybe if you're a white Christian conservative male things seem to have gone downhill, but things seem to be looking up for everyone else.
And there would have been social media junkies and helicopter parents using it to make their lives worse, too. I doubt it would have been used significantly differently back then.
>But even if one dismisses the value of access to media to quality of life, the degree to which online services (any service, including streaming media) democratize that access compared to the limitations of physical media and gatekept broadcasts
I wasn't alive for the introduction of VHS, but was for the shift from tape to DVD to torrents to Netflix. The amount of media consumed increased dramatically one physical media died, and even that small amount of exercise and social interaction walking around blockbuster and thanking the guy behind the counter has been squeezed out in the name of efficient distribution.
>That seems like an objective improvement to quality of life in the same way that the printing press, internal combustion engine and indoor toilets were.
And yet I literally threw mine away and don't miss it. It was nothing but a distraction that prevented me from doing things I needed to do.
>my niece and nephew have a huge backyard they play in, and my nephew also makes games for his friends on Roblox
That sounds like my wife's upbringing in South Africa. Hardly an ideal to emulate.
>white Christian conservative male Black families have been disintegrating even faster.
Free market economics didn't tell people to spend less time with their families and more time consuming entertainment media. Moreover, the argument that we have culturally regressed since the 70s only makes sense from the perspective of a white male.
It literally did. I've probably seen tens of thousands of advertisements for games consoles, films and Netflix-style streaming services.
>from the perspective of a white male
Many women would disagree with you on the "male" part.
>Many women would disagree with you on the "male" part.
And any woman with a professional job would disagree.
My mother is going to be 70 in a few weeks, she is a highly regarded teacher of English, and in her opinion, a lot of things have gone downhill since the 1970s, and especially since the 1990s, though obviously not all of them. So there is your counterexample.
People are complicated and stereotyping them (any woman with X) is bound to fail.
I think this subject is one of the more important ones to the US right now, and is largely ignored because it makes a lot of ideologies look bad. I'd be curious what leads you to your accusation.
Part of the reason I blame the free market is because of the timing, but also because many of the functions that used to be performed by the family and community are now performed by businesses.
Specifically, I think the fact that middle-class people in Western countries no longer rely on friends, family and neighbours to meet (or even augment) our material needs has changed the way that we perceive interpersonal relationships on an individual level.
Because most forms of maintaining personal relationships come with real costs (monetary, stress/expectations, time, lost sleep) but minimal tangible benefits outside of the existence of the relationship itself, our "social mammal mental accounting software" discounts their value.
The net result is that we engage with friends, family and neighbours just enough to keep the relationship alive, but no more. We're lonelier, sadder and less fulfilled.
It's pretty bleak, and I'll admit it's a pretty broad stretch of logic, but I think it's at least partially true based on both my own experiences and the conversations I've had with the people I'm close to.
I could see that being true. Do you mean businesses like Facebook and Twitter with their substitution for socializing?
I fully agree with the rest of your post. If you're interested in the subject, I would suggest reading Robert Putnam's research on Social Capital. Bowling Alone is a good synthesis (but I'd personally pass on his other books, which lean more toward polemics).
Rich societies (not just Western ones) seem unable to reproduce themselves - the TFR has gone south of 2 pretty much everywhere, with interesting exceptions (Iceland, Israel). That means that our lifestyle is incompatible with long term survival.
We also have a huge, huge health problem that might directly be caused by abundance of food. Metabolic diseases. Just count all the fat people you meet during a 10 minute walk downtown. Many of them are young and already on their way over the 300 pound mark.
I am not even starting a rant about how algorithms hijack our emotions and manipulate our behavior online.
Humans aren't necessarily built for the world we created. Yes, many things are obviously good: not dying of cholera at the age of 2, for example. But there definitely are things to denigrate in our daily life script. And we must acknowledge these downsides if we ever want to get rid of them.
Only if the rate stays there permanently, which is unlikely. Over the span of a century or two, some population contraction might actually be good for overall survival.
It might be that Taliban-like theocracies inherit the Earth through their much higher fertility, or it might be that authoritarian countries start producing children in artificial wombs, or something completely different. But the current societal model where the old are more numerous than the young is likely to be unsustainable. It is not just raw numbers (population contraction); it is the structure of the population that is extra worrisome.
For myself, I burned out pretty hard on 9-5 work, so I don't take on a full time workload and I don't take on work that requires butt-in-seat engagment, even remotely.
In that way I retain full agency over my time, and great flexibility in when I work. I work when I am feeling the most effective, and I can eliminate all that dead time wasted at traditional jobs, where you are just tabbing mindlessly between screens because you have spent your focus budget for the day.
I am assuming you're a software developer, I'm by no means an expert on contracting, but my two recommendations are: Specialize in a domain, and stay on the technology bandwagon. You can't pin your career on a technology, they go obsolete too fast, but you can specialize in an industry domain.
I specialized in eCommerce, and I've had to use dozens of different technologies, each project brings in a new tech stack and a new set of idioms. I have a friend in motorsport/automotive software, which is an exciting field by the sounds of it. There are dozens of industries that need software but aren't solely software companies, and I think that's where much contract work is.
I am ideologically against the rapid technology swapping our industry loves, I really prefer to dig in deep to a framework or stack, but this is work so I keep my eyes up and forward. Sometimes all you need is to recognize the buzzword, say "Yep I've heard of that", then go home and do some research to make sure you can pull it off before accepting the contract.
Focusing on an industry domain (rather than toolset) seems smart. It’s difficult to be productive in new/unfamiliar knowledge domains and I’m sure buyers understand that.
To answer your question a bit better, I don't see much career growth per se, there's certainly no ladder I am climbing, it just becomes easier and easier to find work over time thanks to prior experience compounding. You get to choose nicer contracts and work with people you like.
There's a lot of potential for personal development though, and you can choose to spend more time on developing recurring revenue and "productifying" your expertise instead of just selling your time hourly.
Me? I didn't have a chance to "try" things. My room for error was zero. Must get above 90 average. Must get scholarship. MUST find job. MUST be there at 9AM. MUST pay rent.
Now I am saving money to take one year off to work on my own thing, but only because my first future ex-wife works for NYC and I can be on her insurance. Without that safety net, at 40, no way.
So, not everyone can be born a failson like Jared Kushner, but what we CAN have is a safety net to let people take risks.
You can do that as well in many EU countries. Without being rich.
A safety net may lead some people to experiment and play with things, others to slouching off. This even applies outside the public sphere. A stereotype of a bored millionaire's son with no energy to do anything substantial exists for a reason.
But, interestingly, few people do. And those who do seem to take on less risk than their counterparts in the US.
Where I was born, everyone has money and people are generally modest: do not need ferraris or whatever so they just want a happy relaxed life. And that is very easy to get here. I worked very hard since I was 15 as I wanted (and have) (not ferraris but travel) more, but I was never interested in money or fame that can get someone kidnapped. I believe if I lived in the US, my parents would have sent me to Stanford or something and things might have been different somehow. I will never know: I like not having stress, at all so no regrets.
To be clear, I don’t grieve the lack of Ferraris. But the lack of ambition and related consequences gets to me.
I would prefer just taking every 21 year old and saying "here is 15 grand, go do something amazing".
I don't know what the results will be, but a fair number will be worth the risk.
On the other hand, I actually like this idea. It would help people escape abusive situations, and I generally think it's fairly ridiculous how we ask young people to live on so little money while educating themselves. I just don't think it would cause many people to "go do something amazing".
But like you I like the idea ...
If you look at what people do in life, very few pick professions or businesses with high agency. Pretty sure that is not just some function of upbringing but risk tolerance and attitudes vary and not everyone wants to be a surgeon, trader, entrepreneur, racing driver, etc.
A lot of high paying professions actually are fairly agency free, e.g. consulting and other professional services - so as far as putting a price on it, agency is not necessarily rewarded much
Because at the end of the day everything gets old - every act, job, etc. (hedonistic treadmill).
And having complete freedom isn’t a solution. You’re still trapped within your own head 24/7.
Taking time to pursue meditation and other activities that help you be happy no matter what the circumstances of the external world seem like the best choice of activity when younger in order to build agency.
I'm sure I'm not the only one who felt like my schooling was mostly a giant waste of my time and energy.
I was waaaay ahead in subjects I liked, because those things I learned myself out of innate interest. Rather than the system accommodating and encouraging being ahead, in those subjects I was held back and forced to sit through material I already knew, because "in year x we learn this and in year y we learn that". Don't get ahead. Zero agency.
In other subjects that didn't interest me, I was forced to sit through stuff only to forget everything I "learned" soon after.
It really begs the question, what's the point? And while I'm no genius at anything, surely a system like this will kill many, many actual geniuses, just like the article says.
I ended up majoring in math instead of compsci as a result. It ended up being a good choice, because now I have skills in both areas. But I was pretty disappointed as an incoming freshman, enthusiastic about computer science, that college was nothing like what my parents and teachers made it out to be.
University would not accept the AP classes, and basically two years of college to learn what I had already been taught in high-school.
I transferred over to the maths department who welcomed me with open arms, took all my credits, and then beat the every living shit out of my brain so much harder than the CS department ever would have.
It's a culture thing, and how annoying the admin culture is there.
History isn't the present, but the reason most laws exist today is just inertia, not some principled stand of the legislative bodies that might otherwise be able to repeal them.
Telling people not to go to school is bad life advice.
> I was [in school and thriving]
I don't, would you go into the time machine and like, not go to school, as a young person?
The only way to get more individual schooling is to have well-off parents who send you to a school with smaller classes, and ideally with a more relaxed schedule, like Montessori (I personally find them a little cult-like, there are other approaches too). Or, get born in Finland or Sweden, they invest heavily into their public education system, and it shows.
I don't live there anymore though, I left as soon as I could, can't stand the place, but that's kind of a side note, lol.
Finland and Sweden's schooling systems are very, very different.
I wouldn't have enjoyed the Finnish one either, just saying.
Kind of, yeah. I'm not saying school is 100% useless, but I like to think I would have been better off with maybe 80% of the curriculum cut out.
I could have put all that time to much better use developing knowledge and skills in those things that I had an innate interest in, let alone spent more time being active, around others, and outside - not sitting down at a desk.
But society disagrees, so there's little choice but to conform.
I realized what the GP said when I was 13. I was either bored working on subjects I liked because I knew them or bored working on subjects I didn't like and had no interest in. I was an angsty teenager who could not handle this, so I dropped out.
At 18 I got my GED, after doing no studying, and that got me into a local college. After my first year I transferred to a less than Ivy League college in my state.
I had no support, and therefore did not use this opportunity to do great things, but I still ended up pretty much where I would have had I not dropped out. I look back on that time as my pre-working early retirement that allowed me to figure out what was important to me.
To educate the highest number of children possible, as a reasonable cost, to assure a steady supply of capable labor year after year.
Sadly, this results in low-salaried teachers, cookie-cutter teaching plans, and teacher-to-student ratios that are not adequate to cater to the outliers that need attention.
In my view/experience the real outliers need only to not be held back (implicitly by culture, or explicitly).
She still takes math at school but that's usually her only class. Otherwise she's doing things. She's gone to Florence (with us) to take art classes there. (She wants to be an artist or author.) That first year she made a video game (#17 here https://news.ycombinator.com/front?day=2018-01-02), and this last year she wrote an 80,000 word crime novel. If she can get the kind of score on the SAT that she's getting on practice tests, she has a good chance of going to one of the schools that she wants. (Her early application choice is Yale.)
She's doing things and that gives her meaning to what she's learning. It's not just words on a page but something that she sees value in knowing. We get a lot of eye-rolls when we say she's home-schooled but for her, it's been a game changer. And agency is a big part of that.
Most people are not geniuses, they are average. You are not a genius.
Most people who flunk out or drop out of school do not become billionaires and neither will you.
Most people who decide to give it their all and become various forms of artists will never be famous, noticed no wealty or admired (Though on a nano scale you may have people who do)
By a large margin most restaurants / startups fail. You are not going to create the next unicorn.
yes this is not 100% accurate because it does happen. Much like buying a lotto ticket. People do win.
But you will not. (Almost entirely certain but again some do win).
People like Lonardo da Vinci are 1 in a billion. Maybe one in 2 billion.
People like Jobs and Zuckerberg are a lot more common. There are maybe 1000? 10.000? If we say 100.000 that is about 0.0013% of the world population. You are not in the 0.0013% (2019 estimate)
(Though you really need take into account the privilege accorded people based. on where they live, where they were born, family. If you win the lottery and grow up in a wealty educated country, you have a HUGE advantage.
Much like buying 1 lottery ticket drastically increases you chance of winning.
The point being nearly all people fail to be special. They will not be remembered by the grater society after their death. They will have made no huge impact on the world. They will never make it big.
Thus we should not focus our choices in life my making a few of the same choices that are advantageous for 1 in a billion.
We should not set our goals to achieve what they did.
We should focus on having a nice life, a good set of friends, enough money to live ok, having interesting hobbies Having a job that is ok. A safe and dry place to live. Have some love.
We should expect and respect that we will be average That is not a failure. That is what most likely will happen.
So set out to make the most of it.
The great thing about life is that it's so multidimensional. If you want to be the richest person in the world, of course you're setting yourself up for failure. But if you want to be the best version of yourself, you can easily be the best father-husband-son-coder-blogger-walker-painter to your children+wife+colleagues in your city in July 2021.
More than that, you can do things no one else has done. If you like research, the frontier is endless and extremely high dimensional. Find some niche that you enjoy and crush it. If you like helping people, there will never be an end of people you can help. You don't have to be average -- you can be in the 1% of what you're passionate about, easily, because there are so many possible choices of passion.
One of them read to me like "go and strive to be great in one of the million directions possible" and the other was "you won't win on any direction more than average, so settle down and live simple".
Kids have far more curiosity and insight about things, "education" exists to squash those qualities in those outside the donor class.
I am now in the 1% of global earnings, and every step has been truly awful degradation as I have had 0 negotiating leverage and just learned to do what others hate because you get paid more for it.
I 100% guarantee that in the age of the internet there are more "self made" millionaire teenagers than at any point in history. And that puts the lie to the core feeling he puts out (which to be fair he does contradict multiple times) that there is less opportunity for agency now than previously, as always the sense of ones own childhood agency is still dependent on the quality/existence of your parents, the personality of the child and family/environmental wealth.
This article has a true premise in its title, autonomy and agency do matter very much, but the authors inability to grasp that starting conditions are the sole determining factor for any organisms global boundaries of success/failure are telling and they clearly romanticize the stories of extreme outliers and disregard data for narrative.
I 100% agree, this individual is romanticizing things he doesn't understand and the article has a lot of generally poor thinking.
Base rate fallacy gets people every time, the idea that opportunities for agency have decreased is absurd.
Also he apparently has a big thing for allowing kids to build full on buildings because he brings it up twice... which I don't think has ever been generally acceptable.
He should read books like little house on the prairie to get a better idea of how poor childhood opportunity has been throughout history.
So very true.
I see top management, up close, spending much of their time handling stupid/obnoxious tasks nobody else wants.
I see a friend reap considerable wealth by dealing, literally, in garbage.
I see $minwage jobs filled & paid because nobody else wants to.
I’d write software for free. It’s the absurd deadlines & requirements I get paid to deliver on.
I see the “income inequality” issue as a matter of most people not willing to do - and those who do get paid well.
I personally feel like I am capable of providing an “agentic” education but I almost certainly won’t have the time nor the persuasive powers to convince a (hopefully) rebellious 7 year old that, say, grammar matters and gardening is dope. Seeking any suggestions.
This is based on my own experience, because I was allowed to manage my free time. When I got out of school, I had a chore or two, but the rest of the evening was mine to manage. (I was expected to do my homework at some point, though, and make decent grades. In fact I made A's and B's.) But the rest of the time I watched about 2-3 hours of TV, drew a lot, jumped on the trampoline, and in general ran around outside (We lived on five acres).
My parents never sent me to summer camp. The summer was mine. They never made me take piano lessons or join the boy scouts. Nothing.
I graduated magna cum laude, started my own business (which failed) then pivoted to a completely different field (web programming) and taught myself everything, through books, blogs, etc. That was 15 years ago and professionally speaking, I lead a very stable life.
When I hear about today's children being shuttled from school to one extracurricular activity or another, where they have very little unstructured time, I scream on the inside on their behalf. I've known a handful of adults who were homeschooled, and most of them have turned out very poorly. They basically are walking time bombs: quiet and obedient through childhood, then they get out of the house and explode.
As my mother wisely said, "Kids need to be kids." (We had a very strong religious teaching, however, in my household --- firm but not oppressive. I ascribe my own acceptance of that teaching as a key reason I did not just squander all that freedom on drugs, sex, and rock'n'roll. But most of all, I felt very, very loved and accepted as a person, even if I were to screw up royally.)
I don't doubt your account of a handful of adults, but the research seems to point to the opposite conclusion:
> Homeschooled children are taking part in the daily routines of their communities. They are certainly not isolated, in fact, they associate with— and feel close to—all sorts of people. Homeschooling parents . . . actively encourage their children to take advantage of social opportunities outside the family. Homeschooled children are acquiring the rules of behavior and systems of beliefs and attitudes they need. They have good self-esteem and are likely to display fewer behavior problems than other children. They may be more socially mature and have better leadership skills than other children as well. And they appear to be functioning effectively as members of adult society. (Medlin, 2000, p. 119)
https://www.stetson.edu/artsci/psychology/media/medlin-socia...
There are a number of people I know who transcended the station of their birth but I know a disproportionate number of homeschoolers who did from an early age per capita.
All bets are off if the homeschooler is insularly religious. Has a kid at a young age or they became "homeschooled" because they were kicked out of every regular school for extreme violence or other similar behavior.
Mine are grown up and have moved away, but I do have a suggestion. It's okay, and may be the best method, to just say, "grammar matters and gardening is dope," then stop talking while you gauge their reaction or listen to what they say. If all you ever do is talk with them, they will listen and talk with you.
This is so damn true… having a son has taught me that my words matter a lot, so choose them wisely and say no more than is necessary.
This came about from possibly taking this old saying too seriously:
"90% of what people say is untrue"
My childhood self didn't want to be the sort of person with that kind of pointless conversation. Combine that with something I picked up more recently:
"People don't remember what you said, people remember how you made them feel".
Choose your words carefully. Words are cheap, but their effect can be expensive.
I read up quite a bit on unschooling, which sounds great on paper but is probably only feasible when both parents are enthusiastically committed. Sudbury schools are probably the closest thing to unschooling without having to do it yourself, but there’s probably less than 100 such schools in the entire world.
One big realization I’ve had is that children really grow when their parents aren’t around. Schools may suppress agency, but so do parents. There’s a reason that all the stories in this article are about apprenticeships and first jobs—the outside world will always be a much richer source of new and unexpected interactions and discoveries than anything inside the home. Maybe that’s my suggestion: get your kid out of the house and around other trustworthy adults as much as possible. (I moved across the country to live near family just to make this happen)
This sounds like a good point, I'm going to try to keep it more in mind, thanks.
Using gardening as an example, choose a fruit or vegetable your child likes, then go with them to a store and buy seeds / trees / whatever. Then get them to help you plant it and look after it. Children love harvest time, the excitement is palpable.
If you have chickens you can feed them wheat. If your child likes bread then you can show the child how to turn wheat into bread.
The key is not to force things. Monkey see, monkey do. If my nephews see me doing yoga, suddenly they are all trying their best to copy me.
For programming, I am not sure. But i think the best way is to start with a simple language that can alter something visual, so that there is clear cause/effect.
I'd love to hear any other examples people have!
But if you have patience and determination the difficulties will be manageable. The love one feels for ones child is a deep well to draw from during frustrating or difficult times.
Don't worry too much about planning things out, because the any grand parenting plan will go out the window once they baby arrives haha
I immediately wrote down "autonomy"*. I learned nothing at all about pitching that day, as no-one I spoke to needed any convincing whatsoever: everyone had the same response: "Oh! I never thought of that. That's much more important to me than what I wrote down."
* I know "autonomy" and "agency" are technically a bit different from a philosophical perspective but hey.
I work part time now and spend most of my days working on what I want. I guess I partly achieved that, by age 36. Getting there.
If I recall correctly he gave me 100 guilders (about $50) for a couple of days of work. The data format was for HP ChemStation, good memories.
As an analogy, as a kid when I played with Lego or K'NEX, my favorite thing to do was not assemble kits but instead come up with my own designs from the parts therein. Working within the system, but being a creator rather than a consumer.
At school, I wasn't just trying to learn the material they wanted me to know, I was also trying to reverse-engineer the tasks asked of me to figure out what the teachers most wanted.
Here's one example:
Slashdot posted a link to a place that would let you search all graduate thesis papers at about the same time I was starting an English class taught by a grad student instructor.
I looked up the instructor's Master's thesis and found it was on <Literature Period X>. While the instructor was passing out the syllabus, I said loudly to the person next to me "I hope we don't have to read anything from <Literature Period X>." The instructor just froze and stared at me mouth agape for about 30 seconds.
By 4 weeks into that class, the instructor informed me that regardless of my performance, I was not going to get a grade higher than a D. I did in fact end up with a D.
There are many unspoken mythical legends living today, huddled in their numbered and anonymous cubicles. There are many unknown engineers who've done crucial work within their own boundaries of "scripted life" to prevent bridges from collapsing or payroll runs to be corrupted (just in time). No one hears about them. No one celebrates them. But there are billions of us on this planet achieving myth-level brilliance daily just by being responsible parents. Or just by being simply kind to fellow humans.
There is no default scripted life.
Edited: added "Or just by being simply kind to fellow humans."
This prompted me to realize that Factorio has become a refuge from my sense of lack of agency. I love solving little problems that won't come back and bite me years later if I get it wrong.
Thanks for posting, and the discussions it prompted, both here and at home.
Walt Disney, Leonardo DaVinci, Steve Jobs, et. al. had gigs at 13, so now we draw grand conclusions about how shitty kids have it today?
Nah. Doesn't credit.
Even accepting as given the undemonstrated premise of the article, that society today has fewer "onramps" for children to contribute, what conclusion can be drawn from that?
Do we really have fewer (let us call them) extreme contributors today?
Have all extreme contributors had childhood onramps, or are those cited in the article cherry-picked examples?
Are all adults who worked as children demonstrably greater contributors as adults than those who did not? Or are they about equivalent?
We need answers to those questions before asserting anything at all about how society is failing its children.
Now, let us turn our attention to the question of childhood today versus that of even pre-1970. A child today is by all measures safer and healthier than a child of any time in the past: child mortality, disease, environmental pollution, heavy-metal poison, homicide, abuse, all down globally as well as in the US.
Let us take as given (not demonstrated, but why not, for the sake of argument) that somehow the rate of extreme contributors is lower now than in the past. Is it really the lack of child labor or is there something else causing this (again, so-far imaginary) problem? Just concluding "lack of avenues to contribute is the problem" could create other problems without addressing the root cause.
Definitely, give kids who are eager to take on adult responsibilities some, and let them figure out how much they can handle. Let them fail safely, or succeed wildly, but let them be kids.
That's a great message, but it does not need to be couched in terms of some grand societal failure. That part is bullshit.
Furthermore, I suspect that there is no formula to making these extreme contributors other than (continue) to make society a better, safer, healthier, wealthier context for children to contribute, or not, as they will.
What is up with HN promoting articles advocating working 13 year olds? Here's another, just as nonsensical: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27675603
This was the same takeaway I had of your comment. It reads like glenn beck.
Purpose & meaning are strong motivators and I agree with the author that there is not enough focus on that to help promote agency in individuals. There are societal failure(s) to be highlighted here, despite your unwillingness to see them.
Odd, this need that some people have to insult those who disagree with them.
... and you edited your response to add this after I criticized you.
If you had written this in the first place, maybe left out the insults, we could have had a nice conversation.
Like money, agency is (to a degree) within our reach. It can come and it can go. Time on the other hand, simply runs out. Time can be be taken, it can be given, and it can be squandered. It can never be returned (overtime today repaid by a vacation tomorrow is still time lost today).
If you're salaried you know exactly how much you're selling your time for. Real wealth is when ALL your time is yours to do with as you please. Agency therefore is simply one means to that end.
"Proscribe" means forbid; not sure this is what the author meant here.
This does not mean schoolwork would have been more meaningful to them if they had less meaningless work in their earlier years. Most schoolwork is complete crap that is highly irrelevant and should never be taught unless there is strong interest on the part of the student.
I love math and would explore every avenue available to learn more about it, to someone who hates math what's the point of teaching them derivates? Forcing people to learn stuff they aren't interested in only makes them resent the subject and kills any hope of them naturally becoming gravitated to it in the future.
Also, statistics and chance. Maybe it’d allow people to properly understand why we need to get vaccinated.
If the author preaches agency, stop pretending like you don’t have the agency to “just” be as the system asks.
If the system forces. Not.
This is almost so self-evident as to be banal… and yet this fundamental observation about humans is roundly ignored and outright rejected by most institutions charged with educating our children.
This essay feels like it could’ve come straight from John Holt or John Taylor Gatto—highly recommended.
I became a cracker when I was a kid and we published how to replicate our results on the early Internet. We were the first generation that could play with computers because they were ours.
We were much better than 40 years old people(those that protected against the cracks) because they were trained in their youth with machines that were so expensive they basically could not touch. They programmed on paper.
We started our own web company early on. We were much better than the competence and it was an easy life and sold the thing at great profit. Today in this field people have 100x more skills and is rewarded way worse and it is an oligopoly of big companies.
Then I traveled the world and worked abroad. I worked in China, Japan, Korea, the US. Great opportunities that today are closed.
I used digital cameras before everybody did. Nobody uses them and suddenly, boom, everybody uses them.
My family though I was crazy for not doing what everybody else does, but turns out everybody started doing what we did first with 10 years of delay.
The last thing is working remotely. We have been doing that for a long time. It was just common sense. If you spend 2 hours commuting and are tired before working the company is wasting resources that could be channeled to create real value.
We could get people in our company so easy because they loved working on their terms and very few companies could compete with that. Those companies were like KODAK trying to do things the way they always were and it was great for us.
Now suddenly Covid happens and so many people are realizing they could work on their terms too. The mass of the people is processing and adapting to what early adopters have discovered way earlier.
Over here it seems like what the author is looking for is on the rise.
I have begun fearing we live in a world that actively hides useful, meaningful work behind bureaucracies, licensure, advanced degrees, and other mechanisms. I believe this happens as a type of nepotism...a holding onto a nugget of meaningful work/knowledge until someone like you can grab hold of it and complete it to your liking.
Why are so many business deals hidden behind golf rounds and clinking glasses? Because business/work/utility is power. If I rely on you, you have power over me. So I better make sure I approve of the who and the how of that power.
It's fear that drives this. And my fear of the world it creates is stifling.
Making life difficult for Management is unquestionably NOT a path towards promotion, and continues the rotating door of mediocre management. And mediocre management wants, desperately, to hold on to their position because they're aware, consciously or otherwise, of their mediocrity.
Having someone who can out-think you as a report is a threat to your position. Like you said: fear.
For me, I had at least the two following choices:
1) Following the straight edge - getting an education, taking a job I enjoy, and work/save for 25 years. I could retire before 60. Low risk, medium reward. 2) Following my dream. Going all in on my passions, and trying to capitalize on them. Maybe if lucky, sell some startup and be able to retire before 40.
The problem, though, is that for each year I'd try and fail at option 2), option 1) also becomes less viable. One year for failure at 2) equals one year worth of savings and returns on investment from option 1).
FWIW, I'm from a wealthy Nordic country (Norway) - and it's not that entrepreneurship is looked down upon here, it's just that the safe option is much more probable, and the pay-off is pretty good.
> "As far as I can tell, the concept of the hormone-crazed teenager is coeval with suburbia. I don't think this is a coincidence. I think teenagers are driven crazy by the life they're made to lead. Teenage apprentices in the Renaissance were working dogs. Teenagers now are neurotic lapdogs. Their craziness is the craziness of the idle everywhere."
Well articulated. I always felt a visceral sense that childhood, the school world, and even arguably college for many feels like we're being kept in some weird pin sequestered from the real world.
As the author shows with early examples, this is not how it's ever been in human societies (as a default for everyone) prior to the last 100 years.
Could this be thought of as a massive experiment the Western first world is undertaking?
School that our western society has created quite recently exists for the purpose of keeping children off the labor market.
There's a whole lot more reasons for our current schooling than this as a sole reason IMO.
I think this sentence is almost correct. The act of creation does wonders and induces imagination, but that is not the only way to achieve imagination. The act of just going deep on a thought and abstracting away the frictions of the real world can do wonders. Imagination is probably most readily available to a brain that is operating at its most abstract level.
You can tell a child they can create things. That should be enough for them to abstractly reason from there about all the possibilities, right? Or is it that you have to teach a child to create so that they can imagine what they might create next?
1. How many people under consideration ("famous people") did not posses the quality brought up in the premise ("agency from early age")?
2. How many people did posses the quality ("agency"), but did not achieve the desired result ("fame")?
Without that, we are pretending to show data to support a premise, whereas it's just an opinion with cherry-picked data.
Granted, it's hard to get numbers for 1 and 2 (esp 2, I guess), but I don't even see anyone trying before considering their premise "proven" or at least worth sharing. :/
Encouraging their passion and enabling them to succeed at whatever it may be, is paramount.
Everyone in school is so caught up on checking off the right prerequisites in the curriculum for the next set of prerequisites all the way up until graduation, that there usually isn't much room for any sort of real exploration in the system until graduation. However, after graduating, a whole new set of real world responsibilities appear that often restricts the ability to both explore and fail since they come with real consequences that make failing a high school class seem like nothing in comparison. For example, it is kind of hard to explore in university when that year exploring will cost tens of thousands of dollars, or if you are on your own and need to find multiple low skill/ wage jobs just to survive.
I was just lucky that my dad had a stem job and had a computer, which got me into video games, which got me into hacking them, which got me involved in communities full of people way older and smarter than I was, which facilitated my growth in a way that school never could. Without that first computer, there is a good chance that I would have just been railroaded into some soul draining corporate job pushing papers.
Really? Math is useless? English is useless? History is useless?
If an educator can't articulate why you are learning something, they are a BAD educator.
Math is useless--until you start trading on Robin Hood and can't calculate the financial implications of turning over your stocks that fast.
English is useless--until you are standing in front of a judge and don't have enough literacy to understand that what got written down on the official paperwork isn't what the judge ruled.
History is useless--until you have a President fomenting an insurrection and you join in because you never studied what happens to 99% of all insurrections.
This last is way off in the weeds, but formenting insurrection is often a noble & virtuous thing, change often is direly necessary or more worsely overdue. There is a huge amount of fumbling & failing that often prevents good execution, that ruins follow through, & we see in history so many pendulums of society swinging & counter-swinging wildly around one another: this is purely my personal opinion, but I for one don't de-rate the attempts just because it keeps being really really hard (& often woefully mis-done!!). I think the effort to try is gloriously humanistic, challenges be damned. No, hungry for the challenge, the chance to improve. An agency of last & too often necessary resort.
What I would judge might-be insurrectionists on though is their cause. It's easy for groups to be riled up, to let one's group escalate itself rapidly towards inssurectionist climax, to mantle oneselves with cause. Whether you search for some objectively worthy (legible) truth or cause is important. Having a strong epistemic basis is important.
I liked almost nothing about what has recently happened & I think we probably agree a lot about how history isn't/might-not-be useless, & that modern times have shown some real grade-A fuck ups vis-a-vie that all. But still, it feels important to me to not condemn insurrection so widely. As a communist, it certainly seems like insurrection remains necessary. Outcomes haven't been good but the revolutionary spirit dwells in all our hearts, amid the beautiful, high-agency/highest-agency better-possible selves we might have had in us.
Take the examples, for instance. The author puts a lot of stock in what Nabokov and Da Vinci did themselves in their youth and calls this 'agency'. But at the same time, conveniently or inadvertently, the author doesn't expand and look at the broader picture in which those individuals lived and how that determined their lives.
Nabokov was born to a very wealthy and prominent Russian family with ties to Russian high nobility. He had access to a breadth of networks, resources and means to develop into the person he became. Without disparaging the his talent as a writer, it's equally important to acknowledge that his early life wasn't burdened by poverty, bad health, illness, instability and so on. Nabokov himself even described his childhood as "perfect" and "cosmopolitan".
Da Vinci, on the other hand, was born out of wedlock outside Florence to a lower class family. The historical record regarding his life before his arrival Florence is fragmentary at best. What can be deduced is that his early childhood must have been tenuous and turbulent, living in different homes with different family members (grandparents, uncles, mother). His own parents went on to live separate lives as well. We do know that he only received very basic education - reading and writing vernacular - as a child.
Da Vinci's life was determined by a stroke of chance. At age 14, his family moved to Florence and he was lucky enough to end up a studio boy at Verrocchio. He became an apprentice at 17 and received 7 more years of training. Even so, at the same time, it's clear that his family wasn't wealthy and so he might as well have ended up in a very different place at the time e.g. working as a clerk for a budding bank, notary, or even an industry like a tannery.
It should be clear that 'agency' only counts for so much. Neither Nabokov or Da Vinci are exceptional as millions of others also engage in poetry or drawing in early childhood. External circumstances such as birth and chance are just as determining. From a historical perspective, the author can be perceived as falling into the traps of hindsight bias and survivorship bias in that regard.
Even so, the article does make a valid criticsm regarding education systems. Transferring knowledge through rote exercising and standardized testing serves a purpose. The upshot is that it allows for scaling basic education towards millions, which is no small feat to accomplish. The downside is that doing so ignores the needs, traits, ambitions, strengths and weaknesses of individuals.
Modern educations systems were first formed during the 19th century Industrial Revolution, and further grew during the 20th century when humanity experience profound growth, economical and technological advancements. It should be noted that there never was a unified vision on education, and the argument in the article isn't new by any means.
During the early 20th century, incumbent education was heavily criticized by emancipatory movements. Helen Parkhurst, Maria Montessori, and John Dewey were influential educational thinkers who addressed some of the issues touched upon by the author as they laid the groundworks for an educational framework called the Dalton Plan.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dalton_Plan
At the same time, Célestin Freinet is another influential educational thinker who created the Freinet system, addressing the same criticisms, which is widely adopted throughout the world:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C%C3%A9lestin_Freinet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freinet_Modern_School_Movement
Finally, the article betrays a fallacy hidden in it's subtitle: The world is a very malleable place. To an extent, the world is malleable. But one only controls one's actions, less so the outcomes. Human life is complex, unpredictable and capricious. The impact of some decisions can sometimes only be gauged several decades into the future.
While we consider Da Vinci a succesful individual, a young Leonardo would quite likely have been just as anxious about what what the long future held in store for him as the next young person today. In that regard, it might come across as ironic that Vasari has recorded Leonardo lamenting in his deathbed, aged 67, that "he had offended against God and men by failing to practice his art as he should have done."
In the end, it's not unwarranted to consider the author's question "Do children today have useful childhoods?" carrying a due amount of presumptuousness as well. While lamenting how society tends to shoehorn millions into a corset of conformance towards norms and values, it would be quite ironical to fall into the same trap and subject younger generations to different, yet at the same time equally high, expectations and standards maximally living up to purported 'agency' given for the sake of 'agency'.
The Well-Trained Mind: A Guide to Classical Education at Home has an interesting comment on this issue. The author, with a Masters in Education and years working in public schools, says that she often runs into parents who are worried they are not qualified to teach because they do not have formal training in big-E Education. Her response is that our Education training system, with all of its study of psychology and law, is not designed around educating a single child to their maximal potential, but about scaling up education so that a single teacher can teach a room of 40 children to a socially acceptable minimum. From this point of view professional educators have no advantage over the individual parent and may even bring along irrelevant habits from their formal training.
It's also why I think the web is unlike almost everything else in computing: it's a high agency environment. Applications afford you certain options, but the web has historically offered great agency to the user. Extensions and user-scripts allow for quite a wide range of alterations to be done! I use the DarkReader extension for example, which makes almost all sites I visit "dark mode". There are ad-blockers, form history control programs, word count programs I make use of on a regular basis. Someone a couple hours ago was complaining about certain sources on HN and asked for them to be banned, and it took me less than 5 minutes to scratch together a userscript they could use to filter their experience in a way they desired[1]!
Thinking of the computing medium we are given as just a start, a launching point, that we inject our agency & prowess into: that constructivist, can do mentality is everything to me. It's completely unmatched, incomparable to everything else I've seen in computing. Having a core medium, and the viewing system decoupled from it, ready to help us do better, has made all the difference.
There's a lot of not-so-great modern web sites, that make things rough. I tried to help someone recently who was asking about scripting a React site[2]. Most of the times I can eventually wrestle the vdom into shape, to make it do what I want, but here the poor user was facing draft.js, a nightmare hell-mode take-over of the browsing experience by a large pile of software that thinks it can do better. Poor user was never going to win. There's all sorts of anti-user potentials to the modern web. I disagreed hard with a refusenik reactionary "the web browser I'm dreaming of" yesterday, but agreed[3] a) that the user should have choice/agency about what they want enabled and b) that certain technologies are an existential threat to agency, chiefly WebAssembly, which further heightens the impossibly of user-agency on the web. I've been quite a jerk to Flutter's CanvasKit a number of times, because it turns the web into a giant television tube that blasts pixels in our face, destroys the hypermedia basis that web engagement has been built around. Threats to user agency, to a modifiable web are everywhere, and plenty of folks simply tell me I'm full of shit, that I'm delusional for thinking the web experience is user programmable. They're not so far off the truth, especially in the days of virtual-dom & react, but I think that's an industrial convenience we've been taking advantage of, and that ultimately we'll see pressures to use the medium more respectfully, to use Custom Elements & other technologies that return some primacy to the DOM, rather than floating off into the virtual forever & treating this medium like an end-target to be made to dance as the large overgrown industrial toolkit + application so desire. There has not been a lot of progress in that direction, and weirdly: that gives me hope. It makes me think we are rife for disruption, that when good folk start trying to understand how not to do harm in their web-application-development, there will be leaps & bounds, huge strides. Meanwhile React &c are definitely mature technologies at this point, excitement has winnowed away, advancement comes in little tiny pinprick bursts. A more hyper-textual medium is possible, this ascent of code over medium doesn't require a total rewrite: we can make the DOM powerful again, make a pro-user, pro-manipulable, pro-rich media experience again. JS will be with us, but woven through the media, rather than hijacking & parasite-ing off it. I look forward to rich internet hypermedia becoming a powerful, expressive, user-manipulable system again, as the web once so powerfully was for users. This would be such a sign of progress and respect: for the web to put the user first again, to make the medium something shapeable by user-agency. I believe those days come.
Computing was always, to me, so compelling because it enabled the limitless virtual, because we could go anywhere, do anything, go wherever we might think. But I see few other places in computing where the frontiers continue to open, where we ennoble & enable the agency within each of us. The web remains one of the rarest finest gems of computing, where agency remains vastly possible & expanding. So much of the rest of computing feels settling & shrinking, receding ever further within the firewall.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27693710
This particular line is something I foresee as a future problem:
> I suspect the downplaying of agency in childhood not only creates fewer opportunities for great people, it must also create more marginal people
The less agency, and corresponding personal responsibility is given out, the more likely it is that we will condition future generations to expect things to be provided. After all, they are used to diminished choice and lesser agency, and removing those training wheels can be intimidating. That's not only a risk, but it is also sad, because I think it will have some indirect impact on the creativity of future generations and the intangibles of life.
This article is focused on childhood and schooling. Maybe those are addressable via concepts like school choice (vouchers). But I would argue that problems of agency extend to adulthood as well. Agency is something that needs to be defended through our policies and laws. For example, I foresee future policies that are hostile towards car ownership as eroding agency. I see the practical need for continuous work history (no gaps in employment) as eroding agency. I see the 5-day work week as eroding agency. I'm sure other HN folks will have their own set of examples and desires for greater agency that are very different from mine. I feel like it'll be harder to solve for all of it except to err on the side of individual freedoms when possible.
As an adult, the type of agency I derive from cars is slightly different. It's about being able to go where I want quickly, without the waiting times of public transit or slow speeds of a bicycle. It's about being able to put that faster travel time to use, by spending the new free time on other activities. For example I can run errands, manage children, meet with a friend, and go to the movies all in one day thanks to the magic of a personal car. And when I go out of town, a car lets me go wherever I want with nearly endless freedom only limited by availability of road infrastructure, while moving the cargo (and people) I want with me at those destinations.
I reckon open source projects and app/game development are great ways for kids to "reach" today. You can have a meaningful impact, learn a lot, and possibly set yourself up for live.
This Australian Ben Pasternak developed a hit game as a teenager, and at 21 he is being featured in the Wall Street Journal after raising $50m for a food-tech startup.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/at-21-this-entrepreneur-has-lau...
But this goes back to Bill Gates and Paul Allen - https://www.cnbc.com/2019/07/02/microsoft-co-founders-bill-g...