The world is alive. Would you sing a song to the Moon? Read books to animals or stuffed toys? Show your tablet to an airplane so that you can watch cartoons together? My daughter does. To her there’s no difference between our rescue dog and her stuffed teddy bear. Both are alive in their own ways, both can be admired and engaged with, both of them deserve her love and attention.
For a long time, I’ve had this nagging feeling that we’ve lost something really important by switching from an animist-based metaphysical view of the world (which seems to have been widespread in tribal societies) to a scientific-rationalist “individual in world” (broadly, theistic) model. In religious studies, this is called “disenchantment” and examples like the author’s suggest that this is a learned cultural phenomenon and not something inherent to how humans see the world. The interesting question is, will future technologies push us back to an animist perspective? A future full of unexplainable and incomprehensible AIs seems almost naturally animist to me.
> The interesting question is, will future technologies push us back to an animist perspective? A future full of unexplainable and incomprehensible AIs seems almost naturally animist to me.
I call it "the Daemon-Haunted World" after Sagan's book:
> "The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark" is a 1995 book by the astrophysicist Carl Sagan and co-authored by Ann Druyan,[1] in which the authors aim to explain the scientific method to laypeople and to encourage people to learn critical and skeptical thinking. They explain methods to help distinguish between ideas that are considered valid science and those that can be considered pseudoscience. Sagan states that when new ideas are offered for consideration, they should be tested by means of skeptical thinking and should stand up to rigorous questioning.
> Whatever you do, do it as a ceremony. ... Yes, it takes us three times longer than it used to, but we’re not in a hurry
We do this too, but we also often acknowledge, in front of the kids, that we have a lot of privilege to be able to do this. I want to make sure they know that poor people don't have the time to do what we do, because I already see signs of them asking "why don't homeless people just get jobs" and "did you know [classmate] has never been on a cruise before!!". I answer those questions too but I'm hoping to change their world view so they don't have to ask because they already know.
I remember when I was a kid and I went to a friend’s birthday party, a Warriors game. His Dad was general partner of a VC firm, owned part of the Warriors and we had a center box with a buffet and everything. The mascot came to hang out with us, and much later some team members
Obviously I had no idea what was going on. I went home to my parents very middle class home and promptly told my own Dad I wanted to take my 4th grade girlfriend to a Warriors game with box seats and a limo! How funny looking back.
This is a fair question to ask, though. Why don’t they just get jobs? What are the structural issues in society that lead to this? Why are some people chronically homeless while the average length of homelessness (for those experiencing it) is “just” around 150 days? Why is getting a job not the solution for many? Why are there even people with jobs who are homeless?
That’s a wonderful (and important) discussion to have!
There are entire fields of research devoted to the question “Why don’t people just pull themselves up by their bootstraps? What is preventing that?”. It’s a great question that everyone should take time to think about imo.
edit: this gets even more interesting when you expand beyond USA. Why are there homeless people in countries with full safety nets? When someone can collect unemployment or disability that is meant to cover basic needs, why are they on the streets and asking passersby for handouts?
> This is a fair question to ask, though. Why don’t they just get jobs? What are the structural issues in society that lead to this? Why are some people chronically homeless while the average length of homelessness (for those experiencing it) is “just” around 150 days? Why is getting a job not the solution for many? Why are there even people with jobs who are homeless?
I feel that it's more fruitful to not frame discussions on "why homeless people X" and instead think about why some of us end up losing any support and specially income so that the only and best option is to lose our home.
This gets even harder when the neighborhood you live in has a substantial population of visible unhoused on fentanyl. Kids will make generalizations as quickly as adults when provided with first hand observations, and explaining selection bias to a 5 year old isn’t easy.
I feel like this is one of those questions that have different answers for different people. Hence there need to be multiple solutions that solve different root problems in different ways.
Off the top of my head, homelessness can be caused by drug or alcohol abuse, mental illness, financial distress, or a desire to just tune out from societies responsibilities. I'm sure there are more.
Some would like intervention, some would not. There is no "one size fits all" solution.
The easy ones to help are the ones who are homeless for financial reasons. They need a leg up, and once up will be just fine.
It's much harder when people are unemployable (mental illness, drug abuse etc) and basically need either reoccurring rehab, or long-term medical care. Our society does not function well for those too sick to fit in.
I think it is purely political question intending to frame and limit the discussion about the issue. That is why it is pointless time wasting question.
If it was honest direct question, the only true answer is that being homeless makes getting a job super hard. You need stability, you need address, you need to guard your belongings and you are too tired to be reasonably effective in work. And employer does not want you. And that is where it stops despite ignoring quite a huge amount of reality.
And the issue with homelessness is not primary job issue. It is housing cost issue. It is mental health issue. It is social safety network issue. And drug use issue and violence issue. It is many issues in perfect storm that touch jobs only in an artificial way.
> We do this too, but we also often acknowledge, in front of the kids, that we have a lot of privilege to be able to do this.
I recently interviewed a few high school students and they each made a point of professing their privilege. Even a kid who emigrated recently and lives in a poor part of town talked about his privilege. When everyone talks about their privilege, the word loses its meaning.
I understand the point of being self-aware. And I wouldn't have been so struck if some of the kids had used different words. But they just sounded like little robots, reciting a mandatory confession. So if you want to talk about privilege with your kids, at least mix up the terms every now and then.
They are reciting the guilt that they are copying off their parents. It’s horrible.
Think about it this way. You worked damn hard so that your children have a better life. I know I do. So did my parents. Is it unfair that we give that advantage to our children? No. And certainly neither you or your children have anything to feel guilty about.
I’m not from the US so I don’t understand the whole slavery issue but still, no one alive today deserves this insane guilt put on them now for some ancestor sin. That’s called collective guilt and it’s why nazis killed Jews. People need to stop it.
Life is unfair and we are all different. What you do with your talents and resources is what counts. Not what some ancestor of yours did. It’s ridiculous. If you do feel privileged, give away your wealth. If you don’t, then don’t. But for gods sake stop feeling guilt about things you didn’t do.
Unless you've actually lived through it yourself, you yourself don't understand so there's no chance to instill this in your children.
It would be akin to trying to get an extremely wealthy child to understand the experience of using a washing machine for years on end when they've never even seen one because the help does all of that for them.
Or the reverse, to get a middle class child to understand what it's like to have never even seen a washing machine because you have other humans who do it all for you.
It's the human condition.
But what you're doing is performative in the same way that screaming at people on twitter rather than actually working to help child abuse victims is performative.
It's a way to assuage your feelings of guilt without expending enough of yourself to attempt to improve others' lives.
---
On a side note, I'm aware HN is a "safe space" for folks like yourself, but sometimes it needs to be said. Perspective is a hell of a drug and often when I see posts like this it gets my gander up as someone who went from extreme poverty to privilege. And to answer the question that's coming, I'm known to be extremely charitable to _persons_ who need it, but I don't go out of my way to solve the general problem either. But the difference is I have no illusions about it.
Well first off I have the perspective and did live through it, so there's that.
But also, why do people assume others can't have empathy? I don't have to touch a hot stove to know it hurts. I don't need to live in poverty to understand how difficult it is.
Growing up Jewish I have been discriminated against, but I don't assume anyone who isn't Jewish can't understand my discrimination.
It sounds like you have a chip on your shoulder, or perhaps guilt for getting out of your situation. You shouldn't. You should be proud of your accomplishments.
But you should also give people the benefit of the doubt that they can actually have empathy even if they haven't lived it.
The best thing that happened when my daughters were born was that, as the author suggests, you get to experience the world (and life) again vicariously through their eyes. There were in fact seemingly ordinary things in the world that I had come to take for granted.
This was great to experience and a real gift with my kids. Everything is shiny, powerful, and new again. I only hope their excitement affects me more than my learned tendancy to dismiss somethings is on them. It really creeps up on one over the years, and I think I can best express it as I don’t have a favorite colour any longer.
and this is just scratching the surface, I can’t emphasize enough how much better life is with your own children who depend on you, it almost seems stupid now that it surprised me as much as it did, it’s not just better horizontally or vertically, it’s more like an exponential fractal, better in ways you couldn’t have possibly imagined, especially once they start demonstrating how soon they will be smarter than you
I still have a lot to worry about in this world. I'm not set. But I have a child. It's easily the hardest thing I've ever had to do and, tonight, just before putting her to sleep (and now reading your comment), I had a similar thought. The experience of raising a child is not one you plot on the scale of how we'd rate our existing lived experiences. Life becomes so much more important in a totally orthogonal way.
I cannot stand the cynicism about child rearing nowadays. Our generation chooses to believe that our worries are unique (they aren't). They think they know what raising a child is like because they too were once children, or know others with children. They have no clue.
Again, parenting has been f*ing hard. If I could go back to my old life in a time machine, would I? Hell no.
The mood of this is so happy and wholesome that I hesitate to mention what's coming next, but her focus will turn towards the people in her life and scrutinizing all the little things they do.
Almost all these bullet points sound ominous when the author contrasts adult behavior with kid behavior, and she undoubtedly notices the difference too.
Expect the sour behavior
when routines get broken or just plain boring, unfamiliar people start coming into the picture due to school or other social needs, pets come and go, moving to a new home, etc. Lots of energy will be dedicated to curiosity, language building, and asking questions since this is all just as profound to her as seeing anything else for the first time. It shapes a personality.
Well, yes, but this is not necessarily a bad thing. It struck me reading this that my 4 year old already has a lot more in common with adults than with this 2 year old.
All of the consuming problems in his life consist of what toys he wants to play with, which friends he wants to see and what he wants to do, but there’s no doubt he has them. He’s not so concerned with discovering the world around any more (though still more than an adult), and he has a model for how he fits inside it. Maybe this comes from gaining a true sense of self?
I have a toddler and my conclusion so far is somewhat pedestrian, but here goes:
Nowadays there are many tools available enabling a person to half-ass parenthood, but they all come at a cost which becomes apparent later, the most glaring example being diet.
It's important to put in as much effort as you can, but it's equally important to not pay attention to people trying to one-up you about this.
> The last few months in Warsaw were very cloudy, so if one of them suddenly shines through the clouds, it’s a big occasion to celebrate.
Just an hour ago I got into a heated debate about this because my friends extrapolate the climate in Warsaw to the whole country.
The weather is one thing I don't miss about that place, having grown up there.
I’ve spent a lot of time with kids and I like them, but I don’t have any of my own. This piece strikes me as much less magical than most people here seem to view it. It’s just kind of a “duh, that’s how kids work.” I have to wonder if the author hadn’t spent much time with children before having her daughter? Or maybe there’s some chemical nonsense involved in the biological connection that makes all this seem profound.
> This piece strikes me as much less magical than most people here seem to view it.
I think a lot of it is self-selection from the commenters - negative comments on an article like this will be perceived as assholeish, so people just skip it.
I think these are simply observations. The writer has a young child, is amazed at the way this child has made her view life. I certainly went through it when I first had children. There's nothing wrong with a parent standing in awe of the freshness of the world through a child's eyes. If you're of a particular philosophical or observational bent it can certainly be profound as it's happening.
What an amazing text! It really made me realise that babies are the most perfect things in this world. It's incredible how such a small human being is capable of being a infinite fountain of happiness.
I really got stuck in the beginning of the text when she say "I gave birth to the most wonderful person on this planet", because that's exactly the feeling amount of love that every parent had right in the moment that they grabbed their children for the first time, and the second, and the third and so on...
Readit News
For a long time, I’ve had this nagging feeling that we’ve lost something really important by switching from an animist-based metaphysical view of the world (which seems to have been widespread in tribal societies) to a scientific-rationalist “individual in world” (broadly, theistic) model. In religious studies, this is called “disenchantment” and examples like the author’s suggest that this is a learned cultural phenomenon and not something inherent to how humans see the world. The interesting question is, will future technologies push us back to an animist perspective? A future full of unexplainable and incomprehensible AIs seems almost naturally animist to me.
I call it "the Daemon-Haunted World" after Sagan's book:
> "The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark" is a 1995 book by the astrophysicist Carl Sagan and co-authored by Ann Druyan,[1] in which the authors aim to explain the scientific method to laypeople and to encourage people to learn critical and skeptical thinking. They explain methods to help distinguish between ideas that are considered valid science and those that can be considered pseudoscience. Sagan states that when new ideas are offered for consideration, they should be tested by means of skeptical thinking and should stand up to rigorous questioning.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demon_haunted_world
Just as we are about to defeat superstition once and for all, we populate the world with new "spirits" called "Siri", "Alexa", and "Cortana".
We do this too, but we also often acknowledge, in front of the kids, that we have a lot of privilege to be able to do this. I want to make sure they know that poor people don't have the time to do what we do, because I already see signs of them asking "why don't homeless people just get jobs" and "did you know [classmate] has never been on a cruise before!!". I answer those questions too but I'm hoping to change their world view so they don't have to ask because they already know.
Obviously I had no idea what was going on. I went home to my parents very middle class home and promptly told my own Dad I wanted to take my 4th grade girlfriend to a Warriors game with box seats and a limo! How funny looking back.
This is a fair question to ask, though. Why don’t they just get jobs? What are the structural issues in society that lead to this? Why are some people chronically homeless while the average length of homelessness (for those experiencing it) is “just” around 150 days? Why is getting a job not the solution for many? Why are there even people with jobs who are homeless?
That’s a wonderful (and important) discussion to have!
There are entire fields of research devoted to the question “Why don’t people just pull themselves up by their bootstraps? What is preventing that?”. It’s a great question that everyone should take time to think about imo.
edit: this gets even more interesting when you expand beyond USA. Why are there homeless people in countries with full safety nets? When someone can collect unemployment or disability that is meant to cover basic needs, why are they on the streets and asking passersby for handouts?
I feel that it's more fruitful to not frame discussions on "why homeless people X" and instead think about why some of us end up losing any support and specially income so that the only and best option is to lose our home.
Off the top of my head, homelessness can be caused by drug or alcohol abuse, mental illness, financial distress, or a desire to just tune out from societies responsibilities. I'm sure there are more.
Some would like intervention, some would not. There is no "one size fits all" solution.
The easy ones to help are the ones who are homeless for financial reasons. They need a leg up, and once up will be just fine.
It's much harder when people are unemployable (mental illness, drug abuse etc) and basically need either reoccurring rehab, or long-term medical care. Our society does not function well for those too sick to fit in.
If it was honest direct question, the only true answer is that being homeless makes getting a job super hard. You need stability, you need address, you need to guard your belongings and you are too tired to be reasonably effective in work. And employer does not want you. And that is where it stops despite ignoring quite a huge amount of reality.
And the issue with homelessness is not primary job issue. It is housing cost issue. It is mental health issue. It is social safety network issue. And drug use issue and violence issue. It is many issues in perfect storm that touch jobs only in an artificial way.
edit: i'm serious. do you guys know any drug addicts? you lose your ability to make a plan.
You MUST have an address to write on the forms, you must have a phone number. For a job you'll need to have a shower, clothes, transport, etc.
I recently interviewed a few high school students and they each made a point of professing their privilege. Even a kid who emigrated recently and lives in a poor part of town talked about his privilege. When everyone talks about their privilege, the word loses its meaning.
I understand the point of being self-aware. And I wouldn't have been so struck if some of the kids had used different words. But they just sounded like little robots, reciting a mandatory confession. So if you want to talk about privilege with your kids, at least mix up the terms every now and then.
Think about it this way. You worked damn hard so that your children have a better life. I know I do. So did my parents. Is it unfair that we give that advantage to our children? No. And certainly neither you or your children have anything to feel guilty about.
I’m not from the US so I don’t understand the whole slavery issue but still, no one alive today deserves this insane guilt put on them now for some ancestor sin. That’s called collective guilt and it’s why nazis killed Jews. People need to stop it.
Life is unfair and we are all different. What you do with your talents and resources is what counts. Not what some ancestor of yours did. It’s ridiculous. If you do feel privileged, give away your wealth. If you don’t, then don’t. But for gods sake stop feeling guilt about things you didn’t do.
There's a first time for everything.
It would be akin to trying to get an extremely wealthy child to understand the experience of using a washing machine for years on end when they've never even seen one because the help does all of that for them.
Or the reverse, to get a middle class child to understand what it's like to have never even seen a washing machine because you have other humans who do it all for you.
It's the human condition.
But what you're doing is performative in the same way that screaming at people on twitter rather than actually working to help child abuse victims is performative.
It's a way to assuage your feelings of guilt without expending enough of yourself to attempt to improve others' lives.
---
On a side note, I'm aware HN is a "safe space" for folks like yourself, but sometimes it needs to be said. Perspective is a hell of a drug and often when I see posts like this it gets my gander up as someone who went from extreme poverty to privilege. And to answer the question that's coming, I'm known to be extremely charitable to _persons_ who need it, but I don't go out of my way to solve the general problem either. But the difference is I have no illusions about it.
But also, why do people assume others can't have empathy? I don't have to touch a hot stove to know it hurts. I don't need to live in poverty to understand how difficult it is.
Growing up Jewish I have been discriminated against, but I don't assume anyone who isn't Jewish can't understand my discrimination.
It sounds like you have a chip on your shoulder, or perhaps guilt for getting out of your situation. You shouldn't. You should be proud of your accomplishments.
But you should also give people the benefit of the doubt that they can actually have empathy even if they haven't lived it.
The best thing that happened when my daughters were born was that, as the author suggests, you get to experience the world (and life) again vicariously through their eyes. There were in fact seemingly ordinary things in the world that I had come to take for granted.
My loss.
This is such a beautiful way to express it. Thanks for sharing.
I cannot stand the cynicism about child rearing nowadays. Our generation chooses to believe that our worries are unique (they aren't). They think they know what raising a child is like because they too were once children, or know others with children. They have no clue.
Again, parenting has been f*ing hard. If I could go back to my old life in a time machine, would I? Hell no.
Dead Comment
Almost all these bullet points sound ominous when the author contrasts adult behavior with kid behavior, and she undoubtedly notices the difference too.
Expect the sour behavior when routines get broken or just plain boring, unfamiliar people start coming into the picture due to school or other social needs, pets come and go, moving to a new home, etc. Lots of energy will be dedicated to curiosity, language building, and asking questions since this is all just as profound to her as seeing anything else for the first time. It shapes a personality.
All of the consuming problems in his life consist of what toys he wants to play with, which friends he wants to see and what he wants to do, but there’s no doubt he has them. He’s not so concerned with discovering the world around any more (though still more than an adult), and he has a model for how he fits inside it. Maybe this comes from gaining a true sense of self?
The kids brain will develop in normal way and thus the things parent does will change. But really nothing suggest unusual issues.
Nowadays there are many tools available enabling a person to half-ass parenthood, but they all come at a cost which becomes apparent later, the most glaring example being diet.
It's important to put in as much effort as you can, but it's equally important to not pay attention to people trying to one-up you about this.
> The last few months in Warsaw were very cloudy, so if one of them suddenly shines through the clouds, it’s a big occasion to celebrate.
Just an hour ago I got into a heated debate about this because my friends extrapolate the climate in Warsaw to the whole country.
The weather is one thing I don't miss about that place, having grown up there.
I think a lot of it is self-selection from the commenters - negative comments on an article like this will be perceived as assholeish, so people just skip it.