Does parenting make you a better person? (with Erik Hoel)

Erik Hoel: Yes I do. And just to clarify: I think it worked me a better person. I carefully hedged the piece to say that I’m not sure parenthood is the right move for everyone; and if people have very strong opinions about not being a parent, I believe in a personal choice about it.

But when it comes to my own psychology, there was a very significant phase shift in the before-and-after. And maybe I’ll put it in a way that I didn’t put in the essay, but in a way that you might appreciate yourself, which is that I think people are good monsters when it comes to themselves. And it’s very difficult to notice this: you go through life and your preferences – what movie you’re going to watch, what food you’re going to eat – all these things are a constant, almost exhausting game of optimization.

And before, when I got on the plane, I thought, ‘Oh, what book am I going to read? What am I going to watch on the plane? And what little snack should I bring?’ or something. While now I’m getting on the plane, which isn’t even on the radar at all. And it’s honestly a relief in some ways not to be a utility monster. And I don’t think I was particularly unique in this: I think it’s this implicit background noise that’s very difficult to notice. And maybe saints and some other people notice it and actively fight it every day, but I think most people don’t. And that was one of the most refreshing things about parenting: giving up the exhaustion of being a utility monster for your own preferences.

Erik Hoel: Yeah, and I talk about this a little bit in the piece when I speculate about why the “parenting is actually great” type genre of an article isn’t that popular, especially lately, among a certain class. of points of sale. There has been a trend of posting articles titled “The Parents Who Regret Having Children.” Time magazine. And this has been a pretty popular article genre, at least in places like Time or The New York Times or The guard or so. And some of them are quite loud, right? But they also have the sound of truth in them, in the sense of… someone described it in the Time piece as ‘domestic Gulag.’ Right? And I think that captures an element of what’s difficult about parenting.

But just to speculate, why aren’t there sort of response pieces to these pieces about actually regretting parenthood, where someone says, “Well, actually parenting is great.” And I think one big problem is just that: parenting is also very, very difficult and it can be terribly difficult at times. And it can be sad: it can sometimes be deeply sad. You may disappoint yourself. Your children may disappoint you. And all of those things together make it very easy for someone who says, “Oh, parenting is actually great,” to be subjected to criticism.

The “parenting is great genre” is kind of a very delicate genre. I forget what Kurt Vonnegut said about literary criticism, but it’s kind of like putting on full armor to attack a sundae. And that’s, for example, the essay ‘Parenting is Awesome’: it’s just an ice cream sundae. And you can find great ways to poke holes in them.

One of the reasons I personally don’t think it’s a very popular genre is that it says things that everyone knows to some extent. Seventy percent of Americans have children. So new parents go through a phase where all of this stuff is suddenly new to them, and yet it’s not really some kind of world-transforming information. It is a kind of information that everyone knows: you just experience it.

And in this – you know, it reminds me of – I’ll draw on another philosophical example. Mary-the-color scientist is this famous argument in Frank Jackson’s philosophy of mind. And in it – it’s kind of like this – Daniel Dennett called these ‘intuition pumps’. But in this intuition pump it’s like: Mary, the color scientist, grew up in this black and white room and she’s an incredibly good neuroscientist. She specializes in vision. But she has never seen color. She has only seen black and white.

And there’s the question: OK, assuming she knows everything about visual processing in the brain, when she finally sees color for the first time – think Dorothy The Wizard of Oz Walking into Oz and then entering the color – does she learn something new? And if she learns something new, why isn’t that information part of the neuroscientific information available to her?

And it’s just a thought pump used to sort of justify the explanatory gap on how to explain consciousness.

But it’s a good description of parenting in a way, because it’s, listen, anyone can do it narrate you what parenthood is, from the outside; but it turns out that actually experiencing things is just very different from knowing them from the outside.

And that, I think, is another reason why the “Parenting is Awesome” essay isn’t all that popular. It’s because you’re just expressing that you know the information that everyone else knows, but you’re just doing it from within.