I came to say the opposite! Before kids you can get out of a funk by taking some random vacation to middle of nowhere, taking a sabbatical or random time off work, spend an uninterrupted day at the library, whatever. Once the little ones come along you get about five minutes per day to solve your problem.
I find that the more I focus on my problems, the stickier ennui is. It is specifically being forced to solve other people's problems that slackens its grip and allows for escape.
Agreed, but when you're forced to solve the same person's same problems day after day after day after day after day, results on your own psyche can vary.
I appreciate this answer, it sounded facile at first, but hints at a significant ambiguity when calling something 'my' problem. You are absolutely correct that my daughter's problems are my problems, but their motivation and the manner in which they must be dealt with are fundamentally different from the rumination that causes [me?] ennui.
Taking a fundamentally trite example: my daughter wants a pencil so that she might draw. Fundamentally, she's not concerned about me solving the 'pencil problem' utterly, for all time, but rather wants one 'now'; that is, ideally within ~30s but definitely within ~5 minutes. There is no time to dwell on the merits of STAEDTLER vs Caran d'Ache, or whether I should be provisioning a set focused on soft or hard lead, or a lifetime supply of Ticonderogas. Instead, you find the first one that you already have around that has a reasonable chance of keeping its lead intact long enough to allow her to finish her doodle and move on to the next thing.
So yes, I agree with your premise, but I also argue that the problems you inherit by proxy are materially different from the ones I [at least] find cause ennui.
I have two younger kids and it's great and exhausting at the same time. But it did not change the motivation to do other things in the evening, when they are asleep.
I still have week-long phases of ultra hyper focus and phases of absolute bat-shit boredom where I binge-watch or play everything half interesting.
It's a personality thing. I have a real hard time doing something evenly across a long time. Either I give it all I have until I power-out or I leave it aside and rot.
Kids don't help in this regard. The only thing which changed is that I have less time to work on personal projects. I tell myself, that I'm better at it because time got really valuable, but actually I know that I'm still the same lazy bugger I was like before.
I am like that too but to me having a child has helped me narrow down on interests and made me focused on what is important for now, the life's experience. I used to be a lot less satisfied before this stage in life, now I am really content.
I suspect a ton of the psychological illnesses/problems we see today are the result of radical divergence from the behaviors we had in our ancestral evolutionary environments. It would be remarkable if the brain didn't make a bunch of assumptions on the structure of our environment when tuning stimulus sensitivity, neurotransmitter production, etc.
Some examples that seem obviously concerning to me are changes in child-rearing patterns (later and fewer), changes in diet (less fat and protein, more stuff that didn't exist in the evolutionary environment at all), changes in stress exposure (mental, physical, and immune [especially parasitic]).
> I keep wondering how many of the psychological problems arise from people having children much much later in their lives than used to be normal
This is also something I have been thinking about for a long time now. The human body, instinct and mind seems to be made to raise children. As a new parent, you have zero experience in handling a child. Yet after just a few minutes, your instinct kicks in. You somehow know how to hold the newborn, despite the fact you have never done this. You try everything to keep it warm and comfortable. You realize that your body is perfectly shaped to hold a baby with one arm, and that the baby instinctively contracts its legs for a perfect and secure fit. Despite the fact that crying babies sounded the same to you all your life, you can suddenly distinguish the crying of your own child from that of others from the beginning and from a large distance. If your baby cries, you instinctively know what the problem is. Without making a conscious decision regarding this, your absolute number one priority is suddenly to keep this child alive, whatever it takes. The thought that you would fight anything or anyone attacking your child, until the bitter end, suddenly seems completely natural. All of this can not be made clear to people without children, which is basically why parents like to talk to other parents. Raising a child certainly is one of the most extreme things a human being is capable of, and yet most parents manage it. To me, it would not at all be surprising that not using this potential may lead to serious psychological problems.
Having children because you're bored has to be among the most self-centered, repulsive thing humans do.
Not that it's you're doing for just pointing it out. I actually admire how much a single HN comment could disgust me.
Though I will also say, one of the amazing feats of humans is our ability to become incredible people despite being born to parents that had no business having children.
Could you elaborate on how giving life to a human being and dedicating the next 20 years of your own life (and the major part of your income) on bringing the child up is self-centered and repulsive? How on earth can you derive the parenting quality from the reason the child was conceived? What, in your opinion, is a non-repulsive way or reason to get a child? Until not that long ago, the overwhelming majority of children was born because their parents wanted to have sex, and quite possibly lots of it. Does this also disgust you?
> dedicating the next 20 years of your own life (and the major part of your income)
Dedicating time and money does not make something unselfish, so this can't really be used as justification to show that having a child is not selfish.
We can start with a lower bar -- having children is definitely not selfless, right? Most people have children to give their life purpose and meaning, or because they believe they will be good parents and want to see if they can raise a child that will find success in the world. So at the very least, I think we can agree that a parent gains something by virtue of having a child, and they have a child so that they can benefit in this way. Ergo, having a child is not selfless, we can at least agree on that, right?
Next we can move onto showing why it is actually quite selfish. Let's just look up the word "selfish" to find some footing:
> (of a person, action, or motive) lacking consideration for others; concerned chiefly with one's own personal profit or pleasure.
So if I can demonstrate that the parents lacks consideration for others when having a child, that should sufficiently demonstrate that the parents are acting selfishly, yes?
So who benefits (other than the parents) from the child being born? I can only think of one party you may suggest -- the child. But the child has not been born yet, so how can the parent be acting out of consideration for their unborn child? Can you act in the interest of something that does not exist?
This is where we get into the matter of opinion. Can an unborn child have desires?
If no, then the parent is definitely acting selfishly. The only one who desires the child be born is the parent, so this is by definition selfish.
If yes, then you may say that the child desires to be born, and the parent is acting out of consideration for this desire. But if you are in this camp, you must also admit there is a chance the child desires not to be born, yes? And if this is the case, then by bringing this child into the world without first consulting their desires, I would argue the parent is acting selfishly. They made an assumption about their child's desires, and acted without confirming them -- giving their child no say in the matter. This sounds quite selfish to me.
So I think this conclusively demonstrates that having a child is indeed selfish, would you contest this? The only reasonable way to contest this argument, in my opinion of course, is by taking the religious stance and somehow "speaking" to your unborn child (through god?) to first determine if they want to be born. This is impossible to reproduce though, so it's impossible to say if anyone has ever done this, and therefore I won't bother addressing it.
Of course, I'm not saying having children is "repulsive," but it's definitely selfish.
I don't have a child, but I have 2 nephews that I watch. And I can 100% say that kind of boredom is just the mind numbing repetition of doing stuff thats frankly just not that interesting. Then having to do it over and over again really starts to wear you out. Especially from the ages of like 2 to 6 is tough in my opinion.
It's different when it's your own child. You see the world through their eyes and the mundane becomes interesting again. Something like tying shoes is such a feat for a kid to achieve. They are on cloud nine for a week once they learn it. This is infectious.
Some people have that feeling on a more general level. It seems I'm lucky that some of them work in the kindergarden where my two youngest kids go.
Somewhat related: while I've always cared about others after I grew up it is much stronger now. How much of it that comes from having children an how much comes from becoming a new person because of deliberate decisions I don't know.
Also probably a necessary evolutionary trait to spend the resources necessary to raise a child. If our brains didn’t reward us for child raising, our species would’ve ended 1 year after it started.
The opposite of boredom is not entertainment. The opposite of boredom is activity. Your house being on fire is not boring, but it’s also not exactly fun either.
however the same exasperating routine with someone over a long time might be described as boring. Boring is, like many things in English, a flexible concept.
