It’s october 1 2023. my wife and I are having our first child this month, which is going to be a huge change to our lives. I’m pretty excited. Nervous. Hope everything goes well. Hope I can rise to the challenge and do a good job. People throughout history have had kids, literally everyone that exists or existed was someone’s child, though it’s also clear that not everyone who had kids did a good job of raising them. So many cultures have creation myths involving absolutely heinous relationships between parents and children. I’ve always wondered what that’s about, why does it seem so ubiquitous. Is there a selection bias of sorts going on? That everybody is transfixed by stories of conflict, and it isn’t all that interesting to hear stories about things that go well? Maybe.

Anyway. I do feel my senses sharpening, sort of. Though I did sleep a lot last night. But everything is beginning to seem and feel more consequential. I won’t have as much time or space to fuck around. I don’t think that should mean NO more fucking around – I’ve learned from experience in the past that having that sort of attitude is overly rigid-authoritarian and inspires rebellion. It’s more like, I have to make each moment count more. And that might end up being better.

An anecdote that’s been ringing with me: someone on twitter told me about how she used to be a competitive swimmer, and back then she didn’t breathe on her left because it felt unnatural and slowed her down. But now that she’s a middle-aged mom, she no longer cares about speed, so she took the time to learn it properly… and now she’s actually faster for it. How incredible is that? I hope that’s how I can make my life play out in the coming months and years. I can’t go as long without sleep, I have to take better care of myself, my diet, my posture, fitness, everything – BUT, I don’t think that’s necessarily a negative, I think it can make me more sensitive, and more sensitive can be a very good thing. I’m also now reminded of how the Doom video games are actually more fun to play at higher difficulties. At normal difficulty, you can kind of blunder your way through everything, and it’s a kind of fun, but it’s not challenging, not consequential. You don’t really have to think. I always thought of myself as a fairly casual gamer who plays everything on Normal, but I read a blogpost once suggesting that Doom is more fun at higher difficulties, and I challenged myself to try it, and I found myself enjoying the experience. Yeah I died more often but dying doesn’t cost you anything in a game like Doom, just some time. It’s much more satisfying to get it right when you know you’re being really challenged. Every choice you make matters.

So yeah… a part of me feels a little silly that I haven’t used the past few years more strategically, cleverly, etc, but from another point of view, I must have been doing the best that I was able to do at any given point in time, roughly speaking, maybe? I wish I had been more courageous, more assertive, more confident. I wrote a bunch of things on my whiteboard recently, took some photos of it, and then I took it all down. I’m proud of myself for doing that. I’m going to finish this wordvomit and feel good about doing that too. Basically I generally want to be more decisive than I’ve ever been. I do think being a dad is going to make that easier in some respects, because it should become so much more clearer what’s important and what’s not, what I can afford and what I cannot.

One failure mode to be concerned about is overdoing it. I can again point back at how I did a version of that when I went from being a teenage bum to being married at 22 and having to suddenly do a good job at work and take care of my wife… I was overly anxious to make everything work, and I became grim and despondent. I don’t think I will make that mistake a second time, because I’ve been through the gauntlet, done the preparation, did my hero’s journey across the planet, wrote FAN and Introspect,and I believe I now have a felt understanding of the importants of levity, silliness, playfulness, cheerful spirit. I don’t want to be a stern, sterile, frightful dad, though I do anticipate that some of that energy is going to arise in me as I worry about the health of my wife and child. There certainly is a literal physical fragility to young children that they themselves neither appreciate nor care for. This is reminding me slightly of all the times my cats would perch at my windows, without any way of us communicating with each other our understanding of how dangerous things are. I don’t believe in insulating a child from danger entirely, I don’t think that’s possible, I don’t think it’s effective, I don’t think it’s desirable, everything about that attitude is wrong. Overly insulating a child from the world is really about assuaging the parent’s anxiety at the expense of a child. I can imagine this is easier said than done. But nonetheless it’s worth saying because it’s worth doing. Some amount of risk is unavoidable when it comes to living your life. Children should be somewhat insulated – there’s a sweet spot between coddling them and leaving them to fend for themselves, and neither extreme is desirable. I suppose everyone will have different ideas about what is extreme and what is not, based on their own experiences. I don’t think there are any absolute correct answers, just a lot of dynamic tension to be managed.

As I approach the end of this wordvomit I find myself thinking, man, with a little bit of nudging and poking, this could be a substack essay. But I set out to do a wordvomit and I want to publish it as one. maybe i’ll rework or reference it later. I don’t know, we’ll see. There’s a bit of scarcity mindset that’s crept in over the months. I know I’m capable of writing thousands of words a day, so maybe I should… relax the filter at the start? Actually there’s a lot to get into here. Maybe I’ll get into it in the next wordvomit.