it’s been almost 2 months since my last post and I just wanna spend maybe 30 minutes writing something and hitting send without thinking too much about it

the main thing going on in my life right now is that i’m a dad. my son (lets call him Lentil, which is a cute little inside joke my wife and I made up last night) was born on October 20th 2023, which means he is 140 days old, or 20 weeks old, or just over 4.5 months old. I love him. I love him so much.

i have many different thoughts and feelings going on at the same time. and sometimes the challenge there is not knowing which to lead with, since reading and writing are done linearly, and the order of things influences how they are perceived

i’ve done 9 threads on twitter so far reflecting on my experience of fatherhood. I think it’s pretty clever and cool how each thread quotes the previous one. theoretically i could try and rewrite them or summarize them here, but the prospect of doing that is a little exhausting, and I think that’s actually kept me from writing. If you don’t really enjoy the reading experience on Twitter, I’ve transcribed them in full over here.

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a sort of bittersweet thing that’s been happening is that I seem to keep getting offered amazing opportunities abroad. I’ve gotten at least 4 offers that a part of me wishes I could say yes to, in Europe and in the US. but i’ve had to turn them down, because I am busy taking care of my baby. “had to” is a tricky choice of phrase. if I really badly wanted to follow through on a couple of the less-involved opportunities, my wife would be ok with me leaving for a bit. but I’m not okay with it right now. I want to be present for her and my son during this incredibly precious and challenging phase.

In a couple of days my wife and I are going to be leaving our son with my sister’s family for a few hours while we go and watch Taylor Swift perform, which will be our first date night as a couple since Lentil was born. We’re kinda nervous about it. And as I write this a part of me is sort of of meta-nervous about how that might be perceived, like how maybe some people might think it’s weak or soft to be worried about leaving a 20 week old with family for a few hours. And then I wonder why I care about whether people think I’m weak or soft, and I realize that’s probably some leftover childhood shit. The important question is, do I think I’m weak or soft, to a degree that gets in the way of me living my life the way I want to? I don’t think so. Does being wrongly perceived as weak or soft by random strangers limit me in any way? I don’t think so. Many times over the years I’ve reaffirmed to myself that I would rather be honest and deal with the consequences of that, than put on fake pretenses in the hopes that people would be kinder to me. It’s somewhat interesting to rediscover that this courage has to be remade anew each day, like how Ursula Le Guin described love: “Love doesn’t just sit there, like a stone, it has to be made, like bread; remade all the time, made new.”

Back to fake pretenses – Kurt Cobain allegedly said “I’d rather be hated for who I am, than loved for who I am not.” I loved that quote as an angsty teenager, though I also recognized that it could be maliciously interpreted to justify being an asshole. Then and again, almost anything meaningful can be creatively weaponized to justify bad things. But yeah– my point is that I’d rather bond with the people who can say, “yeah, even if you’re a tough guy, the first time you leave your baby can be kinda nerve-wracking” than the people who are either putting on a fake macho posture, or worse, so insensitive and disconnected from their empathy that they don’t feel anything for the baby that’s about to experience separation from its parents for the first time.

Anyway, the point of all of that was to contextualize the idea of me being separated from my wife and child for longer than a few hours. I could imagine leaving them maybe once Lentil can say a few words, and we could maybe Facetime or something. I don’t know yet. I’m tired and it’s hard to think straight. Which brings me to another topic I wanted to talk about: parental exhaustion.

I hesitate to say “being a parent is exhausting”. I feel like I’ve heard that a lot from a lot of people, and maybe a little too much. One of the things I’ve learned about contributing to the commons is– if everyone’s saying something, it isn’t quite necessary to say more of the same thing. Elsewhere I’ve talked about the usually-minor tragedy of someone going viral and getting criticized thousands of times for something comparatively trivial. If you made a mistake, maybe a handful of people telling you can be helpful, but do you really need to hear it five thousand times in a matter of hours? The hivemind is wonderful at a bunch of cool things, like finding obscure information, but it is terrible at delivering proportionate responses. There are multiple reasons for this, one is that “no snowflake feels responsible for the avalanche” – each individual who responds usually doesn’t feel compelled to take the time and effort to consider how their response sits against all the other responses. Then there’s also the fact that viral events tend to invite and inspire the most deranged outlier individuals to chime in with the most extreme responses. Fun!

But yeah. I believe that part of why I’m “good at twitter” is that I’m sensitive to the hivemind, and I’m pretty careful to make what I consider to be good contributions to the commons. This usually requires reading what other people are saying, which seems to be effort that other people either can’t afford to expend, or don’t care to. I can’t do much about that – but sometimes the reason people are inconsiderate is because it simply never occurred them that being considerate is an option at all. And here I can make a meaningful contribution simply by demonstrating what being considerate can look like. (There’s an essay here I’ve been meaning to write titled “Can’t, or won’t?”)

Hiveminds predate twitter, and the internet. You could say that the history of humanity is the history of hiveminds, groupthink, collective consciousness. I have a lot to say about that, a lot I want to dig into and explore and learn about that, but right now I suppose I want to talk about the parenting hivemind. A while ago I tweeted