The Most Powerful Force in the Universe
It’s been said that the most powerful force in the universe is compound interest. It has a converse: erosion. Erosion applies not only to matter but also to mind. The mental form of erosion is, of course, forgetting. And the most insidious form of forgetting is forgetting your reasons for doing things.
The mind is like a leaky bucket that you have to keep refilling, by reminding yourself. Just as we can’t fill our stomachs once and call it good, so we can’t stock our heads with our reasons for doing things, our motivations, and expect them to stay there. Not without consistently revisiting them. Not without reminding ourselves why we’re doing things, what our purpose is.
I was reminded of this by a bowl of raspberry cream cheese. An innocuous thing to find on your kitchen counter, you might think. For me, that bowl sealed a conclusion in my mind with the with crushing weight of a castle gate falling shut. And when the dust settled, I found myself wondering about my wife’s sanity.
Why had she seemingly changed so much in the two years since having our son? At one level, it was obvious: sleep deprivation. In my layman’s understanding, not getting enough sleep changes the chemistry of your body, especially your brain. Do that for long enough and it also starts to quite permanently change the wiring and shape of your brain.
But I understood that there was also a conscious component. People’s values change when they have a child. More precisely, they add into their lives a new value (noun) that they hopefully value (verb) more highly than most of their prior values. That means this new, higher value gets more claim on their time and energy. And the purpose of expending that time and energy is analogous to the purposes of going after food to feed oneself, to sustain the process of once again going after food to feed oneself. And likewise, it’s analogous to the purposes of thinking through things, determining what we ought to do and why, and then doing those things, so that we can once again think through things, come up with reasons for what we want to do and why, and then do those things. That is, the ultimate reason for pursuing values is to sustain our lives and, hopefully, make them happy.
But the raspberry cream cheese proclaimed otherwise. It said to me in that moment that the ultimate purpose of adding this wonderful new value, this literal ball of joy, to our lives was not to enrich our lives, but to replace them. It symbolized for me, the conclusion that my wife had forgotten—if only for a moment, but perhaps longer—why we had a kid: to make our lives better.
That’s why I did it anyway. “Lord knows” there are all kinds of messed up reasons people have kids. But I think the only reason to do it, and the only way to do it, is to help a child thrive for the enjoyment it brings you to see him come into his own. There’s literally nothing more rewarding, in my close to forty years on this planet, than seeing your kid develop skills, preferences, personality, character—and knowing that you are cultivating that.
But some people, especially mothers, forget that there’s a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. They forget their reasons for doing things, for having kids—and perhaps much else, thanks to the sleep deprivation. They become the snake in the children’s story that is so greedily hungry that he errantly starts eating his own tail. Then, before he’s knows it, he disappears. Except the impulse in their case is not their own greedy hunger but their kids’.
Kids are pure in this regard. They want things, and they ask for them, and they go after them. They care about others insofar as those others enrich their lives. But they don’t want to stop wanting things, nor can they. They aren’t “in their heads” in that way. They haven’t been taught the vile idea of renunciation. The milk is good. It nourishes them. They want it. They want enough of it to fill their tummies. Maybe even a bit more.
But mothers especially tend to forget about their own tummies. Almost every video I’ve seen by the funny mom on the Instagram account BigTimeAdulting ends with the command, “Get yourself a snack!” It’s tongue-in-cheek exaggeration, but it’s also not. It’s humorous, but it’s also a vital reminder to moms to care for themselves too. And, colored by my raspberry-cream-cheese flashbacks, it’s easy enough also to see in it a reminder to moms not to forget the reason they had a kid.
Your job is not to become a culinary extraordinaire, to whip up some new dish every morning for a picky eater. There are basics that work, and that fit into your life—that leave you time to think about your own breakfast too, or at least enough to get yourself a snack. You’re not a snake that eats its own tail and then disappears. You’re a human being—with a kid, yes, but also: a life. And you can’t show that kid how to live that life and thrive if you let him gobble up the seed corn. You have to keep something for yourself, or you won’t be able to keep something of your self.
To hold on to your reasons for doing things in the war zone of parenting, or of building a company, writing a book, a symphony, or whatever your “kid” is—whatever you’re bringing into this world—that is difficult, and its difficulty should not be underestimated. Because erosion, not compound interest, is the most powerful and pervasive force in the universe. Making growth your default is an immense human achievement. But erosion has the benefit of being nature’s default, automatic and unstoppable. To fight it takes the fortitude to get yourself a snack, and to remind yourself that what you’re trying to create is not one irresistible breakfast but a whole damn beautiful life.
[Sorry for springing a non-music post on you. I hope you find it nonetheless noteworthy.]
Great one, Jon. My wife and I talk about how we would live with kids and how we would raise them all the time. Why we might love to have them, and ultimately, why we don't have them. (It's a narrow margin that has kept winning out!) And just recently, at a coffee shop after morning tennis, how we might lose this, and also how we might lose ourselves in other ways. I told her that we would not. We would just have to recalibrate all our habits and routines in a way that gives us the room for ourselves. And she does know it's true when I come back with this stuff. She has also said over the years that she would be afraid that she would be a crazy, Korean tiger mom, getting angry with them, etc. I always assure that she wouldn't. And anyway, I wouldn't let her. Haha
But while it would be true that we might not play tennis any morning we like, we would still do it, and we would still have coffee. Only our kid(s) would be there. And we would talk to them, share it with them, show them how to be when out, how to pay attention to things, etc. And that would be a different delight than how we currently do it. Everything would be a different kind of delight than how we currently do it.
But I always insist that we would never give ourselves up for our kids. (I mean, ultimately, I would give up anything for them, but I mean our SELVES, in the way you were writing about.) In fact, that is what we can't give up, because the most fundamental way we teach them is to model good behavior, a good life. I wouldn't allow myself to be a frazzled, flustered dad who didn't take care of his health, grooming, work, home, etc. And neither would my wife.
I also always add that of course I don't mean we would be perfect and always right on point. There would be scrambling, periods of burnout, etc. This is true just managing the two of us! But we always gather ourselves and get back on track, usually a new and higher track (this is the jagged upward graph of progress). And the ruts are shorter and shorter as we get wiser. I'm sure it would be the same with kids. Just different.
We have (half) joked for years that we ought to have kids just to show people how we would do it! To answer the, "Oh, you don't know. You don't KNOW." But I do know I would never compromise my very life. It's the one thing I need to maintain to show my son or daughter. But that window has all but finally closed at our age.
You guys are doing great, Jon, just be being good people. Good luck with it. And enjoy!
Thought provoking article. I don't have a child. Always wanted one. I've been a teacher and a mentor and a leader. I can relate a little bit to the feeling of seeing someone whom you have nurtured, as they come into their own. It's a great feeling. But when they're not your actual kid, that feeling fades. I also appreciated how you tried to relate the feeling of nurturing a child to nurturing a project. I see that. It's not the same, but it has similarities. Compound interest works best when the relationship is maintained. That's probably why the parent-child relationship, (and perhaps the relationships of lovers,) is richer than any others.