family studies

Why having kids is bonkers (if you’re addicted to comfort). Hot take: If your life is all about chasing pleasure, getting the newest shiny thing, and looking for your next dopamine hit, then yeh – having kids is nuts. They’re messy, noisy, and they’ll likely ruin your dreams of becoming a social media influencer. But look around: something bigger is going on with those dropping birth rates.

Sure, economics matters. But my Irish grandparents had five kids, and they didn’t exactly summer in the Bahamas. I’ve seen families in Africa with seven or eight kids despite barely scraping by. So maybe it’s not just about money.

We’ve built a culture that’s an adult daycare for the comfort-addicted. We’re encouraged – by society, marketing, and that little voice in our heads – to stay immature consumers. It’s profitable and predictable, right? Because if you’re constantly shopping, scrolling, or swiping, you’re not rocking the boat.

From a purely “maximise pleasure” angle, kids are a bonkers choice. They’ll cost you sleep, money, and the ability to go to your hot yoga class. But historically, people saw beyond short-term gratification. They had kids out of a sense of meaning, continuity, legacy. Today, we’re not just lacking cash; we’re starved for connection to something bigger than our own endless entertainment feed.

So, it’s about more than just economics. It’s a spiritual crisis. We’re collectively disconnected from the deeper stuff: community, purpose, “God” (call it what you like). And until we find our way back to that, birth rates might keep plummeting because, honestly, who wants to sacrifice the “me me me” of their Netflix-binging comfort for “grown-up responsibilities”?

I’m not saying everyone has to have kids. But maybe it’s time we grew up. I’m certainly thinking about it 😉 Or at least started asking the uncomfortable questions: Do we want a life that’s only about the next hit, or might there be more to it? Believe me, I’ve tried it and it’s not all it’s cracked up to be. That’s why I’m planning some pretty big life changes.

Anyway, that’s just something to chew on. Just do so before your next Amazon package arrives.

Ancestral trauma/patterns is real? bullshit? I've been working with a healer the past year that holds a more ancestral trauma frame being transmitted down the line. To believe such a thing, you kinda have to believe there's either (A) a non-material way of transmitting such trauma across generations or (B) we simply don't have the physical causation yet.

We do have the epigenetics research that shows descendants of people from poverty or famine have an effect even if their own upbringing didn't feature it at all.

On another hand, whatever is true subjectively is well true subjectively. 

Is it simply an interpretation of our inner experience or could there be explanatory power?

Gun violence in the USA schools. This weekend Stephanie got onto an instagram rabbithole which took her into some dark, near-conspiracy places about gun violence. The sad bit was of course the increase in polarization, rather than an increase in compassion, or even solutions focus. It’s much easier to blame an other than try to sort out a super complex, nuanced, and ambiguous problem.

This topic is interesting in general to me, and it kicked off a beautiful discussion on the UpTrust slack thread (it seems we’re influencing ourselves to be better online conversationalists everywhere!), but it also made we wonder how to solve the school-shooting issue in the USA? What are the nuanced, synthetic perspectives? For example, even comparing data about school shootings across the world can be shaped, interpreted, mixed. Many of the countries that have fewer school shootings (all of them) have much higher death-by-firearm rates, or death by gang-violence, or war, etc. So it’s difficult to get good comparisons, even if we ignore cultural approaches. Also

How do we take an integral approach which addresses all four quadrants?
- UL psyche: mental health—but what does this mean? Where does the money come from to increase such mental health?
- LL culture: US roots in revolution and gun ownership, media, glorification of shooters
- UR behavior: Gun safety training? mandatory? What can we learn from Israel and Switzerland, who have similar or higher gun ownership rates but no school shootings? Quick research: it seems like increasing metal detectors and stuff is NOT a solution that works. What other behavior changes do?
- LR systems: Gun control—even as a gun owning Texan, I think it’s obvious at this point that things need to change. I don’t have much research or understanding so probably people have a lot to say about the nuanced ways of doing this, and I’m sure I’m naive in my suggestion here but it seems like there could be various licenses like there are for driving; the more dangerous a weapon is, the more training you have to prove you’ve had like getting a commercial driver’s license. It also seems like we could clearly do a two year experiment: Write a new law that expires in two years and look at the data: did we stop the shootings?

anyway this is super inchoate, but I’d love to get the collective brain’s nuanced take that can genuinely steel man all sides, understanding and including the validity of the right-wing arguments as well as seeing the problems of the left-wing solutions, the bits left on the table.

New structures for family-friends? Chatting with a friend recently and came up with this novel idea.

Historically, many people would end up married, having kids, and having responsibilities to their family and local community and groups.

These days, we have less family and civic integrity, less people are having kids. More people are creating their family of choice with friends.

I think there’s a general love and aliveness everyone wants to express and be in connection with.

But without the usual routes of kids/religion/local community, it doesn’t get routed well anymore.

We need more structures/ideas/understanding to support new kinds of families and community structures.

Examples:
How about an app that makes it easier to crowd source among trusted local friends to babysit?

Most housing is built around one nuclear family 1-4 bedrooms. But what about community homes with larger kitchens and living rooms and smaller but more bedrooms?

I’m gesturing at this general area at the idea that modern, industrial civilization is built around nuclear families but we have a lot more forms being generated now but still lagging behind in the idea/social practice/phys infrastructure to match.

New structures for family-friends? Chatting with a friend recently and came up with this novel idea.

Historically, many people would end up married, having kids, and having responsibilities to their family and local community and groups.

These days, we have less family and civic integrity, less people are having kids. More people are creating their family of choice with friends.

I think there’s a general love and aliveness everyone wants to express and be in connection with.

But without the usual routes of kids/religion/local community, it doesn’t get routed well anymore.

We need more structures/ideas/understanding to support new kinds of families and community structures.

Examples:
How about an app that makes it easier to crowd source among trusted local friends to babysit?

Most housing is built around one nuclear family 1-4 bedrooms. But what about community homes with larger kitchens and living rooms and smaller but more bedrooms?

I’m gesturing at this general area at the idea that modern, industrial civilization is built around nuclear families but we have a lot more forms being generated now but still lagging behind in the idea/social practice/phys infrastructure to match.

What kind of content do you like engaging with? I’m exploring and uptrusting and experimenting here.

Seems like some of us are into posting musings or frames we Believe In or are currently exploring. Some are treating the space like a Xanga or LiveJournal (which i love tbh). I’ve posted a practical question.

What kind of content are you enjoying? What do you want to engage with?