Because people complain about virtually everything? You straight-up say you don’t want to hear people blabbing about how wonderful being a parent is OR complaining about how much of a pain it is. You just aren’t interested. Which is fine!
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Replying to @mileshuman @arthur_affect
But if you’ve ever done a deep dive on the psych literature on parenting and time spent on it and how it relates to metrics of happiness and life satisfaction, I haven’t seen it. There has been a fair amount written about it. There is data.
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Replying to @mileshuman
Yeah I've heard about it I am deeply, deeply suspicious of any kind of study that tries to "go beyond simplistic measures of day to day happiness" with broader statements about "fulfillment" and "purpose" "Fulfillment" is just a word, an extremely tautological one
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Replying to @arthur_affect @mileshuman
Hell, I'll be extremely blunt about this The time in my life when I was most at risk of actually killing myself was the time when if interviewed me - which people actually did - I would've said I was closest to "fulfilling my purpose in life"
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Replying to @arthur_affect @mileshuman
And now I'm extremely on team fuck that noise In my book happiness is measured in how many hours of uninterrupted sleep you get and little else
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Replying to @arthur_affect @mileshuman
(For the peanut gallery - it's fairly uncontroversial that studies show parents are less happy than non-parents on "superficial" measures of how calm, cheerful, relaxed, etc you are at any given moment of any given day)
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Replying to @arthur_affect @mileshuman
(In response to these studies, which weren't telling anyone anything they didn't know but still upset a lot of people, they did other studies saying parents report more "fulfillment" or "sense of purpose" or whatever than non-parents Again, nothing we didn't know)
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Replying to @arthur_affect @mileshuman
Fun fact from my long useless BA in psychology: Parents love their children because their brain releases chemicals telling them to bond. Babies are basically heroin dealers. This is the only reason they put up with them, they're chasing that high.
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Replying to @DonQuixano @arthur_affect
Sure, but if you want to think about it that way, the entirety of our human experience is attributable to our brains releasing chemicals telling us to X. Fall in love. Appreciate nature. Enjoy a first-person-shooter video game. Fall asleep. Everything.
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Replying to @mileshuman @arthur_affect
I mean yes but I'm suggesting it's much stronger stuff than usual. We're comparing weed, booze, or cocaine to something much stronger (and addictive) like heroin, which makes sense given the lack of immediate reward for the effort of parenting beyond the offspring existing.
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The whole deadbeat dad phenomenon indicates that, for a certain segment of the population in hostile environments, it wears off pretty fast
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Which, if we were actually talking about heroin, would be an inspiring story of kicking the habit ("As soon as the high faded I looked around at my crappy house filled with the smell of dirty diapers and realized - this isn't worth it")
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Replying to @arthur_affect @DonQuixano
Deadbeat dads: the inspirational heroes who’ve beat their oxytocin addiction and are living their best lives.
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