Mason  🏃‍♂️ ✂️

The reality is that *most* of the constraints children operate under have little or nothing to do with their health and safety. They reflect parents working very hard to fulfill social expectations and guide their children down a path that made sense approx one generation ago.

Hewing to the past is a fair criticism. But pity us: it's always hard to see what parts of the present will make the best future. As with any evolutionary family tree, there are many dead ends

It's *impossible* for anyone to predict the future in which their kids will operate The entire point of the thread I linked below the original tweet is that this begs us to have some humility

I entirely agree about humility. But I still think we can do better than "we cannot know". About the other thread: yes yes let's not strangle our Zuckerbergs but (a) most kids aren't Zuckerberg and they still need an education and (b) even Zuck didn't have Twitter

Here's what I can tell you: my intelligent, well-meaning parents fucked up. Badly. I'm not Zuckerberg, but I'm certain that school cognitively stunted me. I've met more interesting people, received more opportunity & been offered more jobs via twitter than any other tool I use.

Based on what you've said here, I suspect your intuitions about these things are terribly, terribly off. Maybe I'm broadly wrong; maybe your path to happiness and fulfillment is much more standard and requires subservience to certain norms that don't work for me.

But frankly I'm really fucking tired of people enjoying the oddness of my life from afar while insisting that they and their kids are too stupid, "normal," reckless or passive to stop going through the motions themselves and start playing a little bit

Somewhere upthread Jeffrey noted how crazy it would be to leave a child in a casino with a credit card, and I found myself thinking: why? If your child can't be trusted to *that* degree, something has gone very, very wrong.