Nine Things I Learned in Ninety Years

Even with sub-replacement birth rates I don't see humanity at a threat of extinction (from natural population decline!) in the next tens of thousands of years. And even if -- what's the issue? It's only humans who think humanity is this great gift to the universe that needs to be protected and spread.

Maybe a good part of this is the risks and responsibilities without a co-operative village to grow families interactively.

What if the lingering problem is one of scale, that has not yet been solved?

Remember this whole thing is from a 90-year old and the smaller the village, the fewer the population of any one age group.

It's really making people think about all kinds of things all over the ball park.

If it's a small enough village you can't end up with a crowd of 1st graders ever, for instance, so age segregation as we know it for any years at a time has no similarity, and across-the-board people of all ages are part of the same group more so. Which means for one thing, if there is a 90-year old among the village, almost every one would be familiar with interacting with them routinely, as they were all growing up no less. An overwhelmingly more abundant number of adults would effectively be taking care of the children from start to finish, compared to how widespread adult influence is not intentionally minimized today, but ends up that way with same-age peers being more influential and naturally less mature.

Counter-intuitively it may even be that humanity, in the body of each family itself, thrives better when there remains satisfying group support for community focus more so than separate individual cocoons, which today are each more like on their own in rapidly changing times.

The villages humans mainly evolved to thrive in are about the opposite of what we have now in the big city.

It's also a good reminder that those of us who are a lot closer to 90 than we are 20 have still got a lot to learn.

So no quitting or you'll never be as wise as this letter shows.

Quantifying something doesn't explain it, it just... Quantifies it, deeper inspection is needed to understand what the statistics says.

You are prescribing what needs to be done based on something that is, ultimately, descriptive.

That's why I'm saying you have cause and effect in the wrong order: children issues are tied to one or both parents not caring about them, and a symptom of that was having children before marriage, when marriage was "the only way" to a family. Nowadays things are different, and you can totally be a functional family without signing any contract on paper.

Picture two scenarios:

1. A loving unmarried couple, regardless of gender, sexual orientation, or child bearing, lives in an affluent neighbourhood, in a rich country, have steady incomes, and decide to have a child. After ten years they decide “I love you so much. I don’t need a piece of paper to prove that, but let’s get married. It’ll be a great opportunity to connect our friends and family, and it’ll give us some legal and financial protection when one of us dies”.

2. In a poor neighbourhood, a woman who was mistreated all her life marries her high school sweetheart, who turn out to be abusive. He not only beats her, he rapes her regularly. Like too many victims of domestic violence, she’s afraid to move away. Eventually she becomes pregnant and has the child against her will.

Which of those do would produce the better outcome?

Being fatherless isn’t in itself the issue, but everything which came before to reach that point might be. There is a huge difference between not having a father because he abandoned you, or because he died, or because your mother as a single affluent woman with the means to do so decided to do in-vitro fertilisation.

I highly recommend “New Family Values”, by Andrew Solomon, to get a feeling for the different types of families which work. It goes way beyond “one mother, one father, married”.

https://andrewsolomon.com/books/new-family-values-audiobook/

If I overstated my point, it's only because I was pushing back against the idea that education, employment, and a traditional family are equally attainable by all, and if someone has failed in any of these areas, it's because they lack virtue compared to other people (many of whom had more advantageous starting points in life, but supposedly that doesn't matter).

Or in simpler terms, "poor people are poor because they're bad and they deserve it". It's a sentiment that's been very useful for the ultra-wealthy class, and detrimental to everyone else, not just the poor.

It is not reasonable to tell a child sold into slavery or forced to be a soldier to “make their own luck”, that “society, and the wider economy are for everyone to navigate”. A person in the eye of storm and another in calm waters cannot navigate the same way.

People who firmly believe they above all “made their own luck” are the ones who had such a large amount of it outside their control they don’t even realise how much of it they had, like a fish unable to perceive the water.

That is what all societies are finding out right now. Before, they could count on women having babies providing a need to hope, but now that children are optional, societies don’t seem to have a replacement mechanism.

It's why the quote has survived since 1854.

> "dans les champs de l'observation, le hasard ne favorise que les esprits préparés" ("In the field of observation, chance favors only the prepared mind")

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_Pasteur

Are you saying that no one of color in that era made any worthwhile contribution to the world? Or are you saying that every white person of the era should hold themselves to the standard of achievement of Thomas Jefferson since that is the power of the privilege they held?

I personally know handful of extremely lucky people who spent their entire lives doing the exact opposite of this

So it works, sometimes, on limited populations.

On the other hand, if you received nothing in return for your work, would you do it?