sj_zero on Nostr: We live in an era of civilisational collapse. It's already baked into the cake, it's ...

We live in an era of civilisational collapse. It's already baked into the cake, it's already happening, the world 100 years from now is not going to look like the world today. All you need to do is look at birth rates, and how long they've been as low as they have been. Therefore, the highest calling as a parent it's not maximizing their individual happiness, or their market success, is building them into an individual with the strength, adaptability, grit, and emotional stability to carry forward meaning, virtue, and civilization through a collapse even if institutions that we rely on fail. In this way, parenting is not just an act of personal love (though of course it is), but an act of love for all of humanity, helping to carry forward the flame I got everything you feel worth preserving in your family and our culture.

In case you think I'm a doomer or a prepper, there's a few points. First, if you end up making your kid anxious and nihilistic then they aren't mentally emotionally stable, strong, adaptable, and they will lack grit. Civilizations end all the time, that doesn't mean the end of everything and everyone. Arguably the World wars ended Western Civilization as it once existed, and we are living in the aftermath of that right now. Second, preparing a child for collapse looks pretty similar to preparing them for no collapse. You still want to raise a kid who is strong, adaptable, has grit, and has emotional stability.

In an archetypical way, every generation sees a collapse and rebirth as the new generations pick up with their parents left them. In some ways, there was a massive collapse in the 1970s, in the world of the 1980s is nothing like the world of the 1960s. By the way people playing the baby boomers for what the world turned into in the 1980s, but they didn't really have much of a choice with the world collapsing around them.

Another important thing is that people might misunderstand and think you raise your kid hard and mean if you think that a collapse is coming. I don't think that there's any evidence of that being the right way to do things. Your kids grow up seeing the world through the lens that you give them with the way that you treat them in their childhood. If you show them that you are anxious, that you are scared, that you are weak, when they are going to assume that that's the way that the world works and how you have to live. By contrast, if you show them love, and joy, and competence, if you show them how to live in a world without relying on massive institutions and every moment of every day, then that will be the way that they grow up. The sort of child who makes it through the collapse will have a secure attachment to their parents, many wonderful memories playing outdoors, maybe learning to weld, to build things, they will remember going through their life being able to do things and figuring out the struggles along the way. And so when they aren't getting their hand held they will know that they are strong enough to deal with things.

This whole concept was hinted at in the last chapter of my first book, the graysonian ethic, which warns my son that nobody owes you anything, and you have to have a combination of gratitude and skepticism for the things you do get. My next book which I'm releasing in the next month or two once editing is complete is actually about the collapse, looking at a world 100 years in the future. The key is that just because civilization collapses doesn't mean that's the end of everything, or that we go into a mad Max dystopia. It means whoever remains will need to lay a New foundation of meeting, values, and make sense of world that no longer makes sense under the old paradigm.