Copy-paste family (Ricky Weekly #90)
This is where I share 3 things every week with my friends and anyone else interested.
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A picture from my life:
I went to see Dear San Francisco at Club Fugazi. Incredible how much they were able to do from a tiny stage. Highly recommend!
A thing on my mind:
Whenever friends talk about having children, I like to play a game where I guess how many they’d want. The answer is almost always the same number they grew up with, and the rationale never sounds that sophisticated. If you grew up with siblings, you might say, “wouldn’t it be lonely to be the only child?” If you were an only child, you might say, “one is enough because I was happy!” I feel like I can play the same game and guess how you’d want to raise your family. In a city or suburb? In an apartment or a house with a backyard and a pool? Nuclear family? Extended family? Public or private school? Divorce ok? Religion? How much of your career are you willing to sacrifice? I’m ignorant here because I haven’t had to step through these decisions, but my guess is that it might be difficult to think about them from first principles because the stakes are so high. It’s easier to simply copy-paste the model we grew up with if we think we turned out ok.
And then there’s the trauma. If church f’ed you up as a kid, no-church might be a non-negotiable for you. If dad wasn’t around or never showed any love, you might choose to be very present and affectionate to make up for what you didn’t get growing up. A big public school could’ve given you the toughness and personality you are proud to wear today, or it may have scarred you enough that you’d never want to subject your children to that kind of brutality. So it seems like, on top of copy-pasting the parts that worked, we also have non-negotiable reactions to past trauma.
I like thinking about how we come to want the things we want, especially something as consequential as starting a family, but it’s also a bit scary. I think I turned out fine, but I don’t have any desire to copy-paste the “model” I grew up with. While common, my upbringing was not considered “normal” or what a family should look like by the dominant American, Christian-based, family values. That’s scary, but I soothe myself by watching a wholesome Taiwanese reality show that follows a different family’s story every episode. Single-parent, divorced parents, deceased parents, estranged parents, same-sex, cross-cultural, cross-border, differently-abled, multi-generational, adopted, blue collar, white collar, religious, non-religious, etc. and every episode shows me that anything goes and any arrangement can be okay. Taiwan is still a traditional Confucian society, but because of its counter position against China and obsession with freedom, there’s a market for a show like this to highlight the society’s diversity of values and infinite possibilities. That’s encouraging to me.
On my own, I’ve also collected stories from friends and acquaintances that go against the traditional family narrative, like stories of people who decided against marriage and/or starting families, or people who chose to be nomadic with children, homeschool parents, families where one parent works abroad but still loving, etc. I wish there were more positive stories to show a wider variety of ways to live life successfully rather than stories that prey on our fears and insecurities about living life different from the norm.
A piece of content I recommend:
The quest for psychological perfection by on Substack (h/t
)Thanks to my friend Jason Shen I am now a fan of Dr. Gena Gorlin’s writing. Many of the topics she writes about are the same ones I’ve thought or even written about, but I clearly don’t understand them as well as she does.
This particular article talks about the idea of “perfectionism,” how it’s been maligned by society, and separates the “drill sergeant” (aka arbitrary standards) and the “neurotic” kind of perfectionism from the “builder’s ideal” where the perfectionism stems from simply caring about excellence.
My bonus rec from Dr. Gorlin is her article on “Vision or Delusion?” (Part 1, Part 2). If you compare them to what I’ve written in the past about this topic, you’ll notice a big gap in my understanding…
If these topics are too serious, here’s a fun rec: Chibi Unity’s EPIC performance on AGT!
🤗
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As always, you can find out what I’m thinking in more real-time on Twitter and my essays are on my website. My primary focus (and where I focus) is on Flow Club.
There are so many different paths - not to permanent happiness, which is a delusion, but to satisfaction with you have achieved and what you have overcome.