Fatherhood
Today my son, Alan Bolte, turned 9 months old. Becoming a parent has been a very unusual experience for me, so I thought I should write about it.
It would not be fully accurate to say that I think Alan is cute. A more accurate articulation of how I feel towards my son is that the value of everything else in the world is measured relative to him. I don't think this happened immediately. I spent most of my wife's pregnancy living apart from her, while working on my startup, so finally holding our baby in my arms was kind of like holding an alien that came out of nowhere. As I've gotten to spend more time with him, I've started projecting more of myself onto him - giving him sticks to swing, letting him touch trees and flowers, tossing him up in the air so that he learns to love excitement and adventure. It also helps that as he's grown older he has started to bear a stronger familial resemblance to me. His head circumference is 99th percentile, like I was when I was a baby, which even a first-year phrenology student could tell you bodes very well (although it made my wife worry that he might have a subdural hematoma).
I think more people should have kids. I think it results in better decision-making, particularly if you are someone with an internal locus of control. It forces you to face reality about the types of people you're surrounding yourself with, because you're not just putting yourself at risk, you're putting your child at risk, too. That framing forces you to think through decisions more carefully, and makes it easier to exercise good judgment about what tradeoffs are worth making. I don't think this leads to risk aversion, necessarily - I think most good people still weigh major life decisions within the context of their own mortality, and the opportunity cost of wasting your time on Earth still looms larger than worrying about if your kid can go to private school. It's more that it gets you outside your own head. It makes you more sensitive to when people are bullshitting you, stringing you along or trying to screw you over, because it feels like they're also trying to do the same to your child.
Having a child has felt like filling in a missing puzzle piece. I have wanted to be a father for a while. I try to be fairly deliberate and thoughtful about big life decisions, like getting married, leaving FAIR to start a startup, and trying another startup when that one didn't go the way I'd hoped, and when I get fixated on something it becomes very hard for me to stop thinking about it. A big component in my decision to get married was that not getting married felt like a waste of time. I knew what I wanted from my wife - a woman who would apply her full energy and intellect towards building an extraordinary life with me - and I didn't see any value from waiting around to start building that life. I have essentially the same feeling about becoming a father. I feel today that I am fully alive; there is nothing I'm waiting for or putting off; all the constraints are known; the mountain is visible, all that remains is to climb.