You’ve decided to leave your children $0. Or not. Either way, you certainly want them properly developed such that they need not be left anything. So how does one “let kids be kids” while also cultivating a confident, independent resourcefulness in them?

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Pillar One: Take pride in being quite competent in many, many domains. Sounds obvious… until you recall how the world dispenses prestige. It’s a dinner party with well-educated professionals casually bragging about their lives. By accepting Pillar One, you are accepting that these guests will likely have you beat. They will flaunt social currency that you don’t have, and what you do have won’t be as valuable. “That’s cool you fixed the garbage disposal. I had my maid do it when mine broke. By the way, I just made president! Look at my new Porsche.” Without true belief in Pillar One, it will be all too easy to surrender your values and compete with this fuck on his terms.

No! To earn that “true belief,” I believe Pillar One must be instilled early before calculable opportunity costs hit and money-centered social pressures take hold. If not, the compelling logic of time is money will appear unbeatable. You look at a to-do list; you look at your salary as an hourly rate; you start justifying all manner of convenience as “savings” in effort of the more productive activity (i.e., work). Repeat, repeat, repeat and you become someone who is extremely good at one thing (work) and trash at everything else. The fat billionaire who can’t change a tire. This character is worthy of our derision. Yet without an appropriate grounding philosophy, simple cost-benefit analysis will lead anyone else to the same place.

Pillar One tips:

1. Celebrate broad competence. “Damn, Mom is sooooo good at x. You know those fucks down the street actually pay someone to do x? Ha. They are missing out on so much! Look how fun this is!”
2. Support development of broad competence. “But Dad, I don’t know how.” “Great. Let’s learn.” “Can’t you just do it for me?” “No. We are xxxxxxxxx and we figure things out ourselves. Don’t worry, I’ll be with you the whole time. LFG!”
3. Reminders of what you now have. “Remember when you didn’t want to learn? Remember when it sucked? Remember when you told me Tommy down the street didn’t have to do it? Tell me how it feels now in all your power. Stand and feel your worth, young buck!”
4. Earned not given. You simply cannot buy competence and it can never be taken away. We call this sub·​stance. Related passage from the absolutely lovely The Lincoln Highway by Amor Towles:

I am of the opinion, Professor, that everything of value in this life must be earned. That it should be earned. Because those who are given something of value without having to earn it are bound to squander it. I believe that one should have to earn respect. One should earn trust. One should earn the love of a woman, and the right to call oneself a man. And one should also earn the right to hope. At one time I had a wellspring of hope—a wellspring I had not earned. And not knowing what it was worth, on the day I left my wife and child, I squandered it. So over these past eight and a half years, I have learned to live without hope, just as surely as Cain lived without it once he entered the land of Nod.

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Pillar Two: Be extremely wary of convenience and luxury (CAL). As CAL increases, creativity and resourcefulness decrease. You are bored. You only have a tennis ball. Go! Conversely, you are bored, and you only have every goddamn toy on the planet. I’m betting on the first kid in the long-run. I’m also betting the first kid ends up with a lower threshold for pleasure. That is, if you, say, eat only $200 steaks, the possible meals that will leave you satisfied are quite small compared to the person who only eats canned beans. I’m not suggesting only eating beans; I am suggesting at least some healthy randomness leaping between maximal and minimal CAL.

Perhaps that kid/toy example doesn’t really drive home the point.[1] Try instead the thought exercise where your car breaks down in western Nebraska miles from civilization, your cell phone is dead, and you are alone. Nobody would wish for this, but if you retained any “just figure it out” ability that this entire letter is trying to help foster, the desperation of the situation allows you to tap into creativity previously unknown.[2] These creative reserves will never be harvested from a position of comfort.

Time is money is of course a seamless way into CAL. Why go to the grocery store when you can have groceries delivered and keep working? Furthermore, grocery store trips don’t enhance Pillar One, right? And you’re not really losing creativity, right? True, true. However, CAL ↑/creativity ↓ is but one reason for Pillar Two. Another is that too much CAL restricts one’s interactions with different segments of society. Not only does that Porsche fuck—almost certainly an automatic transmission driver, btw—have too few skills, he also would feel uncomfortable in too many settings. Put him in a junkyard, a Spirit flight, a rest stop in rural Montana, or even a low-end grocery store, and for all his alleged “confidence,” he will struggle to connect. To push this deficit out of his mind, he may well look down at “these people,” which all but guarantees a grim fate where he succeeds externally but not internally.

Pillar Two tips:

1. Just because you can buy a new thing doesn’t mean you should. “But Dad, my glove is worn out and Tommy got a new one.” “You know what, Tommy is soft. xxxxxxxxx are not soft.”
2. Make deal-finding a game. “If you really want a new glove, let’s find a deal on FB Marketplace. Let’s have you negotiate it. Let’s not rush it.”
3. Explicitly restrict oneself to little amounts of money. “We have $20 to spend on today’s activities. How should we spend it?”
4. Expose kids to money. Somewhere in the “let kids be kids” mentality is a taboo around money discussions. This leaves kids to learn about a centerpiece of our world from… um… schools that lack financial literacy classes?… the Internet?… luck?… The School of Hard Knocks? Bad options. Gift your kids a massive edge with candor in this area. Fortunately, unlike so many potential edges that kids reject, kids generally love learning about money. It’s so real! It’s so forbidden! It’s so powerful!

5. Are you really appreciating the goodness of this foray into CAL or is it some mindless default? Fresh from winning the Tokyo ATP event last October—and surpassing $9 million in prize money for 2010—Nadal surprised other passengers on Air China’s 3½-hour flight to Shanghai by settling into seat 29C. “I listen to my music,” Nadal says of his in-flight habits. “It sounds the same as it does in [first class].”

1. Pay attention to good parts of non-luxury. “You notice how this mechanic seems to enjoy his work more than that Porsche fuck?” Or, “Isn’t it cool the diversity of people at this here Olive Garden?!!?”
2. Gratitude is easy via deprivation. Wanna have the best lunch in what feels like centuries? Don’t eat for a week. Or, more plausibly, eat bare essentials for a week, and then eat “normal” foods again. This works for everything. Stay in a motel, then return to the Ritz. No electronics for a weekend, then return to a life of screens. On and on.
3. Increase awareness and control of impulses which are constantly under attack in our temptation-saturated modern world. “But I’m hungry NOW.” “I hear you… and we are going to walk to the restaurant.” “Walk?!?!! But my legs are tired and I’m hungry now!!!” “We are xxxxxxxxx and we are not soft like Tommy’s family and we can walk when we are tired and hungry. Let me see you flex those leg muscles. Flex ‘em goddamnnit!!!”
4. Provide support for finding answers, rarely the convenience of the answer itself. “But why is the sun hot?” “Let’s go to the library and check out a book on the sun.”

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Pillar Three: Run hard whenever curiosity strikes. Take away that Porsche fuck’s job and give him the gift of time. Call it Covid or severance or whatever. He now wakes up with nowhere to go and nothing to do. He’ll probably like it at first. Sleep. Party. Watch those shows he didn’t have time for before. Then what? He doesn’t really have interests or hobbies. And while he may have a short list of things that would be cool to learn like a foreign language,[3] he, crushingly, doesn’t have the skill to truly attack his short list. Discipline is a necessary skill here, sure, and this dude may have it. Crucially, it isn’t sufficient.[4] He lost what most kids naturally have: curiosity. The kid isn’t interested in the sun because of dinner parties or resumés or the feeling of power and accomplishment. No. He’s interested because the world IS interesting. This fact gets unlearned over time partially because people don’t adhere to Pillar Three. So over and over and over, program a link between I’m curious —> I’m chasing that feeling —> I’m still running hard toward that interesting thing even though I started this run on smooth pavement and now, wtf, I’m running through this awful mud and the wins aren’t quite so easy —> Oh yea, for those select few who even started this run this is the part where they stop running and the skill of being aggressively curious dies a little and that won’t be me. No way. I shall keep this childlike curiosity forever —> Wow, it sure is great chasing curiosity.[5]

Pillar Three tips:

1. Ask people for help. Chasing curiosity by yourself in the library is way harder than utilizing humankind in the pursuit. Kids have a massive advantage here in that everyone loves helping kids. “Dear Professor Y, I’m a 7-year-old wondering why the sun…
2. Word is your bond. This can be tricky because you want to encourage bouncing from curiosity to curiosity while also sticking with something while also appreciating that sometimes we are wrong about what we expect will be stimulating. If you do too much mud-running, that may become the primary association with curiosity and could lead to its diminishment. Still, “Hey, you said you were interested in the sun and you said you wanted to understand Z, so let’s make sure we get to Z before quitting.”
3. Demonstrate curiosity as a parent. Kids follow energy. Maybe not always where you want them to go, but they can sniff out inauthenticity. If you are blah blah curiosity blah blah while on your phone and never showing true interest in much of anything, well, then, good luck instilling Pillar Three. If, instead, you are raving and showing how cool Z is, then probabilities have tilted in your favor.

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You undoubtedly face a great challenge, one where so much will always be out of your control. Even if my advice is flawless, nobody can force a kid to respond—some will take to it and some won’t. The upside, not that you need me to tell you, is the rich meaning and joy that comes from great challenges. Your thoughtfulness and open-mindedness about parenting count as important proof points that you are more than up to the task.

 

 

 

[1] Because you aren’t a kid. You are a MAN!

[2] One more passage from The Lincoln Highway:

If I learned anything along the way, it’s that the point of utter abandonment—the moment at which you realize no one will be coming to your aid, not even your Maker—is the very moment in which you may discover the strength required to carry on. The Good Lord does not call you to your feet with hymns from cherubim and Gabriel blowing his horn. He calls you to your feet by making you feel alone and forgotten. For only when you have seen that you are truly forsaken will you embrace the fact that what happens next rests in your hands, and your hands alone.

[3] A total waste if you ask me and almost certainly on his list because it would play well at that dinner party above.

[4] LSAT Test 142 // Section 4 // Question 22

Fish with teeth specialized for scraping algae occur in both Flower Lake and Blue Lake. Some biologists argue that because such specialized characteristics are rare, fish species that have them should be expected to be closely related. If they are closely related, then the algae-scraping specialization evolved only once. But genetic tests show that the two algae-scraping species, although possibly related, are not closely related. Thus, the algae-scraping specialization evolved more than once.

The reasoning in the argument is flawed in that it:

(a) infers a cause merely from a correlation

(b) infers that just because the evidence for a particular claim has not yet been confirmed, that claim is false

(c) takes a sufficient condition as a necessary one

(d) infers merely because something was likely to occur that it did occur

(e) appeals to the authority of biologists who may not be representative of all biologists with expertise in the relevant area

 

[5] It’s possible, especially in youth, to skip the middle two steps à la how kids “exercise” (by playing) without ever tasting the grind adults associate with “exercise.”