I’ve changed my mind about a lot of things over the years, especially since becoming a parent. I’ve written about how becoming a parent has changed me, and about some of the things I’ve changed my mind about, including health and wellness and my current political and social sensibilities. In this article, I want to home in on three specific ideas that I’ve completely changed my mind about over the past few years. In each case, my old stance now feels insane to me.
Changing your mind is difficult, but necessary. It’s always interesting to examine successful examples of changing our minds both to understand how our own thought processes and views evolve, and also as a model, both for how others might be convinced to change their minds, and for how we might be convinced to change our own minds about other things.
Thing #1: Roots 🌳
I’ve moved constantly. I’ve lost count of the number of places I’ve lived, but I’ve probably moved every two years since high school. That’s a lot of years and a lot of places, and they’re not all close together. I’ve moved back and forth between the East and West coast several times, I moved up and down the Northeast, and I’ve moved abroad and back several times. I’m currently in the process of moving abroad again.
I was also nomadic for a few years. I was on the road a lot for work, and I felt that it didn’t make sense to pay rent at home, since home was so expensive. I figured out that I could actually save money by being on the road, away from home, most of the time. I did the thing that relatively young, well off, unattached people in the Ethereum community love to do: I followed the global conference circuit, drifting from place to place, one week here, two weeks there.
I was having the time of my life. I had friends all over the world, and they’d show me the local experience when I visited. I made friends and romantic partners on dating apps and went on escapades. I found and spent lots of time in my favorite cities and favorite hotels, but always made a point of visiting new places and exploring as well. I worked in hotel rooms, in friends’ offices, and on dodgy wifi connections in cafes in small towns. I thought I was productive, and I thought my behavior was normal, mostly because so many of the people around me were doing the same thing.
I devoured travel writing, favoring writers like Jan Morris who wrote wistful ballads of places far from home. I dreamed of someday being a travel writer myself, of living a life constantly on the go. Then, as now, I felt deeply privileged and fortunate to be so mobile. I recognize that, even today, most people tend to stay pretty close to home and very few travel the way I do. But, oh, what a gift to be able to see the world! I’ve always loved travel because of how it opens my eyes and allows me to see things a totally different way, and most importantly, how it allows me to “arrive where [I] started and know the place for the first time” (to paraphrase T. S. Eliot).
Over time, however, I began to see the dark side of this lifestyle. I had the feeling that I should enjoy the nomadic lifestyle while I could, because I sort of knew it couldn’t last. I was right. Of course, I was still unmarried and childless, but even so, being away from my family and friends back home for long stretches of time was difficult. Even if it was okay for me, it was very hard on them, and being gone most of the time demonstrated a lack of empathy and compassion for the people who matter most. For another, in spite of my desire to expose myself to radically different cultures and ways of thinking, in practice I began to see that, as far from home as I was, I was spending the vast majority of my time with people who think more or less as I do. It turns out that staying in fancy hotels, hanging out in coffee shops, and attending tech conferences isn’t the best way to broaden your perspective.
Then there’s the productivity factor. It took a pandemic to cause me to stop traveling and to stay in one place for a while. I would’ve guessed that I was about 80% productive while traveling. During the pandemic, when I had a stable schedule, a healthy routine, and a comfortable, reliable work space, I realized that it had actually been closer to 20%. I was around 5x as productive at home as on the road! I simply hadn’t appreciated the impact that constantly moving around, changing locales and timezones, not having a stable schedule, work space, or routine, etc., was having on me. The same is true of health. I did my best to stay healthy while traveling: eating well, exercising, getting enough sleep, etc. But, as with work, nothing compares to having a stable, healthy routine at home: having control over what you eat, how and when you exercise, etc.
But the very darkest part of a nomadic lifestyle is that you simply never put down roots anywhere. It sounds appealing, being constantly on the go, having a little bit of a life here, there, and everywhere, having friends in many places, etc. But speaking from deep personal experience, it severely limits the degree to which you can invest in things: people, places, relationships, affiliations, etc.
I used to consider myself first and foremost a “citizen of the world,” rather than of any particular place or culture. The idea was instinctively attractive to me, and felt somehow progressive and correct. I eventually realized that I was wrong. That’s no way to live. Everyone needs a home. The degree to which we personally benefit from anything, from any relationship or affiliation, is directly proportional to how much time and energy we invest in it, and we simply cannot invest meaningfully in anything when we’re constantly on the go. A hundred “single serving friendships” all around the world can’t match a handful of true friendships, close to home. And while it’s true that we live in an increasingly global world, so many of the organizations and institutions that matter are still on the ground, close to home, and won’t be digitized or globalized anytime soon. We need grounding in local community to thrive as individuals, as families, and as communities.
My family and I are moving again this year, and we may not have a stable, permanent home yet, but that’s still the goal and the plan, and each move gets us one step closer to it. The biggest lesson I’ve learned is that where you live is much less important than how much you invest in building a home there.
I see so many young people today living the nomadic lifestyle that I lived, unwilling or unable to put down any roots anywhere, afraid of attachment and entanglement as I was. Of course I see the allure, and it’s hard to blame them for something that I myself indulged in, but at the same time I know that so many of them would be better off if they put down some roots and invested in a real home sooner rather than later. I wish I could explain this to my younger self.
Thing #2: Family 🏠
My thoughts on family and on society more generally changed quite a bit once I became a parent, something I’ve written about here a number of times. The core thing that’s changed is that I didn’t previously understand or accept the critical role that family plays in happiness and success. I thought, and I was led to believe, that you can be a complete person—healthy, happy, successful—on your own, playing by your own rules. In many ways, this is the central tenet of modern liberalism. I won’t go so far as to say that it’s impossible and there are definitely some people who are truly happy without family, but I think this number is very small, and in my experience, the happiest people are all family people.
This unfortunate belief manifests in many ways. I used to think it was totally normal to move across the country or across the world, far away from your roots and from your family, chasing a career or maybe a romantic partner. I did this many times myself. I now see that in many or perhaps most cases, this is a mistake. The family is our core support structure: the original, the most enduring, the strongest. By fracturing the family and moving far away from family and from home, we’re removing our most important support structure, which leads to a lot of downstream social ills. It should be no surprise that countries with stronger family structures also tend to have less homelessness and poverty, as one concrete example.
I’m speaking from experience. After our son was born, we spent the first year and a half trying to raise him on our own in the big city, thousands of miles away from family. I now think that was crazy, and it’s absolutely crazy to think that you can or should raise children outside of the support structure of the wider family. Every parent understands that raising a child—even a single child—is more than a full time job, and that it takes a village to do it properly (to say nothing of raising multiple kids).
I also used to think that it was normal to remain childless. Before having a child, I thought that becoming a parent was a “someday, maybe” thing. It didn’t feel especially urgent or important. I now see how wrong I was. It’s the single most important and socially valuable thing that most of us will ever accomplish. As I already mentioned, it brings an enormous amount of joy, happiness, and wellbeing to the entire family. It redefines your life away from you and around another person, which is extremely healthy, and it immediately gives you a much deeper sense of purpose. And it’s the best possible safety net for the future. While I respect the choice of people who think through all of the consequences and decide not to have children, I think that, for 99% of people, deciding not to is crazy. All of this seems painfully obvious in retrospect, but was admittedly not so before becoming a parent.
By the same token, while I have much less strong thoughts about marriage and home ownership than I do about becoming a parent, to the extent that they create a safe, stable environment for raising kids, I now think that these are important, too. I was pretty opposed to marriage before I did it, and I’m still not completely sold on it, but I do see how it helps, and is arguably necessary, to raise kids well. The same is true of home ownership. I know many people who prefer not to feel tied down, who prefer to be able to move around constantly. That makes sense when you’re young, childless, and unattached, but children need stability and it’s hard to beat the degree of stability that home ownership grants you! It also forces you to invest in the local community, school system, etc., which is good for you and good for the world.
Thing #3: Belief 🤲🏻
There’s some connective tissue between Thing #1 and Thing #2. What sort of belief system strongly promotes both putting down roots in the community, as well as the importance of family? The answer, of course, is religion.
To the best of my knowledge, every human society traditionally had some version of religion. Every human society traditionally emphasized the importance of both community and family. There aren’t that many things that are truly universal among human societies everywhere, but these things are on the universal short list. So I think it’s safe to say that there’s some deep, essential, ancient wisdom baked into these beliefs, and as a result we should discard them or de-emphasize them at our peril.
Nevertheless, most people grow up today in my home country, and in most major world cities, with little to no religion. This is certainly true for my siblings and me. My father was raised Jewish but later discarded the faith. My mother was a Sunday School teacher who was deeply flawed and who sinned constantly. Growing up, my father considered himself an atheist and my mother, while nominally Christian, didn’t feel that she should force religion on her kids. My father, a scientist, was also hyper-rational, a trait that I inherited from him. He put his faith in science, and raised his kids to do the same. He believed that science effectively disproved the existence of God, and by extension the purpose of religion, and that we should never believe in things that we cannot measure experimentally. I used to believe that, taken at large, religion was a force for evil in society: Marx’s “opium of the masses.”
Thanks to my mother I had some early exposure to Christianity, but considered myself agnostic and effectively areligious for most of my life. It was only much later, when I was exposed to Buddhism, that I changed my mind—and, to be fair, Buddhism is a very unique religion, which is in practice both much more and much less than a religion. It’s a very different thing from the Christianity that I knew growing up. Today I consider myself spiritual, if not precisely religious. I consider myself Buddhist, and in some senses, I also believe in the existence of a Christian God (I personally see no fundamental incompatibility between these two systems of belief).
Most importantly, however, today I see both the clear value of religion at large as well as the positive role that spirituality and, to some extent, religion play in my life today. I changed my mind about this for several reasons. By far the largest was the powerful experience I had when I was first really exposed to Buddhism. In my mind, religion and community are also intrinsically linked: religion is the first, the largest, and still the strongest community that many people will ever experience. As I’ve come to understand the importance of community, as I described above, I’ve also come to see the role that organized religion has to play in promoting that community. And, as I’ve matured and become a parent, I’ve also become more socially conservative in general—that should be fairly obvious from the Things above—and viewed through this lens, religion is in fact a force for good because it connects us to our roots and to where we all come from as a people.
By the same token, I see the effect that the absence of religion has had on the world around me. One obvious effect is that people have tried to invent things to replace religion, and those things are mostly pretty terrible. A perfect example of this is Effective Altruism, which I’ve written about before. Every religion emphasizes the importance of charity and service, and a Christian, a Buddhist, or really any religious person would simply tell you to go help your neighbor. By contrast, an “Effective Altruist” would have you build crazy companies, earn tons of money, not help anyone at all in the process (and, in fact, maybe hurt a lot of people), and then, someday maybe, use the proceeds to go buy some mosquito nets in Africa.
In my opinion, this is a pretty evil ideology, but it’s the sort of thing that arises in the absence of real, mature religion, and tons of smart, well-intentioned people convince themselves that it’s somehow better than these systems of belief that have existed for thousands of years (because they’re somehow smarter). To pick on the most infamous Effective Altruist, I see Sam Bankman Fried as a tragic example of what happens when you remove things like religion, community, a traditional value system, and a deeper sense of meaning from society.
More generally, and while I also see the risks and downsides to religion, on net I think its absence has contributed a lot to the breakdown of the family, and of community, and of the social fabric more generally. Regardless of your thoughts on the particular tenets of this or that religion, you must admit that putting most of the community into a room once a week to discuss life’s deepest questions and how to help other people is probably on balance a force for good, and removing it (without something similar to replace it) was probably, in retrospect, a pretty terrible idea.
While I see these effects playing out everywhere, including at home, the most extreme case I see today is China, a country that went to war against religion a generation ago as part of the Cultural Revolution. The generation of Chinese that have grown up since then are, above all, quite lost. In the absence of deeper beliefs, they chase things like money and status—which are the lowest common denominators, and which are precisely the things that religions exist to warn us about. This is a recipe for unhappiness. It should be no surprise that, in China and in many other places, young people today are unhappier than they’ve ever been before. There are multiple reasons for this, but I think that lack of religion and community is one of them.
It’s less obvious what we do about it, and where we go from here. I don’t realistically see a major revival of existing religions happening anytime soon. But I wonder if the organizations and communities that do remain—schools, universities, companies, associations, athletic clubs, etc.—might not be able to cater to some of the same needs that religion is intended to fulfill. America would be a much healthier, happier, more prosperous, more productive country if these institutions stopped preaching stupid postmodern ideologies like wokism and instead leaned into the lessons of traditional religion. At the very least, we need to have a public conversation about the negative consequences of the lack of any coherent system of belief, and acknowledge that this is a problem that we have to solve together.