#granddad

My grandparents on their wedding day in the 1940s Today would have been my Granddad’s birthday. It’s difficult to believe that he passed away nearly thirty years ago. In some ways it feels like a lifetime ago, yet in others it doesn’t feel that long at all. The years pass, life moves on, but the people who mattered never really leave your memories, do they? My Granddad was a kind and decent…

People are unable of objectivity.

The problem is not lack of effort or attentional practice. Mindfulness, in the traditional sense, is irrelevant here, even perfect awareness doesn’t bypass the structural filters of human cognition. Our sensibility, our sensory apparatus, our conceptual frameworks, our interpretive habits is not designed to apprehend the world “as it is” independent of us. The albatross does not exist for us in itself; it exists in relation to our faculties, which distort, categorize, and moralize from the outset.

When we think we are “observing” the bird, we are actually translating it into a map our mind can hold, colored by human concerns, biases, and projections. We do not, and cannot, step fully into its perspective. The cognitive act is always asymmetric because the world is adjusted to us, not us to the world. Any attempt to “mature perception” into an albatross-like mode is doomed because there is no mechanism in the human brain that can replicate the sensory, ecological, and evolutionary context of a bird.

Why non-reproduction is costly?

Having children is costly in the obvious, material, individual sense. Time, money, exhaustion, damaged bodies, damaged lives, neglected children. Yes, modern conditions make reproduction increasingly reckless. But that is not the cost I meant. When I say non-reproduction is costly, I do not mean it costs diapers, sleep, or school fees. I mean it costs something much harder to give up, namely, symbolic continuity.

For most humans, children are not primarily about care or love. They are about: – continuation of the self – insurance against death – meaning outsourced into the future – social legitimacy (“a normal life”) – participation in the species’ narrative

Non-reproduction cuts all of that off.

You don’t just lose children. You lose: – the illusion that something of you will go on – the social script that organizes adulthood – the moral shield of “I did my part” – the hope that suffering will be redeemed downstream

That is the cost. Biologically, the species doesn’t care. Economically, societies panic, still irrelevant. Psychologically and existentially, most people cannot bear the void this opens. That’s why cultures moralize reproduction so aggressively. If it were merely “easier not to have kids,” there wouldn’t be this level of coercion, shame, and mythology around it.

Under current conditions, reproduction is often more destructive than refusal. Children raised without time, care, stability, or attention are not a triumph of life; they are collateral damage of instinct plus ideology. Autism rates, stress disorders, chronic illness are not mysteries. They are system outputs.

Like spending the afternoon at your grandad's?

𝚊𝚏𝚝𝚎𝚛𝚗𝚘𝚘𝚗 𝚊𝚝 𝚐𝚛𝚊𝚗𝚍𝚍𝚊𝚍𝚜 𝚖𝚘𝚘𝚍𝚋𝚘𝚊𝚛𝚍 👴🏻🧦🪜📕👔🍂

Stalk the shelves and wells at your favorite bar, and you’ll likely see a familiar, orange-labeled bourbon staring back at you. Old Grand-Dad isn’t new. In fact, it’s very old, as it debuted in 1882. But over the past decade, it’s experienced a renaissance led primarily by bartenders. They’ve enlisted this retro bourbon everywhere from high-end cocktail bars to lovable dives. Old Grand-Dad, or…