DRMacIver's Notebook
Real examples are messy
Real examples are messy
I’ve been reading “On Caring” by Milton Mayeroff today. It’s a mostly pretty good book, outlining a theory about what it means to care for something, but it has an example quite early on which set me off.
Obligations that derive from devotion are a constituent element in caring, and I do not experience them as forced on me or as necessary evils; there is a convergence between what I feel I am supposed to do and what I want to do. The father who goes for the doctor in the middle of the night for his sick child does not experience this as a burden; he is simply caring for the child.
I think that this example is obviously made up, and I think that you can partly tell that because of the straightforward lack of detail, but I just think it’s also not true.
If your child is currently in desperate need and on the way to ER then sure, obviously, you’re not going to experience this as burdensome, because your mind is focused on the immediate emergency, but that’s not even particularly because it’s your child. In the middle of an emergency I mostly find that I’m too focused on the actual crisis at hand to think about how burdened I am by it, although I might have a moment of thinking “Oh, what a pain” right at the beginning.And, in real emergencies, have.
In contrast if your child is up with, say, a stomach bug, and has been vomiting, and you’ve just got off a long shift and you’re exhausted and want nothing more than to go to sleep, then obviously you’re going to experienced this as burdensome. You’re exhausted, the whole thing is a pain, and you want to go to bed. You (hopefully) do it anyway, because its your child and you love them and you do things because you gotta. But that doesn’t mean you will never experience it as burdensome, only that you bear that burden mostly willingly, albeit sometimes begrudgingly.
And I think that the idea that this devotion and caring in the context of a child means that you don’t experience any burdens just completely fails to capture the very normal experience of parenting. And I think that if you were to look at many actual concrete examples of day to day parenting you would find that parents experience those children as burdens fairly often. And typically they will regard those burdens as worth it, because they want what’s best for their child, but that doesn’t mean that they never experienced these “oh gosh, my life would be so much easier if I didn’t have to deal with this shit.” moments. Most importantly, having these sorts of thoughts doesn’t mean they don’t care about their child.
And this is a big part of why I care quite a lot about this example and its basic failure to capture the essential humanity of real situations. If you’re in a parenting situation like this, where you’re exhausted and have to deal with a minor medical crisis or other such problem with your child, there is definitely going to be some part of you that goes “oh god. Yet another fucking thing.” And, when it does, there’s another part of you which looks at that part and goes “Gosh. You must be a bad parent for feeling that way.”
And this seems to me to be what happens when you start with these tidy narratives, theories of how things should be rather than looking at specific concrete examples of things as they actually are. You try to understand your experiences through that lens, and you fall short because you fail to be the perfectly spherical human in a vacuum that the theory predicts.
If, on the other hand, you talk to other parents about their experiences, pretty inevitably what will happen is they’ll tell you that yeah of course they feel like that sometimes too.I can’t find a single biographical detail about Mayeroff, so I don’t know if he had kids. If he did, maybe he had an unusually saintly degree of equanimity. But I doubt it. I think he just had a theory and made up an example to fit it without thinking about whether it was true.
If you instead listen to things as they actually are, as told by people who actually been through the experiences, what you’ll find is that there is a richness and a messiness to them that doesn’t conform to sort of very tidy theories that say how things should work. And I think this is key to personal growth, to self forgiveness, to navigating the world in a humane manner, and being kind to both yourself and others. You have to encounter humanity in all its messy complexity, rather than humanity as you would like to idealise it.
In a smaller context, I’ve been sort of developing this theme recently because I’ve been writing a bunch of really mundane blog posts. These are things like here’s how I clean my kitchen, or I had to cook something on short notice in 45 minutes, or even just here’s some stuff I learned playing Slay the Spire.
Each of these starts from a very concrete experience, talking about how I navigated it and what I’ve learned in doing so. It’s not purely a narrative about a specific thing - it sort of tries to point out where I’ve used some idea that I think generalizes or some oddly useful principle, but it is still fundamentally the story of that particular event.
I think these pieces are in many ways much more useful because they are forced to grapple with the concrete reality of the task at hand. So they contain a lot of details and how those details were dealt with that would not have been present if I had started from some much more general theory. I do then tend to write a little bit about generalisable lessons from them of course, but I think starting from a real and detail-rich experience and trying to figure out how to transfer it to other similar situations gets you a lot further than trying to start from a tidy theory and forcing your life into its procrustean view of the world.