#95, I have discovered the secret to aging
Plus I dove deep on that Business Insider pronatalist piece
Lit’rally nothing more boring than hearing about other people’s travel so I promise I’ll keep this brief, Kevin and I went to Lisbon with friends and without kids and on the last night we all got beautifully drunk and I had a beautiful drunken revelation. This was after briefly trying to get into a special bar that we did not have reservations for. (We did not get in.)
A subtheme of the conversation among the six 40-ish people on this trip was along the lines of: Are we glad we are kind of old, or do we wish we were young? Do we miss our kids, or do we not? Should we have done more of this in our 20s, or is it better to do it now when we’re no longer so poor? Maybe going in our 60s will be even better, though what if one of us dies, etc.? Do we feel so free right now? Are we still young, we’ll look back at this and say we were so young, look how young we technically are still!
Anyway the revelation was this: Even if we wanted to be go back in time and be young again, we couldn’t be. “IT ISN’T A CHOICE,” I yelled at Kevin, geniusly. (See also the genius line from a New York Times parenting column by Alexandra Sacks a few years back, “If your goal is to ‘get your body back,’ you might want to ask why you’re putting so much pressure on yourself to perform the magic trick of going back in time.”)
When we got home I spent a bunch of time Googling things like “American move to Portugal with family” and “raise American kids Portugal.” I came across this Instagram account by some Americans who moved their family of seven to Portugal full-time. The mom, Leslie Stroud, has also done some blog posts about moving to Portugal and I could have read them endlessly. Excerpt:
All of the parents know each other as well and while I’ve been slowly invited into some text groups for classes, I am certainly not a part of the group. I have no idea what to do in these groups or even what they are talking about most of the time.
School schedules in Portugal are much more catered to working parents. I have yet to find a couple where both parents don’t work, at least part-time, and school schedules are set to accommodate this. The kids are gone SO long each day. That’d been difficult for us all. They leave around 8 am and return at 5:30 pm.
They get 3 hours of breaks at school (two 30-minute breaks and a two-hour lunch break), so the overall school time is about the same as in the US, but they are gone from home much longer. They’ve hated this, of course, as do we. However, it’s just the way of life.
The long school hours were tempting but the “I don’t understand the text chain” part made my heart beat faster, as if I was having a little panic attack. Because I HAVE TO BE A BIG PART OF THE GROUP TEXT CHAIN AND I *KNOW* WHAT I AM DOING THERE. Like I know when to make a passive-aggressive comment for the sake and I know when to do the little “!!” reaction (almost never) and and I know when to start a separate smaller, mocking side chain with just 2-3 moms. The thought of being an expat and losing this highly specific cultural knowledge and ability was frankly stomach-churning.
In other words this isn’t going to become a Substack about how we uprooted our American family of five and moved to Portugal. However, the one other thing I will say about Portugal is people there have the infant carseats in the front passenger seat. I’m just noting this here so I can remember it one day when I’m writing the definitive piece on why so many American mothers are such assholes about carseats on social media.1
Speaking of being assholes about carseats
Perhaps you saw this by Julia Black. The headline is “Billionaires like Elon Musk want to save civilization by having tons of genetically superior kids. Inside the movement to take ‘control of human evolution’” and it profiles Malcolm and Simone Collins, two “self-proclaimed pronatalists” who “fear that falling birth rates in certain developed countries like the United States and most of Europe will lead to the extinction of cultures, the breakdown of economies, and, ultimately, the collapse of civilization.”
So far, they have three children: Octavian (3), Torsten (18 months), and Titan Invictus (baby). All were conceived via IVF with genetic screening. (Malcolm: “We are the Underground Railroad of ‘Gattaca’ babies and people who want to do genetic stuff with their kids.”) Malcolm ever so delightfully proposed to Simone on Reddit. In total, they say, they want 7 to 13 kids (I’m calling it now, they have 5 max). I came away from the article actually not completely clear about how much money they actually have or how they made it but the answer seems to be mainly a ton of family money, plus “together they write books and work in the VC and private-equity worlds. Simone has previously served as managing director for Dialog, the secretive retreat cofounded by [Peter] Thiel,” plus I found this crappy website that is weirdly missing a lot of prepositions from sentences like “I am fairly easy to spot because I decided only wear black after concluding that having just one color of clothing would be maximally efficient” and “I took on advisory roles at a number of companies, including a COO role at WOWTasty, which is one Vancouver’s largest online delivery companies,” but really, I think it’s mainly family money.
I combed the Insider piece for the most interesting-to-me parts, and they are:
“Beneath their thick, black-rimmed glasses — hers round, his rectangular — the couple look, as they would put it, ‘biologically young.’” Or you could put in another way if you wanted.
“Sitting around the breakfast table after the 6 a.m. day-care drop-off and ‘morning strategy walk’ the Collinses take every day, Malcolm read aloud a text message from his mother. She wanted to know how he and Simone planned to monetize their pronatalism ‘hobby.’ ‘Remember: Everything is transactional,’ she texted.” I got extremely stuck on the “6 a.m. day-care drop-off” because wow, I have never heard of a daycare that opened that early, but don’t get so distracted by that that you ignore the part about the text from the mom.
If I’m understanding this correctly: They analyzed their embryos from a round of IVF using this tool, but it didn’t screen for enough things so they got the company to let them “access the raw genetic data for their own analysis,” they made a spreadsheet, analyzed the embryos and gave the embryos either red or green rankings for “risk factors” like “obesity” and “headaches,” tallied up a final score and chose the embryo with the most green cells in the spreadsheet: “With a large number of green columns and a score of 1.9, Embryo No. 3 — aka Titan Invictus (an experiment in nominative determinism) — was selected to become the Collinses’ third child.”
“The Collinses themselves have been called ‘hipster eugenicists’ online, something Simone called ‘amazing’ when I brought it to her attention. Malcolm’s ‘going to want to make business cards that say ‘Simone and Malcolm Collins: Hipster Eugenicists,’ she said with a laugh. ‘It’s funny that people are so afraid of being accused of Nazism,’ when they're just improving their own embryos, Simone added, after noting that her Jewish grandmother escaped Nazi-occupied France. ‘I’m not eliminating people. I mean, I’m eliminating from my own genetic pool, but these are all only Malcolm and me.’”
“Pronatalist pet issues include everything from increasing housing development to changing laws around car-seat regulation (one study2 found that people would stop having children when they couldn’t fit any more car seats in their vehicle). During the coronavirus pandemic, the Collinses tried to raise money for a family-friendly ‘startup town’ they called Project Eureka, where all community rules would be ‘ultimately set — all disputes resolved’ by the Collinses.”
I looked up Project Eureka’s childcare plan. Among other bullet points, “Eureka has both on call childcare for younger children and an ‘adaptive boarding school’ for older children when their parents are both indisposed. Granting both the children and the parents more freedom.” You can add yourself to the waitlist if you want but do note that “Eureka vets all incoming families the way a boarding school vets incoming students to ensure we are creating a safe environment for our children from weeding out individuals with dangerous criminal histories and ideological extremists.”
I think the other thing to note about Project Eureka is that it doesn’t exist. (…Yet?!)
I haven’t quite pinned it down but there is a definite blood collection between Malcolm Collins and @deeptomcruise, I think they’re maybbe cousins.
Guys, you gotta put your smoke detectors back up! This is like looking at pictures of my house where you can see peeling tile and ancient electrical sockets in the background, but at least I have the excuse of not being a billionaire!
And finally
Notes for the piece: Puffer coats!!! Patagonia/Primary discussion, loosening straps slightly does what, why do so many people who care the most about carseat safety also seem so dumb generally?, tagging a carseat expert in the Facebook comments, car seat Tiktok — is it thing? Also, possibly revise question: Why do so many people who care about carseat safety strongly in either one direction or the other seem so dumb generally?
This is the study and it’s mostly about having a third child: “Using census data and state-year variation in laws, we estimate that when women have two children of ages requiring mandated car seats, they have a lower annual probability of giving birth by 0.73 percentage points.” I love that the two men who wrote this study were like “We solved it, the reason people are worried about having a third child is that they don’t want to get a bigger car.”