The number of self-absorbed parents who care about their children only as accessories to their own lives, to be embraced when useful and ignored when inconvenient, is staggering.

I think that it is a thing for a shockingly large percent of parents. Historically children were the retirement plan (in addition to labor for the family). That type of thinking is fairly common.

> Historically children were the retirement plan

They still are. It's just that the retirement plan has been socialized to the level of the nation state. The labor of the young takes care of the old. This is literally true in the case of social security which is funded by taxing current productive labor.

This isn't necessarily bad, because it's the way it's always been. But it is something like a multi-generational ponzi scheme. It can work for a very long time, but eventually, the last generation is left holding the bag with no one to pass it onto.

> This isn't necessarily bad, because it's the way it's always been.

I'm not sure this sentence make any sense. The same could be said about slavery. Is slavery not necessarily bad because it's the way it's always been?

You're right, that sentence is bad.

Maybe I should have said it isn't obviously bad or some new, modern evil that we just invented. It's how human social groups that take care of their non productive elderly have always operated.

The futurology trackers have "breakdown of intergenerational solidarity" as a possibility with no given time frame. It really didn't occur to me how implicated the nation state is in this until you pointed out the fact (in retrospect, glaringly obvious) that this function of family life has been subverted by government.

Do you mind dropping a link to what you're referencing? I haven't heard of it.

But yeah, I do see it as a potential systemic problem. Because the care for the old has become so massively socialized, we also find ourselves in a situation where it becomes individually advantageous to not do the personal sacrifice of having and raising children. Not only is having children a huge financial burden, but it's also a huge time commitment. And when you don't get to primarily benefit from you own children's productivity, that burden isn't as highly rewarded as it has been in the past.

I think we're starting to see this break down in many first world countries that don't have a replacement birth rate. I could see the reactions being one of...

1) start penalizing the childfree. There's a long history of this solution going back to as far as ancient Rome, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bachelor_tax.

2) increase the social reward for having and raising children. We already do this to some extent, e.g. the child tax credit.

3) develop non family oriented baby mills. Basically state run institutions that raise (and possibly even incubate with artificial wombs) children at an industrial scale. Brave New World is a classic example of this taken to the extreme. We already do this to some degree with public schools and face increasing calls to expand it with free preschool. If we can figure out how to produce healthy, well adjusted members of society with the greater efficiency of 1 adult "parent" to 30 children, like we do in school, rather than 2 parents to 1-5ish children, then we'll probably do it. Currently, it doesn't appear that we can do that, judging by the outcomes of orphanages.

It appears on here, for example, under the "Wildcards":

https://espas.secure.europarl.europa.eu/orbis/sites/default/...

The last generation will have a lot more to worry about than who will take care of them in retirement.

That's exactly the point. The last generations will have done their jobs supporting their elder predecessors, but won't have anyone to come after them who will take care of them.

Left holding the bag.

The last generation will be too busy trying to backpedal their way out of existential doom to take care of their elders. Assuming they make it out of the cradle at all.

But aren't his parents pretty successful lawyers who are pretty well of on their own? There are usual family pathologies and unusual family pathologies, and this looks like the latter.

I’ll rephrase. There are too many parents who don’t care about their kids or what happens to them. This tendency goes up a bit, I think, if the kids are not necessary for retirement or care when old age sets in.

Maybe he never was their favorite son anyway.

Oh I think it's the opposite.

I think they thought of him as the second coming of Jesus himself, and he felt he had to do extraordinary things to live up to that image (which of course is impossible).

I think he secretly hated it and that's why he trashed his own hypocrisy in some interviews, saying that the charity talks were all an act and not true.

And I also think that's a big part of his "I'm stupid / I fucked up" line of defense. Yes, he may think it helps his case (but is he actually that naïve?) But the main goal is to tell his parents "see, the genius you thought I was is actually a complete idiot, what do you make of that?!?"

I think he's happy to suffer if that makes his parents suffer more.

(Of course that's all speculation and pop' psychology and as such isn't worth the electrons it's typed in; but it's a possibility.)

I'm glad you have great parents, but I think you vastly underestimate how much many parents do not care about their children, and will sacrifice them for their own well being.

Most caring parents would aggressively caution their children from heading down the path SBF went, especially if they're smart, educated parents.

There are no "boy geniuses" out there like many lead SBF to believe he was, people from prestigious backgrounds know this better than anyone. There are some really smart people out there, but anyone being propped up the way SBF was is being setup.

I don't have any sympathy for SBF, but a lot people whose names we'll never know where more than happy to set him up to think he was himself an unstoppable genius because that helped them sell a product and they know that it will also help focus all the blame.

His parents are Stanford law professors, so they are smart and educated. But doesn't mean that their child has to listen to them or to behave in an ethical manner.

That's the thing. You can do everything you can to educate your children and teach them right from wrong, but at some point they are free-thinking adults. Of course you would be distressed if they end up taking the wrong path, but underlying that you would know that you did your best and it's not your fault.

You'd be surprised.