Thank you for sharing this. I hope my children bring their grandparents as much joy as you do.
Speaking of this - "tends to be factual, rational, and logical." - do you worry much about what the world will look like when your grandchildren are middle aged? I spent probably too much time concerned with rising authoritarianism, climate breakdown, shortages of food and water resulting from same, and their resulting wars, and it brings a tinge of panic to my thoughts on their future. I certainly stress out about this far, far more than before I was a parent.
I don't really know how best to address it, aside from trying to live in a way resilient to those things, and am curious how you think about this things given the obvious joy in your post (and again, thank you for sharing this; it brought joy to my own day).
I think about this question often as I now have a 2yo and 4yo. It used to stress me out, but now I realize that no matter how bad it gets, it will almost certainly be better than anything any human had to deal with in pre-modern civilization. Even with all the possible negative things coming, the tools we have acquired as a species would be incomprehensible to anyone say pre-5000 years ago. We are alive such a short blip of geological time and tend to get lost in the brief frames. The ability to bring a life into this world, even if it's harder than we have it right now, is still giving someone an opportunity to learn and experience things beyond wonder. Our technology is sufficiently advanced to be magic to anyone who died like pre-1990. Yes we have challenges ahead, yes a bunch of people will die and be displaced and people will be scared and think it's the end, but even if the population shrinks to 1 billion people the human spirit will endure and figure it out. Personally, I'd much rather experience life than none at all--even if it wasn't at the top of existence.
I like this perspective! In the end my wife and I ultimately said "well either civilisation persists OK-ish and we'll regret not having kids, or this is it and in the grand scheme of things what does it matter if they go down swinging?" So far, I am glad we had them.
Speaking of this - "tends to be factual, rational, and logical." - do you worry much about what the world will look like when your grandchildren are middle aged? I spent probably too much time concerned with rising authoritarianism, climate breakdown, shortages of food and water resulting from same, and their resulting wars, and it brings a tinge of panic to my thoughts on their future. I certainly stress out about this far, far more than before I was a parent.
I don't really know how best to address it, aside from trying to live in a way resilient to those things, and am curious how you think about this things given the obvious joy in your post (and again, thank you for sharing this; it brought joy to my own day).