Comment by embedding-shape
2 days ago
> You don’t choose family
Maybe it's because of my upbringing, and moving away from home when I was about 15, but why not? I think most people could actually "choose family" (or not, if it's better for you as individual). Why stick with people if they're mostly negative and have a negative impact on you? Just because you happen to share 0.0001% more DNA than any other human on the planet?
Not to take away from the rest of what you say, it's a highly personal experience, and I thank you for sharing that heartfelt message to give people more perspectives, something usually missing when "divisive" (maybe not the right word) people end up in the news. Thank you for being honest, and thank you for sharing it here.
My experience has been that "chosen family" is a thing that works when you're young, but almost always falls apart when you get older. This has happened to countless people I know. Life throws all kinds of curveballs, incentives change, conflicts arise, sometimes very intense conflicts. Empirically, chosen family is a structure that works in a particular place and time, then disintegrates when conditions change. Real family isn't like that; there is a very strong anthropological connection wired into us that doesn't go away when the situation changes.
Of course it's different for everyone, some families are so tragic they may not be worth preserving, etc. But that's an outlier-- the modal experience is that the power of family is precisely in the fact that you don't get to choose it.
Modern western societies kind of broken that. A culture of Kicking your kids as soon as they are 18 years old is not very conducive to a culture of strong familiar links like, let's say, the culture of early 20th century Sicily.
I moved out at 18 (like most of my peers) and my extended family lives far away to begin with. I think I have an alright family situation compared to some friends, but it's not like I see any of them more than once or twice a year?
If you can get friends who live nearby and come over once a month that's probably closer than the modern us family structure tbh
And I have seen multiple counterfactuals. Even people who are descended from the one who was part of the "chosen family" continue to visit and treat them as family.
An adopted child is also a form of chosen family. As is a spouse.
I think the point that's being made is-- it's a lot easier to stick together over the long term when you spend the first 20 years of your life together in a family unit. It's possible to build long term, stable bonds under other circumstances-- just less likely. It's also possible to screw the former up.
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> there is a very strong anthropological connection wired into us that doesn't go away when the situation changes.
I have not found this to be true.
>> You don’t choose family
> Maybe it's because of my upbringing, and moving away from home when I was about 15, but why not?
I'm sorry you had that experience.
There are very good reasons to leave / avoid family. I have an extended family and I've seen it all: One cousin recently had to kick her husband out for being an alcoholic; a different cousin was kicked out for being an alcoholic and met his 2nd wife in AA. Fortunately, my ultra-conservative aunt and uncle tolerate their transgender grandchild, but it creates a lot of friction between them and my cousin (transgender child's parent).
For most of us, our families are a positive experience. As we get older, we also learn that families are an exercise in learning to accept people as they are, and not as we wish they would be. We just can't go through life changing our people whenever they don't live up to what we want them to be.
As you get older, please try to find people who you can love unconditionally until you die.
> As you get older, please try to find people who you can love unconditionally until you die.
Protip: the love has to be reciprocated. Never, ever unconditionally love an abuser in the name of family. Set boundaries, when they are crossed, leave. There may be a cost, but it may be lighter than the cost of staying. We may not choose family, but we continually choose whose company we keep.
> I'm sorry you had that experience.
I'm not, it was something I did on my own volition, I wasn't kicked out, I moved out. So don't be sorry about it, my life would also look 100% different than it is if I didn't, and I love my life, it's better than 99.99% of the people out there so I won't complain about it, nor how I got here :)
> We just can't go through life changing our people whenever they don't live up to what we want them to be.
You can, if you stop "wanting them to be" anything at all, and just treat people like they are instead. And if they're still "bad people", you leave.
> As you get older, please try to find people who you can love unconditionally until you die.
Respectfully, no. That's not the kind of relationship I want with other people, I want people who doesn't love me unconditionally but can tell me straight when I'm doing bad stuff, etc. "Unconditional love" removes that.
I'm glad to have found the people I've found, and stuck with those since we became close. They're hard to find though, and I've met only one such person after turning 30. But I rather have this small group of 4-5 people I can trust to help me bury a body if needed, than spending time with people who feel they have to love me unconditionally. Life just gets easier that way, for me at least. But luckily, there are all sort of people out there, some match with you, some match with me, so we all can live the life we wish :)
I’ve cut out most of my family when I was a teen and am middle aged now. The way I always say it is “my family is the one I built”. The one I was born into will pull you down with them. The family I built, is not without issues. But they are an order of magnitude better and generally aren’t trying to actively ruin each others life’s. In general, we work towards improving our lives and supporting each other; whatever that may mean. There might be some drama along the ways but it’s mostly forgotten and inconsequential.
My brother has a substance abuse problem. When he gets out of prison, he’s clean. Them a cousin or uncle that hasn’t seen him in a while will stop by with a party favor (an 8 ball of coke or something) and then before you know it my brother is in jail again. They all are alcoholics and drama often escalates to fist fight type drama. Or the women will start throwing stuff around someone’s house and trash the place. It’s just like normal to them. Sometimes they make up and help clean up and sometimes they don’t. But the few times I’ve been around them on the decades since I made a decision to cut them out, it’s always just the same ole shit. They’re in a cycle of “dependence on family” while also “destroying family” from my perspective. It’s so volatile I can put up with it at all. My kid has only met these people a couple times and it’s always for brief time because once the booze get flowing or the other substances get passed around anything can happen. When I was a kid my mom was arguing with her then boyfriend and he ran her over and she was in a full body cast for like 6 months. My dad was always normal ish, from a more stable family, then in my mid 20s he was caught in a pedophile sting situation. And that’s just the beginning.
Like, who tf are these people. I have no time for this shit, Is my take on it.
Oh gosh, yes, I agree, it's best to severely limit your contact. I hope your experience with your built family lasts for the rest of your life.
I'm getting off-topic with this, but a quick aside:
In my teens I began to learn that most of the people on my father's side of the family were horrifically broken people with severe issues. There's at least one town in New Mexico where I wouldn't want to use my last name because an uncle of mine has run it deeply through the mud and 20' underground so to speak.
I've actively cut those people out of my life. I've decided that blood isn't the only thing that makes family, and that I can choose who I want to treat as family.
The infighting bastards who happen to share my last name are not my family.
Mr. White, is that you?
I need a new belt for my SuctionMaster Pro 9000, urgently.
I don't disagree with your overall point, but I would point out that "happen to share 0.0001% more DNA than any other human" is probably not the best mental model of how to quantify this sort of relationship. Due to combinatorial explosion, these numbers are kind of misleading. It is similar to saying that it is trivial to crack a 1 million bits of entropy password because we already know 99% of the bits. This leaves out that you still have 2^(10000) possible passwords.
Your immediately family shares hundreds of thousands more variable sites in your genome than a 'random' individual. Which is to say there would need to be something like a 2^(100000) population of humans before someone 'random' would be as close to you in terms of variable sites.
I guess my point being "you happen to share 0.0001% more DNA" is just not trivial or a small coincidence that can be waved away with "we are more similar to each other than not". Whether any genetic similarity means that one's biological family deserves one's attention, I have no comment.
> I think most people could actually "choose family"
It's all fun and games until grandma passes with a $10M net worth without a will, and the 5 children and 20 grandchildren start a real life session of battle royale
My grandfather barely had a net worth when he passed away. It amazed me how awful some people became, seemingly overnight.
I was better off without those people, and that's quite the realization before you're 10.
The farther I get, the happier I am. Put me in the "choose your own" camp for family.
What gets me is how much energy some families put into fighting each other over something that is really not worth that much, be it money or otherwise. I know it can be relative but the instances I witnessed, the actual parties could have made more money just even doing gigs in the hours they spent fighting, not to mention money spent on legal fees. It boggles the mind
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Richard Bach in his book Illusions: Adventures of a Reluctant Messiah: “The bond that links your true family is not one of blood, but of respect and joy in each other's life. Rarely do members of one family grow up under the same roof.”
I first read those words many years ago. They were a comfort and a revelation then, and they still resonate today, when I have very much chosen my own family.
My interpretation is that there are two different senses of “family” at play here:
- The people with whom we share close bonds, stronger than ordinary friendship; we absolutely can (and should) choose them, and choose them wisely.
- The people who've disproportionately shaped our development into who we are as persons today; barring sci-fi technologies like time machines or false memory implantation, that's pretty hard to change.
GP's comment seems to be more about the latter, and of Scott Adams being in that category. I agree with that in my case, too; both the Dilbert comics and The Dilbert Principle were formative for me both personally and professionally — which amplified the pain I felt when Adams started to “go off the deep end” and reveal himself to be less of a Dilbert and more of a PHB.
You can choose family and still choose wrong, you can have family assigned at birth and it could be the best. You get what you get in life and eventually it ends anyway.
But here is used in a way of "Yes, I know his views hurt other people, and are more despicable than not, but he's family, what am I supposed to do? I can't ignore them", which is what I'm feeling a bit icky about.
I don't see what's icky about refusing to ignore Adams problematic views. He's not excusing or overlooking them, which you seem to be implying.
And to top it off… he’s not actually the guy’s family is just a cartoonist he likes.
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