Exploring the Dynamics of Parental Joy Across Income Levels

We analyze a graph showing lower income parents rate being a parent as more enjoyable and rewarding than higher income parents. Debunking the bias that poorer people must be miserable raising children, we argue cultural factors like faith and insulation from the childless urban monoculture better enable them to find meaning in parenting. We also discuss how defining life goals around pleasure paradoxically reduces durable happiness.

Simone Collins: [00:00:00] What this graph demonstrates, that both the percentage of parents saying that they find being a parent is enjoyable or rewarding highest among lower income people.

Malcolm Collins: A lot of people don't realize that when you define your personal goals around hedonism, like I am having a kid to be happier.

That kid will always provide you with less happiness than if you are having a kid because it is your ideological duty to have the kid, the happiness that you get from tasks that you do. Because you think they are a thing of intrinsic value and not to make yourself happy will always give you more durable happiness.

And the person who is chasing hedonism in and of itself, but the urban monoculture doesn't tell people that it tells people that the highest order goal in anyone's life should be. Sort of the mass distribution of hedonism.

Would you like to know more?

Malcolm Collins: Hello, Simone. You sent me an interesting graph today that I want to talk about because [00:01:00] it speaks to a point that we often talk about within the perinatalist movement, where we will say lower income individuals have more children than higher income individuals. This is true between and within countries.

So that means on average, the less wealth the country has, the more kids, the higher the fertility rate is going to be. But also within countries in general, like if you look at the US until you get to like really extreme levels of wealth which we've talked about in our other video, like the, the will will child support cost speciation video, you do get high fertility rate again at extreme levels of wealth, but generally less wealth you have, the more kids you have.

Simone Collins: And I think a lot of people like, especially like wealthier people. When they hear us say this are like, Oh, well, that's just because these terribly uneducated people are just miserably having children because of their dumb religious beliefs or because they're too dumb to use birth control properly. And they then would, of course, the assumption there is if that is really true, if that is what is happening.

These are the most [00:02:00] miserable parents, right? Of course, because they don't have the resources for the kids, right? Because raising a child is so expensive these days. And because of course they're having children by mistake, because they're so dumb to not use birth control properly.

Malcolm Collins: So these wealthy parents, yeah, they're the ones who are having the fulfilling parenting experience.

One

Simone Collins: would assume, of course, because they were, they, they paid all the IVF. to have their Children at age 55 and they wanted their Children and they

Malcolm Collins: have the resources. I think that there is a level of, within the urban elite in our society today, this urban monoculture we talk about, a dehumanization of the lower classes in, in America.

You think? You don't think? Well, no, I mean, you say you think, but it's something that they, I do not think, realize that they have done.

Simone Collins: Well, especially the woke masses believe that they are the champions of the poor and

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, well, that's what they say. They're like, yeah, I'm the champion of the little guy.

And, and then you, you, you're, you're, you're like, the [00:03:00] little guy is, is, is the people who you're like dehumanizing and these, these, you know, and you see this in their language, you know, the, the, the quote unquote uneducated. And, and, and the reality is, is that they don't champion the little guy.

They are a group that defines They've never freaking

Simone Collins: met the little guy. Like the vast majority of these people.

Malcolm Collins: They don't, they don't care. They don't have an understanding. They, they really, and, and their policies generally make things worse for the little guy. And the little guy could tell them that, but they just don't want to hear it.

What they want is centralized. Control in an expansion of the bureaucracy, which is what they're really fighting for because this expanded bureaucracy increases the number of jobs that they can have, which actually, before we go into the graph that you sent me, we'll go into a graph that I sent you that demonstrates this phenomenon.

Simone Collins: Version of sex. This is the graph and graphs to each other. And we're like, Oh, look at my data.

Malcolm Collins: Look at my data! So this is a graph called growth in education staffing has [00:04:00] far outpaced student enrollment. Oh yes!

Simone Collins: When you, oh my gosh, you shared this to me the other day, when I think, yesterday when I was out in Harrisburg, right?

And, oh my god. So

Malcolm Collins: if you look at since the 1970s, there has been an 8 percent increase in student enrollment in the U. S. A 60 percent increase in teaching staff and a 138 percent increase in non teaching staff. And this is something we're seeing in the university system as well and stuff like that.

Wherever this ultra progressive movement has concentrated itself they expand the number of jobs that are in these essentially like cash for nothing programs. Right?

Simone Collins: And let's be very clear. There is no correlation between this and improved student outcomes. Yes.

Malcolm Collins: Oh, and this is really true. If you look at like the amount of money going into school systems and stuff like that, anybody who is telling you we will pump more money into the school system and get higher outcomes is just not relating to the data that we have right now.

Simone Collins: No, if there were massive reform in the public school system, this [00:05:00] could. Theoretically be possible, but right now, putting money into the school system means giving money to teachers unions means basically feeding the bureaucracy and the adults, not the children. So we're not

Malcolm Collins: saying that like important for this quote unquote educated class.

Yes. Yeah, believes that they deserve basically a doll from the state for existing. And then when Yeah. You know, I love it. So many people, they grow up so much in this class that you're now getting like this like anti work movement and stuff like that where they're like even horrified that the idea that humans have to work for a living because they have been grown up expecting that each and every one of them is so upper class in their expectations that they get to live

Simone Collins: Yeah, no, it is.

It is completely insane. It is. It is what

Malcolm Collins: they really mean when they say no work. If they mean no work for the college educated, they still expect someone to support them

Simone Collins: because yeah, someone has to deliver their food. Who's going to do their door dash? Who's going to

Malcolm Collins: do this to them? Like they genuinely, I do not think see [00:06:00] these people as humans.

Simone Collins: Like literally though. Oh my God, Malcolm. Cause I, I just spent like the, I just spent the past more than two weeks every afternoon out door knocking. Frickin cold. And the way that people treat you when you were like someone who knocks on their door it is insane. And I'm like, I'm heavily pregnant now.

And it's obvious. It is, it is completely wild. Just yeah, like strangers or people seen as like delivery people. And you know what though, like the, you know, who was the one consistent group of people when I was out door knocking, who was incredibly nice to me. And he'll always wish me luck, delivery people.

Malcolm Collins: Oh!

Simone Collins: They're like, Hey, what are you up to? You know, and I'm like, Oh, I'm doing this. I'm like, Hey, good luck. You know, I don't live in your district, but you'd have my vote. You know, just it's so weird, this striation. And then I also saw. How the delivery people were treated by the people in the neighborhoods I was walking around, just like me.

It is wild. Yeah. So just yeah.

Malcolm Collins: You have this art student, you're like, you could become a delivery person. They're [00:07:00] like, no, no, no, no, no. I'm above that kind of work. I have this degree that's now made pointless by AI. But hold on. So let's get to this graph that you shared with me because it was pretty surprising even to me.

I mean, I'll admit that I was to some extent affected by this bias. The people,

Simone Collins: I think another reason why you are affected by it is if, for example, we look at the fertility crash in Latin America and we see analysts saying, Oh, well, the reason why fertility is crashing is because all these unwanted children aren't being had by these teen mothers in Latin America and therefore blah, blah, blah.

Which implies that the people who had a lot of kids in the past really weren't ready to have them really didn't want to have them weren't, you know, this was not their thing. So you would assume that there's a lot of misery around this you know, we just, everywhere the data implies.

Malcolm Collins: Hold on, this data comes from the U.

S. and so I think that you're seeing something different here.

Simone Collins: No, no, well, yes, because this is, we're talking about now and we're talking about the U. S. and, and, and as we point out, yeah, like more, lower income people have more kids, but [00:08:00] yeah so. Let's go over this graph. What this graph demonstrates, and of course it's not profound but it shows that both the percentage of parents saying that they find being a parent is enjoyable or rewarding highest among lower income people.

So 38 percent of lower income people and 36 percent of lower income people find parenting to be either enjoyable or rewarding all the time. 38 and 36 respectively. You know, you're getting sorry. I'm sorry. And it's right there.

Malcolm Collins: 38 and 43%. So 38 percent I'll read the graph here. Thanks. Yeah, go ahead. 38% Of lower income individuals find being a parent enjoyable all the time and 49 percent in addition to that.

So 86 percent of lower income people in total find being a parent very enjoyable all of the time or most of the time. Now, if you contrast this with upper income people, instead of 38 percent all of the [00:09:00] time, it is 14 percent all of the time for upper income people. And with middle income people, it's only 21 percent all of the time.

And you also see lower total levels of all of the time or most of the time. So in contrast with the 86 percent of lower income people that find being a parent enjoyable all the time or most of the time you only have 79 percent within the upper income community. Now, if we talk about the amount that find it rewarding, you actually have about the same rate across all groups.

If you're talking about all of the time or most of the time, it's 80, 79, 81. So within one point of each other. But when you talk about all of the time do they find it rewarding all of the time? The number of lower income people that find it rewarding all the time is. 43 percent contrasted with only 28 percent in the upper income community.

So what you're really seeing here is upper income people seem to pretty dramatically and markedly find parenting both less enjoyable and [00:10:00] less rewarding. Yeah. And you

Simone Collins: know, if I were to like, let's say this graph was presented to us with only the numbers and not the. Income levels, you know, they're like, okay, well now put the incomes.

I would first think to just invert it. Right. Because everyone's oh, well, the reason why people can't become parents, the reason why people are miserable as parents is they don't have enough money. They don't have enough money. Look at this, look at this enjoyable and rewarding.

Malcolm Collins: So I think that there's a few things going on here. The first one is one that often isn't talked about but I do not think that it is totally causal, the correlation between income and parenting. I think that there is a correlational element here. Which is to say that if you're the type of person that values family and parenting more, you are going to spend more time on doing that than on maximizing your personal income stream.

Oh,

Simone Collins: okay. So there's a, there's a different, the causation moves in a different direction. You're not having more kids because you're poor. You're poor because you're having more kids. Like the Weasleys. Well,

Malcolm Collins: because you have different life

Simone Collins: [00:11:00] priorities. Yeah. Yeah. Like you're, you're spending your time raising family instead of, you know, pulling.

Malcolm Collins: It's not just how you're spending your time. It's how you structure your life. So a good example of this would be us. Okay. For people outside of the world of degrees. It's probably literally the hardest degree to get into in the world. It's much harder to get out than a Harvard MBA, for example, and MBAs are much harder to get than PhDs.

I remember one person it was like you implied you had a graduate degree from Stanford Which would you which made me think you had a neuroscience PhD from Stanford because you said you had a neuroscience degree and that's obviously a lie like a scam and I got very frustrated with this because I could have gotten a neuroscience It would have been Astronomically easier to get into the neuroscience PhD program at Stanford than a Stanford MBA.

Simone Collins: And less expensive if,

Malcolm Collins: It's literally probably about if you're talking about the, the, the difficulty, the difference

Simone Collins: between no, no, their entrance rates are just [00:12:00] Google entrance rates, just Google entrance

Malcolm Collins: rates. Yeah. Well, it's not only that, but if you look at like the average scores you need and stuff like that yeah, so I was frustrated by that.

But what I'm saying is I could demand a very high salary. Simone has a graduate degree from Cambridge, like we could demand incredibly high salaries. If we wanted to play that game, if we wanted to live in like Manhattan and San Francisco, but we didn't, we moved to rural Pennsylvania, right? Like we, we live on a farm, right?

Like we, we do what we can and, and we're the, our, our education skills and network gives us some level of financial security that a lot of people wouldn't have, but we would probably be considered middle income people. I think when I look at the stats or upper middle income family whereas we certainly wouldn't need to do that.

We are that because we are optimizing around what we value. Which is, is really important. A lot of these people who the, the chart is looking at is lower income might just be [00:13:00] generally genuinely like they're living in a suburban or rural area where their income is intrinsically going to be less than if they're living in an urban area.

Because of cost of living, for example,

Simone Collins: But that's awesome to have more kids. Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: Allowing them to have more kids. So I think that that's one component that we're seeing here. But then the other component I think we're seeing could be and this is a component that would be for the the other side of the argument.

It could be that high wealth individuals have access to more compelling competing tasks. Oh, sources

Simone Collins: of enjoyment and meaning. Meaning that like when you are lower income. Like you won't, you can't take fancy trips. You can't engage in charity. You can't join a board and become a big, big fancy person.

So,

Malcolm Collins: and so this is where I disagree with that. I really don't think that that many things that you could otherwise do are limited when you're lower income. Yeah, there really isn't, this is something that when

Simone Collins: lower income people are super involved in their communities, [00:14:00] for example, when you look at rates of giving to charity and like proportional charity donations, lower income people give the

Malcolm Collins: most.

Yeah. So this is my roommate when I was at business school he smartest person I've ever met. I think just a genuine one of my favorite moments with him is the. There was this guy in the classroom who was talking about building his app company. He was a, he was a guest

Simone Collins: speaker.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, he was a guest speaker. And, and, and, and my roommate I'm not going to say his name or anything because he's a very private person. And he does a lot of what he does through like shell companies. So people don't know that it's all him. But the guest speaker. was like he said he had said something about how to get, like, how their system for ranking apps works and stuff like that.

Simone Collins: At that time it was like, hold on, app store, right?

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Right. And, and he like just dismissed him. He's I'm sorry, you, you misunderstand the system. This is how it works. And then the guy said, snarkily to him, he goes, How many top 10 Apple app store apps have you had? And he goes, how many do I have on the top 10 list today?

[00:15:00] And the guy was just floored. Because he programs them. He's got a number of shell company he uses to program them, but really smart guy. And we were talking to him about wealth at one point because he just has an enormous amount of wealth. Very humble guy. And he was complaining.

He's I don't understand the point of being wealthy anymore. Do you remember? He's like, all of the things that I used to have exclusive or historically I would have had exclusive access to as an ultra wealthy person. I, I, I, what, I can't, I don't have a private driver anymore. Like you have Uber now, right?

Like anyone can have like basically a private driver on demand. I don't have what was it like food delivered to me anymore? Anyone can do that. Right. I don't know. He was going through all of the things like all these

Simone Collins: customized services, hiring someone at the drop of a hat to do something for you as an assistant.

Oh, we'll just use Upwork.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Or oh, you know, what do I have a band in my house? I can listen to any band in the world wherever, you know, constantly playing. And he was just going [00:16:00] through all of the exclusive things that used to be the realm of the ultra wealthy and the ultra elite. Which are now generally accessible to everyone.

In fact, when I look at the wealth gated hobbies right now, a lot of them either suck I dunno, like sailing or skiing or

Simone Collins: polo. Yeah. No one actually wants to do that.

Malcolm Collins: It's more like a status signal thing, or they are hobbies where honestly the, the. Expenditure of meaningless wealth is part of the point of the hobby.

So here it's collecting would come into a big part of this. I'm talking to you, you Warhammer figure collectors and stuff like that. You're, you're no, it's true. You know, all of these collectibles, all of these you know, uh, I guess, you know, whatever, like the things are going to conferences too, and you're buying all these baubles, which have a increased price due to the scarcity, due to all of the people who are collecting them.

The. [00:17:00] Yeah, I mean, I think about the hobbies that I have I'm like, what competes was my time with the kids, right? Writing, which like, I guess I love writing. I've been having so much fun writing recently. So that's one thing that's not like a wealth gated thing at all. And video games are one of those things where somebody might be like, well, video games have been rising in price recently.

And I'm like, If you contrast video game prices today with what they were when we were kids you know, a new video game when we were kids used to cost 50 bucks. What you are not taking into account is inflation. I remember I was talking with Simone during the pandemic, where I was always shocked that video game prices were rising so much more slowly than they were.

You have video games now where you'll get AAA games that are selling for 70 or something like that now, 75 for a base game, which is more than they used to sell for.

Simone Collins: Yeah, but I'm sorry. Super Bowl tickets are now 9, 000. Getting into Disneyland is like 4, 000, sorry, 400.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, that doesn't really impede my enjoyment of it, because another [00:18:00] thing that's changed with video games is also the indie game scene.

And frankly, I find the AAA games To be a lot less enjoyable than they used to be in the indie games to be a lot more enjoyable and they're even cheaper than games used to be. And then you have things like Epic Store that's giving out like a free new, often pretty good game, like every year a couple, yeah. It's not particularly a wealth gated hobby. So I'm thinking like, where are these wealth gated things that are they don't exist.

Simone Collins: Basically, in other words yeah, I don't think that that second hypothesis, I want to be clear

Malcolm Collins: about this point because people might be misunderstanding me when people don't have a lot of wealth, there are things that they don't have access to that.

Wealthy people do have access to, but those things are not in the category. Of entertainment, they are in the categories, typically of personal safety, personal health, personal ability to do something like, I guess, travel the world on a dime or or not have to work, but all of those things don't fall into this [00:19:00] category.

Of competing for their entertainment daily time. So anyway yeah, that was really interesting to me.

Simone Collins: Sorry. Yeah, just, I mean the most important thing that I wanted to point out by doing a podcast on this is just that you think that lower income people who are having more kids are doing this by mistake and miserable note, they.

They're finding this extremely satisfying. And I mean, I think a lot of that's, I mean, a lot of the

Malcolm Collins: people have to make a hypothesis. I think I know what the actual answer is, but I want to hear what you were saying. I'm going to say,

Simone Collins: I think that there's also a correlation between higher levels of we'll say faith.

And that could be a hard culture, any sort of harder culture. Weirdly correlates with lower income. And I, I can't really say why maybe lower income leaves more room in your like head for faith. But I, I think that that's probably a big correlatory factor is people of faith and hard cultures are more likely to [00:20:00] be pronatalist are more likely to find the enjoyment and meaning of having kids.

And people who are wealthier are far more likely to be part of the urban monoculture. And therefore be, if anything, Negative utilitarian antinatalists at heart who have children,

Malcolm Collins: but then kind of really on the fundamental point. Okay. So what is it? Wealthier people are statistically much more likely to be in the urban monoculture than less wealthy people.

Um, Well, no, because you were saying that the alternative was faith, and I'm saying the alternative isn't faith. It's just not being in the urban monoculture. You know, it often looks like faith, okay? Faith is one component of this, but you need to keep in mind if you're less wealthy, regardless of your group, so even if you're a less wealthy Democrat, for example, right, you are often not going to be in the urban monoculture.

You're going to be in your local, Often like a minority ethnic community, like you're going to be ingrained with your local Hispanic you know, [00:21:00] often like Catholic church and family network or your local black community or your local and these culturally are very different from the urban monoculture, even when you are on this democratic side and then when you're not on the democratic side, you know, this is not an issue.

And so I think what we're really seeing here is that the urban monoculture has created a, it cultural system for relating to children where they are basically treated like pets. And children are very high maintenance pets. If, if you are getting children like pets, children suck

Simone Collins: as pets, but they really do.

They suck as

Malcolm Collins: pets. Well, when this is, yeah, this is one of the things that I, you know, I talk about here is sometimes the way to be happiest. And this is one of the things we talk about on our podcast. Like you can see being happy. Being unhappy is a sin our episode on, on, on that concept, which is a lot of people don't realize that when you define your personal goals around hedonism, like I am having a kid to be happier.

That kid will always provide you with less happiness than if you are having [00:22:00] a kid because it is your ideological duty to have the kid, the happiness that you get from tasks that you do. Because you think they are a thing of intrinsic value and not to make yourself happy will always give you more durable happiness.

And the person who is chasing hedonism in and of itself, but the urban monoculture doesn't tell people that it tells people that the highest order goal in anyone's life should be. Sort of the mass distribution of hedonism. So first, do what makes you happy and then try to increase pleasure and reduce suffering in others.

Simone Collins: So you're saying the very nature of the cultural monoculture makes it difficult to actually enjoy having kids and find having kids rewarding because it does. Detract from in the moment pleasure.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, because, because chasing after pleasure, defining your life around pleasure, both your own pleasure and the pleasure of other people's sort of disables your ability to really feel genuine pleasure.

And I think that that's what's [00:23:00] happening here. But then I also think that there's all of these, and we talk about like the psychologist cult and everything like that. I think the way that these individuals, when they're in deep in the urban monoculture relate to mental health and frame their own mental health around questions like trauma, the way they interact with things is just really unhealthy and it causes them to interact with their kids in really unhealthy ways.

Simone Collins: And hurt their kids ultimately, which is disturbing

Malcolm Collins: to me. They treat their kids like little

Simone Collins: princelings. Well, and, well, and, but then they also apply this whole trauma mindset to their children. And we've met, it's so interesting. Um, we, we keep meeting young people, right? And then we've, we've met a decent number of young people from both more conservative, traditional religious communities as well as super woke communities.

And it's so funny. I I'm, I'm thinking of two people in particular. One is like super to the point, like super regulated. I I've never heard about. Anything ever that [00:24:00] happened that was difficult in her life or anything like that, just, you know, her comments and thoughts on things. And then I'm thinking about the other one.

And every single time I talk, there's some mention of trauma or difficulty or ideology, actually. Which is really interesting and it just shows how like how screwed up this culture is and how it's creating people who are miserable. So I mean, you

Malcolm Collins: allow your kids to engage with this culture of I, I don't know what to call it.

It's a culture that has disseminated from the psychology community, which was why originally I started my career as a neuroscientist. And I worked in psychiatry and and so I'm saying this as somebody who is informed about how the community is structured and the way it works and the way the human brain works.

It is really much more structurally similar to a cult. Now, what what is taught as psychology than it is to historically what we called psychology. It's actually much closer to what Scientology was in the 80s than than what any real evidence based psychology is [00:25:00] and we have episodes on this psychology called episodes, stuff like that.

But. It has disseminated into all aspects of how these individuals in the urban monoculture see themselves and relate to their own self narrative. And when a kid is raised in this, and it's funny, you get the two people who you mentioned were girls. And I thought you were thinking of two guys who I know.

Who had the same phenomenon. Oh my

Simone Collins: God. You're right. No, I'm now I'm thinking of those two guys, the two young. Yeah. But I was thinking of

Malcolm Collins: really sad because these are really otherwise competent individuals. Well, all of these

Simone Collins: people are equally, I think they all have the equal, like potential as humans. And yet one of these groups, like we we've given up on their futures, honestly, like we've just been like,

Malcolm Collins: okay, we're ready.

We've basically written them off. I'm going to be honest. Yeah. Well, and it's interesting, the smart ones like when I think about the smart people who are in each of these groups that I know the, the and I, I think that people here when we're talking about like conservative young people they, they probably think that we're talking about.[00:26:00]

I don't know, like white what they would think of as traditional, like I, I don't know, like trad cast . Every one of the people I'm thinking about are the first generation immigrant de descendant. Yeah. Those are the most,

Simone Collins: or, or, or children? Some are children of first generation

Malcolm Collins: immigrants. That's what I'm saying.

The ones who I'm thinking of. Oh, the woke ones. Yeah, I don't know any woke. Oh, you do. Okay. Well, I did. I don't know the one you're speaking of but generally the first generation immigrant kids who I know are less affected by wokeness because they're still you know, I think they have the

Simone Collins: ability to see in contrast to their home culture, just how like ridiculous and unhinged woke culture is.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. And they're like, no, this is ridiculous. And then the ones who I know who have really succumbed to it, their families have been here for generations. Yeah. Yeah. And they, they succumb to what culture and they had so much promise, but honestly more than like 50 percent of their mental effort seems dedicated to maintaining quote unquote mental health, which is really just degradating of [00:27:00] mental health.

Like just do yourself, get it like, like the, the elevation of, of this sort of mental landscape that has come with this mental health expansion within our, our society. It's both unnecessary and causes more mental health issues.

Simone Collins: And it also pulls people totally off their career track.

Like I, I, you see all these people now who like want to be life coaches or want to be therapists or want to go into all these sorts of they just want to feed into this. Because it's all they're ever thinking about. And so then they're, they're becoming unproductive. They're not getting jobs.

Like they're, they're not getting well paying jobs. It's, it's awful. They're also putting themselves into huge amounts of student debt to get degrees.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Well, I mean, it's, it's, it's an, and I think very, really an addictive process. Yeah, for sure. And it's interesting to me because people know that I really love studying religions, but my love of studying religions really came from a love of studying cults.

I always wanted to understand how do people get enthralled by these ideas [00:28:00] that seem just completely pointless and feckless. And how do we control our own minds? That was something that I always really cared about. I was like,

Simone Collins: well Right, if a cult can make you give all your money to strangers and do all these crazy things, well then what could cult tactics make you do if you If you leverage them for good to do what you actually want,

Malcolm Collins: brainwash myself.

Could I create a little, like my own mental landscape that would do well and move me towards efficaciousness and

Simone Collins: seeing as powerful, cool tactics are totally, you should be thinking

Malcolm Collins: that. Well, I, I believe I've executed on it within my own life. I'm quite, quite happy with my life. As everybody always comments on there.

Like it is

Simone Collins: wild. Yeah. Everyone is is he on drugs or is this an act? And it's no, this is just I mean, by the way. Guys, this is Malcolm at his low point. He has been up since 2am. He is exhausted and tired now. You should see him first thing in the morning. I mean, my

Malcolm Collins: god. Oh yeah, I am very high energy first thing in the morning.

We've had some interviews. The Chris Williamson [00:29:00] interview was me earlier in the morning. And people want to be like, what is Malcolm like when he's like earlier in the morning? Blahblahblahblahblahblahblah. You know, I get really excited about everything. Or right after I've completed a task I'm really excited about.

So I think that you can actually brainwash yourself basically, not brainwash yourself because it's, it's really just, you choose your mental landscape much more than people realize. And when you act like your mental landscape is something that you don't have complete authority over and, and that you are not the authoritarian dictator of your mental landscape.

I love these people. They're like, Oh, I'm listening to all the little voices in my head. And I'm trying to. Create what's the word I'm looking for? Some sort of balance or harmony among them. You know, this, this pushed by like insight out and stuff like that. It's don't listen to them.

They're wrong. We're, we're not the slave of your emotions. You, you're the slave of your logic. Your logic is the dictator of your mental landscape. And if you want to feel happy, then you feel happy because you've got bigger things than feeling good [00:30:00] about yourself. And we really we are dealing with a collapsing society right now.

We cannot afford these types of emotional indulgences. And part of the reason society is collapsing is because so many people are indulging these emotional indulgences. Actually, very interesting. If you look at historical periods. Right before societal collapse is you see a similar sort of mental health ism under different names Among the what like

Simone Collins: temperance

Malcolm Collins: or what was it?

Oh the vapors, you know, I can barely think right now. Oh, no.

Simone Collins: No, yes the hypochondriac women who are always Swooning and they had these mysterious illnesses, etc.

Malcolm Collins: Or, or always, yeah, competing in these, these sort of mental games or writing long poems about how mentally anguished they were. Right. Yeah.

Simone Collins: Goodness gracious. Well, I mean, so my takeaway from this graph is basically this, this thought that being pure and being apparent will make you miserable is. Like just off [00:31:00] that, you know, lower income parents are, there are clearly fewer low income parents who don't find any rewarding enjoyment from parenting than wealthy people.

And it's so funny, like when I actually look at, you know, the lower income families, we know who are parents. And I, I look at how they are around their kids and we hang out in person. And I was just like, look at your, their Facebook posts. And then I think of the higher income parents that we know. And their children, I see how they act around them.

And speak about them and post about them. It, it actually kind of checks out. There's a lot more sort of like, Cognitive dissonance around being a parent with the wealthy in some way, and also maybe this feeling like they're kind of above raising them. So that like time spent with them is kind of like, you know, it's, it's, it's very hard for me to articulate this, but anyway it, it does shape the way that I look at pronatalism and income.

And I mean, it certainly reinforces our thing, which is, yeah, this whole money, please approach to pronatalism is [00:32:00] incredibly dumb. But yeah, I'm glad that you indulged me in talking about this

Malcolm Collins: graph. I love you to death Simone. You are a wonderful wife.

Simone Collins: You are a dapper and perfect husband. I

Malcolm Collins: love you so much.