Someday, Together,

[gaytog]

You don’t need to vote. Not voting doesn’t make you a monster. It doesn’t make you responsible for the bad things in the world. There are many different ways to make the world a better place—big and small, political and non-political. Voting is just one option among many. If you find that it’s not worth the time or stress, or if you just plain don’t want to, that’s perfectly okay. It’s also perfectly okay to not assume responsibility for fixing the world at all; it’s okay to just live.

[gaytog]

Utilitarianism is the moral philosophy of maximizing happiness and minimizing suffering.

It is naive when applied on case-by-case basis with no consideration for context or second-order effects. Naive utilitarianism tells you to pull out your calculator for every decision, and to follow the numbers no matter how outrageous the outcome. It compels you to steal people's organs and sacrifice fat men to runaway trolleys.

Of course, "murder is bad" is a better social norm than "anyone can kill whoever they want as long as doing so saves lives in expectation": if going to the doctor means your organs might get harvested, you won't go to the doctor, and you'll die sooner of natural causes. Don't-do-murder world is better even by utilitarian standards.

A consideration for context and second-order effects also leads to more mundane insights:

If you give away so much money that you make yourself miserable, then your lifetime earnings will go down, and you will donate less money in expectation than if you'd set a reasonable limit for yourself in the first place.

If you approach every social interaction with the goal of maximizing all participants' happiness as quickly as possible, you will become a people-pleaser who struggles to navigate important conflicts and form lasting relationships.

If you lie or cheat whenever you think you can get away with it, then you will keep lying and cheating until, eventually and inevitably, a truth comes out and someone gets hurt.

Rack up enough of these, and you begin to notice a pattern: common-sense morality is a pretty good stand-in for considered utilitarianism. Thus the golden rule: If you think you have a good utilitarian reason to violate common-sense ethical norms, don't. Just don't.

Meta-naive utilitarianism is an overcorrection for naivete, one that leads to selfishness or complacency. "I shouldn't donate away my entire life" becomes "My own comfort is of the utmost moral importance, lest the slightest hardship minutely increase my risk of burnout and decrease my expected lifetime donations." "It's important to assert my boundaries and not shy away from interpersonal conflict" becomes "I don't have to care at all, ever, about hurting other people's feelings."

Meta-naivete is inherently more difficult to correct for than naivete. Deferring to the status quo is easy; we are creatures of habit. Figuring out exactly when and how to break from it is hard. If there's a single rule of thumb to follow, it's to understand which trap you're currently falling into—naivete or meta-naivete—adjust course as appropriate, and return to the question every so often.

None of this is new, but it's been on my mind.

[supreme-leader-stoat]

In front of you are five doors, each concealing one of the following: a random man, a hungry grizzly bear, a walrus, a fairy, and a car. Each door has something different behind it. The game show host, who knows what is behind each of the doors, has you select one of the doors at random and does not reveal what is behind it. Whatever is behind the door will pass into your ownership without taxes. After you make your decision he opens one of the doors of his choice which is not the door you picked and which he knows conceals neither the fairy nor the car. You have now eliminated either the man, the walrus, or the hungry grizzly bear from the pool of unknowns.

The game show host then offers you a chance to either keep your current door, or switch to another one of your choice, with a catch. A train full of your loved ones is currently hurtling down a track at high speeds towards another one of your loved ones, who is tied up on the tracks. If you change your choice of door, the train will be redirected away from your loved one and to another track with a man you do not know, a hungry grizzly bear, a walrus, a fairy, and two clones (complete with memories) tied up on it. One of the two clones is yours. The train is sturdy enough that neither option will cause it to derail.

At the same time, another person is playing an identical game, and if you both change which door you have picked, your trains will divert onto the same track in a head-on collision, killing many of both of your loved ones as well as everyone tied up on that track. As part of the game show, the studio is prepared to pay out money to you equal to the life insurance policies of any of your loved ones that die as part of the show.

Before you make your decision, the game show host hands you a gun. You must shoot one other person in the problem.

Who do you shoot?

The other contestant, before they can change their pick

My loved one on the tracks

The other contestant's loved one on the tracks

My clone

The other contestant's clone

The unknown man on the tracks

The bear on the tracks

The walrus on the tracks

The fairy on the tracks

The game show host

You, Stoat, for making me read all this

The person I reblogged this from (other than Stoat) for making me read all this

Voting ended onMay 17, 2024

[gaytog]

mold of my teeth

[valentinedagger]

a loosely connected conglomeration of thoughts:

if i wasn't homeschooled and not allowed to see peers irl unsupervised around 14-17, i would have been having sex. i was a stereotypically horny gay teen with a high libido and an understanding of my kinks.

most of the people i ended up making friends with irl have said they started having sex around that age. most of these people also were not on tumblr or really most socmed other than, like, snapchat and insta.

the other homeschoolers/cyberschoolers i was acquaintances with as a teen were similarly sheltered, and often had a sort of sense of superiority over it to cope with the isolation they experienced. "i'm better than other kids my age because i'm not partying and doing drugs" kind of thing.

a lot of us only had access to exploring our sexualities via online connections, and this resulted in a lot of blurred boundaries and skewed ideas about what exploring sex and sexuality looked like. a lot of assuming that what happened in roleplay and fanfic was an accurate depiction of having sex with a peer, a lot of trauma for being criminalized by consensually exploring sex with peers (because it's legal to do so irl as a teen, but as soon as you take it to text or video chat you can get in deep legal shit), a lot of trauma from anonymous sexual relationships that turned out to be inappropriate and even grooming from people who lied about their ages.

a lot of queer people on this webbed site have copped to being raised in hyper conservative middle class christian households. a lot of them were teens when violent homophobia was peaking in the teen demographic specifically and being gay was a sentence to complete social isolation until you graduated high school (like, no "queer friend groups" or GSAs, it'd just be you as the only openly gay kid in the entire school until you graduated).

it is entirely possible the discourse around sex and teenagers on this webbed site is being led by people who do not currently/did not have very many friends in high school and feel a sense of superiority for being Not Like Other Teens, and/or whose early sexual exploration took place online in contexts that caused an abnormal amount of sexual baggage and even trauma. this would definitely explain the weird disconnect from reality in sentiments like "my peers who are having sex at 15 are only doing it because they're being groomed."

[yaoist]

you know all those posts that are like "your support of [marginalized group] needs to come before your hatred of [bigot]"? well your support of survivors needs to come before your hatred of pedophiles

[gaytog]

What exactly are your political leanings since you're no longer an anarchist? I'm a bit curious since I do like the thoughts you have on things

I don't pay much attention to what my government is doing on any given day, largely because I no longer believe that politics is my best avenue toward changing the world for the better. I do, however, have a few rules of thumb to guide me through elections.

At the local level, I'm a single-issue voter in favor of urban density—that is, building more housing in cities, getting cars off the streets, and preventing urban sprawl. I've made this a priority because it does a lot of good things all at once: lowers rents (which in turn reduces poverty and homelessness and allows more immigration), combats climate change, reduces road traffic deaths.

At the national level, and especially when it comes to electing a president, I'm a single-issue voter against U.S. military involvement anywhere for any reason. If I knew more macroeconomics I might care more about international trade policy, which can also result in widespread devastating harms—but given how very little attention I'm willing to lend to national politics, I'm content to leave my stance at "We're the evil empire and we need to stop."

Overall I'm extremely libertarian (in the social sense); I'm in favor of decriminalizing drug use and sex work, and otherwise letting people do whatever they want that doesn't hurt anyone else.

My voting is not any sort of glowing endorsement of my government, which I think is pretty corrupt and terrible! I just want to put in a little time and effort to keep the wheels of democracy turning, since even a corrupt, violent, imperialistic democracy is much better than the readily available alternatives.

[gaytog]

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-myth-of-the-teen-brain/ an article i came across recently that i thought may be of interest to you and fellow YRAs :>

Thank you for sharing! Unfortunately I can't evaluate most the article's claims, given my ignorance of the relevant fields. (I tried to at least chase down some "underdeveloped prefrontal cortex" headlines to see if they're as flimsy as the author claims, but I only found one recent article that actually links to a study…and the study was behind a paywall. I'll try again later, since it seemed like a good idea and I'd like it pan out.)

In any case, I think that even if young people—and I'm including children here, not just teenagers—do have an inherent cognitive impairment that leads to worse decision-making, that's still not sufficient reason to take away their rights! Even if you don't think that individual rights are terminally important, the current "adults force children to make good decisions" system does not obviously lead to the best outcomes.

First, it's quite possible that "adults make better decisions for themselves" doesn't even translate to "adults make better decisions for and on behalf of young people." After all, nobody truly knows another person. What's good for you might be bad for me, and vice versa. Children have intimate knowledge of themselves that their adults lack; this might have a stronger positive effect on decision-making than the negative effect of a developing prefrontal cortex. (Not saying that's definitely the case, just that it's a possibility everyone seems to be overlooking.)

And the current system also has a bunch of harms associated with it.

Forcing people to act according to your wishes instead of their own a) often requires violence or the threat of violence to enforce, and b) is itself a form of coercion. When adults do this to each other, we call it "abuse." That's a harm.

When other people decide where you go and what you eat and when you sleep and who your friends are and everything else about your life, you end up feeling powerless, lacking agency. That's a harm.

When one person has socially sanctioned, absolute power over another, they can and often do get away with severe mistreatment and abuse. That's a harm.

Considering all the uncertainties and harms involved, I'd be really surprised if the current system is leading to better outcomes than letting children make decisions for themselves and learn from their mistakes—again, even supposing that adults are inherently, straightforwardly better at rational decision-making.

[keynes-fetlife-mutual]

forever exhausted with people going "this is a valuable skill for adults! therefore we should demand that kids practice a pointless artificial version of it in school, and punish them when they struggle!"

[keynes-fetlife-mutual]

this is much akin to the "there oughta be a law!" impulse. even if I agree that the thing you want to legislate against is bad, or that the skill you think kids should learn is valuable, you have come nowhere close to establishing that your (law|curriculum change) would do more good than harm, or really do anything at all to further your stated goals.

[gaytog]

Early in 2020, quarantine killed my ability to engage with effective altruism. Turns out in-person meetups were load-bearing. I had access to online EA discussion spaces, but trying to do it all online—keep up with the latest news, learn more about each cause area, think over my career and donation decisions—proved unsustainable. Barely a week in, I felt the early signs of burnout.

So I stopped. My new goals for the pandemic were: finish university, take care of myself and my partners, don't catch COVID. Anything else was secondary.

This wasn't a change in values. I reasoned that hunkering down to focus on myself and my loved ones was, even from an EA perspective, the best thing I could do—that my total life impact would be higher if I kept up a good trajectory overall, rather than run myself into the ground for a little short-term gain. Not the only reason to take care of myself, of course, but it made the decision feel robustly, straightforwardly good.

And I actually did okay! Finished university, moved in with my partners, didn't catch COVID. Quarantine eroded my health, self-esteem, and overall well-being—but I had loads to begin with, so I was good for a whole year and a half, and the fatigue was temporary when I did finally catch it. Now I'm doing more than fine. I'm almost flourishing.

But EA is still missing from my life in a major way. I'm ready to get back into it, and I'm trying, but it's hard.

When I decided to take a break, I thought the pandemic would last a year or two. I thought it would end, cleanly, and my life would pick up where it left off. (I have no idea how reasonable this prediction was. I have a frustrating mental block around thinking too hard about COVID, because the 24-hour news cycle stresses me out and COVID was the 24-hour news cycle for a long time. Bleh.)

I was wrong in a few different ways:

The pandemic didn't end cleanly.

A lot happened in the movement while I was gone. I'm missing a lot of context. I barely know where to begin catching up.

I moved cities. My new home has a much larger EA community than the old one, but ironically this works against me—there's no single local meetup, so it's hard for newcomers to find the kind of in-person discussions and community I'm looking for.

That said, I have some cause for optimism:

I have an in-person job, and the whole "getting out of the house every day" thing is super helpful for managing the mental health burden both of the pandemic and of being lonely in a new city. Since I no longer spend 100% of my time at home, in-person EA meetups might not be so load-bearing anymore.

I'm making a monthly habit of donating 10% of my income to GiveWell-recommended charities, and of actually looking into their research when I do (instead of poking around just enough to make sure they're legit, which is all I did for my first donation through GiveWell). In addition to the normal benefits of giving to effective global health charities (fewer people dying!!!), the whole exercise feels extremely empowering and agency-affirming—which I did expect, but not to this degree! I've only done it for one month so far, having postponed the November donation due to NaNoWriMo, but I expect I'll keep up with the commitment because wow it feels good.

The FTX scandal has been (indirectly) helpful in getting me to feel like part of the community again. Most effective altruists are as in the dark as me, or nearly so; I'm learning things at the same time as everyone else. And lots of people are returning to the drawing board, reasserting and reevaluating their fundamental principles, which gives mild but helpful "101" energy to some conversations.

For now I've been doing a lot of lurking in online spaces, as well as trying to think seriously about my highest-impact career paths, both of which are easier now than they were in the early pandemic. We'll see how it goes!

[argentconflagration]

On the subject of the 'cultural Christian' discussions going around, have you heard the term Christian hegemony? I heard the term recently (in a ms-demeanor post maybe?) and, like, it just fits so much better—emphasizes systems over individuals, less blame-y, inclusive of internalizing bits without ever being Christian. Plus the term is used beyond chronically-online spaces.

Yeah! And to be honest I do think there are people who use the term "culturally Christian" itself without any intent of excusing bad behavior toward atheists/nonreligious people, like when people talk about "cultural Christianity" with the focus, like you said, on systems rather than individuals. It's important to me that I mention that I'm not actually talking about the term "culturally Christian" per se, but about the

entitlement to speak over atheists/pagans/nonreligious people about their religious identity

belief that people's ex-religions still get to 'claim' them

presumption that you [general you] understand other religious minorities' relationship to Christianity better than they do

implication that people who experienced Christian religious abuse are privileged for having been abused in that way

essentialism about people not really having autonomy over their religious beliefs and identity

implication that nonreligious people do not have complete belief systems (like religious people do)

erasure of experiences of religious oppression that look different from your own

implication that apostates of non-Christian faiths aren't critical of their former faiths or aren't critical of religion in general

erasure of non-Western atheist thought

and other bad behavior typically associated with using the term.

[youth-rights]

I am continuously astounded by how much pro-homeschooling rhetoric flies in youth rights circles.

Homeschooling (yes, that includes unschooling) consolidates massive amounts of power into the hands of parents. Homeschooling causes horrific abuse and isolation.

The homeschooling movement is far-right and blatantly pro-abuse. The HSLDA called a man who kept children in cages a “hero.” They has helped to block the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child AND the UN Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women, has backed legislation banning both same-sex marriage and civil unions, and helped kill a bill that would define isolation as abuse, among countless other offenses. Its founder, Michael Farris, wrote in his dramatized narrative of CPS “stealing” children from their Christian homeschooling parents that hitting children to the point of bruising is not abuse.

Libby Ann has extensively documented HSLDA’s support of abuse, including praising abusers and attempting to block all bills that define abuse more strictly, even if “more strictly” simply expands the definition to include bruises and welts.

You can’t be pro-youth and pro-homeschooling.

[gaytog]

By “pro-homeschooling”, do you mean the belief that parents who want to homeschool their children should be allowed to do so, regardless of the wishes of the child? Or that children should be able to decide for themselves whether or not to attend traditional school, and whether or not to be homeschooled? Because that seems like a really important distinction to me; one robs children of agency over their lives, and the other is the backbone of youth rights.

If a child hates school and would prefer some form of homeschooling—well, I guess you could argue that you should ignore their wishes, because homeschooling is so harmful on net that the harm of forcing the child into a traditional school against their will is outweighed by the harm of providing a even single scrap of legitimacy to the right-wing homeschooling movement. But that seems really dubious to me.

[onecornerface]

Homeschooling is kind of like guns. There are reasonable arguments in defense of the thing itself, but (at least in America) 90+% of the culture surrounding it is devoted to insane ideology and evil agendas.

[gaytog]

That's certainly relevant in a conversation about public policy. I'm open to the idea that making homeschooling illegal in the short term would be net beneficial for children. But (and I could be misreading here, sorry if so) OP seems to be condemning not just the homeschooling movement but any and all individual instances of homeschooling. This is confusing to me in an explicitly youth rights context, because if you let children make decisions about their own lives then some of them will choose to be homeschooled, and denying this to them on youth rights grounds is a self-contradiction.

[youth-rights]

I am continuously astounded by how much pro-homeschooling rhetoric flies in youth rights circles.

Homeschooling (yes, that includes unschooling) consolidates massive amounts of power into the hands of parents. Homeschooling causes horrific abuse and isolation.

The homeschooling movement is far-right and blatantly pro-abuse. The HSLDA called a man who kept children in cages a “hero.” They has helped to block the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child AND the UN Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women, has backed legislation banning both same-sex marriage and civil unions, and helped kill a bill that would define isolation as abuse, among countless other offenses. Its founder, Michael Farris, wrote in his dramatized narrative of CPS “stealing” children from their Christian homeschooling parents that hitting children to the point of bruising is not abuse.

Libby Ann has extensively documented HSLDA’s support of abuse, including praising abusers and attempting to block all bills that define abuse more strictly, even if “more strictly” simply expands the definition to include bruises and welts.

You can’t be pro-youth and pro-homeschooling.

[gaytog]

By "pro-homeschooling", do you mean the belief that parents who want to homeschool their children should be allowed to do so, regardless of the wishes of the child? Or that children should be able to decide for themselves whether or not to attend traditional school, and whether or not to be homeschooled? Because that seems like a really important distinction to me; one robs children of agency over their lives, and the other is the backbone of youth rights.

If a child hates school and would prefer some form of homeschooling—well, I guess you could argue that you should ignore their wishes, because homeschooling is so harmful on net that the harm of forcing the child into a traditional school against their will is outweighed by the harm of providing a even single scrap of legitimacy to the right-wing homeschooling movement. But that seems really dubious to me.

[guerrillatech]

[random-thought-depository]

On the one hand, yes. On the other hand, I think it’s legitimately a bad sign that I’ve never seen a convincing answer to questions like “If we’re supposed to ‘abolish the police,’ what’s your plan for protecting me from being casually robbed, abused, or murdered on my way home from the grocery store?” and “If we’re supposed to ‘abolish prisons,’ what are we going to do with unrepentant rapists and murderers?” and “If we’re supposed to ‘give the land back,’ what are your plans for the hundreds of millions of people who are already here and aren’t descended from people who were here in 1491?”

I don’t expect you to have it all planned out like Hari Seldon, but I do want assurances that your plan amounts to more than factional allegiance signaling or “destroy an important load-bearing feature of society without creating any viable substitute and let the chips fall where they may” or “we actually do want what you’d see as a dystopia, but we know we’d never get popular if we explicitly stated our goals, so we won’t do that.”

The seventeenth to nineteenth century liberal revolutionaries certainly didn’t have our society all planned out, but they did have plans about how to run a country without a king that amounted to more than “we’ll get rid of the king and then, uh, I dunno.”

[tanadrin]

as an adult, I am pleased to note that virtually everything that my parents or other authorities did that pissed me off as a kid, i was 100% justified in being annoyed at.

[anerdyfeminist]

“You’re too young to really understand” SURPRISE it’s adult me from the future here to butt in and say “I’m not too young, you’re a bad person.”

[tanadrin]

#I cannot tell what type of parent this is talking about:#abusive parent?#queerphobic parent?#ableist parent?#just capitalist adults in general? 

sometimes. adults can just be crappy to kids. without it being part of a System Of Oppression.

the corollary to “if a behavior is harmful it is part of a system of oppression” is “if a behavior is not part of a system of oppression it is not harmful,” and that’s a stupid-ass maxim people use to get away with really shitty behavior sometimes

[earlgraytay]

I do think that “the way adults treat children” is a system of oppression, and that if childhood wasn’t a state that ends it’d be a lot more obvious

we treat children the way they treated women in Victorian England, with an equal mix of condescension and terror

condescension about how INNOCENT and SWEET they are and how much they need to be SHELTERED from the evils of the world and kept in their OWN SPHERE

terror at how violent and angry kids can actually be, how much even the most sheltered kid knows about the evils of the world, and how much the child wants to change those evils (and the child is right)

and terror about how vulnerable kids are, how easy it is to hurt them, how easy it is to get them to stray from the path that you think they need to be on

and this condescension and this double-barrelled terror means that adults do oppress children. full stop. everything about the American public school system, everything about most mainstream parenting advice, everything about STRANGER DANGER- it’s all designed to keep children corralled and obedient.

fuck, legally in most places in the US and Canada, kids under a certain age can’t go places on their own.

Like. “Their guardians will go to prison if they take the train to school by themselves, even if it’s a five minute train ride” legally.

I’m not saying your larger point isn’t true- there are plenty of things that are shitty that are not oppressive, and it’s very true that you need to keep that in mind so you don’t hurt people

but like. if you cannot legally travel five minutes away from your house, buy a carton of milk, and go home, you are not free. if you cannot organize with your peers for better working conditions, you are not free. if you cannot legally decide where you want to live, who you want to live with, and who you never want to see again, you’re not free.

children are an oppressed class. full stop.

[max1461]

the laws of nature as a tyrannical god, technology as malicious compliance. philosophical idealism as denial of your own subjugation

or something like that. needs more development

[max1461]

@str-ngeloop

kinda?

In a couple of (related) senses, I think.

The first is that it frames certain things as "freedoms" which we might not otherwise think of that way. One example is morphological freedom, which is to say the liberty to inhabit the sort of body you'd like to inhabit. This is important for trans and nonbinary people, as well as in the context of disability rights (moving away from frameworks of "curing" disabilities, etc), and probably other contexts as well.

The point is that we don't innately or "naturally" have much choice as to what kind of body we get, and it's only through technology (and ideally, a just and equitable social framework for accessing it) that we can give ourselves that choice. In a very literal sense I think this is a process of liberation. Of freeing ourselves from the naturally-imposed morphological shackles of our birth-bodies. Moreover, framing it that way helps to combat other, anti-liberatory projects that may make use of similar technology (like eugenics, or the elimination of autism, etc.).

Another, perhaps more mundane example of this is freedom from the threat of infectious disease. There is a very real sense in which having to live your life in fear of every cut or scrape lest it get infected, or of contracting smallpox or polio, is massively constricting. These things make it harder for people to live their lives autonomously and to freely pursue whatever it is they desire.

The importance of recognizing this as an oppressive force (other than that I think it's accurate) is that it helps combat anti-scientific tendencies on the left. Since the middle of the twentieth century leftist thinkers have (rightly, imo) dedicated a lot of thought to the ways the institutions of science and medicine, and the narratives those institutions foster, can be oppressive. But there's relatively little acknowledgement of the fact that much of the work those institutions do also has a deeply liberatory element, and for people to be freed from oppression in all its forms that work inevitably has to continue.

(This is the reason I dislike the school of thought which claims that all reality is socially constructed — it kind of strikes me as akin to sticking your head in the sand and ignoring every axis of oppression that isn't amenable to be solved through sociological changes alone. It's sort of like the stereotype of the arrogant physicist, who comes in to another field thinking he can solve all its problems, when he's actually just unaware of the genuine complexity at hand [I think the cool kids are calling this 'Gell-Mann amnesia']. The humanist who insists that all problems are social problems and only social problems similarly strips themselves of the tools necessary to realize when the things they propose might actually further oppression.)

Another sense in which the viewpoint of reality-as-oppressor is useful is that I think it makes it easier to be a utopian.

I believe, more or less, that everyone deserves to get everything they could ever want, all the time, non-negotiable, period. And I can't help but feel as though until we live such a world, it will continually constitute an injustice. But obviously a world like that is impossible to achieve (not just in practice, but in principal, since people often have contradictory desires). I still think, though, that there's a lot to be gained from striving for one. We might not be able to get there, but we can get a lot closer than we are, and the more we strive the closer we'll get.

In the times of my life where I've struggled the most, often over things that were no person's fault, it felt incredibly comforting to be able to say "No, no one should have to go through this, even if it's 'natural'. This is not just. If I have no choice but to go through this, I can at least work to make sure that eventually no one ever has to."

Framing reality as oppressor makes it easier to point at those sorts of circumstances in our lives and not rationalize them away. To not say "well, it's just part of life, I suppose I have to accept it". Maybe so: some problems will almost certainly turn out to actually be beyond our capacity to solve. But a lot won't, even ones that seem impossible now, and the sooner we recognize that, the sooner we can save ourselves and each other from those struggles.

[biggest-gaudiest-poltergeist]

When we were children, my sister had private music lessons at her violin teacher’s house. I only visited there once, but I still remember that afternoon. The teacher had an artificial pond in her yard, a large beautiful thing with lily pads and plant life. And in the pond, there were goldfish. I had never seen such enormous goldfish. 

I spent several minutes just staring at them (and trying to convince them to bite my fingers.) When my sister’s violin lesson ended, her teacher came out to the yard and explained that these goldfish were the same small creatures that were often unfortunately sold in plastic bags at state fairs. They were only about two inches long apiece, when she bought them and put them in the new, empty pond. In essence, they were like every goldfish I had seen before, but they had been given a much larger, much richer environment in which to flourish. As a result, they had grown into some of the most remarkable, vibrant creatures my twelve-year-old self had ever met with. All because of a pond. 

Funny what lessons children remember. My sister doesn’t play the violin anymore, but that was the first time I caught a glimpse of the overwhelming extent to which it matters, the way the world treats us.

[yellow-hatco]

Reblogged again for this drawing I made for it

[221b-hound]

Give us room to grow and see how we flourish.