Further thoughts on paternity

Time goes by faster as you get older, because when you are, say, ten, one year is 10% of your life; when you are thirty, it's 3.3%, and therefore feels like a smaller interval. But if the passage of time normally accelerates at a steady pace as you get older, it jumps to hyper-drive when you have a child. I cannot fathom how almost two months have gone by so quickly.

But parenthood also exaggerates time's other quirk - that the more crammed your schedule is, the faster time seems to go by as you are experiencing it, but the longer the time interval seems in retrospect - a year spent climbing the Himalayas and learning to sky dive will seem longer in memory than one spent watching Friends reruns (I am not passing judgement on the merit of each activity, and I personally would much rather do the latter than the former). Similarly, it feels like these two months have gone by incredibly fast, and to have lasted aeons, at the same time.

In-between these time warps, I have had some further thoughts on parenthood that I jot down below:

What is love?
I touched on the strangeness of missing someone you have only met for a few hours in my first post on paternity, but I have been thinking about it some more. When I think of the love I feel towards other people in my life, such as my parents, my wife or close friends, I notice that this love is either the product of familiarity and affection over a long time, or the evolution of peripheral feelings, such as those of respect or sexual attraction. In contrast, and in my wife's words, my love towards my son is totally unearned.

On the contrary, if I told you that I love to bits a person who completely disregards my own needs and wants, habitually deprives me of sleep, and yells at me whenever I am a minute late in catering to his every whim, and all he gives me in return is the occasional smile, you'd probably refer me to a psychiatrist. (I am not the first to notice this - a book a friend gave my wife classifies motherhood as a particular case of Stockholm syndrome.)

Yet I do of course love my son to bits, inexplicable though this is, and I will gladly be peed, farted and puked on in return for a single smile. It forces one to rethink one's understanding of the concept of love.

Should you have a child?
I wrote on Facebook that you should have a child if you enjoy playing Sims. In addition to fans of the game (and I mean those fans who actually took care of their Sims, not those whose objective in the game was to come up with novel and increasingly convoluted ways to get them killed), there are a few more kinds of person who will love parenthood. You will enjoy the experience if you...

• had Tamagochis that did not die;
• like scatological humour & fart jokes;
• are in dire need of exercise;
• never got used to surviving with fewer than ten hours of sleep, despite everyone's insistence that you totally would when you reached your twenties, and want to do so;
• want to master the art of the micro-nap, or to learn to fall asleep within seconds;
• want to test the strength of your marriage;
• want to finally get your Greek mum/grandmother/other relative to stop fretting about your health (though you won't be 100% successful here);
• think having your wife sleepily trying to unscrew your head in the middle of the night, thinking it's your child she's trying to pick up, is jolly good fun (it is, but only in retrospect).

How much do I really believe in gender equality?

I don't care whether you have won a flinch of bacon at Dunmow, if you have a child, your spouse and you are going to have an argument. Sleep deprivation does that to people. In one such argument, I told my wife that she was failing to appreciate how much I am doing for our son - way more than most men do. She countered that I do not get credit for merely doing my share. As is the case about 25% of the time often the case [ed.], my wife was right: in spite of thinking that I hold men and women truly equal, I was giving myself kudos for assuming shared responsibility for raising our son. But the man assuming 50% of the responsibility ought not to be praiseworthy, it ought to be the default.

Everyone knows we all have biases of which we are unaware. Everyone also slyly adds (though not out loud) "but I less than everyone else". It is rare that our biases are so clearly called out, and shocking when they are.

How can everyone not see that my son is simply the best?

As I've mentioned before, my son is the first grandchild, great-grandchild, nephew, cousin-once-removed &c on my side of the family, and the first of the new generation amongst family friends. As a result, he has been showered with an obscene degree/number of affection, attention and gifts; his pictures on FB have received plenty of likes, smiley faces and hearts (not without side-effects - my mum's old nanny believes digital well-wishers are giving Christopher the evil eye). 

Yet all this attention scarcely seems enough: whenever my son smiles, or coos, or simply is, I am shocked, shocked, to find out that everyone is not looking at him on the verge of tears. Do they not realise just how amazing each smile is? How can they glance at their phones, or cook, or read their books instead, when every smile they miss is a smile they will never get back? And at least family and friends are praising him - what about all those people I pass on the street, or on the boat? How can they fail to even steal a glance? Do they not realise they are in presence of pure awesomeness? How do they just go on about their lives?

You think I am exaggerating, and okay, maybe I am taking some poetic license - but only a little. I pride myself on being very rational but when it comes to my son, I am genuinely constantly surprised that other people do not think he is exactly as amazing and attention-worthy as I think he is, even though I fully understand I shouldn't expect them to.

More to come, as they come.

Paternity - First Thoughts

My son was born on Monday, 2nd of July, at 9:35 in the morning. I am not given to sentimental prose, but when I see him opening his little eyes, and measuring the world around him with a quizzical,  questioning expression, my heart melts.

As I did with my move to China (and as I would have done with my joining Google, were it not inappropriate), and seeing as I am among the first of my friends to have a child, I am putting pen to paper (/fingers to keyboard) to record my first thoughts and impressions on paternity.

Feelings accompanying parenthood
One of the most common questions I got in the months preceding the birth was, how does it feel knowing you are about to become a dad? Invariably, my response was, it hasn't really sunk in yet - I expect it will after the baby comes.

It hasn't. Every few hours, my wife and I feel a light bulb turn on in our heads, accompanied with a surge of adrenaline and the thought, "wow. We are parents now". But my whole worldview, my mental image of my daily routine, of what it means to be, and act, like me, has not really changed yet; the fact that I am no longer master of my own life, but that my life, schedule, and priorities are all now subordinated to that of a tiny human being's is understood intellectually, not viscerally.

What has happened very suddenly is the formation of the bond between us, the parents, and our child.   When doctors had to take our little person (to whom my wife refers as μικρούλι (mikrouli - little one), little beast, or the kraken ("the kraken awakens", she declared, before rousing me to help her feed him)) for some tests, we experienced strong saudade (I had to look up for the noun for the feeling of missing someone; I suppose I could have used the more commonplace "longing", but that rings somewhat melodramatic, more fitting to a romantic novel than a 21st century blogpost); it may not sound all that surprising that parents miss their children - but it is curious nevertheless: you would be shocked if I told you that I miss someone I have only known for a couple of hours.

That said, I don't feel jealous at all with regards to holding him; as long as I know that he in my vicinity, I don't really mind if it's other people hugging him - such as his grandparents. Actually, I am keen to encourage that - I always get a little annoyed with parents whose children are exceedingly shy and uncomfortable around other people; I want my children to learn to socialise from day one. Plus, it's such a joy seeing my parents handle him - especially my dad (whose name my son shares, as per Greek custom), whose face lights up, literally lights up (and I hate incorrect use of the word literally, but it does, his face seems brighter to me) when he sees his grandson.

The last feeling of note is the joy and gratitude I feel towards all the friends and family members who have come to visit us or sent their wishes already. It is so wonderful to know that this little human comes into the world surrounded by people who love him and will support him, and that he will be safe and taken care of even if - God forbid - anything were to happen to Jessi and me. (This child is not only my first, but is also the first grandchild and great-grandchild on my side of the family; the first of his generation amongst my parents' best friends; and among the first on my own close friends - I do hope that subsequent children will generate as much excitement!)

Labour
I was in the room with my wife when she gave birth. I know everyone "knows" this, but I don't think everyone knows it until they have experienced it or at least witnessed it: labour is painful. In the almost 11 years I know my wife, I have never seen her acknowledge pain, besides the occasional exclamation (granted, this is partly thanks to her being very careful and rarely injuring herself); while giving birth (she decided to do everything naturally), she cried. This was so unsettling that I started crying. This then made my wife laugh.

Marital Privacy
My wife and I are not squeamish (you can hardly be squeamish when you have been brought up skewering lambs' livers and lungs down metal spikes, and wrapping them with intestine), but we had done a fairly good job of compartmentalising our hygiene routines. While I won't go into details, I will just say that I've seen and discussed bodily functions in two days more than I had in a decade. And that's in spite of having worked on feminine products back at P&G.

Handling a baby
When people say that something has a steep learning curve, they usually mean it's difficult. What it actually means, though, is that learning takes place in a very small time frame, not that acquiring this knowledge is particularly hard. Learning to feed a baby and change its nappies has a steep learning curve in that second (more correct) sense: you learn a lot of easy stuff very quickly.

A few things that strike me as particularly interesting here: first, handling an adult the way you are supposed to handle a baby would be bullying. To wake it up in case it needs to eat but is sleepy, you place it face down on your palm, and quickly rub your knuckles on its back until it starts complaining (at which point you quickly pass it to the mother, who waits for it to open its mouth to voice its discord, and as soon as it does stuffs a breast down its mouth without waiting for it to state its (legitimate, on the face of it) case - rendering the whole feeding process very similar to what goes on in foie gras farms); to wash its behind after changing a nappy, you execute a judo manoeuvre, whereby you grab its little thigh with one hand, its arm with the other, and twist it across your forearm, so that it's resting there with its face down; to put it to sleep in case it's crying (and its crying is not due to its being hungry or in need of nappy change), you execute that same judo move, then place your index and middle fingers in a scissor position, pinch the thigh that's dangling down from your forearm between them, and move its leg backwards and forwards, like a pump. This last trick is incredibly good at calming down a baby.

Which brings me to the second interesting point: the reason that handling a child has a steep but easy learning curve is that there are tricks for everything. Once your midwife explains them to you (by the way, I have to note here that we had a wonderful midwife whom I would very strongly recommend to anyone planning to give birth in Greece), a lot of things become way easier than you might expect. At least, that's how it seems at the moment...

Third, it's funny how quickly your standards change when you take care of a child. Those who know me know I value my sleep. I lived for four years in Geneva, and almost never went skiing nearby, because I hated to get up early on Saturdays; I ask colleagues to avoid inviting me to meetings before 9:30; I complain when I get less than 8 hours' sleep. Yet I was jubilant last night, when my son slept for four hours in-between feeds (vs his average of two to three) - I considered these four hours of uninterrupted rest rejuvenating and God-sent. And I feel surprisingly awake, and able to write this. I hope this continues.

Fourth, because this is our first child, and Jessi and I have no idea what is normal (how long should it feed? how long between feeds? how heavy is it, compared to other babies that age? how much weight can we expect it to lose and regain in its first days and weeks?), we are being quite methodical about recording its development - we even have an app which allows us to time its feeds, and sync them across our phones. I plan to record its effort to speak (I already have a model in my head, whereby I will record phrases he says, and then tag them - for language, number of words, number of syllables &c, and track all these across time; incidentally, this will make for an interesting blog post a couple of years down the road, if I manage to maintain the disciple to do it). Again, I wonder whether we will do all these for our future children...

This is all for now. More to come, if deemed interesting enough.

Petty Pet Hates

My wife once gave me a pearl of wisdom, lifted off some book or film: the devil causes most of the world's misery not through wars and famines and plagues but through the tiny, daily frustrations he puts in our way. Small things that cause inordinate annoyance. For me, these small things include...

That scene in the Matrix where Morpheus asks Neo if he believes in fate, and Neo says no because I do not like the idea that I'm not in control of my life and Morpheus leans in and emphatically says I know exactly what you mean as though this is a super-profound insight

Okay, yes, granted, this is very specific and weird, but every now and then this scene pops into my head and it makes me cringe. There may be some people who find comfort in the idea they have no control of their lives; but literally everyone who finds fate an uncomfortable concept does so because they do not like to think they lack agency. So Morpheus's "I totally understand the way you feel" vibe as though he is somehow special for "getting it" is just annoying. Everyone understands the way Neo feels. Move on.

"Better safe than sorry"
This is maddening because "safe" and "sorry" are not opposites, nor mutually exclusive, which makes this statement a false dichotomy. "Sorry" is a bad thing to be: it means something bad happened to you. Everything else being equal, if you are given the choice between sorry and literally anything else, you'd pick that something else - unless that something else is something that will also make you feel sorry, in which case you are not being offered a real choice.

What the statement is trying to convey is "better not take a particular risk, even if the potential benefit is large, because there is a chance things will go wrong" - but this is much more debatable. Indeed, if we never took any risks, if our decision-making heuristic were "avoid even the slightest chance of ever feeling sorry", we would never get anything done.

So what people who say "better safe than sorry" are doing is stacking the deck to their favour - they take a matter which admits for discussion and turn it into a binary, "there is only one obvious choice here" statement. For shame.

People who pronounce "Barcelona" "Barthelona" or "Ibiza" "Ibitha" because "that's how the locals say it"
Okay, and Greece is "Ellatha", China is "ZhongGuo", "eclectic" means "picky" and a "sycophant" is a slanderer instead of a suck-up. Barcelona may well be pronounced differently in Catalonia, but in English it's pronounced with a c. Mispronouncing the word to show that you have been to Spain does not make you sophisticated, it makes you a massive douchebag.

One exception is Spanish people themselves - in their case, saying "Barthelona" does not mean they are pretentious; it just means they are not speaking English properly.

Deadpool (the film)
What bothers me more than having wasted two hours of my life watching this rubbish is the fact that most people - critics and audiences alike - seem to think it was actually good.

It was not. I am pretty sure no-one will argue Deadpool's strength lies in its plot or its gratuitous violence - instead, people seem to take pleasure in its supposedly funny and original meta-breaking-the-fourth-wall quirk.

Except that was not novel, nor well-done. There are literally hundreds of films, series, plays, books, songs and even video games that have done meta way before, or way better, or both, than Deadpool. Think I am exaggerating? Okay, how about:

House of Cards, Family Guy, South Park, the Simpsons, Looney Tunes, Tom & Jerry, Wanted, Trading Places, Young Frankenstein, Blazing Saddles, Scream, Scary Movie, Shriek If You Know What I Did Last Friday the Thirteenth, Not Another Teen Movie, Wolf of Wall Street, House of Cards again, the Expendables, Space Jam, House of Lies, Δύο Ξένοι, Στάβλοι της Εριέττας Ζαϊμη, S1ngles, the Dark Tower, If On A Winter's Night a Traveler, several Milan Kundera novels, Logicomix, Economix, Maus, Asterix, Lucky Luke, Comix Zone, The Devil and Daniel Webster, Monty Python & the Meaning of Life, That Mitchell and Webb Look, Monty Python & the Holy Grail, The Rocky Horror Picture Show (the theatrical version), certain performances of Don Juan, Turandot and many other plays, xkcd, Cyanide & Happiness, SMBC, You're So Vain, Amelie, Arkas, Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, M*A*S*H, Lego Batman, Love Red Nose Day, various DFW essays & short stories, Fleabag, Rick & Morty, 22 Jump Street, Harold & Maude, La Cite de la Peur, Team America, The Cannonball Run, Harold & Kumar, Airplane!... and and these are just the ones I came up with by myself - more here.

Here's where I stand on meta: meta references necessarily remind the viewer/reader/listener that the work of fiction they are absorbing is just that - fiction; they therefore break the illusion, reduce empathy for the characters and ultimately detract from any substance the particular piece of art has - unless doing so is necessary to achieve whatever that piece of art is trying to achieve (for example, an investigation into the role of art). This means that serious art would not really rely on meta, as it would risk undermining itself.

Of course, meta can be used for aesthetic purposes. In some cases, meta serves to make the viewer complicit with the artist - a wink-wink, nudge-nudge, "we are in this together" gesture (a la House of Cards). In the vast majority of cases, meta is deployed for comedic effect. But I think that meta is overused for both these purposes, and especially for the latter: meta, like many forms of humour, is only funny if it's incongruous and unexpected; otherwise, it's just too lazy, too easy - a cheap source for halfhearted laughs.

And this is where Deadpool fails miserably. Its meta references are only unexpected by idiots. No viewer with an IQ >110 would fail to anticipate a quip about how Reynolds is a bad actor; or one about how the film only had budget for third-tier X-Men; or a post-credit scene mocking viewers' expectation of post-credit scenes in Marvel films. Most jokes are not funny the second time, since you already know the punchline; Deadpool isn't funny the first time either, because the punchline is just so bloody obvious.

When people say "my gut says..."
The reason this drives me crazy is that people use a part of their digestive system to justify a belief they cannot defend rationally. And for some inexplicable reason, a decision-making system that is no better than flipping a coin (and that is, in fact, likely worse, given humans' numerous documented biases) is accepted even in business environments.

To be fair, there are cases where "gut instinct", idiotic nomenclature aside, is a valid heuristic. A person who operates in a repetitive environment with little-changing conditions can develop an intuitive understanding of that environment. In such cases, the person's subconscious can detect patterns faster than rational thought. Chess is a good example. When I was in high school, my classmates and I used to play chess against each other and against our teachers. One particular maths teacher was undefeated - none of us ever even came close to beating him. I remember we once asked him how many moves ahead he plans. He responded that he does not really plan ahead more than two moves - instead, what made him so good was that he could just "see" whether a particular position on the board was to his advantage - he had an intuitive understanding of what made for a good arrangement of his pieces.

Similarly, when I was coding at university, there were times when I noticed bugs in my programs, and would immediately know which portion of my code was the root cause, without having to go through an exhaustive debugging process. Both chess and coding are governed by fixed rules. If you do enough of either, your brain starts spotting patterns without having to work through each rule sequentially. This happens because the patterns that develop in both activities are repetitive and give immediate feedback, so your subconscious learns to spot them: "the last three times my pieces were arranged in this position, I lost the game... perhaps I should make a different move".

However, most people use "gut instinct" in totally inappropriate circumstances. I have heard senior managers make strategic decisions following their gut - but the business environment is not characterised by rigid, well-understood and unchanging rules. Quite the opposite - it is rapidly changing; your past experience in dealing with a customer like Tesco is of little relevance when dealing with Amazon; what was true in the 80s for Gen X need not be true for millennials in 2020. And even if business were governed by stable rules, even senior managers would not have enough experience and quality feedback to justify relying on instinct.

(In fact, even in well-regulated games, the intuitions players develop can prove wrong: AlphaGo beat human Go champion Lee Sedol by making moves that "human players would never think of doing"; in other words, intuition stemming from long experience can put blinkers on our creative thinking.)

At the end of the day, even in these environments where gut instinct is a thing, it's nothing more than a short-cut. A serious chess player would be able to rationally explain his instinctive preference for a position, if given time; a coder would be able to deconstruct his reflexive debugging process. So, putting things down to "gut instinct" and leaving it at that is inexcusable, and nothing more than charlatanism.

Dropshipping - where capitalism's morality goes to die

Nothing tests your belief in a system than its most egregious application.

I am a firm believer in laisssez-faire capitalism for two reasons: first, no other socio-economic system has been so successful in raising people out of poverty and increasing material wealth than it; second, and more important, is that libertarian capitalism is the only framework that that does not require an authoritarian morality adjudicator deciding what is just, good or desirable: it lets everyone make their own choices.

Dropshipping makes me question my faith in it, and my instinctive dislike of most kinds of regulation. The term refers to the practice of setting up an e-commerce store (typically via a platform such as Shopify) that manufactures nothing and holds no inventory. Instead, what it does is advertise products produced by wholesalers (mostly based in China) and sold on AliExpress. When a consumer places an order on the dropshipping site, the dropshipper immediately places an order on AliExpress, providing the consumer's address. The dropshipper makes a profit by charging a higher price than AliExpress. You can watch tutorials on youtube here and here (I recommend watching the videos at 1.5x or 2x speed, otherwise they are pretty dull). You know those annoying facebook ads for hoodies, bracelets, fidget spinners &c you occasionally see? Odds are clicking them will direct you to dropshippers. The picture below illustrates the whole affair:

Dropshippers argue that this is not that different to what most retailers do. For example, all supermarkets sell branded and private label products that they do not manufacture themselves, charging a mark-up vs the price at which they procure them from their suppliers. The difference, however, is that most supermarkets source their products from wholesalers who do not sell directly to consumers (DTC). The wholesalers' decision not to sell directly to consumer makes sense - it's more profitable for them to produce huge batches to sell to the Tescos and Walmarts of the world, even foregoing the mark-up these retailers charge to the end consumers, than to set up costly supply chain networks to sell DTC. Though DTC is becoming cheaper and cheaper, for the time being there are often big efficiencies in the traditional model, which ultimately benefit consumers themselves.

Not so with dropshippers. Consumers could just go to AliExpress and buy products themselves, often at huge discounts to the prices dropshippers charge (in one case, a dropshipper was charging $12.95 for rings that cost $2.85 on AliExpress). So dropshippers are not adding any value whatsoever; all they are doing is ripping off their consumers by peddling junk and riffraff and bombarding them with crude ads on social media platforms. And economists the world over are wondering why productivity is stalling.

Still, if consumers are too stupid to resist the urge buying the worthless nonsense that's marketed to them, and too lazy to bother comparing prices (something that takes <5 minutes in the age of google), who am I to complain?

But it gets worse when you learn about the marketing tactics dropshippers employ. Rory Ganon, the guy in the first video linked above, advocates the following practices:

• Claiming that products are "free", and consumers only have to pay for shipping. In his tutorial, he sells a bracelet that retails on AliExpress for $1.99; he charges $0 for the bracelet itself, but adds a $9.99 price tag to shipping. AliExpress's actual shipping cost? Free.
• Adding a "limited offer" countdown in the product's page to suggest that the $0 price offer will expire in one day. This is a bold faced lie, of course.
• Installing an app on your Shopify shop that bombards the people browsing it with pop ups whenever other people have bought something on your site - the idea is that this gives the impression your site has a lot of traffic, and is therefore credible. However, the app can be configured to produce pop ups for fictitious sales.

What's astonishingly, cartoonishly sleazy is that dropshippers like Rory Gannon are not only not ashamed of their conduct, but are actively showcasing it (characteristing it "hustling") in their tutorials - it reminds me of the scene in The Big Short where Steve Carell's character asks his associates "I don't get it, why are they [mortgage brokers] confessing [to selling mortgages to people who won't be able to repay them]?" to which they answer "they aren't confessing; they are bragging".

I do not know how big the dropshipping market is, nor do I know what % of dropshippers employ such tactics as described above. But given the size of e-commerce, now in the hundreds of billions of dollars per year, the popularity of apps enabling the kinds of practices described above, and the sheer number of dropshipping sites, I imagine the answer to both questions is "big". And though I would never advocate banning dropshipping (as I implied above, the rule of regulation should not be to protect consumers from their own stupidity), surely regulators should intervene to prevent downright dishonest marketing. And perhaps the mainstream media should spend less time worrying about the power of legitimate companies like Amazon (which are hugely beneficial to consumers), and start investigating the self-proclaimed hustlers who are fleecing the clearly none-too-bright public.