Restarting again

Alright i’m going to commit to daily writing again. Whatever is on my mind is going to get published here. To start i’m going to commit to 7 straight days. Don’t care how long or short but I have to write for 7 days and by posting this publicly im going to commit to this. If i’m successful then, i’ll commit for 14 straight days and then after that I hope i’ve made this a habit which sticks. I have a poll at the end please be sure to fill it out.

So here we go. Whats goin on in my mind right now. I am not going to cover all these in this post today but enumerating here to discuss them later as topics in no specific order.

1. Kids

   1. Socialization

   2. Education

   3. Attention

2. Capital Markets

   1. Dollar

   2. Stablecoins

   3. Gold

   4. Bitcoin

   5. Equities

3. Unemployment / Retirement

   1. Boredom

   2. Clarity

   3. Desire to do more

4. Geopolitics

5. History

   1. World War I & II

   2. British, American, & French Revolutions

6. Entrepreneurship

   1. Next venture

   2. Teaching

7. Being Content vs Having a Desire to do “something”

8. Revisit Success & Failure

Kids & Parenting

I have 2 beautiful kids age 11 & 12. I often think about their future, as im sure do most of the parents. Usually starts with a thought similar to “..what are they going to do with all this chaos and rapid change in the world?” As soon as this thought goes into my head, I have tried to train myself to muse on the following next thought. Did my parents and all the parents of who raised my generation look at the world and felt the same anguish as I do now? What has changed since we grew up? Yes mobile Phones & Social Media have totally shifted how kids socialize and engage today. Parents, myself included, usually resort to saying “When I was growing up (fill in how tough your life was and how easy they have it”). We all do it, just like our parents did it. The question I often end up at is not how kids are being changed in this world, rather, how has parenting changed over the years and affect it has had on socialization for kids?

Today, I drive my kids everywhere and can’t imagine a scenario where I don’t know where my son or daughter are any given time of the day. I have direct line to them via a watch, when they don’t forget it at home, or calling the school directly. I am able to contact them at all times when they are not around me. Should I be concerned about all this access? Does having so much access add more stress raising a child? Does it ruin the experience of childhood for the kids? “When I grew up…” my parents had to clue where I was most of the time. I’m certain if you asked my parents they will say i’m embellishing a bit in the carefree nature of my parents. Off-course they knew…right? “Off-course” they knew I was on a bike going up Jefferson Ave, to the top of the Redwood City hills cross. From where I was planning to play in the small forest (felt huge at the time) and then speed down all the way, without a helmet. “Off-course” they knew that I fell a few times and could have gone off the side of the road in a pretty deep fall on the side of the road.

Na, they never knew and that right there is the magic of my childhood: Curious & lucky. Lucky because I didn’t get hurt & side tracked into bad company, Lucky because I was able to follow my curiosities. I’m sure if my parents knew what had happened on my bike, I would certainly not have been allowed. What my parents didn’t know was probably a good thing for them, ONLY because it turned ok. Had I fallen off and been deeply hurt or worse, well then they would have repented their “lack of oversight”. They would have been scolded for not being present parents. What can you chalk this all up to? Luck. Parents get lucky. Kids get Lucky. Same framework can be applied but circumstances can make the framework look completely foolish in one scenario and distinguished in another.

So back to the question which I posed earlier: How has parenting changed over the years and affect it has had on socialization for kids?

I posit the following: We have more oversight, yet we are more fearful than our parents. We live in independent pods, so we read self help parenting books rather than have elders and community who can guide us. This creates stress because we are constantly questioning our parenting. Now checking the mirror and questioning our parenting style is not harmful, in-fact should be applauded but shifting parenting styles constantly is the issue. Many of us don’t have a parenting baseline or if we do, we want to avoid the baseline passed down from our parents. So we are constantly looking for the new age parenting handbook. It creates massive stress of the family and all individuals.

By being ever so connected and so in-tune with every happening of our kids we have become a helicopter, shall I say a lawnmower generation of parents. This is to no fault of our own. Never in history of humanity has a stranger been able to access our kids so easily as they can today. If we give our kids a phone the world opens up to them and they open up to the world. That indeed is stress provoking. So we do the natural thing, we close up, we protect, we oversee everything because we are not looking to be negligent.

Technologies today, specifically social media (Tik Tok, Instagram, YouTube Shorts) are all designed to do one thing, grab attention. These attention grabbing virus’ have already infiltrated every adult reading this post. There are few who don’t have the listed platforms but then I sit on X reading financial posts all day, somehow telling myself its not as bad as the others (truth is they are all attention hogging virus’).

So in a world where attention is the most prized possession, we as parents have been hacked. We have been told that we deserve a break at the end of the day, so go lay on that couch and scroll for 30 minutes, then go watch Netflix, you deserve it after a hard days work. Soon that 30 minutes starts to infiltrate dinner time, then bed then morning routine. Do we want to be infected with this kind of attention grabbing virus? This is what has fundamentally changed for us. We have been hacked. We need anti-virus so we can get out attention back. We owe this to our kids. This is how we change society and this is how we bring our kids back to having a childhood where their curiosity and luck can thrive.

Best of luck to all my fellow parents, i’m rooting for all of us.

Note: I commit to consume less and produce more. Wait less and more is not enough. I want to be commited to metrics as I told my girls tennis team. So I will post my current X usage in my next post and then strive to reduce usage by 25% each week until im at a point where its no more than 15 minutes of my daily usage. Then I commit to producing more posts, learning piano, another language.