Written in 2018

I became a dad in an unusual circumstance. My wife’s brother died in the fall of 2016. His daughter—Asher—was almost one year old and in foster care at the time. Prior to his death, he and Asher’s mother had agreed to ask my wife and I to adopt Asher. Asher’s mother persisted in this wish after he died.

Asher’s dad died at the end of August 2016. My wife and I had graduated college in May 2016, were married in June, and moved to Ghana for a company I was starting at the beginning of August.

I am now 25 years old, Asher is two and a half, and my wife and I are expecting a second child in September.

In some respects, my position—25, married, one kid with another on the way—is quite normal. Statistically, it is not the average. But I grew up among devout Christians in the midwest. Many of my high school friends are married and some have kids.

But among my more recent peers, it is very odd. I went to college at Brown University. People thought it was crazy that I was engaged my Senior year, and I have no friends from school who have gotten married or engaged. If being married made relating difficult, having a kid pushed me into a whole different universe.

It is odd also among my startup founder peers. When my wife and I were actually able to get full custody of Asher, in January 2017, we all moved to San Francisco so I could participate in Y Combinator’s startup accelerator. Very few in my Y Combinator batch were married, fewer had kids, and adopting a few months after starting a company seemed crazy.

And in a way it was and is crazy, but humans are adaptable and what’s crazy today feels normal next week.

Being a dad is a very special thing. Asher is one of my closest friends. I think adopting has made the oddity of it more stark to me. To be a parent feels to me to be arbitrarily paired with this other person. The relationship has a lot of unique characteristics and many of the most important are purely cultural.

It’s like all of my other human relationships: we’ll have good times and bad times. We’ll try to love each other. We’ll certainly hurt each other.

Though the relationship feels unique to me in that the joy and love and affection are more intense than I have felt in any other relationship. I think some of this is just due to the fact that kids are joyous.

I remember when we first moved to San Francisco with Asher. I walked around the city, thinking that everyone was working in hopes of getting to a place where they will have some moment by moment happiness. To have a good life, whatever that means to them. And I thought, there’s an easy trick: just have a kid!

I have 6 siblings and I am close to them and my parents. Growing up, I imagined that I would have a big family and that it would be very important to me, but I was also career ambitious and I think wanting to do great things outweighed any push to start a family.

However after graduating high school, I lived in Guatemala and India. For a few months in India, I had a slow job. It should have been a personal productivity dream: no friends or distractions, just time to read and think and plan. But I wasn’t happy.

I was living with a family with five kids at the time. The oldest fourteen and the youngest 2. I realized the best part of my day was the forty-five minutes I allowed myself to go downstairs in play with the kids. I knew then that most of my happiness in life would come from my family.

So maybe what I am saying is that I think you should become a parent because it will make you happy. But I want to say something else, too.

This sounds esoteric, but I mean it practically: beginning and ending a process of reflection is an act of the will and is beyond rationality.

I want to say that because I think that it is possible to get meaningfully lost in processes of reflection. From the smallest—Where will I eat lunch?—to the biggest—How can I know that anything is real?—and everything between: Where do I want to live? What's my calling? Etc.

If you believe that there is such a thing as moral good and bad (everyone argues as if they do, even if they say they don’t) then I want to say that thinking and reflection are not good in and of themselves. They are only good to the extent that they lead to good action. And it is possible to waste a lot of time reflecting.

I think we all know and feel that our highest calling as humans is to love. I think the highest love is to give ones life for another, and I don’t necessarily mean to die for another. Dying for someone else costs little of the will. You do it once and it’s over. But can you die to yourself everyday to serve someone else, to love another?

We all experience the deep gulf between what we want to do and what we do do. Our own life is so far from how we would ask others to live. It is very hard to daily live towards these ambitions of love and service.

A good trick is to have a baby. You have to take care of them. Daily, whether you want to or not. You have to give your life for theirs. And in this you will be sanctified. And in this you will be satisfied.