 Adopt the position When she was a child, the author of Cartoons Hate Her wanted to adopt lots of children. Years later when she and her husband faced an infertility diagnosis she looked into the process but eventually decided against it, opting for IVF instead. She was amazed by the vitriol she received: Online strangers called her a “selfish bitch” who wanted a “designer baby.” But when people think about adoption, she says, they are thinking of something like the musical Annie, a bunch of orphaned kids waiting for someone to rescue them. That was fairly accurate, in the 19th century. Lots of people died young so there were lots of orphans. But now, luckily, orphans are rare, and adopting an infant is difficult. Most adoption now is of older kids taken away from neglectful parents — and even then it’s a last resort, because the goal of foster care is to reunite families. Would-be adoptive parents may well look after a child for years, and then see them given back to their biological parents. That’s good, but it means that grieving infertile people shouldn’t be misled into thinking foster care will end up with them having a child of their own. The fact that so many children need care is a tragedy, she says, but it “isn’t the fault of infertile people.” Dead reckoning If you suffer from excessive guilt, you might have subconscious goals like “I don’t want to make anyone mad,” or “I don’t want to hurt anyone,” or “I don’t want to be a burden.” “These are what I call the life goals of dead people,” says the rationalist writer Ozy Brennan, “because what they all have in common is that the best possible person to achieve them is a corpse.” Compare those to other goals one might have: “I want to write a great novel,” “I want to be a good parent to my kids,” “I want to learn linear algebra.” All of these “are goals that dead people are noticeably bad at,” notes Brennan, and it’s hard to disagree. It’s easy to fall into a sort of negative ambition, aiming to take up as little space as possible in the world. But being alive means having needs and wants and doing things, which will mean affecting the world, and, sometimes, annoying people. “If you want to be dead, that’s your own business,” says Brennan. But “as an alive person, you have one major advantage over dead people: you can take actions. You can work jobs and write novels and learn math and parent children and watch movies and rescue adorable animals in need. You will be much happier if you play to your comparative advantage.” Holy wood Every few years, a religious movie does well at the box office. When that happens, a bunch of think pieces come out, saying that faith-based movies are the future of entertainment as Hollywood taps into the huge underserved religious market. And then, a few weeks later, everyone forgets and nothing really happens. But, writes the data journalist Daniel Parris at Stat Significant, religious — and in particular Christian — movies are a quietly profitable industry. Mel Gibson’s 2004 The Passion of the Christ is the highest-grossing independent film of all time, raking in $611 million. It was followed by an uptick in Christian-themed movies. Parris notes that those movies are usually low-budget, without established stars, and reliably make money despite consistently low ratings on review sites. But mainstream Hollywood still doesn’t tend to pick them up, suggesting that there is “an unspoken consensus [that mainstream movies] may touch on cultural aspects of spirituality from a safe distance, but they steer clear of overt religiosity.” |
