Which ladder should you climb?

There's overwhelming pressure to deprioritize relationships. But that can change

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Today I have a bunch of different articles I’m going to try to connect into one coherent thought. And despite rewriting this intro six different times, I haven’t come up with any catchier way to start than simply stating the thesis.

So here it is: Many of us are too alone. We lack adequate circles of friends and family — a village — to both help us materially and also enrich our lives with good company. I suspect if you’re reading this blog you know this.

But the problem isn’t just being too busy or too addicted to our phones or whatever else might be going on (though surely those are part of the problem). It’s that our entire worldview, our paradigm, is constantly pushing us away from family. We’re climbing a ladder that is leading us away from loved ones. And so we need a better ladder, a family ladder.

What do you want your kids to do?

Author Michael Perrone recently hit on the problem I’m trying to identify on his Substack. Discussing parenting, he wrote that “there is no status in having kids who do dishes while they live at home. There’s no status for having kids for kids sake. There’s much more status in kids with good credentials.”

The point is similar to the one I made last month when I argued that we need to rethink status awards. I pointed to recent comments from Vivek Ramaswamy, who suggested we strip the fun from childhood in favor of things like more tutoring and college-ready extracurriculars.

I suspect Ramaswamy and Perrone would find themselves on opposite sides of this idea, but either way the point is that the default paradigm for a lot of us is what we might call the corporate or careerist ladder. That’s a problem because it leaves little room for relationships and, as Perrone points out, leads to things like counterproductive helicopter parenting.

Perrone’s solution — which I agree with — is to go in the opposite direction and focus on relationships. The idea is to raise a kid who “isn’t chasing activities to add to his college application to tell him who he is, but one who has authenticity naturally from the duty, obligation and honor he gets from associating with real people.” Amen.

Relationships are tough in a world of careerists

Here’s the problem, though: If you focus on relationships, you run the risk of falling behind.

Think about it, while your 5-year-old is making cookies with grandma, my 5-year-old is in an SAT prep program. While your kid is lounging around a friend’s swimming pool, my kid is on a traveling debate team. While your kid is having parties on the beach at U.C. Santa Barbara, my kid just graduated early from Harvard and landed a clerkship at the Supreme Court.

I’m hyperbolizing a bit, but the point is that there are real incentives to do more tutoring, get more credentials, work longer hours, and so on. And with finite time, always choosing those things also inevitably means not choosing other things — for example relationships.

This isn’t a new idea. A long time ago, I wrote a post called “The Victorians ruined your friendships.” Among other things, the post noted how the industrial revolution and the rise of wage labor broke down family networks. Basically, in the early 1800s most Americans still lived in “corporate families,” which means a family engaged in some collective enterprise. The example I used in that post was a family farm, where everyone worked together. Then wage labor came along and suddenly you didn’t have to slave away under the tutelage of your annoying parents. You could run off to the city and get a job. There were obviously upsides, but this change also created incentives to spend time away from loved ones and eliminated bonds of interdependence between family members.

That’s still the world we live in, and it’s a very difficult paradigm to avoid. Last week, for example, I had a piece in the Deseret News about status and men’s work. Apparently, there are people who think men shouldn’t accept “low status” jobs because those jobs are professional and personal dead ends.

Plenty of people, including me, argued against that idea. But the debate highlighted the pressure to adopt a careerist, credentialist worldview — the same one that emerged back in the Victorian era and which is now championed by people like Ramaswamy. And in that context there’s always something else you can do that might push you further up the ladder. More tutoring, more test prep, more extracurriculars, more hours on the clock and so on forever.

All of this is just a long way of saying that I suspect most of us would like to prioritize our relationships. But that’s basically impossible to do because we live in the Ramaswamy-verse where you get rewards for doing just the opposite¹. Family and work are fundamentally pitted against each other.

The family ladder

So what’s the alternative?

There are many pieces of the puzzle I’m sure — Perrone has written for example about homeschooling — but I want to float three possible components to an alternative, a family ladder.

First, we need to reimagine work.

It was changes to the economy that dismantled family networks back in the 1800s, and now the Ramaswamy-verse continues to pit work and relationships against each other. The antidote must therefore involve an un-pitting.

In my Deseret News piece, I point to the “gentry” as an alternative to the idea that everyone needs to climb the same corporate ladder. What I’m suggesting is essentially a revival of the corporate family model that was common in previous eras.

I’ve written about this several times before and I always get push back, I suspect because people think I’m just arguing that you need to be rich. But that’s not it. The actual money one accrues is irrelevant. In my neighborhood there is a small cafe where we buy cinnamon roles. The owners are not rich at all. But they are a family working together. The more they work, the more time they spend together. The more unified they are as a family, the more aligned their vision, the more they prosper. I don’t mean to suggest their lives are easy or lacking in conflict, but they are climbing a different ladder.

So is the real estate family I profiled a couple of years ago. So are many people. For some reason, the status bros in the Ramaswamy-verse seem to be unaware that this type of career exists. Nevertheless, when Perrone raised the question, “what do you want your kids to do?” the answer for me is, this. I want them to have a life where work and relationships are not pitted against each other. Where there are financial and status incentives to maintain relationships, not neglect them. I would love for them to be rich too, but more than that I want them to see work not as the purpose of life but rather as a means of fortifying their village.

Second, we need better role models

One of the problems with the corporate or careerist ladder is that at least when I look up at the top rungs, I see people whose relationships are quite chaotic. Consider: Who is the person that most captures our present ethos? Trump? Jeff Bezos? I recently read a piece about Bill Gates who, despite having all the money in the world, regrets that his marriage fell apart. Oof.

The point is not to weigh in on the professional achievements of these guys, but rather to highlight that relationships, family, and village-building are not even part of the status equation. Do you know how many kids Bezos has? I didn’t. (I Googled it, and apparently he has four kids, though for all I knew he could have had zero.)

We need more stories and more figures in which relationships are integral, not ignored. I saw an example of this recently when Elissa Strauss argued that “we got Darwin all wrong.” I did not know this before reading Strauss’ work, but apparently Charles Darwin was a really nice guy and family man. He was a good father and husband. His kids inspired his work. He didn’t believe in God, but accepted that his wife did. Strauss argues that Darwin wasn’t just a good guy by the standards of his day, but was good even by our standards now. And this goodness intersects with his work; he’s known for the idea of “survival of the fittest,” but he also believed in “survival of the most sympathetic” — a value he himself embodied.

I don’t know what kind of family village Darwin had, but the fact that he was a kind and tolerant person whose family and work influenced each other strikes me as exactly the kind of story we need to hear more of.

Third, there are sticks and there are carrots

Also in recent days, I wrote for the Institute for Family Studies about growing up Mormon and how Mormons tend to have high fertility rates. I speculate that part of the reason Mormons have a lot of kids is because you don’t suffer status penalties for having a family. My parents had eight kids, but served in various leadership positions and were respected in their community. Family is a source of status in Mormonism, not a liability.

But it’s not just that the Mormon world offers rewards to people with families. There are also penalties for those without. In the IFS piece, for example, I recall a young man who returned from his proselytizing mission and subsequently suffered a status hit when he didn’t get married within a time frame that people considered reasonable.

I have saved this point for the end of today’s post because I suspect it will be an unpopular idea. Many people, including me, feel uncomfortable with the idea of shaping behavior via both carrots and sticks — though of course this already happens. The entire debate about “low status” jobs is premised on the idea that there are social penalties for choosing the wrong path in life. In fact, the debate reinforced and amplified those penalties. We are all constantly responding to both positive and negative incentives.

My IFS piece was specifically about fertility, but I think this principle applies here as well². If we want people to lean into relationships — if that’s what I want for my kids — the incentive structure has to flip. The specifics of how to do this deserve more space than I have here, but the point is that if the goal is a paradigm framing relationships as paramount, there have to be positive and negative incentives. People have to believe that there are rewards for climbing a family ladder — and costs for ignoring it.

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1. You might think you’re rejecting this worldview by, for instance, not being a credential-obsessed helicopter parent. But you’re probably not. If you live in a world where tutoring is an advantage, opting out of tutoring doesn’t mean you reject the value of tutoring. It just means you accept the costs of not doing it. You know Harvard is the best school, but you’re okay if your kid nevertheless goes to an unremarkable state college. There’s nothing wrong with that, and I’m basically describing myself here. But we’re all still living in the Ramaswamy-verse.

2. Mormonism offers a useful case study in what I’m talking about. Though Mormons have somewhat warmed to Trump in recent years, when he first entered politics my people were outliers for being generally conservative but Trump-skeptical. And the reason wasn’t Trump’s policies, it was his personal life and behavior. Being rich or successful in a Mormon community is not enough to overcome the social penalties you suffer from repeatedly divorcing your wives and having high profile affairs. There are rewards for good behavior, and penalties for bad behavior. That’s not to say there aren’t bad people in the Mormon community. Rather, the point is that if you are known to buck the social norms, you will suffer penalties.