King Wen of Wei asked Bian Que:

“Of you three brothers, all physicians, who is the finest in the healing art?”

Bian Que replied:

“My eldest brother is the finest; my second brother comes next; I, Bian Que, am the least of the three.”

King Wen said:

“May I hear why?”

Bian Que answered:

“My eldest brother sees illness in the spirit, before it has taken shape, and removes it unseen; therefore his name is known only within our household.

My second brother treats illness when it is but a hair’s breadth from appearing; therefore his name does not travel beyond our village lane.

As for me, Bian Que: I pierce the blood vessels, administer strong medicines, and cut open the flesh. Thus, by such visible acts, my name has spread among the lords.”

Maybe I'll just leverage my programming experience and build something using online tutorials and a Dosbian box.

Not sure about the teenagers as my kid is too young. But I do remember I was like what you described when I was a teenager -- I didn't do drugs or any illegal stuffs, but maybe being totally confused and squandered the whole 15 or so years between 20 and 35 are not really too different.

Anyway, glad that you found a lot of meaning in parenting. I'll still need to search for mine.

Does that "deep meaning" come to you when you look back, or you felt it when it happened? I have to say I didn't find much meaning in all that grinding, guess that's because I'm never good with human-beings, so I'm frustrated by little tornadoes. My son is almost 6 now so there is some meaning to be found when we do things altogether, but frankly we share very few hobbies and such so it's mostly like throwing darts and see which one sticks.

But all in all, I guess I'm just the kind of person who are not good with persons and who are totally fine to be left alone. I don't even know why I get married -- guess it's just something that everyone does so I did it anyway. Hell, I've been confused by myself since high school and have never truly gotten out of that confusion.

Do you have any blog, or any recommendation of books to read for such topics? Maybe I can find some "Programming for kids" book back from the 90s. I find teaching kids in general very hard, much harder than teaching myself because kids don't have the cognitive capacity as an adult.

In fact, I’d argue it was more fun than programming Javascript these days.

In modern societies families are atomic. Parents don’t get support from grandparents very often and sometimes they don’t get any support. There is no community support either, or very very little unless you happen to belong in some ethnics. On the other hand, people are more aware these days and regulations are tougher, so you can’t do a lot of things back in the day, like my parents used to leave 4 years old me to my neighbours for work.

So I’d argue that our society is actually more and more difficult for parents to give birth to babies, especially middle class parents because they don’t even enjoy much of financial support anyway — those goes to poorer families.

And this becomes clearer if you look at wealth distribution. Nowadays, in my city, which is considered as the most affordable metropolitan in Canada, it is very difficult for working people to buy properties with median salaries — and rent has gone up too so you can’t say “just rent it”.

All in all, I don’t know about Northern EU but it is harder and harder for working parents in Canada to have babies.

It’s ironic that I’m pretty good with it.

One big issue for me is that when I use Linux I only use it for a specific purpose, e.g. hacking kernels, and the cli commands are extremely limited. I have been using a Linux box for a year and haven’t learned much TBH.

Wish Asahi to be more successful.