Wild Problems

Reading time: 5 min

Today’s high-signal drops:

• Makes-You-Think Tweet: the most likely outcome
• Mind-Expanding Concept: wild problems
• Cool Quote: action > knowledge
• High-Signal Content: Poor Charlie’s Almanack

Makes-You-Think Tweet

Mind-Expanding Concept

Wild Problems

I've never felt a visceral need to have kids. Some people do. Particularly women, in my experience. Not having this "feeling" is the first thing my friends bring up as the reason for not having kids. Although I was in the same boat, the more I explored the decision to have kids seriously, the more I was convinced that I wanted them. In the end, I definitely wanted them. But this process was surprising, to say the least.

For many decisions - whether to buy a new car, how much to invest in what asset class, which product features to prioritize, what supplements to take - frameworks can help. There's an analytical path to these types of decisions. You do a cost-benefit analysis, lay out risks, think about reversibility, and build scenarios. Damn, you can build a full-fledged decision tree with probabilities and other shenanigans.

But for the decisions that truly matter, that's not the case. There's no playbook to decide with whom to get married, if and when to have kids, where to live, when to change jobs (or careers for that matter), and how much time to spend with your parents. These are what the economist Russ Roberts calls "wild problems", as opposed to the less complex, tamed problems of the day-to-day. Wild problems are not amenable to data. They resist measurement, so we can't scientifically reason through them. They are not the kinds of problems with answers.

One thing I commonly do before deciding is talk to people in somewhat similar situations. I go: "How would you go about making this decision? What criteria would you use? What is often overlooked?". I did the same thing when marinating about having kids and one thing stood out.

People who didn't have kids didn't truly know what was like to have them and people who did have kids couldn't imagine their lives without them. Their perspectives were unescapingly biased. It was particularly eye-opening to talk to the latter group, the parents. They (obviously) didn't have kids at some point in their lives so they could in theory picture a life flying solo. But what I saw were grown-ups scrambling to string words together to describe a hypothetical child-free life only to land on a joke about having invested a Ferrari-worth in diapers and childcare. If in theory, they could picture a life without kids, in practice, they couldn’t. Not anymore.

If one can't imagine how the life of a parent is, a cost-benefit analysis won't do. How are you gonna come up with upsides and downsides? It is hard to imagine because living through an important decision such as being a parent transforms you in a way that is both unique and unpredictable. Your tastes change. Your priorities change. That's the nature of wild problems, they change you.

Fast-forward and I now have a 4-month-old who melts my heart a few times a day with her dimples. And I experience "feelings" and states of well-being that I had never experienced before and I could never predict. It's real. It's wild.

Cool Quote

High-Signal Content

See you next week,

Filipe