I wonder if part of is it the paradox of choice—‘the worried well’ of us now have so many options of how to live (how liberating!)that it can feel impossible to choose the ‘right’ decision. Thus, unbending conviction is admirable and/or desirable; the only way to see through the morass
Yes, I totally agree! I feel like the Lillian Fishman essay that came out last week on marrying young did a wonderful of depicting this (a must read if you haven't read it yet).
I think denying purity and simple comprehension in favour of complexity is a richer way to live, if a more uncertain one. Still, I think this way of being is also more connective because it helps you empathize with other people rather than write-off their choices. I'm also reminded of Tavi’s idea about contradiction being a form of alignment. Holding space for multiplicity within yourself feels more honest. I will say that I think sometimes this way of being keeps me paralyzed by self-analysis and future possibility. Obviously, the allure of certainty is strong—it explains the pull toward hyper-confident creators on social media who offer concrete advice, but it feels dishonest.
I agree, it is by nature dishonest, and I see it less as cognitive bias and more as a defense mechanism-but what are you defending against, other your own fear and ambivalence? We recognize this certainty as ringing false in others, creating disconnection, it's harder to see within ourselves. But our relationship with regret is like any relationship-we have agency and control over how we can choose to engage with it. The issue with a purity vortex is its inherent ineffectiveness-when we experience certainty there just isn't a need to defend. Like the example given, you can tell yourself a story about how committed you are to childlessness, but if you were to allow yourself to actually grieve the death of a possibility, if you learn to trust that you can experience grief and sadness and they will pass or retreat, making space for joy and gratitude, which they can live along besides, you don't have to be so afraid of ambivalence, and I would argue you actually experience less of it, because you learn to truly trust yourself and your experience.
So so well said. I think the most aspirational posture for decision making is actually to see the folly of assuming there’s a right or wrong choice, and embrace that ambiguity
I can really relate to this, and agree that embracing the ambiguity is the way. I did a lot of soul searching last year about the decision to have kids or not, and ultimately came to the conclusion that I could be truly happy either way. Each way has some big tradeoffs, and each way has grief for the life not lived. It's comforted me to process and accept the grief (instead of avoiding the grief of either decision forever by not deciding), while also exploring options that are less binary than the choice originally presented (like taking a more active role with my friends' kids).
I love the way you put this and the idea of self-trust as trusting your ability to live through emotional complexity. It is all too easy to equate uncertainty with a lack of self-trust, but you’ve really challenged that idea. Maybe it’s making the best choices you can with the experiences you have at the time and forgiving yourself if it leads you somewhere you didn’t predict or want. I appreciate the humility inherent in this awareness. And the acknowledgement that life and emotions are cyclical and inescapable so to trust is to acknowledge the grief in every possibility.
I mean, what is life if not emotional complexity? Sure it's easy enough to be certain what you want to eat for dinner (maybe? for some?) but when it comes to marriage? Children? People spend so much energy trying to convince themselves they don't actually feel whatever it is they are feeling that I feel like that's what everyone is actually escaping when they 'break free' and escape to divorceland. People can leave a relationship-I don't think there's anything wrong with that, married, single, throuple, whatever configuration suits you,but I do think that when Miranda July talks about relationships being for 10 years or so she's just recognizing that in that span of time , people grow and change-and if you don't talk about this with your partner, of course you are going to grow apart. Staying silent in a marriage of course isn't the answer, but how brave to show up to your parter with what you're feeling, exploring together how you both might break free together. There's a richness you can get from that that I don't think you can get going from partner to partner-although there's something to be said for the invigorating new.
Yes, absolutely! I’ve always tried to live and think in a way that embraces uncomfortable or disruptive truths over illusions of congruence though I think sometimes we keep secrets most effectively from ourselves. It’s hard obviously to NOT engage in a kind of self-delusion and not minimize feelings that don’t align with your ideologies or the prevailing logic of your life or whatever. Or maybe it’s not hard, and we’ve just been conditioned that way. I suppose I feel like there’s more of an obvious and justifiable utility in embracing complexity if you’re creative or involved in some kind of art-making. I guess I tend to find that people who aren’t often have a preference for linearity and preservation above all else, and I understand how this seems appealing and sensible. I appreciate that you brought up MJ. I know I’m so late to the game and actually just about to crack into All Fours but from the discourse I’ve seen around it so far, I tend to agree with you. There is a particular richness of insight that comes from sustained love, too.
There’s that Voltaire quote: “Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is an absurd one.”
Also just happened to read this which seems too uncanny to not share re: suppressing conflicting emotions…
“Psychoanalysis is the study of how we maintain not knowing what we know,” said Matthew Steinfeld, a professor of psychiatry at the Yale School of Medicine. “And America is organized around not remembering what happened here.”
Completely agree with all of this! I'm a therapist so I get to work with that absurdity up close and in person every day! When people actually allow themselves to sit in dissonance it's wonderful and amazing, but being the proxy through which others seek to convince themselves is often exhausting and can feel like groundhog day.
I first noticed this with weddings! And now with babies and all the attendant decisions. And agree that some people seem to shift in and out of it while others remain firmly within indefinitely.
I have also wondered if the closer someone is to you (you, the person in the purity vortex) the more you “need” them to agree with you by replicating your decision. Because the alternative inspires doubt or regret that you have fastidiously left behind.
Love this take. The best advice my mom ever gave me was to simply make the choice that would open up MORE choices. When I was in my 20's every choice felt so BIG and CONSEQUENTIAL, so this idea switched up my thinking in a wonderful way. Mom was first a nurse who ended up leaving her job to go to law school, ultimately starting her own practice and holding down her full-time job throughout my childhood.
I also wish more people dispensing advice would just acknowledge the mysterious and massive role that luck plays in their profession, personal life, whatever. Luck is huge, people! And it's easy to mistake a fortunate person for one with a special kind of wisdom to share.
Wow, I love this! This perspective helps give me more empathy for my friends who are stuck in their vortex, rather than just rage about it haha. Thank you!
Yes! This is such a thing. For me it was moving away from my home country. I had to convince myself it was shithole and everyone who stays there is an idiot to muster up the courage to jump and then I slowly realized how warped my thinking was. It cleared slowly, like a fog. I would like to admit though that the deep grief and personal crisis that emerged is not nice. I am nostalgic for the fog sometimes (other than the part where I thought my friends who stayed were idiots, that was really lame and I am happy they were generous).
Totally, I actually talked about that a bit with my editor Mallory. She was saying that when you leave your hometown you can become really judgmental of people who don’t leave or who return at first, but as you get older that often changes and you gain more respect for either your hometown itself or even just the general idea of committing to a place
This reminds me too of “rational” v. “rationalize.” For example, people with strong opinions on something often describe their conviction or decision as rational, implying they are looking at concrete, objective facts and making an easy choice based on the presence of those facts. But in fact nothing is inherently rational; instead people *rationalize*. Just like you mention, the decision has already been made, and we come up with reasons retroactively that support that decision.
I really enjoyed reading this as a follow up to your podcast from Wednesday re: sleep training. We didn't sleep train our kid, but I do not fall into the category of being strongly opposed... And I loved listening to all of your thoughts about sleep training and expected to feel stronger in my conviction as a reaction to the episode. I found myself waiting for the moments of "aha that's totally why sleep training is wrong" or "that's totally why sleep training wasn't the best choice for us". But the truth is, we always vacillated and I remain unsure of the "right thing to do". Our kid is four and she sleeps in her own bed and goes to sleep easily but at various times when she was one and two I sat with sleep training material in front me, so so close to pulling the trigger. And this meant that any time the topic came up with other parent friends or new parents I was eager to talk through the pros and cons and the nuance. And I still am, with sleep training and so much other parent stuff that I am unsure of. I think avoiding the vortex within parenting specifically is helpful to encourage respectful conversations amongst young parents. And those conversations have helped me profoundly.
So nice to hear. I’ve also had revelations since recording it, finding that I could have softened some of my convictions that were maybe partially defensive and not entirely precise. I tried really hard to be balanced but in hindsight the vortex did creep in!
This was such a thought-provoking piece. It made me think of my own somewhat related pet theory - something I think a lot about in general is the utility/truth of "regret" as a signal of whether a choice you made was actually the right one. When I was considering going to medical school, basically everyone couched their advice (regardless of what it was) in my potential future regret - i.e. "you don't want to regret it forever if you pass up this opportunity." This got me thinking a lot about the feeling of regret and how credible it really is. When I thought of what my future would look like if I made either choice (medicine or some more unstructured, yet-to-be-known, career path), it was clear to me that there would be moments in both futures that I would desperately regret my choice, and moments where I would feel unbelievably grateful that I made that choice. I think this is relevant because one of the reasons for the purity vortex is the desire to stave off regret, which IMO is one of the most painful sensations only because we tend to trust that feeling so deeply as a sign that we missed an opportunity to improve our (preciously short) lives. So we create whatever narratives we need to avoid regret. Being a little less scared of regret has in turn made me more confident in decision-making, while also being less quick to be so sure that my decision was the only possible correct choice :)
As someone pregnant for the first time and surrounded by well meaning, enthusiastic parent friends this resonated with me! The overwhelm of impending parenthood is made more serious by the die hard opinions (often presented as facts) on everything from bottles, to naps, to daycare. As someone who is curious and eager to learn, the tone of the purity vortex is totally off putting! I understand where it comes from - we’re all learning something new and scary for the first time - but I’m finding it difficult to engage in. I also think the culture of data in parenting literature adds another layer to this.
This is so so good Haley. Worth incorporating as a lifelong practice of awareness when *I’M* doing it but also as an observation of others doing it. (Not in a judgmental way but just as useful context.) And I plan to make the phrase “purity vortex” part of my everyday lexicon.
This was such a good read! I was just thinking about how my 30s have been about discovering nuance in all sorts of situations. One area where I’ve observed this in my life is mental health/therapy — several friends of mine have broken up with their therapists around the same time independently of each other, although they/we were previously certain that said therapists will help them through just about anything in life. I think for my friend group life has changed so much that an approach which used to work before no longer works. So I guess we left our vortices. (Or vortexes? English is my second language, I never know.)
"A new cognitive bias" is exactly the right description of the "Purity Vortex".
Our brains evolved to make difficult decision simple (aka biases). Maybe the agitation around Purity Vortexes comes from the disorienting feeling that comes from disrupting the peace / simpleness the brain so desires, but doesn't exist.
I think a lot of this can also be boiled down into only seeing what the results of your side of any decision are. While I don’t believe everyone is out there making blindsided selfish decisions, I do think within the vortex, focusing on you and your results is what feeds said vortex.
I think divorce can really be a good example of this (and let me start by saying my bias is that of someone who was divorced by someone abruptly and unexpectedly) and how one side of the story is someone feeling trapped in a marriage who needs help finding reasons to leave, and then there’s someone else, whose reality is about to be drastically altered by this decision. The same can be said of two people in a relationship deciding to have children, or any waterfall consequences of any decision. It’s not like we can constantly factor in vast amounts of actions as consequences, but something to chew on when considering a decision in a vortex maybe?
This is a wonderful insight and I totally agree. I left a comment on your podcast last week saying I genuinely don’t care if people don’t sleep train their kids (true) and I have never pushed sleep training on anyone (also true) but I do believe very strongly in the benefits of sleep training and I do find it baffling when parents choose not to do it. That’s my purity vortex right there - and while I genuinely don’t care what other people do, I still by default and almost subconsciously have to believe my choice is the correct one. Because I did it.
Totally!! It’s what inspired this…sleep training is a great example bc you realllllly have to believe in it to go thru with it, and that in a way creates a sort of blind belief in it. But when I gently step away from that mental framework I do find more ambivalence—even envy for some parents who never do it!! (Although of course often don’t envy them too, lol)
I think in the last few years of my life as I've gone through health issues that had not just a huge physical impact, but a deep, painful mental one (and a painful breakup in the middle of it all!) my perspective on life has shifted greatly. To echo another commenter, I've started to recognize and appreciate the nuance in everything.
My life is not what I thought it would be in my teens or 20s, but I'm hopeful (with this country/admin looming in the background...) and I feel more accepting and at peace with things and where they may or may not go. I am not trying to be passive at all. I am still trying to make certain decisions with certainty; however, some paths just don't happen, and I think that's okay. I would like to meet someone and get married, but either way kids might not happen (I'm 32 - not throwing in the towel because I think I'm ancient, but the older I get the less I might have the energy...).
Even until I meet someone, I'm not waiting to live my life and find joy and experience amazing things until then. I want to love my life and appreciate it even if kids don't happen. I don't think either path is better/worse. I have friends who are married and have children and it's so beautiful and I don't feel bitter toward them or pity them (or some similar negative feeling). I also have friends who are certain about not having children and they are living amazing, full lives too.
I wonder if part of is it the paradox of choice—‘the worried well’ of us now have so many options of how to live (how liberating!)that it can feel impossible to choose the ‘right’ decision. Thus, unbending conviction is admirable and/or desirable; the only way to see through the morass
There’s also a mistake in believing that there’s a “right” decision.
All decisions have pros & cons, the pros have pros and cons, the cons have pros & cons etc etc.
The pros & cons of cons!!
Yes, gain always involves loss
Yes, I totally agree! I feel like the Lillian Fishman essay that came out last week on marrying young did a wonderful of depicting this (a must read if you haven't read it yet).
Need to read!!
Yes!!! Would love your thoughts on it
https://open.substack.com/pub/metropolitanreview/p/would-you-rather-have-married-young?utm_campaign=posts-open-in-app
I think denying purity and simple comprehension in favour of complexity is a richer way to live, if a more uncertain one. Still, I think this way of being is also more connective because it helps you empathize with other people rather than write-off their choices. I'm also reminded of Tavi’s idea about contradiction being a form of alignment. Holding space for multiplicity within yourself feels more honest. I will say that I think sometimes this way of being keeps me paralyzed by self-analysis and future possibility. Obviously, the allure of certainty is strong—it explains the pull toward hyper-confident creators on social media who offer concrete advice, but it feels dishonest.
I agree, it is by nature dishonest, and I see it less as cognitive bias and more as a defense mechanism-but what are you defending against, other your own fear and ambivalence? We recognize this certainty as ringing false in others, creating disconnection, it's harder to see within ourselves. But our relationship with regret is like any relationship-we have agency and control over how we can choose to engage with it. The issue with a purity vortex is its inherent ineffectiveness-when we experience certainty there just isn't a need to defend. Like the example given, you can tell yourself a story about how committed you are to childlessness, but if you were to allow yourself to actually grieve the death of a possibility, if you learn to trust that you can experience grief and sadness and they will pass or retreat, making space for joy and gratitude, which they can live along besides, you don't have to be so afraid of ambivalence, and I would argue you actually experience less of it, because you learn to truly trust yourself and your experience.
So so well said. I think the most aspirational posture for decision making is actually to see the folly of assuming there’s a right or wrong choice, and embrace that ambiguity
I can really relate to this, and agree that embracing the ambiguity is the way. I did a lot of soul searching last year about the decision to have kids or not, and ultimately came to the conclusion that I could be truly happy either way. Each way has some big tradeoffs, and each way has grief for the life not lived. It's comforted me to process and accept the grief (instead of avoiding the grief of either decision forever by not deciding), while also exploring options that are less binary than the choice originally presented (like taking a more active role with my friends' kids).
I love the way you put this and the idea of self-trust as trusting your ability to live through emotional complexity. It is all too easy to equate uncertainty with a lack of self-trust, but you’ve really challenged that idea. Maybe it’s making the best choices you can with the experiences you have at the time and forgiving yourself if it leads you somewhere you didn’t predict or want. I appreciate the humility inherent in this awareness. And the acknowledgement that life and emotions are cyclical and inescapable so to trust is to acknowledge the grief in every possibility.
I mean, what is life if not emotional complexity? Sure it's easy enough to be certain what you want to eat for dinner (maybe? for some?) but when it comes to marriage? Children? People spend so much energy trying to convince themselves they don't actually feel whatever it is they are feeling that I feel like that's what everyone is actually escaping when they 'break free' and escape to divorceland. People can leave a relationship-I don't think there's anything wrong with that, married, single, throuple, whatever configuration suits you,but I do think that when Miranda July talks about relationships being for 10 years or so she's just recognizing that in that span of time , people grow and change-and if you don't talk about this with your partner, of course you are going to grow apart. Staying silent in a marriage of course isn't the answer, but how brave to show up to your parter with what you're feeling, exploring together how you both might break free together. There's a richness you can get from that that I don't think you can get going from partner to partner-although there's something to be said for the invigorating new.
Yes, absolutely! I’ve always tried to live and think in a way that embraces uncomfortable or disruptive truths over illusions of congruence though I think sometimes we keep secrets most effectively from ourselves. It’s hard obviously to NOT engage in a kind of self-delusion and not minimize feelings that don’t align with your ideologies or the prevailing logic of your life or whatever. Or maybe it’s not hard, and we’ve just been conditioned that way. I suppose I feel like there’s more of an obvious and justifiable utility in embracing complexity if you’re creative or involved in some kind of art-making. I guess I tend to find that people who aren’t often have a preference for linearity and preservation above all else, and I understand how this seems appealing and sensible. I appreciate that you brought up MJ. I know I’m so late to the game and actually just about to crack into All Fours but from the discourse I’ve seen around it so far, I tend to agree with you. There is a particular richness of insight that comes from sustained love, too.
There’s that Voltaire quote: “Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is an absurd one.”
Also just happened to read this which seems too uncanny to not share re: suppressing conflicting emotions…
“Psychoanalysis is the study of how we maintain not knowing what we know,” said Matthew Steinfeld, a professor of psychiatry at the Yale School of Medicine. “And America is organized around not remembering what happened here.”
(https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/22/style/freud-psychoanalysis.html)
Completely agree with all of this! I'm a therapist so I get to work with that absurdity up close and in person every day! When people actually allow themselves to sit in dissonance it's wonderful and amazing, but being the proxy through which others seek to convince themselves is often exhausting and can feel like groundhog day.
Also, agree, why are the only easy decisions related to food and drink lol
Haha, are they? My husband and I had just spent ten minutes trying to decide what to cook for dinner before just giving up and ordering pizza!
I first noticed this with weddings! And now with babies and all the attendant decisions. And agree that some people seem to shift in and out of it while others remain firmly within indefinitely.
I have also wondered if the closer someone is to you (you, the person in the purity vortex) the more you “need” them to agree with you by replicating your decision. Because the alternative inspires doubt or regret that you have fastidiously left behind.
For sure
Love this take. The best advice my mom ever gave me was to simply make the choice that would open up MORE choices. When I was in my 20's every choice felt so BIG and CONSEQUENTIAL, so this idea switched up my thinking in a wonderful way. Mom was first a nurse who ended up leaving her job to go to law school, ultimately starting her own practice and holding down her full-time job throughout my childhood.
I also wish more people dispensing advice would just acknowledge the mysterious and massive role that luck plays in their profession, personal life, whatever. Luck is huge, people! And it's easy to mistake a fortunate person for one with a special kind of wisdom to share.
Wow, I love this! This perspective helps give me more empathy for my friends who are stuck in their vortex, rather than just rage about it haha. Thank you!
Yes! This is such a thing. For me it was moving away from my home country. I had to convince myself it was shithole and everyone who stays there is an idiot to muster up the courage to jump and then I slowly realized how warped my thinking was. It cleared slowly, like a fog. I would like to admit though that the deep grief and personal crisis that emerged is not nice. I am nostalgic for the fog sometimes (other than the part where I thought my friends who stayed were idiots, that was really lame and I am happy they were generous).
Totally, I actually talked about that a bit with my editor Mallory. She was saying that when you leave your hometown you can become really judgmental of people who don’t leave or who return at first, but as you get older that often changes and you gain more respect for either your hometown itself or even just the general idea of committing to a place
This reminds me too of “rational” v. “rationalize.” For example, people with strong opinions on something often describe their conviction or decision as rational, implying they are looking at concrete, objective facts and making an easy choice based on the presence of those facts. But in fact nothing is inherently rational; instead people *rationalize*. Just like you mention, the decision has already been made, and we come up with reasons retroactively that support that decision.
A great reminder
I really enjoyed reading this as a follow up to your podcast from Wednesday re: sleep training. We didn't sleep train our kid, but I do not fall into the category of being strongly opposed... And I loved listening to all of your thoughts about sleep training and expected to feel stronger in my conviction as a reaction to the episode. I found myself waiting for the moments of "aha that's totally why sleep training is wrong" or "that's totally why sleep training wasn't the best choice for us". But the truth is, we always vacillated and I remain unsure of the "right thing to do". Our kid is four and she sleeps in her own bed and goes to sleep easily but at various times when she was one and two I sat with sleep training material in front me, so so close to pulling the trigger. And this meant that any time the topic came up with other parent friends or new parents I was eager to talk through the pros and cons and the nuance. And I still am, with sleep training and so much other parent stuff that I am unsure of. I think avoiding the vortex within parenting specifically is helpful to encourage respectful conversations amongst young parents. And those conversations have helped me profoundly.
So nice to hear. I’ve also had revelations since recording it, finding that I could have softened some of my convictions that were maybe partially defensive and not entirely precise. I tried really hard to be balanced but in hindsight the vortex did creep in!
This was such a thought-provoking piece. It made me think of my own somewhat related pet theory - something I think a lot about in general is the utility/truth of "regret" as a signal of whether a choice you made was actually the right one. When I was considering going to medical school, basically everyone couched their advice (regardless of what it was) in my potential future regret - i.e. "you don't want to regret it forever if you pass up this opportunity." This got me thinking a lot about the feeling of regret and how credible it really is. When I thought of what my future would look like if I made either choice (medicine or some more unstructured, yet-to-be-known, career path), it was clear to me that there would be moments in both futures that I would desperately regret my choice, and moments where I would feel unbelievably grateful that I made that choice. I think this is relevant because one of the reasons for the purity vortex is the desire to stave off regret, which IMO is one of the most painful sensations only because we tend to trust that feeling so deeply as a sign that we missed an opportunity to improve our (preciously short) lives. So we create whatever narratives we need to avoid regret. Being a little less scared of regret has in turn made me more confident in decision-making, while also being less quick to be so sure that my decision was the only possible correct choice :)
As someone pregnant for the first time and surrounded by well meaning, enthusiastic parent friends this resonated with me! The overwhelm of impending parenthood is made more serious by the die hard opinions (often presented as facts) on everything from bottles, to naps, to daycare. As someone who is curious and eager to learn, the tone of the purity vortex is totally off putting! I understand where it comes from - we’re all learning something new and scary for the first time - but I’m finding it difficult to engage in. I also think the culture of data in parenting literature adds another layer to this.
This is so so good Haley. Worth incorporating as a lifelong practice of awareness when *I’M* doing it but also as an observation of others doing it. (Not in a judgmental way but just as useful context.) And I plan to make the phrase “purity vortex” part of my everyday lexicon.
This was such a good read! I was just thinking about how my 30s have been about discovering nuance in all sorts of situations. One area where I’ve observed this in my life is mental health/therapy — several friends of mine have broken up with their therapists around the same time independently of each other, although they/we were previously certain that said therapists will help them through just about anything in life. I think for my friend group life has changed so much that an approach which used to work before no longer works. So I guess we left our vortices. (Or vortexes? English is my second language, I never know.)
I’ve totally been going through this with therapy too!!! And same with some of my friends. I might write about this
"A new cognitive bias" is exactly the right description of the "Purity Vortex".
Our brains evolved to make difficult decision simple (aka biases). Maybe the agitation around Purity Vortexes comes from the disorienting feeling that comes from disrupting the peace / simpleness the brain so desires, but doesn't exist.
We aim to make difficult decisions simple, so true
I think a lot of this can also be boiled down into only seeing what the results of your side of any decision are. While I don’t believe everyone is out there making blindsided selfish decisions, I do think within the vortex, focusing on you and your results is what feeds said vortex.
I think divorce can really be a good example of this (and let me start by saying my bias is that of someone who was divorced by someone abruptly and unexpectedly) and how one side of the story is someone feeling trapped in a marriage who needs help finding reasons to leave, and then there’s someone else, whose reality is about to be drastically altered by this decision. The same can be said of two people in a relationship deciding to have children, or any waterfall consequences of any decision. It’s not like we can constantly factor in vast amounts of actions as consequences, but something to chew on when considering a decision in a vortex maybe?
Good point!! Definitely another element of it
This is a wonderful insight and I totally agree. I left a comment on your podcast last week saying I genuinely don’t care if people don’t sleep train their kids (true) and I have never pushed sleep training on anyone (also true) but I do believe very strongly in the benefits of sleep training and I do find it baffling when parents choose not to do it. That’s my purity vortex right there - and while I genuinely don’t care what other people do, I still by default and almost subconsciously have to believe my choice is the correct one. Because I did it.
Totally!! It’s what inspired this…sleep training is a great example bc you realllllly have to believe in it to go thru with it, and that in a way creates a sort of blind belief in it. But when I gently step away from that mental framework I do find more ambivalence—even envy for some parents who never do it!! (Although of course often don’t envy them too, lol)
I think in the last few years of my life as I've gone through health issues that had not just a huge physical impact, but a deep, painful mental one (and a painful breakup in the middle of it all!) my perspective on life has shifted greatly. To echo another commenter, I've started to recognize and appreciate the nuance in everything.
My life is not what I thought it would be in my teens or 20s, but I'm hopeful (with this country/admin looming in the background...) and I feel more accepting and at peace with things and where they may or may not go. I am not trying to be passive at all. I am still trying to make certain decisions with certainty; however, some paths just don't happen, and I think that's okay. I would like to meet someone and get married, but either way kids might not happen (I'm 32 - not throwing in the towel because I think I'm ancient, but the older I get the less I might have the energy...).
Even until I meet someone, I'm not waiting to live my life and find joy and experience amazing things until then. I want to love my life and appreciate it even if kids don't happen. I don't think either path is better/worse. I have friends who are married and have children and it's so beautiful and I don't feel bitter toward them or pity them (or some similar negative feeling). I also have friends who are certain about not having children and they are living amazing, full lives too.
This is so lovely!! Really admire this perspective