Baby boss

 A newborn 

A new boss. 

It's a hit or miss sometimes . You don't know how your new boss will be like until it comes out. Get a baby, they said. It'll be a joy in your life, they said. Yes. There is a joy that comes, but the physical and mental toll on both me and my business partner (my wife) holds down a whirling tantrum on our daily, almost hourly progress meetings with a boisterous dictator who aggressively cried for attention -- even for inconsequential desires that change on a whim. Part of our job description is to coach the boss, 

Perhaps in the end we shouldn't look at it as a logical, business decision. Rather, we should lean into a sacrificial nature, where personal identity is splintered and reshaped to fit into this new dynamic with this new boss baby. It all clinches on capitalising our emotion. The baby's face is engineered to look cute to us. That's no coincidence.

....

A newborn.

A new boss.

In business, hiring is a risk. You never truly know what a new boss will be like until they step into the room. It’s much the same with a baby. We look at our friends who had such obedient angels, kids that listen and have understanding for them to make this relationship work.

Get a baby, they said. It'll bring you joy, they promised.

And yes—joy does come. But alongside it arrives an overwhelming toll, both physical and mental, on me and my business partner (otherwise known as my wife). 

Together, we endure daily—and sometimes hourly—progress meetings with our new boss: a tiny, boisterous dictator who demands attention with cries that range from the urgent to the bafflingly trivial, whose desires shift as quickly as the clouds.

Part of our unspoken job description is to coach this boss, to gently steer them towards civility and growth, even as our own identities are slowly being broken down, reshaped, and rebuilt around theirs.

From a colder lens—an antinatalist one—this arrangement seems almost grotesquely absurd. Logically, the numbers don't add up:

Why willingly enter a contract that guarantees sleepless nights, emotional exhaustion, financial depletion, and the fracturing of personal dreams?

Why spend years giving, knowing that the return is uncertain at best, and heartbreakingly painful at worst?

Why introduce a conscious being into a world riddled with suffering, instability, and decay?

By any metric of rational decision-making, having a child is a reckless gamble, one taken against overwhelming odds. It is a commitment signed blindly, based on a fantasy of what could be, not the reality of what is.

And yet, here we are.

Because this isn't a decision powered by logic. Logic doesn't stand a chance here.

Nature has stacked the deck: evolutionary biology crafts the baby's face to trigger our instincts; social norms glorify parenthood as a rite of passage; sentimental narratives drown us in images of smiling families and fulfilled lives. We are swept into it by momentum, by culture, by the ache of wanting to love and to be loved in a primal, undeniable way.

We tell ourselves stories. It'll be different for us. The love will be worth it. The struggle will build character.

And maybe that's true—or maybe it's just the only way to survive the dissonance between expectation and reality.

In the end, it clinches on emotional capital. It’s not the spreadsheets or the life plans that keep us under the rule of this new boss. It's the ancient pull of tenderness, the foolish and ferocious hope that something meaningful can be built from sacrifice.

It’s not logic that keeps us here.

It’s something older, something wilder, something perhaps more heartbreaking—and more beautiful.