PhD or Baby? It’s a Celebration

Ah yes, the now-infamous Reddit post, where a woman deigned to voice disappointment that her family was thrilled for her cousin who had her third kid and effectively ignored her PhD.

The internet responded as the internet does1...

• Ha! PhDs are worthless.

• What did she expect? Human vs. piece of paper, lol.

• Ok, so she hates her cousin. Wow, nice person.

• My kid will make a bigger impact than a dumb PhD.

  

There are…many errors in this discourse, many of which have been pointed out by Lirpa Strike2 and The Cultural Romantic3.

Anyway, there are a few valences at play that the untrained eye may not notice.

1.) We don’t know anything about the PhD lady. We don’t know where she got her PhD, if she is single, married, lesbian, straight, deaf—anything. We know very little about her family.

2.) Also, let me briefly explain how PhDs work.

Competitive PhD programs pay a stipend. You beat out hundreds of applicants, and the university pays you to teach, research, and write a dissertation.

In the humanities, you may learn two or three languages and pass multiple qualifying exams before even beginning the dissertation. Think: UChicago, Michigan, NYU.

Other programs are essentially pay-for-play and far less selective.

So yes—some PhD programs are extremely competitive, and finishing one is a serious accomplishment.

3.) Reddit is a notorious cesspool of anti-family, anti-parent, anti-love toxic trash. It is rife with advice to divorce your husband, go no-contact with your parents, etc. So it is not known for offering a healthy, balanced perspective. At all.

What I did not expect to find was that here on Substack was for so many adults to fundamentally not understand that having a baby is distinct from a PhD (or a book, or a business, whatever).

Now, I am not really a baby person. I don’t hate them—after all, I was one once. My nieces and nephews were. But they aren’t super interesting to me.

BUT—read this, BUT—I am happy for my friends with kids. Why? Because they are happy. And because my friends are functioning people, and we need more functioning people in this world, as evidenced by this ridiculous baby-vs.-PhD debate.

A baby is loved because he or she exists. This is normal and generally good. After all, our worth as humans is not determined by how high we scored on the Koine Greek exam or the number of times our work is cited.

A PhD, on the other hand, is not appreciated simply because it exists. A good PhD program reflects years of hard work, study, panic attacks, and finding a PDF or ebook copy of Archive Fever.

Some will accomplish this and others won’t. Some people will win Olympic gold medals. Others won’t. Some will become astronauts. Others won’t.

These are incredible accomplishments, and we should celebrate them. We should honor hard work and excellence.

But hard work, excellence, and accomplishments ought not be confused with our worth as human beings.

I’m going to be real with you—I spent years wanting to write. Everyone—my mom, dad, even one jackass boyfriend and one good boyfriend—was like, “You should do this.” But I felt scared because I thought only “smart people” wrote (lol, omg, if only I knew).

One day in 2020, I was sick and tired of CRT/BLM/UMCs, so I wrote :

It dropped top line on a Monday morning and was, honestly, the talk of the organization. (I shook the table, as it were.)

Maybe a NYT writer, book author, or editor at a prestige publication would guffaw: “Oh dear me, 1,200 words in that right-wing rag. Pity, it is.”

But it meant something to me. And my friends and family were proud.

Then I started writing more. And more. And more. Now I do it for clients who, blessedly, trust me enough to help them share their message.

My sister is married with three lovely children. We love them because they are family. We love our friends and family simply because they are—not because of what they are.

Back to the Reddit post. It was never really about baby vs. PhD. It was about someone who felt overlooked by the people she loves.

A baby isn’t celebrated because it’s an “achievement.” A baby is celebrated because he or she exists and is loved.

A PhD, a book, or a business is different. Those are accomplishments that reflect years of discipline and effort. And not everyone does it.

Both things are worthy of celebration—but for different reasons.

In the end, what people really want isn’t applause for the baby or the PhD. They want to be seen by the people they love.

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