Escalation never works, and you don’t actually have authority over other people.

About halfway through the day yesterday, my wife and I were talking about [WAVES HANDS AROUND] all of this going on and she said:

I feel like he’s a parent who threatened to take away the iPhone, and the kid said “fine!” So then he said “for a month” and the kid said “fine”, so then he said “I’ll throw your phone out the window” and the kid said “fine”. So now he’s saying “I’ll kick you out of the house!”

To which I responded, “Yeah except with nuclear weapons.”

A lesson I have learned the hard way from being a parent is that escalation never works. It is a super easy cycle to get sucked into but one way or another, it will always blow up in your face.

There is a related lesson that I had mostly learned from being a manager of people in various jobs, and which was 100% confirmed and reinforced by being a parent. That lesson is that relying on authority to get people to do what you want reaches a point of diminishing returns and furthermore, “trying to get people to do what you want” is just a terrible, broken idea that should generally be avoided.

Having now made it through 50+ years on this planet, I am pretty thoroughly convinced that no one really has “authority” over anyone else, at least not in the way that people tend to think about authority. Sure—you may be able to exert force of one kind or another over someone else in the moment, but doing so will just build up resentment and soon you will find that you have exhausted whatever force you were able to exert.

As a parent, it is a really scary feeling to realize that you can’t actually control your kids, that the authority you think you have over them is entirely fleeing and illusory. It seems like a lot of people struggle fiercely with that notion, not understanding that kids are independent humans with their own internal lives and motivations rather than objects that can be bent to our wills.

I try not to judge other people’s parenting styles and choices. Having two kids myself, I am fully aware of how much being a parent can challenge one’s sense of self and poke directly at every emotional and psychological sore point. That said, whenever I hear parenting advice of the “Give them an inch an they’ll take a mile” variety, I find myself thinking “This is a person who does not actually understand that other people are real.”

It feels like there is a pretty fundamental difference in people’s approach to the world at play here. There seem to be a bunch of people for whom the notion that the other people in the world are not means to and end but rather ends themselves is completely alien. In this approach to the world, you tell people to do what you want and they either do it or they don’t, depending on how much power you have over them. When they don’t, you get mad and you take it out on them, or more likely on someone else over whom you do have power.