Why is B2C User Acquisition Broken?

Backstory

Right after graduating from college, I started my first company, Skritter, with my two best friends. It’s an app that helps students learning Chinese and Japanese write characters. We didn’t do anything special to get users: we created content on our blog, hosted a forum, learned about a new thing called SEO, and kept releasing new features. The company grew little by little via word of mouth. The company is now old enough to vote and is still growing.

In 2013, we all stopped working on Skritter to start our second company, CodeCombat. It’s an app that helps middle schoolers to code. We were part of the W14 YC batch. At CodeCombat, we became experts at getting onto the HackerNews front page, but most of the lasting user growth was viral. Learning to code was hot in 2014 and our product was eventually pretty good. Today, the company is several times larger than Skritter and continuing to grow. 

After CodeCombat, I was experiencing burn out and decided to work a corporate gig for a while. But I learned the hard way that it’s really hard to scratch my entrepreneurial itch at a corporate gig. So I did what any sane father of 3 does: I started building some side projects in my free time. 

It can be fun to build for yourself, and I’ve done it plenty of times, but it’s a lot more fun to build something that other people want. So, rather than just building the 10,000th bespoke Quantified Self app for myself, I set out to find the overlap between 1) things I want to build and 2) things that other people might want to use.

This time around, I wasn’t interested in creating another startup. I had pretty modest goals: build something that other people find valuable and maybe generate a little income on the side.

Little did I know that at some point during the intervening decade, B2C user acquisition broke.  

My 3 B2C Attempts

I had a couple of ideas that I was passionate about and I thought might resonate with other people: 

Never Apply 

My idea here was to help people find jobs through their network. $1,000 in LinkedIn ads later and there was no engagement at all. I drew what seemed then like the natural conclusion: no one wanted this because my idea or execution were bad. No big deal, running companies has taught me that most of the stuff you try doesn’t work. Onwards to the next thing!

Here’s what the homepage looked like: 

Talk with Sage

I’ve struggled with depression my entire life and I thought there might be a niche in making a much better agentic AI chatbot therapist. I did some organic Reddit content creation and also bought ads. Here too, I got literally 0 engagement. No signups, no support requests, no rants about pricing. Absolutely crickets. 

Like Never Apply, I thought, well, I probably just didn’t clearly express the value-add or find the user group who would actually use this thing. Another case of poor execution or market segmentation. But it was mildly interesting to me that I’d had two absolute flops. You sort of expect things to fail when building new stuff, but getting zero signups or signs of life was a bit extreme.

Here’s what the homepage for this one looked like:

Family Caller

My grandmother was diagnosed with early stage dementia last year and her care has been challenging for my family. I offered to build this one to help my mom. I felt a lot more confident about this one because I personally know a couple of family members caring for elderly folks. They all agree it is hard, draining work. My initial run of Meta ads showed some of life, so I decided to invest a bit further.

I doubled down, iterated the product messaging and dove deeper into the actual product build. But despite that initial ads-based interest, there was almost zero engagement with the product. 

And this is when I started to think that something systematic might be broken with the ecosystem, not the products I was testing. Family Caller is still live, here’s a screenshot of the homepage: 

None of these ideas seemed obviously stupid. I helped to design each of the pages with a designer who is a lot better than me, and Scott helped me out and built the backend for Family Caller. True, each of them had noticeable rough edges, but I showed the pages to some friends and family without first telling them I’d made them, and the feedback was generally “this seems legit.” 

Broken B2C User Acquisition

At this point I need to stress the problem: there was almost no engagement at all. It wasn’t that what we built didn’t work from a business perspective. We instrumented the apps pretty well and what we saw is that people (or maybe just bots) were looking at the pages, scrolling, and tapping, but almost nobody actually used the products.

Here’s all the stuff we tried to figure this out:

1. Conducted in-person UX testing. At first, I thought maybe the pages were misleading and that people were signing up thinking that each service did something else. That might explain why accounts were getting created and then going silent. So I did some UX testing with live humans: they had no problems navigating the sites or explaining what each product did.

2. Installed Posthog for screen recordings. Dead internet theory 101 says that most activity on websites are crawlers and bots. So I installed Posthog to give me screen recordings of sessions. You can’t tell definitively from a recording whether it’s a person or a bot, but if these were bots, they were super inefficient and idiosyncratic. I concluded that either they were sophisticated bots built to closely emulate somewhat weird human behavior or actual humans.

3. Installed Cloudflare’s Turnstile to screen for bots. This only partially worked and introduced noticeable bugs. Via Posthog user sessions, we were able to see that a fair number of sessions were getting Turnstile errors that broke the site for them. These weren’t “you’re a bot, no more pages for you” notices, these were “Turnstile broke everything” errors. We ended up uninstalling it. 

4. Emailed users. I had legit-looking email addresses and I figured that if someone was willing to part with their email, they must have some shred of interest in the product. So I tried a couple of email tactics. I reached out asking for feedback. I offered first unpaid and then paid usability testing sessions. I emailed to “check in” to see if they needed help completing onboarding. I sent all of these emails personally from a Google workspace account 1 by 1 to maximize delivery. Out of the couple hundred I sent, I got one generic reply. 

5. Installed a chat support bubble. We installed a “chat with us” feature for a while and we got … 0 chats, despite manning the chat threads myself and trying hard to ensure the users knew I wasn’t an AI agent. I guess I failed the reverse Turing Test.

After all this, I was even more convinced that B2C user acquisition might just be broken compared to a decade ago when my cofounders and I were running CodeCombat. But why? 

Nobody Buys Software Anymore

I track my finances religiously and am responsible for managing our spending categories. A couple of years ago, I mentioned to my wife that even though she and I are always worried about paying for software subscriptions that we don’t use, we buy almost no software these days. Here’s a full dump of all the software that we’ve bought in the last 12 months:

• Steaming entertainment: Netflix, Hulu, and Disney+

• Big Tech services: Microsoft Office, Amazon Prime, Youtube Music

• One-offs: TinyBeans (yearly kid photo storage subscription), Partiful (nice party invites, only 1 month for a party we hosted), Quicken (yearly subscription)

So apart from streaming entertainment (which I would argue is more akin to cable television than software) and services from FAANG / MAANG, we just aren’t buying much software.

Next, I asked a couple of my friends about this. The way I phrased the question was “apart from FAANG and streaming services, do you buy software?” The answer seems to be “not really.”

So what happened? I remember a decade ago, I bought all sorts of niche software. I had a Zeo headband with a monthly data analysis subscription, I tried the paid tier on Strava, I bought the pro plan on AllTrails, etc, etc. I wouldn’t say that I was a software spendthrift, but I certainly paid for more B2C software than I do today and I arguably had fewer problems to solve in my life. (nothing beats kids for creating life problems!)

Then I had an idea: what if this isn’t just me and my little social bubble? What if people in general are just not buying much software anymore? That would be kinda weird, but I had an easy way to sanity check my idea.

It’s Not Just Me, YC Is Funding Mostly B2B Startups Now

YCombinator has a publicly-available list of all the companies that they’ve funded: YC Startup Directory. They are funding a lot more B2B companies now than B2C: 

YC has funded 5,407 companies. 2,685 are B2B, only 838 are B2C. That’s a telling statistic on its own. The single biggest startup accelerator in the world has funded approximately 3x as many B2B companies as B2C. 

But if you take a look at the time trend, the data gets even more stark. I did some tedious scraping and number-crunching from public sources for you. The percentage of B2C companies that YC funds per batch has fallen from around 30% in the early 2010s to around 7% in recent cohorts. 

And that number actually understates the drop. If you actually dig into the B2C companies in the most recent cohorts, most don’t monetize their products directly. IE, people aren’t paying for them, they’re ad-supported, VC-backed, or funding themselves via affiliate revenue.

So, putting this all together:

1. My own little side experiments have proven that user acquisition for B2C products is not working for hobbyists.

2. My peers and I no longer buy much software directly.

3. The YCombinator Startup directly provides strong evidence that B2B is where venture-scale investments pay off, not B2C. 

Despite these trends, the tech industry is bigger than ever as measured by public markets and VC funding: 

So what’s going on? 

Some Hypotheses

After thinking about this a bit, I have a couple of hypothesis that might explain this trend, but would love to hear from readers to see whether I’m overlooking some more obvious explanations:

1. Software ate the world, now there’s nothing left. Andreessen may have been right that software is eating the world, but perhaps now there’s no world left. If there are 50 note-taking apps, the 51st is going to struggle to find users, even if it’s demonstrably a lot better. Maybe the problem is literally that there’s too much software.

2. AI bots have made user discovery impossible. Large language models are flooding product communities faster than they can be detected and removed. It’s possible that this asymmetric advantage has essentially spoiled the ability of new products to find their users. Maybe with time, defensive tactics will catch up and things will be like email spam in the early 2001s: a major problem until it isn’t any more. But for now, AI could just be ruining things. This trend applies to B2B as well: cold emailing, content marketing, and direct phone sales used to work and are no longer viable strategies. The one saving grace of B2B is that business owners are real humans that have real needs and you can sometimes talk to them. 

3. Growing distrust of tech in general. Maybe people are turning away from tech-driven recommendation engines like ads and feeds as part of the tech backlash that kicked off in the mid-2010s. You could imagine a world where average people have just stopped trusting that they’ll get good value from any digital purchases after they struggle to cancel the subscription on their fitness app or the accumulation of dark patterns in their social networking app of choice leaves them with a bad taste in their mouth.

4. The middle class is finally gone. We’ve been hearing the story about wage inequality for a long time, but maybe things have finally become bad enough that mass-market apps that aren’t explicitly tailored for the top 1-10% just aren’t viable. Anecdotally, I know quite a few underemployed and unemployed people my age that are finding it extremely difficult to get jobs or save money, so this one too seems at least plausible.

Of course, it could be all of these things plus 2-3 more that I’m missing. What do you think: why is B2C broken for new startups?

Books That I Read in 2024

Nonfiction

★★★★★ Different: Gender Through the Eyes of a Primatologist - changed the way that I view the behavior of myself and my young children.

★★★★★ Not the End of the World: How We Can Be the First Generation to Build a Sustainable Planet - some much needed optimism about climate change and our ability to change the world.

★★★★★ Humankind a Hopeful History -reminded me of the book “Factfulness,” it’s a good read for anyone feeling gloomy about the state of the world.

★★★★★ Outlive: The Science and Art of Longevity - lots of people have already learned this stuff, but I haven’t been paying attention to nutrition or longevity research and it was a fascinating read.

★★★★★ The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity - a good rebuttal to “Sapiens” and “Better Angels of Our Nature.”

★★★★☆ The Hidden History of Guns and the Second Amendment - well-researched argument that gun rights and slavery are tightly entwined in ways that most people don’t want to talk about.

★★★★☆ Why We Fight: The Roots of War and the Paths to Peace - apparently we don’t start wars over resource scarcity which was a surprise.

★★★★☆ Judgment at Tokyo: World War II on Trial and the Making of Modern Asia - I learned about the Nuremberg Trials in school, but never learned about the Japanese equivalent. This was a long but fascinating read.

★★★★☆ The Little Book of Aliens - I don’t know where I learned that humanity had done a lot of searching for aliens, but this book disabused me of that fact.

★★★★☆ Freezing Order: A True Story of Money Laundering, Murder, and Surviving Vladimir Putin's Wrath - this and “New Cold Wars” pair well together if you’re interested in an analysis of US / Russian relations.

★★★★☆ The Survivors of the Clotilda: The Lost Stories of the Last Captives of the American Slave Trade - change is never tidy and uniform, this book does an amazing job of bringing to life a transition that was always quickly and factually summarized in school history books.

★★★★☆ Blitzed: Drugs in the Third Reich - I knew that lots of drugs were legal in the early part of the 20th century, but didn’t realize that the Third Reich was meth’d up and that it may have been responsible for some of their early military victories.

★★★★☆ Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals - I had been avoiding working on some important life projects because they didn’t feel enjoyable. This book explained to me why that is and why it’s imperative to do the work anyways.

★★★★☆ The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer - if you thought that cancer was monolithic, you should read this and marvel at how our best enemy really is ourselves.

★★★★☆ The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt - so much has been written about TR’s presidency, but not as much about his adolescence and early adulthood. You can disagree with some of his policies and still respect the man.

★★★☆☆ Blight: Fungi and the Coming Pandemic - pair this with the TV show “The Last of Us.” You’re welcome.

★★★★☆ Nuclear War: A Scenario - prior to reading this book, I ranked nuclear war as perhaps the 3rd or 4th more pressing existential threat to humanity. Now I think it’s probably #1.

★★★★☆ The Price of Time: The Real Interest Story - a compelling and well-researched argument against low interest rates.

★★★★☆ The Upswing: How America Came Together a Century Ago and How We Can Do It Again - a great snapshot of historical consequence, but I fear that what worked previously won’t work now that Facebook, Instagram, and video games exist. Just the same, fascinating.

★★★★☆ The Demon of Unrest - I spent a full semester learning about the American Civil War and had never learned about this pivotal event that started it all.

★★★★☆ The Coming Wave: Technology, Power, and the Twenty-First Century's Greatest Dilemma - would have been better if it had taken more seriously some of the existential AI threats, but I still really liked it and thought the points were timely and well-articulated.

★★★★☆ Takeover: Hitler's Final Rise to Power - before reading this, I thought that the political situation in the US now was very similar to Germany in the 1930s. Turns out I was quite wrong.

★★★★☆ Smoke and Ashes: Opium's Hidden Histories - if you can get past the kinda weird intro, this is absolutely addictive read about a botanical history I’d never heard.

★★★★☆ Magic Pill: The Extraordinary Benefits and Disturbing Risks of the New Weight-Loss Drugs - the author might not be super trustworthy, but GLP-1 weight-loss medications are borderline magic and may fundamentally change the world.

★★★★☆ Of Boys and Men: Why the Modern Male Is Struggling, Why It Matters, and What to Do About It - finally a politically centrist book about some of Charles Murray’s points about gender and sex without all the conservative axe-grinding and culture war baggage.

★★★☆☆ Smoke Gets in Your Eyes: And Other Lessons from the Crematory - made me think harder about death one moment and laugh out loud the next.

★★★☆☆ The Lost Tomb: And Other Real-Life Stories of Bones, Burials, and Murder - pure entertainment, this is a real page turner. It’s what would happen if Indiana Jones were actually real.

★★★☆☆ Number Go Up: Inside Crypto's Wild Rise and Staggering Fall - I didn’t know most of the history of crypto currencies even though I’d lived through it. Good, if fairly opinionated read.

★★★☆☆ Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty - don’t watch the TV show, read the book. This also pairs well with “Smoke and Ashes” above.

★★★☆☆ Lies Across America: What Our Historic Sites Get Wrong - high schools should be teaching from books like this not textbook propaganda. This is entertaining and illuminating.

★★★☆☆ The Man from the Future: The Visionary Life of John von Neumann - John von Neumann was truly an impressive dude. A bit scary, but also impressive.

★★★☆☆ Hunting the Falcon: Henry VIII, Anne Boleyn, and the Marriage That Shook Europe - it turns out that Anne Boleyn was a total badass.

★★★☆☆ The Wide Wide Sea: Imperial Ambition, First Contact and the Fateful Final Voyage of Captain James Cook - I’m surprised that this story hasn’t been turned into a TV miniseries already. It’s got everything you need: murder, intrigue, disease, war, sex, suicide, and ambition.

★★★☆☆ The In-Between: Unforgettable Encounters During Life's Final Moments - good reminder about mortality and the beautify of being human.

★★★☆☆ The Worlds I See: Curiosity, Exploration, and Discovery at the Dawn of AI - not as good as “The Coming Wave,” but still an interesting read for context about how current-gen AI systems were created.

★★★☆☆ Between Two Kingdoms: A Memoir of a Life Interrupted - even though we’ve made so much progress treating cancer (see “Mother of All Maladies” above), surviving cancer sucks.

★★★☆☆ Tokyo Vice: An American Reporter on the Police Beat in Japan - don’t watch the TV show, read the book. It’s a lot more realistic, complicated, and entertaining.

★★★☆☆ The Indifferent Stars Above: The Harrowing Saga of the Donner Party - there are some incredibly visceral and memorable human stories in here.

★★★☆☆ Alexander at the End of the World: The Forgotten Final Years of Alexander the Great - I’ve read quite a bit about Alexander the Great, so this wasn’t a revolutionary book for me, but still interesting.

★★★☆☆ The Trading Game: A Confession - I listened to this on Audible and the author’s narration makes it 2x as good. It’s like “Chaos Monkeys” but for finance.

★★★☆☆ Marilyn Monroe: The Biography - turns out she didn’t commit suicide and may, in fact, have been killed? Interesting story about an American icon.

★★★☆☆ Tripped: Nazi Germany, the CIA, and the Dawn of the Psychedelic Age - not as good as Blitzed, but still an interesting read.

★★★☆☆ Waco Rising: David Koresh, the FBI, and the Birth of America's Modern Militias - now that I’m a Texan, I really enjoyed learning the history of the city directly to the north.

★★★☆☆ The Molecule of More: How a Single Chemical in Your Brain Drives Love, Sex, and Creativity - I started this one for the neurobiology, but ended up taking away some interesting lessons about the brain chemistry of people in different political camps.

★★★☆☆ Dealers of Lightning: Xerox PARC and the Dawn of the Computer Age - the couple of depictions Xerox park being pillaged by Steve Jobs that I’d seen are wrong. It’s a quick read, so if you work in the tech industry you should probably read it.

★★★☆☆ New Cold Wars: China's Rise, Russia's Invasion, and America's Struggle to Defend the West - good, but very, very long. He makes a pretty convincing argument that the US government hasn’t done a great job responding to either China or Russia across administrations and we need to put aside partisanship and get serious about being more hawkish.

★★★☆☆ The Heat Will Kill You First: Life and Death on a Scorched Planet - great read if you live in a hot climate because the heat really is dangerous and we don’t commonly admit that.

★★★☆☆ The Woman in Me - I’m not a huge fan of Britney Spears, but it was sad and illuminating to hear about the struggles that she’s endured.

★★★☆☆ Danger Zone: The Coming Conflict with China - pair this with “New Cold Wars” to get a more balanced read on Chinese / American relations.

★★★☆☆ In the Heart of the Sea: The Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex - this is the story that Moby Dick is based on and it’s better than the novel.

★★★☆☆ Into the Clear Blue Sky: The Path to Restoring Our Atmosphere - didn’t learn a ton, but it was interesting to learn about how much more valuable it would be to remove atmospheric methane than CO2.

Fiction

Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel - very different than the TV show and (like almost every book), better. If you enjoyed the show, you should definitely read this.

Termination Shock by Neal Stephenson - pretty fun read, but drags a bit at the end.

The Three Body Problem, The Dark Forest, and Death's End by Cixin Liu - I devoured all 3 of these in 2 weeks. Very entertaining and better than the TV show.

Books I Started, but Didn't Finish

Are Prisons Obsolete? by Angela Y. Davis

The Woman They Could Not Silence by Kate Moore

Notes on a Nervous Planet by matt Haig

The Great Mortality by John Kelly

November 1942 by Peter Englund and peter Graves

Behave by Robert Sapolsky

The 99% Invisible City by Kurt Kohlstedt and Roman Mars

Hits, Flops, and Other Illusions by Ed Zwick

1177 B.C by Eric H. Cline

Evicted by Matthew Desmond

Plagues and Peoples by William H. McNeill

Solito by Javier Zamora

The Warmth of Other Suns by Isabel Wilkerson

Life After Power by Jared Cohen

Cloistered by Catherine Coldstream

Days of Rage by Bryan Burrough

The Small and Mighty by Sharon McMahon

The 10 Books I'm Most Excited to Read in 2025

Gray Matters: A Biography of Brain Surgery

House to House: An Epic Memoir of War

A Fatal Inheritance: How a Family Misfortune Revealed a Deadly Medical Mystery

As You Wish: Inconceivable Tales from the Making of The Princess Bride

Prequel: An American Fight Against Fascism

The Achilles Trap: Saddam Hussein, the C.I.A., and the Origins of America's Invasion of Iraq

The End of Everything: (Astrophysically Speaking)

Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation

Soul Full of Coal Dust: A Fight for Breath and Justice in Appalachia

Is Population Density the Reason Americans Can’t Discuss Politics?

A couple of weeks ago, I was at a work dinner with other members of my team. We were at an amazing restaurant in downtown Austin. The appetizers had come and gone, the drinks had arrived, and conversation had started to open up a bit from the perfunctory discussions of work projects and the weather. As inevitably happens, a lull in the conversation occurred and a member of our engineering team, Vinay (not his real name), piped up and asked if he could ask our table a somewhat sensitive question. 

I love controversial conversations. I was also sitting right next to Vinay, so I piped right up and told him to fire away. There were about 8 people at our table, and I reckoned that even if the conversation got a bit spicy, the background din of the restaurant and organic cross-conversation could cover.

“Why is it impolite for Americans to discuss politics?” 

He said it gently and urgently. It was obvious that he wasn’t spoiling for a heated conversation or baiting anyone at the table. He went on:

“In my hometown in India, everyone talks about politics all the time. And most of us don’t agree with one another. But that’s okay. I can even tease other people about our political disagreements and it doesn’t get in the way of friendships. Why isn’t that the case here in the US?”

People were fidgeting at the mere mention of the word politics, and another member of the engineering team sitting across from me chuckled as if to dispel the tension.  “Well, it’s just something we’re all taught: politics and money aren’t topics for polite company!” He looked around as if to say “what can you do?”

But Vinay was having none of that. 

“Sure, there is some social training here, but I’m betting you can all feel the tension of even just asking this question among coworkers. Why is that? Why can’t we disagree and remain friendly at work? It’s not like we are making policy decisions, we work at a tech company writing code.”

Another coworker interjected, “It’s so hard making friends as a parent, I don’t want to risk losing out on a friendship over political beliefs.” Several others nodded in agreement. 

Vinay smiled in a self deprecating way, “I’m sorry, I have to push further on that. Why is it that a disagreement about something as abstract about politics is an acceptable reason to end a friendship? Do all Americans spend most of their weekends attending political rallies?”

I took a half-hearted swing at a response: “I think that in America, political beliefs and violence are more closely entwined than in other parts of the world. I’d be a bit worried about getting punched if I got too deep into politics with someone who disagreed with me.” I said that last bit sarcastically to help diffuse the tension.

Vinay smiled apologetically at me. “You know that people have been lynched in India in the last few months due to political violence, right? Americans think their politics are so polarized, but it’s worse in India right now. Has anyone been killed in America recently because they were a Democrat or Republican?”

I felt pretty stupid, I clearly didn’t have much of a handle on the political situation in India. I had to confess that nobody I’d heard of had died because of their party affiliation. And if that happened, I suspected I would have heard about it. 

I meekly replied “I don’t think so, that’s a fair point.” 

Fortunately, Vinay wasn’t interested in embarrassing me and continued, “In Bangalore, my family lives in an apartment building and when I go home to visit, I have conversations with a couple dozen people every day. If politics were as divisive as here in America, I’d have no friends left.”

That got me thinking. “You know, one thing that’s very different between most of the US and most of India is population density. I live in a suburb here in Austin and I have to actually go out of my way to see my neighbors at all.”

A couple of my coworkers were shaking their heads in agreement. 

“Most of the time, it’s as if I don’t have neighbors. There’s a lot of physical space separating humans. If I have even a slightly uncomfortable situation with someone, it would be easy for me to never see them again.”

Vinay thought about that for a moment. “I couldn’t avoid most of the people in my apartment building if I wanted to, I almost trip over them when I come and go.” 

Another coworker added. “This all lines up with my experiences. I’ve been trying to find a tennis partner to play with and the one guy that’s been the most dependable lives about 20 minutes away from me. If either of us said anything to offend one another, it would be super easy to make excuses not to play again. That’s one of the reasons we don’t talk about politics.”

As he concluded that thought, the entrees started to arrive. Vinay grudgingly accepted that something as trivial as population density could be an important catalyst for forming a cultural norm against offending others. 

More food came, we drank and talked about other topics. You could feel the tension draining away as the dreaded “P” word was replaced with other more polite subjects.

Choosing to Have Kids During the End Times

My best friend believes that humanity has a 60% probability of becoming extinct in the next 15 years. He’s one of the smartest people I know and is an extremely well-adjusted and high-functioning person. He scoffs at conspiracy theories, doesn’t wear tin foil hats, and has an abiding love of statistics. His belief is terrifying because it derives not from fevered information bubble YouTube binges, but from years of methodical research and predictions.

But I don’t need his bleak predictions to feel like the world is ending. I’m apocalyptic enough on my own for that. And now that I have 3 young children, I’m more worried for them than I am for myself. What kind of world did I bring them into?

Is it wrong to have kids when you are aware of all the risks? Am I to blame if my children suffer through a world-ending event?

It’s Not Just In Your Head

Last summer at a family gathering, I asked my parents about my feelings of dread.

“Mom and Dad, is it just me or is the world ending? Are my concerns just what it’s like to be the father of 3 young kids?”

My parents are some of the most rational and loving humans I’ve ever met. I’ve always been their paranoid, obsessive son. The kind of son you have to constantly tell to relax and not to worry. Take a deep breath, things aren’t that bad, George.

“The world is a lot scarier now than it was when you were little.” I almost couldn’t believe they said it. Maybe they had misunderstood my question?

Later that weekend, I asked my 93-year-old grandmother. She looked at me with pain in her eyes and said, “I’m worried about what your generation will have to face.”

These Are the Ways the World Ends

And those are just the risks that have a decent shot at ending our species. If you’re more conservative and only care about you and your family living, you’ve got lots of other risks to worry about: political instability, war, and the normal plagues.

Most people probably fall into this camp, and the sad fact is that it’s historically mundane for entire families, cities, and nations to be extinguished unceremoniously.

Let’s stop here for a moment and return to the main point of this post: the kids.

As a parent of young children, the thought of even these mundane calamities befalling my children is heart-breaking. No. Those words don’t quite do the emotion justice.

If I think of my children dying, a lump forms in my throat. I lose the ability to function. My brain freezes and I teeter on the brink of tears. The idea of this happening to every person’s kids is unfathomable. It’s pointless to multiply infinite suffering by anything.

So perhaps it is rational to just not have children?

Are We Just Species-Level Hypochondriacs?

People have been predicting the end of the world since there were words to record the sentiment. I’m fond of this Wikipedia article: list of dates predicted for apocalyptic events. And lest you think that all of these predictions are just about a religious end of the world, don’t overlook the predictions about floods, comets, and earthquakes.

It’s tempting to conclude that humans are just species-level hypochondriacs. Even before nuclear weapons, prophets were envisioning the end of the world in a hundred different ways. 

We now know that apart from the mundane firestorms, floods, tsunamis, earthquakes, hurricanes, tornadoes, and heat waves, there are more exotic and deadly natural phenomenon: 

• The Chicxulub asteroid impact killed ~75% of plant and animal species on earth. It was only 1 of 3 truly enormous asteroids known to have impacted the Earth.

• Massive volcanic eruptions are strongly linked with 4 out of the 5 major extinction events in Earth’s geologic record.

While all of the major asteroid impact events and mass extinction events predate our species by hundreds of millions of years, far smaller events happen regularly. For a sobering read, check out the Tunguska event.

So yeah, nature is out to kill us, and that’s stressful. But that’s sort of our species’ baseline. Me, my parents, and my grandmother all seem to be cluing into something more modern and ominous. 

Many Existential Risks Really Are New

Our species has probably existed on earth for ~190,000 years. Four out of five potential ways to end ourselves were created in the last 100 years. That means that the bulk of our species’ known existential risk has been created in the last .05% of our collective existence. Two of those risks (AI and pandemics) have really only become existentially threatening in the last 20 years. That’s .01% of our species’ existence.

Against the backdrop of massively increased risk, we’ve also created instantaneous worldwide communication and algorithmic information bubbles. That seems like the perfect storm for anxious people. 

Whenever I start down this path, I reflexively think “well, we haven’t destroyed ourselves yet, so maybe I’m just worrying too much.” But we’ve come alarmingly close more than you’d think: 

• There have been at least 20 nuclear close calls since the creation of nuclear weapons. Some incidents got so close it makes me nauseous to read the accounts.

• Covid-19 killed ~27M people and was probably created through non-nefarious gain-of-function research plus an innocuous containment leak. Oopsie.

• Climate change is thought to have already killed ~2M people.

So, we’ve already nearly ended our civilization with nukes about two dozen times and millions of people have already been killed by two of the other major risk vectors. And unlike previous generations, we are cursed with the knowledge of the risks, the near-misses, and the accelerating rate of change. 

Given all of the above, I have to conclude that it’s fairly rational to be more worried about our civilization and our children than previous generations.

So, Why Have Kids?

If you’ve read this far, it may seem stupid to invest time and energy bringing children into such a risky world. Selfishly, kids take a lot of work and cost a lot. If you think our civilization will end in 5 years, why not remain child-free, retire early, and sip cocktails in the Caribbean? Even if cocktail-sipping in the tropics isn’t your thing, isn’t it philosophically cruel to bring kids into a world knowing that there is an increased risk of suffering and dying young?

I think that if you believe the world is going to end in less than 5 years and you don’t already have kids, then yeah, maybe don’t do that. But if you think we have more than 5 years and / or you already have kids, I think investing in them is essential and valuable. 

The Utilitarian Argument for Kids

I’ve read a bunch about the psychology of happiness. Daniel Kahneman proposes two ways of understanding the experience of happiness: the experiencing self and the reflecting self. The experiencing self is what everyone is most familiar with. It’s just how you feel while you live your life. It’s how you feel while you read these words. 

The reflecting self is different. How did you feel when you last went on vacation? What was something particularly fun that happened in the last month or so? Spend a couple seconds thinking about those experiences. Remember all the little details: the events, the people, colors, smells, and sensations. This is your reflecting self.

Kahneman and others have shown that we think very differently about our lives in these two modes. And most importantly, he has shown that we spend the vast, vast majority of our lives experiencing rather than reflecting.

This makes intuitive sense: most people spend orders of magnitude more time just living life than thinking about living life.

I think this simple fact makes for a pretty strong argument to have kids. I’m not a strict philosophical utilitarian, but follow me down the utilitarian path for just a minute here. 

Let’s say that you have a kid and every hour of that child’s life they get to experience a range of emotions that net out slightly positive. Sure, there are tantrums, pain, and displeasure, but there’s also lots of joy, excitement, and love. Over 5 years, that child gets to experience 25,550 hours of waking, positive life.

If the world gets nuked out of existence, they might have a couple of weeks of terror and pain followed by death. Even if that terror and pain last for 3 months and every single waking second is miserable, that’s still only 5% of their life. More likely, they can find joy even in the most grim circumstances. If this point seems hard to believe, read Man’s Search for Meaning.

Also, as a father of young children, I can attest that young kids seem from the outside to be very joyful most of the time. They aren’t plagued by the morose moods of adults. The movie Inside Out did a good job of visualizing this early-life psychological simplicity.

So, unless the end of the world is extremely drawn out and painful and your kid is already prone to suffer an unusual amount of physical or mental pain, I think having kids creates net-positive human experience … if you think the child can live beyond early childhood. 

Why the caveat about age? Because among most parents I know, raising kids from 0-5 is a very net-negative experience. Some people love babies and toddlers, but I haven’t met anyone yet that loves them for 90+ hours a week. 

The Phenomenological Argument for Kids

If you’ve done your philosophical homework, you may have read Heidegger or Sartre. They represent a branch of philosophical thought called phenomenology. One of the tenets of that system of thought is that human experience is inherently valuable, regardless of the quality of that experience. 

I’m not fully convinced of this in the extreme cases. For instance, I think it’s wrong for someone dying of excruciatingly painful and terminal cancer to be denied euthanasia on the basis that their suffering is meaningful. But for more mundane examples, I agree that human experience is superior to none at all. I think most people fundamentally agree. It’s pretty obvious why: we’re all human and the vast majority of us inherently value other members of our species. 

This school of thought would argue that a child’s existence and consciousness are valuable, regardless of whether that child is happy or sad. I think it’s tough to quantify this value, but I agree in principle that our species is enriched by having another child exist vs not exist.

The Hedonic Treadmill Argument for Kids

Maybe you aren’t convinced by esoteric philosophical arguments. That’s fine, I think there’s still a very strong argument for having kids if you want to. It’s called the Hedonic Treadmill. Empirical studies find time and time again that most people revert to a happiness set point, regardless of what life throws at them. 

This was popularized in the highly influential and oft-quoted study about recent lottery winners and paraplegics. Researchers enlisted people who had recently won the state lottery and people who had recently become paraplegics or quadriplegics due to an accident. They asked those participants to rate their happiness while experiencing everyday events like watching TV and talking to friends. What they found was that in the long run, there wasn’t much difference between the two groups despite their substantially different life circumstances. 

Put more simply, we can adapt to basically anything life hurls at us, and for most of us, we’ll probably be about as happy before and after. This effect has been labeled the Hedonic Treadmill. Like walking on a treadmill, our brains quickly adapt to new life circumstances and we tend to return to a happiness “set point.” 

Why is this applicable to having children? Because it strongly suggests that over the long term, you’ll be about as happy with kids as without them.

I can hear some folks reading this now and saying “whoa, hold on a minute, one of your arguments for having kids is that they probably won’t make you more miserable?!”. But I actually think that is a very strong argument. Bear with me for a moment.

I think Jean Twenge made a pretty compelling argument in her book Generations that despite their rhetoric, most young adults that choose not to have children today do so for selfish reasons. But what the Hedonic Treadmill strongly suggests is that avoiding kids so that you can enjoy your life more won’t work for most people. 

You might think “without kids, I can have tons more fun, I can go hiking and go to parties and live in an expensive city and play video games all day!”. And those things are fun, but only for a while. After you finish playing your 30th video game of the year, you’ll probably want to do something else. After living in San Francisco for 5 years, you might want to try living somewhere else.

Personally, I think parents in the US really are less happy on average for the first 3-5 years. Childcare is criminally expensive. Most parents don’t get any leave from their work. Young children induce sleeplessness, sickness, and marital tension. And in reaction to all these changes, many parents do stressful things like move out of big cities, change jobs, and remodel homes. All of that pushes a lot of parents to be less happy moment-to-moment.

In the long term, though, parents are about as happy as non-parents.

If you think that the world is going to end next year, there’s a pretty strong argument not to have kids because you’ll struggle less in those 12 months. But if you think the world will last at least 5-10 years, there’s a pretty good chance that having kids won’t make much difference to your long-term happiness.

Also no, having a kid isn’t an environmentally immoral action.

The Life Regret Argument for Kids

People regret things they didn’t do more than the things they do. That’s true even if the things they do end badly. 

Even with advancements in reproductive technology and medical care, if you want to have kids, it’s still a very good idea to have them when you’re relatively young. So, unlike some other big decisions in life, it’s not feasible to wait and see indefinitely. 

I’m a firm believer that people who don’t strongly want children shouldn’t have them. The US cultural norm that you grow up, marry, and have kids has become less prevalent, but is still too strong. If you don’t want kids, you shouldn’t have them. It’s that simple. And anyone that pressures or shames you for that decision is wrong.

If you do feel strongly that you want kids, but are worried about the state of the world, however, things are more tricky. If you’re in your mid-30s and feel strongly that you want kids, but decide not to do so because of political strife, climate change, nuclear war, etc, you may come to regret the decision. And there are very few options to go back and change your mind.

Why I’m Raising Kids in the End Times

I’ve struggled with depression my entire life. I’m not proud of it, but there is a certain comfort in the thought of surrendering to nihilism. What’s the point in struggling to raise children when there’s a non-trivial chance Putin will end the world in 2026 with the flip of a button? When you’re in that mind-space, you’re numb to all the fears and concerns.

But for all the reasons I’ve outlined above, I still think having children is worthwhile. Is it always pleasant? No. Does being a parent heighten my concerns about existential threats? Yes. But to simply surrender to nihilism and depression would make the world a worse place. If for no other reason than to show my children how I want them to act, I’m not willing to do that.

Top 10 Nonfiction Books of 2023 and What They Taught Me

Here are the top 10 nonfiction books I read in 2023 and 3 things that each of them taught me.

★★★★★ An Immense World by Ed Yong

1. An organism’s umwelt (pronounced “um-velt”) is a description of what they can perceive. Many organisms have such different umwelt that they are essentially existing in different universes without any perception of one another.

2. It makes no sense to make statements like “a dog’s nose is 10,000x as sensitive as a humans.” Dogs almost certainly perceive the world in radically different ways unrelated to the number of nerve endings in their olfactory bulbs.

3. Humans only perceive a very narrow range of possible sensory signals. To take a single example, elephants can communicate with one another using subsonic frequencies that are imperceptible to us. In a very real sense, the world is fundamentally different depending on your species.

★★★★★ Chip War by Chris Miller

1. Only 3 companies in the world are capable of physically manufacturing the most advanced computer chips that power everything from laptop computers to cell phones: TSMC (Taiwanese Semiconductor Manufacturing Corporation), Samsung, and Intel.

2. Only 1 company in the world is capable of creating the specialized ultra-UV lithography machines that these three chip fabs require: ASML. It’s lithography machines cost $300-400M each. It takes 13 containers and 250 crates to ship a single machine.

3. Because chip fabrication facilities are so mind-bogglingly expensive to build and run, many companies known for their electronics design (Apple, Nvidia, et al) don’t physically manufacture their own chips. They design chips which are then fabricated by TSMC, Samsung, or Intel.

★★★★★ The School of Life: An Emotional Education

This book defies the pattern of science-y nonfiction. It’s not, in my opinion, especially useful to summarize in bullet form. You’ll have to just check it out and see if you agree with the points.

★★★★★ Generations by Jean M. Twenge

1. I used to think that generations were a bit like astrology: make-believe concepts that people used to justify pre-existing biases. After reading this book, I realize that view is probably too extreme. There are real differences between differently-aged people. Whether you’re comfortable lumping them together using birth years or not doesn’t have anything to do with large and observable differences in the way those people think and act. So by all means go ahead and disagree with whether “millennials” start in 1979 or 1982, but people born around that time have significantly different life trajectories to people born in the late 1950s.

2. Younger people’s (Gen Z) mental health started to decline dramatically starting in 2012. A broad consensus is forming that the cause of that decline is due to cell phone use and social networking in particular. The impact has most heavily impacted young women.

3. The falling birth rate in developed nations is probably being driven by increasingly capable technology, wealth, and social acceptance of individualistic behaviors. The alarmist rhetoric about people not having babies because of climate change or overpopulation don’t hold up under research scrutiny. Most people that don’t have children do it for the obvious reason: children are insanely expensive and inconvenient. In the past, more communal societies distributed the cost of raising kids at the same time that it put pressure on individuals to have families to adhere to social norms. As societies have become more individualistic, the cost of raising kids has skyrocketed for parents at the same time as society has punished adults less and less for choosing not to have kids in the first place. Hence, fewer babies.

★★★★★ Seek and Hide by Amy Gajda

1. The right to privacy has been a part of English common law in some form or other for hundreds of years. Americans imported it into the original 13 colonies, but enforcement has always been inconsistent.

2. At the end of the day, the main battles in privacy law enforcement have centered around relatively powerful people attempting to obscure their deeds from the public. US society has gone through periods where it was deemed more and less acceptable to muckrake and expose those secrets. During the late 1790s, for instance, journalists and muckrakers had a largely free hand to malign politicians and businesspeople. During the early and mid-20th century, by contrast, the right of privacy was more strictly enforced and courts ruled more in favor of protecting individual’s private details.

3. We are currently in what Gadja thinks is the end of a period of particularly lopsided privacy enforcement that protects journalists and internet platforms.

★★★★★ Immune by Philipp Dettmer

1. The immune system is so dangerous to the body’s tissue that there are an almost mind-boggling number of steps, checks, and safeguards on it’s activation. So, if you ever see a medication that promises to “increase immune response” be skeptical: you don’t want an over-active immune system.

2. The body keeps a chemical memory of every pathogen it has ever encountered. That “memory” can be activated days, months, or years after first encounter. It also means that if you think of our immune system as a library of sorts, it is one of the most impressive information storage systems.

3. When your tissue is infected, it becomes warm to the touch. This is a localized version of having a high temperature during a bout with the flu. Scientists currently hypothesize that the added heat does help a bit to kill off pathogenic invaders, but mostly, it’s to facilitate easier and faster protein synthesis for the immune system. Basically, we get warmer when we’re fighting off a bacterium or virus because the immune system can more efficiently create warrior cells at slightly higher temperatures.

★★★★★ The Fall of Robespierre by Colin Jones

1. Robespierre’s contemporary oratory and rhetoric sounds unnervingly similar to modern populist leaders.

2. As with most tyrants, Robespierre held onto power through the use of violence and scare tactics. But this was also his undoing. The primary reason he was removed from power wasn’t due to a widespread popular backlash against his methods, it was because other powerful members of the revolutionary government were concerned that he might kill them.

3. There were many unlikely events that led to Robespierre’s removal and execution. If any one of them had ended differently, there’s a pretty good chance he would have survived and continued running the revolutionary government. In one particularly comedic situation, overwhelming military strength was arrayed against Robespierre’s enemies and it looked like the entire rebellion was over. But the leader of the that military detachment misunderstood how many guards there were in a government building. Fearing a clash with a non-existent enemy and fearing for his own title and office, he chose instead to retreat.

★★★★★ Good Economics for Hard Times by Abhijit V. Banerjee and Esther Duflo

1. International trade benefits developing nations far more than it benefits the US. The authors estimate that if all international US trade were halted tomorrow, it would only cost American consumers about 2.5% more per year to source all goods and services domestically. This isn’t a good argument to cease international trade, though. Hundreds of millions of people worldwide have better lives due to trade with the US. It is, however, an important fact to keep in mind when creating policy.

2. One of the primary hypotheses the authors put forward to explain rising income and wealth inequality in the US is a lack of a social safety net. While it seems like an obviously good idea on the surface for recently-laid-off workers in Cleveland to move to San Francisco to take advantage of more plentiful and highly-paid work, most can’t afford to do that. That’s not to say that they are modern day Okies fleeing the dustbowl with no money for gasoline. But expensive housing, a lack of subsidized childcare, and inaccessible health benefits make most disenfranchised workers rationally conclude that it’s better to remain in a place where they have social ties, even if there is no gainful employment. This perpetuates economic inequality. The laid off workers get poorer in small rural towns while coastal knowledge workers get richer in big cities.

3. In response to growing automation and AI-fueled job destruction, we could significantly increase social stability by offering displaced workers government-subsidized jobs doing work that robots can’t do such as in-person teaching, caring for children, or producing certain kinds of art. The way to identify these heavily-impacted people, however, will be difficult and contentious.

★★★★☆ Entangled Life by Merlin Sheldrake

1. Most fungi are not visible to us humans. Mushrooms are only the fruiting part of most fungi plants, and not every fungi species distributes it’s reproductive material via the air. The overwhelming mass of fungi on earth are contained in rocks and topsoil.

2. The whole premise of the video game and TV show The Last of Us is way less far-fetched at a scientific level than I had expected. Seriously, it’s a bit terrifying how advanced and pervasive fungi are and how little we can do to control them.

3. The root systems of most plants offload the production of necessary chemical symbiotic fungi species. That means that most trees and plant species would be incapable of existing on the planet without fungi.

★★★★☆ When Crack was King by Donovan X. Ramsey

1. Crack babies don’t exist. Or rather, the impact of crack on pregnancy outcomes was massively over-stated during the late 1980s and early 1990s to fit with a racist narrative of inner city black women and their lifestyle choices.

2. There is actually fairly solid evidence that the US federal government colluded with large, known cocaine traffickers during the 1980s as part of the Iran-Contra affair. While there isn’t a direct link between entities like the CIA and cocaine distribution in inner-city neighborhoods, the conspiracy theory about the US government using cocaine to control black communities isn’t as misplaced as I had assumed.

3. The end of the crack epidemic appears to have largely been driven by young people witnessing the ravages of the drug on their communities and abstaining. Ramsey even suggests that influential hip hop artists like Dr. Dre may have intentionally glorified the use of less destructive drugs like marijuana to discourage kids from using cocaine, crack, and heroine.

Other Books I Read in Q4

★★★★☆ Platonic, by Marisa G. Franco

★★★★☆ Stalin by Oleg V. Khlevniuk

★★★★☆ When Crack was King by Donovan X. Ramsey

★★★☆☆ Growing Up Human by Brenna Hassett

★★★☆☆ A Storm of Witchcraft by Emerson W. Baker

★★★☆☆ How to Survive History by Cody Cassidy

★★★☆☆ Gangsters vs. Nazis by Michael Benson

★★★☆☆ What the Ermine Saw by Eden Collinsworth

★★★☆☆ Homegrown by Jeffrey Toobin

★★★☆☆ Under Alien Skies by Phil Plait

★★★☆☆ Things Are Never So Bad That They Can’t Get Worse by William Neuman

★★★☆☆ The Dive by Stephen McGinty

★★☆☆☆ The Declassification Engine by Matthew Connelly

★☆☆☆☆ Fortune’s Bazaar by Vaudine England

★☆☆☆☆ I Know Who You Are by Barbara Rae-Venter