So you do the sensible thing. You go and ask.
You find the friend who had a baby eighteen months ago — the one who used to be much like you, same job, same doubts, the same long careful conversations about whether and when — and you ask her directly. What is it actually like? Should I? She goes quiet for a moment, and then she says: "I can't explain it. It's the hardest thing I've ever done, and I wouldn't undo it for anything." You wait, because that is not an answer. So she tries again. She talks about the tiredness, the way the days disappear, one particular morning with the light coming in. And none of it settles the question for you. You nod. You write nothing down, because there is nothing to write.
It is not that she is inarticulate. She is one of the cleverest people you know. It is that the thing she is trying to convey does not fit into words. So you ask three more people, and you get three more versions of the same reply. You'll understand when it happens. There's no way to describe it. It changes everything. And somewhere around the fourth conversation you notice something. They are not failing to tell you. There is something here that cannot be told. The one piece of information you came for is the one piece that cannot be passed from one person to another.
Last time, we found the first thing wrong with the sensible plan — the careful weighing, at the kitchen table, of what would be best for the child. The difficulty then was on the child's side: there is no one there yet to be the person you are deciding for. Tonight the difficulty moves to the other side. Tonight it concerns you, the person doing the deciding — and it begins here, in these kind and useless conversations, with the discovery that the one fact that would settle the question is a fact you cannot obtain.
This is Philosophy for Us — philosophy for everyone, no degree required. This is the second of nine episodes on the most loaded question a person ever faces: should I have a child? Last time we examined that question and found a single flaw in the most reasonable approach available to us — you decide for the child's sake, but the child is not there yet to be the one you are deciding for. Tonight, the second failure, and this one is on the side of the person choosing. The plan was to picture the two lives — the one with a child, the one without — weigh them, and choose the better. I am going to try to convince you that you cannot. Not that it is difficult. That, if the philosopher I am about to draw on is right, it cannot be done, even in principle. She built her whole account of the problem around exactly this decision.
The philosopher is L. A. Paul, and the book is Transformative Experience, published in 2014. The case she builds her whole account on — the example she returns to again and again — is the one you are standing in: whether to have a child.
Start with what just happened when you asked your friend. Paul has a precise name for why it failed. Some experiences, she says, are epistemically transformative. The phrase has a plain meaning underneath it: there is knowledge inside the experience that you cannot acquire in any way except by going through it. Not knowledge that is merely hard to get — knowledge that is available only to the person who has had the experience. The standard example is tasting something you have never tasted: a fresh pineapple, say. People can describe it — sweet, sharp, a little astringent. You can read everything ever written about the taste of pineapple. And you will still not know what pineapple tastes like until you have some in your mouth. The description conveys many facts about the experience. It cannot convey the experience itself.
Having a child, Paul argues, is an extreme case of the same thing. What it is like to hold your own child; to be responsible for a person in that particular unbounded way; to be woken and reorganised, in the dark, by a cry — that knowledge is available only from the inside, to someone who has already had it. Your friend was not being evasive. She had had an experience you have not, and she was trying to describe it in words that can only refer to experiences you already know. Of course it came out as a shrug. The shrug was honest. It was the most honest thing she could give you.
And here is why this matters for the decision — not as a sad fact about conversation, but as something that undermines the sensible plan directly. The plan was to find out what each life would be like and weigh them. But you have just learned that one of the two lives — the one with a child in it — is the kind of thing you cannot find out about in advance. You can learn the practical facts: the cost, the logistics, the broad shape of the days. You cannot learn the one thing that would actually settle the matter: what it would be like, for you, from the inside. So when you sit down to weigh the life with a child against the life without, you are not weighing two known things against each other. You are weighing one thing you know against one thing you cannot know until after you have chosen it. And there is no honest way to compare the two.
You might think this is a problem of quantity. Ask enough parents, read enough honest memoirs, and surely the picture fills in. It does not — and seeing why is the whole point. Every one of those accounts is another person who has had the experience, describing it in the only words available, which refer to experiences you have already had. A thousand such accounts still do not put the experience inside you. The difficulty is not that you have too little testimony. It is that this particular knowledge cannot be conveyed by testimony at all.
All right, you say. Forget other people. I do not need their reports. I will do what I always do with a large decision — I will work it out in my own head. I will picture it. I will close my eyes, imagine the life with a child as vividly as I can, imagine the life without, and feel which one is mine.
This is what we actually trust — not the calculation, but the imagining. You picture the child asleep on your chest. You picture the long quiet of a house that stays quiet. And you wait to see which one feels more like yours.
Paul's argument is that this fails for the very same reason the asking failed. Consider what your imagination is made of. It is made of experiences you have actually had. When you picture a beach you have never visited, you assemble it out of beaches you have visited — the sand, the heat, the sound — recombined into a new arrangement. Imagination can only ever recombine materials you already possess, and the only materials it has are experiences you have already had. So when you try to imagine your own child asleep on your chest, you are assembling that scene out of every other tender thing you have felt — holding a niece, a sleeping animal, some moment of being loved — and presenting it to yourself as a forecast. And it feels real. It feels like evidence. But it is assembled entirely out of old materials, standing in for an experience you have never had. The picture is vivid, and, if Paul is right, you cannot trust it in the one respect that counts. Not in its details — in this: it cannot contain the part of the experience that is genuinely new. The new part is exactly the part your imagination has no material to build from.
Try it now, honestly. Picture the life with the child, and then ask where that picture came from. Every warm moment in it, you imported from somewhere you have already been. And the difficult moments too: the exhaustion you are dreading, you built out of all-nighters and bad illnesses and the most tired you have ever been. But parents will tell you, almost without exception, that the tiredness of a newborn is not a worse version of a tiredness you already know. They say it is a different kind of thing altogether. Your imagination gave you the familiar kind, because the familiar kind is all it has. So the vivid scene you just trusted — the one that was going to tell you which life is yours — is an invention. A sincere invention, assembled with care out of the only materials you have. And not one of them is the material you would actually need.
So both routes into the plan are now closed. You cannot get the knowledge from outside, by asking — it does not travel. And you cannot generate it inside, by imagining — your imagination can only hand you a recombination of things you have already lived, presented as a preview of a life you have not. The forecast you were going to rest the largest decision of your life on is a picture you assembled yourself, in the dark, of a place you have never seen.
That, on its own, would be enough to defeat the plan. But there is a second difficulty, and it is worse — because the first one concerned only the information. The second concerns you.
Suppose we grant you the impossible. Suppose some oracle could give you the whole experience directly — what it is actually like, the genuinely new part included, delivered perfectly into your mind. You would still be stuck. And this is the deeper part of Paul's argument, the more serious part.
Because a decision is not only a forecast. A forecast tells you what an outcome will be like. A decision also requires you to say what that outcome is worth — to you. You do not only predict the life with a child; you rate it. You ask: would I want that? Is that life good, for me? And to answer, you consult your values — the things you care about, what you would trade for what, everything in you that decides what counts as a life well spent.
Here is the second difficulty. Having a child does not only hand you a new experience to rate. It changes the very values you would rate it with. This is what Paul means by personally transformative — and again the term is plain underneath: the experience changes who you are, what you value, what you would trade for what. Ask any honest parent what they care about most now, compared with five years ago, and you see how far things have shifted. What was once central — the career, the freedom, a particular cherished idea of themselves — has been quietly demoted. A person they had not yet met has become, with no decision ever consciously taken, the one they would sacrifice everything else for. They did not decide to value the child above their old life. The experience changed what they valued.
So look closely at the position you are in. To decide whether to have a child, you have to rate the life with one. To rate it, you have to use your values. But the life with a child comes with its own new set of values — and those are the values that would actually be living it. So which set do you consult? If you use the values you have now, you are letting a person who will never live that life pass judgment on it: present-you, who cares about present-you's things, scoring a life that would belong to whoever present-you would become. But if you try to use the values you would have — the remade ones, the future ones — you cannot, because they do not exist yet, and the only way to acquire them is to make the very choice you were hoping to use them to make. You would have to be the parent already to know how the parent rates it. And if you are already the parent, the decision is behind you.
What has broken here is easy to confuse with last episode's problem, and they are not the same. Last time, the difficulty was that there was no one yet on the child's side — the person you were deciding for did not yet exist. This time there is no settled person on your side either. Or rather: there is the you who decides, and the you that the deciding would remake, and they want different things. The self who chooses is not the self who would live the result. They share a name, a body, and a past; what they do not share is the one thing the decision turns on — the values that would rate the life. So the person choosing is being asked to decide on behalf of a self they cannot consult, because that self is who the choosing would turn them into. The values you would need to judge by are the ones you can only get by making the choice.
Let me say plainly what has and has not happened here, because the temptation now runs in two directions, and both are mistakes.
What has not happened: no one has shown that having a child is a bad idea, or a good one. Not a word of tonight is an argument for or against. What has broken is not the answer. It is the method — the particular way of deciding you walked in trusting. The plan was to picture the outcomes, weigh them, and pick the better. And we have now watched that plan fail twice over, for two reasons that do not depend on each other. You cannot get the picture, because the knowledge is available only from inside the experience and will not travel by report or by imagining. And even if you were handed the picture, you could not run the weighing, because the values you would weigh with are themselves remade by the thing you are weighing — so the values you need are on the wrong side of the choice.
This is a step you can take on your own, and it applies well beyond this decision, so let us move it to another. Think of a different choice — a real one, ideally one of your own. Emigrating for good to a country you have never lived in. Leaving a settled profession for a calling you cannot yet practise. A conversion — to a faith, to sobriety, to a wholly different life. Any choice that does not merely change your circumstances but changes you — where the person who comes out the other side wants different things than the person who went in.
Now try to decide it in the sensible way. Picture the two futures; weigh them. And notice the exact point at which the reasoning fails. You are rating the new life — the life abroad, the life in the calling — with the values you hold right now, the values of the person who has not lived it. But the whole point of a choice like this is that living it would change those values. So the verdict you reach is present-you's verdict on a life present-you will never be the one living. You are not forecasting your own future. You are adopting the judgment of a person you are not yet, and treating it as your own. The moment you see that — the rating falling apart, the realisation that you do not even know whose values you are meant to be using — that is what Paul was pointing at. Run it once, on one choice, and the same thing is waiting on every choice of this kind for the rest of your life.
Now I have to rule out one response, because it is the one almost everyone reaches for here, and it presents itself as wisdom. It goes like this: if you cannot calculate it, then stop calculating. You cannot know, so just leap. Trust your instinct. Take it on faith. And you can hear how well that sounds. It sounds brave. It sounds like the grown-up acceptance of not knowing.
It is an evasion, and here is why. "You cannot calculate it, so leap" treats this like ordinary uncertainty — like a bet where you do not know the odds but you do know what you are betting on. That is not our situation. Our situation is that you do not know what you are betting on, and you cannot trust the part of you that would decide whether you even want it. "Just leap" does not answer that. It stops asking. It belongs to the same family as "you'll know when you're ready" from last time: it presents the absence of a method as a kind of courage. Leaping is not a repair for the broken forecast. It is a decision to act while the forecast is still broken, and then to call the acting wisdom. You are allowed to act. People do, and must. But do not let anyone tell you the act is a way of knowing. It is a way of acting without knowing — which is a different thing, and a far more exposed one.
Paul herself does not stop at "so just leap," and it is worth seeing where she goes, because it is stranger and more honest than the easy version. She says: if you cannot choose by what the outcome will be like — because you cannot know that — then perhaps the choice in front of you was never really "which life is better." Perhaps it is a different choice altogether. Do you want to undergo the transformation at all? Do you want to become a person you cannot yet meet, by doing a thing you cannot yet understand — to undergo the change for the sake of finding out what it is — or do you want to remain, knowable, as you are? That is a genuine reframing of the question. And notice that it does not give you your answer back. It takes the question you could not solve and hands you a different one, which you also cannot solve by forecasting, because you still cannot know, from here, whether you will be glad you became that other person. It does not rescue the method. It states the plain truth instead: there is no version of this choice that you get to make from the safe outside, with full information, on behalf of the self who will live it. There is only choosing — from where you now stand, without the knowledge you wanted — whether to undergo the change or not.
So let us count up what has gone, as we did last time — because the list of what you do not have has grown longer, and that list is the progress.
The method everyone trusts — picture the two lives, weigh them, choose — will not run here. Not because you would carry it out badly, but because there is nothing to carry out: four kind conversations that left you with nothing to write down, and a forecast you cannot run even inside your own head. What you have instead is an account of why, which is the thing you actually gained. Some choices change the world around you, and those you can forecast: more money, less sleep, a bigger house. But some choices change you — and those, Paul argues, you cannot forecast, because the thing doing the forecasting is the thing being changed, and the one fact you would need is available only from inside the experience you are trying to decide whether to have. Having a child is one of the clearest cases there is of the second kind. You cannot picture your way to it. Now you know why — and you know it well enough to recognise the same difficulty behind the other large decisions of your life.
Two methods, then, have failed. Last time: there is no one yet on the child's side to be the person you are deciding for. Tonight: there is no settled you on your side to do the deciding, because the act of choosing would remake the very self whose values the deciding needs. The sensible plan needed both — someone to decide for, and a settled someone to do the deciding. We have now removed a support that each of them needed.
That is two of nine. And here is where we go next, because we return to the child's side. We have spent tonight on the side of the person choosing. Next time we cross back to the other side, and we stop asking whether you can picture the person who does not yet exist. There is a harder question waiting there, and it has nothing to do with what you can or cannot imagine. It is this. Whoever comes to exist, you would be giving them the whole of a human life — every joy in it and every wound, the entire package, unrequested — and they will never, at any point, have agreed to take it. You cannot ask them first. You cannot get their permission. Next time we take that fact — which sounds mild, and obvious, and like nothing — and find that it is one of the hardest objections to having a child that anyone has ever made.
One question breaks the picture, and it is worth keeping. The next time you catch yourself trying to picture your way to a decision that would remake you — this one, or any of the others — do not ask what that life would be like. Ask: whose values am I using to judge it, and will that person still be me? The forecast falls apart. That falling-apart is not you failing to think clearly. It is you finally seeing the choice for what it is.
Thanks for listening. I'll see you next time.