Paddy | Joyfully Rejecting the System

Paddy’s emotionally-detached boarding school upbringing left him distrustful of authority, including the unspoken expectation to have children. A growing awareness of ecological and social crises and the desire to break a cycle of generational family trauma led him to choose a vasectomy. Today, he and his wife enjoy a joyful life while standing up to oppressive systems.

• TRANSCRIPT

  Paddy (00:00):

  The simplest way of describing my decision is that I didn't feel a strong compulsion to have children. And often I was quite sort of anti-authority. I suppose you could say I kind of identified that the authority that was surrounding me was not imbued with love. It was more carceral and I was starting to make the connection with economic systems. Capitalism needs people in the machine. It needs consumers. So it's in its interest to keep driving more people being born to feed that and was, I think, revolted by the idea of playing a role in that. I know several good friends who didn't feel that biological impulse either, but did feel the societal pressure and they had children anyway and they really struggled. They found it very difficult.

  Nandita Bajaj (00:55):

  That was today's guest Paddy. Hi everyone, and thank you for joining me. My name is Nandita Bajaj and I'm the host of Beyond Pronatalism, Finding Fulfillment With or Without Kids, an interview series in which through intimate conversations with women and men from diverse backgrounds, I explore how they are courageously and creatively navigating pronatalism - the often unspoken pressures to have children, whether from family, friends, or the culture at large. In each episode, I dive into personal stories with people who are forging unconventional pathways to fulfillment, including redefining what family means to them, whether that means being childfree or childless, having biological kids, adopting or fostering children or animals, or creating close-knit communities of friends and loved ones. Hello and welcome to the podcast, Paddy. It is wonderful to have you on.

  Paddy (01:51):

  It's a real pleasure to be here. Thank you for having me, Nandita.

  Nandita Bajaj (01:54):

  Yeah, absolutely. And Paddy, we've been getting to know one another over the last several months through our common work and interest in looking at ecological and social crises all around us, and it has been just so wonderful getting to know you and hearing very briefly about your story, and I am very excited about unpacking more of that with you today.

  Paddy (02:21):

  Well, thank you for asking and yeah, the feelings are very much mutual, so thank you for having me.

  Nandita Bajaj (02:26):

  So Paddy, to start, could you briefly introduce yourself to our listeners?

  Paddy (02:31):

  Yes, of course. So my name's Paddy. I live in Glasgow in Scotland. I turned 39 last month. I currently live with my wife. We've been married over 10 years now. I work independently on lots of different efforts as you've been describing, focused around the ecological and social crisis, the polycrisis, the metacrisis, mainly using a toolkit of communications to try and encourage change, raise awareness, and think about what comes next. I grew up as an expat child moving around the world in lots of different countries. My dad actually worked in an oil company and that led to me going to boarding school age seven in England as a result of a dangerous situation in Africa where we were living at the time. I eventually went to university by default and I trained to be an actor to avoid having to be a lawyer. And then I eventually fell into consulting and many years later jumped into climate activism when that was really kicking off, I guess around 2018, 2019. And since then I've been working, as I say, independently doing all sorts of things and getting to meet brilliant, wonderful people like yourself.

  Nandita Bajaj (03:41):

  Thanks for that. Having grown as an expat child, you would've traveled to a lot of countries. You said you were in a boarding school. Did you stay in that boarding school for a long period of time while your parents were traveling or did you travel with them?

  Paddy (03:59):

  I did. So I traveled with them until I was seven, and then the reason I left and had to go to boarding school was because my dad blew the whistle on corruption in Africa in the place we were living, which was a very dangerous thing to do, but a very brave thing to do of course. So I started boarding full-time at a time when contact with this part of West Africa we were in was very limited, so I could only communicate with them via fax machine I think every two weeks. And I didn't see them for about five months to begin with. And then that remained the arrangement for a year, and eventually my mum came back to be in England, and that meant I could see her on the weekend, not every weekend but many weekends. But yeah, that first year was pretty hard going for sure.

  Nandita Bajaj (04:49):

  Yeah, it's a young age to experience all of that. And what were some of the messages that you were receiving as a young child, both from the different cultures but also from your family, specifically expectations around creating your own family?

  Paddy (05:06):

  Yeah, I mean I suppose it was just heteronormative relationships were normalized. Having children was normalized, having a boy and a girl often that was very much what was around us, wherever we were. I think the odd thing about being an expat is that you do go to these other countries, but you are often then within a community of other expats who are often quite similar. And although you do integrate somewhat with the local community and you obviously meet people, you sort of remain a bit isolated from them. So before I went to boarding school, I was in English schools in these countries I was in, mainly meeting British people. Interestingly, when I went to boarding school in England, that was probably when I came into contact more sort of steadily with different cultures because there weren't many full-time boarders like me. And so on the weekend at boarding school, there would be a small group of us left behind maybe 20 or 30 people who were all from very different places and all from a similar sort of fairly well off families.

  (06:07):

  But yeah, I suppose the interesting thing was that the family dynamic for me changed completely in that experience because suddenly the relationship I had with my parents became a very distanced one obviously, and my time with them became one of seeking comfort and seeking love that I was otherwise not getting in the boarding school. And I was having to make do without that in the boarding school in an environment where there were a couple of hundred boys looked after by a matron who was sort of a mother figure, but obviously couldn't be a mother for everybody. And then a boarding parents couple who gave this sort of false image essentially of being parents to all of us, but were actually mainly there to sort of keep us in line. And of course that's what ordinary parents are doing, but parents are doing that with their own children with love behind it.

  (06:57):

  And for these house parents, these boarding parents, they couldn't put love into it really. So it was a very strange setup and I've spent years in therapy dealing with all of this. So yeah, to answer your question, I mean I was exposed to very different cultures and their expectations, but there was definitely a common thread of just total normalization of having children and the man being the one working in most cases, the woman being the one certainly in the expat communities we were in being the one sort of having to be the wife at home. And that was sort of standard setup. Someone actually said to me once until you leave school, certainly a boarding school, it's quite difficult to meet someone who hasn't had children. So yeah, I didn't meet an adult who hadn't had children probably until I was in my twenties, I don't think, or at least spent time with. So yeah, it was totally this standard thing, had no other idea apart from mainly heteronormative relationships, having children, and that's it.

  Nandita Bajaj (07:50):

  Do you have any siblings?

  Paddy (07:51):

  I have a younger sister, yeah.

  Nandita Bajaj (07:53):

  And do you know what her experience growing up was or were you in different places with you being in the boarding school?

  Paddy (08:01):

  Yeah, we were in different places. So she was too young to go to boarding school when I did. She came to the same school eventually, but at that time it wasn't a full boarding experience, but she had to be with my parents when they were getting divorced, when they were living in America at that point. So she had very different experiences to me, but you know also very challenging ones. She herself also hasn't had children and I think struggles more with the societal pressures to be having children. So amongst my very close-knit friend group from school, I am unusual in not having had children. I think there's maybe one other person from school that I can think of now who's part of my friend group too, in fact, who don't have children, and one of those is planning to, but I don't get too much of that pressure from them. None of them are actively saying, why don't you have kids? They've come to sort of accept it, whereas in my sister's case I don't think that's true. I think she really does get pressure from her peer group and finds it very uncomfortable and very difficult. It's totally unbalanced how women are the ones who are asked, When are you having children? I don't get asked that that much. So it's definitely easier I think for me compared to my sister.

  Nandita Bajaj (09:12):

  And you say the pressures mainly from the peer group. How about family? Is there any expectation for either of you to fulfill that role?

  Paddy (09:21):

  I know that both my parents would love to have grandchildren. My dad, his second wife has three children who are roughly my age, and two of them have three children each. So he's got his hands full with being granddad to them, so he's kind of he's okay, but he's also, he is sad that he doesn't have direct line as it were grandchildren, but I think he does put a bit more pressure on my sister or she feels more pressure at least. I think he's been quite sort of honest with his disappointment with her in a way that she has found difficult. Whereas for me, I suppose as a result of the boarding school experience, as I said, my relationship with my parents changed quite a bit. I sort of became a kind of independent from them. That meant that they sort of accepted my decisions in a way that actually I've really struggled with because I often felt I don't have enough guidance from them.

  (10:13):

  But yeah, they just sort of they let me get on with it. It is one of kind of worst things about the boarding school experience is that you are given this totally false sense of independence. You believe, oh yeah, I'm completely able to live without my parents. I'm kind of strong and independent whilst being totally spoonfed, totally wrapped in cotton wool, in this albeit uncomfortable but protected environment where when you get to the senior school, you've got people delivering papers and milk to your door, all this kind of stuff. It's ridiculous and you believe yourself to have grown up when actually you haven't. And that moment that most people have when they sort of leave the nest and say goodbye to the parents, that never happened or it did happen, but much too early. And so there's then this weird disjoint in the growing up experience, which I'm sure has affected my lack of desire to have children myself to some degree. This is really only occurring to me actually as I'm talking, but never quite feeling like I've reached the point of maturity to have them weirdly. But there are many other reasons why I've made that decision.

  Nandita Bajaj (11:12):

  Yeah. I want to touch a bit more on this really valuable point that you brought up, that the false sense of independence that you felt and how though you were coddled with all of the comforts and conveniences, there was that lack of affection and love and the comfort of parents. Even though you say your parents have given you all this independence and they seem okay with the decisions you're making, sometimes, and it's a little ironic, receiving pushback from your parents, as annoying as that can be for any child, it really is a sign of love and care, but to not have any of that pushback coming toward you and how that represents a lack of love and affection, I think is a really profound point. I'd love to go into the reasons you started talking about what some of the reasons are for you to have chosen to not have children, and you said some of your upbringing played a part, but there are other reasons. I'd love for you to go into that.

  Paddy (12:23):

  I suppose one way of describing it is that as a result of my upbringing and my experiences, I developed a kind of comfort with being different. I was always a bit 'special' in the journey. As I said, I was only one of a few people who were full-time boarders at the school. I was white, but living in Africa, that was weird at the time. And as I think as a result of being 'special', I developed an interest in taking that further and being unusual, doing unusual things, dressing unusually, being into unusual music or challenging music. And often I was quite sort of anti-authority. I suppose you could say I kind of identified that the authority that was surrounding me was not imbued with love. It was sort of more carceral, so I reacted against it. But yeah, so the simplest way of describing my decision is that I didn't feel the biological draw, the pull, the push, whichever way we look at it, to have children.

  (13:18):

  There were moments where I was like, well, I can imagine that being an incredible thing and feeling the love for that person and being curious about what the combination of myself and my wife would be as a person. But essentially I didn't feel that strong thing. And as a result of this somewhat rebelliousness, I guess you could call it, I didn't feel the strong pressure to have them anyway - from society, from the people I was spending time with. I know several people, good friends, who didn't feel that biological impulse either, but did feel the societal pressure and they had children anyway, and they really struggled. They found it very difficult. They've dealt with severe depression. They've worked through that. They have families. They're in loving relationships, so they're in a good place as it were. But I suppose what enabled me maybe in the moment of deciding was being free of those kind of pressures to some degree, being aware of them, but being in a sense unmoved by them or if anything moved away from them, feeling a desire to sort of do something different.

  (14:20):

  So that's the sort of simple way of describing it there. Then there are other reasons then that sit with this. A big one is that my mom mentioned earlier, she didn't really have a family. That's because she grew up in an incredibly appalling, really, environment in abject poverty in England, suffering at the hands of at one point a stepmother and at another point a stepfather who abused her and raped her as a child. So she had this horrific trauma and a very weird arrangement of these people who then ended up in a sort of four-way relationship, and it was all very, very strange. She essentially never healed from that. This is at a time when this kind of thing wasn't talked about at all. Still not fully there yet, but at the time it was even worse.

  (15:01):

  And so she never had a journey of healing and that trauma has carried through her life and it led to major postnatal depression for her, difficulties for me as a baby. We were living on the other side of the world by ourselves, didn't know anyone in my first week of my life, and eventually to the divorce of my parents. That was the main reason for it because that trauma resurfaced and the blame was laid on my father, which is a common thing in those cases apparently. So as a big part of my decision was not wanting to keep that trauma alive, if you like to draw a line under it in some ways, saying not wanting my children to have that carried through to them by their grandmother, not wanting them to have that carried through to them by me, and they're likely being surprises that I don't know about yet in how I would end up parenting as a result of both the trauma I've just been describing and of course also the boarding school upbringing.

  (15:58):

  So those are sort of a couple of the dynamics here. Also, my partner was feeling similarly, just didn't have that strong compulsion, and we ended up making the decision very, very carefully together. So part of us doing that was me having a vasectomy because albeit you can reverse that, there's no turning back from that. Part of it also was the horrific devices that women have to have implanted in order to, well, why the hell would I impose that on my wife when I can have a very brief period of having to wear tight pants? I can get away. I can manage that. So yeah, it has been the right decision. I have never regretted it.

  Nandita Bajaj (16:40):

  Let's hear a little bit about your experience going through the vasectomy.

  Paddy (16:44):

  So I remember it being an easy decision. I remember looking into it. I remember finding out what the process was going to involve, not thinking that sounded too bad. I'd had two hernia operations when I was very young, and I don't think they're as bad when you're young as when you're older, but I'd been under general anesthetic for that, and this was a local anesthetics, and that was slightly kind of really, are you sure? But it was sort of reassuring that it was because it suggests it can't have been that bad. And then I remember the main thing being a question of what pants was I going to get to wear? My dad had had one after his divorce, so I had a sort of role model in a sense. I wasn't with him when that was happening. I was at school, he was in another country, but I suppose him setting an example there played a role here.

  (17:29):

  But the decision for me ultimately was easy because having made the decision not to have children, it was insane to me that my wife would have this horrific device inside her that was uncomfortable that you could feel this thing so, as it were, I took one for the team, but actually going and doing it was very, very easy, really quick. It was like having a tooth pulled, but much better. I had four teeth taken out for my braces, and that was way worse than this was. You go in, there's two nurses, they're very friendly. In fact, if anything, being quite young, when I did this, that was the moment where I kind of experienced some kind of like pronatalist pressure. They were a bit like, they didn't say it, but I got a kind of like, 'are you sure?' kind of energy from them or it would be such a shame for you to not, they didn't say that, but it was in the room a bit.

  (18:16):

  But yeah, then they just kind of, you lie down. I don't even remember there being an injection, but there must've been, but I don't remember it being very noticeable. And then I think they had music on in the background maybe. There's kind of, you can't see what's going on, there's a sheet up and you're just lying there. They're talking to you about stuff. Takes about five minutes maybe. What I remember feeling is a slight tug, but nothing beyond that. And I was really surprised that it was over when it was then over. And then after that it was maybe a few days of having to be very careful with a plaster and then wearing these kind of jockey short things, very comfortable. I've still got them in fact, never really lost them. And that was, that was it. It was really, really straightforward. I guess the other thing that was reassuring in the whole process was knowing that it is reversible if you go that way and that it has no noticeable effect whatsoever on any other functionality as it were. I just would not know otherwise. So yeah, if anyone is considering it and are worried about doing it, you don't need to worry. It's really straightforward. It's really easy. It's really quick, painless, and the fuss afterwards is minimal.

  Nandita Bajaj (19:28):

  Well, thanks so much for sharing that. I think it was a very similar experience with my husband as well, very quick. I think it involved maybe a day or two of frozen peas, but other than that, it was, yeah, never looked back. And what were her reasons?

  Paddy (19:47):

  So I mean, a lot of them were sort of similar in a sense of do I feel strongly compelled to have them? But the big thing for her was that she really wanted to work. And we've recently learned actually that she's autistic and for her her sort of special interest is work. And she really struggles with having multiple demands at once. I think even then she at least intuitively understood that about herself. And the idea of being able to do children and job just didn't feel viable. That was a part of it. But also there was a consideration around this not being about not liking children. And it's so interesting because a lot of my friends often don't invite me to things that have their children involved because there's like, well, there's an assumption somewhere that I just must not like children, which is not the case at all. And I have three very young godchildren and a niece and nephew and who are my wife's sister's children completely adore them.

  (20:41):

  They're the best people alive in my opinion. And I think that was part of her thinking too, is that she wanted to be able to give that kind of love that she had to these people. And we both shared a recognition as part of the decision-making that essentially what we were witnessing in particularly with our friends having children, how it was, society in the West in modernity is not set up for child- rearing - certainly not in the kind of individualistic way that it's currently designed. And it was really obvious that that was the case, and we didn't feel like we were up for that in a sense. So that was a big part of it was actually feeling like, well, in a world where it takes a village principle is sort of better integrated into how we might actually bring up children. But yeah there was a sort of systemic awareness, I suppose, that we were facing.

  (21:32):

  But there were other decisions. Okay, so what does that mean when we're older, when we're getting into old age and retiring and wanting someone there to look after us? Who's that going to be? And then we would think, well, and this is 2020, so this is before I suppose the degree of awareness that I have now about the likely trajectory we're on. But yeah, we were thinking, well, we'll just work hard ourselves. We'll enjoy working and we'll build good relationships with these other little people that we're close to in our world, and we'll look forward to spending time with them in our retirement and we'll stay healthy. And I do, I look around at my friends who have in some cases, three children and are working incredibly difficult strenuous jobs in order to pay for that. And we look different - physically, facially, the hair. We look like almost a different generation of people in some cases.

  (22:28):

  So then that's a big part of the result of this systemic arrangement for looking after these people. These people are under so much pressure. I remember being around the time we were making this decision, and of course there's a whole side of this I've not talked about yet. 2020 was a year or two into my final step of, 'oh fuck' on climate before I jumped out of my corporate career and went into versions of activism, I suppose. And I think the big realization for me at the time was, oh, it's now and it's much worse. And I think I'd read Uninhabitable Earth, and I think that was giving me that feeling. And so obviously then I was like, well, there's not going to be a world here. What would we be bringing people into? And this is obviously sort of now a very common thing that's happening for a lot of people that they're making that decision either because they're just thinking about climate alone or they've gone further than that and they're thinking about more significant degrees of collapse and civilizational failure and so on, or the sort of non viability of modernity overall and the difficulty we're going to face in trying to move beyond that into different ways, and that bringing children along for that ride is going to be hard. That was becoming something I was aware of at the time, and I was starting to make the connection with economic systems and their priorities and the relationship, therefore, with the crises I was witnessing or starting to understand, I guess. And for me, it was just a case of, oh, well, capitalism needs bodies. It needs people in the machine. It needs consumers. So it's in its interest to keep driving more people being born to feed that. That was a very simplistic way of understanding it.

  (24:09):

  But I saw that and was, I think, revolted by the idea of playing a role in that. There was another dimension to boarding school as well, that the history of those schools is fascinating in the UK where it's funny that they're called public schools, that they are charities, and there's a history to it, which we won't go into here, but a very fascinating one. But the main role that those schools were playing was to produce young men, mainly to be cogs in the empire machine. That was the idea. They were being drilled in a particular way of operating parts of the machine, sort of bits of a computer that was going to be spread around the world, and they're essentially still doing that. So yeah, empire builders initially, empire maintainers shortly after that. So I sort of had that alive for me as well as awareness.

  Nandita Bajaj (24:52):

  Well said, yes. And yeah, we can wrap things up by hearing more about where you are at now that you're aware of the ecological and the social situation, and how do you feel about the decision you've made with your partner to not have kids, and what does life look like for both of you today?

  Paddy (25:14):

  In general, I just feel really, really good about it. There's a few things it's enabled, one of which is being able to work in a way that is often what I'm doing is essentially unpaid or very low paid, because that's not the point. It's usually about trying to encourage systems that are less, or not at all finance-oriented or finance- centric. It's quite hard to be paid a lot of money to do that. So having children along for that would've been impossible, I think. I mean, I know people that do it and people that just about manage, but it's really hard for them. It's one of the big challenges of the situation. The people who are 'trad wifing' or people at the very top of the system, they can afford to pay people to look after their kids so they can just keep going. And it's hard for the people at the bottom who are trying to fight and change it to do both things at once.

  (26:02):

  So that's been a big positive from it for me in the work I'm trying to do. Most of the time, whatever experience my wife and I have, whether it's occasionally going to having to go to an airport, which we try and avoid obviously, but it happens. Or constantly speaking to friends who are like, oh yeah, we've got the flu again, or some new kind of nursery bug or going to a shopping center or dealing our bathroom recently started flooding the people downstairs from us, and then we had to have it fixed. And while that was happening, some other thing broke, and so we had all these men running around the house, things like that. On so many occasions, my wife and I are like, thank God we don't have children, or we just say to each other, we don't have children. And if we had been people who desperately wanted to have children and weren't able to, that would be tragic and really sad.

  (26:51):

  We weren't those people and we're really, really happy with the way things are for us. But we are also delighted that there are these little people in our lives in our niece and nephew in our godchildren. We love looking after them. We love spending time with them. There are friends' children nearby that we love spending time with. I mean, I do like the 'make kin not babies' expression, and I suppose we live with that in a way. We don't go as far as people who sort of have adopted a school of dolphins, which I think is wonderful. But there's an element of that in how I think about the work I do, which is I have a very caring orientation and I'm very much focused on trying to return us, and I think it is a return to cultures of care and mutual aid, and I'm finding the sort of pathways for that outside of my own immediate family, and that feels good. So yeah, in general, I feel very good about the decision and often to the point of almost feeling guilty about it when I spend time with my friends who are struggling.

  Nandita Bajaj (27:51):

  Right. Yeah. I really love that description that you gave of the pathways that you're trying to create to kind of manifest the imagination that you have of being in a different type of a world where there's different sets of values of care and collaboration that go beyond the dominant narratives of modernity. This was such a delightful interview. I am so grateful that you chose to share so many candid details about your upbringing. I'm sure they weren't easy to share, but then also the full experience of where you started and where you ended up and how thoughtful you were in coming to this decision. Thank you so much for being with me today.

  Paddy (28:40):

  Such a pleasure. Thank you. One last thing to say is I do admire and respect everyone I know who is a parent, particularly those who've made that decision in the difficult circumstances we're in and in the systems we're in, a lot of love for them. It's not their fault we're in this situation. It's not their fault we're in these systems, and hopefully together we can do something about getting beyond them. But no, thank you. It's been a real honor and a pleasure to chat with you, and I love everything you're doing. It's so important and so needed, so thank you.

  Nandita Bajaj (29:06):

  Thank you so much, Paddy. That's all for today's episode. Thank you so much for listening. What did you think of this episode? Do you have your own story you'd like to share? Check out the show notes to see how you can get in touch with me. Whether you'd like to share feedback about the show or a particular episode, or whether you'd like to join me on the show to share your own story, I'd love to hear from you. Thank you so much again for joining me today, as we collectively discover and celebrate the many different pathways to fulfillment beyond pronatalism. Beyond Pronatalism is brought to you by Population Balance, the only nonprofit organization advancing ecological and reproductive justice by confronting pronatalism. This podcast is produced and hosted by me, Nandita Bajaj, with the support of my production team, Josh Wild and Alan Ware.

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