Without being sure of how relevant it is, I notice that among those, job and community are also domains where individual psychologies and social norms that treat a single slot as somewhere between primary and exclusive seem common, while the domains of friends, children, and principles almost always allow multiple instances with similar priority. I’m not sure about ambitions. What generates the difference, I wonder?
Why juggle two jobs that pay the same wage, when ypu could just work twice the hours at one and grow your career much faster?
Why be an absent parent and spouse of two suspicious and frustrated families when you could be the top notch spouse and parent in one?
Kids are always growing and changing, so having more than one kid lets you experience different phases of life at once. Kids spend a lot of time away from parents as they age, so having multiple gives you some ongoing kid time.
Adults have many competing demands and the value of friend time can saturate pretty quickly, so it makes sense to have a lot of friends you can slot in to spare hours.
Poly people say they get a lot of extra value out of having multiple partners—different kinds of conversation, sex, emotional connection, and so on. They seem to experience low enough coordination costs that things work fine, and to find the experiences they enjoy through polyamory to be worth any tradeoffs in other areas of life. Makes sense to me. I just have different experiences and priorities.
Overall, I think people are mainly trying to just optimize the quality of their time on earth as best they know how.
Without being sure of how relevant it is, I notice that among those, job and community are also domains where individual psychologies and social norms that treat a single slot as somewhere between primary and exclusive seem common, while the domains of friends, children, and principles almost always allow multiple instances with similar priority. I’m not sure about ambitions. What generates the difference, I wonder?
I mean, that’s kind of obvious right?
Why juggle two jobs that pay the same wage, when ypu could just work twice the hours at one and grow your career much faster?
Why be an absent parent and spouse of two suspicious and frustrated families when you could be the top notch spouse and parent in one?
Kids are always growing and changing, so having more than one kid lets you experience different phases of life at once. Kids spend a lot of time away from parents as they age, so having multiple gives you some ongoing kid time.
Adults have many competing demands and the value of friend time can saturate pretty quickly, so it makes sense to have a lot of friends you can slot in to spare hours.
Poly people say they get a lot of extra value out of having multiple partners—different kinds of conversation, sex, emotional connection, and so on. They seem to experience low enough coordination costs that things work fine, and to find the experiences they enjoy through polyamory to be worth any tradeoffs in other areas of life. Makes sense to me. I just have different experiences and priorities.
Overall, I think people are mainly trying to just optimize the quality of their time on earth as best they know how.