WHEN THE WORLD IS BEING REBUILT

25. A Late Night in Beijing

"What was once dystopian fiction may become reality in our lifetimes."

A Singaporean diplomat I was drinking with in Beijing once leaned across the table and said, very quietly, "It's already happening. Just slowly." We had been arguing about whether the state would one day take over having children. I had floated the idea half-jokingly. He answered like a man who had seen the spreadsheets. I've sat on what he said for a long time, kids, because I'm genuinely unsure where I land — and this letter is my attempt to walk you through it honestly rather than pretend I have a tidy answer.

A late night in Beijing

I was in Beijing, on some unremarkable evening, and the night had taken one of those turns where a casual drink with new people somehow flips into a conversation you'll remember for years. The group around the table was an odd mix — a senior official from the IMF, a Singaporean diplomat with the kind of even tone you only get from a lifetime of meetings that mattered, and a couple of others whose careers I forget but whose ideas I won't. The first hour was light. Travel stories. Political gossip. The cultural quirks you collect from a life spent in airports.

Then somewhere past the second drink, the talk slid sideways into something heavier. Demographics. Specifically, the slow collapse of birth rates in developed countries — and what that actually means for the next generation.

You probably know the broad strokes already. Japan, South Korea, China — entire economies tilting toward an inverted pyramid, where too few young people are carrying too many old ones. Governments are panicking, in their bureaucratic way. Cash incentives. Paid parental leave. Government-run matchmaking. None of it works. The trend lines keep going down.

I sat there listening, thinking about my own parents and the assumptions they had about what my life would look like. The whole structure of family that they grew up inside — marry, have kids, raise them in the same house, retire near the grandchildren — is dissolving in real time, almost everywhere I've lived. Children have stopped being inevitable. They've become a lifestyle choice, weighed against careers and rent and freedom and a hundred other things. Sometime around 1 a.m. I asked the table, mostly as a thought experiment: what if, by the time this gets bad enough, we just hand the whole thing off?

A thought experiment I can't shake

The scenario I sketched out, half-jokingly at first, went something like this. Imagine a world where having and raising children has been quietly nationalized — not by force, but by gravity. People aren't doing it on their own anymore, so the state steps in. Governments select for healthy genetic material from willing donors. Embryos are screened. Pregnancies are carried, eventually, by artificial wombs. Children are raised in specialized institutions optimized for their development — the best educators, the best nutrition, the best psychological care, on a schedule calibrated to the individual child.

In the version I described, no kid is held back by an exhausted parent or a struggling school or a bad zip code. The system is fair in a way the natural lottery never has been. Every child gets, by design, what only lucky children get by accident.

The diplomat next to me leaned in and said, "It's already happening. Just slowly." And he was right.

How far we already are

Here's the thing I keep getting stuck on. We talk about this scenario as if it's some distant dystopia, but most of the building blocks are already in place. IVF is normal now. Genetic screening of embryos is normal. Surrogacy is a real industry. Wealthy families already outsource enormous parts of parenting — private tutors, nannies, full-time coaches, boarding schools, therapists, college consultants. The "involved parent" of the global elite is often a coordinator of specialists, not a daily caregiver in the way my parents were.

The question is not whether we will optimize childhood. We already do. The question is how far we go, and what gets lost on the way.

Would I take the deal?

So let me ask the question back to myself, honestly. If, in twenty years, some version of this offer landed on my desk — "We've selected your genetic material. We'll raise your child with resources and expertise you cannot personally match. They'll be healthier, smarter, happier, more capable than any child you could realistically raise on your own. All you have to do is sign here" — would I take it?

I want to say no immediately, and a part of me does. But I want to be honest about why, because the easy answer is the one I distrust most.

The easy answer is "love." That a parent's love is irreplaceable, that no system can replicate the bond between a father and his child. I do believe this. But I notice, when I press on it, that I can't entirely rule out the possibility that the bond is partly a story we tell ourselves to justify the chaos of how we actually raise children. Maybe a perfectly engineered childhood — calm, attuned, designed by people who actually understand child development — would produce a happier, more whole human than the messy, sleep-deprived, well-meaning version most parents manage. Maybe my refusal to take the deal would be a sentimental indulgence at my child's expense.

I want to be clear: I still wouldn't take it. But I want you to know I wouldn't take it for the reasons I've worked out, not the reasons that feel automatic.

Why I'd still keep it human

What I keep coming back to is this: a perfectly optimized childhood might produce a person who is excellent at every measurable thing and missing the unmeasurable one. The thing I think your mother and I will give you — if we get the chance — is not better-than-average tutoring or better-than-average nutrition. It's the texture of a real relationship with two flawed people who chose to show up for you, day after day, badly and well, for decades. The way I'll mishandle a hard moment and have to come back the next day and apologize. The way she'll lose her temper over something small and you'll learn that even people who love you fully are not always at their best. The way you'll watch us be uncertain, and disagree, and figure things out together, and come to understand from the inside that this is what an adult life actually looks like.

I picked up The Road to Character on a Sunday afternoon in Cambridge during my HBS years, expecting one of those airport business books and getting something else entirely. David Brooks's whole framing — that there are résumé virtues (the skills you bring to the marketplace) and eulogy virtues (the things people will say about you at your funeral) — has stayed with me, and I think about it more now, on this question, than I did then. The version of childhood I was sketching at that bar in Beijing would produce a kid optimized on every résumé axis you could measure. Test scores. Verbal fluency. Sleep architecture. Emotional regulation under controlled conditions. What I'm not sure it produces is the eulogy axis — the kind of person friends still call at 2 a.m. twenty years later, the kind who shows up for a dying grandparent without being asked. Those don't get built in a curriculum. They get built by watching imperfect adults choose to keep showing up, badly and well, and absorbing — without anyone teaching it — that this is what love actually looks like.

A system, no matter how well designed, cannot give you that. Not because the system is bad, but because the imperfection is most of the point. A child raised by a perfect system learns how the system works. A child raised by imperfect parents learns how people work. The second one is what you'll actually need.

I notice, too, that the part of parenthood that scares me most — the helplessness, the sleeplessness, the unfixable moments — is also the part that I suspect will change me most. If I outsource it, I get a more optimized child and a less developed self. That's not a trade I want to make, and I think a lot of parents who don't think about this carefully end up making smaller versions of it without noticing.

There's a line from David Deida — The Way of the Superior Man, which I read in my mid-twenties while I was still pretending I had time to be a serious person before having kids — that I underlined and have not been able to unsee since. The basic idea: your children are not a project you complete; they're a context you grow inside. You don't graduate parenthood the way you graduate school. The whole point is that they will hand you the things you cannot give yourself — the patience you don't have, the humility you've been faking, the courage to be looked at by someone who needs you to be more than you are. An optimized institutional childhood, by design, removes precisely that pressure. The kid might come out fine. The parent doesn't come out at all. He just stays whoever he was at thirty, and pays the system to do the part of the work that would have rearranged him. That's a quieter loss than I think most people realize when they hand pieces of it off.

What I'm watching for

I don't think we'll arrive at the full scenario I described — government-issued children raised in pods — anytime soon, if ever. The scarier version is the slow one. Each year, a slightly more optimized tool. A better embryo screen. A better digital tutor. A better child-monitoring app. A better algorithmic nudge for what they should be doing right now. Each one feels fine in isolation. Each one comes with a story about better outcomes and a guilt trip about why you'd refuse. Twenty years later, you wake up with a child you've quietly outsourced and a relationship you no longer know how to build.

That's the version I'm actually worried about. Not the dystopia. The drift.

So if you're reading this and you're already a parent of your own — or you're thinking about it — the question I want to leave you with is the same one I'm trying to ask myself. Which tools will you consciously say yes to, and which ones will you consciously say no to? Where will you accept the algorithm because it's actually better, and where will you insist on the messier, slower, more human version because something important would be lost otherwise?

I don't think there's a single right answer. I think the wrong answer is to not have one. To drift into accepting everything because the marketing was good and everyone else was doing it.

What I think I owe you

Whatever shape parenthood takes by the time you have your own children — and I genuinely don't know — I'll try to tell you what I learned about it from the inside, honestly. The parts that surprised me. The parts I got wrong. The choices I'd make again and the ones I wouldn't. I think that's most of what I have to offer you on this question.

The rest is the same thing I keep telling you across every letter in this book: stay close to the human part of the equation, especially when the algorithm is better. The messiness, the love, the showing up imperfectly — those are not bugs to be optimized away. They might be most of what makes a person, in the end.

I walked out of that bar in Beijing somewhere past 2 a.m., into a quiet street, and I remember thinking that this conversation was going to stay with me for a long time. I didn't expect to be writing it down a few years later for kids I don't yet have. But here we are. And the answer I have for you now is the same one I left the bar with: I don't know exactly what's coming, but I know I want to be the one raising you when it does.

Love,

Dad.