Thoughts

Highly recommend reading this memoir. You will realize how important it is to provide children stability when they are young. We over index on education but truly making children feel loved and giving them stability is likely more important for their development. Rob also details out luxury beliefs - you will see them everywhere after reading this.

Favorite Quotes and Chapter Notes

I went through my notes and captured key quotes from all chapters below.

P.S. – Highly recommend Readwise if you want to get the most out of your reading.

Highlights and Notes

Preface

• I’ve come to understand that a warm and loving family is worth infinitely more than the money or accomplishments I hoped might compensate for them.

• When educated Americans discuss what’s best for kids, we tend to talk about education as the be-all and end-all, when it should be seen more as the fortunate benefit of a warm and loving upbringing.

• I had little supervision at home and no one who took an interest in my grades. When adults let children down, children learn to let themselves down.

• Making good choices is hard enough, even in the best of circumstances. Just because you know something will benefit you doesn’t mean you’ll actually do it. As a kid, I knew a lot of the choices I was making in the moment were unwise. I just didn’t care. Knowledge alone isn’t enough. For children, having a stable environment with two parents who implement rules, provide attentive care, and cultivate a sense of security goes a long way. Even when you present opportunities to deprived kids, many of them will decline them on purpose because, after years of maltreatment, they often have little desire to improve their lives.

• Plainly, being poor doesn’t have the same effect as living in chaos.

• I’ve heard variations of the phrase“I’m grateful for what I went through because it made me who I am today.” Despite what I’m proud to have accomplished, I strongly disagree with this sentiment. The tradeoff isn’t worth it. Given the choice, I would swap my position in the top 1 percent of educational attainment to have never been in the top 1 percent of childhood instability. Much of my own life has been an unsuccessful flight from my childhood. Each time I moved, each time another adult let me down, and each time I let myself down, it was like tossing a Mentos into a Coke, sealing it, and believing everything would be fine.

Chapter One: Until Your Heart Explodes

• One in five foster kids are placed in five or more homes throughout their time in the system. Three-quarters of foster kids spend at least two years in foster care. Thirty-three percent stay five or more years. One in four are adopted. The median age for leaving foster care is seven years old. 1 I am a data point for each of these statistics.

• I was a kid surrounded by strangers who thought that maybe I had a learning disability or some condition that inhibited my academic progress. I don’t know if they’d considered that never having had a family and moving all the time was a big part of why I wasn’t doing well.

• Adults didn’t seem to take my needs seriously. So why, I thought, should I take their tests and questions seriously?

Chapter Three: Burnout

• He was mad that she left him and wanted to get revenge. She said his decision to not see me anymore was his way of hurting her.“Why would Dad not seeing me hurt you?” I asked, trying to sound angry instead of miserable.“Because it’s hurting you, Rob.” She took off her glasses and wiped her tears. Though crestfallen that my adoptive dad abandoned me, I didn’t want to hurt Mom. I didn’t want to hurt. I’d long associated despair with relocation— in my mind they had become interlaced. And so, deep down, I feared that if I expressed sorrow, it would lead to a placement into yet another family. Being abandoned by my birth father when I was a baby and never knowing him was hard enough, but now, after all those foster homes, I was being discarded by a second dad. I closed my eyes and flipped the switch I had built— the one that turned off my sadness. I hugged Mom and wondered why I’d had so many moms but no dads.

Chapter Four: No Matter Where You End Up

• She said kids in poor families, and of course, foster kids, are more likely to move around and change schools a lot. This increases the odds of fights breaking out because boys constantly feel the need to reestablish the pecking order. At schools where everyone already knows everyone else, fights are less frequent.

• I started to understand that there were reliable connections between good choices and good outcomes and bad choices and bad outcomes. It had taken a long time for me to internalize these connections because outcomes were so often delayed.

Chapter Five: Little Boy

• I was also reading a lot of books during this time, and I was drawn mostly to memoirs by people who had lived tough lives. I read Black Boy by Richard Wright, This Boy’s Life by Tobias Wolff, and Daughter of Joy, about a Chinese woman who worked as a prostitute in San Francisco during the Gold Rush. I found these books in the school library, which I’d browse alone before or after school. Whenever I felt down, it was soothing to read about others who had experienced hardship and found ways to rise above it. It seemed like whenever something good happened in my life, something bad was right around the corner. Then I’d read a few pages of a book, and I’d remember I was not alone. If, instead, I’d read stories(or scrolled images) of people living wonderful lives without any setbacks, it might have just led me to feel sorry for myself.

Chapter Six: Stray Dogs

• For as long as I could remember, I felt a constant undercurrent of throbbing rage, along with anxiety and shame(which I sometimes mistook for rage) for being abandoned, for being unwanted. But I was incapable of understanding it or communicating it. I was so overwhelmed by emotions I didn’t understand that I acted impulsively just to prove to myself and others that I wasn’t weak. I’d once read that when an animal gets hurt, they know they are vulnerable and that predators will target them, so they are prone to lash out at the slightest sign of danger.

Chapter Seven: What’s Expected of You

• My favorite part of training was the camaraderie. I especially enjoyed drill and marching. The synchronized movement with others, moving as a single element, instilled a feeling of belonging. Everyone dressed the same, was held to the same expectations, and was treated on merit.

• As a kid, I was weighed down by instability and hopelessness. The military helped to unlock my potential, because it provided a structured environment, a sharp contrast to the drama and disorder of my youth. I was surrounded by supportive people who wanted me to succeed. In this new environment, I gradually came to realize that my childhood was anomalous, and I didn’t have to let it define the rest of my life. I’d been liberated from the mistakes of my past. I believed that the external comportment I had cultivated would allow me to control my internal demons and productively channel my restless energy.

• I learned that so much of success depends not on what people do, but what they don’t do. It’s about avoiding rash and reckless actions that will land us in trouble. The military presses the“fast forward” button on the worst, most aggressive, and impulsive years of a young man’s life— the time when a guy is most likely to do something catastrophically stupid. Studies have found that a man’s likelihood of committing a crime peaks at age nineteen, and then gradually declines throughout his twenties. 2 This has led some psychologists to describe their larger appetite for violence, risk-taking, and competitiveness as“the young male syndrome.”

• Many people say that to do something difficult and worthwhile, they need to be“motivated.” Or that the reason they are not sticking to their goals is because they“lack motivation.” But the military taught me that people don’t need motivation; they need self-discipline. Motivation is just a feeling. Self-discipline is:“I’m going to do this regardless of how I feel.” Seldom do people relish doing something hard. Often, what divides successful from unsuccessful people is doing what you don’t feel motivated to do. Back in basic training, our instructor announced that there are only two reasons new recruits don’t fulfill their duties:“Either you don’t know what’s expected of you, or you don’t care to do it. That’s it.”

• Community college creates a holding pattern, where people can take and retake classes for years with some pie-in-the-sky dream of transferring to a four-year college. Seventy percent of community college students in California never complete their programs.

• The little kid who was betrayed over and over by parental figures and himself was suddenly seeking expression and validation. It felt like these internal conflicts had come out of nowhere. But the truth was they’d always been there, dormant, waiting until my environment was stable enough for me to process them. The stress I’d muted for years was now demanding to be heard.

Chapter Eight: Potentially Deleterious Effects

• If you want to gauge your relationship with yourself and your life, put everything aside and just be alone with your thoughts. Sitting silently in rehab— no alcohol, no phone, no distractions— I found a mountain of unresolved inner pain.

• My understanding was that if a kid doesn’t feel safe early on, then it is harder for them to ever feel safe later. Other potential consequences of lack of attachment to a parent are lower-than-average intelligence, delinquency, aggression, and depression.

• Propensity for addiction is, to some extent, genetic. But how it manifests depends on the situation.”

Chapter Nine: Who Is GI Bill, GI Joe’s Brother?

• As I browsed various online forums trying to learn about college, I came across a book published in 1983 with an intriguing title: Class: A Guide Through the American Status System by Paul Fussell. I bought a copy and discovered a new lens to understand education. The book claimed that the criteria we use to define the tiers of the social hierarchy are in fact indicative of our own social class. For people near the bottom, Fussell wrote, social class is defined by money— in this regard, I was right in line with my peers when I was growing up. We thought a lot about money. The middle class, though, believes class is not just about the size of one’s pocketbook; equally important is education. The upper class has some additional beliefs about class, which I would later come to learn.

• The lessons from the program that I related most personally to my life came from a seminar-style discussion. Led by the eminent Yale historian John Lewis Gaddis, the other students and I discussed the ideas of Isaiah Berlin. Berlin, a mid-twentieth-century philosopher and historian of ideas, contrasted two different kinds of freedom. One is“positive liberty.” We have positive liberty to the extent that we are self-determined and can pursue and fulfill our desires. The other kind of freedom is“negative liberty,” meaning we are free to the extent that we are not being coerced when we make our own choices. Positive liberty is about the ability to accomplish our aims, negative liberty is about the absence of coercion. I couldn’t help but apply these concepts to my own life. For long stretches of my childhood, I had an abundance of negative liberty, and it simply allowed me to make a lot of bad decisions. The military stripped me of those freedoms; it was a giant coercion machine. It demanded I conform to certain beliefs and behaviors, which, at age seventeen, was beneficial. Berlin believed people should not be tampered with or coerced. But he went on to say that giving children total freedom means they may“suffer the worst misfortunes from nature and from men.” Therefore, he believed, kids need a higher authority who knows better than they do in order to set boundaries. Restricting some freedom is essential for children to grow up, or, in the case of my enlistment, recover from the process of growing up.

Chapter Ten: Problem Child

• Many students would routinely claim that systemic forces were working against them, yet they seemed pleased to demonstrate how special they were for rising above those impediments. This spawned a potent blend of victimhood and superiority. It was odd to see relatively advantaged people occupying elite institutions while seeing themselves as somehow beleaguered.

• Interestingly, studies have found that people with adverse childhood experiences— physical or emotional abuse, neglect, poverty, parental divorce, and so on— seem to age faster. Children with stressful lives tend to get their adult teeth earlier, reach puberty sooner, and undergo accelerated changes in their brain structure. 5 This also implies that a very comfortable upbringing might slow maturation. In high school, the guys I grew up with looked older than many of my college peers.

• When I passed through the gates of the university and walked through downtown New Haven, I would occasionally think about how— despite their lofty rhetoric— the people educated at elite universities are often driven more by self-interest than implementing meaningful change. Solving the country’s most challenging social ills was a secondary concern.

• I later read a study that found that upper-class people are more likely to endorse utilitarianism and the belief that“the ends justify the means.” One reason for this is that affluent people score relatively low on measures of empathy and favor cold calculations for decision-making. 7 Upon reading this, I thought about how students would sometimes tactically undermine their competitors to get prestigious internships.

• Interestingly, working-class Americans are more likely to read local news, while the wealthy and highly educated favor national and global news. 8 To me, it makes sense to keep up with what’s going on in your local community. But there seems to be less practical reason to regularly read about events far removed from you, unless you aim to show others how worldly and sophisticated you are.

Chapter Eleven: Luxury Beliefs

• Gradually, I developed the concept of“luxury beliefs,” which are ideas and opinions that confer status on the upper class at very little cost, while often inflicting costs on the lower classes. The upper class includes(but is not necessarily limited to) anyone who attends or graduates from an elite college and has at least one parent who is a college graduate. Research has found that parental educational attainment is the most important objective indicator of social class. 1 This is because, compared with parental income, parental education is a more powerful predictor of a child’s future lifestyle, tastes, and opinions. 2 In 2021, more than 80 percent of Ivy League students had parents with college degrees. 3

• in 2021 the Pew Research Center found that among households headed by a college graduate, the median wealth of those who have a parent with at least a bachelor’s degree was nearly $ 100,000 greater than those who don’t have college-educated parents. 6 This bonus of being a“continuing-generation”(as opposed to a“first-generation”) college graduate has been termed the“parent premium.”

• My classmate’s promotion of one ideal(“ monogamy is outdated”) while living by another(“ I plan to get married”) was echoed by other students in different ways. Some would, for instance, tell me about the admiration they had for the military, or how trade schools were just as respectable as college, or how college was not necessary to be successful. But when I asked them if they would encourage their own children to enlist or become a plumber or an electrician rather than apply to college, they would demur or change the subject.

• Many affluent people now promote lifestyles that are harmful to the less fortunate. Meanwhile, they are not only insulated from the fallout; they often profit from it.

• I managed to piece together the luxury beliefs concept from my observations and readings to understand what I was seeing. In the past, people displayed their membership in the upper class with their material accoutrements. But today, luxury goods are more accessible than before. This is a problem for the affluent, who still want to broadcast their high social position. But they have come up with a clever solution. The affluent have decoupled social status from goods and reattached it to beliefs. Human beings become more preoccupied with social status once our physical needs are met. In fact, research has revealed that sociometric status(respect and admiration from peers) is more important for well-being than socioeconomic status. 9 Furthermore, studies have shown that negative social judgment is associated with a spike in cortisol(a hormone linked to stress) that is three times higher than in nonsocial stressful situations. 10 We feel pressure to build and maintain social status, and fear losing it.

• The French sociologist Émile Durkheim understood this when he wrote,“The more one has, the more one wants, since satisfactions received only stimulate instead of filling needs.” 11 And research supports this. A psychology study in 2020 revealed that“Upper-class individuals cared more about status and valued it more highly than working-class individuals.… Furthermore, compared with lower-status individuals, high-status individuals were more likely to engage in behavior aimed at protecting or enhancing their status.” 12 Plainly, high-status people desire status more than anyone else does.

• You might think that, for example, rich students at elite universities would be happy because their parents are in the top 1 percent of income earners, and that statistically they will soon join their parents in this elite guild. But remember, they’re surrounded by other members of the 1 percent. For many elite college students, their social circle consists of baby millionaires, which often instills a sense of insecurity and an anxiety to preserve and maintain their positions against such rarefied competitors.

• Veblen even goes so far as to say,“The chief use of servants is the evidence they afford of the master’s ability to pay.” For Veblen, even butlers were status symbols. Veblen proposed that the wealthy flaunt these symbols not because they are useful, but because they are so pricey or wasteful that only the wealthy can afford them, which is why they’re high-status indicators.

• Consider the Veblen quote,“Refined tastes, manners, habits of life are a useful evidence of gentility, because good breeding requires time, application and expense, and can therefore not be compassed by those whose time and energy are taken up with work.” Only the affluent can afford to learn strange vocabulary, because ordinary people have real problems to worry about. The chief purpose of luxury beliefs is to indicate the believer’s social class and education. When an affluent person expresses support for defunding the police, drug legalization, open borders, looting, or permissive sexual norms, or uses terms like white privilege, they are engaging in a status display. They are trying to tell you,“I am a member of the upper class.”

• Drugs are frequently considered a recreational pastime for the rich, but for the poor they are often a gateway to further pain.

• Similarly, a 2020 survey found that the richest Americans showed the strongest support for defunding the police, while the poorest Americans reported the lowest support.

• The poor reap what the luxury belief class sows.

• Unfortunately, like fashion trends that debut on the runway and make it into JCPenney three years later, the luxury beliefs of the upper class often trickle down and are adopted by people lower on the food chain, which means many of these beliefs end up causing social harm.

• It is not a coincidence that when Hamilton tickets were prohibitively expensive, affluent people loved it, and now that it can be viewed by ordinary Americans, they ridicule it. Once something becomes too popular, the elites update their tastes to distinguish themselves from ordinary people. In 2015, seeing Hamilton was a major status symbol. In 2020, it didn’t mean much. And this is why the affluent suddenly turned on the musical. It’s a status game, with members of the upper class distancing themselves from something that had become too popular. Once a piece of art becomes mainstream, elites must distance themselves from it and redirect their attention to something new, obscure, or difficult to obtain. The affluent relentlessly search for signals that distinguish them from the masses.

• A common rebuke to those who are not fully up to date on the latest intellectual fads is“educate yourself.” This is how the affluent block mobility for people who work multiple jobs, have children to care for, and don’t have the time or means to read the latest bestseller that outlines the proper way to think about social issues.

• Interestingly, it seems like many people who earn status by working hard are able to boost their status among their peers even more by saying they just got lucky. This isn’t just limited to my own observations, either. A 2019 study found that people with high income and social status are the most likely to attribute success to mere luck rather than hard work. 24 Both luck and hard work play a role in the direction of our lives, but stressing the former at the expense of the latter doesn’t help those at or near the bottom of society. If disadvantaged people come to believe that luck is the key factor that determines success, then they will be less likely to strive to improve their lives.

• Successful people tell the world they got lucky but then tell their loved ones about the importance of hard work and sacrifice. Critics of successful people tell the world those successful people got lucky and then tell their loved ones about the importance of hard work and sacrifice.

Chapter Twelve: Twistable Turnable Man

• Whatever sympathy you felt while reading my story, please channel it toward kids currently living in similarly unpromising environments. And then think carefully about the luxury beliefs, practices, and policies that gave rise to their predicaments.

• When adults make children feel like they’re incapable of being loved, kids retain those feelings, and they often don’t go away. And when children feel unworthy of love, they want to hurt people and do bad things.

• According to some schools of thought within psychology, very young children are implicitly preoccupied with three questions. 2 First, am I a lovable person who is welcome here? The answer kids perceive from those around them is critical for how they feel about themselves. If the answer is no, then their self-esteem is thwarted. Kids long to earn that gleam from their parent’s eye. If they don’t receive this, then they have difficulty cultivating a sense of vitality and self-worth.

• second question: How can a small, inexperienced being like me cope with this vast world and all these overwhelming feelings? If kids have parents that are calm and reliable, then they will develop an internal sense of security as they reach maturity. If not, they often find harmful ways to cope as a means of escaping awareness of their own vulnerability.

• the third question: Am I like other people, and am I accepted by them, or am I weird and unacceptable? When kids are in a stable environment with reliable parents and predictable patterns, they feel integrated into a social environment and find it easier to befriend peers who want the best for them.

• Living in such instability can often redirect a kid’s trajectory regardless of their interests or capabilities. In fact, childhood instability has a much a stronger effect than family socioeconomic status for a variety of important outcomes, including education. This is clear when comparing children living in poverty with children living in foster care. In the Los Angeles County foster care system(where I grew up), for example, only 64.5 percent of foster kids graduate from high school. But the graduation rate for students categorized as“socioeconomically disadvantaged” is 86.6 percent, the same as the overall average in LA.

• We now live in a culture where affluent, educated, and well-connected people validate and affirm the behaviors, decisions, and attitudes of marginalized and deprived kids that they would never accept for themselves or their own children. And they claim to do this in the name of compassion.