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A nice restaurant. credit: Left Bank Brasserie
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As humans we are blessed with poor memory. Sure, poor recall can have negative effects - like when you forget an anniversary and thus have no idea why your spouse just threw a flowerpot at you - but the benefits far outweigh the disadvantages. Some things, if we remembered them clearly, would prevent us from repeating them. Having a baby is just such a thing. Our memories naturally dwell on all the delights of having a baby, and sorta gloss over the bad stuff. It's a good thing, too: if we truly remembered all the travails of raising a baby, no one would do it after the first one. The human population would diminish rapidly, and that would send the world economy in a tailspin when there weren't enough consumers to support the world's cell phone manufacturing industry. As the population plummeted in the western world, infrastructure and emergency services would fail. Mass famine would break out in a generation, followed by riots, the breakdown of national governments, martial law leading to revolution eventually resulting in the collapse of civilization, returning us to roving, feral tribes attempting to scrape a living from the ruins of the past.
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