Don't skip pills even if it seems interesting

Advice from a chronic pill skipper

Scene from Umbrellas for Cherbourg (1964)

Read this post on my blog.

When my kids were young I yelled. Just a little. But then I read that any yelling at all permanently damages kids. I thought: Really? One time? That’s weird. Because when I was a kid, a yelling day was a good day. It meant no blood.

But I knew the patterns I’d inherited from my parents would have to change; I had to find new patterns. So I started drinking to make myself less anxious.

After a year of escalating alcohol, the CTO of my startup said he wouldn’t make the site live until I stopped drinking. I told him, “I only drink so I’m calm with my kids.”

He told me, “You’re an alcoholic.”

“What are you talking about?”

“I know what I’m talking about,” he said. “I’m Russian.”

So I stopped drinking and I started taking anxiety medicine. Mostly. Whenever I thought it was doing nothing, I’d skip a pill. My kids would notice within hours: “Mom, did you forget your medicine?”

I would pretend I’d forgotten. I mean, I really had, sort of – I’d forgotten that the pills actually work. So I’d say thanks for the reminder and take a pill. Once I did say, “How could you tell?

They could hear a change in my tone of voice. That’s what made me stop skipping. I accepted that I was taking the medicine for my kids. I couldn’t tell the difference in my behavior but they could. I also learned that yelling is so awful for kids that they learn to identify a portentous shift in tone of voice. You really can’t see your own childhood until you see it through your kids.

Now that they’re gone, I’ve been skipping. I think it’s the human condition to stop taking psychiatric meds because we forget who we are when we don’t take them. The meds work so well that they convince us that the person we are with them is the person we’ve been all along. And so, we let ourselves forget why we ever needed help.

I skip one day and find myself writing such good emails that I make a note to include my insights in a blog post:

The Alpha School is an example. They report using AI during the school day with great success. But Alpha School has a 3:1 teacher/student ratio, which means that AI is helping teachers, not kids.

Then, while I’m on a roll, I order pizza for me and Nino because while I was so busy being manic, which I get from skipping pills, I forgot to figure out what’s for dinner. In some other universe where I am nice, I told Nino that I like cooking for him, and so it’s my job to deal with dinner for us four nights a week.

Nino and I watch The Umbrellas of Cherbourg. Nino is selecting his favorites from the list of top 250 movies rated by film directors and film critics. Trust me when I tell you that you’ll know less than 15 of those movies. The Umbrellas of Cherbourg is all in song. In French. It feels like we’re dating again because I used to love doing deep dives into his eccentric interests. My love language is expertise.

I pause to go to the bathroom. This is also something I have not done since we were dating. Not the bathroom part, but sneaking off to write down something I don’t want to forget. I write:

AI can’t replace tutors because the kids who can self-study already do. Thousands of kids self-study for AP exams every year. The kids who really need tutoring can’t self-study.

Then I go back to Umbrellas. The movie is gorgeous. I have to concentrate to not be a bitch about the insane singing. I tell myself over and over again that if I’m going to be snarky when Nino shares something with me then I’ll be all alone for the rest of my life, or I’ll have to start over with someone else and they won’t have seen all the same movies as me and it’s just too much. So I follow along with the songs and try not to be aware that the rhyming isn’t there. Not all songs need rhyme. Fine.

Anyway. We only watch half a movie. Then Nino goes home to bed.

Normally I’d go to bed too, but I’m already in pill skipping mode, so there are no rules. I snuggle up on the sofa with my laptop and catch up on Marginal Revolution which is a blog I love when it doesn’t infuriate me (which is funny, because that’s what readers say about my blog). And now that I’m feeling warm and cozy, I start a fight.

This is the comment that sets me off:

My kids used two AI learning apps that really helped them. 1) Google Read-along, which listens to them reading and helps out if they are struggling with a word. 2) Simply Piano, it listens to what they are playing, uses spaced repetition, and increases difficulty as they move on. It’s also super gamified. My kids learned piano and thought they were playing a video, won’t move on until they get 3 stars for every song.

I write a reply:
I don’t understand using AI for this. There is no evidence that kids enjoy reading out loud to a computer, and there’s no causation between quality of education and ability to read aloud: fluency is genetic. Also, there is no evidence that kids learn to enjoy practicing music by doing it with a computer.
A $100,000/year nanny is not nearly as good as a parent home with the kid. Why would we start talking about an AI nanny? What is the point? What are we measuring this “AI achievement” against?

I get upvotes. Only three. But I’m emboldened. The AI Parent comments back to me, explaining what gamification is and why it’s so great for parenting. And I write another comment about how he should stop offloading his parenting duties to AI.

It’s an understatement to say that I do not get upvotes. Because you can downvote on Marginal Revolution. Also, it’s an economics blog. So I am wishing that I at least hadn’t commented with my real name. I know I always say that I don’t care when people think I’m stupid. But I do care when I am stupid, and I wish I could delete my comment.

Then I decide that I am grateful that I expressed my pill-skipping ire online. At least I didn’t pick a fight with Nino. And now I have the chance to write it down, right here, to remind myself that skipping pills never works. I always regret doing it, even if I like that little manic moment right before everything goes bad. This is my reminder to myself: Skipping pills is not good. It’s a repetitive story, and it never ends well.