The word conflate is interesting in that it has 2 different definitions, but the one I think of is to confuse 2 different things for each other. For example, I often conflate 2 different things that have nothing to do with each other into one thing in my mind, so when a clue asks for "This wife of Andrew Lloyd Webber was a soprano who also sang with Andrea Bocelli," I confounded (another word that I conflate with "conflate" that means almost the same thing, mixing up 2 different things) Sarah Brightman (the soprano) with Sarah Bernhardt, the French stage actress. Or strudel, the layered Geramn pastry dish with sweet filing, with streusel, the German crumbly topping of flour, butter, sugar. The novel "Metamorphosis" by Kafka and the poem "Metamorphoses" by Ovid. "The Stranger" by Camus is often confused with "The Alchemist" by the Brazilian author Coehlo in my mind for some reason, as well as other names/words/concepts that I just didn't learn fully and didn't learn correctly the first time, thus I have to go back and reconfigure the wires in my brain to separate them apart. Moldova the country with Moldavia the region in Romania. Gigi Hadid the model with Zaha Hadid the architect. Thomas Cromwell the advisor to Henry VIII and Oliver Cromwell, the Lord Protector of England many years later. Moussaka, the Greek lasagna dish, with souvlaki, a gyro-like Greek meat dish. The star Sirius, brightest star in the night sky, with Canus Major, the constellation that it's located in, because they're both dog related. Rin Tin Tin the dog with Tin Tin, the cartoon character. Josh Gibson the Negro League baseball player with Bob Gibson the Cardinals pitcher and Harlem Globetrotter! So many things! Why can't all these names be obviously distinct from each other???? As the great pop singer of my youth Avirl Lavigne once said, "Why the hell you gotta go and make things so complicated?"
Small details like the above likely won't matter in the big picture of life, but some bigger conflations will, like confounding money with happiness, or confounding "going out on the town" with having a good time. In my twenties I often felt like I needed to do something, anything on Friday nights to justify the Friday night because that's what everyone else was doing and I assumed everyone else was having a good time without me, but I've learned that going out and having beers, going to bars can actually get boring for me and I can't wait to get home, and that often those ideas of a good time on Friday night are just the entertainment/ restaurant business advertising themselves and artificially creating demand. Aka, making me feel like I need something that I don't need.
Here's a bigger question though: Am I conflating having kids with happiness? From all the pictures on social media and the general consensus within the larger group of society, I've been lead to believe that having a child/children is one of the greatest joys in life, and I still believe that it is. However, I also thought weddings were a given and a celebration, which it can be, but 5 years after having our wedding, I feel like it was a little overhyped by the wedding indusry.....it's a fun party where I knew everybody at the party and I got to be the star of it, but I could have hosted any other party (Game of Thrones party, dodgeball reunion party) and had almost as good of a time, with a fraction of the cost. Especially nowadays with "eloping" being all the rage and people actually encouraging couples to skip on the wedding (I often heard guests who felt bothered and troubled by being invited to weddings, like it was a nuisance to go or have to send an obligatory gift) I've reconsidered my stance on weddings. So will I reconsider my stance on having kids? It's hard to know until I do it, just like I'm sure I would be wondering what my wedding would be like had I never had one. Unlike a wedding, however, that lasts just one (magical) night, having children is permanent and one of the most irreversible decisions 2 people can make. I see all the cute baby pictures, the excitement that expecting parents are oozing with, the professional family photos that they have of 2 kids and a dog, and I definitely want that life, but am I conflating children with only those happy images and videos? A work employee, mother to a young child, once confided to me that she thought childbirth was one of the tricks society pushes on all members in order to sustain its members, to keep the species alive, that actually it's a lot of sacrifice and the consensus for parents doesn't include all the burdens one assumes.
They're all good points, and I would be wise to consider all those before Fools Rush in (Selma Hayek and Matthew Perry movie, I often conflated Matthew Perry with Matt LeBlanc). I'm still in favor of having children because I've always had a great relationship with kids, I like teaching kids, and always wanted to provide a life for someone else and add a loving member of the family, but I also know that it doesn't always end that way and that my relatively carefree life would become much more care-ridden and anxiety-filled. I know these things, but I still would like to go on and have a child anyway.
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