The following is excerpted from the Deseret News. To read the full article, CLICK HERE.
Self-help gurus love to tell people to visualize their goals. Tony Robbins says, “Starting your day without visualizing your goal is like starting your day without breakfast.” In this space, it’s not just about figuring out where you’re going, but actually picturing your future self — how that person will feel, what that person might do. So it’s no surprise that a new app is making a big splash.
According to The Wall Street Journal, Remini, which recently became the most popular free app in the Apple store, “lets users generate images of themselves in wedding dresses or pregnant in maternity wear. Remini will even serve up family portraits showing the user with AI-generated babies.”
In principle, of course, people have been imagining their future families for hundreds of years, if not since the beginning of history. They didn’t need artificial intelligence. Children played dress-up, they pretended to get married, they played with dolls. And since most everyone followed the same path, it was easy to imagine what the next step would be.
But in the past half century, things changed. No longer is the course of a woman’s life (or a man’s) so obvious. She can have a career first and then a family, or a family first and then a career. Many people think it’s fine for a woman to have children first and then get married — or to forgo children or marriage altogether. And at some point, she may wonder in which direction she should head. As with many things in modern life, having too many options has resulted in a lot of unhappiness.
The Journal’s reporter talked to Ziyah Brown, a 35-year-old makeup artist in Cincinnati, who “has spent most of the past decade focusing on her small business and preparing to buy her dream home: a five-bedroom house she closed on in November.”
Brown said that when she was in her 20s, she was too busy to focus on kids. She became an aunt, but started to assume that she wouldn’t have kids herself. “On Tuesday, those feelings changed when she stumbled across Remini,” the Journal article said. “The app was like a magic mirror showing a future self: a photo of her pregnant, plus a string of group portraits where she has children all bearing a striking family resemblance.”
Brown told the Journal, “Feelings of motherhood rushed over me … I was like, ‘Wow, now I can actually see myself being there at some point.’”
To read the full article, CLICK HERE.
MaryannAugust 4, 2023
The sad fact is that sometimes people put off having children, only to find that they are unable to have them later. We should not take this great gift for granted. We have been counselled not to procrastinate starting our families. I can say from firsthand experience that child rearing requires a LOT of energy, which we generally have more of when we are still relatively young.