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Comment by DashRattlesnake | Hacker News Reader

> I wonder who's outraged by someone else saying something about their own life and feelings?

It's kinda violating a social contract. Everyone's the product of thousands of people over thousands of generations who chose to have kids. By choosing not to have kids you also choose to not contribute the the labor force that will likely take care of you in your old age. You can say all you want about contributing money or inventions, but money is just a claim on future labor and few people's inventions are really that valuable.

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> few people's inventions are really that valuable

The problem is, now you're stepping into quantifying the context on heavily subjective terms. Here's how that goes then:

How valuable have most of the last 15 billion people been on average? How about the bottom 50% of those people in terms of productivity and what they contributed to the betterment (subjective) of humanity or the earth? How valuable, in similar terms, have the bottom 10% of those people been?

And that's why - among dozens of other good reasons - it's entirely unreasonable to judge a person's life in such a manner.

So you're saying those "outraged" parents don't like it either and don't like to see people freeloading and not taking their share of the pain? They're "outraged" because some people are getting off scott-free?

You can still love your job and feel that someone else is a freeloader. I'd think the same would apply here.

There's no shortage of humans on this planet, and by the time we're retired, automation will have advanced considerably.

We're not some small tribe in danger of going extinct. It's a terrible argument to say someone who doesn't reproduce is a freeloader. We need less people on this planet, not more. We're on pace to have 10 billion by mid century. That's going to be a challenge to support that many people while not ruining the environment in the process.

> There's no shortage of humans on this planet, and by the time we're retired, automation will have advanced considerably.

To be honest, that's a very freeloader-like mindset: "I don't have to contribute to X because someone else will take care of it for me."

I guess the proper response to this in context of the conversation on moral imperative to reproduce, would be, "So what? Why should I care? Either I want kids or I don't, and that's the end of it for me. And since society isn't going to make anyone reproduce, go fuck off."

> It's kinda violating a social contract. Everyone's the product of thousands of people over thousands of generations who chose to have kids.

It's not actually so clear cut. In all times there was a huge sways of people who won't have kids. Handmaids, sailors, mercenaries, servants, slaves, etc, etc. Some of them could have children but it was never guaranteed.

This was offset by other people who'll have more children. Sometimes it wasn't. At all times a lot of lines will wither. Some vast tribes will be reduced to a few dozen families.

Social contract is XX century construct and obviously unsustainable at that. Once children stopped being source of labor but labor sinks, it tried to also became unconscionable contract. As in, everybody tries to slack off their duty while praising it to other people. It's like with conscription.

Many, many species have members that don't reproduce. After all, "It takes a village to raise a child". The genes of non-reproducers are even selected for - children who share a lineage with them, do better. So the gene carries on.

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