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Comment by daenz | Hacker News Reader

>Having kids is one of those intense types of experience that are hard to imagine unless you've had them. But it is not, as I implicitly believed before having kids, simply your DNA heading for the lifeboats.

But it is, because your entire biology has evolved for billions of years with the sole purpose of reproducing effectively. No amount of "I feel like I enjoy it" negates that it is programmed into you as an organism. It just re-enforces how integrated the drive is with your psychology and consciousness.

The negative points from the post:

  * less productive
  * less time for your ideas
  * less ambitious

If you're the type of person for which those points sounds disastrous, don't have kids. Get a pet instead. You can still fulfill that nurturing side of you without having it take a wrecking ball to your productivity.

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I refer you to his later point: "On the other hand, what kind of wimpy ambition do you have if it won't survive having kids? Do you have so little to spare?"

I'd argue that your ambition simply shifts upon having kids. If you channel that ambition into being a better parent everyone benefits.

And from an "accomplishment" perspective, I'd ask which of a would-be parent's projects are so world-changing that they'll be alive or still affecting things 70 years from now? If you're Elon Musk maybe you can make that argument, but for most people their kids will have more overall influence then their work ever will. So if you want to make an impact over the long term and aren't just satisfying an obsessive workaholic itch, kids can be a great way to do that.

> If you channel that ambition into being a better parent everyone benefits.

That's begging the question. Your original ambition doesn't benefit. What if it was something really good and worthwhile?

> for most people their kids will have more overall influence then their work ever will.

This can't be the case, unless you think the amount of 'influence' always increases as generation pass (why?)

My kids are humans, just like me. If we're both selected at random, we should expect equal 'influence' for both. If I have some reason to think I'm above average in influence, then I should expect regression to the mean for my kids.

> > for most people their kids will have more overall influence then their work ever will.

> This can't be the case, unless you think the amount of 'influence' always increases as generation pass (why?)

There are three errors in your reasoning:

1) Having kids won't completely eliminate any non-child influence you've had or will have in the future.

2) If you have two or more kids, they'll together have more influence than you have (respectively three or more kids, if you account for your partner).

3) Your kids will potentially have kids themselves, further increasing the influence your kids can have.

I'd say having kids is also really good and worthwhile if you raise them into responsible, productive adults.

Why would influence have to always increase? Kids have a lifespan as well, it's just much longer than most projects.

The piece of software I'm currently working on will almost certainly not be doing squat 20 years from now. It will have been replaced with something else or upgraded beyond all recognition. And if I wasn't there to write said code some other software developer would be hired to do it. My personal contributions will have zero or asymptotically approaching zero influence 20 years from now. Kids on the other hand...

Kids aren't entirely selected at random, you select your partner based on impulses evolutionarily designed to produce stronger offspring. Then you spend over a decade shaping their behavior, whether you choose to do so directly or not. If you're a responsible parent you teach your kids what you know so that they can build on it as they see fit, when they grow up. And then they pass along a diluted form of said lessons to grandchildren. Now there's no guarantee of this happening, tragedy can strike and you can mess it up. But it's an effective enough mechanism that, for most people, your indirect influence through raising kids will be far greater over time than your direct influence via your work. It's one of the ways generational wealth is formed.

If you can take an honest look at your work and say:

1. If I don't do this no one else will, or they'll do it substantially worse

and

2. Its direct or indirect impact will still be felt 70 years from now

Then sure, don't have kids. And I'm not being facetious, if you're working on some unique device or policy that shows real promise at saving/fundamentally improving lives and your leaving would set development back years or worse, that qualifies. Most people aren't doing stuff like that though, in part because simply being in a position to do so is largely luck. In that case, kids are probably a better bet.

What if every interaction we have matters and does influence the world, and what if having kids can improve the quality of those interactions?

>On the other hand, what kind of wimpy ambition do you have if it won't survive having kids? Do you have so little to spare?"

It's a disingenuous argument. He acknowledges "attention is a zero-sum game" and that having kids has lowered his ambitions. Therefore, it's not a question of what is there "to spare" (implying leftover time/energy), it is a question of "how much are you willing to give up" to make room for the new priority.

It's not a question of ambition being strong or wimpy, it's a question of your tolerance for lowering your ambition.

Yeah, that didn't really track with me either. If attention (and therefore ambition?) is a zero-sum game, diverting attention from $SOME_THING to your kids implies diverting ambition as well. Either you divert less attention to your kids, and are still able to fulfill your prior ambitions, or you divert more, and you aren't. Or somewhere in between. It's not that your ambition is wimpy, just that it's finite.

I do better when I'm busy. Calling attention/ambition zero-sum doesn't add up for me. I don't really consider it finite either. We can usually find a way to push past our previous limits.

Do you like food? Or sex? Or being at a comfortable temperature? Because those are all programmed into you as an organism, too. Do you enjoy social status? Accomplishing goals? Material prosperity? Same deal. You are an organism and all of your root-level desires and goals are programmed into you by an evolutionary process of self-replicating genes and ideas. You’re not an immaterial ghost of rationality haunting a meat puppet that might hijack your life goals; you are the meat.

Where's the beef!?!

My point is not: "it's biologically programmed, therefore bad," as you seem to be suggesting. My point is: "it's biologically programmed, so it's silly to say that it isn't just because you enjoy it."

The same argument could be made for literally anything you or any other meatbag ever experiences, desires, or enjoys. It’s completely fatuous to use this line of argument to distinguish having children from any other human goal, activity, or desire because the criticism applies on both sides and hence cancels out.

If you go back to my original post, I used the idea of "biologically programmed" in the context of "sole purpose of reproducing effectively." That's the context that I am using "biologically programmed." It seems you are using it in a much broader context of "all possible human behavior." I am using it to distinguish between behaviors that support reproducing effectively and those that don't. If you are using it to include all possible human behavior, which it seems like you are, then of course we are going to disagree, because our basic definitions are not aligned.

Example: suicide before reproduction may be a "biologically programmed behavior" in your context, but not in mine, because it's not a behavior that supports the biological programming of reproduction.

In other words, you’re making a circular argument: since you’re defining “biologically programmed behavior” as “having children”, you’re only proving that having children implies having children—a tautology.

You’re also missing my point. The only reason you have any desires or goals or ambitions in the first place is because, at least heuristically, they serve some sort of self-replicating purpose. Not all possible human behavior serves a self-replicating purpose, but the vast majority of actual human behavior does, at least heuristically. That’s why we behave that way and not in some other way.

>In other words, you’re making a circular argument: since you’re defining “biologically programmed behavior” as “having children”

No, I am pointing out a contradictory argument, which was PG's "X is not X (because some Y)." Well, no, X is X, because that's how reasonable people define identities.

His original quote:

>But it is not, as I implicitly believed before having kids, simply your DNA heading for the lifeboats.

How I read it:

>[Having kids] is not...simply your [biological programming to reproduce].

That is obviously wrong to me, and the clearest way to point that out is to show that "biological programming to reproduce" is the definition of having kids.

>You’re also missing my point. The only reason you have any desires or goals or ambitions in the first place is because, at least heuristically, they serve some sort of self-replicating purpose.

I'm not missing that point, I agree with that point. I just don't see the relevance to my original argument.

> If you're the type of person for which those points sounds disastrous, don't have kids.

This is not a great advice. Those points only "sounds disastrous". It can be totally changed after you have kids.

As a developer, I always know I will be less productive etc. after having kids. On the other hand, I know I am not a genius, and I know I will be fulfilled more from my kids than from my lost productivity.

And then, you know what? When you get older, you will realize that losing productivity is unavoidable. It is so great to spend time with your family outside of work. Nobody can stay at 20s forever.

There is one more important factor: If you want to have a life without kids, you need to find a partner with the same mind set, which is not easy, or just stay alone.

> you need to find a partner with the same mind set, which is not easy,

That's actually not as hard as you probably think it is. More and more people (of both genders) are skeptical of child-rearing than ever before. Certainly any showstopper requirement you place on a romantic partner will reduce the size of the pool, but I think the pool of people who don't want children is plenty big enough these days.

At any rate, "I want to have kids because otherwise I won't find a partner and will be lonely" is a horrifyingly selfish and terrible reason to have kids, and if that's your thinking, you absolutely should not.

The interesting thing here is that if you take a long-term holistic view, there is actually more productivity (literally an extra lifetime), more time for ideas, and more ambitions being added to the world. You can choose to instill your values in your children and watch them bring ideas you might've had into a world you will never enter.

That only matters if you care about what happens to the world after you die to the extent that you're willing to allocate many person-years of your life toward raising a child. If that's not the case, and you just aren't interested in having kids, then this point doesn't really matter.

I agree your DNA is heavily involved, but I don't think he's trying to deny that, at least the way I interpreted it.

I think "simply" is an important word in that sentence, and when I read "is not ... simply your DNA", I read "simply" as "merely". He's saying that, sure, there is a biological compulsion involved, but there is also more to it.

The kid is a human being you can have a meaningful relationship with. They will do or say things that are interesting or worthwhile or significant in a way that's not really connected to the fact that they're your kid.

(It can be compared to a romantic relationship. Are there hormones making you want to be with a romantic partner because you like their looks, etc.? Absolutely. But on top of that, you can have a real friendship with a romantic partner where you have shared interests you enjoy pursuing together, you have interesting discussions, you support each other, and so on.)

On a side note, some parents can only see their kid through the lens of parenting. They rarely or never connect with their kid on the human-to-human level, and every thought and interaction is on the parent-to-child level. Maybe they just haven't thought in those terms, or they're afraid of undermining parental authority by being too much of a buddy, or their sense of parental duty dominates their thoughts, or maybe they can't connect personally to anyone else either.

And yet if you look at some of the highest achieving people, many of them have kids. Presidents have kids. CEOs have kids. Billionaires and movie stars have kids. Nobel prize winners have kids. Not all of them, but many. A key part is probably having a spouse who is willing to do a larger share of the childcare, but kids do not seem to be a disqualifying factor for achieving just about anything.

My first 7 months with the newborn were exactly that: absolutely unproductive at work (got fired) and no time for anything of my own. And I was OK with it, because my only concern at the time was making sure the baby’s needs are met. After the initial 7 months passed, things went back to “old normal” - baby was much more stable and predictable, and I could get back to work.

> If you're the type of person for which those points sounds disastrous, don't have kids.

I agree 100%. But at the same time, I have to appreciate that nearly all Presidents (to use an example) have children, many of them young enough to live in the White House. So maybe it's not quite as brtual as 'take a wrecking ball to your productivity' unless you want it to.

Anecdotally, I also observe that I don't mean that many folks in senior management and above who don't have kids. It's clearly possible to remain ambitious and be very successful even with kids in the picture.

Now, if your definition of productivity is coding every waking moment, then ... well, that goes away with age regardless :).

I'd also say don't get a pet unless you really want one. I'd much rather have another kid than a dog.

It varies from person to person. For me it was mostly a sacrifice in leisure time. But I spent most of my weekends hanging out with friends and playing games. If you spend 24/7 focused on career, then yeah you're an extremely ambitious outlier and will have less time towards those things you listed.

But in my experience most people actually spend a lot of time hanging out with friends or doing nothing at all. This is where sacrifice of leisure and time management kicks in. I don't actually work on side projects any less than before I had kids. But I play games, hang out with friends, and do nothing a lot less.

  * less productive
  * less time for your ideas
  * less ambitious

These points may or may not be true depending over what timeframe you measure.

If it’s your own lifetime, sure. If you measure your productivity over the next 300 years as what you plus your transitive offspring accomplish, it’s possible having kids is a huge boost to your aggregated productivity.

> But it is, because your entire biology has evolved for billions of years with the sole purpose of reproducing effectively. No amount of "I feel like I enjoy it" negates that it is programmed into you as an organism. It just re-enforces how integrated the drive is with your psychology and consciousness.

I don’t think it’s programmed into me. I am actively repulsed by children, the thought of reproducing, the concept of adding more humans to society, or increasing the resource consumption of my leaf node’s subtree.

The whole thing seems disgusting and self-centered and self-indulgent and selfish and irresponsible to me.

That said, I think that myself and others that feel this way stand in contrast to your claim that we are simply programmed to reproduce. We are not—only a subset of us are.

It depends on what you count as biologically programmed, I think. Certainly there's a great deal of cultural programming driving people to reproduce, which is a kind of software programming, even though it's much more malleable than a hardwired instinct would be.

Just remember that your desire for productivity, for time to think, and your ambitions, all come from that same place that makes you want to have sex and maybe kids.

You get to decide what kind of slave to your genes you'll be, but no one gets to build themselves free of them.

Our biology is what survived billions of years of culling out beings with insufficient skill or will to live.

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