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Comment by daxfohl | Hacker News Reader

I'd even go further and say it's irresponsible these days to post things like this. If nothing else, because we know the Earth cannot support many more people. Or at least it's looking that way.

I think as a society we need to get away from sappy Hallmark channel stuff like this and celebrate the individual. We should not be made to feel like having kids is some transcendental thing.

Studies consistently show childless people are happiest irrespective of age. Parenthood is just a thing to do, nothing more. There's no need to make people believe they want to have kids when it will more likely decrease their happiness, and definitely increase co2.

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> Studies consistently show childless people are happiest irrespective of age.

Funny, another poster somewhere here suggested that studies show people with young children are less happy, but after about 5 years old or so, happiness is roughly the same, and after the parents turn 60, happiness and health tends to be higher than for older people without kids.

No one seems to be posting sources, so it's hard to verify these claims.

Yea and once you start digging through the papers, it can get all over the place. I mean, trying to measure happiness is pretty subjective anyway. It's almost always a self-reported score and there are so many other variables it's difficult to lock down solid correlation.

I'm not sure if it's possible to tell if kids make people happier or not. There are simply too many other factors.

If you want kids have them and if you don't, then don't. Your mind will compensate if you see it as a non-reversible decision. Our minds have a power psychological immune system to help us accept whatever irreversible choices we've made (Dan Gilbert does a good talk on this. I also wrote a post about this about 10 years back: https://battlepenguin.com/philosophy/science/time/).

> Studies consistently show childless people are happiest irrespective of age

Not true. It depends on the support network around the parents. Government support, kindergarten opening hours, grandparents, etc. I would conclude that spending time with your kids is great in moderation, but achieving moderation is nigh-impossible without (a lot of) help.

That's a bit over the top, but I agree there's a bit too much social pressure toward parenthood. And it's a bit presumptuous to make parenthood sound like rainbows if it may actually make a lot of people miserable.

I'd go further and say that the central question shouldn't be whether having kids makes our lives better in some way, but rather is it right to impose a life on a person, as well as the inevitable death they will eventually have to face, with all the potential negative experiences in between just to fulfill a selfish desire. A strong case can be made that the answer is no: https://aeon.co/essays/having-children-is-not-life-affirming...

So life is on balance a negative experience in your worldview? In all sincerity, I hope things turn around for you, because that sounds pretty bad

A case could also be made for the opposite: is it right to deny a hypothetical not-yet-conceived person the opportunity of life, just so you can have more free time? I think both arguments boil down to nothing.

No it can't because you cannot deprive a person that doesn't exist of anything. That's an absurdist position. Also the free-time aspect of it for me doesn't even factor because, as I said, the argument isn't whether being a parent or not is better for me but for the person that is going to have to live the live that is imposed upon them.

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