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Comment by avl999 | Hacker News Reader

Not "important" for everyone. In case of many people kids can actively reduce their quality of life due to having to worry about things like money for houses, school etc.

That kids are important of a person's life is a lie sold to the public. Sure if you want to have kids have them but not everyone should feel compelled. Kids costs hundreds of thousands of dollars not to mention the tangential background impact on your life of always having to worry about money and their well being.

If there are people reading this who don't want to have kids, don't feel bad. It is your choice to make!

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Such choices sound lovely until those that choose not to realize too late that the 100% of their ancestors that made the opposite one might've been on to something. If it's a lie sold to the public, the entity doing the lying is the selective pressure of evolution. Dispositions that reduce to evolutionary dead ends don't get far.

You can also look at that from opposite point of view - kids can add immense meaning to your life. I can tell from first hand experience that I became more productive since I got a kid and started cherishing every single moment with my loved ones even more. Money can be earned and replaced in so many ways it's not worth discussing.

That's fair but there are vast number of people for whom having kids is an immense drain on their life. I am not just talking about the folks who fall into this category that visit HN (well off professionals who decide to forego kids for lifestyle reasons), I am also talking about those with financial issues whose life might objectively be better if they only had one kid as opposed to 3.

It's as if survival depends on a species being prevented from reaching a point of average intelligence where a single errant outlier with a malicious streak can destroy the whole. When everyone has the ability to build a doomsday device, someone will. Hence the vast, fecund universe for the taking scored by the inexplicable, seemingly eldritch, fermian silence.

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