Is "we don't want to" not a valid reason anymore?
Edit to make it a more substantive point: me and my spouse are currently 35 and 36 years old and after much deliberation together (as well as observations of friends who did have children) we don't think our lives would be substantially improved by having children.
What would those decisions be?
Observing someone else’s family and deciding that you don’t enjoy their kids is the saddest way to decide not to have a family, and indicates a deep lack of parental empathy. Your kids are nothing like other kids, for all values of “your”.
In any case, observing other couples was only one of many reasons we decided on this. We made the decision as well-informed adults and whether you think it "sad" or not is not all that important to us.
Do you also write reviews of restaurants you haven't been to?
All your posts seems to say is "we heard that kids are hard work in the short term so we decided not to have them".
That's not to say that everyone has the same expectations.
For most communities, normalizing childless will only come back to bite people in some form or another.
[1]: pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34288933
If that is so, how can people like this exist today, after hundreds of thousands of years of human evolution? Could it be that biological evolution alone does not predetermine one's desire to procreate?
It is totally normal to expect children to care for you in your old age. The guarantee is that other people can and should ostracize people for not caring for their parents. When an acquaintance tells me they don't visit/call/care for their parents with pride, I make a mental note to not be friends with that person. If you can't keep the most basic relationships straight... that's not a great sign, realistically.
After that period things are great!
. . . until you've faced with a household full of teenagers rebelling against anything and everything in overly dramatic ways.
What if the analysis turns out completely wrong? Did you weighted the downside as good as you did your analysis?
By that logic you should evade your taxes and park in handicapped spots. Having kids isn’t an individual choice, it’s a social obligation like paying taxes.
And that’s not a moralistic point but a basic economic one. Any sustainable society needs people to have and raise 2.1 children on average. That’s self-evidently true in subsistence agricultural societies. But our society is still closer to those than to some hypothetical post-scarcity one where robots do all the work and replacement humans are created in artificial wombs. We can afford some people to be childless, but it can’t become a widespread thing.
You can paper over that temporarily with immigration, but you’re really just outsourcing a key social function to immigrants. Those immigrants then have to bear the burden of raising kids a toxically individualistic society that’s hostile to children.
Doesn't that then beg the question; if a society can't convince it's enough of it's members of the value of that obligation, does that society/culture really deserve to continue to exist as is?
I get what you mean, but fuck that idea into the flaming sun.
All we need now is the state and society to force us to have children, on a planet with 8 billion souls.
Fuck that idea. Do whatever you want with your life, but don't go forcing it on other people and saying it's "social obligation". When has individual choice become a radical, antisocial idea?
It’s not an “idea.” It’s like saying “paying taxes is a social obligation” or “having a job if you’re able bodied is a social obligation.” At bottom those assertions rest on factual observations about society and the economy. If everyone evaded taxes civilization as we know it would quickly collapse. If able bodied people dropped out of the work force en masse, the economy would collapse. If we found out that the last child had been born in America, your retirement funds would quickly tank. These are such fundamental facts that societies have added a moral or religious gloss to them, but the underlying facts don’t go away even if you strip away that gloss.
If you won’t do those things, someone else will have to pick up your slack. Unless your retirement plan consists of hoarding canned food and ammo, or perhaps drifting out to sea when you can no longer work, you’re going to be depending on the children of the people who did the work of raising kids. And until we have robots that can wipe old people’s asses, that’s going to be an inescapable fact of society.
> Do whatever you want with your life, but don't go forcing it on other people and saying it's "social obligation".
Now that’s an “idea.”
> When has individual choice become a radical, antisocial idea?
You’ve got it backward. Until five minutes ago, everyone agreed that everyone has a social obligation to carry out the various work necessary for society to function. “Do whatever you want with your life” is a blip in human cultural history. It’s a blip even in the history of western civilization. And to date every society to adopt that notion has essentially doomed itself to obsolescence.
All of these "outlandish" alternatives are seriously entertained by at least some members of the class of people who frequent HN.