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Comment by fnordpiglet | Hacker News Reader

Note this article is 11 years old.

Everyone in my generation X generation said they wouldn’t have children. We still laugh about that at the toddler play dates. We are older than our parents when we had kids. But you get to a point where the things that drive you earlier in your career make less a difference once you’ve achieved them, and life takes priority over changing the world in some way. You realize the world overall can be changed during working hours, but the most impact you’ll ever have is in the world of the children in your life. Finally you realize 72 hours of work a week isn’t more effective than 35 hours balanced with a human life on the rest.

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> generation X [...] toddler play dates.

You must either be right at the tail end of Gen X, or you had kids REALLY late. I'm in the middle of Gen X, didn't have a kid until I was 35, and my kid is about to turn 18.

I’m mid gen X and my kid is 7. But my wife is a millennial, so it somehow works out. We are thinking about kid 2, it’s a bit more risky now.

Yes I waited pretty late and mine is 9, not quite a toddler. However when she was a toddler I expected all the other parents to be much younger than me given how late I was. But they weren’t.

How is having kids necessarily going to change the world? Is there something totally unique about the way you're raising them, like training them from birth to be ninja assassins and infiltrating government institutions with them? Or are you just trying to change the world by doing the same thing as everybody else by raising them to be healthy and happy and educated and letting them grow up and make their own decisions, like sitting around all day playing video games and doom scrolling and social networking on their mobile phones?

“The world” is defined by experiences of individuals. By shaping and being an integral part of the world as a single human being experiences it changes the world - as experienced by someone - dramatically more than building an online dry cleaning service. You shape the nuanced perceptions of everything in that life, you become a primal force that defines every moment of their life, to their last breath. There’s no greater impact to be had on “the world.”

The broader sense of the world is an intellectual exercise. The world is a spinning ball of uncaring rock covered in a crust of self replicating carbon structures. You might slightly perturb the movements of that crust in some remote way, they might even shape some rocks to look like your long gone carbon structure, but you don’t change anything at that scale.

At a certain point your local experience and the present matter more. Particularly the stronger influence you’ve had on the world at large the more empty it feels in the end, because you are still you, you still only live 24 hours a day, there is no score, no game over you won screen, and the impact that matters most to you is the way your children look at you as you take your last breath.

Online dry-cleaning might impact a single person orders of magnitude less than being their parent, but it impacts many more people, possibly by the same orders of magnitude. Certainly the creation of Hacker News (just the website, not even Y Combinator) has had much more impact on the world than one parent raising any reasonable number of children.

Yes - but the people you impact in having kids is two - you and your child. Your world is your experience. Everyone impacted by online dry cleaning are never a part of your experience beyond an intellectual experience. But your parenthood extends to the entirety of your world, and the world of another. The magnitudes aren’t orders - they’re infinite, as the life of someone in another city is as far as another universe.

By all means make the world better for all man. But realize for you it’s nothing, literally. For your own world, there is no greater impact than your child.

Tell that to Hattie Louise and Thomas Midgley Sr, whose child had an enormous impact on the world.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Midgley_Jr.

>His legacy is one of inventing the two chemicals that did the greatest environmental damage. Environmental historian J. R. McNeill stated that he "had more adverse impact on the atmosphere than any other single organism in Earth's history." Author Bill Bryson remarked that he possessed "an instinct for the regrettable that was almost uncanny." Science writer Fred Pearce described him as a "one-man environmental disaster".

Everyone is someone's child. Attributing all the deeds anyone does to their parent is ridiculously reductive.

I'm 38 and have had the opposite experience. Of all the friends I remember saying they wouldn't have kids, I don't think any of them changed their tune. I do have friends who used to say they wanted kids, but probably never will.

In those 11 years fertility has fallen near universally. Speaking as a millennial, I never saw my career as a means towards changing the world or some life mission driven by passion; I just wanted to find stable employment to hopefully find some financial security and keep my ass in health insurance (I foolishly contracted a childhood condition that left me somewhat disabled). Graduating into the great recession and trying to stay on the treadmill of employment as I flee one layoff or another hasn't left much space in life for a lot else.

I actually feel quite fortunate these days (for a number of reasons) that I never wanted children (also for a number of reasons); if I had I can imagine that it would be quite a disappointment at how it has become ever more infeasible.

Except the correlate isn’t as people propose here poverty but wealth, as wealth increased fertility has decreased. I would note that having kids doesn’t mean having a brood like people did in the past. One or two children is by far the norm in my cohort and I have one. Growing up families were not uncommon with 4-6 kids, now it’s unheard of.

I think the change the world mentality is distinctly GenX, and arguably we did pretty profoundly. I know my career changed a lot of things for many people. But you hear time and time again from people who had great careers or impacted the world in some way that the changes that mattered most to them were the ones they made at home with their family.

I believe the biggest correlate is actually religion, and I've suspected for some time now that Nietzsche was really onto it quite early with the whole "Death of God" thing.

That said, I can say that while I may in theory be able to afford a kid today, I couldn't after a layoff, which does happen to me sometimes. Frankly, I like my current employment, but I'm starting to get some bad vibes sadly. The thing is that kids need support for like 2 decades and it's hard to imagine a job lasting that long. I always remember the scene from Monty Python's "The Meaning of Life" where the dad walks in and tells the kids he can't afford them anymore so he's going to sell them to science, and I can at least find it all pretty amusing.

So you’re saying the Japanese are godless ubermench and they were Christian they wouldn’t be seeing population decline?

My grandmother lived in a family of five kids and her parents were unemployed (her father was disabled in a factory accident in the 1920’s) during the Great Depression and homeless. Most of the world is considerably poorer yet have more children. You can afford to have children, they’re only expensive if you lavish wealth on them. That’s not strictly necessary, education is free. What people usually mean is they don’t want to sacrifice their standard of living or disrupt their way of life. That’s fair - but literally everyone can afford to have kids, that’s why so many kids are born into poverty yet reach adulthood. :-)

Christian or apparently anything else; the specific religion doesn't seem all that relevant actually (which says some things about religion I think).

I suppose I am currently mildly homeless which does tend to make the thought a bit harder. Also, as a man, I am not able to make children no matter how much money I'm given; there are other things necessary that I do not have. Anyway, the idea really just does seem infeasible for a few reasons - money is just one of them.

I suspect wealth is the causal agent for lack of religion - not just wealth concentrated in a few and the rest in extreme poverty. Being an opiate for the masses, it’s important to have god when life is essentially not worth living. As the median wealth increases opiates are less necessary to forestall abject misery. Likewise, the need to have many children decreases.

But, there is nothing quite like raising a new life, one that for whom you loom as large as your parents loom for you, for better or worse. Your choice as to which. Maybe your parents were worse. But you can be better. That’s powerful stuff man, and worth it.

I am profoundly sorry to hear about your struggles. I have had my own that are enough to curl anyone’s hair. A king once called a Buddhist monk and ordered him to give him the most valuable treasure that can be. The monk took the crown off his head and inscribed in it “this too shall pass.”

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