you should probably have a kid

because as we know, human behavior is primarily genetic

But... today's generation of have few children are the descendants of yesterday'shave many children.

> Cutting back and focusing on quality for a century or two seems like a good idea.

I don't have a strong opinion one way or another, but a half century without a growing population seems like it'll cause some changes/consequences for investment and retirement.

Will the overall stock market grow faster than inflation when there aren't more customers to buy stuff? Can you actually save for retirement when your investments don't grow?

I have no idea how things will change, but it's not obvious that quality of life will improve.

>Fertility drop is a self correcting problem.

If it was, it would have been corrected already.

so wanting children is genetically determined and inherited? can you back this up with a single study? :)

There's 2 problems with your line of thought: 1. The portion of the problem that is due to chemical exposure decreasing fertility and/or effective birth control/abortion is not a self correcting problem without identifying and stopping the chemical exposure and/or changing the economics of having kids to turn the very recent invention of having kids being mostly a choice, rather than a likely consequence of sex, into a choice people want to make sooner and more often.

2. The way this problem has been self correcting in history was through the destruction of the society through calamity or conquest and someone new moving in either with actual new people or with a new ruling regime. Neither of those sound like any fun to me, I'd rather people change the prevailing custom through discourse, as this article is attempting to do.

This feeling is interesting, and very new. During the Baby Boom, people married young (women at 22 or 23) and had kids young, not as a "capstone" to a developed life.

Do you have any insight into why you feel that way?

The number of single mothers would suggest that many do not rise to the occasion.

This tracks with what my mom says - that she didn't feel like a full-fledged adult until she had kids, whereas her life before had just been a continuation of her adolescence and young adulthood.

My experience with my friends who had kids isn't like that at all.

To a person, they spent many years trying to be "responsible adults" and then they feel they've given something up, they've missed something. They suddenly (sometimes when the kids leave the house and sometimes before) want to act like kids themselves and have adventures of self-discovery! 50 is not 20. It's a bit unseemly.

I wonder if mid-life crises happen because of parenthood.

Although I appreciate the author's sentiment, and would probably appreciate the encouragement on those bases if I was in a more stable circumstance or considering having a kid at all, it's hard to escape the sense that in many cases we're not being passed a torch—from broader society or our own relatives—but rather a flickering ember that we're to attempt to re-ignite at 11pm while camping in the Pacific Northwest. If you're feeling squeezed, it's hard to rationalize squeezing one out. If you didn't grow up with a stable family life and don't see a reliable income on the horizon, I don't know how adding a child would compute. But... that's not everyone, not by a mile, and maybe people who are on the fence could use the reflections of a new parent like this.

Well, the people who don't have kids won't pass their values on to their kids.

Much of the value system of the liberal west and the westernized world (i.e. what we call the modern world these days) is, if not explicitly anti-natalist, implicitly anti-natal. That is it values other things, like personal achievement and self-actualization over having children and all that entails (e.g. self sacrifice). This is the value system I grew up in, and I see the result. My dad had 35 first cousins, and the seven total cousins (including my siblings and me), have produced only seven offspring.

I really think we're in an interesting situation with current falling fertility worldwide and the prospect of declining world population. In a world with a shrinking, graying population, tight-knit subcultures with pro-natal value systems will be in a very strong position. They will grow rapidly as a share of population.

Furthermore, they will be youthful and vibrant when the rest of the world is old and getting older, which should afford better protection against youth attrition than they have today. In 2124, a young person leaving their, Mormon, or Traditionalist Catholic, or Ultra-orthodox Jewish community for the secular world may feel less like a small town kid moving to the city and more like a kid leaving the city to live in a an economically depressed small town.

In democratic societies these communities will also have growing political power. We see this today in Israel, where secular women's total fertility rate is 1.9, while Haredi (ultra-orthodox) women's TFR is around 6. The Haredim was a microscopic minority at the founding of Israel and now they are a voting bloc big enough to topple governments.

It is also EXTREMELY frowned upon to say that you dislike your kids, so knowing how people actually feel about the matter is challenging.

I mean, think about how fulfilling life with a kid is, given how parents have this recurring problem

Yes, I've never really felt like I found a place in the world - I might be doing ok these days, but I feel I didn't so much climb the ladder as much as I held on for dear life as it was pulled up. I can't imagine being a child these days and trying to find my way.

> Most people that are not trying to have children have chosen so either because they know they cannot afford to give a child a good life, or because they loathe to bring a new life into the quickly deteriorating world around them.

Or, maybe it's because raising children is hard, and expensive on top of that, both in revenue costs (which eats into your hobbies and indulgences) and opportunity costs (that time could be spent on your career, that money could be invested into your business or credentials, etc.)

I'm not trying to imply that people who don't want kids are selfish, because those are legitimate reasons. I just don't think everyone who's abstaining from having children is doing so purely because they think it's because the kid would be better off never having been born.

Yes, I don’t think the whole “it’s a life changing, all-consuming experience” people are selling it as well as they think they are. Not all of us want drastic life changes, and if you look at time studies, it seems that people are spending more time on child rearing than ever and that’s in addition to more time at work. I assume sleep and social time are non existent.

If it was something like, “kids are pretty good but we still get to hang out with friends and do some sports and dancing like we always did”, I think it would be a better pitch.

> Everything the OP said isn't necessarily wrong (I don't have kids but have heard similar sentiments), but they are glossing over the ABSOLUTE INSANE FUCKTON of work that he/she/they've put in up to this point.

I do have kids, so consider me a single data point that what OP describes is not universal. I certainly haven't experienced anything even remotely describable as a "mystical oneness of all things" despite having 4 children.

If you prefer data, 20% of fathers are classified as "absent" by the US census SIPP.

tbf it works both ways. My wife and I are child-free by choice. We haven't lost friends, but they definitely became generally unavailable after the kids arrived. They also made new friends, as kids are an incredibly common thing to relate to. They'll "come back" in 15 years or so, but still.