It's common in some tech and upper middle class bubbles, but outside of some startups and a few VHCOL cities most of the 40+ people in tech I encounter have families.
I think the mindset is most popular in internet bubbles like Reddit. Reddit went mainstream a decade ago and many people in their 30s and 40s grew up reading a lot of Reddit. Reddit cleaned up their popular subreddits list years ago, but for a while subreddits like r/childfree were constantly in everyone's default feeds. Redditors would talk about people who had kids as "breeders" as a derogatory term and treat them like they'd made terrible decisions with their lives.
I didn't realize how much this carried over into the real world until my friends and I started having kids. I knew a few people who treated our decisions like we were making terrible mistakes and throwing our lives away. I still encounter people from younger generations who are confused when I say that I like spending time with my kids. They can't imagine how that would be enjoyable in any way. When you grow up with your chosen social media telling you that the smart people are maximizing their bank accounts, minimizing their responsibilities, and doing as little as possible to get there, they can't fathom how someone could be happy with kids.
I came from a big family and grew up somewhat poor watching remorseful adults who didn't recognize the gravity of bringing a life into this world, let alone several, basically drink themselves to death to cope.
My social life is mostly offline and I enjoy helping people in any way I can, but I am fully aware of my own flaws. I find balance by being generous in what seems like a million other ways I might not have the energy or time for if I had a family. To each their own.
For the vast majority people nothing else they can do with their lives will be anywhere near as fulfilling as having children. There are exceptions, of course, but it takes something like an unusual personality, or a great commitment to something else (e.g. celibacy in religious orders etc.), or something else really fulfilling.
I strongly suspect that someone who has the sense of responsibility that you have about children would make a great parent and not do what you grew up with.
The outcomes of the children are directly correlated with the quality of the relationship the parents have. No relationship I've ever seen, then or now, seems to be stable enough to do much better.
In my case, they made up for it with love and attention that brought plenty of comfort but few answers. I know many people pine for that sort of thing, but it's very heavy for a child to go through. People often foolishly romanticize a life where anything seems possible as long as they feel supported. They think that support is the missing piece. What they don't think about is all the times that kid is going to walk directly into a wall and have to find the courage to not be mad at the wall or lose their shit and turn radical like those people on reddit. Love is not enough for hope, and hope is not a plan.
On the other end I had some friends whose parents brought plenty of answers without much love. Those people found some early success in life, but ended up restless and unsatisfied following someone else's path.
You can again say I'm being extreme, but my own experience with relationships is to bridge this gap is almost impossible. Trust is hard and must go both ways, and the current social climate makes it harder than ever. I am still young enough to give it time I guess. I'm not saying no to a family ever. I'm saying I don't know enough to be confident I can do better.
To be clear, I'm saying I've never met someone that has the curiosity and unyielding stubbornness to truly know something (in the Richard Feynman sense) while still being strong enough to be vulnerable and really love their family over all else. What few out there exist and meet that bar must then somehow find each other and commit. It's tough.
I think where we disagree is that I am more optimistic and I think you have higher expectations of what is needed to give children a life worth living. There is a lot of pressure on parents to be perfect.
For example, I agree about outcomes being correlated with the quality of relationships parents have, but its not the only factor. I brought up my kids for many years in a deteriorating marriage, and in the last few years by ex-wife became increasingly emotionally abusive towards me and the children in the last few years of our marriage. That was painful for them, but there were a lot of happy times in their childhood before that.
In terms of outcomes they are balanced, kind people with great relationships with everyone in their lives except their mother. They have done well academically and the older one has a job she loves.
From my own point of view, I regret marrying my ex, but I do not regret having children with her.
The fear of bringing up kids who become extremists or other bad outcomes is reasonable, but its always been a problem. I love what Kahil Gibran says about this: https://poets.org/poem/children-1 Its a small risk as very few people are like extremists on social media, and the rewards are enormous.
I do think there are social problems in both developing good relationships, and in lack of social and financial support for bringing up children. We make parenting far to difficult these days.
Sometimes you just need to know when to stop pushing for a while and come back later. Later can be sooner than you think, or never. It's the whole point of living. I'd find it miserable to be over my skis the entire time, but I still take risks here and there. How else do you find out?
And fertility determines not only the size of a population, but even the age ratios within that population. Low fertility means you end up with far more elderly than you do working age. Far from this vision of being a society with more for everybody, we'll be creating societies where labor is ever-more scarce, economies are primarily dedicated to helping sustain the elderly and simultaneously collapsing at the same time. It's not going to be pretty.
For these reasons, and many others, I think the social aspect is one of the most important. Self fulfillment and these other things are very important and good, but if we don't have children then we're going to be creating some pretty messed up societies for our descendants. We're likely going to get to see this play out in South Korea during our lifetimes. And I do wonder what their descendants will think of the South Koreans of today.
And it becomes even less realistic if you look outward to times when this becomes necessary. Japan is a good example of this issue. Migrating to Japan is not difficult. The only meaningful barrier is learning basic Japanese. Beyond that, after just 5 years of residency you can even apply for citizenship which has a very high acceptance rate. And there are a ton of 'Japanese enthusiasts', many of whom already speak basic Japanese.
And many of them have tried to migrate, but they don't last at all. They quickly realize that a Japan in decline is not the Japan in their minds. Getting paid $1500 a month to work a job with extremely high expectations and demands in a country with a median age of 50 (and increasing) isn't the Japan they thought they were moving to.
Yet there are many western countries where the issue is how to prevent all the people attempting to get in from doing so.
US also put a lot of roadblocks in a way of highly skilled immigration. For example, check the waiting time of Indian engineers to obtain Green card.
> These people are no more a solution than our idealistic weebs.
Not sure I agree with this assessment. Unskilled immigrants tend to be over-represented on hard low-paying jobs, both in EU and US. Someone has to build, pave roads, cook, deliver, tend of elderly, etc.
It was enough that, even with the on-off nature of the work (you're not getting paid when nothing's getting built), they could easily raise a large family very comfortably. Now a day construction in the US pays awfully and a big factor is the large number of illegal migrants working in it for sub-market wages. So you're talking about the necessity of solving a problem by expanding the thing that caused it.
It's very difficult to predict what demographic collapse will look like in a place like the US, but one general trend that might inform us is that fertility within places like the US remains strongly inversely correlated with income. Those who are earning a lot aren't having children, those who aren't earning much - are. Pair that alongside fairly low upward mobility, and again I think it's unlikely that significant numbers of unskilled workers will have any real value in the future (or present).
Personally I am of the opinion that everyone is entitled to their own life, and that the default assumption should be that they make conscious decisions in line with their own preferences.
Have a child? Great, but don't complain to me about early mornings and stress... you knew that before you had one. No child? Go for it! But don't complain to me about loneliness and lack of purpose.
I'm leaning towards the no child camp myself. I love my long morning, and complete lack of some little createurs (rightful) demand on my time. Yes, I won't have the pleasure of seeing that little creature grow up, and I might have a lonelier old age (but there's plenty of social settings I can inject myself into), but that's life. There's advantages and disadvantages to everything.
The trick is to find out which ones you like more.
That would be great, but I never heard any realistic proposals how to make educated women with good opportunities want to birth and rear 3+ children.
Countries like Sweden and Norway have equal non-transferable paternity leaves and "free" daycare/education/healthcare. They birth rates are still nowhere near replacement levels. The hard truth seems to be that majority of women with education and opportunities don't want to spend their best years on children and bear the cost to their health from multiple child births.
> Improve the climate to that we can be positive about the child’s future.
Please. Now is objectively the best, safest time to have children. When western societies had high birth rates the expectation was basically "it is a coin toss whether a child will survive until adulthood and then they will have to deal with wars, famines and epidemics".
This argument is rather one dimensional. If you're trying to solve the problem in modern developed society, you can't look to what happens at a more primal level, you need to address the actual concerns people are living with.
We have more choice and visibility into options and unfair power structures now, and unless your solution is to remove choice again, then looking back to a time when people depended on children for survival and safety isn't going to offer much relevant insight. Instead it's going to lock you into positions with no way out.
Do they? Or have most just become too distorted to feel allright filling their emptiness with empty online debates and netflix?
I know people who are really happy without kids (and who will never have them), but the majority is rather miserably lonely when you look past the facade. And with many, there isn't even a facade.
I haven't asked "why should I even try" in ages. The question "how do I even manage this hell" has been on my mind more often.
No question about that. My life has become simpler in many ways: the annoying big questions have gone away.
People make their own choices, and it’s not up to me, nor you, to make assumptions on their lives. If children give you fulfilment, god speed to you. If others can find happiness without children, god speed to them.
By the way, I’m speaking as a person who wants children. But I totally get my child-free friends. I know people in their 60s as well, who debated this question and found a life for themselves. There is always a “what if question” hanging around, but all in all, they’ve weighed their options and are generally happy.
I think a lot of people who ended up having children to find fulfilment did not find happiness in other means. So they can’t experience the “other side’s argument”. Same applies to child-free people, as they haven’t experienced the other side.
And I did not, nor would I ever say people need to have children to be fullfilled. Those who question whether having children is the right choice, I would never urge to do it. Rather the contrary as you cannot reverse this decision and if you find out after the act, no, children are too much for me - then it is too late.
Edit: my friends without kids have more cash for toys (boats, trips, etc) but it doesn’t make me resentful or anything. Besides, they let me play with their toys whenever I want :)
I'm myself very happy I don't have children. I'm gay and can't adopt in my country, so I'm also happy I don't have any desire to have children, because that would be a problem. However I do really like working with teens, and it's very important to me on a gut level.
This describes all of the childless people age 50 and older than I know.
It does not describe the social media r/childfree mindset people I know at all. They have their bubble of friends they keep in touch with only when they feel like it but that's about it.
There's a big difference between childless and r/childfree style people, though.
> People wanting FIRE is a lot more to do with the current economy and wealth of useless or harmful jobs than kids
FIRE rose to popularity before this economy, though. It felt like peak FIRE was during ZIRP when it was easy to get a high paying tech job even if you barely had the skills for it. All the blogs and influencers made it sound so easy to just keep that going straight into early retirement as long as you continued living an austere lifestyle, which came with implied advice to avoid having kids.
I followed several of the FIRE blogs and forums in the early days but had to stop reading after they started filling up with people convinced they could retire at age 36 with $1.2 million in the bank because they they lived frugally last year and decided they could keep coasting that way for another 50 years without their lifestyle changing. I remember reading a few disaster stories from people who thought they were doing leanFIRE with their spouse until their spouse grew up and realized they actually wanted kids and to be married to someone who had a little more ambition in life. I know these stories aren't what FIRE is supposed to be about in the theoretical optimal sense, but there were so many stories like this that the forums just felt like a sad place to be.
Do you actually know a lot of those people? I know a lot of people that don't have kids and they all are very normal, well adjusted people. None of them hate kids. Using the word "breeders" as derogatory is weird, bordering on mentally unwell behavior. I've never met anyone that doesn't have kids that's like that. Even for the few people I've met that don't particularly care for children, they just keep it to themselves.
Reddit I think is not representative of real life for the vast majority of people.
They're mostly bitter anti-child people who rail against what they see as entitlements that parents get that non-parents don't. They derisively call parents petty and mean things like "breeders" and seem to be a very cynical bunch. I'm not saying their feelings are always ridiculous; certainly some of them have reasonable reasons for feeling the way they do. But they're a mostly-toxic, vocal minority.
It really annoys me when people assume all (or even a significant number) of childfree people are like those reddit folks (not accusing you of that, just saying in general.
And I don't get the automatic association between FIRE and childfree that some people are making here. Sure, FIRE is easier if you don't have kids, but IME the two groups are only loosely connected, at most.
On the other hand it remains quite confusing that after centuries of capital achieving vastly better results than labour people still keep going for labouring as their primary strategy. Building up a strong income-generating capital base is just common sense and it is an extremely good idea to have enough that you could technically avoid working if it made sense.
Someone has to bring up the next generation, the no kids crowd want all the luxury of having the next generation without putting in the effort or spending the money.
Instead, people who like having kids should have more kids. This would proliferate a healthy culture that sees kids as a source of happiness, not a burden of misery taken out of necessity.
To make this work you need some kind of cross-subsidy (e.g. large child tax credit), because having a larger number of kids requires the means as well as the will and the people willing to do it aren't all billionaires.
But then we do essentially the opposite and drive up housing prices when larger families need more house. Higher housing prices are essentially a transfer from young and future families to retirees.
I would describe myself as being the converse of that statement. I do not believe my desires should truly have much of a bearing on my situation.
The assumption that humanity must, and shall, exist forever has no proof.
I grew up with emotional neglect and all sorts of mental health struggles that grew from that, so I find the cavalier attitude people have towards parenting and how people in the world treat each other in general appalling.
My parents (and honestly most, in my opinion) were not qualified to be parents. They were deeply broken themselves and didn't even have awareness of that.
I know humans could do better, but looking at the state of things, greed and hatred and aggression in all forms from interpersonal to wars are propagating themselves as the most successful traits. In a dog eat dog world, I'd much rather leave everything to animals, at least they don't destroy the entire planet when they maul each other
Who do you think pays for schools-kindergartens for your kids while you getting tax credits for them and likely for your dependent wife who doesn't work while rearing them? And on top of that for your kid's healthcare in many European countries...
In my opinion, it's better to not have kids when you are not 100% LOCKED IN on wanting them instead of gambling and potentially being forced into a commitment you never wanted to make.
Almost all the teachers I know have kids. Most scientists do. Einstein had three kids, Dirac four, and Planck five. Marie and Pierre Curie managed two.
That is not restricted to the “current” economy. It has been that way throughout all of human history (and probably applies to other animals too).
Who wouldn’t want security of energy, food, shelter, healthcare, and education?
Everyone worries about what happens to their kids if they get injured, or even just lose their job. It’s only in the last few decades that a significant portion of people have access to more of that security (even though it’s only an increase of 1% to 10% of the US).
Now we have free brokerage accounts and low cost index funds so being financially independent has a catchy acronym.
They just post about how important those things are online but not doing much about it.
We have no shortage of humans, so there's no need to try to shame the childless. Nor those who focus on themselves.
A global retirement community without even any grandkids to visit them strikes me as a depressing dystopian future.
This is very well put.
I think the culture today is what pushes us towards that: we have a very individualistic culture, which I think comes from the US. I'm from southern Europe, where family used to be very important, whereas now we've adopted a much more individual-centered view.
We have "freedom" as a value, but it's hard to tell what to do with it. You are privileged, therefore you can do whatever you want. But what is it that I want? What do I do with my freedom, privilege, options? We also need an objective, and "to be happy" is not a good objective, because we humans are very bad at predicting what will make us happy. Seeing stereotyped photos of happy people on tropical beaches on Instagram makes it even harder to remember what happiness is.
For happiness you need objectives, things you believe in, a sense of purpose.
Well, that's the key question isn't it? What do we actually want?
In America it is dead simple. Having successfully cut all of our important social ties & creating all this existential anxiety via propaganda, "free enterprise" has swooped in promising to solve all our ills with the simple tap of a credit card.
Lonely? Here pay for a therapist. Need childcare? Get a nanny. Need exercise? Buy a gym membership. All in service to inflating the vanity metric that is the US GDP.
You got lucky and had kid(s) that were not extremely difficult to raise. Not everybody gets that. Not all kids are alike. Some will make your life a living hell. It is a total crapshoot.
Also, not everybody enjoys parenting, even if they have easy kids. We are not all built the same.
I did get lucky and had relatively easy kids. I love them. But, I do not enjoy parenting.
People can obviously make the opposite choice, but I'd encourage anyone that's never been around good little kids as an adult, to find a way to be around them in a helpful or fun role for a while. Volunteer at a youth group, sports camp, coding class, whatever. Or just be an "uncle" to some of your friends' kids. My volunteering at a church youth group in my early 20's probably gave me the nudge I needed.
But probably my biggest concern with having kids of my own is that you can't really choose their personalities. Even the best parents can end up with kids who are frankly much less enjoyable to be around.
I’d love to have had kids, but ew. That is creepy. When you’re a single man even just beyond 30, trying to be around other’s kids isn’t a good idea in today’s society. Besides, trying to play your part while the kid is in another education schema is inconvenient because any meaningful perspective on life might conflict with the parents’.
I love my kids and they're pretty great (and seem easy by comparison to others), but it's definitely burdensome and hard.
This sounds very judgmental. Don't assume there's a single way to live a happy life. People with kids aren't immune to depression or lack of purpose.
Especially when their kids turn into adults and don't need them anymore. Having "kids" doesn't last that long.
The day my oldest son (he’s 16) was born I was holding him and my mom said “enjoy every minute because you’ll blink and it will be over”. I got two years left and he’s off to college. Just two years, it feels like I’m getting fired. She was right, as mothers usually are.
Does it?? That sounds like the perfect life for me - I don’t need to contribute to others to make myself happy, I’m already happy on my own.
To me, this sounds like there’s something wrong with you - your capacity to just be happy by yourself is broken, you need the happiness of others to validate your life, and that’s a terrible way to live, always desperate to get what you need from others.
Rabindranath Tagore
How amazing and ironic or a reminder it is that the comments below that seem the most reasonable and avoid generalizing an entire group of people or way of life are the ones that are the least likely to drive more comments because they are perfectly reasonable.
From the few ive read about previous decades, people joined adult life earlier, with easier and better integration around adults and cheaper housing or similar needs. This creates a different existential landscape imo
None of us are really contributing to each other when we work, or the commons, since that's all been purchased and is being rented back to us.
For some it works for some it doesn’t. The hard problem is knowing yourself well enough to make the right choice. Personally, I’m in the “you get what you give” camp but I know not everyone is. Again, the key is knowing which camp you actually belong in. I want to add that “knowing yourself well enough” is no small task and can take a lifetime meanwhile you encounter the forks in the road of life almost daily so.. much easier typed than done.
/turning 50 in about 2 months so, while not that old enough to be considered wise, have been around the block once or twice
Once that’s done there really isn’t a purpose in life other than to pass it along to someone else. Dare I say that’s your responsibility. What are you gonna do, buy another toy? Go to another bar?
Candidly, if half of your friends are in regretful marriages and 90% of the people you encounter are "crap" then I would be questioning your social filtering.
many of them are higher class than me. in absolute numbers it's more lower class simply because there are fewer rich people than poor people but take 5 truly random people of either high or low, I think you would agree with me that only 1 at best you would want something to do with.
When those of us with noble traits -- intelligence, empathy, morality and so on -- refuse to reproduce, we do so at the cost of allowing the OTHERS who lack those traits to make up a larger and larger percentage of the population. They WILL reproduce.
Food for thought.
The thing I most crucially remember about my son being born is that it felt downright easy to simply dive into all the things I would now be doing: because there was no one else. I either got it done or it didn't get done.
Someone else's kids on the other hand there is a choice: their parents.
It's not absolute IMO but you also see it echoed by working too: when it's your job, it's a lot easier to simply go "right I need to handle this" then when it's not.
This is a strawman position in my opinion. I don't think there's that many people who think they're carrying out some selfless act by having children. It's simply biologically true that the children you'll probably have the easiest time raising are your own and, assuming we want to continue as a species, we do need people to have children. It's fine to have them, fine to not, neither side has some moral high ground.
I have the utmost respect for people with kids, but I also think that an individual needs to be 100% ready to have one, and not just reproduce because it would somehow provide them with a purpose.
The extreme mode of 50% of child-bearing age adults going 0 kids is not necessary and will probably end up being disastrous.
What happened to the Shakers?
Meanwhile ideas can be "self-removing" due to being bad, but then you'd just say "that's a bad idea" not "that's self-removing", so genetic descent was implied.
But I think looking at this in global terms is wrong-headed anyway, whether you're for or against. The question is whether a specific person should be a parent here and now in specific personal circumstances. So of course it tends to be selfish. It's not entirely selfish since others are involved locally, including the future child. But "the world needs more children" or "the world needs fewer children" is barely relevant at all.
It's a choice I made for myself, that I am ready to bear the consequences of, say paying a greater share for other's childcare/making society more family-friendly/later retirement. I just would not want to add another ~copy of my soul to this pile. Yet I respect those who do.