If you're a woman, the clock is ticking. With delayed adulthood / 40 is the new 30 stuff, that means for women your time is limited. Combine that with the fact

If you're a woman, the clock is ticking. With delayed adulthood / 40 is the new 30 stuff, that means for women your time is limited. Combine that with the fact that if you are under 35, your dating pool is almost three decades of men. So when women actually wake up to whether they want kids or not (stereotypically in early 30s), then you have, shit, 5 years or less to find someone and start establishing a relationship. A woman turns 40? Stereotypically the men who will date you are 40+, likely not interested in kids because that's why they are dating you or they already been there done that. Women functionally have until 35 to be in a stable relationship to start family planning. Men can procreate well past 40? 50? Those are the biological ground rules. Also, when you have kids, you realize that 90% of how single people choose each other has very little to do with a functional relationship with even one kid. So if you have a social network, there are a large number of people who have wrestled with all the hard realities. Meanwhile, as a single person, you can largely fall into a rhythm / routine / rut and time can fly by. We are in an entertainment society that is tuned to the 18-40 people. Again, that's fine biologically for men who decide to "settle down" at 45. Not for women. So if you tell yourself "nah" on kids, well, fine. But let me tell you something that came through crystal clear as I watched my mother die of cancer and helped her in her dying days: you'll want kids to help you in your worst times, because our (American) society doesn't give two shits about you once your productivity is gone, and the medical system is absolutely overloaded and understaffed from the perspective of nursing. Again, modern society caters to you in your youth and free consumption years. It lulls you into staying there where you provide a lot of profit to companies. But reality lies beneath the consumer facade. The day my mother died I walked around a town square, and everyone seemed like they were in a daze. Didn't they realize we're all going to die? How short and fragile this is? Everyday life exists to distract us from such realities, and keep us slotted in cogs in the machine as generations flow through it.