3 ms·

What is it that you don't want to? Give birth?

• WJW 4y ago
  Children. 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.
  • hsn915 4y ago
    The vast majority of women who end up single and childless into their forties don't do it by choice. At least not directly. They _want_ to find a partner and have children; they just didn't succeed at making the right decisions in their life to end up in that desired destination.
    • Dalewyn 4y ago
      Arranged marriages, known as "omiai", are still a thing in Japan, especially if someone is desperate for a marriage. If a man or woman doesn't marry, that is in the vast majority of cases by choice.
    • WJW 4y ago
      Perhaps things are different in Japan then, over here in Western Europe that is definitely not the main reason.
    • eggsmediumrare 4y ago
      Yikes
    • Dracophoenix 4y ago
      > they just didn't succeed at making the right decisions What would those decisions be?
      • majikaja 4y ago
        Not putting enough effort to look like the girls in the idol groups
  • geraldwhen 4y ago
    Future generations will replace you and your wife with those who think quite differently. If you feel that your values or culture are worth preserving, you have kids. 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”.
    • satvikpendem 4y ago
      So what? I'm not going to live my life for future generations, we only have a limited amount of time in this universe and personally, I don't want to waste it having and raising children for the next couple of decades. I know what one would rebut with, that it's "your" kids and that there's a lot of fun in raising children, and that may be true, but again it is not something that appeals to me and many other people these days.
      • nec4b 4y ago
        That fine as long as you realize somebody else's children will have to take care of you when you wont be able to. And if enough people would think the same way as you do, than there certainly wouldn't be enough children to take care of the elderly generations.
        • satvikpendem 4y ago
          Humean ethics don't seem to work particularly well in day-to-day society. If I have enough retirement savings, I will hire said children to take care of me either way, as there is no guarantee my own children would take care of me anyway.
          • nec4b 4y ago
            Of course you can pay them, but they still have to come from somewhere.
    • majewsky 4y ago
  • rayiner 4y ago
    > we don’t think our lives would be substantially improved by having children. 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.
    • sph 4y ago
      > Having kids isn’t an individual choice, it’s a social obligation like paying taxes. 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?
      • rayiner 4y ago
        > Fuck that 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.
  • PedroBatista 4y ago
    What’s the timeframe of that analysis? What if the analysis turns out completely wrong? Did you weighted the downside as good as you did your analysis?
  • michaelgrosner2 4y ago
    It's better to have a terrible 5-6 years dealing with diapers and strollers in your 30s than spend 30 years in your 50s to 80s alone.
    • satvikpendem 4y ago
      There is no guarantee your children will visit or take care of you in old age, and if you're having children due to the above reason, that is a very poor reason indeed to have children, as it seems to be more of an argument for the parent's well being, rather than the child's. If you don't want to be alone, cultivate lifelong friends.
      • anon291 4y ago
        These are all novel cultural values not common in any traditional society with normal birth rates. In fact, this attitude is one reason why birth rates are so low. 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.
        • satvikpendem 4y ago
          That is certainly...one opinion. You don't know what those people have been through, they could have had abusive parents for example and don't talk to them anymore. If the parents don't take care of the child well when raising them, I consider it more than fair to not take care of them in old age (or even simply once the child leaves the nest, so to speak). Taking care of one's parents is not an immutable law of nature (indeed, many if not most organisms simply breed and leave their children), nor should it be. That you implicitly "make a mental note to not be friends with that person" is quite telling indeed.
    • midoridensha 4y ago
      If you're still pushing your kid around in a stroller at age 6, something is very wrong.