6 ms·

> It baffles me. Frankly, I never really got why people wanted children in the first place, so this turnabout is amusing. Perhaps you can ask some of these peo

> It baffles me. Frankly, I never really got why people wanted children in the first place, so this turnabout is amusing. Perhaps you can ask some of these people that you are close with as to their reasoning.

justahuman74 3y ago
For me it's like this: https://www.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/hf0rf/for_reasons_unexplained/ https://www.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/hf0rf/for_reasons_une... (third square)
- dgfitz 3y ago
  Heh, maybe if people were having more kids the US political landscape wouldn’t be so fucked.
  - datavirtue 3y ago
    You think the fallout is bad now? Give it twenty years.
  - sunnybeetroot 3y ago
    Watch idiocracy for what that could lead to.
toasterlovin 3y ago
Biological organisms not procreating despite living in material and caloric abundance is cosmically weird.
- Barrin92 3y ago
  Evolution has equipped us with a pretty generous frontal cortex so we have a sort of escape hatch to reflect and decide on whether to act on our biological imperatives. Reduction of human beings to 'biological organisms' as if we're humping rabbits is no less weird.
  - ChainOfFools 3y ago
    A fire has no cortex whatsoever, and yet if fire did not continue doing what fire does in order to stay fire - turn things that are "not fire" into itself- it would cease to exist altogether. That's all there is to it. There is no big picture. edit: I expected apathy at best from a comment this deep in a thread. Now, granted, HN does not stand for Hard Nihilism, but four downvotes with zero explanations in under an hour suggests there is an incurious hostility toward the view that people (myself included) are, like fire, essentially just echoes of thermodynamics.
    - jodrellblank 3y ago
      > That's all there is to it. There is no big picture. Even if it is correct (which you haven’t tried to support, just claiming that you know best), how is it relevant? If there’s no bigger picture then what’s wrong with going extinct which should push us to procreate? The comparison to fire - the human population is the highest it’s ever been and still increasing so it doesn’t seem like we are “going out“, and if that was happening the collapse of civilisation would lead to the loss of the ability to mass manufacture birth control and loss of the medical systems supporting them at some point, and the population would go up again after that, wouldn’t it? Fire runs out of fuel, but human food grows on trees - less humans leads to more ecosystem regeneration which could support more humans. > "an incurious hostility toward the view that people (myself included) are, like fire, essentially just echoes of thermodynamics." I thought we were “just“ hydraulic systems? Just LLMs? Just clockwork? Humans are just {recent scientific discovery of the era} is an interesting view on its own but is it relevant to the thread? "We are just thermodynamic systems ... so we should reproduce"?
      - ChainOfFools 3y ago
        OP is saying that we have a complex brain which allows us to reflect on our biological impulses and choose whether or not to answer the instinct to reproduce. I'm arguing instead that we - as complex frontal-cortex-having organisms - have no more choice than fire does whether to make more of ourselves. And abstractly our existence follows the same flowchart as that of a fire but, as the kids say these days, "with extra steps." Our integrity and thus identity floats upon a process of degrading complex configurations of energy into simpler, uniform ones. If fire were to gain sentience and therefore know what it was up to, this would not change its essential prerogative to keep doing it, in order to be able to keep doing it.
xyzelement 3y ago
It's the simplest answer. I find life to be worth living, I am grateful I have life and it's the most meaningful to me to be able to give life to someone else and try to make it as good and meaningful for them as possible. And it can be so fun. I just taught my 3 year old to ride a bike and for the first time today we went for a bike ride along the boardwalk, each on our bikes. I had a pretty amazing single life but I would be hard-pressed to think of anything that matched how much fun this was for me. I suppose we come at life from very different perspectives, shaped by our culture and our family. It is very hard for me imagine how someone must feel about their life and the world to say "nope, it ends with me." I know people do it but... I don't envy that starting point.
- silverquiet 3y ago
  When it ends, it ends, and that's it regardless of how many others you created who will now go on to face their own ends. I get that somehow people are able to live in denial of the ultimate extinction of their being, but I never really seemed to be able to get the hang of that. To each their own.
  - Aeolun 3y ago
    > I get that somehow people are able to live in denial of the ultimate extinction of their being Is that truly any more likely than the non-extinction of our being? It seems like a safe assumption as a default, but…
    - silverquiet 3y ago
      I mean, I'm not trying to be bleak, but do you have any evidence that any of the religions out there can deliver on their promises? Like I'd be somewhat inclined to listen, but extraordinary claims and all that...
      - xyzelement 3y ago
        I am not the one you're asking but I was born an atheist and discovered religion as an adult, through intellect. Here's my answer from that background. Ready? The answer is "we don't know." There may be a Gd, there may not be. There may be meaning, there may not be. You can't really know either way. The answer is that it doesn't matter. The question is what kind of life do you want to live. One that lives as if there's meaning or one that lives as if there isn't? I know my answer. If I get to the end and turns out the meaning was just something I made for myself, and that there's nothing special about my children and my values other than my deep affinity for them... that'd still be a pretty great life.
Aeolun 3y ago
I dunno, I grew up in a family of 5 kids, and it just never really occurred to me to not have them. I think my greatest regret in life is going to be having only one :/ However, I have no issues with people that don’t want them. To each their own.
- locusofself 3y ago
  interesting .. I'm the oldest of 5 myself and have just one daughter, but I can't really imagine having or wanting more.
  - Aeolun 3y ago
    Honestly, it’s a relief when there’s other kids to play with him. I love having 3 kids in the house at the same time and to just guide them in their play, instead of having to _be_ the playmate. I’m pretty young, but I do not have the kind of imagination required to keep that up for a day :P If he’s been outside running around the street with his friends all day it hasn’t cost me anything and the evenings are so much easier/relaxed. I remember that being the same for me, except that I always had people to play with around, because they were living in the same house.
matwood 3y ago
I'm older and also never wanted kids. There was a brief moment in my 20s where I would have been ok with it, but the relationship I was in didn't workout and that was that. Now I've been married a long time, and we had the no kid conversation on date one. Instead we rescue dogs and are in the process of moving and semi-retiring in a small coastal town in Italy. My desire for not having kids is rooted in my own childhood. My parents had me at 19, we were poor and struggled for much of my early life. My mom used to say, "don't have kids until after college unless you want to work at McDonalds". And, for better or worse, my drive became for financial security above all else.
hiAndrewQuinn 3y ago
For me, I consider bringing a new human life into existence to be one of the most net positive things a human being can do. It's also one of the most reliably net positive things. Economists have very roughly estimated the value of a human life at around $10,000,000 these days, and there are reasons to suspect this is a vast underestimate for my kids in particular. The total cost to me as a parent to rear this golden goose? Somewhere around $100,000 total, spread over the course of 18 years. What a bargain! There are of course things one can do which are worth even more, but it's exceedingly hard to reliably become a billionaire, or even to found a billion dollar company. But any old schmuck can nut inside a woman and force push eight figures worth of bliss into the source code of reality!
- KptMarchewa 3y ago
  100k? In many places, just an additional room for child alone would be that much.

justahuman74 3y ago

For me it's like this: https://www.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/hf0rf/for_reasons_unexplained/ https://www.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/hf0rf/for_reasons_une... (third square)

dgfitz 3y ago
Heh, maybe if people were having more kids the US political landscape wouldn’t be so fucked.
- datavirtue 3y ago
  You think the fallout is bad now? Give it twenty years.
- sunnybeetroot 3y ago
  Watch idiocracy for what that could lead to.

toasterlovin 3y ago

Biological organisms not procreating despite living in material and caloric abundance is cosmically weird.

Barrin92 3y ago
Evolution has equipped us with a pretty generous frontal cortex so we have a sort of escape hatch to reflect and decide on whether to act on our biological imperatives. Reduction of human beings to 'biological organisms' as if we're humping rabbits is no less weird.
- ChainOfFools 3y ago
  A fire has no cortex whatsoever, and yet if fire did not continue doing what fire does in order to stay fire - turn things that are "not fire" into itself- it would cease to exist altogether. That's all there is to it. There is no big picture. edit: I expected apathy at best from a comment this deep in a thread. Now, granted, HN does not stand for Hard Nihilism, but four downvotes with zero explanations in under an hour suggests there is an incurious hostility toward the view that people (myself included) are, like fire, essentially just echoes of thermodynamics.
  - jodrellblank 3y ago
    > That's all there is to it. There is no big picture. Even if it is correct (which you haven’t tried to support, just claiming that you know best), how is it relevant? If there’s no bigger picture then what’s wrong with going extinct which should push us to procreate? The comparison to fire - the human population is the highest it’s ever been and still increasing so it doesn’t seem like we are “going out“, and if that was happening the collapse of civilisation would lead to the loss of the ability to mass manufacture birth control and loss of the medical systems supporting them at some point, and the population would go up again after that, wouldn’t it? Fire runs out of fuel, but human food grows on trees - less humans leads to more ecosystem regeneration which could support more humans. > "an incurious hostility toward the view that people (myself included) are, like fire, essentially just echoes of thermodynamics." I thought we were “just“ hydraulic systems? Just LLMs? Just clockwork? Humans are just {recent scientific discovery of the era} is an interesting view on its own but is it relevant to the thread? "We are just thermodynamic systems ... so we should reproduce"?
    - ChainOfFools 3y ago
      OP is saying that we have a complex brain which allows us to reflect on our biological impulses and choose whether or not to answer the instinct to reproduce. I'm arguing instead that we - as complex frontal-cortex-having organisms - have no more choice than fire does whether to make more of ourselves. And abstractly our existence follows the same flowchart as that of a fire but, as the kids say these days, "with extra steps." Our integrity and thus identity floats upon a process of degrading complex configurations of energy into simpler, uniform ones. If fire were to gain sentience and therefore know what it was up to, this would not change its essential prerogative to keep doing it, in order to be able to keep doing it.

xyzelement 3y ago

It's the simplest answer. I find life to be worth living, I am grateful I have life and it's the most meaningful to me to be able to give life to someone else and try to make it as good and meaningful for them as possible. And it can be so fun. I just taught my 3 year old to ride a bike and for the first time today we went for a bike ride along the boardwalk, each on our bikes. I had a pretty amazing single life but I would be hard-pressed to think of anything that matched how much fun this was for me. I suppose we come at life from very different perspectives, shaped by our culture and our family. It is very hard for me imagine how someone must feel about their life and the world to say "nope, it ends with me." I know people do it but... I don't envy that starting point.

silverquiet 3y ago
When it ends, it ends, and that's it regardless of how many others you created who will now go on to face their own ends. I get that somehow people are able to live in denial of the ultimate extinction of their being, but I never really seemed to be able to get the hang of that. To each their own.
- Aeolun 3y ago
  > I get that somehow people are able to live in denial of the ultimate extinction of their being Is that truly any more likely than the non-extinction of our being? It seems like a safe assumption as a default, but…
  - silverquiet 3y ago
    I mean, I'm not trying to be bleak, but do you have any evidence that any of the religions out there can deliver on their promises? Like I'd be somewhat inclined to listen, but extraordinary claims and all that...
    - xyzelement 3y ago
      I am not the one you're asking but I was born an atheist and discovered religion as an adult, through intellect. Here's my answer from that background. Ready? The answer is "we don't know." There may be a Gd, there may not be. There may be meaning, there may not be. You can't really know either way. The answer is that it doesn't matter. The question is what kind of life do you want to live. One that lives as if there's meaning or one that lives as if there isn't? I know my answer. If I get to the end and turns out the meaning was just something I made for myself, and that there's nothing special about my children and my values other than my deep affinity for them... that'd still be a pretty great life.

Aeolun 3y ago

I dunno, I grew up in a family of 5 kids, and it just never really occurred to me to not have them. I think my greatest regret in life is going to be having only one :/ However, I have no issues with people that don’t want them. To each their own.

locusofself 3y ago
interesting .. I'm the oldest of 5 myself and have just one daughter, but I can't really imagine having or wanting more.
- Aeolun 3y ago
  Honestly, it’s a relief when there’s other kids to play with him. I love having 3 kids in the house at the same time and to just guide them in their play, instead of having to _be_ the playmate. I’m pretty young, but I do not have the kind of imagination required to keep that up for a day :P If he’s been outside running around the street with his friends all day it hasn’t cost me anything and the evenings are so much easier/relaxed. I remember that being the same for me, except that I always had people to play with around, because they were living in the same house.

matwood 3y ago

I'm older and also never wanted kids. There was a brief moment in my 20s where I would have been ok with it, but the relationship I was in didn't workout and that was that. Now I've been married a long time, and we had the no kid conversation on date one. Instead we rescue dogs and are in the process of moving and semi-retiring in a small coastal town in Italy. My desire for not having kids is rooted in my own childhood. My parents had me at 19, we were poor and struggled for much of my early life. My mom used to say, "don't have kids until after college unless you want to work at McDonalds". And, for better or worse, my drive became for financial security above all else.

hiAndrewQuinn 3y ago

For me, I consider bringing a new human life into existence to be one of the most net positive things a human being can do. It's also one of the most reliably net positive things. Economists have very roughly estimated the value of a human life at around $10,000,000 these days, and there are reasons to suspect this is a vast underestimate for my kids in particular. The total cost to me as a parent to rear this golden goose? Somewhere around $100,000 total, spread over the course of 18 years. What a bargain! There are of course things one can do which are worth even more, but it's exceedingly hard to reliably become a billionaire, or even to found a billion dollar company. But any old schmuck can nut inside a woman and force push eight figures worth of bliss into the source code of reality!

KptMarchewa 3y ago
100k? In many places, just an additional room for child alone would be that much.