I don't generally tell people why I never wanted children, but when I see the "people are just more hedonistic now than ever in history" type explanation, I do

I don't generally tell people why I never wanted children, but when I see the "people are just more hedonistic now than ever in history" type explanation, I do feel that I can at least add my two cents, so-to-speak. When I was seven years old, I realized that there was no god, and that when I died, I'd simply be gone forever; my consciousness extinguished as though it had never existed, and that nothing mattered. I'd learn much later that this could be called experiencing the death of god and becoming a nihilist; pretty rough stuff for a kid in grade school. And it meant life was just a long slog of work, and if you're lucky maybe a bit of vacation once in awhile. But that was basically the plan they wanted for you - grow up, work, have kids to repeat the cycle, and die. I never could get much enthusiasm for any of it, and I could never imagine having to explain this existence to a child; I don't have any of the happy stories regarding loving gods and an afterlife that seem to get most people through. You'll find that religion correlates fairly highly with fertility, though I don't think there's any easy, slam-dunk causal factor that explains why people don't want to have children. Still, it makes sense to me that they have declined together.