7 ms·

In the nicest possible way, this is basically the oldest lesson there is. You weren’t happy because you optimized your feelings or had the right opinions. You

• nvarsj 7mo ago
  There’s an entire generation of mostly childless adults who are shocked to find they enjoy contributing to others’ happiness. I have friends like this, their only purpose in life is to have no responsibilities, FIRE, and never give to anyone but themselves. Seems like a terribly depressing way to live but pretty common in tech/upper middle class circles.
  • bengale 7mo ago
    Yeah, and I do get it to some extent. Everything about having a child seems burdensome and hard. Turns out it's doesn't feel anything like that and I can't think of anything I'd rather be doing. I wouldn't swap with another person on this planet.
    • nlavezzo 7mo ago
      100%. I never was excited about having a kid but it's totally amazing to be helping a little human that you love to figure out the world and grow into a good person. 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.
      • eastbound 7mo ago
        > Volunteer at a youth group, sports camp, coding class, whatever. Or just be an "uncle" to some of your friends' kids. 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’.
      • rudhdb773b 7mo ago
        I coached a sports team for 6-10 year olds during the summers as a college student and agree that there are some incredible kids who are a joy to mentor and be around. 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.
    • cheema33 7mo ago
      > Everything about having a child seems burdensome and hard. Turns out it's doesn't feel anything like that and I can't think of anything I'd rather be doing. 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.
    • jebarker 7mo ago
      > Everything about having a child seems burdensome and hard. I love my kids and they're pretty great (and seem easy by comparison to others), but it's definitely burdensome and hard.
    • Cook4986 7mo ago
      Existence is suffering. But there are moments that make it worthwhile. When you have a kid, you not only get more of those moments, but you give those moments to people in the future.
    • jimbokun 7mo ago
      Yeah kids are often more interesting and insightful and fun than adults. It’s wonderful to have their refreshing perspectives in your life.
  • whaleidk 7mo ago
    People who want to be childless usually champion the importance of building strong community through friends and neighbors, just because they don’t want kids doesn’t mean they don’t want to contribute to others’ happiness lol. People wanting FIRE is a lot more to do with the current economy and wealth of useless or harmful jobs than kids
    • arealaccount 7mo ago
      > dont want to deal with kids 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.
      • nine_k 7mo ago
        I suppose that people who actively do not want to have kids should not have kids. Their hypothetical kids won't be happy and well-developed, but instead always feel that they are an undesired burden. 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.
        • AnthonyMouse 7mo ago
          > Instead, people who like having kids should have more kids. 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.
        • graemep 7mo ago
          I am not convinced that is true. Once you actually have kids it changes your outlook too dramatically. Someone who does not want to have kids before they have a kid, will almost certainly love any kid they actually have.
  • RGamma 7mo ago
    Childlessness seems to be an increasingly compassionate choice. Degrowth by force.
    • nine_k 7mo ago
      Childlessness is a beautifully self-removing trait.
      • card_zero 7mo ago
        Ideas aren't genetic.
        • bigDinosaur 7mo ago
          It doesn't have to be genetic to be 'self-removing'. What happened to the Shakers?
          • card_zero 7mo ago
            OK, religious ideas are kind of genetic via indoctrination. (Epigenetic? Heh.) 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.
            • bigDinosaur 7mo ago
              I didn't say the Shakers had a bad idea, it just was an idea that led to them removing themselves from further existence that was not genetic. Whether that was a good or bad decision is an entirely separate judgement call.
    • jimbokun 7mo ago
      No choice is more selfish and misanthropic.
      • card_zero 7mo ago
  • deleted 7mo ago
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  • idiotsecant 7mo ago
    It's always funny how many people think that the only font of altruism is taking care of children who have your DNA, like that's some kind of selfless act. It is, in fact, the ultimate vanity of which humans are capable. Raising little variations of yourself might make you feel good, but if you think it's a unique path to a fulfilling life I suggest you are the one in the little bubble.
    • deleted 7mo ago
      [deleted]
    • XorNot 7mo ago
      I think what usually gets mixed up is how the responsibility works, and biological children sit at the overlap. 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.
      • komali2 7mo ago
        I think this mindset might be unique to western "atomic families." I have friends that would talk similarly about this kind of responsibility to cousins or non "genetically related" people in their village.
    • jebarker 7mo ago
      > It's always funny how many people think that the only font of altruism is taking care of children who have your DNA, like that's some kind of selfless act 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.
  • Aurornis 7mo ago
    > but pretty common in tech/upper middle class circles. 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.
    • sublinear 7mo ago
      I am about to hit 40 soon and have an alternative take on all that. I agree reddit was and still is a very toxic echo chamber, but the rest of us who have avoided having kids shouldn't be lumped in with those people. 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.
      • abc123abc123 7mo ago
        This is the way!
      • chasd00 7mo ago
  • satvikpendem 7mo ago
    I want to do that some of the time, not all the time, that's the difference.
  • dec0dedab0de 7mo ago
    what does “FIRE” mean in this context? I can’t figure it out
    • kashunstva 7mo ago
      Financial Independence, Retire Early
    • deleted 7mo ago
      [deleted]
  • anal_reactor 7mo ago
    The problem though is that relationships with others are risky. When I look at my social circle about half of my friends express some kind of regret related to their marriages. Call me an entitled prick, but I honestly believe that 90% of people are liquid crap. I realized that in order to have a good social life I need to filter very hard who I hang out with. Even if I could reproduce by budding, this is not an environment I want my kids to grow up in. "Dad, why did you make me into a world full of normies?"
    • Aurornis 7mo ago
      > When I look at my social circle about half of my friends express some kind of regret related to their marriages. Call me an entitled prick, but I honestly believe that 90% of people are liquid crap. I realized that in order to have a good social life I need to filter very hard who I hang out with. 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.
      • deleted 7mo ago
        [deleted]
      • throwaway290 7mo ago
        From experience I think 90% of people are really liquid crap. filtering can get it down to 50% or less but it also means you are WAY more lonely
        • N_Lens 7mo ago
          There’s an old saying regarding what you’re saying.
          • anal_reactor 7mo ago
            Higher social classes have always despised the lower ones. Imagine going to ancient Rome and saying that slaves should be given full citizenship and treated as equals.
  • paulryanrogers 7mo ago
    No one chooses to be born. Once they are, they may find that procreation is impossible for them or just not something they'll do well or even want. None of these is necessarily depressing. We have no shortage of humans, so there's no need to try to shame the childless. Nor those who focus on themselves.
    • jimbokun 7mo ago
      We are on course to have far more elderly people than young people. A global retirement community without even any grandkids to visit them strikes me as a depressing dystopian future.
      • littlexsparkee 7mo ago
        I see less burden on earth's environment as a positive.
        • ionwake 7mo ago
          not necessarily connected to the number of people but the type - if they are all conservationists that would be a net positive, not counting OTT population numbers.
          • littlexsparkee 7mo ago
            we're talking about aging in advanced economies - those are folks with heavy footprints. if the west could be content with africa's growth and allowing for more migration, this problem is licked.
            • ionwake 7mo ago
              i dont think I agree at all bro
        • jurgenburgen 7mo ago
          More likely it will be a larger burden on the environment. If there are no future generations to care about then why bother investing in a better future?
  • asdfe3r343 7mo ago
    Sure why not get trapped youself with responsibilities and work your life off making rich people even richer.
    • cindyllm 7mo ago
      [dead]
    • boca_honey 7mo ago
      That's just childish. Eventually you'll have to learn responsibilities (towards other people) are a privilege and necessary for a full life. You'll just keep getting (more) bitter and lonely until you understand that.
      • komali2 7mo ago
        I think what they mean is that "responsibility to society" has been co-opted by capitalists such that even our own children are a resource we're expected to raise to further contribute to endless growth and someone else's profit margins. 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.
  • MengerSponge 7mo ago
    I slept and dreamt that life was joy. I awoke and saw that life was service. I acted and behold, service was joy. Rabindranath Tagore
  • tock 7mo ago
    Something about FIRE makes people have a visceral reaction. How DARE people not work like the rest of us. I get the purpose part if they were like teachers or doctors or something. Nope. SWE at Meta.
    • littlexsparkee 7mo ago
      A lot of people can't comprehend trying to restrain their consumption either, they try to poke holes in your plans to assuage themselves that their lifeplan is the right one.
  • yodsanklai 7mo ago
    > Seems like a terribly depressing way to live 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.
    • thunky 7mo ago
      > 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.
      • chasd00 7mo ago
        > 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.
  • nanopasta 7mo ago
    This is a rather uni-dimensional and, might I say, judgemental view of the CF movement. People choosing to be child-free just want to have "no responsibilities, FIRE, and never give to anyone but themselves" - really? What about women finally taking agency and rejecting the belief that they must have kids to be fulfilled? You also seem to completely ignore the economic state of the world. The economic conditions we grow up in leave a psychological imprint and influence the choices we make, even as adults. 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.
  • mock-possum 7mo ago
    > I have friends like this, their only purpose in life is to have no responsibilities, FIRE, and never give to anyone but themselves. Seems like a terribly depressing way to live 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.
  • martopix 7mo ago
    > There’s an entire generation of mostly childless adults who are shocked to find they enjoy contributing to others’ happiness. 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.
    • stuxnet79 7mo ago
      > 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? 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.
  • agumonkey 7mo ago
    I agree with you but i'd add our cultures pushed these psychological profiles (not far from mine) into running for some kind of (supposed) early safety because entering adulthood felt too bland heavy and risky. 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
  • mchinen 7mo ago
    This has clearly triggered a lot of people, with the full spectrum of arguments for and against having kids below. I'm bookmarking this as an example of driving engagement by taking a fairly benign topic ('helping others was rewarding!') with an extreme view on a topic that everyone has a stake in ('an entire generation lost the plot on life'). 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.
  • chasd00 7mo ago
    > Seems like a terribly depressing way to live but pretty common in tech/upper middle class circles. 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
  • mlsu 7mo ago
    Yeah it’s kind of crazy. My opinion of course, but I think it’s a big part of growing up to realize that your life being “yours” only lasts about 20-25 years. You have your childhood, then your time as a young adult to have your fun and set yourself up/work towards your own life goals, find your place in the world. 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?
• jraby3 7mo ago
  Similar for me. Happiest I've ever been was when I was an assistant guide for birthright Israel. My job was to make sure the 40 kids that came were having a good time. When your job is to make others happy, you become happy.
  • deleted 7mo ago
    [deleted]
• et-al 7mo ago
  Also, I think for a good number of people, their first job out of college is oftentimes one they will look fondly back on because they've just finished ~17 years of school, have financial independence with a salary, and are still bright-eyed about all the possibilities.
• perrygeo 7mo ago
  The entire zeitgeist of software technology revolves around the assumption that making things efficient, easy, and quick is inherently good. Most people who are "sitting in front of rectangles, moving tiny rectangles" have sometime grandiose notions of their works' importance; we're making X work better for the good of Y to enable Z. Abstract shit like that. No man, you're just making X easier. If the world needs more X, fine. If not, woops. The detachment from reality makes it all too easy to deceive yourself into thinking "hey this actually helps people".
  • Swizec 7mo ago
    > Most people who are "sitting in front of rectangles, moving tiny rectangles" Hey dude these are my emotional support rectangles! Truth is, anything can be meaningful. We make our own meaning and almost anything will do as long as you believe in it. If optimizing rectangles on the screen makes you happy, that’s great. If it doesn’t, find something else to do.
    • temp8830 7mo ago
      Yup, because there are plenty of opportunities to get tokens to feed your family outside of moving those rectangles. Not.
  • bitexploder 7mo ago
    These are all value judgements that reflect your disillusionment rather than some universal truth. No one is attached to some mythical objective reality. Everyone is imprisoned by the same social, economic and thought prisons.
  • jimbokun 7mo ago
    It’s really just because those of us choosing this profession are also very good at optimizing chosen metrics. But don’t always ask whether they are good metrics and whether they become counterproductive past some point.
  • slopinthebag 7mo ago
    This is one of the reasons why I'm so disgusted by the mainstream voices around AI. As if I'm going to be "left behind" because my only priority isn't increasing shareholder value or building a saas that makes the world a worse place.
• popalchemist 7mo ago
  Even if it's the oldest lesson, it's one we all need to learn, sometimes multiple times. Yesterday was the best time to have learned it. 2nd best is always today. There is never a bad time to learn this lesson.
  • pickledish 7mo ago
    Agreed! I'm not sure why the GP comment has a somewhat negative attitude about it, I think it's great for people to realize this and talk about it, every year a whole new year's worth of young adults turn up not knowing it! Insert XKCD lucky 10,000 comic here
    • bengale 7mo ago
      Not meant to be negative.
      • pickledish 7mo ago
        Ah -- IME people usually start a sentence with "in the nicest possible way" when they're couching something mean is all. Often it's even sarcastic, and the meanness isn't even meant to be couched, so I wasn't sure how to read it
        • popalchemist 7mo ago
          Agreed, the default connotation / reading of this phrase implies a snide attitude.
        • bengale 7mo ago
          Ironically, I went back and added it because I thought the comment sounded a little bit unfriendly on a first pass. Mission failed.
• steeleyespan 7mo ago
  I’ve spent too much time talking to Claude, because this sounds exactly like one of its messages
  • bengale 7mo ago
    Absolutely! That’s a great point. For real though, I’m not wasting tokens on comments. I do wonder if we will pick up habits when interacting with them a lot though.
    • ionwake 7mo ago
      For real the grammar is so good its sus, did you aprse this through claude?
      • steezeburger 7mo ago
        I don't think the grammar is "good", it just uses speech patterns like LLMs do.
      • bengale 7mo ago
        No. I do have the gammarly tool running though, and it often corrects my writing.
    • steezeburger 7mo ago
      I 100% thought this was written by an LLM. You copy its style if it wasn't. Or it has copied yours! Lol
      • bengale 7mo ago
        My understanding is it learns from us. It's to be expected that it often speaks the way we speak, especially in places like this, since it's a free source of training data. I'm not sure playing "spot the llm" is going to be a good use of time in many cases.
• Fr0styMatt88 7mo ago
  Yep yep and yep. The massive move towards individualism in our culture is making people lonely and empty.
• card_zero 7mo ago
  > Chasing happiness, moral righteousness, or political engagement just loops you back into your own head, helping people doesn’t. Feeling good is a side-effect of being useful, not the goal. Presumably you imply that moral righteousness, too, is best attained intuitively, by being useful to others and helping them (to do whatever, like a useful idiot?) without conscious thought for what's right. Or else you're saying "help people for no reason even though it isn't right, and you'll end up feeling good that way so it's fine".
  • bengale 7mo ago
    This feels like a bit of a staw man argument, I'm not sure there's any reason to read into it that you could help someone do morally bad things and feel good about it. To be clear though feeling good is not the justification per se, it's pretty much just the signal that you're aligned correctly. When you aim outward, morality becomes less about self image and more about stewardship which is why it tends to work. I’m also not claiming morality is relative or "attained" particularly beyond normal development as an adult. I would assert that we already know what’s right, the problem isn’t discovering the moral law, it’s obsessing over our own righteousness instead of living it.
• joshkojoras 7mo ago
  ^^ This comment sums up the entire philosophy of happiness very well, although you first have to go through life to get the context to understand it. I'm over 40 and single and childless. I work in Tech, have a good salary, a house, a car, investments and a second property. I have everything people work for in life but I'd give it all up for a family. I wish I hadn't been so proud and arrogant and full of myself when I was younger and made different decisions. I'd much more prefer to not have the material wealth that I have today, but instead have a home to come to after work and kids to wake me up in the morning. I used to shrug it off in the sense that there is still time and as years went by I suddenly woke up one day to be 40y old and realised the time left me behind. I have more money than I need but have nothing that needs me. And it's nice to be needed. I did achieve a lot in terms of professional career but now I can't help but feel that I was scammed. Nobody cares about the things that I had built or features I helped develop and ship, I doubt anyone can even see them. All those decades of my life completely invisible to the world. All I'm left with now is money and countless mental health conditions I have to deal with as a consequence of my life choices. And I don't believe for one second that there are people who are 40-50 without any dependencies and feel happy in life. That's just bull shit. The reason why people say that is because they keep their minds preoccupied and when you don't have time to think you have no problems. The problem with that is that eventually kicking the can down the road doesn't work anymore and you reach a point when you have to stop and take a break. And that's when all your baggage comes rushing forward into your consciousness and you crash. I often remember Blaise Pascal's quote: "All of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone."
  • JuniperMesos 7mo ago
    Children are not typically known for sitting quietly in a room alone. Blaise Pascal himself was unmarried and childless, and died at the relatively young age of 39.
  • ane 7mo ago
    It is a good reminder that most of us that work in software engineering will never build anything remarkable and will fade into history. Even if you do brilliant engineering work for a company, said work was commissioned by the company and the intellectual property rights belong to said company. It wasn't yours to begin with.
• mr_toad 7mo ago
  > That kind of outward focus kills emptiness fast. I used to race on a friend’s sailboat. One of the things that people noticed on a sailboat is that you need to and have to be focused on immediate problems, rather than any problems on land. If you fail to pay attention to problems at sea, you may no longer have any problems on land, or anywhere. This can allow you, at least temporarily, to forget any problems you might have on land.
  • iguhhyfchh 7mo ago
    [dead]
• nunez 7mo ago
  So, as you saw, this provoked the age-old parenting vs CF "debate." (There isn't a right answer.) I'm child-free by choice, so I can only offer the CF perspective. If you're a parent who wants to better understand our viewpoint, or if you're not a parent but are on the fence about kids, I recommend reading "Childfree by Choice" by Dr. Amy Blackstone. It's an extremely comprehensive book that deeply explores why we choose this life and how we find fulfillment beyond the material benefits that come with this decision. (I want to be clear: There are loads of happy and very fulfilled parents out there, and it is possible to have a rich life with kids!)
  • bengale 7mo ago
    I didn't even mention them being his kids, the point really is that focussing on giving to others is the path to happiness and fulfilment vs focus on self. It doesn't have to specifically be children at all. I guess I get why that irks a lot of the child-free people but it wasn't really the point I was making.