It's not as much the excitement of my alternate life, or the reservation of more resources for myself (money, time, etc.) though that, selfishly, sounds nice. It's mostly the stress and ever-present burden of being a parent. I could do without it sometimes.
I don't know what the next dozen years of my life will look like if I don't. It may be cooler, it may be worse. We're going to find out, though. Ever into the unknown...
5 years of diaper changes? Or sleepless nights?
Diaper changes can end by mid-year 2. Sleepless nights can be mostly eased well within a year.
Of course, there's always random suck. I had a crisis that I was receiving texts up till 3AM... and then my 8 year old showed up with a stomachache at 3:30AM.
Murphy’s law is indeed a thing as well. All three kids waking up sequentially because of some trouble or ache. It does happen but is very rare.
I assumed I'd hate having kids until they were like 11/12 but to have the adults would make it worthwhile --- even just the chance of a close relationship with them as adults. But I'm actually shocked to find I even enjoy the baby/potato stage.
I don't think it's binary "sucks/not sucks", but I do think, for me, it'd clearly be sig LESS fun to be old without kids based on what I've seen of the older people in my life with different family situations. Seems shitty to me.
I'm sure there are people who have the opposite experience, but I was trying to explain why the "sacrifice" of prime years can be seen as an investment rather than a straight loss.
The audacity, unbelievable. So I guess I'll stop having fun now go back to my boring life?
You're looking at what, 2-5 years of that? Per kid? Plus the huge time commitments for all of the other burdensome stuff that having kids entails, like school and transport and non-school education? 2-5 years out of a lifetime isn't much, but 2-5 years out of your 30s or early 40s is a gigantic percentage of your remaining not-old life. Unless you're a major biological outlier, you're not traveling on sporting vacations or backpacking trips or hallucinogen-fueled music festivals when you're 55. You don't get a lot of useful years remaining as a not-old person by the time you're old enough to responsibly have kids. It's a gigantic tradeoff and to minimize it like this is woefully shortsighted.
It's fine if you like kids and didn't have actual plans to have fun in your 30s or 40s, but people with exciting lives will lose a lot if they suddenly have to dedicate almost all of their free time for 5 years to their offspring.
This is also assuming that you have more than enough money to spend on kids and all of the other things you like to do in life. Even if kids took 0 time (which as we know they do not), this is not true for most people.
> You actually like hanging out with your own kids.
Some people do. Sometimes children grow up to be terrible, for reasons outside of direct parental control. Not every potential bad final outcome can be avoided with good parenting. Not everyone who thinks kids might be a good idea is capable of being a good parent.
I personally find the idea of having huge, tremendously expensive, hugely time-consuming, unavoidable responsibilities like this in the middle of the prime of my life to be a living nightmare, for well-considered reasons which you seem to simply handwave away as trivial. Having kids and raising them well must necessarily become one of your primary goals in life, displacing others as there are only 24 hours in each day.
We don't have a lot of time left.