Thanks for the perspective.
My kid is now 9, and while a fancy brunch is beyond him, he can do a sit down sushi dinner. We've done a couple of international trips with him, and we've settled into a friend group with similar interests so we are constantly doing camping, backcountry backpacking, and in the winter skiing - all with him and his friends. It is pretty good, and certainly not a no-life.
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^ And we knew what we wanted, so even though many of the early trips where miserable, the kid can say he’s been backpacking and xc-skiing every year of his life.
My question would be why you value your kids time more than bouldern?
Because you made them? Because they consume so much time with them?
Or because you are just better in being a parent and biological getting satisfaction out of it?
Unfortunately for me I'm not sure if I would end like you or the other poster who regrets it sometimes.
Also I'm not sure if I want to force another/new human through my experiences like going to school etc.
In dune the king new/realized that he can't do what is necessary but has to prepare his son to do so.
I have the opposite though: perhaps I need to not to have kids to stop the cycle of creating meaning through procreation.
Yes I overthink stuff and one way or the other I still think becoming a parent would be a life changing experience but besides all of the normal thoughts climate change comes on top of it.
Having diff perspectives is cool so it would be unfortunate for yours to get flagged because it seems too aggressive.
Also, “escape goat”, while an amazing phrase, should be “scapegoat”.
It is totally this. We are biological creatures and we cannot escape that.
Love, sex, friendships, relationships, parenting, happiness, and so forth are all aspects of our biology. We are not automatons living a purely rational life. Satisfaction in life depends on those biological mechanisms and shouldn't be seen through a purely rational lens.
Kids aren't a scapegoat for a meaningful life. They do absolutely make life meaningful. Much in the same way eating a delicious meal brings pleasure. We depend on our biological wiring to feel such things.
Oversimplified: would you be okay to create a new human if you know they have only 100 days to life? 5 years? 20? Suffering in school, sleep problems etc etc?
Just because it's evolutionary pre programmed?
I think it's fine if people don't have kids, I just find the reasoning "what if they suffer, etc" a cop-out. You cannot know that beforehand and even if they suffer, they may still find meaning in life.
Don't dismiss critical thinking with an attack on you just because it feels obvious to you.
Missery etc also can only be felt when you are alive.
You clearly don't take any responsibility at all otherwise I'm lost on how easy you just dismiss concerns.
Maybe your need to pass judgement on my character based on two posts should tell you something about yourself. It really takes an inflated ego to, as a non-parent, talk about responsibility with a parent. Paraphrasing: "Responsibility as a parent is heavy as a mountain, deciding not to have children is light as a feather".
There's a song where I'm from with a funny line about that - Life is short, but it's long in small stretches.
What I eventually gradually realized was that the kid might just be another person, but you're not just creating a person, you're also creating a relationship with that person. And it's a unique kind of relationship, in some ways more intimate than any relationship you can have with anyone else including your romantic partner. (Which adult runs with beaming face to hug you whenever they see you come home from work and you know it's all totally genuine?) I'm not an expert on what has objective meaning in life, but I'm pretty sure that deep relationships like this are one of the stronger candidates.
You won't stop the cycle though, others who do actually have kids will simply continue it, and the single biggest way in which you could have had and influence on the future of the world and the human race will have been eliminated.
And that's before you get into any religious implications of having and raising children.
In my pov, saying having kids is the most important way to influence the world unfortunately provides an excuse to prop up the status quo of incredibly imbalanced power and wealth structures.
It also seems a bit mean to posit having children is the way to most influence society. Not every one can responsibly and properly raise children. Or have the financial foundation
I'm not responsible for potential suffering of others.
It can fill up your life, and if you have good close friends it may be enough to feel long term OK and have amazing moments, which I kinda was. In fact, I've spent all my 30s like that, and backpacking around the world. I needed that, I felt I needed that back then, and when looking in retrospect it was right emotion, it made me a more complete human being (and later better parent too). Some can get there without, I couldn't, didn't have the right environment for it when growing up. This worked very well even when married, my wife complements me well in this (we met on a climbing session so that part was covered).
And then kids came, one just before covid and one during. I clinged to that climbing (with buddy) a bit, that was my escape for few hours a week into easy good times that were. Then I had this year injury of wrist, and then broken foot (all in civil setting, ie falling down the stairs in kindergarten) and I lost it all, and I blamed kids internally. I was depressed a bit. My sleep for past year was never, ever uninterrupted, good 8 hours (those damned teeth, how could evolution fucked up so badly? any animal with this trait would simply die out over few generations). That normal sleep is just gone, and I am mentally at maybe 70% at better days, more irritable, less patient.
But the thing is, kids bring up the hardest moments just as much as the best moments of your life. And we humans generally are OK with suffering quite a bit for those few nice moments. Kids bring tons of those. Even when walking relative valley of the shadow now with small kids (diapers, various naps during day that block anything bigger, teeth and lack of sleep), without cheaping out and outsourcing many troubles to nanny (or grandparents), they are amazing to watch, to experience. They love you back, unconditionally (for now), and it just feels natural to continue what all generations since ever did. It had been a rough year, few folks died in close family, and when my grandpa died 2 days ago, hugging my kids made it much much much more bearable.
I am pretty darn sure that skipping kids would be by far the biggest regret of my life later, met quite a few older folks like that. No need to always do the mistake to realize others were right again. But - if one has some serious mental issue which make them unable to be a stable partner and caretaker, then it should definitely be avoided. Too many sad stories out there already.
I mean: any part of life is not life. Kids are not life.
Or am I missing something?
Lightness is nice, it's comfortable, but vertigo inducing. So we also long for weight sometimes.
To be honest, I felt exactly like that when kids were small, especially when being at home with them. Every day same as one before, with only minor variation. Going for vacations meant doing exactly same things as at home, except in harder setup. Nothing ever ever happens either. And plus, you are isolated from other adults, falling into depression and loosing ability to socialize.
Genuinely, I am glad I have kids. But I am so glad that period ended.
That does not make isolation choice. That makes some people finding friends despite suddenly seriously limited pool of options. You are starting from zero, not knowing anyone and loosing both actual existing friends and actual related hobbies. The only thing you have in common with most of those people is the similar age kid.
You need to be seriously extroverted to be able to create friendship out of nothing after you have seen each other twice on playground while also supervising the toddler. People here complain about loneliness while having incredibly easy situation compared to that, seriously.
There is less time and less energy no matter how you cut it. The priorities will change as well as they should - why have kids if they are not very important part of your life.
Someone with less time, less energy and different things to prioritize will never get as far in creative pursuits, business, sports, scientific research. It's fine but it's a trade-off. Don't pretend the child free option is just a bar night or brunch with friends. If it is, you really haven't even started figuring it out.
I can already see through getting wasted on weekends with friends, hikes, trips, etc that seem to "normalize" as I age.
Though, I don't see kids as the only "fix"; far from it. Perhaps it's just that we get saturated from experiences, and how much new things we can experience is limited by where we live, expendable income, physical fitness, etc. So it's natural to not have the same level of novelty in experiences.
In the same vein, my uneducated and inexperienced guess is that raising the third or fourth kid wouldn't feel as much as mentally rewarding as the first kid or two.
There is no more depth in life than raising kids properly, the good and bad combined. If you are up to it.
It would be interesting to see my thoughts if I had never had kids, but I feel as though it would be positive either way because I choose it to be.
That being said, I do feel personally like there is more to life than living for yourself. Whether that transfers to having kids or volunteering somewhere to help others, etc., I'll leave that decision to the reader.
I didn’t have kids until my 40s – didn’t delay, it just worked out that way – after getting married in my late 20s, spending…very little time dating or hanging out in bars, and it was wonderful. So was having kids. And once I had them, I certainly wouldn’t have minded having more of the energy of youth with them, but I also don’t mind the life experience that I had first.
> I had a nice career and could go anywhere and do anything I wanted, but it turns out none of that made me even a little bit happy. […] Happiness is extremely overrated.
Happiness isn’t overrated; as you yourself explicitly note, you didn’t find it and were miserable because of that.
> Now I’m tired and busy and I don’t go out and do “fun” stuff very often, but I’m much more satisfied. My biggest regret is that I waited so long to start my life. Brunch isn’t life.
Brunch (both literally and, as I understand the use, metaphorically) very much is life (not all of life, but, in its slice, as much “life” as anything else), for many people.
So can kids be, for many people.
So is anything you have a passion for, whether its the activity, or the companions, or the mission motivating the activity. (Bonus if it is a combination of all of those.)
Doing things merely because you’ve got the idea that it is socially expected that they will provide happiness, though, usually isn’t going to be it.
This seems like a strange conclusion to draw, it doesn’t sound like you were happy
One take away I had from Tim Kreider’s “I Wrote This Book Because I Love You” was that everyone he met who was older and unmarried had a certain aloofness about them or continued search for meaning. This largely wasn’t present in those that had families. We have a strongly selected source of fulfillment baked in as part of the human experience, it may not be for everyone but it’s probably not something that should be dismissed lightly.
Looking at old people and what they regret (and what they value) at the end of their life can be a way to help make fulfilling life decisions, or at least try to steer things in that direction.
But it doesn't sound like they were happy even by this definition..
I remember being happy --- I was a kid. I remember when it stopped --- gradually when I became a teenager and completely when I became an adult. I had a career, I had money, more than I could spend. I had a loving wife, better wife than I ever expected to have. I lived in a free country. I was passionately interested in a myriad of subjects: Films, books, sports, programming, science, I had a lot of hobbies, never stopped being busy. All those hobbies I had since I was a kid. But I realized that I don't see them the same way I saw them when I was a kid.
Sports, I hated long-distance running as a kid, found it tedious and grueling. As an adult, I would run and run and run, run through pain, through exhaustion, became sick with over-training, developed anemia, had multiple injuries, had pain almost every day, ran through injuries because I didn't want to lose fitness, reached almost 20 BMI, was frail and weak. What for? Nobody cared, not even me. It was just an obsession, looking for something that wasn't there.
Science, it was no longer the wonderful curiosity-satisfying endeavor that it was when I was a kid. It had become stressful research, anxiety to learn as much as possible, guilt and feeling of worthlessness when I couldn't really understand something after studying it for a period of time.
Films, I would watch 100-150 per year. Had a film-club subscription and watched pretty much everything they put on. Went to film festivals and watched 30+ films in a week. Watched something at home regularly. When you watch so many films they become tedious and you hate 90% of what you watch but I had to keep doing it because, what else would I do with all the free time I had?
I realized that there's nothing wrong with all those activities, what's wrong is what I expected from them. I wanted too much from them. I wanted them to give meaning to my life which was at a point when no meaning could be extracted by such activities.
And then I had kids. It was stressful, yes, it was tiring, yes, but oh boy --- no doubt about it, I was happy. I wanted to run out on the streets screaming from my happiness. I could not get angry any more. Everything that happened to me I just smiled and went on. And 6 years later I miss every time I awoke at night, every time I held them screaming. I am absolutely and positively sure that there can be no greater happiness in this world than the one I felt back then. I realize that I can have another kid now but it won't be the same.
And it all feels like it was one second ago. It all passed me by in an instant. Now my kids are old enough to do almost everything by themselves. Soon they will know how to read. I now do all the activities I mentioned above. But no obsession. I run enough to stay fit. I started weight-training which made me feel and look better than ever. I study science with a smile and with an understanding that I will never understand everything.
Everything has meaning now.
Now, as to how he dealt with this angst, that's a story for another time
I remember one summer making plans to go camping with three different groups of friends three weekends in a row and realizing at the end of it that all three weekends were exactly the same. Nothing new happens. You're not missing anything if you just stay home.
Happiness is extremely overrated. I had a lot of laughs in my 30s, but my life was a disaster. Now I'm tired and busy and I don't go out and do "fun" stuff very often, but I'm much more satisfied. My biggest regret is that I waited so long to start my life. Brunch isn't life.