This is less true now, but perhaps only for now.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/09/world/middleeast/israel-u...

https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2023-02-06/ty-article-ma...

>The coalition agreement PM Netanyahu signed with ultra-Orthodox party Shas promises to broaden the reach of Israel’s rabbinical courts far beyond family law – and grant them a status equal to that of civil courts

"As far as I am aware, the US does not have that problem"

Not true, we don't have a replacement population. This means all of your welfare programs and retirement programs will not have enough people in the younger generation to pay into them and support them.

"I hate the pretense that baby making for normies is anything other than creating workers for the ruler class."

Where did you pick this view up? Yes people have to work to survive. What do you think society would look like if you just did away with all the modern conveniences and the "ruling class". Do you just assume you'd be able to sit around doing nothing or pursue your "creative goals"??? No, you'd be gathering firewood and hunting all day, hoping you don't die of starvation or freeze to death.

This is such a silly naive stance. I hear it all the time and it sounds so childish. I assume it's some Marxist trope young people pick up from college sociology class and think they sound smart. What you want is a class of plebs doing the manual labor for you so you don't have to do be a "worker". Someone has to do the shit work, just not an elitist like you right?

My suggestion to you is to find an actual purpose and stop stewing in your hateful anti-humanist outlook. Having kids can be that purpose, but you could actually just go out and do something to be helpful to other humans too.

So step 1 for sustainability: remove said programs, as the alternative is either A) acknowledging they are just a pyramidal scheme or B) removing individual freedoms and forcing people to have children they don't want to have, just to support the programs you want to have.

You're right, they are pyramid schemes. Which is why I think it's dangerous to put important programs like this in the government's hands and make your population reliant on them.

You're drawing an association the ruling class and modern conveniences. Those are two incredibly different things.

I have a really hard time believing that because a small group of people have a disgusting amount of wealth, somehow modern conveniences are "divined" from that

What you want is for those plebs to provide that to you, while you essentially become the new ruling class that sits around benefiting off the working peasants.

I love how you hardcore Marxists only take the good parts of what you say while conveniently leaving out the guy that's gonna be swallowing in the ditch for you.

Uhh no? I just think that the people working in ditches should be compensated a living wage, preferably through forcing the ultra rich to pay their fair share in taxes and redistributing

Compare this to a child-free lifestyle. I know many child-free people. Fundamentally, their lives at 50 are not so different than their lives at 30. The main differences are they have more money, but they’re also fatter, uglier, have less energy, and are more jaded. The law of marginal utility dictates that, while they are still happy, they enjoy their life less over time.

My decision to have children was less about breeding and more about not living an ever-shittier version of my late 20s life.

Is travel at 50 really fundamentally different than travel at 30? Other than having a bit more money, my opinion is not really. In many ways, travel at 30 is better, even with less money.

They wouldn't be limited to options that don't build. You can have children and build a family, but you can also choose to dedicate your resources to building a business, or a skill, or knowledge, or whatever. Doesn't matter that you lose energy as you age and make lesser contributions, because you're kind of transforming it into something more persistent that you value. That could be a family, but it doesn't have to be.

> Is travel at 50 really fundamentally different than travel at 30? Other than having a bit more money, my opinion is not really. In many ways, travel at 30 is better, even with less money.

Even with relation to travel, maybe you dream of having a deeper understanding of one or more cultures or pieces of history and each travel contributes a bit to that.

I don't think the vast majority of people achieve this with the vast majority of their travels. Kind of curious what are some examples of that in your own life, especially the 'when a contribution to something was made' bit.

I have felt several times that "Is this just it now? We're not going to do anything terribly different, just work/eat/hobbies/occasional trip, pretty much on a loop, while our health just keeps getting worse?" I do feel having children would change that, but for various reasons (not all of them great reasons, imo) we still haven't had them yet.

Personal anecdote only: My life at nearly 40 is a tremendously better version of anything before it, even my 20s. No drama, way more peace of mind, little to no job stress, some disposal income, many hobbies both old and new, and most importantly... time. I'm not constantly focusing on the needs of kids, just what my partner and I feel like doing (both in the instant and in life in general).

I lost my job recently and feel great. Time to breathe and regather, without having to worry about making kids homeless or moving them outside of their school system. Don't wake up to crying babies and come home to shouting matches and needing to cook for 4. No homework help, just learning whatever we want to. Or taking the night to just relax and watch TV, try a new board game, go out somewhere new, take a new class, spend time in nature. It's pretty great. Every time we see or hear about someone else's kids, we feel absolutely sure in our choice -- not that we ever doubted it to begin with.

Far from feeling meaningless, I get to pursue work and hobbies that bring fulfillment, because they're well considered and taken for want, not need, and not dependent on the financial or time constraints of someone else.

It's only shittier if your stop growing. At this age I'm still contemplating a new degree, making new friends, evaluating new careers and cities (and frankly lifestyles), all with the financial resources and mental and emotional maturity I never had in my 20s. It's pretty great, and it was the exact outcome I hoped for. I knew I didn't want kids as early as my early teens, and got a vasectomy in by mid 20s. Both turned out to be terrific decisions.

Probably this sounds selfish. In truth I've always really valued community, and spend most of my adult life working in nonprofits and mission driven orgs, along with making a ton of friends all over the world. I love people, just prefer adults with their own interests rather than kids that I have to groom into something. The idea of living vicariously through them has no appeal to me (as someone subjected to the same from my own parents, in a nearly joyless childhood).

Another big reason I didn't want to create children (as opposed to adopting) is that there are way more than enough Americans already, each of whom consumes dramatically more resources than a child raided elsewhere. From a social and global standpoint it's not really sustainable, and probably quite likely apocalyptic, to keep having kids without really having a plan for their future in regards to climate and democracy, both of which are in rapid decline. That seems more selfish to me than not having them at all. Adoption seemed like an accept middle ground, but my partner didn't want kids (adopted or not) so I didn't pursue it.

Are there people who just settle into a routine after 30, never really changing much again? Sure, but that could happen with or without kids. That's up to you to prevent, as a parent or not. But I know more happy childfree couples than I do parents. Maybe it's a self selecting crowd. The happy couples probably don't want to spend time with kids, so we find each other. Likewise, the happy parents tend to fade from my life and have their own play dates and whatnot. To each their own...

That being said, I'm not saying that it's impossible for you to have a fulfilling life at 40 years old. My point is that, in my experience, 70 year olds with kids seem more fulfilled than 70 year olds without. Perhaps that's just a reflection of me and my role models.

But statistics aside, I think there is also a deliberate tradeoff there in terms of optimizing for the present vs the future. Some folks think of children as an investment for their future, someone to take care of them and provide companionship when they're older... but often at the cost of surrendering several decades of their mid-life for child rearing.

Conversely, for those who don't want kids, some of us choose to frontload our life's pursuits towards the prime middle years instead, traveling and doing stuff and meeting new people etc. while we're still physically healthy mentally sharp. Some chronic illness is always around the corner, and being stuck with disabilities in a nursing home, with or without kids, doesn't really excite.

Not having kids means planning for the future is a bit different, not just in finances but also risks and costs. We can choose to make a planned exit at some point without that decision being blocked by next of kin, opting for some happy accident doing something fun (space travel? free solo climbing? or just medication). I'd much rather shave off a decade or two of my life if that means a higher quality of life for the preceding decades... quality, not quantity :) Even without something that drastic, planning for retirement looks very different when you have no college funds or weddings to save for. Even homeownership (which is largely out of reach for my generation anyway) ceases to be as important a consideration. You can live more fully in the present time, instead of forever optimizing for some future state that may or may not ever come.

And that's to say nothing of where society will be in 40-50 years... probably not gonna be pretty, lol, and not something I'd want to subject kids (or myself) to unless we make drastic improvements.

In the meantime, though, what we have is the here and now. Might as well live it now instead of worrying about living it someday later.

I hate to point out that it doesn't always- your children may hate you (difference in politics or lifestyle) or abandon you. Or they may be simply too resource constrained to do anything other than visit you on holidays. I guess the lifestyle in most Western cultures has normalized elder neglect and loneliness anyways. Though I recognize there are many examples to the contrary. On average most families relegate care of the elderly to homes or caretakers if independence is no longer an option. I guess I don't see the point of children if they don't actively care for you till death. Do I expect too much, or just reject the Western norm?

[1] https://www.vhemt.org/

but also, yes, I totally agree with you that some of this "oh you're a late bloomer, you'll want to do it when your older" stuff comes off as condescending if you actually just don't want to own a house with 2.5 kids.