I participated in a mentoring program where I worked with younger people entering tech careers. It was mind blowing to hear them talk about children as being impossibly expensive while we had just discussed negotiation of their six-figure offer letter a few days prior. It’s like the reality of having kids got distorted and twisted and exaggerated so much on sites like Reddit that they all lost touch with reality and instead cemented the idea that kids were impossible for them.

If you’ve “conditioned yourself to not want them” then that’s a really weird place to be. That implies that you did maybe want them at some point and overrode that via “conditioning” based on facts that turned out to be untrue (that you couldn’t afford them). If I was in your shoes, I’d be taking a long, hard look at what other life assumptions you’ve been “conditioned” out of from exposure to false narratives and internet exaggerations.

Maybe kids are not for you, but I’ve seen enough very happy parents into even their 40s who started out thinking they never wanted kids until they finally re-evaluated how they arrived at that conclusion and realized it was the result of bad inputs. If you know the key inputs were false, maybe re-run that whole decision process again with a clean slate and some accurate facts. You might be surprised.

When it comes down to it, I think the real answer is selfishness. The sacrifice to their way of life, financially and otherwise, is too great for them. We can argue why there is a spike in selfishness - maybe it’s a reaction to an increasingly uncivil world, or maybe it’s due to social media’s hyperfocus on the self.

But either way, it’s more socially acceptable to say “raising children is prohibitively expensive these days” than to say “I can’t be bothered to change my solipsistic way of life.”

Individualism has been the cultural focus of education and child rearing for a long time. Having children changes who you are and can stand in the way of achieving your personal or professional goals.

I'm not sure it's a bad thing but it's easy to see how that could lead to less people wanting to be parents, especially women who've had a much more dramatic cultural shift in the last several decades.

This is not even to mention that many parents simply do not care for their children well, as parental child abuse cases as well as the number of potential adoptees in the world is non-trivial. Now that is truly a cruelly selfish act more than any amount of not having kids can be, to bring a conscious entity into the world and then to let it suffer.

Or maybe parents are selfish? They ever asked their unborn child if they want to be born?

I’d also point out that the decision to have children is almost always one motivated by what people want for themselves, not some altruistic obligation. If asking people why they chose to have kids wasn’t taboo, I’d be willing to bet that the answers you’d hear back would be about what the parents want for themselves. At its core, “We’ve always dreamed of starting a family” is about the life the parents desire to live.

Lots of tech folks live in low fertility areas where nobody has kids. So strange ideas just persist.

When my partner in a childless relationship gets asked “but why?” when she says she doesn’t want children, her answer is this: “would you have asked the same question, had I said I want them?”

and then they didn't survive for the next generation. If that is okay with a society, nature will simply replace that society with another one.

Combination of the latest trends of the past few decades (contraception, individualism, nuclear families) goes against the natural design for the sustenance of our species. Nature doesn't have morals and is pretty ruthless, so if a sub-species doesn't want to have kids, it will cease to exist and will be replaced by the one who values kids.

South Korea will be an interesting example to watch - whether they reverse their course and start valuing kids as a society, or they might get replaced by immigrants or are taken over by the neighboring countries. Nothing good or bad inherently with either option because life is meaningless anyway.

* Having and raising children is expensive (both financially and otherwise) regardless any factor(s). Any parent will corroborate this.

* I do not find life worth foisting upon a new individual; life is nothing but challenges and hardships. I refuse to throw a newborn life into this hellscape.

* Related to the above, I refuse to make my children be witnesses to my inevitable death. I am in that phase of life where I must deal with the eventual passing of my parents, and that is fucking hell. I do not wish this experience upon anyone, and to that end I refuse to have children because to do so means I wish this hellish experience upon them.

* Children as a concept is hypocritical: On the one hand I am responsible for their well-being and that implies I can and will and should have a say in their life; on the other hand they are independent individuals whom I cannot violate, and I refuse to impose my will upon them anyway because that is not my place.

* I find the entire notion of a family far too bothersome for my life. I do not need nor want a spouse whom I won't ever understand anyway and whom I will grow to resent. I do not need nor want children whom I won't ever understand anyway and whom will grow to resent me. I do not need nor want familial relations which will all be concentrated bullshit. I do not need nor want any of that noise in my life, I desire peace and tranquility.

The life has a way to handle this: children. Not saying you should but just saying that having children makes passing of the parents a bit less hellish. Will not make it easy but children forces us to be in the present and in the local now and contemplate less about about the extended family or past.

Just to clarify: it will be extremely immoral and unethical to have children just to alleviate this. And damaging in so many ways. I am just presenting a side effect here.

I’m a parent, I disagree. I might have thought in my 20s that having kids is expensive, but in my 30s I make so much money that is not an issue. Buying a house, that is expensive :)

> I do not find life worth foisting upon a new individual; life is nothing but challenges and hardships. I refuse to throw a newborn life into this hellscape.

Have you spoken to a therapist recently? You might be depressed. From my point of view, life is beautiful and challenges make it interesting.

This is a very deep and philosophical question, I think its perfectly reasonable for people who are not depressed to still come to the conclusion that they don't want to create more life since life itself is too difficult. Even in a best case scenario of being born to a rich, loving family in some prosperous democracy you still have to deal with yours and everyone you loves mortality.

I think there's another interesting issue that may be going on - people postpone having kids more and more, many start seriously considering it in their late 30s. That's an age where most people also start feeling the squeeze of midlife - ill parents you need to take care of, sometimes your own health starting to decline a bit etc. It's not surprising some people give up on kids.

Rural Appalachia is one example.

I assume this was the reference point for that comment:

> life is nothing but challenges and hardships. I refuse to throw a newborn life into this hellscape.

Which gets at a question I often have for those in these threads - what would you do if you had a child who was so depressed that they're unable to live independently?

Perhaps the optimal path for people who feel that way is to enjoy the good parts until it comes to an end?

When Douglas Adams said that the answer to life, the universe, and everything is "42", it was pretty obvious that he was saying that the entire question is just absurd.

Enjoying what time is left is indeed my goal, and perhaps what a stoic or existentialist would tell you as well. It has not been easy though.

It’s like a ‘guns for all’ policy.

Euthanasia should be allowed only after 18-36 months of therapy sessions.

Guns should be allowed for all that aren't criminals and/or mentally ill.

If you come from or live in a western country, you have no idea how good your life is.

And how you have to make up problems because real problems have been done away by your society.

Real poor people in Asia and Africa would give anything to be poor people where you live.

You're contradicting yourself. I'm a dad of two. Kids are extremely expensive and the largest expense is needing a large enough house in an area with good schools (UK here). That alone adds extra hundreds of thousands to your cost of living.

My 2 cousins grew up in a one-bedroom flat of 50m2.

On the other hand, I would have wanted a larger flat / house even if I remained childless and/or single.

Schooling in the UK is indeed a fuckup of epic proportions that I luckily don’t need to get involved with, but homeschooling is an option, right? The alternatives are getting better and better, with improved technology etc.

Uhh are you okay?

My goal is to lead a peaceful, tranquil life and when the time comes for my passing to leave as little as possible behind in my wake. Ideally I hope to not suddenly die in a freak incident, so I can relinquish or otherwise destroy my personal possessions prior to my passing.

If nobody notices I ever existed after I pass, I am satisfied.

Women in every rich country have fewer children than they desire:

https://medium.com/migration-issues/how-big-is-the-fertility...

If it was a good deal, women would have more children than they want because the economics were right

> whenever civil protection and economic freedom gives them any semblance of a choice, the number of children they get goes way down.

Which is clearly falsified by the link I posted.

I certainly agree with you that the economics of raising children is not right in western countries, but this still doesn't deter women from wanting more children than they're having, so I don't think it's at all fair to say that fewer are willingly choosing to have them.

That doesn't make a lot of sense. The impact on health is transitory and most women recover just fine after birth. Social life can actually get better when it expands to other parents. Career? I guess if your goal is to grasp the golden ring that's true.

But my god, surely our lives have more meaning than living as long as possible, maintaining the social life we had in our 20's as long as possible, and dedicating our lives to our careers.

Yikes, I'm not sure how accomplished and how satisfied with my life I'd be if I got to my 90's and successfully fulfilled those goals. I'd feel rather empty to me honest.

But this opinion seems very common on social media. It's like there is no worthy goal in life beyond optimizing health, eating at trendy restaurants and becoming CEO.

Like I said, don't have kids if you don't want to. Nobody should.

But the idea the world is doomed and your offspring are destine for a life of misery isn't really based on reality.

The way I look at it though, the desire to have children comes from societal and self conditioning too. For the majority of people, building a nuclear family is what they see all around them, and few ever really question whether or not their desire comes from the fact that it seems like the default and it would be too hard to go against the grain.

I don’t have the drive to have children. Maybe I would have if I saw it as more of a possibility earlier on in life, but I think we underestimate how much of that drive actually originates from outside forces for many people.

My father had me when he was 50 so I didn’t feel like I was too old. Ended up having 3 and wouldn’t trade them for anything. For all the hardship there is such an overwhelming joy that also comes with children that I’ve never found anywhere else.

I quite like the idea that when it is about vision or meaning of life we should carefully make the learning or setting in stone kind of process harder. I think when young we are very biased to see the world in some way as we are biased to see it in some other way at 50.

Not trying to convince you to revisit specifically the decision about children. Just sharing my own learning

A lot of young people have done exactly that because a childless lifestyle seems much more appealing. Particularly for women who have to sacrifice their careers as well.