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Notes -
Briefly on procreation, the population crisis, homelessness, and foster care:
I'd like to have children for pro-social reasons. I believe that failing to give back to the world when it has given so much to you is somewhat of a metaphysical thievery. My position isn't that everyone needs to have children, but I have contempt for old men who fail to plant trees whose shade they won't enjoy, especially when they have plenty of land and seeds. It's a narcissistic and hedonistic rot.
I'll focus on the word have, though, because my partner and I are not particularly well-positioned to have biological children. I feel that the base urges we have to literally procreate are just that - base urges. I am not Genghis Khan. There are 7 billion people on Earth, and cosmically my specific genetics are not even a footnote within a footnote in the story of humans. My siblings and cousins have me covered anyway when it comes to the genetic progeny of our bloodline, anyway. While the concept of creating something so awesome from almost nothing is romantic, it strikes me a bit as a novelty when put into a modern global context.
The factoid that I always try to bring up concerning homelessness in the US is that, depending on the source you cite, between ~30% and 50% of every homeless adult spent time in the foster care system. Like many social programs, the issues lie with the "cliff": when foster children turn 18 they age out of the system overnight. In 2025, it's a near impossibility to support oneself at age 18 entirely independently, especially if you're struggling to graduate high school or obtain a GED. To be a bit cliche, 22 is the new 18 (and 26 is the new 22, according to health insurers). It seems like, if you were to try to provide better than the "median" fostering experience, you would go a long way by simply supporting the foster child to age 22 instead of age 18.
To connect the dots, adoption and / or fostering seems to be a great way for this old man to plant trees, especially if biological children are completely ruled out. There is undeniably a population crisis and replacement rate is an issue, but from a (gross?) utilitarian perspective the population crisis is about productive members of society. Adopting and / or fostering well kills two birds with one stone: it reduces the population that is at-risk for homelessness, and creates more productive members of society.
If you are infertile that may be one thing, but I urge you not to adopt out of some sense of moral duty or ethics. Genetics are real and you will be scraping the bottom of the barrel genetically, you will destroy your own life.
Eh, it's entirely possible to adopt some 85 IQ child and raise them to be a perfectly productive truck driver or whatever, and it doesn't destroy your life. At a certain point society needs bricklayers- rather more than it needs more sysadmins.
In that case, people who would have been sysadmins are either paid to become brick layers or are forced to do it because that's the only job left.
There's a reason you rarely see Asian-Americans working low end jobs in the US, while those positions are filled back in their native countries. A society of Einsteins will have a need for janitors, until they automate the solution away. It is still better to be such a society with such a population.
Einstein said that with hindsight being a plumber would have been a better day job than being a patent clerk because it makes you tired in different ways, so you are more able to do physics in the evenings.
Not sure if he was true, and of course it relies on plumbers making enough to put food on the table in 40 hrs a week (then, as now, not a problem for plumbers specifically, but an issue for a lot of blue-collar jobs that would otherwise make good day jobs for struggling intellectuals).
Even if you make enough money, working in a blue collar job all day means you hurt all evening, which is going to interfere with physics. Einstein may have overly romanticized plumbing.
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