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Culture War Roundup for the week of February 9, 2026

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Having kids is one of the worst things you can do to your short term happiness, up there with getting addicted to heroin or getting in a motorcycle accident. Whatever things you might have enjoyed in life before them is completely gone, for the rest of your life. Every waking moment of your life outside of work will be completely occupied by taking care of monstrous creatures that make every single bodily function besides breathing as difficult as humanly possible. Eating, sleeping, farting, shitting, drinking, etc. will each be a torturous ordeal that you will have to deal with multiple times per day.

You forgot to mention that you do all of that while being subjected to months of sleep torture that would make a CIA contractor call up The Hague. Calling that a "hedonistic cost" is like referring to the Troubles in Ireland as a "disagreement".

It's backbreaking,

Yes.

thankless,

True.

and absolutely positively unfulfilling.

Here's where you could not be more wrong. It is the most fulfilling thing you will have ever done with your life. Are you familiar with Nietzsche's question of whether you could approve of your life if it were eternally reoccuring? All baby-related suffering automatically gets a big fat stamp of approval. Not sure that's true for anything else.

Eudaimonia does not equate to feeling good.