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I'm going to take a general sentiment in a previous thread somewhat further.
I'm becoming increasingly convinced that having kids is the biggest and most successful disinformation campaign society has pulled on itself in all of history. 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. It's backbreaking, thankless, and absolutely positively unfulfilling. After having kids you will finally understand the men who work 18 hour days every day despite having kids. They're actually doing it because of the kids. Because work obligations are the only excuse they can give themselves to let them spend less time dealing with kids and instead doing something relaxing like writing TPS reports or updating excel spreadsheets. Getting into the office and getting a stack of work from your boss is sweet relief compared to the torture of taking care of the kids.
I'm pretty sure the lie around it has persisted for so long because of the corresponding hard social stigma against saying you absolutely fucking hate taking care of the kids. Anyone who even hints at that idea is going to get completely crucified in the comments section. It's like the Havel's greengrocer, where if he doesn't put up the sign with the approved message, he's going to get hauled off to the gulag. Except for parents the punishment will be worse.
Anyways I find it likely that the cratering of birthrates across the entire world is a mass viral sensation where the lie is breaking down. Likely fuelled by social media as well as other factors, people are finally realizing en masse (though not openly admitting it yet) that it seriously just sucks. Even the welfare queens and third world brown hordes realize that this is true for them too. And they're understandably picking the hedonism option.
And no I don't hate or dislike kids. Kids are great, as long as they're someone else's, and their parents are around to jump in and take care of it as soon as something goes wrong.
I've had these points on my mind for a while now, but I guess now is a good time to write about it.
Imo there are two broad issues in modern culture closely related to this. Actually more, but these two are quite fundamental and thus especially hard to fix.
First the issue of what happiness even is. Modern culture is very fuzzy on it, and as such, has a tendency to default to the easiest-to-achieve, lowest common denominator: Fun and the avoidance of pain. Fun is being on a roller coaster. Fun is sitting on the couch watching Netflix. Fun is anything that doesn't challenge and doesn't create anything but keeps your mind occupied, even excited. I don't think I need to explain what the avoidance of pain is; But intrinsically it's a negative, and you can't built up a functioning society from a negative. Neither of these are wrong per se, they're just not sufficient for "the good life", they feel empty on their own. There are probably even more that I'm not aware of, but two major kinds of happiness are imo necessary to really feel good about yourself: Flow and Satisfaction.
Flow is about being challenged, and rising to the challenge. It's the state of mind when you have sufficiently trained something, say, Tennis, and play against a roughly equally skilled opponent. You may eventually lose, or you may win, the game itself might be mostly pointless (or might not), but the important part is this fundamental knowledge: You really feel deep in your bones you are good at this. The thing itself absolutely needs to a have some appropriate level of difficulty, or else you can't feel the flow.
Satisfaction is when you (either alone or in a group; sometimes even not you yourself but someone very closely related to you) have created something lasting, look back on it and, to quote a well known book: And He saw that it was good. It's having build a house, or planted a tree.
Sexuality gives a nice example of all three: Masturbation is fun; Seduction and sex is flow; Being in a relationship and having kids is satisfaction.
The good life, in my opinion, consists of waking up and immediately being satisfied about everything you see around; Then you do your job and naturally, automatically feel the flow, until you're finished and feel satisfaction again about a job well done. Tired, you indulge yourself with a little bit of fun in the afternoon and do some chores, and then fall asleep, satisfied about a good day and, again, everything you see around you. You can see what the relative priorities in my view are based on how much time is spent on each.
It's easy to see how hunter-gatherer societies effortlessly do this without even being aware: You wake up in a hut/tent which you necessarily must have crafted yourself or someone close to you, and the same goes for literally every piece of furniture and equipment present in it. You go hunting and feel the flow. Ideally, you successfully bring back game satisfied, cook it, enjoy it, and finally fall asleep. Very simplified, I know, but you get the gist. I'm also not claiming that life was necessarily great back then, since fear, despair and death were constant companions. But these positives were downright unavoidable if you did survive.
In modern life, we have successfully conquered those negatives. But on the positive side, everything tends to be the wrong way around: Nothing I have around me I have built myself; It's all just bought. Some work at least involves flow, but since flow requires difficulty it also implies things can go wrong with some regularity. More efficient is when nothing can really go wrong. Having successfully optimized everything, a lot of modern work is largely flow-less, rubber-stamping documents, endless meetings with decisions by committee, or supervising a machine that makes every product exactly the same in a way no human ever could.
But fun, oh fun! Fun is overflowing. Many people who nominally work full-time actually mostly indulge their fun for most of it. Plenty of people just flat-out do not work and you can guess what they do for most of the day. You absolutely can go through an entire modern life without ever really creating anything at all nor being meaningfully challenged.
The second is on the nature of close, especially romantic, relationships. The primary modern narrative is one of matching: You find people who share your views, preferences and inclinations, so any time spent together is automatically fun. People who don't match with you should be avoided. Reddit liberalism is the purest form; Any conflict results in a recommendation of "just break up and find a better match". Worst, in a certain sense, are not only the endless options, but the appeal to identify with those options. You don't enjoy gaming among other things, you're a gamer. You don't just like meat-less cuisine, you're a vegan. Remember the toaster-fucker problem.
The reality, in my view, certainly includes matching, but also involves skill and work, and most of all, adaption and the change of self, letting go of yourself. A lot, in fact. Again, harkening back to hunter-gatherers makes this painfully obvious: The choices in your tribe, maybe also a few other friendly tribes around you, are very limited. Childhood friendships will likely last for life, and should be invested in and adapted to appropriately. You may actually get the girl that suits you the most, but there will still be some points of conflict. Fortunately, options for views and preferences are rather limited to begin with as well, reducing some tensions. But you will have to change the person you are for her, and she for you. And when it comes to kids, you probably already get forced to look after those of other people anyway (and yes, also do the bad parts), so having your own adds not too much extra work.
As an only-child, I've grown up with literally nobody helping me how to manage a close relationship, let alone get a girl in the first place. Or at least putting me in my place, telling me to get better and put in the work. I've spent a large part of my teenage years resenting the fact that I'm supposed to be the active suitor, as opposed to be pursued. Aren't we in a feminist society? If a girl wants me, she can hit on me the same way I can hit on her! Certainly, at least, she should put in the same amount of work during dating! And anyway, no girls have the same interests as me, so why should I even attempt dating them? A few same-age boys and girls correctly told me I'm stupid, but the culture overall indulged me instead. Mostly through indifference, but I even got some approving nods from some older woman who said my attitude was mature and society will move that way eventually, you just have to find the perfect person for yourself!
And for friendships and relationships it even kind of works for enough people. We do meet so many people that it's true we can get much better matches than in the past. And already as kids we regularly get told friendships don't matter, we can always find new ones. So a lot of the social skills for close relationships (which are different from the social skills for early/superficial friendships - I was always good at those!) either never get developed, or atrophy. Few feel the need to ever put in work, and rather just get a whole new friend instead. If you train a skill, it's the one to cycle through people and find good matches.
Kids now are the perfect storm of everything that you did learn being useless, needing all the skills that you didn't learn and were told are useless, being challenged and requiring work in a way you probably never have been before, and the only reward is something that you might not even be aware you want or like. You don't get to choose your kids, you roll the dice with your partner and that's that (though at least they have some predisposition towards being similar to you; adoption is accordingly actually worse in that sense). All the skills you developed to find new friends and explore how well you match are pointless. Instead you have to do a lot of stuff you would never like and you don't even get paid for it. Months of sleep deprivation, changing diapers and reading toddler books.
I'm also increasingly convinced - courtesy of my wife hammering it all the time - that one of the most important parts of parenthood is teaching your children relationship management techniques from a young age on so that as older siblings they naturally have a good relationship in the first place and effortlessly keep it that way. Stuff like, when one gets a cookie, you always break up some part and give it to the other. Or you just sit there when they fight over a toy, and force them to repeatedly give it to the other back and forth until they have internalised that you don't need to fear that the other will keep it for themselves, so you can give away a toy freely, you'll get it again. And, the only part modern life somewhat teaches you, identifying when the other really needs some space and giving it, and to just play on your own without needing constant feedback. Maybe I'm naive and probably we will run into problems again as they get older, but generally they just do this stuff automatically now, simply get along for the most part and when not they also can just play by themselves for an hour or more, despite still being quite small.
And it's obvious to me that plenty of parents lack a certain introspection that allows them to see how deficient their skills in this respect are, and just try to press their square peg modern adult life intuitions into the round hole of relationship management for kids. They may do some things admirably competently, getting their kids into bed at seven sharp, managing screen time perfectly, juggling a million play-dates, working full-time and regularly getting date-nights with the wife through a babysitter. But it's obvious that they mostly resent the intrusion into the individuality they are used to, they don't really teach their kids (if they even have more than one) how to manage the sibling relationship or any other close one, they maximize their childless time on every occasion and worst of all, the kids feel that and correctly identify it as rejection. At the other end parents go crazy indulging every whim because, again, they have never learned how to manage a close relationship in a reasonable way and are so deathly afraid that their kid might not end up liking them that they rather give up absolutely everything. Sometimes parents manage to combine those two, somehow.
So, what is one to do? The first, and most important is the constant satisfaction you can feel every time you have your kids around you. Especially if you're not used to that you may need to concentrate a bit on it. But it's always present, indescribable, and at least for me far beyond what I feel for anything I have ever created otherwise. The next, often near-unimaginable part is that you can actually enjoy things you don't through empathy. I certainly don't enjoy reading toddler books on my own. But I do enjoy watching my toddler, feeling what he feels, (trying to) think what he thinks, and through that even toddler books become great. For this, you need to let go of your individuality a bit however, which not everyone is willing to do. From there, advanced techniques are possible: Changing diapers can be enjoyable, by concentrating on how the baby feels better afterwards, and on the fact that it is a necessary for your children. Even the sleep can be, as you cuddle with your child and concentrate on how happy it is to be with you, on how happy you are that it exists, and waking up a few times in the night is a small price to pay for that. But again, if you do that you are literally re-modelling your entire mental structure and let go of the person you used to be to the degree that "dead" becomes an apt description for that person. As you see, even happiness itself can be a skill issue.
On the other side, the same way you need to teach your kids how to get and give space from and to each other, you need to set boundaries to not go crazy and lose your individuality entirely. Changing diapers is necessary; Making the third dinner because they suddenly say they don't want the first two dinner options you made is not. If they're hungry, they'll eat. You probably screwed up earlier by letting them snack too much and indulging them too often before, otherwise they wouldn't even get the idea that making a third dinner is a possibility. That behaviour is not even good for them, let alone for you.
Again, since you haven't been taught how to properly give up a part of your individuality in the first place, that means you also haven't been taught how stop at some point. I'd echo some other posters here that now with kids, I look back on my pre-parenthood self with cringe; I only really have become an adult after becoming a parent.
Also, not to mention, kids are also lots of fun as well. They just do so much random shit you don't expect, you can't help but feel good. But the fun really isn't the reason why you should have them.
This got quite long, and probably a bit meandering. The TL;DR is, I guess: Children are everything modern life isn't, and hence, it anti-prepares you for it. This is what I mean with "it's cultural"; Even if we gave everyone huge stacks of money for having kids, I'm unsure how much it will change for the better. Ultimately, those that really want them will get them anyway, and for those that don't, I'm not sure it's an improvement if they do. And in our world, the future belongs to those who show up, so evolution will sort it out longterm anyway. We'll just have to muddle through, and maybe try to teach our kids those skills so that they have an easier time.
Great response, captures the feeling I had but didn't want to write.
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