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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.
The lie isn't breaking down. A new lie is growing up, which is that the purpose of life is constant amusement. If human life has a purpose in any grand sense, that purpose must have applied to humans in all periods of history, and constant amusement at scale only became possible 40 or 50 years ago, and only for a narrow segment of the Earth's population. So people should really reconsider whether they are intended or evolved or whatever for nothing but tourism and concerts. So "it's not fun" is a pretty weak argument for tossing out the biggest of Chesterton's fences. I agree, though, that that's what people are doing.
But love is not "fun" either. I mean romantic love- the fretting and ups and downs and fights and giving control of your happiness to another person. But it's still worthwhile, and possibly more worthwhile than most amusements. In that sense, having kids is kinda like romantic love- worthwhile in a bigger way than fun.
I had a marriage proposal rejected once, and though we don't talk anymore, I'm pretty sure the main reason was my stated goal of never having children. Later I married someone else, and we fought for years about having kids, because I was adamant that having children was contrary to the will of God (the goal of life is either to serve God or be happy, the vast majority of people do neither, therefore you are probably condemning your kids to earthly unhappiness or eternal damnation. Probably both). I still don't have a convincing reply to this dilemma, but I also note that my chief goal in life at that time was clearing all the vaults in Fallout 3, so my true motives may not have been entirely theological, but the point is that my "I don't want kids" cred is legit.
I eventually caved because my wife was so annoying about it, and we had a kid.
I hated my own kid so much that I spent a while desperately trying to unearth evidence of infidelity on my wife's part so that I could abandon my wife and kid with a clear conscience (remember, my cred is legit). I might have changed 2 diapers (ever- my cred is legit), so I don't even have that to complain about, but my kid screamed all the time, and my wife basically opted out of marriage for like a year and half because she was a mother now. Being home with my kid and de facto ex wife made me bitterly regret every choice that had led me to that path. My kid also hated me. It was breast-fed for years, so I could not provide anything it wanted. It would only sleep with my wife. I just went around raging all the time. All in all, it was absolutely the worst years of my life. And worst of all, there was no evidence of infidelity.
Then it turned two. It could eat crackers, which I could provide. It could go on little walks to look for ladybugs. You could do the Louis CK thing at the grocery store (not that thing) and say "Look! A watermelon!" and know you had just expanded the kid's mind. You could push it down the slide and be a big hero. Even weirder was the first time the kid knew something I didn't, which was only "where the hammer is," but was a qualitative shift in the relation. It was becoming a full human. It could read. It could be taught math. It made jokes. Just to be present while this kid did anything at all was a gift from God or the universe or luck or whatever. I built my life around reading stories to it every night.
Moreover, I was also becoming a full human. A life spent playing Fallout and eating pizza is, if not a waste, merely the life of an animal. Cattle look for food and scratch itches and avoid pain, which is all I had been doing up to that point. I justified my life by telling myself I was working out and learning music and studying philosophy, and I really was doing all those things a little, but mainly I was playing Fallout. Or KOTOR. Or Arkham Asylum. All the other perfunctory efforts were somewhere on the line between cope and delusion. With the kid I had to reduce that and think about someone else basically all the time, but also admit that I had basically been thinking only about myself all the time. Just as it's hard to explain the value of education to an uneducated person without sounding like a smug tool, it's hard to explain the value of abandoning selfishness to someone who hasn't had it forced upon them. But I would say that I wasn't really an adult until 4 or 5 years into parenthood. (That may be normal, but it's abnormal for that to come at 35 instead of 23)
It wasn't an instant switch being flipped- it was gradual, but love for this kid grew to the point that I only agreed to have a second kid because I knew it would occupy all my wife's time and I would be able to spend even more time with my first kid. Not a great reason, but better than what had convinced me the first time. With the second kid, I knew what to expect and my wife had also grown a lot, and so it was much better, and rather than split the family into factions like I had hoped, everyone drew together, because the first kid also got to watch this baby develop into a full human and the new baby became part of all of our development.
Nowadays, if my kids died in an accident or something, it's a coin toss on whether I'd literally kill myself, because it's not at all clear what the point of living would be without them. I guess I could start over. But once you have kids that you like (not love- everyone "loves" their kids), nothing else is comparable. There is no Fallout or restaurant or vacation that could ever do anything other than remind you that this would be better if your kids were here. So in this sense, saying "kids are gross" is like saying "girls are gross" -only someone who has never experienced a good one would say that. The difference is that "girls are gross" expires on a timer (age), but "kids are gross" only expires on a trigger (getting to know your kids). Pull the trigger.
Finally, my kids are statistical outliers. They are intelligent, but also agreeable and social. Through my extreme weirdness, they have been educated and disciplined far above the standards of the age. I'm not a huge Jordan Peterson fan, but his advice to not allow your kids to do things that make you dislike them seems to have really paid off for my family. This skews my perception of the entire issue. Maybe your kids will be terrors. Certainly, most kids I meet are disliked by their parents and other adults, but in most cases it's the parents' fault for letting the kid get like that- with enough attention and self-discipline (of your self), you can usually discipline your kids into people that you, and everyone else, want to be around.
So you're right but everyone else, but wrong about yourself. Have some kids.
Absolutely love this comment. Agreed on almost all counts, though I agreed to subsequent kids because I liked their predecessors so much (whie dreading the lack of bandwidth for each one it would entail).
Have things improved with your wife post-kid-2?
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