to form babby, or not to form babby

I feel a deep kinship to Nude Spock, but his thread did not gain traction. And while the topic has been discussed severally among various and several threads, it's a huge subject that deserves its own thread.

The central question is, if your having kids, or not having kids, was the result of a definite decision, WHY did you make that decision? Evaluating that decision in retrospect is secondary, but welcome.

I really hope a good discussion transpires this time. The subject interests me greatly, and we ilxors, being mostly 30s and up these days, should find the topic relevant.

It was a definite decision, although we'd been together for ages and sort of knew it was a possibility (i.e. neither of us had ruled it out) although had been 'ambivalent' as in open to considering either option when younger.
I can't remember the reasons now as parenting has frazzled my brane...

I remember thinking that the huge list of 'cons' were all things you know are going to be tangibly bad (less money, less sleep, less freedom) although I admit I did not grasp the extent of sleeplessness and how fucking ruinous it is (or the cost of childcare). But the main 'pro' is this abstract 'amazing love you can't imagine' (I paraphrase). So already it's a bad gamble if you're risk-averse.

In the end it came down to
- having reached a point in life where I didn't feel like I'd miss out on loads by taking time out to do it
- feeling with relative confidence like it might be something I'd like to do (even though I'd not been particularly maternal or enjoying hanging out with babbies)
- that otherwise I'd have to make a definite decision *not* to and I didn't feel I wanted to commit to that - would rather give it a go and see what happens.

Husband also thinks some of it was
- able to relive childhood to some extent (seeing the world through a child's eyes)
- vague notion of continuing some part of you after you die

There is lots I did not know. Lots. I am a different person now. But would make the same decision again (NB this may change after teenage years)

would rather give it a go and see what happens.

I feel this (being childless), as momentous a decision that it is

There is lots I did not know. Lots

I hear this all time, and it's wildly compelling

thanks for a terrific answer, kinder

For me, I hoped my kids would do things better than me or previous generations. I think that's mostly working out.

we were bored, it was time

wow tired meme

always wanted a gang of kids, always loved em, always was and still am good with them, but that first 'always' covered a very adolescent period until my first serious relationship (well, 'serious') which ran from the age of 18 through 24

she, quite fuckin rightly, didnt want to talk about kids at all, and we were so young (jesus, we were so young) that even being as settled as we were back then probably freaked her out at stages throughout.

so it kind of sat there as we learned how to be whatever we we on our way to being, accepted by me that we'd have kids and accepted by her that we wouldn't, until we verbalised that somewhere in year five and i surprised us both by being "fine, im ok with that".

she never believed that, and horsed me out the door a year-odd later, quoting that as much as any other reason.

i approached the topic a lot more maturely with the next serious relationship, because a) dont be that guy b) i realised that i *was* fine with it and c) talk early, talk often and d) future plans at 18 can be anything, as you head into your thirties there's an awful lot more of "hmm ive tried x and ive tried y and id like to continue doing both and certainly i dont want to give up on the options of a lot of z too"

current reasons for not having had kids yet- im irish, married and straight, nobody ever asks the question any other way, are offered in a various set of ways depending on who is asking and how theyre asking

- mind your fuckin business and manners
- the environment (if they're the type who yknow go on a bit at me from a height about anything, especially if they have kids
- housing forbade it
- we werent giving up travel for it

careers didnt come into it, tho tbh what you would have to give up to afford children (knock on- housing, schooling, creche fees etc) rather reverses the angle as far as i can see- to have the family life i see people having in ireland, you have to pack a career and the most efficient, joyless possible progression in it into the seven years between graduation and ooops-no-thirty-year-mortgage, and im not even touching on fertility

if thats not enough, i see plenty of people hating it, and bad at it.

and i came from a shit set meself, and cleaning that up took til i was *checks watch* fuck is that the year, so yeah ive handled the teenagers i really don't feel like going back to the earlier stages now

her reasons- no interest, travel, oportunities forgone in the type of life we still plan to have

I think both of us felt that it was part of the meaning of life for us, so in that regard it was almost an act of faith (in a secular sort of sense) and we never really thought to make pro/con lists.

Having kids vs not having kids is probably one of the sharpest life path divergences there is, so it's difficult to even analogize to other A vs B decisions (which college to attend, which job to accept, even which person to marry).

wow tired meme

― Swilling Ambergris, Esq. (silby), Wednesday, February 12, 2020 6:19 PM (five minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

wow seriously?

I think if your gut tells you not to do it, it might make sense to listen to it, or at very least think hard about why that is.

i fancy having kids, it's a completely arational impulse on my behalf, which i didn't have as a younger man. gf wants kids and that also influences my thinking.

however a 2 bedroom apartment and childcare costs in this city would be beyond us - I'm not entirely sure they ever will be within our reach, as things only get more expensive. i'm amenable to moving to a smaller, cheaper, more boring etc. city in the province but the gf is from here and has lived here her whole life and is extremely reluctant to do that so i'll not push that

it was part of the meaning of life

yes, this is it.

partly as a reaction to circumstances in my life, I've developed a philosophy such that life is something i'm, hiking through, packed lightly, or probably more a gauntlet i must complete and i'm trying to find the easiest path. therefore i'm not trying not to become to invested and entrenched in life (i have not "figured out how to live," to understate it greatly.

When you have kids you are ALL IN, obv

ive also come around to something possibly related as a wider philosophy, existential transience or w/e

i dont think too many people have kids "because my line must continue"/"the people i generate will be even more awesome than i am" but if even like 2% are thinking along those lines in happy to be a counterweight for just one of em

deems, have you experienced and had to deal with the stages of grief, not having kids, and having wanted to, as you say?

have you had the impulse that you wanted to somehow right the wrong that your parents did to you and your siblings (and themselves?). this is fairly common iirc

xp

insert comma after "stages of"

i think it was part of my adolescent drive, yes, that would be fair to say

idk if/what/where grief might come into it, tho

the only thing that stabs me in the heart is when i see dads with their daughters

if thats not enough, i see plenty of people hating it, and bad at it

jk btw
the early years are madness tho

i lived with and helped out a lot when my younger brother had his daughter

idk if that took any edge off such regrets, i think it did tbh

xp i feel sure, as i do with most problems, that the top 97% of ilxors are almost impossible to imagine as anything other than living solutions and not contributors to harm in the hurts of the world, and tbh i feel surer again about any kids they raise tbh

My wife and I had our first child last year, we had both independently always wanted kids. My feeling on it has always been irrational - never considered the finances or how good a parent I'd be, it was always "I'll have kids and then figure everything out". However my wife and I met each other late enough (mid/late-thirties) that we'd already both accepted we probably wouldn't have kids, neither of us wanting to raise kids without a good partner. We got pretty lucky to still be able to have a child at our ages and there's zero regrets so far but I feel sapped of energy a lot and imagine I'd be able to handle it better if I was ten years younger

Raising kids entails accepting a shitload of responsibility and putting out endless amounts of emotional energy in the form of love and patience, so it is my settled opinion that the decision to have kids should never be wholly rational, because rationality by itself will never get you through the whole arduous process, nor should the decision be wholly emotional, because love by itself can't do the whole job either. But if one side of the equation needs to be privileged over the other, then the loving & emotional side is easily the most critical piece. /old_fart_spouting_platitudes

I have always had absolutely 0 desire to be pregnant or give birth. It's all terrible. Other people feel differently. If a baby magically appeared and we lived in a society that provided basic support...maybe. We are both good with kids and I watch some of my friends' kids sometimes but I am thrilled when we are alone again.

Anyway as I’ve often said on this board, I don’t want kids, don’t know what they’re for, don’t know why other people have kids, and don’t even necessarily feel like it’s okay that I don’t understand and think parents should explain themselves better. Kids, of course, are wonderful.

Like if I had my own kid I would love it more than all other children, which isn’t fair at all.

well everyone else's kid usually sucks a lot more than your own. it's the law.

simply put i would not wish my life experience on anyone, born or unborn. tbh

Everyone deserves to have parent(s) who love them more than all others, of course it's fair.

I think the proprietary interest granted to birth parents of their children is inhumane.

At the very least all children should be granted a guardian ad litem from birth and the right to emancipation starting around age 5

do or don't you see that in nature, among non-homo sapiens xp

Child liberation requires tearing down the presumed naturalism of the birth-parent-family.

or to put it another way why am I not just as entitled to raise your kids as you are?

as an only child with no nearby cousins, growing up i had essentially no experience with babbies. never really occurred to me to have or want one. i'm pretty calm and good at explaining things, so as an adult my interactions with kids have been totally fine, but of course i could walk away if things went awry.

at one point i convinced/fooled myself into thinking that having a kid would probably be okay, and worthwhile, if i also had a good partner. neither of those things worked out.

mostly the idea of being constantly and endlessly 'on' and responsible scared the shit out of me, which is lame, but so it goes. i sleep like hell and have trouble leaving the house as it is.

i might have enjoyed being a part of many of the childhood activities, but i can't say i regret being childless at all. it will be a deep bummer when i'm dying in the hospital and no one visits or cares about me, but that doesn't seem like a great reason to have kids.

I am very much into that South Carolina filed bill that if the state bans abortion after 6 weeks then the state must compensate the woman the going surrogacy rate and provide living and healthcare expenses and under certain conditions lifetime healthcare expenses to the mother and child, + start a college education fund for the child.

Kids are wonderful, but I never want to be a parent. The big reasons are probably a lot to do with my own experience as a child: child of a bitter divorce, absent father, a very economically unstable home. I myself was a terrible, angry and violent teenager, and know that I couldn't deal with my own teenage self as a parent. I am amazed every day that my Mum put up with me, but I know being a single mother of 3 still wore her down, as wonderful as she was to us. I know people change, and learn lessons from previous generations, etc. but I genuinely fear that I would end up being a parent/husband like my Dad was due to some traits subconsciously handed down, and the general human thing of eventually becoming your parents. I wouldn't want to inflict that onto a child, or my partner. So there's that.

But there's also the fact that, growing up poor, I wasn't used to having money and freedom or stable relationships, and now I have all of those things, I see a child as something that could very quickly take that away from me. I value the joy that freedom brings me too much to risk it. I understand that people say there are joys associated with having children that are unmatched by anything else, and believe it, but I'm quite content with the joys I get from my partner, my friends, my work, literature, music, just being a human in the world. The potential joy of having a child isn't work the almost certainty of pain, anger and frustration that would also come along with it. The environmental impact of having a child is something that resonates with me a lot too. I don't know if we're at a place yet where we can have a mainstream discussion about the morality of bringing another first-world consumer into a world that is being ravaged by global warming and other environmental impacts overconsumption, but I think for the sake of the world and your potential child, it's something worth seriously considering.

xxp i have never regretted not having kids. life becomes insipid but i'm fine with it

yeah there's also the fact that having kid(s) would have been entirely economically unfeasible until the very end of my/our spawning period

47, married for 17 years, no kids, not having any.

Not sure we ever *made* a decision. I'm pretty passive and my wife never had a strong biological drive for children. In fact, pregnancy invokes some serious body horror feelings with her. We never got beyond general discussions.

Tbrr, I have a bunch of unresolved issues relating to my upbringing and felt like not visiting that shit on kids. At least that is the justification I use for the "decision." I just didn't feel like I would be a great parent.

These days I do feel slightly regretful at particular moments, but these are very passing thoughts based mostly around anxiety of loneliness in old age. But that ain't a great reason to have kids, either.

On the other hand, my wife and I are doing well financially, travel, are about ready to pay off our house, etc., none of which would have happened with kids.

people who do not love or care for their own offspring are even less likely to love or care for any other children under any circumstances, so the problem is not primarily located in the imposition of the parental custody upon the child, but in the shortcoming of parent qua parent. society does recognize the existence of failed parenting, and the need for other arrangements for the kids, but the system for this is chronically under-resourced.

all children should be granted a guardian ad litem from birth and the right to emancipation starting around age 5

this may vent your spleen, but apart from that I hope you know it is pure nonsense

idk anarchism for children!

I would love to raise 1/16th or so of a child

i am sure we could set up some meetings with some choice private equity funds to get this done.

lol

haven't seen adoption mentioned here. my two best friends were adopted, as well as my god daughter. I don’t think people need for a child to be genetically theirs to experience parental love

my parents are such dicks. I once brought up possibly being more willing to adopt older kids than having a baby of my own and they were so against it because of whatever stigma they have in their minds of not raising your own pure baby from scratch.

I don’t think people need for a child to be genetically theirs to experience parental love

as for loving an adopted kid, the love part doesn't need any genetic component. but the genetic link is actually kind of useful in its own way, in that many personality traits tend to run in families, at least as much as physical genetic dispositions do, so the chances are that you will recognize how your child is developing more easily, whether it's seeing a bit of yourself or some trait of a parent, grandparent or sibling. it's not entirely necessary, but it does help ease the child into the family.

I'm not sure I believe that the genetic link means much tbh. I don't have children of my own, and I didn't understand parental love until my god daughter was born (she was adopted from birth). But now I feel like I really get it, and it has nothing to do with a genetic relationship, for her parents or for me

many many things i don't get about having kids, but near the top is naming them You Jr. or having their names all start with K or whatever

when i was little i knew a pair of fraternal twins, both boys, one of whom got the Jr. while the other was instantly branded second-best

There are many circumstantial reasons my being a parent is unlikely to ever happen, but a big one is that for most parents I know, considerations often seem to shrink (quite understandably) down to "fuck you we got ours", consciously or not. Also the notion that making more life is the highest achievement in / "point of" life drives me up the wall.

Doing things for your kid(s), instead of for yourself, does feel like the most important stuff you could ever do, though. I certainly understand how that might sound pretty dumb to non-parents.

having a kid is unethical, to the kid, for making it exist without consent*, i can give a pascal's-wager style argument to prove this but the margins of this post are too small to contain it

*unless you're religious or quasi-religious and have some kind of sophisticated understanding of the repayment of intergenerational existential debt, which, good luck with that

Doing things for your kid(s), instead of for yourself, does feel like the most important stuff you could ever do, though. I certainly understand how that might sound pretty dumb to non-parents.

hence "quite understandably" - I don't blame them. in general I treat parenthood like a particularly effective and widespread cult, one whose benefits can only be properly understood by its membership.

This month my daughter is turning 9, and due to various considerations and circumstances, she’s gonna get her first ever non-hand-me-down device (my old, loveworn iPad mini no longer holds a charge) and her first pet that’s hers (our cat passed last month, cancer) and these seem like such significant milestones to me, whereas in the absence of her, they would be quotidian events (a trip to the Apple Store, a trip to the humane shelter).

^^^ El Tomboto's posts

So are children for being special to you or for being their own person

Doing things for your kid(s), instead of for yourself, does feel like the most important stuff you could ever do, though. I certainly understand how that might sound pretty dumb to non-parents.

oh, this totally makes sense!

having a kid is unethical

ethics are a construct designed to improve life within a human society. when ethical constructs are pushed in the direction of absolutes, the results are always a reductio ad absurdum.

hence my asterisk

my parents are both good-hearted ppl but both deeply dysfunctional, terribly insecure and immature emotionally, and i've often though "wtf were they thinking, having kids". and i've often resented being born, as i suffer the terrible, endless psychic pain that follows having inherited these traits (not genetically, but by nurture/observation)

So are children for being special to you or for being their own person

― Swilling Ambergris, Esq. (silby), Wednesday, February 12, 2020 9:56 PM (six seconds ago) bookmarkflaglink

why are you acting like people acknowledging that their children add meaning to their lives is a gotcha

I love my kids unreservedly and have never regretted any aspect of parenthood, but I want to say that I respect and understand the reasons given here by people choosing not to have children. Specifically I would never feel threatened by someone making that choice, or think less of them either.

xp because ppl say it without acknowledging who pays for the meaning

biggest breakthrough we've had here is discovering, after 13 years, what topic can *finally* make silby act like a jerk

I’ve done it several times!!

silby's comments are fine

i kind of get what silby is saying though. Like the people who only do nice things for other people because it makes themselves feel good and it's a form of impression management.

I hate this part of asian culture because there is so much expectation and duty placed on the child to give back monetarily, in later caretaking and in success as an entitlement of their parents. It's so fucked up.

granted i have to quell the urge to nurture other people and place them first to my own detriment because that shit was ingrained in me and I hate it.

hadn't thought about the idea of 'impression management' before, makes sense

"But better off than both of them is the one who has never existed, who has never seen the evil activity that is done under the sun."

Ecclesiastes, getting down and dirty with it. But then, the Essenes and early Christians were all dead set against procreation. Jesus seems to have thrown in with that idea, too, but less explicitly than Ecclesiastes. Sophocles was known to have said something along those lines, too. The Catholics and Mormons have other ideas, obviously. You pays yer nickel and makes yer choice.

Everyone deserves to have parent(s) who love them more than all others, of course it's fair.

This is beautiful logic and a beautiful sentiment

xp i don't know that it would be better (to anyone) for anyone not to have existed, but it is most definitely the case that in the long run one person does the procreating, and the procreated does the existing, which is kind of dicey risk-assumption-wise.

Don't want kids, but would love to be an uncle. Unfortunately both my sisters didn't want kids either, and they're in their mid to late 40s. They have almost no maternal instinct. Now at least. Like my cats are cute as fuck and they just aren't enamored by them in the least (not equating kids to cats, but pets cuteness is tied into parenting instinct).

Totally feeling Tom's post about imbuing meaning to otherwise meaningless events. I do sometimes think it'd be so cool to mold a human from scratch and see the world through fresh eyes. But then I'll spend a day with my bff and his 3 young boys and I'm like yeah no, fuuuuuuuuuuuck that.

lol

His kids LOVE me. Partially cause I'm only around once or twice a year, and partially because our other best friend is a very cold, detached person who hates kids (though he is nice enough to the boys and shows affection in certain ways eg buying them stuff). But partially cause I do enjoy being around kids in short bursts and have no qualms with being goofy af with them.

I'm very happy with how my life is going. I enjoy my freedom. Why would I want to change it completely at this point. Compromising my freedom to accommodate my girlfriend's wants and needs is plenty for me and my selfishness.

Btw very interesting to read everyone's perspectives here

Matthew K's comment that everyone deserves to have parents who love them more than all others is so right imo

And my parents esp my mom are fucking saints. Never an iota of pressure from them on myself or my sisters about "so when are we gonna get some grandchildren??". They're great parents all around and I have zero complaints about my childhood. Which makes it bizarre that none of the 3 of us "kids" want kids of our own!

My sister has a kid and will likely have more; it would be cool to be a real uncle and influence them and whatnot but they're country people through and through thanks to my brother in law. Oh well.

To j’s thought experiment in ethics, I’d like to see the science on what nonexistent people would be most likely to choose, if they existed and had a choice

I mean we’ve all had to exist, by giving her life I’ve done nothing to my daughter that hasn’t been done to every other living thing

I’m sure if we go down this rabbit hole enough we’ll come out as vomit

I basically share j.'s view

It truly is a gift of life. If one doesn't want it, there are 6 million ways to return it.

no see I don't want to die, that's the whole point

if I were never born I wouldn't have to be here, not wanting to die

except for when I do want to die, which is hardly preferable!

I worry about how the next generation in my family will fare

I think it’s insulting to be told that I’m either unethical or quasi-religious with no room for argument. Especially when the razor is “well, did your babby ask to be existed” - just call me a breeder and fuck off, I’ll try to not bother you any more than necessary.

the key point is not the choice to exist but the negative value of the unchosen irremediably unhappy life; you could feel relatively confident that that won't be YOUR kid's lot and probabilistically maybe it won't be but if it is it'll still be their unhappy life rather than (notwithstanding your sympathetic misery lol) yours

tom, i think there is a possibly non-religious alternative, but on the scale on which these things are measured it seems suspiciously religious in its optimism; basically, if you think it is open to human beings to learn, in an effective way, how to make themselves happy (a la traditional views about knowledge of 'human nature'), then you have some reason to think that the little bastard won't be that bad off and if they are they have themselves to blame rather than you. depends on the limits of 'effective' for the human capacity to lead a good life tho.

xp but that is the case for everyone forever

yes that is why the proof is so good

but as i said, margins too small, etc

if people had bought into this argument at any point, it would have been impossible to ride the new harry potter roller coaster at universal studios orlando, so it’s bullshit. More future people having potentially happier lives dilutes and maybe even compensates for the suffering of life on the whole. It’s not religious to say there are more people living better lives today than ever before in history.

meager consolation for the ones who aren't, though!

I really have to resist the urge to fall back on a descriptivist retort to this as well. If VHEMT has such a strong case, why aren’t they selling more t-shirts?

don't know about this conversation, but I think people do good things for other people for altruistic reasons

you must be quasi-religious

I’m actually religious because I couldn’t come up with any other good ways of not wanting to die.

xps sure they do dan! sometimes. and generally parents love their children. but loving them and being able to do their existing for them are two different things.

tom, i agree that there is some obscurity about how this argument applies to questions about the reproduction of the species. but for most people the salient question is not how they are helping reproduce the species, but what their relation to their child is.

and if you actually are feeling indignant about the 'religious' remark, i think that a) a sincere faith of some kind that existence can be good for your children despite your inability to guarantee it (per the argument under discussion), whether through a divine providence, or some means of redemption (a la the traditional non-philosophical alternatives i mentioned above), just seems like the most normal thing to appeal to in order to bridge the problems with knowledge and risk involved. in other circumstances this is just as well called 'trust' or 'confidence' but given the structure of the issue it seems apt to recognize that the most credible versions of these for addressing the issue are religious in nature (which i do understand to mean, not credible, from many perspectives). nevertheless, b) people generally muddle into having kids and have a combination of self-serving and admirable motives which, if they are well-intentioned and competent, generally become more admirable as the kids are born and lovingly raised. all the argument does is identify a way in which the endeavor exposes the child to a certain kind of 'risk' (for reasons that aimless first alluded to, it's not obvious that the term even has a clear application here) which gives the prospective begetter a strong reason not to beget, IF they take seriously that the fundamental asymmetry involved creates an ethical hazard. presumably most parents are already acquainted with some perception of this, in their concern for their children; the argument just defines what might seem regrettable or guilty-feeling in that perception.

NB i want to clarify that as a Jew my religious reason for not wanting to die is not some expectation of the afterlife or whatever but just that I’m commanded to not want to die and that’s the only thing working for me.

silby I'm counting on you being on this message board for the rest of my life

Don’t worry babe I’ll never stop posting

I'd be willing to adopt you. But I might make you wear a panda costume.

ugh...that came off weird. I am not into furries.

lol

Yerac…thank u

i'll give you the option of a Mr. Met costume instead.

my wife and i made a babby who is now 20 months old

before the babby was made, we were both getting to the tipping point where we were undecided about whether or not to have kids (for the usual financial, lifestyle and/or oh jesus god we're probably going to live through global societal collapse aren't we reasons) also realising that if we didn't try now in our late 30s, we'd probably miss our shot

so we tried some babbymaking, with the support of some apps and stuff that helped us find the optimum timing for the attempts

we almost immediately hit the jackpot, to our surprise and alarm and delight and guilt that we'd managed it without really trying when some of our friends, who seemed to want kids so much more than we did, were not nearly so lucky

so for us it was kinda both a deliberate decision and also a bit of a coin flip that came out babby-side up

20 months on, bizarro jr is an endless source of fun and amazement and drudgery and frustration and, for me, an unstoppable firehose of feelings of love that frequently threaten to knock me clean off my feet

that firehose has also had the unexpected effect of blasting off some of the calcified feelings of self-loathing and self-doubt and fear and anxiety that have weighed me down for most of my adult life, to the extent that i'm now approaching a full year of being free of any kind of medication for anxiety and depression

(ironically the side-effect of being effexored to the hilt and thus being prevented from feeling the full spectrum of human emotions is that the feelings of love are even more acute now that i am raw-dogging reality once more)

being a parent has also made me closer to my parents than i have been in decades, i think - my mum has always been over-protective of me in a way that felt increasingly suffocating as i got older, and became almost unbearable once i really hit my stride in training for the depression olympics in my early 30s

now, in my daughter, she has a more appropriate outlet for that kind of parental affection, and i can see my daughter responding to it and i love seeing my mum and dad spending time with her

being a parent myself now, i think i can understand that instinct in my mum now more fully where before it was a source of anxiety and resentment for me

so yeah being a dad has has a genuinely transformative effect on my life - i feel like i understand myself better, and that i can head off some of my more self-destructive behaviours before they really set in, and living fully for someone else has given me a distinctly different perspective

basically what i'm saying is that parenthood cures depression, your reading this counts as medical advice so please venmo me $500

(btw i have no doubt that i will experience periods of depression again in my life - in fact i have during the last 20 months - but for now i feel like parenthood has genuinely rewired my brane at least a bit)

one more stray thought about babbymaking considerations: babbyraising is tiring and boring and repetitive and you become extremely grateful for any kind of help

my wife and i are super-lucky in that we have two sets of grandparents who are 1) relatively close by and 2) desperate to see their granddaughter as often as possible

we also have a childminder who looks after bizarro jr for at least a couple of days a week

it's entirely possible that i'd be much less mentally healthy if we didn't have that support network, and i think taking what support resources are available to you into account before deciding to have kids is probably very wise

thats a nice run of posts and i rate this babby at 9.6/10 with marks docked for littering

oh she's progressed to much more serious crimes since you met her, let me assure you

hant we all man, hant we all

my older baby will be 18 in a month and we are getting into Japanese cinema and trap together, like a friend I didn’t have to go find

My friend w the 3 boys has always been an anxious type and very shy (self medicated with weed, which made the shyness worse I think). I can see that having kids has helped assuage that to some degree. He's a terrific father and that's a huge part of his self identity now. I know he always felt like a stunted adolescent and so hitting traditional milestones like getting married and then having kids was very important to him.

This run of posts while heartwarming and nice has not made me feel any less weird about the concept that ppl have kids to provide meaning in / order to their lives which I personally continue to feel icky about as a concept (not to judge anyone itt!)

do people have kids in order to provide meaning or order in their lives? maybe they do, i dunno, but my life isn't any more or less meaningful than it was before, i just have a different perspective on it now

they definitely do (I am not accusing ppl itt of doing it but it is definitely A Thing)

Yes, heartwarming posts. I am glad when good people make new people.

we almost immediately hit the jackpot, to our surprise and alarm and delight and guilt that we'd managed it without really trying when some of our friends, who seemed to want kids so much more than we did, were not nearly so lucky

so for us it was kinda both a deliberate decision and also a bit of a coin flip that came out babby-side up

Yes, this about sums it up for me too.

BTW there are probably far more people you know going through/having conceived by IVF than you might expect. Easily a couple (of couples) if not more in each of my social circles.

yeah, same here - a couple of our friends are going to be trying for their second ivf baby soon and i think we know three or four other couples who conceived that way

I have a friend who is big into psychedelics who thinks our biological drive to create children is derived from the fact that we don't know what the meaning of life is nor are we particularly close to figuring it out. But if we keep on procreating, eventually, some generation will figure it out

My early 20s were a ton of fun, I had a very active social life and I didn't want it to end, in part because I wasn't particularly popular in school and didn't make a lot of friends in college, but all my little social groups converged and brought in a bunch of new cool people and I wound up being somehow at the center of it. Also I had my first real job and was living in rural Wisconsin in a house with 3 other guys paying $100 a month for rent so I had money. Anyway as cool as that was it was hard to shake the feeling that it was all temporary. When you're young you have this feeling like "I don't really have to figure things out yet" but once you hit 22 or 23 the writing on the wall gets a bit clearer. You know that people are gonna move away, they're gonna start families, they're gonna get sick of partying all the time, and one day you'll hit the bars and notice that the kids who were several grades below you in high school aren't even getting carded anymore. I mean I felt that myself, just like turning to my buddies and going "this is all kinda stupid isn't it?" You change as you get older. I had a lot of hobbies but I didn't ascribe a lot of meaning to them. Kids on the other hand, that gives your life meaning, something to work towards, something to really feel proud about. Like I have days at work where I'm really on my game and get a ton of stuff done but the pride doesn't really last the drive home. On the other hand my kid dressing himself or doing a great job brushing his teeth really does make me light up inside. Not to mention the fact that you get to be somebody's whole world. I know a lot of people here have mentioned the experience of loving something more than you ever thought possible but it's more than that, your kids NEED you and there's something beautiful in that. One thing I absolutely love is going to the day care and seeing my kids go bonkers when they notice me. Their lives won't always be so simple but as long as they're around my life will have meaning. I can be replaced at my job and I know at some point I'll be a distant memory to a lot of the people I considered really good friends but as long as your kids are around you matter to someone. Anyway this doesn't really answer the question but whatever. There's really no pragmatic reason to do it.

one more stray thought about babbymaking considerations: babbyraising is tiring and boring and repetitive and you become extremely grateful for any kind of help

yeah this is really otm, I know couples who have no family around and it seems miserable. once you have kids you really appreciate whatever time "off" you get. especially since kids do strain relationships - recently my wife lamented the fact that we communicate better over WhatsApp than in person, because when we're at home the kids are ALWAYS talking, always needing something, so you can't really talk much. your relationship becomes more functional. so, like, even getting to go out once a month.....it's a big deal

you're otm on the pride thing - i have a hard time being proud of myself for stuff i've done because i never feel like i've properly earned it and pride aways felt like unconscionable self-indulgence anyway, which is probably an entirely different thread in its own right

but obviously i've been happy for people before and thrilled for their various successes and such

but i've never been as proud of ANYTHING as much as i'm proud today that my 20-month-old daughter can count to 13, and that when i got her out of her cot this morning she said 'please daddy put lights on' which was close to her first-ever sentence and i'm sitting here at my desk a little verklempt thinking about it and i know that there'll be something else i'll be equally proud of her for tomorrow and the day after that and the day after that

What do the kids get out of it tho

a lot of PB&J sandwiches

the chance to choose to experience it for themselves at some point i guess

also trips to the swimming pool

I have been ilxing since 2005 and parenting since 2007. Of the various communities and quasi-communities I'm in, ilx is - by a wide margin - the one that is most hostile to / dismissive of / boggled by the topic of children and parenting. With a few exceptions (El Tomboto and man alive topmost among them).

So it's no surprise to see this sentiment for the nth time:

I don’t want kids, don’t know what they’re for, don’t know why other people have kids, and don’t even necessarily feel like it’s okay that I don’t understand and think parents should explain themselves better

The last time I addressed this I probably said something like: Everybody here loves some human-produced stuff (indeed, it's in the name of the site). You love music, you love film, you love books, you love people kicking or throwing some type of ball.

Now. Every record you've ever grooved to, every film you've ever enjoyed, every book you've ever read was made by a person or persons. Each of those persons was once a babby. And that babby had parents who - at least to some extent - decided or agreed or grudgingly acquiesced or just failed to prevent - said babby.

None of the of human-produced magic on this planet - whether it's a painting, a cassingle, a novel, a moment of tender compassion, a sporting victory, or an inspiring social-justice movement - could exist without the continued churning cycle of parents who form babbies, who themselves become parents who form babbies.

If you love music (and most of us do) you have to at least accept the fact that without parents and babbies there wouldn't be any of it. You don't need to want to be a parent. In fact, if you don't want to become a parent, please don't! But you can leave it to those who do want to.

More to say on this but I can't get it down below essay-length, sorry.

having a kid is unethical, to the kid, for making it exist without consent*, i can give a pascal's-wager style argument to prove this but the margins of this post are too small to contain it

I don't get this, even in deontological terms. Science/probability aside, a non-existent unborn human cannot consent or deny consent to anything, nor do I see how. The human right to give or deny consent to things that are done with one's body can only be acquired subsequent to actually becoming human. How can someone have a retroactive right to require consent for things that were done before they were born, that resulted in the human birth that allows them to have the right in the first place?

*nor do I see how they have a right to do so

YMP that reads to me like an argument that people are valuable but let’s just say I accept that as stipulated. What I want to know is what good is it to a baby to be born?

In my case it has merely saddled me with a huge ordeal which within another 6 decades will be of no further consequence, which I’ve been having panic attacks about for 20+ years.

Maybe ILX is just a front for /r/childfree.

As you can see, I don't have anything intelligent to add. I'm at a point where my wife and I are actively talking about having a kid (we're both only children, so anything more than one is beyond our ken) but given our current financial prognosis it seems mildly irresponsible. Then again, fuck stories like this one and the high rolling motherfuckers who make them possible in the first place:

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/feb/05/pregnancy-vermont-paid-parental-leave-abortion-difficult-decision

the universe can't experience itself subjectively in four dimensions unless it creates life, obv - you're doing the machine elves a favour by being conscripted into birth

this is canon

All is headcanon anyway tbh.

the birth canal is vagcannon iirc

https://pbs.twimg.com/profile_images/1145661889889931264/MQ2NtxYn_400x400.jpg

I'm 45, my wife and I have been together since 1994 and got married in 2001. We always kind of wanted kids, and started deliberately trying after a few years of marriage. It didn't work out, and we went through ten years of various fertility treatments before stopping short of IVF because we both felt there was something structurally wrong and it would be a incredibly expensive failure.

After we stopped pursuing medical interventions, we spent about a year pondering if we really wanted kids after all. We had two couple friends - one with (at that time) 2 young kids, and another who were intenionally childless art professors. I don't know what exactly made us pick sides, but we went with the chaos and terror of kids over the ability to travel and sleep in and do basically whatever we wanted whenever we wanted - which I miss dearly at times but don't think would have been good over the remainder of my life.

We went through an agency, were picked by a birth mother, and adopted our son at birth - we were in the hospital when he was born and took him home with us. The first year was kind of a blur, as adapting to a new baby schedule at age 40 after years of very little responsibility to anyone else was very hard and my depression amped up pretty good - I emphatically do NOT recommend having kids to fix your depression as I spent a lot of time thinking about how much of my life I had wasted because what did I do with all the free time I used to have? How could I have been so lazy / dumb / shiftless before? And when would I ever have time on my own again?

He's five now and is an actual person with opinions and preferences and habits and quirks. It's still exhausting, but in a different way - like constantly arguing about how shit that they don't want to do needs to get done, often the same things EVERY FUCKING DAY OVER AND OVER, and he's smart and coherent enough to argue and lawyer his way around things in a way that is both endearing and maddening.

As for adoption, I almost never consider that he doesn't share any of our DNA - he's our son, but he grew inside someone else and he talks casually about things like "when I was inside XXX's tummy". He looks a lot more like me than my sister's kids look like her or her husband, and people often have severe cognitive dissonance when they find out he's adopted. We're always questioning nature vs. nurture and it's really hard to tell what's what - he does and says a lot things the way I do, does and says other things that his mother does, and does and says things neither of us do and I can't tell what came from where.

Overall I'm very glad we did it - my life is really different now but I don't know what it would have been without him. I'm more social and outgoing and likely to talk to people than before, as carrying an adorable baby around strapped to your chest causes people to approach and talk to you and you also can now bullshit with other parents easily. I'm closer to my parents and inlaws now (including physically - we moved back to our home state for jobs that happen to be much closer to where they all live). He's smart and funny and loves music and Legos and drawing and other stuff that all comes straight from me, and he's also a lot of work and some days it's unbelievably hard. He's got a half-sibling (a few actually, but only one we're in regular contact with) who he sees once in a while when we visit the birth family, and at some point there is bound to be a lot of big questions and feelings about adoption and why his birth mom kept his younger brother but didn't keep him and I'm not sure how we're going to deal with it but it's all he's ever known so at least it won't be a shock to him. Everyone has their shit to deal with, and this will be his and hopefully we can prepare him for that.

As an aside, his birth mother is 25 now and is incredibly pro-choice and I love it - she had two babies, adopted one and kept one, and is very quick to tell people that it was her decision and to force anyone into doing what she did is unconscionable.

Of the various communities and quasi-communities I'm in, ilx is - by a wide margin - the one that is most hostile to / dismissive of / boggled by the topic of children and parenting.

It's a recurring phenomenon in the Guardian comments section too. Every time they publish an article touching on the topic of procreation, it's like an alarm goes off at the Antinatalism HQ.

What I want to know is what good is it to a baby to be born?

― Swilling Ambergris, Esq. (silby), Thursday, February 13, 2020 8:58 AM (sixteen minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

In my case

If I'm understanding you correctly via posts prior to these, you're accusing parents of being selfish. But you're viewing bringing a human life j to the world from a selfish angle too. You personally are unhappy and resentful for being brought into the universe "against your will" and so cast aspersions on everyone who brings anyone into it too. You're ignoring all the positive outcomes of the process due to your negative outcome.

I emphatically do NOT recommend having kids to fix your depression

yeah uh let me be clear that i was not being serious about that, please gentle reader do not try to spwan your way to better mental health

great post tho joygoat, thx

https://i.ytimg.com/vi/h5-0wgrWB9g/maxresdefault.jpg

I don’t care about outcomes really I’m not a consequentialist.

formed babby because I needed someone to go to Disneyland with

silby -

What I want to know is what good is it to a baby to be born?

Perhaps it will strike you as another non-answer but I think Tombot's post is fucking OTM:

by giving her life I’ve done nothing to my daughter that hasn’t been done to every other living thing

Right. A badger, or otter, or a gnat exists. There aren't like gnat parents agonizing over whether they were ready, or whether it was environmentally justifiable, or whether it would cut into their time for gnat brunches and gnat nightclubbing or whatever. The only difference with humans is that we can talk about it with one another and make it complicated and weird. Otters (or whatever) don't miss the brunches they're not getting to enjoy; they understand they're in a species that has a biological drive to make more otters.

My point remains that the sort of magic that we all claim to like (a great song coming on the radio, a really good glass of whiskey, a transcendent acid trip, a joke with old friends) is the result of billions of tiny little decisions that include people deciding to become parents and raising children. Even shitty parenting decisions can produce great art (cf. Philip Larkin). So even non-parents could spare a little gratitude for the people who decide to do it and try to do it well.

Now, I fully realize that the same thing could be said of all BAD art and all evil actions. That's part of why I can't get my thoughts under essay length.

ymp dropping booming posts itt

a while back my kids (5 & nearly 3) were wrestling on the bed, as they often do, and the older one was really irritating his little sister, like covering her mouth and saying things like "You have no mouth!! I don't know how you're going to eat!!". she was wearing a pig puppet on her hand at this time. suddenly she yells "OINK!!!" and smacks him across the face with the puppet. it made him cry but it also made me laugh so hard that it pretty much made the whole endeavor worth it.

I’m not complaining about people raising children, I don’t think? I don’t even necessarily think it’s bad that, at large, humans continue to have children. What I don’t get is being a specific person (and this is not a putative immoral imperative I’m trying to sketch out mind you) and looking around at all the other people on earth and…I don’t know! What’s the leap?! What is not sufficient about all other humans, including children, that you personally are compelled to bring one into being, at great moral hazard (as I think j. has articulated better than I could)?

formed babby because I needed someone to go to Disneyland with

Go to Disneyland with kids and you'll be furious at the single childless adults taking up space on the rides and adding to the queuing time.

oh I will :)

unless it's Alfred cuz I assume he would offer me a negroni as recompense, like a gentleman

Fuck you I’ll go to Disneyland alone and swear and get told off by a monorail employee if I want

tl; dr: My wife and I had kids because we thought/hoped that the kids we made could add more magic to the world.

More gentleness, more art, more laughter, more fun. More compassion, more empathy, more kindness.

Further, if people "like us" don't do it, then people "not like us" win. And rest assured, they want to.

Personally I want there a larger proportion of kids parented by people who value kindness, tolerance, inclusion, creativity, empathy, and sustainability. At the same time, I want there to be a smaller proportion of kids parented by people who are driven by racism, sexism, greed, xenophobia, etc.

Is any of that at all helpful for the non-understanders?

xp thanks biz

"Other animals do it" doesn't strike me as a great argument. Non-human animals do lots of things I don't consider socially acceptable or helpful.

My wife and I had kids because we thought/hoped that the kids we made could add more magic to the world.

More gentleness, more art, more laughter, more fun. More compassion, more empathy, more kindness.

This I can get behind.

Further, if people "like us" don't do it, then people "not like us" win. And rest assured, they want to.

This....what?

That’s a very instrumental attitude towards your own human children! xps

Fuck you I’ll go to Disneyland alone and swear and get told off by a monorail employee if I want

Ha! I'm still angry at the German guy who took up four teacups and filmed himself on an i-pad the whole ride

ymp's argument is basically the one my wife made when i was more unsure than her about having kids and i found it persuasive

My dilemma, centrally, is that I don’t think people are for anything, and yet I don’t know what people are having children for, and when they tell me, they sound like bad reasons!!

arg

I want there *to be* a larger proportion of kids parented by people who value kindness, tolerance, inclusion, creativity, empathy, and sustainability.

Right, I think I was just thrown off by the framing of it as some kind of child-rearing war between opposing forces.

Simon - I am not saying "other animals do it" = "so should we."

In context it's just riffing off Tomboto's "by giving her life I’ve done nothing to my daughter that hasn’t been done to every other living thing."

My dilemma, centrally, is that I don’t think people are for anything, and yet I don’t know what people are having children for, and when they tell me, they sound like bad reasons!!

the joy and terror of being a person is that people are for whatever they choose to be for - if they decide that making more people is one of the things that they're for then you're not obligated to agree with or understand their reasons

i don't understand why people like sport or eat mushrooms but i've made my peace with it

Otters (or whatever) don't miss the brunches they're not getting to enjoy; they understand they're in a species that has a biological drive to make more otters.

I think being broadly against all humans procreating is silly (and ultimately pointless), but invoking other species seems like a bad move. There are animal species that have multiple children and then kill the weakest, etc etc. I don't know otter society too well, but there are def animals that, should there only be enough brunch for one, will let their kids die.

i don't understand why people … eat mushrooms

FP'd.

to open third eye iirc

i mean how else would i meet the machine elves

In context it's just riffing off Tomboto's "by giving her life I’ve done nothing to my daughter that hasn’t been done to every other living thing."

― beelzebubbly (Ye Mad Puffin), Thursday, 13 February 2020 16:44 (two minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

in no way do i want to get involved in what has become "having kids, classic or dud?" but id point out that tombot wasn't responsible for doing it to every other living creature so i dont see this huge point tbh

as far as we know....

He's got a half-sibling (a few actually, but only one we're in regular contact with) who he sees once in a while when we visit the birth family, and at some point there is bound to be a lot of big questions and feelings about adoption and why his birth mom kept his younger brother but didn't keep him and I'm not sure how we're going to deal with it but it's all he's ever known so at least it won't be a shock to him

surely there’s stupid swill re child consent that involves, “hey we just put some cells in the same place, what they do is their biz— and if they want to dock on shore, seems rude to say no, but that’s up to the dock owner.”

See above; not saying other animals' behavior should be a model for our own.

Merely, if calling another being into existence (by forming babby) is a crime, then the guilt is pretty widespread.

Nonhuman animals mostly aren’t moral subjects, imo. I’m a chauvinist in this regard.

https://external-content.duckduckgo.com/iu/?u=https%3A%2F%2Fd1nao0k9edgivc.cloudfront.net%2Fwp-content%2Fuploads%2F2012%2F07%2FDark-judges-spread.jpg&f=1&nofb=1

silby: I don't know what humans were ORIGINALLY "for," and I don't think anyone does.

But, given that humans exist already, what are they "for" now? Dunno but I know that they have made some pretty good funk records, post-impressionist paintings, and high modernist novels. They're also pretty good at making video games, vibrating sex toys, and sushi.

So if I like all those things (and I do!) then it follows that I should endorse continued human existence. And - by extension - I endorse parenting, childhood, and arts education.

As for all other human endeavors (business, law, war, aquaculture, badminton, mathematics), well. I don't know what those are for but maybe they help form the basis of a world economy that allowed people to purchase Marvin Gaye records (among other laudable things).

qed: if you hate babies you also hate Marvin Gaye

baby: dont you do it

i cannot speak to the purpose of babby outside of an attempt to obtain some kind of meaning in existence generally, and feel most other reasons are imagined, performative, or desperate. i also realize “some kind of meaning” itself may sound imagined or performative or desperate.

a decision to form babby in today’s world should involve incredibly broad acceptance of moral responsibility for its emotional and social health, and its general welfare, and all of our general welfare.

For “reasons,” i think bringing more than replacement-level kids into the world is inappropriate, but i am totally aware that quantitative “judgment” is practically arbitrary. given our family position and good fortune so far, we’re at societal norms, but i figure there is practically no fair moral merit to quantitative judgment from 0 to the middle of the curve imo, regardless my opinions of same.

i think just liking and wanting a baby is fine tbh

man they can be utter magic.

confession: i have a three month old on my knee right now

reviewing my platitudinous bs, i must add that for me, i wanted to share world with babby. aaaand, i loved sharing world and experiences with babby and toddler and kiddo to about 10y/o beyond even my imagjnation. and since then it’s been v good, often stressful as hell as they really start to impose their own wills.

What is not sufficient about all other humans, including children, that you personally are compelled to bring one into being

Feel you on this one, this is thought I had back when I was having internal debate on whether I wanted kids. There's more than enough ppl already.

Further, if people "like us" don't do it, then people "not like us" win. And rest assured, they want to.

And this was my response to myself in that internal debate!

well, moreso the rest of that post than that specific line

but I also then think wtf do I care about the future of humanity, I'll be dead soon anyway, and in 4 billion years max the planet will be toast. cheers!

NB I don’t think there’s “more than enough people” per se in some Malthusian sense (and I don’t think you do either)

For “reasons,” i think bringing more than replacement-level kids into the world is inappropriate

totally read this initially in a sabermetric above replacement sense. of course my kids are above replacement value.

(you're right, I don't. Totally boggles my mind when I see traffic jam stretching to the horizon and think omg all of this material to make cars was harvested from the Earth, and this is just one tiny fraction of all the cars ever produced and then there's ships and planes and buildings and boxes of cereal and how is that possible??? so that's as close to Malthusian as I get)

that argument that a reasonable couple with good genes needs to have a baby to even out the babies being had by nutso evangelical racist bigots is definitely a thing. People are very into thinking about bébé polling numbers. i also do not like this thought process.

ya I'm more in favor of just murdering the offspring of racist bigots

I don't think there were only two options.

i dont like the “even out bad ppl babbies” thing, it’s like what, reverse euthanasia?

totally read this initially in a sabermetric above replacement sense. of course my kids are above replacement value.

omg if i have a kid it's WAR will be triple digits, guaranteed

wasn't trying to be snippy to you, Yerac

trump: “you are not the baddies, now go make some babbies.”

oh I know! I don't take anything personally here. I barely know who is talking to whom since I am all sloppy with using xposts.

My wife has been certain since she was a kid that she didn't want babby, we're 38 now and it's definitely not on the table. Having kids always seemed slightly unimaginable to me, since I'm an only child and was not around younger kids or babies almost ever. I never really wanted kids, but used to think it was inevitable and that I'd probably do it eventually if my partner wanted to.

Our life is very good, and we even have a decent amount of friends our age who don't have kids. There's an increasing number that do, of course, and the kids are great but it's also so nice to go home to a quiet house. I do sometimes wonder if I'll wake up in 10 or 15 years and feel like my life lacks meaning (like, will it seem silly to still be spending my free time slow improving at music?), but there's only one way to find out. Also I kinda think not? We're pretty good at appreciating small pleasures (like quiet, conversation, cooking, etc) and I think parenting would be disastrous for our relationship.

I do have one friend who definitely subscribes to the "cool + smart people need to have more kids, to balance out the dumb parents!" philosophy.

people just act so offended that you don't want to produce a baby that they imagine would be cute with good hair and can do a reasonable amount of math.

I do sometimes wonder if I'll wake up in 10 or 15 years and feel like my life lacks meaning (like, will it seem silly to still be spending my free time slow improving at music?), but there's only one way to find out.

]i dont like the “even out bad ppl babbies” thing, it’s like what, reverse euthanasia?

― in a mellow, balmy way (Hunt3r), Thursday, 13 February 2020 18:28 (twenty-two minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

catholicism iirc

kinder - it feels like it's going to be weird to talk about birth family / adoption / half-siblings stuff at some point but who knows. He'll see his half-brother (they look shockingly alike) regularly and casually refers to him at preschool, where we had to explained to his teachers that he's not making up a fake brother that nobody has ever seen. He's met his half-sister on his birth dad's side a few times and knows about her, but birth dad has two other kids who were adopted out and he has no contact with - we haven't even brought those up yet and might not for a while.

I really feel that kids just kind of absorb what they see growing up (again with the "smart / non-racist / non-asshole people having kids and giving them these values") and he's just always known about his birth family so it's hopefully "normal" to him, just like the kid in his class with two moms is totally normal. We have pictures of him at various ages being held by his birth mother, pictures with her and her mom/sister/grandmother/great grandmother, they send presents for christmas and birthdays, we facetime sometime and try to visit at least once a year.

abt Hunt3r's "share world with babby":

One of my thoughts going into parenting was that I'd prolly be a trifle bored by the first x years (Elmo, Blue's Clues, zoo, playground). But there would be a point, perhaps in the tween years, where I'd be able to take her and/or him to an art museum and really look at stuff together. (Insert your own touchstones here, whether it be "listen critically to some great records" or "cook a good meal together" or "read a great book together".) That's a lot of what my parents gave me, and I am glad of it.

Of course part of the experience is a vicarious selfish pleasure ("seeing things anew through her eyes") but also part of it can be a more generous impulse (being able to introduce a beloved person to the joys of culture, food, wine, travel, blah blah blah).

All of those hopes have turned out to be true. But not how I'd imagined. Both of my children are completely themselves, and have followed their own paths. No matter what I put in front of them. I didn't try to make my daughter into a theater kid or make her like show tunes, but she does. I didn't specifically try to make my son be interested in architecture but he is. Etc.

catholicism iirc

wow tired meme

i’m like “what person would self-identify as baddy, and so everyone will max out,” which i guess is the point of dmac’s comment.

i mean everyone is terrible, and i can’t have 8 billion babbies.

aimless upthread: "the genetic link is actually kind of useful in its own way, in that many personality traits tend to run in families"

a curious thing abt my adopted niece is that she has stepped into almost the exact personality space left in my family by my mother's death, even tho mum died several years before my niece was born. it's not genetic and it's not mimicked (my sister is quite unlike my mum, tho someone with many of mum's characteristics suits her well, so it may be learned be positive reinforcement) (viz niece s learned VERY YOUNG AND VERY DEFTLY that being funny and cheeky often lessened the trouble she was meant to be in, a very mum tactic)

I don't get this, even in deontological terms. Science/probability aside, a non-existent unborn human cannot consent or deny consent to anything, nor do I see how. The human right to give or deny consent to things that are done with one's body can only be acquired subsequent to actually becoming human. How can someone have a retroactive right to require consent for things that were done before they were born, that resulted in the human birth that allows them to have the right in the first place?

i agree, that poses puzzles. i don't think i actually need to say 'without consent', it just serves to flag the way in which child-begetting poses an ethical hazard. it's true that were we to need the consent of the begotten to beget them, then it would never be possible to beget them ethically (absent some other factor that made it ethical, since we are presuming that violations of consent belong to some broad class of prima facie wrongs). but the reason the idea of consent naturally suggests itself in this context (to the extent that 'never asked to be born' is such a proverbial complaint) is that were it possible, consent would mitigate the kind of externalization of risk/responsibility that is involved in being the one whose actions cause another being to exist. essentially, a bad thing to have done to someone else is not wrong if 'they asked for it' and voluntarily assumed the risk it entailed.

i suspect that various ways of trying to head the argument off by questioning the sense of its use of similar ethical/moral concepts in a zone where they seem to go awry (much like happens in debates about intergenerational obligations around the environment or climate change, for instance) would be attracted toward removing any sense of 'responsibility' from the key life-course occurrences on which it turns: in effect, to say that while sometimes people's lives can go badly, or not well enough, it can be so without that being 'anyone's fault', not the begetter nor the begotten (nor society etc?).

someone upthread suggested that my argument obviously came from a place of resentment and disappointment, that it served to make baseless insinuations about people who embrace parenthood. perhaps they did not see, as i think silby probably did, that the core idea is one of compassion for the person the child would grow up to be, which i am assuming would be a foremost concern for the prospective parent. the two basic principles are these:

1) calamitousness of existence. people's lives can go badly for them, sometimes profoundly badly, in ways that no one appears to have any reliable means of remedying. i am not talking about being born with problems (though that possibility seems relevant), or with not being raised in a loving environment (which the prospective parent is surely responsible for, which i think tends to suggest that their initial readiness to parent is already implicated in questions about whether one could 'harm' a not-yet-existent being), but with the longer-term life outcomes that enter onto the scene once our default perspective is that a person is their own person now, with their own life to lead, their own responsibility for making their life what they want it to be.

2) externalization of risk. one acts, another exists.

for the prospective parent, the question is not about treating the kid well, or having one's own perspective shift radically upon having the kid, or about sharing the wonders of existence with the kid. nor is it about the human drama of fostering the kid through trials and tribulations that seem all-important but prove to be just growing pains that we all face as we grapple with existence. none of that has to do with the question of whether or not the prospective parent would have a good reason for looking at an undetermined future, with some perhaps negligible chance of an existence which from the existent's perspective was on the whole extremely unhappy, and deeming it suitable to chance it ON BEHALF OF ANOTHER who would actually be the one who stood to be burdened by the choice, were it ultimately burdensome.

it may be that you are confident that not only you have a means for addressing (1), but that you can effectively impart that to a prospective child. this is where some non-religious and some religious alternatives stand to make one contribution to the problem, because they have more to do with how one adapts oneself to adversity and disappointment and disability, to human limitation, than the alternatives that have more to do with ensuring that one has worldly power and security (prudent ones but not ones that seem to be capable of preventing extremely negative life outcomes of the sort that are, again, undergone primarily by those who suffer them). this is one place where the argument could be answered, because the argument involves a difficulty with responsibility. if there are reliable means for any person to say to another, 'you'll be fine, just do…', and really help them do it, then the initial externalization of the 'risk' of existing onto another may carry little culpability.

(2) is by no means the final word on what it would be ethical or responsible to do. we have seen several people in this thread suggest, more or less explicitly, that it's okay for the parent or, more often, for human beings of some larger group or all human beings to treat the kid as a means to their ends, or as a means to the project(s) of human existence more generally. others have suggested that in some sense the kid has just got to suck it up because humanity needs him, or human culture is worth the price of a few broken people here or there. while these responses are relevant they do sound somewhat glib to me as responses to an argument specifically focused on what one person owes another and what one person could not possibly give to - i.e. do for - another, which is to live their life and undergo its possible sufferings for them.

otm

in ways that no one appears to have any reliable means of remedying

suicide pretty reliable means

#rejectedfirstdraftOzzysongtitles

j's long post above is an excellent example of placing the choice of whether or not to have children solely in the province of rationality. the rational objections listed there will never be overcome by rational rebuttals, so that it becomes rationally indisputable that that no children should ever be brought into the world purposely.

but millions of kids are going to be born anyway. all that rationalizing is helpless in the face of the urges felt between emotionally entangled, sexually active adults. the same person who believes in j's conclusions today will eagerly toss them aside when other conditions prevail. imo, it is not wrong, but rather a sterile exercise that leads nowhere.

That’s my fav kind of exercise tho

rationality is dumb imo

everything important to me in my life has nothing to do with rationality

it is not wrong, but rather a sterile exercise that leads nowhere

I see what you did there

'look, kid, don't think about it too much. it's just that your mom and i were screwing a lot, and we figured what the fuck, let's make a baby, what could possibly go wrong for the kid, let that be his problem'

fuck the what

I think the specter of dumb-rationality is not present here honestly tho.

As someone who wrestled with AI design a while back, I concluded that any attempt to replicate human thinking absolutely had to incorporate simulated emotions at a deep, persistent level, or it would quickly fall into absurdity. Without emotions all you have left are appetites, facts and logic, and machines have no appetites.

Emotions tell us how to value our experiences. Without emotions no fact means any more than any other fact. 'Paraguay is located in the Western hemisphere' is precisely equal in value to 'my femoral artery has been severed' or 'these cornflakes contain maltodextrose".

conscious AI is a pipe dream

well, what the argument is especially made to highlight is the emotions with which a parent might look upon the life of a child, since grown to adulthood, and unable to find contentment in life, for quotidian or perhaps severe reasons—but through the lens of concepts which discourage the parent from excusing themselves for their part in that or in crediting themselves morally for any self-regarding satisfactions derived from the undertaking.

j., I sincerely admire your ability to muster such an articulate, in-depth response to the question 'to form babby, or not to form babby'.

so, j, your arguments have established that parents acquire no moral credit for any happiness or satisfaction accrued by their offspring during their existence, but they are to be held fully responsible for whatever pain or discontentment their children eventually feel, due to their having put them in a position where pain and discontent were even possible. quite.

what kind of psychopath gives themselves credit for anything

I have a feeling this will slowly devolve into yet another duel between compatibilists and non-compatibilists.

that's a discussion we should save for: Calvin vs. Aquinas: FITE!

I no longer care about free will, that was a childish fascination

Hi,

We have two. Amber and Alice. Some of you may know this.

Why?

We needed some cool people to talk to.

xps no, i think they can and should accept that credit where appropriate. the argument is concerned with a disparity in the magnitudes of happiness and sadness possible and the ways in which they are to be linked with responsibility.

the reason i alluded to pascal's wager is that for parents and for people thinking of themselves, the extreme negative outcomes coincide with the responsibility-to-exist-and-make-of-one's-life-what-one-can when it is at is most alienated as between parent and child. so the argument is not one of blaming the parent for everything, it is one of the parent (this gets at sund4r's sort of concerns again) 'saving' the child in advance from a circumstance which it is not metaphysically possible to save them from once the child has come into existence.

many of the usual ways of assessing the experience of childrearing and of sharing sympathetically in the sufferings of one's child (as in the exultations) have a tendency to smear the subject of the emotional experience with the subject of the (relevant—the child's) life-as-existed. all i am insisting on is that one not do this illicitly if it prevents one from perceiving the above point, which i think is the dispositive one ethically (pre-begetting).

which it is not metaphysically possible to save them from once the child has come into existence.

yes it is. suicide.

You keep harping on that GD but it is perfectly possible to resent coming into being in the first place and abhor the idea of committing suicide. I resent my existence in no small part because I abhor the idea of suicide.

Perhaps you don't resent your existence as much as you think?

xps you can't save someone else from that by committing suicide!

i don't know how serious your posts on this topic have been, granny, but if you're actually interested and not trying to goad me, i think that it just speaks in favor of the difficulty. a parent hopes never for their child to find itself in such desperation that suicide seems like a way to fix the problems with its existence. but broadly speaking, that is the risk in principle that the parent takes on, that the child might become incapable of choosing life (when, no less in principle, no one else can choose it for them).

I'm just rebutting the gaping flaw in your logical argument

like you can personally reject that as an option, but that doesn't mean it isn't an option

your invocation of Pascal's Wager is apt, though in your application of it, instead of gaining the infinite joys of heaven, the wager consists of avoiding inflicting the known, but temporally limited pains of corporeal human existence. But would not accepting the terms of the original wager as valid nullify your inversion of it?

btw, I'm just playing around here, so you needn't play along unless it is fun.

It doesn’t free a parent of their moral hazard though.

it takes more effort to stay alive than to die

Not sure about that.

it takes a lot of effort to die, I can't even skip a meal without my body screaming at me

referring to a child as "it" is weird

anyway GD your parents can't commit suicide for you

xp Shakey these are uniformly dense spherical childre

xps i don't think you are, granny you're just churlish.

the religious and non-religious remedies to the calamitousness of existence that i mentioned upthread have traditionally put a very strong proscription on suicide, and more or less elaborated visions of existence that served to ingratiate people to life despite its sufferings and disappointments. but thinking that there are not effective remedies of that sort available does not make suicide an 'effective' remedy. the ancient stoics often pillory that idea by encouraging people to kill themselves if they really think life is so bad, but that's because their goal is to convince people that they actually have the means available to escape despair, which no less than committing suicide, involves using one's will to choose under some conception of the good. they just think that in most cases, the choice of suicide is an erroneous one.

to use this possibility in an argument that has to do with how a parent should be concerned for their prospective children seems to me needlessly brutal. what it sounds like to me is someone who dislikes the sound of the argument and supposes that the retort can be directed at the arguer. but not everyone is capable of considering arguments without transmuting them into parodies of reasoning.

again, I've brought up suicide solely in response to "there's no remedy to awful pain of existence"

to use this possibility in an argument that has to do with how a parent should be concerned for their prospective children seems to me needlessly brutal. what it sounds like to me is someone who dislikes the sound of the argument

to deny that suicide is an effective remedy sounds to me like someone who dislikes the crux of their argument being removed

anything more than one is beyond our ken

lol it's all beyond your ken. it's all beyond anyone's ken. or budget, or whatever it is. very few of the metrics seem to apply.

joygoat and ymp i very much enjoyed your posts. i am saving up j.'s until i have a whiskey and can focus on it.

guys

babies

not fuckin existence

babies

they're not just for christmas, is the vibe i'm getting

I mean yes obviously suicide will solve all my problems but I still as a person have to be capable of it, my parents couldn't even raise me well enough to be prepared to kill myself

not enough positive representations of young people killing themselves that focus on how they don't have any problems anymore

well this took a turn!

That's a parenting fail xxp

lol it's all beyond your ken. it's all beyond anyone's ken. or budget, or whatever it is. very few of the metrics seem to apply.

True enough, but we'd rather stick to the more recognizable end of the great unknown (for now).

aimless, the original wager may very well obviate this pessimistic version (or so we could call it—actually it just occurred to me independently, but pascal's wager seems like a useful comparison) of it! i don't know. as i recall, there are some issues with the premises about the infinitude of the expected 'payoff'. but in the case of my argument, i think it is more plausible that one's child's life could turn out badly 'enough' in a relatively fault-free way to make that prospect carry some force in one's considerations (if you're familiar with the probabilistic framing of pascal's wager: 'enough' to make the expected values of the different cases come out as required).

in any case, that's why i allowed that perhaps a sincere faith of some suitably existential/cosmic kind would provide a person with good grounds for believing that taking the risk on another's behalf would be acceptable. it does seem to me, though, like even a 'believer' has the same kinds of problems with respect to imparting the 'remedy' to their child that anyone does (which no doubt partly explains the dogmatism of traditional upbringings)—they're the one who has to live it, not you, which includes 'live with a sincere faith in life', basically.

Bits of this thread make me feel like I'm reading a post-analytic take on Cioran's The Trouble with Being Born.

A friend brought his kids to a party at our place the other night, and they're at that perfect age where they're like cool little adults who haven't quite become annoying teenagers yet.

At point, they were bored of the adults so they seriously just sat on the couch and read the New Yorker.

It's possible they are also just extremely, exceptionally chill & well-adjusted kids.

I'd be ok having those kids for a few years (without having put in the work that got them to that place obviously).

like for crying out loud gary I try to give people the benefit of the doubt but the idea of having kids because it's cool for you is fucking awful to me

as i recall, there are some issues with the premises about the infinitude of the expected 'payoff'

having just refreshed my memory about Pascal's wager this is also the big issue I instantly zeroed in on. the wager is based on a faulty premise. One can envision extending the logic of this wager into increasingly ludicrous scenarios, since even the most specious and ridiculous claim about "the afterlife" or "infinity" etc would apparently require similarly serious consideration.

anyway babbys, I like mine.

why would you say that? they're not there to make you happy!

selfxp

not really surprising that a thread consumed with antinatalism would ultimately become about suicide

I hope all your children disappoint and then reject you ffs

Next up: the death penalty.

because it's cool for you is fucking awful to me

turnabout is fair play lol

lol Mordy

all of these experiments in living and meaning at the cost of other humans that you created just on a fucking whim, my god

like "lol we can prevent ever conceiving a child using science but instead let's just have one how much depression could it possibly have?"

animals, all of you

literally true

Tbf animals don't just engender other animals on a whim.

in response to the original q, I didn't make babbies because I have never been particularly interested in being a parent. Particular because I am female, I have been told "just wait, you'll change your mind," by people who presumably know better than I do? On the other hand, I have never been told "just wait, you'll change your mind" with respect to say becoming a plumber or a nun. Why is that.

Anyway, a side effect of having not having babbies is that I get to feel less bad about my carbon footprint (I like to travel to places! In airplanes! But hey I did not create another carbon-beltching human!) and about my generational privilege/affluence. I am passing neither of those on to a future generation. Whatever of my privilege and wealth I don't leverage for myself will go to the support the greater good and not some more mini-mes.

all of these experiments in living and meaning at the cost of other humans that you created just on a fucking whim, my god

because you're embroiling nonconsenting humans in them

i think ppl who decide not to have children should be happy with the decision they made and not feel judged by anyone (tho might be inevitable if you have parents who yearn for more genetic offspring - but maybe they should've have more kids so they could afford one or two not to reproduce). i think the childless who are all "i cannot even understand why humans like every other living species desire to reproduce" are v silly.

I've never denied being silly Mordy, I'll even cop to being cussed to the point of delirium

I don't create anything in case it makes anyone feel worse than if I hadn't

the parents itt may recoil at the implications of the argument on their own retroactive self-assessments, or lol at the natalolism and despair of the childless who just don't ~get it~, but i think it would be more apt to use it to focus their forward-looking responsibilities. as silby says, one's child could go through the worst suffering, not 'worst' in some objective sense but worst in the existential sense, of not being able to extricate themselves from it but in not being able to avail themselves of any assistance anyone else could provide to do so. that's a heavy responsibility to consider! too many people seem to take it on lightly and then later in life engage in all kinds of bargaining and illicit transference of burdens and indifference and emotional distancing from people for whom they are in some inescapable way responsible—generally by trying to re-construe the matter as one of the child now being the one responsible, of the parent having done their part. parents might not like (or even accept as true) being told that they can never be done with their responsibility for the child, which they continue to share in as long as the child shall live, but perhaps being able to acknowledge it would encourage more compassion toward the worst sufferings not just of one's own children but of any others.

fucking asinine xp

glad you consider your children equivalent to macaroni collage of boats

Yeah I should add that I do feel a little bad for my parents, but not bad enough to have kids just so that they can join in the grandparent chats with their friends.

Also I'm the last descendant on one side of my family. It's kind of sad from one angle (they didn't escape the Holocaust just for me to not bother having kids, etc), but there's a lot of mental illness on that side, so it's probably for the best. And my mother's four other siblings didn't have kids, so they really should have maximized their chances a little more if they wanted that line to continue.

(just continuing to ignore the existential philosophy discussion)

because you're embroiling nonconsenting humans in them

parents might not like (or even accept as true) being told that they can never be done with their responsibility for the child, which they continue to share in as long as the child shall live, but perhaps being able to acknowledge it would encourage more compassion toward the worst sufferings not just of one's own children but of any others.

ime parents feel concern for + some responsibility for their children's well being throughout their entire lives. you are extrapolating lessons for psychopaths.

life: just a bit of fun, let's be cool

how could consent precede existence, the whole premise is ridiculous

xps

Existence precedes essence.

if everyone was assigned a child to raise, I would support that platform.

ideally conceived by randomly combining donor sperm and eggs and gestated by well-compensated workers

huge vat of cum all mixed together

I'm losing my marbles, basically GD go fuck yourself

sounds very pneumatic

everybody has to report to the cum vat once a year

and cum in it

lol xp

maybe you should log off, dear

eat shit

kinda worried about you silby

or start the rewrite of your script. xpost

if suicide is so easy you go first, I fucking dare you

As in pneuma? I can't even tell anymore.

xps

that cum vet in full

https://i.kym-cdn.com/entries/icons/original/000/024/161/Screen_Shot_2017-10-19_at_2.55.08_PM.png

this new idea would tighten the variance of our attractiveness distribution. has the added benefit of solving problems posed in that other thread.

I'm still really mad that I can't order bukkake udon without some dipshit standing nearby making me take a survey.

j. speaking for myself i actually think far far far too much about all the terrible things that might happen to my children. this is pretty common among parents. it's so common as to be a cliche. so who are you talking to? or about? parents itt? believe me, we've imagined the worst many times. if your contention is that some people take their responsibilities to other people they have power over too lightly and don't consider the human consequences i mean... yes i agree! but it's not limited to babies, it's bosses and friends and sisters and, well, everybody with everything.

^^^real talk

i think bill callahan is singing. my partner thinks he's talking over music. only family can vote what goes on the record player. so we created a tie breaker. and a witness.

christ i hope that isn't selfish

couldn’t you just have gone to olive garden instead

parents might not like (or even accept as true) being told that they can never be done with their responsibility for the child, which they continue to share in as long as the child shall live

I absolutely know this and want this and value this and would not have it any other way

Whenever I get dressed up
I feel like some chicken-con
-broccoli'd be good

parents might not like (or even accept as true) being told that they can never be done with their responsibility for the child, which they continue to share in as long as the child shall live

This was always my sense of parenthood from before my daughter was conceived, and as it turns out in my case I have become my adult child's court-appointed legal guardian, so that my responsibility for her is complete, both morally and legally, and will only end if she dies or I become incapable.

j. speaking for myself i actually think far far far too much about all the terrible things that might happen to my children. this is pretty common among parents. it's so common as to be a cliche. so who are you talking to? or about? parents itt? believe me, we've imagined the worst many times.

tracer, perhaps it remains to be seen what parents should make of an argument which i think speaks most forcefully to people as of yet childless. it's clear that just making the argument raises a lot of hackles for parents, since the argument has on the one hand been derided as pointless sterile unemotional nonsense, and on the other prompted people to try to rebut anything it seems to imply about their own ethical status, sometimes by claiming to have anticipated it all already and to not need to know anything only a psychopath would fail to appreciate.

part of the point of the argument is to raise the importance of possibly creating a being who is separate from you in just the dimensions of action, responsibility, and suffering, which separateness is not and can never be overcome by any pains you take to care for the being.

because of the emphasis on separateness, i think anyone who is looking to dismiss the argument or to acquit themselves of anything they think it implies about their choices, has good reason to be doubtful about the value of their propensity to imagine the worst, to be wound up emotionally in the child's well-being, all that affective aspect of parenting. there is a potential there for private emotional theater which however involving is not the same thing as being the child. this is brought out most by just those cases where genuine concern and the agonies of sympathy prove not to be enough to actually help struggling offspring or to alleviate what only they can suffer.

the emphasis on separateness also poses a difficulty for the parent's embrace of total responsibility, however noble that may be. they might in fact be able to say, in the ordinary sense, 'i did everything i could', 'i did the best i could', etc., with respect to their role in assisting the child to live a happy life. but because of the aspects of separateness i mentioned, there will be cases in which the ways in which one's best, or anyone's, does not go far enough, namely as far as what the child can only do for themselves, help themselves out of, suffer themselves. as much as parents might valorize their embrace of responsibility here, their doing so brings them no closer to being the child (and if you don't like that phrasing, note that it is just one of a number of alternative ways i have had recourse to, in order to put words to the fact that the child must ultimately live its own life). i recall that i am not talking about just any old straits into which the child's life might tend, but those circumstances where some children end up badly despite the parents and despite themselves. given the way of the world, that could also be the fate of many well-intentioned and competent parents' children.

I don’t think people need for a child to be genetically theirs to experience parental love

as for loving an adopted kid, the love part doesn't need any genetic component. but the genetic link is actually kind of useful in its own way, in that many personality traits tend to run in families, at least as much as physical genetic dispositions do, so the chances are that you will recognize how your child is developing more easily, whether it's seeing a bit of yourself or some trait of a parent, grandparent or sibling. it's not entirely necessary, but it does help ease the child into the family.

― A is for (Aimless), Wednesday, February 12, 2020 9:04 PM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

Holy everlovin' crow, I can't believe this statement went unchallenged. It's insulting to adoptees, IVF or donor families, step families, and, really, many families without shared ancestry. I know you probably didn't mean it this way, but it's actually a deep gouge.

Love ain't regularly the issue in adoption (or step-families, or foster families or, or, or... ) any more than it is for non-adopted kids – I think we'd agree on that. Love, in families, is often easy to come by. And 'connection' isn't an issue either. Nor are stability, 'fit,' nor opportunities to consider parent/sibling dynamics, the perpetual question of nature/nurture.... none of them are affected by the presence or absence of genetics. However, in the phrase 'love doesn't need a genetic component BUT... ' you have first raised a moot point and, after the conjunction, condescended to adult/child relationships that don't have shared micrometers of DNA. This patronizes adoptees, et al., and implies, in essence, 'you can love an adopted kid, but it's not the same kind of love/appreciation/relationship you can have with a kid who shares your genetics.' Or, more simply: non-adopted relationships are easier/more fulfilling than adopted relationships. As if you can love any two people the same way; as if 'genetic child' and 'non-genetic' child are absolute values.

But I think the idea that there's a primacy or expediency to raising a 'natural born' child is wrong on its face AND somehow misunderstands the terms of a relationship between an adult and a kid. First of all, familial 'love' has a million different valences. 'Love' between parent and child can be a pattern of warm feelings, commitment, loyalty, honesty, mawkish Victorian sentiment, obligation, responsibility, control, attraction, favoritism, comfort, one- or two-way compassion, toughness, abuse, hardening-of-a-child-for-the-apocolypse, etc., or none of these, or all of these ... and entirely confounded by cultural and personal and psychiatric variables. This is obv to say there's no way to essentialize love, and that each connection between each member of each family is irreducible and distinct, and that even /before/ the circumstances of birth/adoption come into play, each person constructs their foundational relationships of different material and to different ends.

The value for parental love from which YOU find fulfillment (e.g. of 'seeing a bit of yourself' in your child and 'recognizing how your child is developing') might strike me, say, narcissistic and invalidating of your child's personhood. And the love I have for MY father (obligatory but warm; draining more than nurturing) would likely seem to you bizarre and passive-aggressive, but there's no reason to judge or weigh the two against each other. There's no ranking, no relative quality, no value to assess. There's just a set of complicated relationships. The same goes for any parent-figure and their relation to any child-figure.

I had more, but I'm gonna stop. Here's what I want to leave with: I am adopted from across the equator and (in terms of genetic ancestry) closely connected to noboy on the planet. I haven't suffered for it, and I've got a family life that is neither more nor less fulfilling, loving, frustrating than anybody else's. When I have a kid – hopefully soon - I could give a rat's ass whose genes the kids has. Frankly, I'd love to find a free kid on the bus ride home. I don't need, nor desire, any biological connection to help 'ease a child into' my family. Please consider this next viewpoint you blithely theorize about this issue.

I feel like I pre-emptively commented on it by calling my parents dicks for having those thoughts about adoption.

j.'s posts should be printed on every tube of astroglide tbh

like Dr. Bronner's

the parents itt may recoil at the implications of the argument on their own retroactive self-assessments, or lol at the natalolism and despair of the childless who just don't ~get it~, but i think it would be more apt to use it to focus their forward-looking responsibilities. as silby says, one's child could go through the worst suffering, not 'worst' in some objective sense but worst in the existential sense, of not being able to extricate themselves from it but in not being able to avail themselves of any assistance anyone else could provide to do so. that's a heavy responsibility to consider! too many people seem to take it on lightly and then later in life engage in all kinds of bargaining and illicit transference of burdens and indifference and emotional distancing from people for whom they are in some inescapable way responsible—generally by trying to re-construe the matter as one of the child now being the one responsible, of the parent having done their part. parents might not like (or even accept as true) being told that they can never be done with their responsibility for the child, which they continue to share in as long as the child shall live, but perhaps being able to acknowledge it would encourage more compassion toward the worst sufferings not just of one's own children but of any others.

― j., Thursday, 13 February 2020 22:21 (one hour ago) bookmarkflaglink

i am having a visceral reaction to in particular the second half of this post.

you have a baby. you raise it through childhood. it becomes an adult and you absolutely are not responsible for every single woe they may suffer nor harm they may do.

the premise is utterly false imo. you choose to bring a child into life, but the above position holds that they never develop beyond that, that you as a parent accept that as a given, and that we're not even discussing this as a maybe, a choice or (as id see it) an utter failure of what you accepted as your part. the presumed infantilisation of the offspring at every stage of their lives inherent in this position is abhorrent to me.

offer it as an angle, but as a stance to take from which to argue the general case? ludicrous. every parent here would wish to avoid what is offered here as the standard (even accepted?) outcome.

if the retort is that you always feel responsible for and care for your children, sure. completely different thing.

the other strand coming into the thread- life is suffering and a burden and should we inflict it yadda yadda- is lmbr one of the most self-indulgent takes possible and is, not in the individual cases, which as always can be wildly divergent and im not telling every one "be grateful to live" or anything, but hard cases make bad law and for the purposes of the question we should generally accept that the child born to ilxors is not entering a hideous world of pain, torment and suffering.

in short, treating the entirety of the range of likely possibilities of any given western hemisphere 21st century life is yr business, but its a very obvious one-eyed argument to set out "probably be utter shit, tell em go fuck themselves"

anyway i did note it was a visceral reaction tbf

along w/ a picture of a toddler drinking a bottle of Paco Rabanne or trying to set the family cat on fire xp

astroglide and Dr Bronner's both have a lot of uses?

given the way of the world, that could also be the fate of many well-intentioned and competent parents' children.

given the way of the world, that could be the fate of anyone, right? count no man happy until he is dead?

i guess i'm returning to the "people seem to prefer being alive to being dead" argument. i can imagine terrible scenarios for my future, and some of them are plausible, but i'm not going to off myself. i'm not sure why the argument changes for potential people.

iirc a decent number of ilxors said they'd push the "blip me out of existence if it would cause no one else any problems" button

jfc listen

anyways

if you wouldnt kill a baby and hold it a kindness lets no more of this "awfulness of life" airiness imo

but not definitively like by all means keep arguin it

ilx not exactly a bastion of pristine mental health

J has convinced me. I'm gonna go impregnated my gf. Spite is a powerful afrodisiac.

not reading this thread but i ctrl-f'd silby's posts after coming from the excelsior thread and silby otm

re aimless and adoption i didn't go loud with it cz i took a vow to be kinder to aimless* on ilx but my anecdopte abt my niece was actually a pushback on what he was saying there and why it was wrong

*and everyone else (nearly)

in essence, 'you can love an adopted kid, but it's not the same kind of love/appreciation/relationship you can have with a kid who shares your genetics.' Or, more simply: non-adopted relationships are easier/more fulfilling than adopted relationships. As if you can love any two people the same way; as if 'genetic child' and 'non-genetic' child are absolute values.

I always enjoy being heavily paraphrased and then treating their paraphrase to stand in as the correct interpretation of my actual statements. This 'essence' you've derived seems to have added several components to what I said, which is kind of the opposite of deriving an 'essence'. Instead these are your inferences and inductions. You've taken my statements about possibilities and tendencies and treated them as binary absolutes.

Now, if 25 years on the internet has taught me anything, I now should quietly slip this post into the nearest memory hole, because no one ever considers their paraphrased interpretations as anything less than brilliant, accurate, and if anything much clearer than the statements they have radically reworded. And by objecting I'm just trying to weasel my way out of being caught and exposed as saying horrible, horrible things. Yup. You caught me. Name my punishment.

like drinking and driving it’s insanely risky but it could end up fun and useful, and fuck the keys are right fucking there. it’s a thing we can do. i’m good at at this, it’ll probly be fine.

NB DONT YOU FUCKING DARE DRINK AND DRIVE PPL.

my point is only that the possibility probability is crazily available.

I am not sure what's going on ao i killed a baby just to be safe

i'm going to form babby just to have something to masturbate in front of

form babby if you have a strong desire to do so and feel you can give babby a decent shot at a fulfilling life
do not form babby if the above does not apply

thraed delivers

stork iirc

obstetrician, let's get real here

twist: the obstetrician was a stork!

the stork was an obstetrician!

The doctor was a lady!

the stork was a raven!

the stork used dr bronner's as lube!

THE STORK WAS THE FATHER!

THE STORK WAS LUBING FROM INSIDE THE HOUSE

How has no one started a drone company that delivers abortion drugs called The Stork?

wow, the carrying capacity of a drone is a lot more than I thought.

eStork drone adoption agency ftw

don't forget to cancel after 30 days

All these babies mine?

if you don't return the selection of the month we automatically bill it to your account

try raising stewart!
(because you enjoyed raising edwin)

that stork in full

https://www.deltameatdeli.net/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/MIN_9070_EAA.jpg

Use offer code ILXOR for 20% off your first month

Use offer code SILBY for 100% off your first babby

wow harsh

love to spread

Forming a babby and raising it to adulthood is a massive undertaking and I humbly submit that you will learn a lot about yourself and human nature, however that is also the case with any similar scale investment of time and energy so the way the question is framed shouldn’t be forming babby vs not but rather vs whatever else you could do with the massive amount of time and energy you would save. You could go for a PhD or live in a foreign country for a few years or lots of things that would pay dividends in new experiences. Admittedly this overlooks the main reason to reproduce which is to have a child to love and cherish assuming all goes well.

There’s still nobody arguing positively that it’s in a child’s best interest to be born regardless of impact on its parents.

glad you consider your children equivalent to macaroni collage of boats

silby, was this meant to be a piss-take of the quality of specific art I've previously created, or a general assumption that anything I had created would be inherently without value?

if i'm at a party with a friend and there's a good a onion dip, i say 'friend, you have to try this onion dip'. if my friend doesn't like the onion dip, i say 'fuck you, friend, i know a good onion dip'. the earth is the party. existence is the onion dip. my kids have got to try this onion dip. they don't enjoy it? maybe some literal onion dip will help.

that can't possibly be argued convincingly so if that's the condition you need satisfied, you "win" I guess. xxp

consider having kids so that they might win like that one day

Babies are great for use as emergency footballs

There’s still nobody arguing positively that it’s in a child’s best interest to be born regardless of impact on its parents.

this is because the question is stupid and based on a faulty premise - prior to being born the child does not exist, ergo they do not have any "best interest"

kinder you wrote:

I don't create anything in case it makes anyone feel worse than if I hadn't

― kinder, Thursday, February 13, 2020 2:21 PM (yesterday)

it seems ridiculous bordering on monstrous to me to treat procreation as comparable to any other creative act, such as you might do for your own amusement. Hence the macaroni collage comparison.

also i have conclusively proven itt that it is in the interest of the universe for babbies to be formed, with reference to green machine elves

i get the dread of existence. i get it. the probability for horrible things happening in a person’s life is pretty near 100% regardless of how many other moments of joy or satisfaction or bursts of insight you have too. so if you, say, asked an AI if on balance, life as a human being was worth the risk of heartbreak and abuse and addiction and poverty and painful death or just insufferable boredom and loneliness and all the other horrors that potentially await even the most advantaged kid, it might say “an interesting game, doctor falken. it appears the only winning move is not to play”. i mean, i can totally understand that point of view. but that’s life. that’s the risk of life. most people accept the risk. given the alternative. parents aren’t culpable for the inherent riskiness of embodied life as a human being on planet Earth.

procreation is the *original* creative act, it is the ur-text for all other creative acts

xps

So now we've gotten to the point where ILXers are being demonized for having babies for the Rong reasons

They are though, that's what I'm saying xps

culpable

that's my point

free will doesn't exist, ergo there is no culpability

Maybe we should find a way to talk to fetuses

shakey I did not invoke fucking free will, jesus

"do u want 2 be born? Yes/no"

"Oh btw shakey mo would be yr daddy"

asserting something many times isn’t quite enough to make it true afaik

I mean whose fault is it I exist?

Maybe we should find a way to talk to fetuses

Xxpost Idk, Lisa *did* need braces

I mean whose fault is it I exist?

the universe?

to the extent my parents are part of the universe, sure, but the universe isn't a moral agent

citation needed

but then I'm a pretty strict determinist. everything is as it is because of all the events that went before it, determining precise points of causality for something general like "suffering" (or even the particulars of your specific existence) is a fools' game with no end.

xps

silby, why did you think my creative act would be macaroni-collage level?

There’s still nobody arguing positively that it’s in a child’s best interest to be born regardless of impact on its parents.

This is exactly what I argued, when I said that the average person's desire to continue living should be our expectation of how anyone would view starting life from behind the veil of ignorance.

(and wanting to continue living doesn't imply dreading death. dreading death is culturally specific. it's an avoidable phenomenon.)

Thread is now a Charles Ives piece

christians: fetuses have rights

ilxors: fetuses have rights before they're created

I mean whose fault is it I exist?

mine, because you are all figments of my imagination

silby are you a Buddhist by any chance?

seems more like a nihilist

silby, why did you think my creative act would be macaroni-collage level?

― kinder, Friday, February 14, 2020 10:30 AM (one minute ago)

I mean it could be Beethoven's 9th or Don Quixote, the moral standing of any work of art vanishes to nothing set next to a human person

I'm a Jew

Well if your chief claim is that existence is dukkha then the sole way out is through nirvana.

I mean Kohelet has things to say on the matter

Sure, but you seem to believe that to escape the endless wheel of birth and rebirth so as to achieve some form of nothingness or oblivion, i.e. return to the non-existence when we came, is the greatest good. Or not really, but you catch my drift.

*whence

Although I quite like 'when' too in this context.

No I believe extant people should live full and vigorous lives and expect nothing, my concerns are for pre-extant people who might be spared having to post on messageboards if they are not born.

There’s still nobody arguing positively that it’s in a child’s best interest to be born regardless of impact on its parents.

Well, that's a completely unfair type of gotcha! because of how you asked the question. You asked parents to explain themselves, and to explain why they had children. So of course parents will answer in terms of what parenting provides them. They list their particular joys and satisfactions and reasons etc. And then you whirl round on them to say "ah HA! You are using the children instrumentally, for your own selfish ends."

Do you see that that's kind of a shitty rhetorical trap?

Imagine if you asked people in romantic relationships why they are with their partners. You might presumably get answers like "she makes me laugh" or "I love having sex with him." They would speak primarily in terms of what they get out of the relationship. (Jeez, how selfish!) It doesn't follow from that that the relationship is not a two-way street.

It seems to me that a heck of a lot of people like being alive. So to them, having-been-born is a gift, not a punishment. So go find some people who are glad they are alive: that's your positive argument. Evidently you disagree about life being, on balance, a good thing. Which is of course your right. But to impose your rather bleak and hostile view of the world on everyone who's ever been born seems kinda insane to me.

I didn't mean to trap anyone, I've obviously gone around the bend a bit in the course of this conversation

my concerns are for pre-extant people who might be spared having to post on messageboards if they are not born.

b/c nothing bad is happening to you when you're pre-extant, just like nothing bad is happening to you when you're post-extant

the inherent riskiness of embodied life as a human being on planet Earth.

Considering the risks involved in being any other living creature on earth, a mouse for example, or a sparrow, humans on average live remarkably secure, long lives and have unique opportunities for fulfillment. But risk occurs at a granular level, so that no matter how it averages out, some people are going to live lives of incessant pain, deep terror, or unrelieved despair. And because a capacity for pain and unpleasant emotions is literally hard-wired into our apparatus, it is absolutely guaranteed that everyone who is born will experience these before they die, even if they live only a few minutes.

So, if one requires parents to guarantee their children will evade every ill turn of fortune before procreating, all I can say is 'u mad'. If all you require is the freedom personally to choose not to procreate, all I can say is, who ever said you didn't have it?

how do you know that xp

as an extant person, things are happening constantly that make me feel bad, and I have to eat food every day, and yet enough good things keep happening to make dying abhorrent

Are we certain that what preceded birth was an infinite void?

as best I can remember.

Is that good enough for your argument to possess sufficient heft?

lol this is getting even more nonsensical

all that travolta sperm? it's travolta's fault. But the one sperm that wins the race in the beginning of look who's talking? travolta can't be liable. that sperm had its own ideas.

This is just the beginning.

xp

listen, I'm an idiot who hasn't read enough books, I'm getting to the end of my rhetorical rope here, all I want is for parents to accept that they've inflicted a potentially grievous harm on their children by having them

"getting"

oh eat a dick

fine i accept and i’m okay with it

existing is the most unpleasant thing I've ever had to do

all I want is for parents to accept that they've inflicted a potentially grievous harm on their children by having them

That 'potentially' has been doing quite a bit of work throughout.

all that travolta sperm?

So, if one requires parents to guarantee their children will evade every ill turn of fortune before procreating

I'd assumed silby was saying even that wouldn't be enough.

existing is the most unpleasant thing I've ever had to do

it's remarkable that you can't grasp what's wrong with this sentence - logically, gramatically, rhetorically

existing is literally the ONLY thing you have ever done. no existence = no you = neither pleasant/nor unpleasant. You cannot transpose the qualities of existence onto non-existence or vice versa, they are mutually exclusive.

I miss the lex.

all I want is for parents to accept that they've inflicted a potentially grievous harm on their children

Okay sure if it cools your incandescent rage for a moment. As long as you accept that we've also provided our children with unmatched opportunities for immense joy, such as orgasms and bacon and Mozart. None of these joys will ever be experienced by the non-extant. That potential for pleasure and happiness has to appear in the calculation or else your argument makes no sense.

We all have the potential to inflict harm on other beings in myriad ways. That's not an argument for never leaving the apartment - it's a calculated risk, as was noted upthread.

all I want is for parents to accept that they've inflicted a potentially grievous harm on their children by having them

And once they have given this proposition the fleeting consideration it deserves and discovered that it provides them with zero useful instruction about parenthood or the advisability of having children, they will promptly move on to more germane considerations. But your desire will be satisfied. So there's that to be glad for.

I mean if I didn’t exist I wouldn’t be complaining about it certainly.

if you didn't exist, but had the option to, would you want to? or would you decide "nah, too risky"

lol I think that's the one thing he's been clear on

silby, at which point did you realize that you were just trolling everyone, but you were going to do it anyway?

being a parent has been really fun so far 🙂

fun for who?

(jk)

just doing stuff like going to the movies or the zoo or we read in bed every night and snuggle, reading the Narnia books

that should be 'for whom?'

(jk)

for who the board lols

silby, at which point did you realize that you were just trolling everyone, but you were going to do it anyway?

― A is for (Aimless), Friday, February 14, 2020 11:00 AM (four minutes ago)

I'm too mad to be trolling

let us be the judge of that

it's a criterion of trolling that the troll isn't mad but everyone else is

if you want babby's soul
you gotta pay the troll toll

Roses are red, violets are blue
trollz do it for the lulz, what about you?

seriously do you guys not remember when ronan and the lex discussed children

fwiw I think children are wonderful people and all the positive qualities parents in this thread have rhapsodized about are otm

El Tomboto at 1:09 14 Feb 20

seriously do you guys not remember when ronan and the lex discussed children

I do not! but I bet it was good.

I do remember tuomas thinking it was ok to jackoff with a baby in the room

if you didn't exist, but had the option to, would you want to? or would you decide "nah, too risky"

lol I think that's the one thing he's been clear on

nah he hasn't

i mean yes plenty of parents are irresponsible in their attitudes here, but i think the general human belief that life is a good thing to have and a good thing to gift is a silly thing to sniff at. like you need to work harder than "what if it's bad tho". not even Buddhists believe that. and being mad at people for having that general human belief is ... not the high moral ground he thinks it is.

being alive is my best option but on balance I don't care for it

at least, not today I don't

I should really be doing my job but I've completely forgotten what it is at this point

don't care for it

your attitude toward life is unusual and parents can be forgiven for not reasoning based on it

can they?????

why should I, personally, forgive my parents

whom I love and have been almost exclusively good to me

and yet had me

half expecting silby to shortly be confronted by an angry magical whirlwind lecturing him on being such an ingrate

I’m grateful for most everything my parents did for me after I was born, but I’m furious I’m alive

OK, my dear silby. I will accept your premise that it should be vitally important for each potential parent to accept that the outcome of having a child includes a potential for that child to experience grievous harm, which same potential cannot be fulfilled if no child is forthcoming.

I have a couple of questions for you. Because the decision to bring a child into existence is binary and can only result in two positions, child or no child, how do you envision this vital acceptance as directing their ultimate decision? What philosophical guidance does it lend or practical application might it have to their decision?

Do not feel you must be brief in your answer. Be as comprehensive in your answer as you feel you require for us to understand your position.

why should I, personally, forgive my parents

different question based on unique circumstances

I mean ,most parents of our age group kind of just had kids on autopilot. I don't think decisions were really consciously made.

Aimless no fair telling me to post longer you're retired

half expecting silby to shortly be confronted by an angry magical whirlwind lecturing him on being such an ingrate

No, I think a bumbling but good-hearted angel needs to take him on a tour of how his idyllic home town would look had he not been born.

Waah sometimes I feel bad, and my body needs calories waah

"I'm furious I'm alive" is a cogent statement of a fact, but it is not a cogent statement of a philosophy.

granny blindsiding the soylent folks itt

GD literally jump in a lake and hope a utilitarian walks by to fish you out

Having surveyed the available evidence, on balance for you, I think not to form babby would be the way to go.

No shit Sherlock

mod, please change thread title to "silby's basilisk"

You first ya pathetic whiny bitch

No shit, Sherlock

Same advice holds for him.

GD I hope you get depression

granny forgot the mike showalter tags

Cronos had kids and he ate them. Admittedly, he was chthonian god, but we should all take a lesson from this.

Luna didn’t exist but she def posted on this board fyi

Medea, ftw.

no life light burned inside luna. no, luna reflected the life light of another.

mod, please change thread title to "silby's basilisk"

*babbyless

fuck

“People”—Geralt turned his head—“like to invent monsters and monstrosities. Then they seem less monstrous themselves.”

I think there's a particular part of the human experience -- which isn't for everyone -- that is only experienced by raising a kid. I think some people articulate it incredibly poorly, or think that the experience and knowledge they gain by raising a child (see: every man who now thinks they have empathy for women after having a daughter) is something only gained through parenthood. But the best parents I know have a relationship with their children that shows mutual growth.

We're not, at least most of us aren't, in societies where children are responsible for their parents after they reach a certain age, like Yerac mentioned. But we're beings with relatively brief lives, and most of us are going to diminish with age in some way, to the extent we might be child-like again as we approach senility. Looking at childhood and being elderly as somehow not the norm, and the plateau of productive adulthood as the normal human state, reduces our communal empathy

there are very few real rugged individualists out there and if forming your family means forming a babby for you, then by all means...

I think there's a particular part of the human experience -- which isn't for everyone -- that is only experienced by raising a kid.

my conclusion from knowing parents is that this cannot be explained adequately using words and thus there's a divide btwn babby havers and non babby havers that can never truly be bridged, hence these endless arguments

A well-phrased point, Simon.

Which is why I didn't see my experience reflected in Yerac's comment (that most parents in her demographic just drifted into parenting "on autopilot" without conscious decision making). It may seem like that because you're not in their heads, and they may not be able to articulate it in a way you'll understand.

For me and for my wife - and most of my embabbied family and friends - there was a LOT of conscious discussion and a lot of serious thought. your babby-makers may vary?

babby-formers, sorry

I was more or less referenciing that marrying and having kids is a very traditional norm that only recently have we had more leeway in decision making against that standard.

oh, and I meant our parents not us being parents. also mh otm.

I think there's a particular part of the human experience -- which isn't for everyone -- that is only experienced by raising a kid.
my conclusion from knowing parents is that this cannot be explained adequately using words and thus there's a divide btwn babby havers and non babby havers that can never truly be bridged, hence these endless arguments

I agree with both parts of this and, like any other experience, we have to trust the user. From my side of the divide, I'm a passive individual and was never sure I even wanted children. I met someone who absolutely was sure and it went from there. Having kids has been unlike anything else I've done - which isn't of course, in and of itself worthy of note - but the singular enormity of it is only partly explained by mental change and mental processes: it's a totalising gesture and feels molecular and existential all at once. There feels something inherently bougie in measuring life in 'experiences' but if that is a permissible measure of a life, for that and that alone, I wouldn't have missed it for the world.

Kids are pricks, mind.

okay Yerac, sorry to misunderstand

My wife and I specifically considered the possibility that our child would have a serious disability when we were discussing whether or not to have any children. We decided that, however difficult it might make life for our child and us, that once you take the plunge you have to accept every eventuality and do your best to meet the challenges you're presented with, because challenges are inevitable and you don't get to choose the ones you prefer and refuse those you don't like.

np. some days i am like, punctuation on the internet is a choice xpost

Aimless, as is tolerably well known, my son does in fact have a serious disability (one we could not have foreseen or prevented or prepared for). His life isn't at all easy but he's a creature of pure joy. He is the happiest person I know, and brings a lot of happiness to the people around him as well.

That said, if we'd known about the disability (or its probability) in advance, we would not have had a second child. And my daughter (who carries the gene) will have to be very careful about what she decides.

if we'd known about the disability (or its probability) in advance

aye, there's the rub. it's rare to know in advance what your probabilities are. otoh, known genetically-determined disabilities, identified in advance, are a different matter from just speculating about a 'what-if?'. I completely understand your position, and had my wife and I known with anything approaching certainty what our daughter's life would be like, we would have refrained. we weren't afforded that knowledge. neither were you. so we live with it and make it work as best we know how.

my brother's third child has pretty bad arthrogryposis and they were notified of this while he was still a fetus. they still decided to proceed with the pregnancy. I was like ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ . and then when they became super anti-choice that shrug turned into an eyeroll emoji. My nephew seems fine, but he's still young and already has had endless operations on his legs and back and hands.

maybe i'm wrong here, but don't silby's and even j.'s arguments assume that there is "something" unconceived, that is acted upon by being conceived? but there is nothing. so the "crime" of bringing it into existence is, literally, victimless crime, a crime against nothing/no one

tbh that stance reminded me of anti-natalism: https://www.newyorker.com/culture/persons-of-interest/the-case-for-not-being-born

xps no

aww thanks j. i see i'm wrong, sorry for the stupid question

hurray for one less son of a bitch

why should I, personally, forgive my parents

put another way, i think one can say "satisfaction not guaranteed, but on balance it's a good thing" without suddenly transforming into a utilitarian

i want silby to write a response song to 'i hope you dance' from the child's pov called something like 'you hoped i'd dance but did you even consider if it was in my best interest to be born?'. it'd be like the 'no pigeons' song by sporty thievz.

Kinder’s answer is pretty much exactly ours: we both decided we’d probably regret it more if we hadn’t had kids, plus there was basically a moment after this vague anti-decision when E definitely and quite strongly wanted kids. And I was fine with that. Plus I’d seen my older brothers struggle to conceive and suffer miscarriages.

So much we didn’t know. Oh holy fuck what we didn’t know.

I love my kids. They are beautiful and funny and smart and charming - C regularly has older kids fawning over him and talking to him like he’s five rather than two, which I find weird, but he does seem to have this magnetism sometimes that he’s oblivious to. Maybe every kid does but you don’t notice it in other peoples’.

But I do sometimes wonder if it was worth it. Especially given what we’ve been through with C’s cancer. E always says “wtf else would we do with our lives, wtf DID we do before?!” and I agree - they give you SO MUCH purpose - but I can also think of plenty of things I’d do without kids in my life. Would I prefer it? Sometimes.

Knowing what I do now, would we still have had a second? Sometimes I think not. But then I think about C not having existed and, despite everything, it breaks my heart.

One of the best things about kids is watching them eat when they’re about two. Watching N eat back then, and C now, pretty much makes it worthwhile.

And it’s not about ‘continuing the family line’ or whatever but I do have this sense that if you don’t leave someone better behind after you to be a custodian of this world then it’s all been for nothing.

So are children for being special to you or for being their own person

great, great post nick

Had a vasectomy after two - because ‘do nothing more than replace yourself’ - and at five months he was diagnosed with cancer and I felt irrational guilt at us not being able to replace him.

Thank you rvw.

I mean, there’s this: https://www.instagram.com/p/B8TVByUpfeB/?igshid=1h7f0lelt3810

And being able to ride bikes and listen to records and go out to the cinema or a restaurant or drink wine on a rooftop in Andalusia whenever you want is GREAT, but these people who are laughing their heads of and having the time of their lives came out of my wife’s vagina and I put them there and she grew them and HOLY FUCK THATS MAD.

i read sheila heti's semi-fiction "motherhood" and rachel cusk's book about this (see https://www.theguardian.com/books/2008/mar/21/biography.women for background on that). read em a bit late (one baby out, another one on the way), but i thought they were both very good.

i can't think of any serious writing like that from a male perspective (recommendations welcome).

listen, I'm an idiot who hasn't read enough books, I'm getting to the end of my rhetorical rope here, all I want is for parents to accept that they've inflicted a potentially grievous harm on their children by having them

<3

Aimless

there's the rub. It's rare to know in advance what your probabilities are.

Yes, sadly, my daughter Puffaleta will be in a very different position from us if she considers babby. She's a carrier, so if she forms a boy babby there's about a 50% chance that said babby will be severely intellectually disabled.

Her choices will be like:

1. Not form babby
2. Adopt babby
3. Select a girl babby
4. Employ some yet-to-emerge technology to form a healthy babby (? Who knows where the science will be in 15-20 years?)
5. Roll the dice and form babby anyway (Not a path I would choose, but ultimately it will be up to her and a hypothetical future partner. She's bisexual, not that that is a determining factor.)

For my son Pufflet I just don't know if he'll ever be in a position to even think about forming babby.

Many xps, this was a difficult post to write. I want to go back and savor Mouthy's posts and respond a bit later

being a human and having a human are both risky ventures

Scik Mouthy, I also had a vasectomy after my second child was born.

For me it was less about an ironclad "anything other than replacement level is unethical," more like a combination of "two is the number we wanted and could handle," plus "gee wouldn't it be nice to never have to worry about birth control ever again," with a side order of "I'm 40 fucking years old and already exhausted all the time."

I don't regret Pufflet's birth and existence. Once he arrived it became our duty to love him unconditionally and do the best we can for him.

Nor do I regret the vasectomy - though I know for some parents of special needsy kiddos there is at least some impulse of "let's try again, and get a healthier one this time." That's not a motive I endorse, but I am not in a good position to judge people in different circumstances than us.

It transcends moral philosophy.

yeah it's hard to argue reproduction is such an arbitrary and "risk" choice when it's a fucking biological imperative. sperm. egg. sexual desire.

risky

Biological imperatives can suck it

That's kinda exacerbating matters in this case

Zing

Why does ilx call babies babbies now? What have I missed?

how is babby formed

Literally a 13 year old meme

We’ve told ilxors younger than this meme

*got not told

We probably don’t but if of you would get your kids to start posting we’d have a little more life in here

i thought having more life in here wasn't the goal

How is memey formed

Aja is 13 iirc

They want the purdie shuffleexistence

the Curly shuffle

hey Moe

hey Moe

hey Moe

hey Moe

After yet another horrible night’s sleep I take it all back. Somebody have my children. They’re horrible. I regret it. I only want to wake at 5am on July Saturdays so I can bike ride.

i have starting bit at 500, 500, do i have 500

tempted, but i'm holding out for steady mike's punk cohort

warming up the eStork

i'm not hearing a bid

also, how, exactly are you warming it up?

You want a punk cohort? Here are mine vibing to that Fugazi cover on YouTube:

https://www.instagram.com/p/B8Dr6LaJXZt/?igshid=8fbnl9f8w1b0

ahem CHANGE TO THE STARTING BID, we've done a reappraisal based on the latest video

do I hear $1,000, $1,000 anybody....how about you in the tweed hat and the checkered jacket?

I disassembled my shitty bed which I hate last night and I feel a lot better now

To form bedd or not to form bedd

If you hate your baby and you disassemble it you get in big trouble!

now he tells me

i put mine back together but i had lost some of the parts during moves so the kid has two left arms now, it's ok tho he wasn't gonna be a baller anyway

any post containing "babby" i'm mentally reading in the voice of Noddy Holder, ay it?

So ya think ive gotta babby formed

Any kid you have at this point is going to have a briefer, worse life than you, most likely. Don’t have kids.

People's reactions to this question come from such an internal place, largely subconscious, that there's almost no room for discussion on either side.

Obtain informed consent from babby first.

I think the science & philosophy of it on both a personal and a general bumanity-wide level are an interesting debate which we probably need to have ASAP.

I also think it's a kind of shitty and inconsiderate thing to suddenly announce to a load of people, some of whom have young children, on a Sunday afternoon.

It’s 9 am in Seattle and we are going to break the June high temperature record set yesterday, which will be broken again tomorrow. Because I am well off I could drop $700 to get a hotel room and avoid spending this interim in our uninhabitable house. I will probably kill myself circa 2050.

silby considers this to be a public service announcement

One of the things I tried to understand after my parents died was how they had the faith in life that their sons would thrive even without them there. I don't share that optimism, I couldn't set something in motion that I won't see to completion.

I’m with silby

lol at this:

I also think it's a kind of shitty and inconsiderate thing to suddenly announce to a load of people, some of whom have young children, on a Sunday afternoon.

did you read even read the thread title?

tbf the stated point of the thread is “state ur reasons” not “tell ppl what to do”

I won’t have kids personally, but I’m hoping my nieces can carry my torso (no limbs after being tortured by Great Lakes Water Guardians) on the back of their motorcycles as they cross the parched desert of what once was northern Minnesota.

Well yes I did read the thread title and tbh it did not prepare me for suddenly thinking about my kids dying.

Among the many reasons I won’t have kids is I assume I would constantly be thinking about them dying

mind your own business

I am all for abolition of the family and of the tyranny parents and other adults hold over children but this seems like a different issue than whether reproduction is good or bad in any particular instance or in general. I am much happier making sweeping statements in the first case than the second since the enduring popularity of malthusianism in the parts of the world most responsible for fucking everything up (not, in general, the parts with higher birthrates) is way more worrying to me than someone having a child. my own lack of interest in doing so just seems kind of arbitrary

I would have preferred not to have been born so there is an emotional appeal but I trust that people who seem glad to be here aren't just pretending

Any kid you have at this point is going to have a briefer, worse life than you, most likely.

I have never had any significant interest in having kids, but once, in a school discussion in 1992, classmates and a teacher found this insufficient reasoning for expecting not to. Under beration, I reached for an argument that I thought would be definitive, and proposed that it could be morally unjustifiable to bring children into this world when climate collapse was likely to occur within their potential children’s lifetime.

I learnt, in the ensuing seconds, that stating this as an individual reasoning prompts people to take it as a personal condemnation. It had not previously been my reasoning: I merely thought it so incontrovertible that it would counter the near-personal-condemnation I was receiving, and allow the conversation to move off me.

I didn’t think much about the exchange for a couple of decades, but have recalled it several times a week in more recent years, and wonder if any other classmates remember it at all.

I'm sure they talk about it all the time

i’ve heard variations of that reasoning over the years and even entertained it myself from time to time. i’m convinced that it’s pretty much always a deflection away from other, real-er reasons. the number of people willing to deliberately plan their own lives so drastically purely for morality’s sake isn’t zero but i think it’s pretty small. like folks who live in huts off the grid. there’s lots of terrible shit in the world. i dunno.

There is always evidence for hopelessness and despair, but the human mind is such that it will always try to avoid these conclusions. People hope against reason. Having children is an expression of this tendency, for good or ill.

- Bob Marley

Children of the current upper middle class will probably be fine. Grandkids, OTOH…

Maybe he would say that idk.

I think the implication of a lot of the posts on this thread is that having hope in the future is not just delusional but ignorant and selfish. I think I disagree. Even if the melancholic apocalypticism on display here is more reasonable, it’s not realistic to expect the majority to embrace a perspective like that. People want to get up in the morning and have something to work toward and feel like existence is a good thing not a bad thing.

And in more pragmatic terms, would the world actually be improved by people en masse taking an anti-natalist stance, with all it implies? Would that society, and its institutions, be more caring and responsible than ours? I think it is possible. But it is also possible it would be worse. I don’t know.

it’s 1650, and your partner is pregnant. “my dearest love. while you know that a child would bring me the greatest joy a man can know, the treaties of westphalia that have recently concluded are fragile. indeed, mercenary bands of shattered armies roam the provinces. no farmer’s family is safe. would we bring a child into a world that harbors the horrors of magdeburg? where soldiers spit young children on their lances for sport? it would be an immorality. i have spoken to you of this many times and yet you still see fit to carry this seed to its fruition. it is with deep regret that i must go.” the letter left on the rough table built into wall of the croft, the horse gone.

i think i identify as an anti-natalist but largely refuse to tell anyone about this bc i also fundamentally identify with thinking experience, maybe as distinct from "existence," is a super cool thing that i'd love to continue doing and maybe share with someone else who could maybe have an easier time overcoming all the mental illness i've endured in the process, or who maybe wouldn't have to contend with a bunch of fake and shitty ideas that we have for some reason orchestrated society around, though there's not a lot of evidence that that would happen

the number of people willing to deliberately plan their own lives so drastically purely for morality’s sake isn’t zero but i think it’s pretty small.

In 1991, the Australian government scrapped plans to set a zero-emissions target for 1995, just as CO2 concentration topped 350 parts per million, In 2021, the Australian government is refusing to set an emissions target to reduce concentration to 350 ppm by 2050.

I agree that the number of people planning around the projected effects of CO2 concentration above 350 ppm appears to be very small.

also telling anyone you're anti-natalist is pretty much a non-starter for civil conversation ime and i completely understand why xp

Can CRISPR give future generations gills?

Feelin brad on existence

In the wider scheme its all just unfolding universe lads

thank you Tracer Hand
anyway my kids have better ideas and attitudes than me, I’m happy they’ll replace me in the world. Their lives will be very different to mine but none of us can know exactly how.

Definitely sweatier.

I don’t have much to add to this discussion but this is a good book that gets into it without getting too big philosophy brained about it https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Notes_from_an_Apocalypse

i’ve heard variations of that reasoning over the years and even entertained it myself from time to time. i’m convinced that it’s pretty much always a deflection away from other, real-er reasons.

Tracer otm. People saying this are fronting imo. (NB I have said this and I don't have kids).

Fronting for what?

I wonder what percentage of generations legitimately believed they were living in the end times

something's always ending

Fronting about the real reasons they don't have/want to have kids.

I dont want kids because it would impinge upon my many future holiday plans and meals out

would be truly selfish for you to impinge on those

Every breath is selfish in this doomed life

^^^^ First reasonable thing anyone's said since thread revive

I'll admit that I'm not having kids in the vain attempt to avoid my responsibility and duty to take care of all the children in the world.

I dont want kids because it would impinge upon my many future holiday plans and meals out

― Eschew things thirty two times before swallowing them (darraghmac), Monday, June 28, 2021 5:43 PM (fifty-nine minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

My man.

It’s 9 am in Seattle and we are going to break the June high temperature record set yesterday, which will be broken again tomorrow. Because I am well off I could drop $700 to get a hotel room and avoid spending this interim in our uninhabitable house. I will probably kill myself circa 2050.

― Clara Lemlich stan account (silby), Sunday, June 27, 2021 9:14 AM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

being able to drop $700 on a hotel because it's hot out means that you have the material recourses to proviide any child you had would have one of the most comfortable lives anyone has ever had in the existence of humanity

They’d still have depression and then probably kill themselves

I expect the 2040s or so to closely resemble CHILDREN OF MEN (2006)

silby, I like you and hope you are doing well. You don't seem like you are doing well, at the moment.

Anyway even if it weren’t a sneak peek of the end of the world today it’s not my only reason for not having kids, for example I want to save my money for things like hotel rooms, useless tungsten cubes, and meme stocks

I wonder what percentage of generations legitimately believed they were living in the end times

I don't know if the fears of millenarian English peasants concerned that Aethelred was the Antichrist really impeach the concerns of someone staring down the barrel of climate change/mass extinction and nuclear annihilation.

I was worse yesterday but icymi the earth is dying and I don’t like the look of it xp

I’m not going to “feel better” in any permanent sense

Being alive is bad and I think objectively speaking it’s only getting worse

xp I haven't missed it. I (sometimes) think about it and it's like sticking your hand in a fire.

But you can only do what you yourself can do. You aren't responsible for everything.

Importantly I’m not responsible for bringing a child into this shitty earth and I feel morally superior about it

If “being alive is bad” isn’t it good that the Earth is dying? Not trying to be a jerk—this is a compelling position espoused by Kirsten Dunst’s character in Melancholia.

Idk maybe

If “being alive is bad” isn’t it good that the Earth is dying?

while it is, at a minimum, rather inaccurate to use one's own experience of what it feels like to be alive as a guide by which to measure all other human lives, it is presumptuous beyond belief to assume that all living things experience life or value it as you do personally.

I don't know if the fears of millenarian English peasants concerned that Aethelred was the Antichrist really impeach the concerns of someone staring down the barrel of climate change/mass extinction and nuclear annihilation.

Yes, don't talk to me about your Black Death killing half the world's population, I've got real problems to worry about.

If “being alive is bad” isn’t it good that the Earth is dying?

The Earth is not "dying" — the Earth is simply becoming uninhabitable by humans.

presumptuous beyond belief to assume that all living things experience life or value it as you do personally.

this must be your first time reading silby's posts

Not just humans unperson. We’re living through a mass extinction event.

At least in the 14th century the Black Death was going to have a hell of a time making it to the western hemisphere - the technology to transport diseases to every corner of the globe in days is pretty new in the grand scheme of things.

Just another rerun of "life is good/bad" with everyone doing their bit, nbd

and so travel agents wear the commemorative brooch inscribed "nobody gave the Black Death more hell"

though i did have the distinct feeling, mid commercial, that Trivago guy would one day kill us all

Trivago girl otoh ❤️❤️

To sum up, the position taken by Kirsten Dunst’s character in Melancholia, as paraphrased by treesh and which he maintained is "compelling", is in my view logically untenable and ethically way off base. We should buy copies of the script and jeer at them.

better change your surname to 'von jeer' bc that's what we'll do to the many copies of your script we bought, lars

at some point, they'll plead with us: "just pay somebody to watch Melancholia on Hulu and transcribe it" or "please buy one script and print multiple copies" but we'll say "that would be ethically way off base". so we will keep buying the script from scripts.com, one per Jeerer (rip netherlands euro 2020), to prove how logically untenable it is.

It’s not my position, as should be clear from the posts I made above, section 1c, third clause. I was just trying to tease out the conclusions of silby’s premises. This is making me remember one day, years ago, when I was logged in and posting in this kind of way and silby said “this isn’t the agora of athens treeship my god”