to form babby, or not to form babby

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