to form babby, or not to form babby

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