to form babby, or not to form babby

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.