You should have kids! Or not!

More generally, grab the universe by the balls, shake it, and see what you can make happen.

One of the most important life questions a man (or even a woman) can answer for themselves, at least in modern society, is whether or not to have children.

The “default” for humans is that everybody is supposed to have children because we are biologically hardwired to do so. If you don’t feel the urge to procreate, you’ve probably stifled it, and likely many of your other biological urges. You might want to get some bloodwork done.

Plus, “society” and “civilization” would really love it if we all have as many laboring, consuming, tax-paying children as we are able to accommodate without ourselves becoming a burden on the system. Producing a large future generation of labor and consumption units is very important for our societies to continue in the same way that they have been. If there’s not a big future generation to create economic demand, pay for stuff, and be taxed into oblivion, that scares governments because a shrinking population means a shrinking economy, and a shrinking economy means less income, more joblessness, and more hungry people with guns.

Organized religions also really, really want all of us to create the future generation of religious devotees. If you have a spouse and children, who are also religious devotees, to be accountable to and for, you’re less likely to tell your religion to fuck off if it does something annoying or asks you to do something you find irritating. Plus, the more devotees there are, the more donations, tithes, or whatever a particular religion’s business structure allows for there are to be solicited.

Socially, it’s also fairly expected that most people are going to get married and have kids. People who don’t follow this path due to inability are regarded as unfortunate failures, while people who don’t follow this path by choice are regarded as immature social deviants with poor priorities.

However, as a fairly intelligent species (on the average, at least compared to goldfish), most people realize that having children is a very significant and hugely important responsibility (not to mention an enormous expense), and that undertaking something so significant simply because you are supposed to with little-to-no other thought or preparation may not be a good idea.

In fact, turning anything into a “supposed to” expectation makes modern humans more resistant to the idea.

If it was a required obligation that we play video games three times a day, with consequences if we don’t, nobody would like video games.

Think of all of the above paragraphs like radio static with the volume cranked up really high. Or like living next door to a busy airport for you kids who are so young you’ve never heard radio static. An absolutely oppressive level of noise bombarding you at all times, making it impossible to focus or think about this issue clearly.

When a modern man (or woman) sits down and really thinks about whether he really and truly wants children - a very significant change in his current life path, and all he can come up with is, “I don’t know. Maybe?”, that’s probably pretty normal given the circumstances. It’s hard to think about this clearly or even to know exactly what you’re supposed to be considering in this incredibly noisy and distracting landscape.

I suppose while being a parent significantly restricts your freedom and costs a lot of money, it’s not exactly “hard”. Impoverished, illiterate peasant farmers in the 1200s raised children just fine, without the benefit of technology. The fact that we are a much smarter and much better-equipped generation of humans, yet we find this task impossible if we can’t afford a 4-bedroom home zoned to a good school district, might make our peasant ancestors laugh at us.

But that’s part of the modern standards to which we’ve become accustomed. If we’re too poor to buy that house and to sign Junior up for T-ball, this means we’re failing as parents.

I’m not entirely sure it’s parenting we’d be failing at in that case. We’re just failing at making lots of money.

Money is definitely a concern - for sure. But I’d caution against conflating providing a decent lifestyle with good parenting. I think a lot of us were raised by parents who conflated those things, and instead of turning out happy and well-adjusted, we ended up finding The Red Pill on the internet and reading and writing bullshit like this as our hobby. Maybe we can improve on our parents’ model a bit.

If you really and truly want children - your life is incomplete without them and it is definitely your calling, your mission, your dream, whatever and you must do this before you die, sitting around complaining on the internet about women and the economy probably isn’t doing much to get you there. It’s a good bit less comfortable, but if this is really your dream, it’s probably okay to raise children in an apartment and not sign them up for ten resumes full of extracurricular activities to make sure they’re on the college track early. Honestly, if you followed that track, got your degree(s), and now work entirely too many hours for not nearly enough money, and you’re always stressed and tired and overworked and irritated at life — can you honestly say following this path has made you happy? If you had children, would you really want to lead them down the same road and teach them to live exactly as you are right now? Would they be happy?

I’m definitely not telling you internet men what to do. But it’s something to think about. These are the kinds of things I think about, anyway. What do I really want from this universe? What actually makes me happy? What about my life today most certainly does not make me happy, and might even be making me unhappy?

As a society, we prioritize money a lot. It’s the metric by which we determine how successful and grown up we are. It’s even the metric by which we determine what stage of life we are in or ready for. We’ve reached a strange place where most people have the mentality, “I need to get rich in this stage of life before I’m ready to move on to the next stage of life.” For example, people want to have house money and a sizeable salary before they consider themselves ready to move on from the young adult with a job stage into the older adult ready to get married and have kids stage. Until that money happens, people still consider themselves in the young adult stage, even if they’re 35 by now.

Essentially, people who earn a university degree and get a decent job will continue to consider themselves children fresh out of school for years and years because they don’t feel like a grown-up until they cross what they consider to be a grown-up wealth threshold. Often this mental threshold comes from how their parents raised them, or how their parents told them they were supposed to raise them.

So we have a lot of creepy 28-35 year-old children out there still waiting to finally be rich enough to not be young adults any more.

In older times, it wasn’t about getting rich. It was about becoming self sufficient. You’d get a job that paid enough to move out of your parents’ house and buy groceries. There. Done. Now you were ready to date, and even find a wife, if that’s something you wanted. Sure, you might change jobs and upgrade your residence and clothes later, but once you were self sufficient, that was good enough to date.

I’m definitely not trying to push people who don’t want the family lifestyle toward it. People who only start families because they feel like they’re supposed to tend to make much shittier parents than people who actually, you know, want and like having a family. It is perfectly acceptable to say “I don’t want children because they’re expensive and I would rather spend my money on other things that will fulfill me better”, as long as that’s true. It’s just a bit restrictive to say “I maybe want children, I don’t know, but I’m not even going to think about it because I’m not rich enough to buy a 4-bedroom home and you need that before you can have kids.” If time passes and you get to the point where you and your future wife are old, you’ll spend that money on IVF instead of T-ball.

Some people kick around this idea that we’re all supposed to have kids to further our “legacy” or our “genetic line” or something like that. Anybody who’s talking like that doesn’t have sex.

Here in the real world, which is not Game of Thrones, we are not kings furthering our legacies. We are plumbers and insurance salesmen and office grunts. Cogs in various machines. We are peasants. We are not furthering our legacy. We have none. If we have children, it’s because we have a lot of love to give, not because it’s critical to preserve our superior genes that led us to an enviable life selling insurance policies.

Some people like the idea of marriage and children because they hate the idea of “dying alone”.

I suppose it’s true that having a family means that for at least some portion of your life, you have companions living in the same residence as you. But take some of that with a grain of salt.

50% of married couples report having sex less than once a week, 20% just once or twice a year. In fact, fighting about sex is one of the most common marital issues, second only to fighting about money. 6 out of 10 couples report at least one partner being unhappy. 30-60% of marriages include infidelity. 50% of couples end up divorced.

Over 25% of children end up estranged from their parents. Raising a child to age 18 in 2024 is estimated to cost over 300,000 US dollars, with over 30% of couples under age 60 stating that they are choosing not to have children due to cost. I may have previously mentioned that the number-one source of martial conflict is money.

If you end up married with kids, your life may turn out just fine. These are just statistics. You may become one, or you might not. But this default path of marriage and children definitely isn’t a silver bullet to obtain happiness. There are risks, a lot of work, and a lot of stress. But most guys on that path think it was worth it. More than a few don’t, though.

Ultimately, it’s incumbent on each of us to figure out what we actually want from this universe, and harmonize that with what’s actually realistic to obtain.

That’s actually a big problem. Most people have no idea what they want. They just do what they think they’re supposed to do, they react to things that happen, and are blown around by life. Any important question you ask them — any question at all, be it marriage, kids, jobs, where to live — the answer is nearly always, “I dunno. Maybe? I guess I’d like it. We’ll see what happens.”

This is an especially common mentality among 28-35 year old “young adults” who are waiting to be rich before they decide they’re grown-ups, almost as though they don’t feel like they have the right to decide on a path for their life yet.

Whatever path you’re on, and whatever path you think you want to be on, be honest with yourself about what you actually want, and what steps you can actually take to get a little closer to that. It’s a big universe out there. Don’t die never trying anything.