Comment by jaco6
2 months ago
Child rearing is a possible solution—it is our evolutionary “purpose” to reproduce, after all, and most people in the developed world today aren’t doing it.
2 months ago
Child rearing is a possible solution—it is our evolutionary “purpose” to reproduce, after all, and most people in the developed world today aren’t doing it.
A bit off-topic, but it’s interesting how this became the de-facto answer to any question related to “meaning of life” in the last 2-3 years in HN/tech circles. I’m not saying you’re wrong, but it’s a bit weird. Like I’m sure everyone knows that? If a person isn’t having a child in their 30s, they either can’t because of multitude of different reasons, or they decided they don’t want to.
Disclaimer: I’m as pro-kid as you can get, just haven’t met a partner who would be on the same page as me yet.
When I was talking about it with my friends, our guess is, people with kids are getting worried. If others aren’t having kids, then their kids might suffer big time in a long run, thus the renewed pressure to keep suggesting the idea to others. Obviously this doesn’t relate to you, just weird how it started in the last few years.
I'd have to guess the demographics of HN lean rather Millennial, and I don't have to guess that they lean heavily male. I think it's probably just a collective biological clock thing; it's something I've started to feel myself. Intellectually, I want kids less than ever (so it's for the best I never had any), but emotionally, I do sort of understand the urge.
Could be! I share the same emotional feeling as well, but the ones telling others to have kids, already have them. They keep going above and beyond trying to portray the idea of “everything is amazing when you have a kid!”, when it’s objectively not true. It’s just a bit off-putting when you have all the information readily available and try to push an ideology to a circle that’s commonly known as skeptics. Anyone who has close girl friends in their late 20s/30s have heard the issues they’re facing and why they’re not having kids either. But then, bunch of seemingly smart people, just keep yelling “just have children!!!” looks a bit dumb. And from the guy’s side we have different sets of problems.
A bit personal, but throughout my life, I’ve met more dead-beat fathers than caring ones. So, I’m incredibly jaded when it comes to giving advice. Statistically, I wouldn’t try to change one’s mind to have a child, because I’d feel bad for the kid if things go south.
Once again, I’m still pro-having kids, but I don’t get why it became such a major discourse compared to 2010s.
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I think it's a pushback against the emphasis on individualism in our culture, which many find does not lead to real fulfillment. When you start a family, you're giving up your own glory, but in doing so you become deeply integrated into something greater than yourself, which makes you greater by extension.
And I say this as someone who doesn't have kids either, and as someone who used to not be so excited by the prospect, but I've witnessed how it's transformed my friends and family members.
But why now, and not like 5 years ago? That’s the weirdness I don’t understand. Is it just very loud people had a bunch of kids and trying to push the same on others? Trying to change the culture from the start? “Meaning of life” is like the oldest question that has ever existed. Both people with and without children have pondered about it for eternity. It just looks funny when you see a sudden shift in the discourse.
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I find this interesting as one of the individualist characteristics of our society is 'my children > everyone else'. I don't see the emphasis on having children as anti-individualist at all.
Many parents are completely unwilling to hold their children to account/tell them no/let them fail/etc. The experience of the people around their children means nothing to them. Teaching their children to be a part of society does not matter: All that matters is their children get what they want because their children are extensions of themselves.
Like many online sentiments I think it's reactionary, specifically to the stereotype of the liberal atheist DINK milliennial couple.
In my case this is probably partly true, but more because I think many people are actively deluding themselves and trying to reject their own mortality with fantasies of digitally transferring ones conscience, bio/medical immortality a la Kurzweil, singularity stuff, and so on endlessly.
But if people look at these things objectively, there is essentially 0% chance of any of this happening, let alone in our lifetimes or anytime remotely near it.
And when you look at the people spreading/making such predictions the timelines always coincidentally come just before their expected end of life.
When you accept the fact that you, and near to every other person alive today, will be dead in 80 years (and mostly far sooner) it rather significantly changes your perspective on life. Want to transfer your consciousness? Not gonna happen, but having a few children is at least a reasonable second.
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Yes, I've noticed it too. The most blaring example was DHH going on a "Just have some kids you'll be happier than you've ever been!" rant in some zoom talk ostensibly about coding that he gave in the past year. it's gross and condescending and not someone speaking as a public figure should be advocating for. IMO, We need better parents, not necessarily more parents, and if you're having kids because you're sad with life then IMO you should reconsider the ramifications of having a kid and then fucking up the parenting process. It's incredibly selfish
Because it's not only extremely fulfilling (well beyond what one might expect) on a personal level but also required on a social level for a culture to persist.
And this is in the context of ever more people complaining of loneliness, lack of fulfillment/meaning, and more. These issues are almost certainly causally related.
Help yourself, help society, and even have a voice (of sorts) in the future of humanity.
There are literal hundreds (thousands?) of philosophical schools for “meaning of life”. It’s really not a new question, and there won’t be a right answer, ever. Trying to convince someone that it is the only route to find a meaning just sounds a bit funny for anyone who watches it from the sidelines.
My question, once again, is why tech circles started focusing on this and pushing it as ideology just recently? Wasn’t a thing in 2010s, people more or less respected personal choices as long as it doesn’t harm others directly.
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I agree it’s becoming a common sentiment among the online pseudo-intelligentsia, but it’s still rare on a population level, so I will keep spreading the sentiment. I think it’s important, mainly on an economic level (I believe economic growth is impossible without population growth), but I speculate the decline of family-having is at the root of some of our other social-psychological malaises: loneliness, substance abuse, mental illness, increasing interest in extreme politics. Tech people should be most interested in family as an answer to social woes because currently people are blaming either social media and tech for social dysfunction,or the collapse in family-having, or both. If family is the answer then lots of tech will be exonerated.
Frankly, I don’t buy the malaises argument. It obviously has some effect, but even the countries that are known for not being lonely has dropping fertility rates. And there’s almost no good argument for having more than 2 kids, which is basically a requirement for increasing population.
People just have more stuff to do, and convincing a woman they should sacrifice at the bare minimum 6 years to give birth to 3 kids is just… yeah, good luck. The only argument is “do it for the greater good!”, and as a society, we have shown that most people don’t care about the greater good the second times become a bit hard.
Some tech circles have been entertaining the whole “trad life” idea, but it’s pretty laughable the second you start talking to real people. Not all women want to be depended on others if they have a choice.
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> Child rearing
For what purpose?
> it is our evolutionary “purpose” to reproduce
Yes evolution selects for having children survive to reproduce, but that’s not a purpose, that’s just “that which continues, continues”.
> and most people in the developed world today aren’t doing it.
Plenty of species have evolved such that when they sufficiently saturafe their environment and resource carrying capacity, reproduction rates drop through behavior changes based on various signals.
>Child rearing is a possible solution—it is our evolutionary “purpose” to reproduce, after all, and most people in the developed world today aren’t doing it.
I doubt it, that's because to most people it does not feel purposeful, it's a chore. Most people who say it's purposeful are generally the most vocal ones, and I suspect the minority.
Chores are a great way to make you feel a sense of purpose. You can directly observe the fruits of your labor. Your kitchen is shinier after a deep clean. Your baby is no longer crying of hunger after a feeding. The same can't be said for scrolling through TikTok for hours or even a lot of employment. Sure your livelihood may depend on moving items from big boxes into little boxes, but it's hard to feel any sort of accomplishment for that.
There is a difference between considering a task a chore i.e a drudgerous task and 2) doing a chore (a mundane task, which may/may not be drudgerous). Same word but different connotations.
As someone with a young child, it definitely feels purposeful. Also the opposite of a chore, it's lots of fun and what I look forward to after a day of work.
And I'm someone who, for most of my adult life, thought I'd be childfree...
Well I've heard people say this. What about the ones that regret it? I know of one personal acquaintance of mine who confided that he regrets having his kid. He would under normal social circumstances not mention it, for obvious reasons.
The problem is that it's a one-way street if you decide to have a child. Now if only one had an option to 'trial-run-before-one-commits' that would be ideal. I suspect (but not sure) that most people will still opt not to have them.
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I would guess the only ones who do not feel it is their purpose are those for whom it happened accidentally.
Anyone who chose to have kids most likely did so with purposeful intent.
Whatever purpose you decide you have, do you think it will come without chores?
Beg the question that a purpose can’t involve chores or unpleasantries much?
Dogs are a chore. Cats too. Oh well.
[dead]
The replies are bit harsh. It is a solution to meaningless of life. I am reminded constantly by some of my friends.
But it's also a problem for some. For example, it means moving out of expensive cities, it means worrying about making lots of money (if you live in the U.S.), it means child care is thousands a month, it means health care is thousands a month. It means you have to be responsible and not drink every day. It means potentially not sleeping for a year.
Personally, seeing the stress of my workmates, and how they became more dependent on their jobs, on the shit of the jobs, and how now they're more competitive on the job, and worried... I'd personally choose to write that off.
But I know people who found meaning through child-rearing, as you say!
>most people in the developed world today aren’t doing it.
Untrue: e.g., in the US, "Among women and men aged 40–49 in 2015–2019, 84.3% of women had given birth and 76.5% of men had fathered a child."
https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nhsr/nhsr179.pdf
This is the best answer. From a strictly rational perspective, parenthood makes little sense. The negatives are obvious and intimidating, while the benefits (which are not rational but instinctual) are less clear. Happily, oxytocin is a helluva drug. It will rearrange your universe in the course of an hour, such that all of its substance revolves around a splotchy, squinty little ape.
I highly recommend it.
And then the sleepless nights of screaming will twist it up again. Postpartum depression can affect any gender when it comes to sleep deprivation.
Doesn't this seem like a tautological purpose? Our purpose is to create a new generation of beings who question their own purpose?
It's not tautological because it's objectively wrong.
There is no biological purpose. We are just a multitude of chemical reactions falling down the entropy slope in a slightly odd way.
"Purpose" is a concept entirely made up out of whole cloth for hairless apes who accidentally invented language and that allowed them to do a lot of thinking outside the confines of their biological processes.
We are perfectly free to CHOOSE reproduction as a "purpose", but nothing about biology actually cares. If you don't reproduce, oh well, something else will take that spot in the ecosystem.
That's the most plausible gloss I've heard. The new generation must be capable of framing a question at least as sophisticated as its parents can if there's to be hope of progress in the world. Otherwise we're on the way to "Idiocracy".
A thought.
What if we have judged the healthiest of a society on the wrong metrics. And the right one is birth rate?
We might say things are bad for a society if it’s too dangerous or not enough food so the birth rate goes to near zero and as a result it dies.
How is a society that has people being too busy or occupied with other task that neglects reproducing a better society than the latter?
Obvious too much of a birth rate is bad, but too little could also be a sign of an unhealthy environment.
Basically what you’re saying is that the healthiest society is the one whose population is growing the fastest?
I would think life expectancy would be a better measure of a healthy vs unhealthy environment.
You're talking about individual health. Regardless of what specifically makes a society healthy, a necessary condition is that it doesn't die out.
A society with a 120 year life expectancy and 0 birth rate isn't healthy.
A society with 20 life expectancy and 6 birth rate is unhealthy but for different reasons.
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> jaco6 : Maybe the minority who want to reproduce will be paid to reproduce for everyone else in the future?
This latter comment of yours was down voted by idiots to the point where it's dead, so I could not respond to it directly.
Anyway, specifics aside, it is actually a good idea - for a variety of reasons.
I like the converse: pay certain people to NOT reproduce.
That's also great.