Comment by bengale
9 hours ago
In the nicest possible way, this is basically the oldest lesson there is.
You weren’t happy because you optimized your feelings or had the right opinions. You were happy because you stopped focusing on yourself and became responsible for other people. Six kids needed you, in the real world, every week. That kind of outward focus kills emptiness fast.
Chasing happiness, moral righteousness, or political engagement just loops you back into your own head, helping people doesn’t. Feeling good is a side-effect of being useful, not the goal.
There’s an entire generation of mostly childless adults who are shocked to find they enjoy contributing to others’ happiness. I have friends like this, their only purpose in life is to have no responsibilities, FIRE, and never give to anyone but themselves. Seems like a terribly depressing way to live but pretty common in tech/upper middle class circles.
> but pretty common in tech/upper middle class circles.
It's common in some tech and upper middle class bubbles, but outside of some startups and a few VHCOL cities most of the 40+ people in tech I encounter have families.
I think the mindset is most popular in internet bubbles like Reddit. Reddit went mainstream a decade ago and many people in their 30s and 40s grew up reading a lot of Reddit. Reddit cleaned up their popular subreddits list years ago, but for a while subreddits like r/childfree were constantly in everyone's default feeds. Redditors would talk about people who had kids as "breeders" as a derogatory term and treat them like they'd made terrible decisions with their lives.
I didn't realize how much this carried over into the real world until my friends and I started having kids. I knew a few people who treated our decisions like we were making terrible mistakes and throwing our lives away. I still encounter people from younger generations who are confused when I say that I like spending time with my kids. They can't imagine how that would be enjoyable in any way. When you grow up with your chosen social media telling you that the smart people are maximizing their bank accounts, minimizing their responsibilities, and doing as little as possible to get there, they can't fathom how someone could be happy with kids.
I am about to hit 40 soon and have an alternative take on all that. I agree reddit was and still is a very toxic echo chamber, but the rest of us who have avoided having kids shouldn't be lumped in with those people.
I came from a big family and grew up somewhat poor watching remorseful adults who didn't recognize the gravity of bringing a life into this world, let alone several, basically drink themselves to death to cope.
My social life is mostly offline and I enjoy helping people in any way I can, but I am fully aware of my own flaws. I find balance by being generous in what seems like a million other ways I might not have the energy or time for if I had a family. To each their own.
> Seems like a terribly depressing way to live
This sounds very judgmental. Don't assume there's a single way to live a happy life. People with kids aren't immune to depression or lack of purpose.
People who want to be childless usually champion the importance of building strong community through friends and neighbors, just because they don’t want kids doesn’t mean they don’t want to contribute to others’ happiness lol. People wanting FIRE is a lot more to do with the current economy and wealth of useless or harmful jobs than kids
> People who want to be childless usually champion the importance of building strong community through friends and neighbors,
This describes all of the childless people age 50 and older than I know.
It does not describe the social media r/childfree mindset people I know at all. They have their bubble of friends they keep in touch with only when they feel like it but that's about it.
There's a big difference between childless and r/childfree style people, though.
> People wanting FIRE is a lot more to do with the current economy and wealth of useless or harmful jobs than kids
FIRE rose to popularity before this economy, though. It felt like peak FIRE was during ZIRP when it was easy to get a high paying tech job even if you barely had the skills for it. All the blogs and influencers made it sound so easy to just keep that going straight into early retirement as long as you continued living an austere lifestyle, which came with implied advice to avoid having kids.
I followed several of the FIRE blogs and forums in the early days but had to stop reading after they started filling up with people convinced they could retire at age 36 with $1.2 million in the bank because they they lived frugally last year and decided they could keep coasting that way for another 50 years without their lifestyle changing. I remember reading a few disaster stories from people who thought they were doing leanFIRE with their spouse until their spouse grew up and realized they actually wanted kids and to be married to someone who had a little more ambition in life. I know these stories aren't what FIRE is supposed to be about in the theoretical optimal sense, but there were so many stories like this that the forums just felt like a sad place to be.
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I think more than FIRE people should just focus on FI. You still have to do something with your day after becoming financially independent and a job is still one of many good ways to contribute to the community even if you don't technically need one. So retiring is an option but not the only one.
On the other hand it remains quite confusing that after centuries of capital achieving vastly better results than labour people still keep going for labouring as their primary strategy. Building up a strong income-generating capital base is just common sense and it is an extremely good idea to have enough that you could technically avoid working if it made sense.
They really don’t.
They just post about how important those things are online but not doing much about it.
> dont want to deal with kids
Someone has to bring up the next generation, the no kids crowd want all the luxury of having the next generation without putting in the effort or spending the money.
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No one chooses to be born. Once they are, they may find that procreation is impossible for them or just not something they'll do well or even want. None of these is necessarily depressing.
We have no shortage of humans, so there's no need to try to shame the childless. Nor those who focus on themselves.
We are on course to have far more elderly people than young people.
A global retirement community without even any grandkids to visit them strikes me as a depressing dystopian future.
Yeah, and I do get it to some extent. Everything about having a child seems burdensome and hard. Turns out it's doesn't feel anything like that and I can't think of anything I'd rather be doing. I wouldn't swap with another person on this planet.
> Everything about having a child seems burdensome and hard. Turns out it's doesn't feel anything like that and I can't think of anything I'd rather be doing.
You got lucky and had kid(s) that were not extremely difficult to raise. Not everybody gets that. Not all kids are alike. Some will make your life a living hell. It is a total crapshoot.
Also, not everybody enjoys parenting, even if they have easy kids. We are not all built the same.
I did get lucky and had relatively easy kids. I love them. But, I do not enjoy parenting.
> Everything about having a child seems burdensome and hard.
I love my kids and they're pretty great (and seem easy by comparison to others), but it's definitely burdensome and hard.
Yeah kids are often more interesting and insightful and fun than adults. It’s wonderful to have their refreshing perspectives in your life.
100%. I never was excited about having a kid but it's totally amazing to be helping a little human that you love to figure out the world and grow into a good person.
People can obviously make the opposite choice, but I'd encourage anyone that's never been around good little kids as an adult, to find a way to be around them in a helpful or fun role for a while. Volunteer at a youth group, sports camp, coding class, whatever. Or just be an "uncle" to some of your friends' kids. My volunteering at a church youth group in my early 20's probably gave me the nudge I needed.
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Existence is suffering. But there are moments that make it worthwhile. When you have a kid, you not only get more of those moments, but you give those moments to people in the future.
I slept and dreamt that life was joy. I awoke and saw that life was service. I acted and behold, service was joy.
Rabindranath Tagore
I want to do that some of the time, not all the time, that's the difference.
Childlessness seems to be an increasingly compassionate choice. Degrowth by force.
No choice is more selfish and misanthropic.
Childlessness is a beautifully self-removing trait.
Sure why not get trapped youself with responsibilities and work your life off making rich people even richer.
That's just childish. Eventually you'll have to learn responsibilities (towards other people) are a privilege and necessary for a full life. You'll just keep getting (more) bitter and lonely until you understand that.
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Something about FIRE makes people have a visceral reaction. How DARE people not work like the rest of us. I get the purpose part if they were like teachers or doctors or something. Nope. SWE at Meta.
what does “FIRE” mean in this context? I can’t figure it out
Financial Independence, Retire Early
The problem though is that relationships with others are risky. When I look at my social circle about half of my friends express some kind of regret related to their marriages. Call me an entitled prick, but I honestly believe that 90% of people are liquid crap. I realized that in order to have a good social life I need to filter very hard who I hang out with. Even if I could reproduce by budding, this is not an environment I want my kids to grow up in. "Dad, why did you make me into a world full of normies?"
Let me guess: you are somehow NOT part of the “liquid crap” category?
> When I look at my social circle about half of my friends express some kind of regret related to their marriages. Call me an entitled prick, but I honestly believe that 90% of people are liquid crap. I realized that in order to have a good social life I need to filter very hard who I hang out with.
Candidly, if half of your friends are in regretful marriages and 90% of the people you encounter are "crap" then I would be questioning your social filtering.
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The world is always full of danger. This moment in time is exceptional only in the form of that danger, not in its substance.
When those of us with noble traits -- intelligence, empathy, morality and so on -- refuse to reproduce, we do so at the cost of allowing the OTHERS who lack those traits to make up a larger and larger percentage of the population. They WILL reproduce.
Food for thought.
It's always funny how many people think that the only font of altruism is taking care of children who have your DNA, like that's some kind of selfless act. It is, in fact, the ultimate vanity of which humans are capable. Raising little variations of yourself might make you feel good, but if you think it's a unique path to a fulfilling life I suggest you are the one in the little bubble.
We are having fewer children and also seeing huge increases in loneliness and mental health problems.
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> It's always funny how many people think that the only font of altruism is taking care of children who have your DNA, like that's some kind of selfless act
This is a strawman position in my opinion. I don't think there's that many people who think they're carrying out some selfless act by having children. It's simply biologically true that the children you'll probably have the easiest time raising are your own and, assuming we want to continue as a species, we do need people to have children. It's fine to have them, fine to not, neither side has some moral high ground.
Whether it is vanity or not is not determined by what you are doing, but why you are doing it. The vanity is not intrinsic.
I think what usually gets mixed up is how the responsibility works, and biological children sit at the overlap.
The thing I most crucially remember about my son being born is that it felt downright easy to simply dive into all the things I would now be doing: because there was no one else. I either got it done or it didn't get done.
Someone else's kids on the other hand there is a choice: their parents.
It's not absolute IMO but you also see it echoed by working too: when it's your job, it's a lot easier to simply go "right I need to handle this" then when it's not.
It’s uh, historically proven, so to say.
The entire zeitgeist of software technology revolves around the assumption that making things efficient, easy, and quick is inherently good. Most people who are "sitting in front of rectangles, moving tiny rectangles" have sometime grandiose notions of their works' importance; we're making X work better for the good of Y to enable Z. Abstract shit like that.
No man, you're just making X easier. If the world needs more X, fine. If not, woops.
The detachment from reality makes it all too easy to deceive yourself into thinking "hey this actually helps people".
It’s really just because those of us choosing this profession are also very good at optimizing chosen metrics. But don’t always ask whether they are good metrics and whether they become counterproductive past some point.
> Most people who are "sitting in front of rectangles, moving tiny rectangles"
Hey dude these are my emotional support rectangles!
Truth is, anything can be meaningful. We make our own meaning and almost anything will do as long as you believe in it. If optimizing rectangles on the screen makes you happy, that’s great. If it doesn’t, find something else to do.
Yup, because there are plenty of opportunities to get tokens to feed your family outside of moving those rectangles. Not.
These are all value judgements that reflect your disillusionment rather than some universal truth.
No one is attached to some mythical objective reality. Everyone is imprisoned by the same social, economic and thought prisons.
Also, I think for a good number of people, their first job out of college is oftentimes one they will look fondly back on because they've just finished ~17 years of school, have financial independence with a salary, and are still bright-eyed about all the possibilities.
> Chasing happiness, moral righteousness, or political engagement just loops you back into your own head, helping people doesn’t. Feeling good is a side-effect of being useful, not the goal.
Presumably you imply that moral righteousness, too, is best attained intuitively, by being useful to others and helping them (to do whatever, like a useful idiot?) without conscious thought for what's right.
Or else you're saying "help people for no reason even though it isn't right, and you'll end up feeling good that way so it's fine".
I’ve spent too much time talking to Claude, because this sounds exactly like one of its messages
Absolutely! That’s a great point.
For real though, I’m not wasting tokens on comments. I do wonder if we will pick up habits when interacting with them a lot though.
Yep yep and yep. The massive move towards individualism in our culture is making people lonely and empty.
Similar for me. Happiest I've ever been was when I was an assistant guide for birthright Israel.
My job was to make sure the 40 kids that came were having a good time. When your job is to make others happy, you become happy.
Even if it's the oldest lesson, it's one we all need to learn, sometimes multiple times. Yesterday was the best time to have learned it. 2nd best is always today.
There is never a bad time to learn this lesson.
Agreed! I'm not sure why the GP comment has a somewhat negative attitude about it, I think it's great for people to realize this and talk about it, every year a whole new year's worth of young adults turn up not knowing it! Insert XKCD lucky 10,000 comic here
Not meant to be negative.
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