Comment by nvarsj
6 hours ago
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.
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.
>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.
Do you actually know a lot of those people? I know a lot of people that don't have kids and they all are very normal, well adjusted people. None of them hate kids. Using the word "breeders" as derogatory is weird, bordering on mentally unwell behavior. I've never met anyone that doesn't have kids that's like that. Even for the few people I've met that don't particularly care for children, they just keep it to themselves.
Reddit I think is not representative of real life for the vast majority of people.
I've read and posted to r/childfree and similar subs in the past, but I quickly came to realize that the people there are not your typical child-free people.
They're mostly bitter anti-child people who rail against what they see as entitlements that parents get that non-parents don't. They derisively call parents petty and mean things like "breeders" and seem to be a very cynical bunch. I'm not saying their feelings are always ridiculous; certainly some of them have reasonable reasons for feeling the way they do. But they're a mostly-toxic, vocal minority.
It really annoys me when people assume all (or even a significant number) of childfree people are like those reddit folks (not accusing you of that, just saying in general.
And I don't get the automatic association between FIRE and childfree that some people are making here. Sure, FIRE is easier if you don't have kids, but IME the two groups are only loosely connected, at most.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
Sure why not get trapped youself with responsibilities and work your life off making rich people even richer.
[dead]
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.
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?"
> 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.
From experience I think 90% of people are really liquid crap. filtering can get it down to 50% or less but it also means you are WAY more lonely
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.
what does “FIRE” mean in this context? I can’t figure it out
Financial Independence, Retire Early
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.
> 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.