Frankly, I never really got why people wanted children in the first place, so this turnabout is amusing. Perhaps you can ask some of these people that you are close with as to their reasoning.
It's the simplest answer. I find life to be worth living, I am grateful I have life and it's the most meaningful to me to be able to give life to someone else and try to make it as good and meaningful for them as possible.
And it can be so fun. I just taught my 3 year old to ride a bike and for the first time today we went for a bike ride along the boardwalk, each on our bikes. I had a pretty amazing single life but I would be hard-pressed to think of anything that matched how much fun this was for me.
I suppose we come at life from very different perspectives, shaped by our culture and our family. It is very hard for me imagine how someone must feel about their life and the world to say "nope, it ends with me." I know people do it but... I don't envy that starting point.
When it ends, it ends, and that's it regardless of how many others you created who will now go on to face their own ends. I get that somehow people are able to live in denial of the ultimate extinction of their being, but I never really seemed to be able to get the hang of that. To each their own.
This sounds familiar, perhaps you and I have discussed it before.
My life matters to me as a vehicle for what truly matters: if my descendants are thriving, and my values are upheld, whether I am physically here once I've contributed to it, is completely irrelevant to me.
I will fight to live as long and as well as I can, but only because that increases my opportunity to contribute what I want. Merely "existing" is not my highest value and therefore is not the thing I worry about solely.
It's certainly possible, but I've seen others here express the same sentiment. Another poster once posted a quite insightful comment about Nietzsche that really described a lot of the problems of nihilism that captured the feelings that I've had since realizing the unreality of religion at a young age, so I'm not exactly alone even if I am a bit of an outlier.
It goes back further than that. "To be or not to be" is indeed THE question, or rather THE choice, especially if you have the type of personality that tends to lead to an existential crisis at some point in your life.
In the end, as far as I can tell, there is no obvious "meaning" in life beyond what we decide to attach meaning to. And "to be" is a prerequisite for most objectives we may attach it to.
Having offspring can be seen as an extension to this. It is to decide that "beeing" will go on even after you as an individual dies.
I mean, I'm not trying to be bleak, but do you have any evidence that any of the religions out there can deliver on their promises? Like I'd be somewhat inclined to listen, but extraordinary claims and all that...
I am not the one you're asking but I was born an atheist and discovered religion as an adult, through intellect. Here's my answer from that background.
Ready? The answer is "we don't know." There may be a Gd, there may not be. There may be meaning, there may not be. You can't really know either way.
The answer is that it doesn't matter. The question is what kind of life do you want to live. One that lives as if there's meaning or one that lives as if there isn't? I know my answer. If I get to the end and turns out the meaning was just something I made for myself, and that there's nothing special about my children and my values other than my deep affinity for them... that'd still be a pretty great life.
Evolution has equipped us with a pretty generous frontal cortex so we have a sort of escape hatch to reflect and decide on whether to act on our biological imperatives. Reduction of human beings to 'biological organisms' as if we're humping rabbits is no less weird.
We haven't escaped any biological imperative. We still have sex. The desire to have sex is the biological imperative that produces offspring, and we haven't lost that. It's because we invented birth control that now the desire to have sex is not enough. We need a desire to have kids. Natural selection will make that desire stronger over time.
> Natural selection will make that desire stronger over time.
Natural selection doesn't work like that.
There is no guarantee that traits appear because they are needed ; only that traits that somehow appear may spread if they are useful or associated with something else that is useful.
But don't we have that trait already in some form? Some people want kids, others don't. The traits that make a person more likely to want kids will become more common.
If we don't have such a trait and the decision to have kids is based entirely on the environment, then this evolution will be cultural instead of biological. Cultures that have more kids will replace those that don't.
My point is more theoretic that an actual reflection on what will actually happen, because I'm not better than the next person at predictions. Simply put: just because a species needs to change in order to adapt, doesn't mean they do. Geologic strata are littered with species that no longer exists.
As for culture, it is not a static thing, or indissociable from individuals. My grandmothers had 6 and 8 kids, most of my cousins have 0-2 kids. So considering my grandmothers' behaviour and my cousins', Are they from the same culture? Will people that reproduce more today convince their children to do the same?
In either analysis, it's really hard to use natural selection as a predictive tool.
We, or at least some of us, most definitely have such traits.
Holding newborn babies tend to have a quite obvious and equally instant hormonal effect on a lot of people. For some people, even a few such encounters may be enough to induce baby fever.
And there are other factors at play, too, that are also inheritable. Factors like impulse control, introversion / shyness, ambitiousness drive and tendency to magical /religious thinking may all affect the number of offspring one way or the other.
So all that is needed is a few generation of strong selection pressure for such traits, and we're back to overpopulation again being a much bigger threat than population collapse.
Even better, invent tools so we can still hump like rabbits but not be burdened with the results. Good stuff. Evolution gonna take a while to figure out a response.
Unless it already figured it out, and placed the solution in the gene pool. In that case, a few generations of natural selection is all that will be needed.
Does it not strike you as strange though that so many different nations / cultures are all seeing the same downward trend at the same time? There is something about it that feels like a biological imperative.
We have better things to do than hump like rabbits? We don’t need kids to work the farm, or to provide net positive muscle power input to the economy. We have machines for that.
>higher rates than before (welcome hookup culture)
Got any source to back that up? All surveys I have seen point to younger generations having less sex, fewer relationships, and even just drinking less than their ancestors. Remember, the boomers were the "free love" hippies and then STDs became a serious concern, and we decided we should warn kids about consequences of sex.
A fire has no cortex whatsoever, and yet if fire did not continue doing what fire does in order to stay fire - turn things that are "not fire" into itself- it would cease to exist altogether. That's all there is to it. There is no big picture.
edit: I expected apathy at best from a comment this deep in a thread. Now, granted, HN does not stand for Hard Nihilism, but four downvotes with zero explanations in under an hour suggests there is an incurious hostility toward the view that people (myself included) are, like fire, essentially just echoes of thermodynamics.
> That's all there is to it. There is no big picture.
Even if it is correct (which you haven’t tried to support, just claiming that you know best), how is it relevant? If there’s no bigger picture then what’s wrong with going extinct which should push us to procreate? The comparison to fire - the human population is the highest it’s ever been and still increasing so it doesn’t seem like we are “going out“, and if that was happening the collapse of civilisation would lead to the loss of the ability to mass manufacture birth control and loss of the medical systems supporting them at some point, and the population would go up again after that, wouldn’t it? Fire runs out of fuel, but human food grows on trees - less humans leads to more ecosystem regeneration which could support more humans.
> "an incurious hostility toward the view that people (myself included) are, like fire, essentially just echoes of thermodynamics."
I thought we were “just“ hydraulic systems? Just LLMs? Just clockwork? Humans are just {recent scientific discovery of the era} is an interesting view on its own but is it relevant to the thread? "We are just thermodynamic systems ... so we should reproduce"?
OP is saying that we have a complex brain which allows us to reflect on our biological impulses and choose whether or not to answer the instinct to reproduce. I'm arguing instead that we - as complex frontal-cortex-having organisms - have no more choice than fire does whether to make more of ourselves. And abstractly our existence follows the same flowchart as that of a fire but, as the kids say these days, "with extra steps." Our integrity and thus identity floats upon a process of degrading complex configurations of energy into simpler, uniform ones.
If fire were to gain sentience and therefore know what it was up to, this would not change its essential prerogative to keep doing it, in order to be able to keep doing it.
I'm older and also never wanted kids. There was a brief moment in my 20s where I would have been ok with it, but the relationship I was in didn't workout and that was that. Now I've been married a long time, and we had the no kid conversation on date one. Instead we rescue dogs and are in the process of moving and semi-retiring in a small coastal town in Italy.
My desire for not having kids is rooted in my own childhood. My parents had me at 19, we were poor and struggled for much of my early life. My mom used to say, "don't have kids until after college unless you want to work at McDonalds". And, for better or worse, my drive became for financial security above all else.
I dunno, I grew up in a family of 5 kids, and it just never really occurred to me to not have them. I think my greatest regret in life is going to be having only one :/
However, I have no issues with people that don’t want them. To each their own.
Honestly, it’s a relief when there’s other kids to play with him. I love having 3 kids in the house at the same time and to just guide them in their play, instead of having to _be_ the playmate. I’m pretty young, but I do not have the kind of imagination required to keep that up for a day :P
If he’s been outside running around the street with his friends all day it hasn’t cost me anything and the evenings are so much easier/relaxed.
I remember that being the same for me, except that I always had people to play with around, because they were living in the same house.
For me, I consider bringing a new human life into existence to be one of the most net positive things a human being can do. It's also one of the most reliably net positive things.
Economists have very roughly estimated the value of a human life at around $10,000,000 these days, and there are reasons to suspect this is a vast underestimate for my kids in particular. The total cost to me as a parent to rear this golden goose? Somewhere around $100,000 total, spread over the course of 18 years. What a bargain!
There are of course things one can do which are worth even more, but it's exceedingly hard to reliably become a billionaire, or even to found a billion dollar company. But any old schmuck can nut inside a woman and force push eight figures worth of bliss into the source code of reality!
Frankly, I never really got why people wanted children in the first place, so this turnabout is amusing. Perhaps you can ask some of these people that you are close with as to their reasoning.