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I am one of those people you are describing, and I actually 100% agree with your assessment! But I think I was fair: as I said in original reply elsewhere (not this thread), it may be Stockholm syndrome, but once you’re in you can’t help but be all-in. It is necessary to remain sane, and thus, it changes you. The only useful semi-rational heuristic I can ascribe to my general stance is that: before I had kids, life was objectively much easier, but I had many regrets and suffered greatly from causes of my own invention. After having kids, my kids are the cause of my suffering and I have no regrets about it. Biology assists you there because it makes you love them even though they are frequently the cause of your suffering. One of the other _pragmatic_ reasons for having kids that I didn’t actually notice until after having kids, is that old people seem to often (but not always) become confused, lonely, and out of touch with modern realities and culture. Family creates, for many, a lifelong bond that bucks this tendency. Of course there are other stressful bonding scenarios that do this, like for combat vets, but seldom are they so cross-generational. The perspective shifts are also quite powerful, and there’s an amazing amount of high quality children’s media (especially books) that are no less powerful for being written in an ELI5 way…sorta like how good coders write lots of good code easily and great coders write only a tiny bit of code that seems totally obvious to everyone upon reading, but that was never done before. Anyway, most of that stuff I know I would have missed. Along similar lines, you get exposed to a much more diverse community: the parents of your children’s friends, and various other child-centered communities. Almost all of my closest friends today, I only met as a side-effect of having kids. There’s probably a counterfactual for the childless but I haven’t lived that life and don’t know anything about it! There are countless pragmatic reasons not to have kids. I think when people ask, “do you regret this life,” it is their lizard-brain kicking in, nudging then towards “yes it is time.” For those of us who have had them, our own lizard-brains kick in with their own reply. An ancient call and response. After all, all the people smart enough not to have kids never achieved offspring to carry on that lifestyle, and likewise for the pack/community that discourages ever having kids. As an atheist, my respect goes out to the “achildists” for bucking the trend: it is a dying breed by definition. As a “childist,” like some sort religious nut, all I can do when confronted with the question “do you regret having kids” is share what is in my heart: having kids is tough but I don’t regret it. —— If someone was asking: “should I have kids?” then the answer might be very different! I’d probably say: “…no, why would you want to do that??” If someone is wondering about regrets, though, then they either have kids and have regrets or they are already feeling the call and asking for a lifeline to resist it. In either case, “sorry bub, your lizard-brain won, it’s too late, but here’s what you can look forward to.” |