[motohagiography]

Imo, your children are the beings you can share the most of your own experience of the world with, and that's a pretty good reason. Arguments about having kids being an expression of ego and conceits are both limited and misleading.

As a man still open to having kids, I've come to believe that the internet imbues us with contempt for one other via a kind of false familiarity, and it's also a source of literal mind viruses that make mutual trust and respect very difficult to maintain in the face of aligning to increasingly absurd narratives we think we need to support. It's a form of captivity, and almost nothing in nature breeds in it. I'm certainly guilty of it as well. Biologically, only a fraction of a given population reproduces anyway, and it's neither here nor there whether one does so or not, but evolutionarily selecting out over something we read on the internet seems like an avoidable fate.

I still believe kids are worth the challenges of sustaining an intact nuclear home for them, but I'd enter into it the way I have other things, which is that they will also cost almost everything, but it's a bet on ourselves and the hope of making and then being a part of a life. It's not a rational decision, which I think is the point. If it were, our species would have died out millenia ago.