[tivert]

> I've always been puzzled by the 'its so selfish to not have kids' idea. Like where does that come from?

Why is it so puzzling? You're part of a whole, and producing children is important work to sustain that whole. If no one did it, the whole would die. Skipping that work voluntarily is a kind of freeloading (and also would typically involves redirecting the personal resources that would have gone to it towards increasing selfish consumption).

> If Norman Borlaug or Frederick Banting never had children but they otherwise did the work that they did, would you consider them selfish?

Maybe people like that, with one-in-a-billion achievements, are the exceptions that prove the rule.... except they both also had children.

[robotshmobot]

> If no one did it, the whole would die. Skipping that work voluntarily is a kind of freeloading (and also would typically involves redirecting the personal resources that would have gone to it towards increasing selfish consumption).

There is no amount of consumption a child free middle class person could do in their lifetime that equals that of introducing a whole other person. That’s ridiculous.

[tivert]

> There is no amount of consumption a child free middle class person could do in their lifetime that equals that of introducing a whole other person. That’s ridiculous.

What's ridiculous is how much you completely misunderstood my comment. Personal "consumption" has nothing to do with the core idea I was talking about. The only way it factors in at all is like the "insult" in "add insult to injury" (i.e. an ancillary thing that just makes perception of an underlying issue worse).