this post was submitted on 17 Feb 2025
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Simple: the moment you have a child, you stop being the person who had hobbies and interests and become a parent, a single-minded organism that exists solely to make sure your children make it to maturity in good shape. Your Spotify Wrapped becomes Baby Shark, your guitar or mountain bike or whatever gets ebayed to make room for a nursery, and travel plans become fiction, written around a character who is no longer you, a stolid lump of responsibility.
This does not sound very appealing, tbh
That's because it omits what all of the things lost get replaced with. The time spent with your kid is incredible. Yes your YouTube playlist gets taken over by baby shark, but also you get to see them go from a lump that can barely move, to being able to do situps, then walk, then run up to you and start clapping their hands making the baby shark motions, and start cackling with the most genuine laughter you will ever hear in you life as you get up off the couch and pretend to scream "oh no the baby shark is gonna get me" as they chase you around the house.
It's good times.
It's also bad times. Like when you have to tell them no, or stop, or bed time, and they scream the scream of pure despair, as nothing in life could possibly be as painful, as terrible, as inhumanly awful as being told you're not allowed to roll around in the broken glass that you just shattered on the ground by wildly throwing your teddy bear across the room.
Your life becomes singularly focused, You lose almost all of the things you were before, but your life is always interesting and meaningful. Except to other people. Other people think your hobbyless, in bed at 8 life, is boring.
Yeah...even then.
Sounds like a lot of rationalization and silver linings for a sunk cost. I mean, if parents feel fulfilled, awesome. But outwardly, it's a hard sell. Unless the family has wealth, the odds are high that any kid born in the US is likely to have a worse experience than their parents did.
If I use my own, elder Millennial born of Boomers experiential framework, having children ultimately seems extremely selfish. The kids are born into a hellscape of Capitalistic predatory systems, and have to struggle for years, or decades to gain any kind of agency. Meanwhile, the ROI for all that stress and trauma is increasingly less. So, why put them through it? So that I can say I have progeny? To scratch a biological imperative's itch? Nah. No thanks. The world doesn't deserve kids; it hasn't earned them.
Having kids is selfish, it's the whole "point". Any DNA based organism's only goal is to clone that DNA. Evolution happened and now you get a chemical boost (or whatnot) that makes you feel like it is totally worth it (which I feel that it totally is).
I said it as nicely as I could.
Maybe you'll get it if I put it like this: I heard the comparison once that children can instantly create experiences that feel like rolling on MDMA.
Yeah I'm pretty sure "just take drugs" is going to win this one. Like for starters, molly only disrupts my sleep for like one night. And I don't need to buy it a plane ticket to take it on vacation.
You can (or should) also only take it like once a quarter.
That's a really weird metaphor. And I'm going to express some serious dubiousness.
Also, why would I want to be rolling on MDMA around a bunch of kids? Nightmare scenario.
I think they meant the feeling of bliss and love you can get when you're on MDMA. Not the hyper sensitivity and all that.
Or you can just play your music. Babies and kids still like regular music. That's what existed before the hyper commercialized crap came into existence. Kids just listened to what their parents listened too, and as they grew older would start seeking out new stuff.
Are you confusing a guitar with a whole band? They don't take up a whole room last I checked. You can just, you know, move the guitar.
And I don't know why you're storing your mountain bike inside in a room but if you can't find somewhere else to place a muddy bike than indoors I'm a bedroom, then yeah, I think it's safe to say you can't afford a kid at the moment.
You can still travel with a baby. Should you? Well, not on planes. But after a year, you can leave them with a relative / trusted person.
Someone who has issues these badly with kids like you tho shouldn't have kids, so we do agree on that however.
This is a weirdly hostile comment... That comment describes parenting experiences for a lot of parents. Is that the absolute reality of everyone with kids? Of course not, but kids consuming a lot of time and resources is absolutely true.
So was the one I replied to
Yeah my dad just played his music on long car rides even when we were pretty young. Mountain bike you can just get a kids trailer for that. Once they get a bit older they can have their own bike.
And start a huge fight every time you want to go on a bike with them, so after a few years you just give up and watch your body deteriorate as you turn into a couch potato.