Nobody Wants to Have Kids | The Renegade Coder

Today, I thought it would be fun to talk a little bit about a trend I'm noticing in my own life around people not wanting to have kids. It's a bit rambly and incoherent, so don't pay it too much mind. The Context: Japan As some of you might know, I have a kid of my own. At the time of writing, I'm 31, and I have a 20-month-old. When my parents had me, they were 24 and 25. When their parents had them, they were all around 18. In just two generations, people went from having kids extremely young to waiting as long as possible. If I kept the math going, I could imagine my own kids waiting until they are in their mid-30s to have kids. Then, maybe their kids would wait until they were 40. Obviously, this trend isn't exactly sustainable. The reality is that adults are going to just stop having kids altogether, and I don't even have to imagine that. In basically every "developed" nation on the planet, the birthrate is plummeting. In fact, I spent a bit of time in Japan, and that's a major societal problem that their facing. Because no one is having kids, there are fewer people to take on key jobs in society. In an act of desperation, Japan is looking at solutions like robotics and immigration to solve their aging population problem. In the short term, however, they're having to do things like asking elderly folks to continue to drive the buses—a solution that I imagine is not very sustainable. It will not be long before this issue approaches other major nations like the US, where many of my peers are not having kids. In my friend group alone, I was the first person to have a kid. Only one other guy has had a kid since, and my other married friends have no kids at all. Meanwhile, the same can be seen in my wife's friend group. She has one friend with kids, and several are married without kids. Why This Concerns Me There are a lot of reasons why I'm worried about no one having kids. For example, I'm a leftist, and I get the feeling that we've completely lost the culture war on families. Every right winger preaches family values, and we have done nothing to counter that narrative. Now, it's conservative to have kids and progressive otherwise. As a result, I think we're going to see a massive uptick in conservative views—views which I find abhorrent and detrimental to society. Though, perhaps kids tend to rebel against their parents, so maybe that's not as much of a concern. Likewise, I'm also concerned because it feels like we've sort of collectively given up. Too often I hear folks justifying their childfree existence by citing some impending doom (e.g., Climate Change, Fascism, AI, etc.). These folks will adopt absurd antinatalist rhetoric in an attempt to justify not bringing a life into this world. And like I get it, the future looks bleak. But, this feels like a post hoc rationalization for the desire to just not have kids. Otherwise, you would be organizing with your community and finding ways to fight back, not giving up. Finally (and this is my hottest and probably most hog-like take), I worry about folks not having kids because it feels like we're collectively caving to hedonism. Why raise a kid when you can save all that time and money for your own pleasure? After all, any leftist would tell you that the key to improving birthrates is to improve the material conditions of society, yet that doesn't seem to be working. Seemingly, places where folks are well educated and have decent wages are seeing massive declines in their birthrates. I think this is still an open-ended question on why, but part of it definitely seems like hedonism with a post hoc rationalization of doomerism. Doubling Down and Confronting Antinatalism Personally, I'm not that interested in birthrates. In fact, despite the title of this article and some of my takes that followed, I don't think declining birthrates really have anything to do with the personal choice to have kids. Surely, the prevalence of birth control and increase in women's rights play a role. Certainly, material conditions play a role (e.g., housing crisis). Likewise, there is probably a social conditioning aspect that plays a role, likely due to the ubiquity of the internet. Eventually, I would suspect that society will stabilize to some reasonable amount of people, but I assume there will be challenges facing the aging populations in the short term (which will likely include myself). In general, I'm more interested in the social stigmas around children. For example, there's a niche idea of antinatalism that is showing up in a broader childfree movement that shows a massive disdain for people who have kids. They even have fun slurs for us, though I wouldn't consider myself oppressed. I'm more annoyed with the arguments, so I'm taking a chance to punch back a little bit. Seeing this article, an antinatalist's head might explode. After all, they can't seem to even approach the idea of children without citing the impact on the climate and the role of consent in bringing a life into the world. As a result, anyone with a child is apparently narcissistic, which is comical given the colossal sacrifice of time, energy, and money you make as parents—a sacrifice that you make willingly because you want to give another being the joy of life. If that "want" is narcissistic, then I would say that some amount of narcissism is good. Or as one Reddit user puts it: Imagine kids growing up with parents who never selfishly wanted them! How horrible! "Well son, no, Mum and I didn't have you because we wanted you, or for any "self-serving" reason. We had you…1) to serve others? 2) to serve the rainforest? 3) to serve other starving children? swearrengen Ultimately, I think people who don't want to have kids shouldn't have them for precisely the reason outlined above. My concern is that the number of people who don't want kids is going up, and their rationale may be self-serving (while publicly rationalizing it as selfless or hopeless). Though, while I don't really care for any nature-related arguments, it does feel somewhat good to be like "well, that's natural selection at work; they won't reproduce their own desire to not have kids." Or as one YouTube comment I saw put it, "I don't mind redditors refusing to reproduce." Revolutionary Optimism With all of that said, I have one last idea to share. I don't know who the target audience is because people who choose to be childfree should probably remain that way. Meanwhile, I can say the same for anyone on the fence. Therefore, I guess I'm just screaming this into the void. If there was one unselfish reason to ever have kids, it would be to ensure that someone is on the other side of whatever hellscape we're in. The reason I write, teach, and organize is for that very purpose. Even if I don't get a chance to enjoy the fruits of my labor, future people will. After all, that's what we're all doing this for, right? To improve society for future generations.