The case against having children
It’s without doubt, the worst deal in the history of humanity. A deal that doesn’t even need someone to sell it. It sells itself.
Chapter I
Million years ago, when one of our ancestors looked around, they saw a world full of various types of creatures. All kinds. It was a world where there was a legitimate struggle for natural resources among various species. None had reigned supreme over others. Our ancestors were merely one of the million species in fight with each other over finite resources.
To win this species war, there was one thing that had to go very well.
Reproduction.
Why? Because evolution takes place over generations. Why is that important? Well it’s important because it was evolution, and the skills it equipped us with, that allowed us to dominate other species. If we hadn’t evolved the way we did, we’d still be a mere middle node in a complicated food chain, and you’d be hiding behind a rock in some part of the world.
But genes don’t care if you’re competing for resources or the reigning king of the world. It knows only one thing. To pass itself on by programming humans to reproduce. Nobody gave them the memo that we won the evolution game.
Genes kept instructing humans to reproduce more, and now there’s 7.9 Billion of us. Correspondingly, there’s only about 3,00,000 Chimpanzees, 3,20,000 Gorillas, and around 1,00,000 Orangutans left. Clearly, we didn’t need to grow to this size, to dominate other species. We did, because we’re programmed to.
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Chapter II
Amit Varma wrote this great column on anti-natalism (the philosophy of not having kids) in 2017. His main argument was that anything done to a person without their consent is wrong. In this case, because you cannot take the consent of an unborn person, birthing them is wrong.
I don’t agree with this straight jacket formula. Imagine you’re walking on a road, and the person beside you in about to fall into a huge pit. By Amit’s definition, saving them from falling is a wrong act. Wrong because you did not take their consent before doing it. But this is still an example of impulse action. The same definition would imply that all surprise gifts constitute a wrongful act. I know this sounds absurd but that’s what I want on imply. Perhaps the consent argument isn’t a good framework to be used here because it suffers from reductio ad absurdum.
So then what’s wrong with having children? As Amit points out, you can not use a utilitarian argument against having children given that you can never ‘calculate’ the net balance of any average person’s positive and negative experiences because of it.
However you need not go as far as even calculating value of experiences to come to the conclusion that life is overwhelmingly difficult for the most part. Everyone is failing on their goals all the time. Those who don’t win the lottery of birth are committed to a life of extreme hardship, and even those born in wealthy families have their set of problems and existential issues. There are only a few moments where you truly enjoy yourself and feel great. Life is nothing but a few good events wrapped in the agony of painful existence. And mind you, I’m neither a nihilist nor an existentialist. At my core I’m an optimist. For myself and the world. But even if I wish and believe that things will, or at least can get better, the process of getting there is filled with agony. You achieve one thing in life, and then fall behind in ten others. To be a human means to forever run in the never ending pursuit of ideals and material pleasure. To desire is to be a human, and as Buddha said ‘Desire is a contract you sign with yourself to suffer until you get what you want’. Forget social contract, everyone who is born signs a contract with time itself to suffer endlessly and mostly needlessly. Even though I have many things and people in life that bring me joy, I have countless others that make me sad, or make life difficult for me. I am thankful for the things that make my life worth living, but the fact that you have to specifically find reasons to convince yourself to do something as banal as ‘live’ (literally to sleep, eat and blink) implies that something is wrong.
Given that common wisdom shows that it is difficult, and arguably now, increasingly difficult (with climate change, political polarization, and worsening economy) to lead what many call ‘ a good life’, why would people choose to inflict the same horrors onto their hypothetical children?
Chapter III
To live by yourself is difficult enough, but before we dissect why people decide to have children, let’s first explore what really happens when you have kids.
First, most people that have kids are not mentally and emotionally equipped to be parents. There is a version of the counter argument that goes ‘By this logic you will never be ready’ or ‘You can only learn when you have kids’. I disagree. What I mean by competency to raise children are very basic and foundational values. Is that person responsible? Do they suffer from any addictions? Are they emotionally and mentally stable? Will they be able to bear the cost of becoming a parent? Are they financially in a position to ensure a good childhood to their children? You see, the more you think about it, the more the idea of some kind of pre parental evaluation will start making more sense to you.1
People dive into becoming parents without doing any kind of evaluation, or projections. At all. The fact that people take the biggest decision of their life without any kind of analysis is mind boggling to me. Ask your parents if they had a long and thoughtful discussion about having kids or not. Most will be dumbfounded at the question itself, and those who will dignify the question will answer in the negative. People make babies like Indians drink chai. ‘Sochna kya hai isme?’.
When you have kids, you sign a contract with yourself to commit to a life of responsibilities and burdens. Children are a burden. There is no doubt about that. And no need to sugar coat it as well. They are a liability for a large part of their lives. And if you’re unlucky, yours may remain a liability all your life. After becoming a parent, you have to then keep a significant chunk of your cumulative (if you have a partner) income for the newborn. But the financial cost isn’t even the worst cost to be borne. You have to spend countless sleepless nights trying to pacify the crying baby. Countless events you miss because the baby needs attention. Movies, dates, picnics, book clubs and what not - all sacrificed at the altar of parenthood. You end up adjusting your whole life around the baby. Career, interests, hobbies, family, everything takes a backseat. Think about all the career moves either of the parent can’t make because of the baby, and considerations attached with it. (And I don’t even want to delve into how parenthood is basically motherhood. Women suffer the most)
Personally both of my parents did not take the next step in their careers because of us, me and my sister. Of course in my mother’s case, it was also because she was a woman. But cumulatively, so much of my parent’s potential was lost just because they had kids at home.
I could very well make a simple case against having babies by arguing:
Given that you only have finite time and attention, and having children takes up the significant chunk of it, you sacrifice possibly the best years of your productivity to being a parent. This productivity loss has a civilization scale impact. The sheer amount of potential inventions, literature, progress, art, culture that has been traded off by humanity for a new generation, every generation, is mind blowing. And it’s not just about opportunity costs. It’s about monetary costs as well. Imagine the money an adult can save simply by not having kids. That can give them foreign vacations, nice cars, unlimited books and what not.
We have somehow culturally convinced ourselves that having a baby is that one thing that completes you. That having a kid will somehow make your life complete. That not having a child somehow leaves a hole so deep that nothing else can fill it. The conditioning is so deep that not only will people screw their whole lives by having kids without giving one cogent thought to it, but also actively go on to pass a value judgement on those who don’t commit themselves to this misery, as selfish.
It’s without doubt, the worst deal in the history of humanity. A deal that doesn’t even need someone to sell it. It sells itself.
If you manage to not kill your kid in its early years, you’ll have to start their education. So much money is spent in only educating your children. And the worst part about it is that you have no idea if it will be of any avail or not. There is no guarantee that your kid will make any use of the education you provide him with. In India it is considered natural for everyone to go to college. However there’s a huge chunk of students who simply aren’t competent enough to be in a college. The incompetency may be due to any factor. Why do you think most of India’s educated are unemployable?
It is literally playing gamble with your own life. If your child turns out okay i.e. is a decent person, does not kill and hurt people, finds something he likes doing or is good at, becomes independent, and can hold a decent conversation with you now and then - you’ve practically won the lottery. As a practicing son, I’ve tried to communicate this to my parents for a long time, but it’s something a lot of parents need to hear. If you child turns out okay, consider yourself lucky - you’ve won the lottery of chance. Of all the horrid, and dangerous things a human being can do, if your child doesn’t do any of them, be grateful. Anyhow, I do not want this to turn into a rant.
My own parents have sacrificed around 1/3rd of the prime years of their lives for their children. They had to sacrifice freedom, mental space, and most importantly - money. My parents have kept their standard of life constant for the past decade. Why? So that as their salaries increase to match inflation, they can save more. For who? Us, their children.
My undergraduate education’s cost was anywhere between 5-6 Lacs despite studying in University of Delhi, one of India’s cheapest premier educational institutes. It was because I had the misfortune of growing up away from Delhi, and living costs were high. Half of my second degree (which by the way, mind you, has been online - I haven’t seen my college even once) has cost my parents 9 Lacs. With the next half likely to cost anywhere between 10-12 Lacs. Lump sum of 20 lacs. Also, that’s just my cost. My sister’s educational cost is different. They could have done so many things with that amount. Vacationed aboard, bought a nice car, gifted their loved ones so many things, gifted each other so many things. But they did none of that. They convinced each other that the right thing for them to do with their hard earned money is to put in the roulette of life and hope their children can do something good. I feel bad for them.
I do not believe that any so called “joy” of having children can outweigh its opportunity cost, regardless of what metric we use. But the magic of social conditioning is that every parent is brainwashed into thinking that the value of having a child is far far superior to any other thing or experience. Maybe I will one day too.
The curse of being a child is to constantly realize the cost of your existence, and how high it is.
Chapter IV
I am more than grateful for the sacrifices that any parent, including my own, make and have made for their children. However, there is a technical glitch with that feeling of being grateful.
You see many parents, especially Indian parents love to remind their children that they are ‘ungrateful’. They constantly remind them of what they did for them when they were little, or what they continue to do for them. But here’s the catch - how can you be grateful to be in a relationship you had no choice in opting into in the first place?
You cannot unilaterally birth a human into existence, and then make the child feel bad for all that you have done for them. You made the decision. Nobody forced you to have a child. Stop asking your children to appreciate you. It is akin to me first putting a friend in a bad situation, and then when I try to remedy the situation, act all high and mighty and accuse my friend of being ungrateful when he doesn’t sing my praises.
The sheer moral tax that parents impose on their children, who were born into this world without any choice of their own, for looking after them - is one of the biggest moral evils we simply turn our heads away from.
If you’re a parent, the first step you can take is to understand that you created this mess, and own it up. Nobody dropped a child at your doorstep, or put your head next to a gun to either reproduce (or adopt) - hopefully. You, as an adult, made a decision. Now, please, for god’s sake, stop getting irritated by the consequence of your own actions.
However, does this mean children can be morally whitewashed of any obligations towards their parents? I don’t know. Perhaps they should be. Logically, I am inclined to make that conclusion. Because they had no say in their existence, it is illegitimate to bind them in any moral or social contract they did not consent to be in. Which means, it should be perfectly normal for a child to abandon his parents if he wanted to. He should have no moral or otherwise burden on him to look after his parents. Why? Because unlike the parents who made a conscious decision to give birth to a human and take on the responsibility to raise him, a child did not make any such conscious decision. He simply happens to be someone’s child.
Every human being is born into this world, already ten fathoms deep in debt.
Epilogue
The last thing I’d like to talk to you about is that parenting makes you loose your identity. After you become a parent, you suddenly stop being yourself. All your identity markers are extinguished. You start to only think as a parent. You shape your identity around the chores of parenthood. Maybe that is required to raise a child, and people who cannot take that personality make for bad parents. But my concern is that parents do not outgrow this, even when most of the routines associated with performing the act of parenting end. A mother who constantly had to think of her child when she was five, and had to make sure she knew at all times where she was, who she was with, what she ate, where she went; continues to do that when she grows up to be a young woman of 25 because for her that’s what parenthood is. That’s what she did for the longest time.
The loss of this is that a cardiologist stops being a cardiologist when they become a parent. They start to de prioritize their career (which to a very large degree define your identity), and prioritize their identity as a parent. Professors stop reading as much, lawyers take long sabbaticals - and worse, women quit their jobs and never go back to work. The economic cost of motherhood is a whole another topic, something that my new favorite intellectual Shrayana Bhattacharya writes in her book Desperately seeking Shah Rukh and talks at length in this brilliant podcast conversation with Amit Varma. Anil, Soumya, Sharan, Bhargav, Dhruv, Devyani, and countless others loose their identity and just become - a parent.
Everybody grows up seeing the sacrifice that their parents had to make to raise them and the hardships they had to endure, yet somehow something happens in the middle where they forget all about that and convince themselves to live a life of anxiety, commitment and misery by having kids. It’s as if someone from Men In Black series comes and flashes that device before their eyes. Poof! All gone. If you’ve seen someone struggle so much for taking a particular decision, why would you take the same decision, when you are free to not do it. Here’s one answer. It’s because we’re all liars. Parents lie to their children by telling them that being a parent is an act of utmost joy, and the children grow up to believe that lie. There’s a moment in the podcast episode that I’ve linked earlier, when Shrayana tells Amit that one of the women she was interviewing for the book recalled a conversation with her mother in law after being utterly frustrated by her child. '
“You want to throw him (the baby), don’t you?” the Mother in law asks. “Yes”, the woman replies. “That’s okay. I felt the same for your husband once” she replies back.
That’s the truth of parenthood.
I understand that many people do not have the agency to not raise kids. It is expected from them. Sometimes it is even enforced. But my argument is that people have much more agency in this decision than they assume. Particularly because we assume it is something we have to do, eventually. Having children makes perfect sense genetically. But we’re not our genes. We’re us. We’re a sum total of our experiences. And with everything, we need to consciously choose to have the experience of parenthood, and not dive head first into it just because it’s something everybody does. It’s a decision with its costs and benefits. Evaluate and then make a decision. Even though the evaluation process itself is likely to be heavily influenced by social conditioning, at least be cognizant of that fact and go ahead.
Parents and their children are constantly embroiled in bitter disputes. From petty fights, to court cases. Every parent thinks that their child is the worst. Every child thinks likewise for their parent. Both fight each other, believing the other makes their life worse. A family is nothing but a lifelong fight with family members to have the right to choose how you live. Conflict is at the center of family.
With all that I’ve said, and so much I still haven’t - I simply see there being no reason why any rational human would choose to have children. And I don’t agree with the “Once you become a parent, only then you’ll understand what it means to be a parent” logic. It’s akin to a meth addict saying “Only when you start doing meth, can you know what it is like to be a meth addict”. And neither of these statements are untrue. But my argument is that, like I can say that being a meth addict is objectively bad than not being a meth addict, similarly, I can say that not being a parent is objectively better than being one. I do not have to be a parent first to make that judgement.
Life is fleeting. Live for yourself and those you love.
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Of course I wouldn’t argue for ‘parental permits’ ever. It’s anti liberty.