This is a story about a girl named Cathy who tried to talk herself into pro-natalism and then wound up right back where she began.
I was chatting in the Center for New Liberalism Slack Group (join us!), as one does, about loneliness, of course, and my interlocutor said, in essence, more liberals should get married and have kids.
And suddenly, a theory of marriage and kids occurred to me.
Broke = marriage and kids reflexively. No thinkie. Just unleash the crotch goblins.
Woke = consider the question, decide not to do marriage and kids. Seems unpleasant, on net. Why not be rich and have fun instead?
Bespoke = realize meaning and connection require pain and inconvenience, decide to do marriage and kids despite it sucking a lot of the time.
Over the past 50 years, one of social science’s most robust findings is that kids don’t make parents any happier. The net effect is zero or slightly less happiness on average. When Daniel Kahneman asked people know how happy they felt as they did various activities throughout the day, childcare ranked near the bottom for moms, below vacuuming.
I decided to re-read my previous advice about happiness and meaning and try to apply it to the question of whether to reproduce.
In How to be happier in 3 simple steps I recommended that my babies optimize for both comfort and meaning. Having kids is anti-comfort but pro-meaning. So we’ll call that a wash.
I also said you should put your relationships first. Obviously kids can make you lonely. Moms especially often feel isolated after giving birth, especially when their friends don’t have kids and they live in car-bound suburbs. Having kids also makes the average person less happy with their spouse.
But, the closeness of the relationship you have with your kids, and the fact that they don’t have to be zero-sum, puts this one firmly in the pro-kids camp.
My third tip was to increase your openness to experience. This is the toughest one. On the one hand, having kids seems to make people, especially women, more closed off and insular. At the same time, having kids non-reflexively is kind of the most high-openness thing you could possibly do. I mean, think of the range and the commitment. Your kid could cure cancer or murder 6 million Jews. And either way, that motherfucker will be your kid until one of you dies. They’re probably going to be in your house for the next two or so decades. “If you can purify the Aryan race you can clean your fucking room!” -Hitler’s mom, probably.
I’ve participated in orgies, sold porn, smoked meth, changed careers and political and religious ideologies, and moved across the country three times. But the idea of having kids scares me to fucking death.
Maybe having kids makes the average person less open to experience. But you have to have a certain kind of openness to experience to be willing to do it. I think that if having kids doesn’t scare you, then it’s not going to do much for your openness. But if it does, having kids might help you become more open. As I write in the post, if you want to be high in openness, act like a very open person repeatedly.
In Don't chase happiness, chase relationships I talk about how many researchers believe you can become happier if you go hard in the paint optimizing in five areas. SPIRE: Spiritual, Physical, Intellectual, Relational, Emotional. Of the five, relationships are the most impactful.
To me, the nut of all this is that simply having kids doesn’t matter much to your overall happiness or quality of life.
Only two things really matter, with a bunch of subcategories underneath. They are, whether and to what extent you:
1. Prioritize creating and maintaining meaningful relationships
2. Exercise your brain and body
Having written all this, I think I’m mostly back where I started. Which was as a 37-year-old Exvangelical childfree soft anti-natalist who hates whiteness and nationalism and doesn’t much care whether humanity continues to exist.
In a world where having kids made it easier for the average American to connect with others, move their bodies, and challenge their brains I’d be all for it. But I don’t see that being the case. It seems like after having kids the average American is less integrated into their communities and spends less time with their friends and exercising their bodies and brains.
HOWEVER, SINCE relationships matter the most to happiness/meaning/flourishing and since the most meaningful relationships are the most important and since the parent/child relationship could be considered the most meaningful, it’s possible that in some circumstances that relationship alone could more than make up for the hits in other adult relationships and exercise.
Then again, your kid could be Hitler.
So if I were trying to juice birth rates, I might look into creating systems that made it easy for parents to maintain relationships with other adults and exercise their brains and bodies. Something like, I don’t know, dense, walkable communities?
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