Not Feeling the Whole Raising Kids Thing
I respect the hustle, but I can't do it.
There are certain people who leverage their parenthood into building their entire personality on a smug, smirking superiority and they love to gaslight others into thinking that having children is a uniquely magical experience that opens your eyes to the true beauty of creation. Raising children, they declare, makes life bigger in every direction because it’s a universal human experience. Well, so are colonoscopies. Roughly 90% of people who have children always complain about their little shits, which isn’t exactly a compelling selling point. The closest I’ll get to having kids is whenever I bump “Meet the Grahams,” but if I did procreate, I would mold my offspring into tortured yet brilliant child prodigies who will hate me as young adults but then we’ll all tearfully reconcile over coffee as I enter old age.
One common refrain you’ll hear is that it is selfish to not have children, but I am of the mind that it is selfish to bring a kid into this world that you are reluctant to raise just because you were guilted into it by some arbitrary societal expectation. This argument has become less convincing even as other ones have fallen by the wayside, although how compelling these are will necessarily depend on your tolerance for social conservatives.
But you don’t want to leave a legacy? I’m already living through the greater depression, I don’t need a side quest.
Don’t you want to carry on your last name? I don’t care, I’ll be dead.
Who will take care of you when you get old? This is the dumbest, most selfish reason for having a child. If anything, it would be cheaper to let OpenAI make me an android nurse that sounds like Scarlet Johansson.
If we don’t have children, we’ll go extinct! Good.
Considering every aesthetic and practical challenge that comes with having and raising children circa This Neoliberal Hellscape, what we have here is a case of conflicting political priorities: The pro-life, pro-family values party supports economic policies that make it awfully cost-prohibitive to have children. It’s not like Democrats or Republicans are offering guaranteed maternity/paternity leave, affordable child care, or Medicare-for-All. Birth rates are declining for the same reason why people aren’t snagging Louis Vuitton Airplane Handbags or buying Erewhon smoothies—no one has a spare $500,000 lying around. Half the reason why I’m a millionaire in Grand Theft Auto V is because I’m too cheap to spend fake money.
The only kid I’m taking care of is my inner child. There are days when I am exhausted and comprehensively stymied, and so I forget to feed myself. How exactly would I go about taking care of a small human?
This digital post-Recession age is grueling and frantic in certain ways that no other historical era has been, and I have the utmost respect for parents who have raised children in this wild milieu. I just don’t have the patience or tolerance for bullshit to bring a child into a world of steepening wealth inequality, increasing rates of loneliness and addiction and depression and suicide, rising nationalism, a more punitive surveillance/police/prison state, rising and unresolved racial tensions, rabid unchecked corporatism, relentless work culture, Marjorie Taylor Greene, cranks complaining about COVID in 2024, TikTok foodies gorging on burgers that they don’t know how to describe, endless reruns of The Office, people talking on speakerphone in public, Gen Z patois, gender reveals, meatriding Elon Musk, therapy speak, toxic positivity, AI art, aligning on corporate jargon, wine snobs, people who say YAAAS!, modern country music, demented culture wars, the politicization of everything, overpriced lunch bowls, Taylor Swift discourse, the oversaturation of prestige TV, tech enshittification, and the bottomless well of toxic sludge piped in from Instagram and Twitter. None of this even touches on the impending climate crisis—which dovetails nicely with the proliferation of social media—as our natural habitat is irrevocably fucked for rare minerals so some data farm in Iowa can simultaneously process automatic transcription and stream Mr. Beast videos, that will irrevocably fuck the attention span of everyone around you.
Ultimately, I don’t have children because I enjoy sleeping in, free time, and disposable income. I could take the money I would otherwise have spent on kids and put it towards living the type of life that would be unrealistic with children in the picture. Travel around the country in a van for a year, go backpacking across the world, start a shitty cover band, get obsessed with rock climbing, restore a classic car, become an expert in some esoteric field of study, get into weirdly good shape for a few years just because I’m bored, learn woodworking, follow my creative pursuits, change careers, go back to school, volunteer at some local soup kitchen, join a cool eco-terrorist cult, fuck too many supermodels (and humblebrag about how I never enjoyed any of it), become a skydiving instructor, really dial in the “functional” part of my chosen drug addiction, and make friends in a bunch of places from different walks of life. Realistically, all my free time will manifest into spending several hours every night scrolling on my phone with Netflix in the background.
I'm having his baby!!!!
No, I'm not - but you should see your faces.
😂💪🏻💯