Posted by nichochar 3 days ago
Nobody's going to give a shit that you founded an AI company and sold it to Meta for $600 million. Sure you can enjoy the material benefits while you're here. Maybe you can even pass some of that onto your children.
The Good Place was one of the best TV shows of the best shows of the last decade (IMHO) and it brought up a relatively recent (1998) book "What we owe to each other". It makes the point that it's not a question (ie "what do we owe to each other?"). You're only meaningful impact is on the people you affect around you, positively or negatively.
Personally, I have no opinion on whether people should or shouldn't have children. That's none of my business other than this: you have to make a choice between having and raising those children and chasing material "ambitions". Bringing people into the world without their consent and then neglecting them makes you an objectively terrible person. Pick a lane.
And if you do choose ambition instead, at least ask yourself why. Studies have been done on this. Money does buy happiness but only to a very limited point. Beyond that it's isolating. So why are you doing whatever it is you're ambitious about, really?
It’s selfish, unnecessary, consumes immense amounts of resources, increases unfair social policies against those who are intelligent enough to avoid it, and almost universally induces a delusion in the parents that they have done something meaningful, helpful, world-changing, or profound, without affecting their ability to notice the plainly obvious fact that humans have evolved this delusion to keep them bonded to the incredible amount of time and inconvenience caused by children so that the species will continue.
Pro-natalists will of course dismiss this view as abnormal, simply because they themselves have succumbed to this delusion. There is no objective benefit to society or others caused by reproduction, and the harms are well-documented (increased resource consumption, crowding, increased need for resource redistribution, etc).
Kids are nothing but a burden to anyone other than their parents, yet society is so biased toward children that everyone in society is forced to accommodate and pay for the poor choices of parents. Parents are encouraged nonstop to have children they cannot afford to fully care and provide for.
It is a nonstop tragedy from all angles.
Children are a luxury option, like buying a Porsche or taking regular vacations to the Greek isles. You probably can’t afford to do it well, it burdens everyone around you for your own pleasure, and after you’re done you haven’t meaningfully improved the world for anyone.
Most people have children by accident, or out of motivations formed exclusively from fear, selfishness, narcissism, or greed. Societal traditions allow and encourage them to paper over these motivations with noble illusions.
Do not in any way confuse the good that human beings have accomplished with the need to produce more of them.