zero kids later iii

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this is the third part of the series. part i and part ii aren’t necessary to understand it.

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“remember kids: be selfish.” — rz

“a little foresight is a dangerous thing.” — Caplan

“let me tell ya, the biological imperative is strong, yo!” — Sophie shortly after first kid’s birth

imagine that you had to decide, as a ten year old, whether to go thru puberty.

there’d probably be immense pressure from parents who want the best for you, cultural norms, and peers. maybe some people just know from the start, but what if you don’t feel ready? or maybe you’d be similar to me: “no more school, right? can’t happen fast enough. ready or not, bring it!” in principle, your ten year old self, could try to make decisions ‘maturely’ — pros & cons, talk to friends & loved ones, journal, etc. that one teenager you know seems pretty miserable, some adults seem to hate adulthood, and i do have a lot of time to do whatever i want… maybe better just to skip the whole puberty business…?

can you even imagine what it’d be like being 30 without having gone thru puberty? Interview With The Vampire might offer an idea. all those manchilds you’ve met maybe offer another idea. ugh, amirite? the point is: prior to going through puberty you really have no clue what it will be like to have gone through it. so, tools like pros & cons offer limited help because you can’t accurately imagine what it’ll be like in either case because puberty changes you deeply. hormones are a hellofadrug, yo!

right after puberty childhood is easily remembered, and while one might crave some aspects of it, proper accounting usually yields that it’s way better to have grown up.

fortunately, few people have to make that decision: puberty happens to you. when it does, hormones wreak havoc, you’re awkward for a while (some of us a looooooong while), and then you’re at peace with being an adult.

having kids is like that.

the only difference is that while in the ancestral environment the kids probably ‘just happened’ (out of necessity, cultural norm, or by accident), in the modern environment we have to make decisions about it.

having kids changes you deeply, and the process is long and intense. i’ve heard the the transition described as a mini-death, as the shedding of skin. and just like with puberty, you’re also biologically-wired for those changes. proper accounting usually yields that parents are very happy to have had kids. well, maybe not at the 3rd month ie during peak diaper season, but y’know, in a less myopic way.

let me be clear about peak diaper season, though: parenting is hard work, often exhausting and frustrating. many new parents report dissatisfaction and it is common to temporarily feel like a huge mistake has been made. there was even that one clip of Chappell Roan saying how all her friends with kids "are in hell". her comment resonated across the internet and sparked some tweets eg Aella and Mason:

Ok but to be fair it does seem like moms with kids in general are having a pretty bad time, based on the way I hear most parents talk about it. Id like kids someday but I've heard enough from parents to be downright terrified about it and I know it's gonna suck and be awful

IMO there are some visions of happiness that are incompatible with caring for young children and some that are impossible without

I feel a microcosm of that tension when I hand my kids off to grandparents. So desperate for a break, so hard letting go of little clinging hands

Parenting is the hardest thing I've ever done. Really, it's more like every day has one to ten moments where I just don't know if I can do what needs to be done or hold myself together. They pass quickly, but they test everything I've got

the core issue is that Roan’s take is myopic, as bosco explains here:

noticing that she is only mentioning friends with little kids, 5 and under

which is, to me, kind of like sampling a bunch of mountaineers in the middle of the worst part of a trek and saying "I don't know any happy mountaineers"

yeah, the early parts of parenting can be brutally difficult. the transformation is far from easy or painless. like with puberty, the difficulty is part of the process that changes you. as such, it’s important to keep in mind the big picture, the grand trajectory of life.

the first two parts of this series deploy stories to combat myopia. but, if stories aren’t quite doing it for you, let me offer another tool to help with shortsightedness: economics. wait what? bear with me. no, i won’t be talking about how having kids brings up GDP and therefore you must — more like, let’s see some of the data that Homoeconomicus cares about.

in Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids, Bryan Caplan argues that people overestimate the costs and underestimate the benefits of having children. he claims that kids are much less work and much more fun than people expect, and that many parents unnecessarily exhaust themselves trying to optimize every aspect of their children's upbringing.

though his argument is directionally correct, it largely focuses on barrier removal (parenting is less hard than you think) rather than on adding benefits (you selfishly want kids).

further, the book relies heavily on studies & statistics, which i often find unpersuasive. there’s a lot of devils in a lot of details: studies don’t always replicate, conclusions get overstated, study-designs are often flawed, and worst, publicized findings often misrepresent what the study actually says. xkcd has a joke about this for good reason.

for example, Caplan cites twin studies to show that nature outweighs nurture on many metrics to conclude that parents can relax and still do well. however, he skips over issues with twin studies and overlooks that many things parents & children care about are hard to measure. a better argument for relaxing is simpler: parents that aren’t constantly stressed-out are happier, and happier parents make happier kids. the statistics are a distraction.

to be fair, systematic study of parenting is extremely difficult. researchers can only study highly-legible variables and interventions. the available evidence does suggest that parenting is less work than people think, just not as definitively as Caplan makes it seem. there’s reasons Homoeconomicus went extinct!

you know who didn’t go extinct, though? humans!

throughout our entire history, both as hunter-gatherers and as post-agrarians, and even as post-industrialists and post-internets (and post-rats?!), we humans have been accumulating knowledge about what works for parenting and whether people should have kids. we’ve been doing so for literal ages. the council of the elders gathered to deliver wisdom: YES.

there’s an issue with looking at the past for guidance, though. namely, we don’t necessarily want the sorts of outcomes our ancestors had; we want to do better, much better. taking that into account means that we seek to be well-informed about the things we do, but does not change the underlying biological imperatives, the underlying human drives.

but hm…what is a human, actually?

we usually think of ourselves as a minds with various systems — a mind with a skeletal system, a cardiovascular system, digestive system, nervous system,…, and a reproductive system. this is a fine way to think, but it is not quite the biological reality.

The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins does a good job of explaining how all that (ie evolution) works, in layman’s terms: the fundamental unit of natural selection isn't the individual or the population or the species, it’s the gene. we often anthropomorphize genes to help us think about them and eg call them selfish, but genes are automatons that copy themselves. genes that are naturally selected are ones that set up organisms which will have behaviors that adapt well to the environments they find themselves in. it is not intuitive at first glance, but genes that “selfishly” copy themselves can account for complex behaviors like altruism and also for variation in behaviors.

so, tl;dr: a human is a genetic reproduction machine with a very complicated survival system made up of bodily functions and behaviors. in humans, that system happens to include a mind that thinks thoughts and a body that has feelings.

put another way: you don’t have a body, you are a body.

and what is a body? a magnificently complicated survival machine to help the little genes inside it copy themselves. most of what we derive meaning from is in that magnificence, but that doesn’t change the underlying physical reality.

this might seem overly reductionist or even cynical at first glance, but i don’t think it is. to my mind’s ear, it is a liberating and actualizing thought: your body knows what to do, you can be in tune with it, and you only end up needing to think about stuff because you have magnificent survival capabilities.

of course, in a complex species like humans, evolution produces variation ie not everyone is equally tuned for reproduction. the selfish gene framework accounts for this. those who feel no biological drive towards parenthood might have evolved because they contribute to the species in other valuable ways — similar to how traits like altruism might’ve evolved. statistically speaking, however, most humans have to be wired with powerful reproductive instincts, otherwise we simply wouldn’t exist. think of it this way: for humans to be a self-sustaining population each couple needs to have 2 kids — 2 parents die eventually and 2 kids remain, repeat. that “breaks even”. but notice that it assumes that everyone will reproduce. if only half the kids reproduce, we need 4 kids per couple, and so on.

toy-models cannot possibly correspond to reality too well because genes & alleles, phenotypes, and behaviors add up to a dynamic complex system. the genes are configured to respond to what happens environmentally ie each individual is adaptable even if the genes themselves are really simple automatons that just copy themselves. the motivation to have kids, despite the costs, is also a result of evolution. one way genes ensure propagation is providing a sense of joy & fulfillment for having done so.

your task then, isn’t to decide whether you want to have kids, but rather to identify your biological drive for reproduction if you have one, with the knowledge that most people do have one. pros & cons lists might help, but this suggests a different toolkit: your body and how it feels, a somatic approach. eg what happens in your body when you are around kids? what happens in your body when you visualize the happiest possible family life? what happens in your body when you visualize your kids being your age? is your body happy your parents had you?

done well, this approach amounts to understanding the nature of the selfish-genes inside of you. ‘done well’ is doing a lot of work there — i don’t mean to present some how-does-your-body-feel-like exercises as a silver bullet nor to say that becoming in-tune with your body will provide some magic revelation. bodies, after all, are pretty complicated and respond to trauma, stress, social conditioning, and a thousand other things. this means that some people will have crystal-clear body signals while others will need to untangle a hairball of conflicting sensations. and the whole thing is only one approach, where there’s probably lots of other approaches that might work.

what’s important is understanding one’s biological makeup and selfish desires. this might happen thru therapy, meditation, conversations with friends, by doing careful self-observation while around children and parents, or whoknows.

regardless of approach, though, the main selfish reason to have kids is that, for most people, it is an adaptive behavior given their physical/biological structure.

reality is far messier than what i described. you can probably find people who regret having kids. and so on. but, i think the most common case is that the most actualized people are those who had kids.

and if you truly identify, from the innermost parts of your body, that the selfish genes inside of you are not tuned for reproduction, there will be actualization there too: you can help in ways that those with kids can’t. go do that! this might be one of the mechanisms that got us art and science and technology and ….

usually we have to doubt our biological instincts because of how different the ancestral environment is to modernity (eg candy bars are bad for you, social media…). when it comes to kids, though, my best appraisal is that people’s instincts work very well. in particular, if you have a notion along the lines of “planning for kids stresses me the fuck out”, it might be helpful to remember that you're genetically programmed to handle the stresses of raising kids and to find fulfillment in rising to the challenge.

the main thing i want you to notice, though, is that comparing imagined career-lives or adventure-lives against imagined family-lives is likely to lead you astray, like ten year old you would be led astray by trying to think about puberty by comparing imagined adult vs child lives. ten year old you had it easier: the body will just make puberty happen and done. thirty year old you has it a bit more difficult, but ultimately, your body knows. listen to it.

this whole essay is a lot of words to arrive at something very simple: the main selfish reason to have kids is that you’ll be glad you did it.