this post was submitted on 17 Feb 2025
1168 points (96.2% liked)
Comic Strips
15795 readers
1663 users here now
Comic Strips is a community for those who love comic stories.
The rules are simple:
- The post can be a single image, an image gallery, or a link to a specific comic hosted on another site (the author's website, for instance).
- The comic must be a complete story.
- If it is an external link, it must be to a specific story, not to the root of the site.
- You may post comics from others or your own.
- If you are posting a comic of your own, a maximum of one per week is allowed (I know, your comics are great, but this rule helps avoid spam).
- The comic can be in any language, but if it's not in English, OP must include an English translation in the post's 'body' field (note: you don't need to select a specific language when posting a comic).
- Politeness.
- Adult content is not allowed. This community aims to be fun for people of all ages.
Web of links
- [email protected]: "I use Arch btw"
- [email protected]: memes (you don't say!)
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I don't even understand how people fine the time, energy, and most importantly money to have children. I can barely find all three to do my hobbies.
Simple: the moment you have a child, you stop being the person who had hobbies and interests and become a parent, a single-minded organism that exists solely to make sure your children make it to maturity in good shape. Your Spotify Wrapped becomes Baby Shark, your guitar or mountain bike or whatever gets ebayed to make room for a nursery, and travel plans become fiction, written around a character who is no longer you, a stolid lump of responsibility.
This does not sound very appealing, tbh
That's because it omits what all of the things lost get replaced with. The time spent with your kid is incredible. Yes your YouTube playlist gets taken over by baby shark, but also you get to see them go from a lump that can barely move, to being able to do situps, then walk, then run up to you and start clapping their hands making the baby shark motions, and start cackling with the most genuine laughter you will ever hear in you life as you get up off the couch and pretend to scream "oh no the baby shark is gonna get me" as they chase you around the house.
It's good times.
It's also bad times. Like when you have to tell them no, or stop, or bed time, and they scream the scream of pure despair, as nothing in life could possibly be as painful, as terrible, as inhumanly awful as being told you're not allowed to roll around in the broken glass that you just shattered on the ground by wildly throwing your teddy bear across the room.
Your life becomes singularly focused, You lose almost all of the things you were before, but your life is always interesting and meaningful. Except to other people. Other people think your hobbyless, in bed at 8 life, is boring.
Yeah...even then.
Sounds like a lot of rationalization and silver linings for a sunk cost. I mean, if parents feel fulfilled, awesome. But outwardly, it's a hard sell. Unless the family has wealth, the odds are high that any kid born in the US is likely to have a worse experience than their parents did.
If I use my own, elder Millennial born of Boomers experiential framework, having children ultimately seems extremely selfish. The kids are born into a hellscape of Capitalistic predatory systems, and have to struggle for years, or decades to gain any kind of agency. Meanwhile, the ROI for all that stress and trauma is increasingly less. So, why put them through it? So that I can say I have progeny? To scratch a biological imperative's itch? Nah. No thanks. The world doesn't deserve kids; it hasn't earned them.
Having kids is selfish, it's the whole "point". Any DNA based organism's only goal is to clone that DNA. Evolution happened and now you get a chemical boost (or whatnot) that makes you feel like it is totally worth it (which I feel that it totally is).
I said it as nicely as I could.