Future generations will replace you and your wife with those who think quite differently. If you feel that your values or culture are worth preserving, you have kids.
Observing someone else’s family and deciding that you don’t enjoy their kids is the saddest way to decide not to have a family, and indicates a deep lack of parental empathy. Your kids are nothing like other kids, for all values of “your”.
There are many ways to impart ones values onto society, children being only one of them. It's a very myopic view to think that your children will copy your values and/or culture without developing a mind of their own.
In any case, observing other couples was only one of many reasons we decided on this. We made the decision as well-informed adults and whether you think it "sad" or not is not all that important to us.
No, but if I ask my friends who have been to the restaurant about how it was, then I can glean enough information from their responses to gauge whether I want to go there as well. Even if they feel compelled by social mores to say it was all great, you can observe how they act in addition to the things they say. We decided that while no doubt others love their children very much, it wasn't a lifestyle we were interested in.
Why are parents so predisposed with trying to convince other people to have children as well, especially those who have made a decision not to, either way?
How are those analogous? People can live perfectly fine without a child but can't without a job (unless they live at home with their parents which coincidentally a lot of hikikomori do).
The ability to attract and successfully integrate hundreds of thousands of immigrants per year to support an oversized elderly population is not a luxury that most countries that can afford.
For most communities, normalizing childless will only come back to bite people in some form or another.
Not that I'm against having kids, but this argument is silly. If you feel that your values and culture are worth preserving, it's much more effective to write a book.
> Future generations will replace you and your wife with those who think quite differently.
If that is so, how can people like this exist today, after hundreds of thousands of years of human evolution? Could it be that biological evolution alone does not predetermine one's desire to procreate?
Of course it holds. Desire for sex was what was under evolutionary pressure which was a direct proxy for procreation. Because of contraception this link was severed. Only recently procreation is under evolutionary pressure.
So what? I'm not going to live my life for future generations, we only have a limited amount of time in this universe and personally, I don't want to waste it having and raising children for the next couple of decades. I know what one would rebut with, that it's "your" kids and that there's a lot of fun in raising children, and that may be true, but again it is not something that appeals to me and many other people these days.
That fine as long as you realize somebody else's children will have to take care of you when you wont be able to. And if enough people would think the same way as you do, than there certainly wouldn't be enough children to take care of the elderly generations.
Humean ethics don't seem to work particularly well in day-to-day society. If I have enough retirement savings, I will hire said children to take care of me either way, as there is no guarantee my own children would take care of me anyway.
I would say that deciding not to have a family by observing others' is a lot better than deciding not to have a family after direct experience with it.
People should be allowed to self-select them selves out of reproduction. On the long term this is a eugenic pattern: it means the next generation will be more likely to have more people who value reproduction.
Observing someone else’s family and deciding that you don’t enjoy their kids is the saddest way to decide not to have a family, and indicates a deep lack of parental empathy. Your kids are nothing like other kids, for all values of “your”.