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I totally respect those that don’t want children and sympathize with those that can’t. For me personally (father of 10 year old twins), sometime around their first birthday it hit me like a ton of bricks, that they would be the best thing I ever do with my life no matter what else I accomplish or experience. They are literally my reason for being. Maybe it’s not for everyone, but it’s plenty enough for me
Hodl. Most people have deep interpersonal and sexual trauma. The thought of loving someone else deeply and truly is terrifying. Let alone the love and commitment that emerges when one becomes a parent. Terrifying to most. And fiat has made the family unit financially strenuous experience. Match these two things together and the birth rate plummeting is no surprise.
What I have noticed from many of the detractors of these posts about marriage and children by @HODL is an underlying rejection of an objective moral standard. The strong libertarian ethos of the Bitcoin and Nostr community has many positive qualities, but one of the biggest ditches libertarians fall into is the *everything is subjective* mindset and the assumption that freedom means people can do and think whatever they want (always with some vague caveat about not hurting other people) because every lifestyle decision is of equal moral value and deserves to be respected. But there is an objective moral standard and there are objectively bad reasons to not get married or have children. If someone chooses not to get married or have children for one of these objectively bad reasons, they are *free* to do so, but that decision is still, nonetheless, a morally impoverished one. Coming up with a thousand nuanced situations that justify a person not having children doesn't change the normativity of having them, the joy and fulfillment found in having them, the objectively superior moral value in having them, or the civilizational suicide course we are on because we aren't having them. View quoted note β†’
I'm 51 years old, prospering and in good health. I have an awesome wife, and we have NO children. (We're actually Catholic, so we don't contracept.) I have no problem telling young couples to generously make babies. That's what we're supposed to do. It is a great blessing on so many levels. I understand that when we are older and need assistance, my wifeand I will have no family to help us or care for us. And when one of us dies, the other will be all alone. It's a cross from God we will bear. It will be okay. But one should never choose this path for the sake of fun now, for convenience now, for independence now. That's a terrible trade-off you will regret if you had a choice.