Ask HN: What are the benefits to having children nowadays?

I'd like to hear more about this one.

People treat intelligence the same way they do wealth: nobody likes to admit how high they are on the ladder. You say you're dumb despite being obviously intelligent. I've met lots of very wealthy people (multiple houses, fancy vacations, etc) who claim they're not rich. If you're dumb, what do you call people who are significantly less intelligent than you? Is there even a word for such a level of profound lack in mental abilities? I'm glad your business is successful but you are definitely an outlier in terms of identifying and executing on ideas, not nearly the norm.

> Yeah, I didn't mean go from 0 coding knowledge -> Facebook. I meant you're working as a software engineer at a smaller company and want to get a job at FB.

That's also not trivial. Very intelligent people get rejected from FAANG companies all the time. If getting a FAANG job is anywhere near easy for you then that only emphasizes how out of touch you are with regular people, or how much you're intentionally downplaying your own intelligence. In a word, utopian, because the vast majority of people are not remotely capable of getting into a FAANG or starting a 7-figure business

This is as strongly biased as the original question, suggesting that not wanting kids is wrong and something that they should perhaps seek to correct.

I'm pretty definitely secure in the feeling that I don't want my own kids or to raise someone else's. I don't consider others wrong for wanting descendents for whatever reason they do¹, while they sometimes take issue with my lack of desire in the matter. And being male I have it easier: not wanting a family seems more acceptable for us, were some female friends of mine are regularly nagged about it and even sometimes called selfish⁴. The “selfish” insult has always bemused me: we aren't begrudging the taxes that go into services to help parents and educate children, so we are net creators of resource rather than selfishly taking that which someone else might need/want.

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[1] Though I question some more specifically: those taking on the responsibility² when they are not really ready or well resourced for it³

[2] I'm only considering those who plan parenthood here, or those who knowingly take actions that might result in it, not those who find themselves in that situation because of circumstances beyond their control

[3] Particularly those that already have families they struggle to support and intentionally have more

[4] Amongst other insults.

Raising them can be challenging, but kids themselves are great. "What's in it for me" isn't really a great question, though, since it's not about you.

As a man still open to having kids, I've come to believe that the internet imbues us with contempt for one other via a kind of false familiarity, and it's also a source of literal mind viruses that make mutual trust and respect very difficult to maintain in the face of aligning to increasingly absurd narratives we think we need to support. It's a form of captivity, and almost nothing in nature breeds in it. I'm certainly guilty of it as well. Biologically, only a fraction of a given population reproduces anyway, and it's neither here nor there whether one does so or not, but evolutionarily selecting out over something we read on the internet seems like an avoidable fate.

I still believe kids are worth the challenges of sustaining an intact nuclear home for them, but I'd enter into it the way I have other things, which is that they will also cost almost everything, but it's a bet on ourselves and the hope of making and then being a part of a life. It's not a rational decision, which I think is the point. If it were, our species would have died out millenia ago.