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Ask HN: How to deal with regret of not having kids

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Re: Ask HN: How to deal with regret of not having kids

#331

Post by twelve40 »

oliwarner wrote: post #131

Don't have kids to fill a perceived hole in your life. I absolutely understand the vicious and cyclical nature of what I'm saying, but half the time people feel like you go on to have kids and then discover that feeling of emptiness was just them all along. Having children can just as much separate and ostracise you from your existing life and social circles, and make things worse. So if you do have kids and it turns…

No, there are no universal "firsts" here. in my 20s I had no freaking clue what to do at work and generally career-wise. Still had kids and don't regret it for a second. If I waited until becoming at least somewhat satisfied with work, i would have surely never gotten around to having kids. Hell, for some people "fix your unhappiness at work first" may take an entire lifetime!

Re: Ask HN: How to deal with regret of not having kids

#334

Post by educatedwoman »

Sohcahtoa82 wrote: post #294
ASalazarMX wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Going from one extreme of not wanting kids to waking up in the middle of the night with panic attacks caused by the idea of not having them? I'm not going to psychoanalyze someone by a single text message, but I also thought it was unusual to swing that hard. Probably the decision was not thought well and hence the regret, maybe the neighbors have beautiful babies and FOMO brings regret, maybe it's a mid-life crisi…

> maybe it's a mid-life crisis where we worry about our legacy It makes me laugh when people talk about having a "legacy" 99.999% of people are unremarkable. There are currently just over 1M Wikipedia articles about living people. Meanwhile, there are 7.7B people on the planet. Even if you made the incorrect assumption that all 1M were about living Americans, with the US population being nearly 330M, that means you'd…

Very true, but I think people associate the word "legacy" more with their children and community rather than their social status in the world. "legacy" is very important to me as I want to have an impact on my friends, family and community.

I might never have a wikipedia article about me, but at least I had kids and they will have kids and so on. Of course, I will eventually be forgotten (I don't know who my great great grandparents were) but if it weren't for them I would not be here today. One of the defs is " something transmitted by or received from an ancestor or predecessor or from the past".

Re: Ask HN: How to deal with regret of not having kids

#336

Post by dmos62 »

ALittleLight wrote: post #327
dmos62 wrote: post #54

Sounds like you're projecting something on not being a parent. Try the "what for" game. What do I want kids for? To extend my legacy. What do I want to extend my legacy for? To feel connected to the world. What do I want to feel connected to the world for? Just keep going recursively until you deconstruct it to a point where you see that it's not as bad as all that. I don't know why, but your story made me think of v…

I'm assuming that people have a biological imperative to reproduce. That matches what I know about biology and evolution and it explains why people so frequently have kids despite kids being, on paper, a rather poor deal. The "what for" is just "This is my fundamental nature." I think that you can't really examine your out of a fundamental drive. You can't scratch the itch by asking "what for" any more than you could…

> I think that you can't really examine your out of a fundamental drive.

It's a problem to label something a fundamental drive, because you're implicitly saying that someone experiencing it is powerless. What if it's not fundamental? You think so, but you might be wrong. Let's just call it a desire.

Btw, kids on paper being a bad deal is a bold statement. For thousands of years that was the primary way of investment. Between the ages 13 and 16 a child on a farm would return all investment required up to that point.

And, as for biology, I'd say that the primary differentiator of the human animal is just how flexible it is in the face of desires such as this.

Re: Ask HN: How to deal with regret of not having kids

#338

Post by nostromo123 »

bhouston wrote: post #259
nostromo123 wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So impossible that both I and my neighbour of similar age got pregnant within a couple of months of trying at 40...must be something in the water here. Or maybe we are just healthy and have good hormonal status ;-)

Anecdotal success after 40 is real. But the statistical distribution means that you and your friend are lucky. My friend circle has a lot of couples in it who have had fertility problems. Often it isn’t spoken of.

For sure it's anecdotal, I just wanted to point out that at this age it is by far not next to impossible to have a child. I wouldn't rely on it, but it's also not a "1 in 100/1000" kind of situation. There are various sources that are extremely discouraging to women of this age, as if getting pregnant and having a healthy child at this age was somehow akin to winning the lottery, when it is not.

Of course, it all depends on the woman's egg reserves and general health; but there, like I commented in another subthread, personal biology definitely trumps statistics.

Re: Ask HN: How to deal with regret of not having kids

#339

Post by nostromo123 »

maerF0x0 wrote: post #226
kleiba wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You're 40. > It's not too late. I second that. A (male) friend of mine was 40 when they had their first child and now they have three. More importantly: 39 is probably not too late biologically for your partner. A lot has changed over the last 20 years for late births. Find a doctor who's competent and supportive to help you along, you're not the first people to have children at that age. Turn your regret into a mo…

> A lot has changed over the last 20 years for late births. There's still a lot of risks, particularly of disappointment, but also massively elevated risk of gestational diabetes and Down syndrome.

Everything worth having in life involves some risk - you could have a heart attack or a stroke the next minute, your wife/husband could cheat on you/leave you, the company you work for could implode and go bankrupt, and so on.

What about the risk of forever regretting that you didn't even try? Everyone has to decide for themselves what level of risk they are ok with (I'm not going to do base jumping, for instance :D), but if you want a "safe" life, you have to stay indoors, live like a hermit, and forego all human contact ;)

Re: Ask HN: How to deal with regret of not having kids

#340

Post by throwaway4aday »

seltzered_ wrote: post #324
throwaway4aday wrote: post #289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm trying to point out an equally impactful predicament, civilizations don't generally survive sustained population collapses. I don't think that averting a theoretical disaster caused by resource exhaustion is worth creating an almost guaranteed disaster due to forcibly reducing population levels (and it is force whether done through law, propaganda or inequitable incentives). If "planetary boundaries" are a proble…

Hmm, you're arguing to attempt to get to a 'stage two civilization' per the kardashev scale, and while I agree there's all sorts of issues with attempting policy-level change I keep seeing a lot of energy/material/ecological blindness with such arguments to go beyond boundaries. Feel like our conversation might go along the lines of this conversation between Nate Hagens and Sebastian Heitmann: https://youtu.be/9Y6BvC…

It's a worthy goal to at least attempt to complete our transition to a Type I civilization and begin work on Type II, the line is probably quite blurry since any type of space exploitation moves you towards II but is quite possible before completing I. I don't doubt the validity of Jevon's paradox but I think it's implications are not negative. From Wikipedia's article on it " increased the efficiency of coal use led to the increased consumption of coal in a wide range of industries" the key point there is that the increased consumption came from a wider application of the technology in areas where it was not able to be used before. This led to higher output and innovation in those industries which further accelerated the industrial revolution. A modern example would be Moore's law which has improved efficiency in transistor production, spreading the technology to almost every other industry resulting in further increases in efficiency and many revolutions and breakthroughs.
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