So, why have kids? Why now? We're just barely getting settled into our jobs. We are just now paying off all of our credit, and we still have a heap of other debts to go. We could just sit back, coast and get down to a happy zero balance on everything before we start the whole kid adventure, right?
Well... there is evolution. When it comes down to it, we are just big piles of genes and cells and hormones. Piles that have been conditioned over millions of years to enjoy the hell out of the procreative process, and piles that are designed to match up pretty well as easily as possible, considering our relatively short fertility range and long gestation cycles. Yeah, there are some incompatibility issues, and things don't always bake up the way you want them, but more often than not we turn a night of drunk fun or a morning pipe-cleaning romp into another pile of genes and cells that will one day manage to crash your car into a ditch trying to pull off a stunt from Fast Five (the physics in this movie are stupid). So, considering all that, we're kind of starting to feel the urge to procreate. Our genes are starting to tell our higher selves that it's time to do the evolution.
We also just kind of think it will be a fun experiment. Can we screw a kid up worse than our parents did us? Can we make the kid eat things that we never ate when we were kids? Can we learn things from some runt that we never thought of teaching them in the first place? Rotten buggers, always getting in your skulls: babies. Huh. What? Where was I?
And, of course, there's the societal stuff. If we're going to have kids, we don't want to be those people who are walking their kids down the aisle in a walker, or whatever. I want to have the energy to actually do all the things I want to do in the experiment. Considering that my body is engineered basically to shut off around age 68, I want to make sure I can torture my poor offspring for as long as possible.The last reason is my favorite: my kids will be SUCH assholes. I mean, they'll be snotty, know-it-all jerks. And they'll turn out at least as snarky and horrible as I was, probably worse. I really, really, want to subject future generations to the kind of wisdom that can only come from a smaller, meaner version of me. I want it to be rotten.
Thank you for explaining all this, because I really don't get it. When I was 8 I told my mom I was never having kids. People have been telling me for 25 years now that I will change my mind. Nope.
ReplyDeleteWhatever instinct or genetics there are that tell you to pro-create, I am missing it. (My sister's missing it, too.) And I've been fortunate enough to never get knocked up, so it is a choice for me, and I choose no. So I'm very curious to know what would make someone choose yes. I still don't get it, but it's very interesting to see it rationalized.
I still don't understand those people who, at age 16, say, "When I get out of college, I want to have six kids!" These people are degenerates who should be destroyed. Those people probably haven't seen anything of the world except their own shitty town, and have been drinking the Kool Aid that their parents and grandparents dish out. For the most part, I think that kind of mentality is a product of indoctrination, and you and I never really had that. Our parents were pretty good at leaving us alone in terms of social indoctrination, and we were excellent at resisting it. People with independent wiring tend to avoid having children, or have them very late for reasons they can rationalize.
DeleteDon't say you don't have the instinct or genetics--if you enjoy sex, you've got it in you. You're designed for it. It's just the rest of it you've managed to compartmentalize. I mean, we have instincts to eat our fingernails and skin when we're hungry, and we have instinctual dislike for spiders and snakes, but we can overcome those things quite easily, because our brains have evolved to have more control over us than our guts. Then again, our guts have quite a bit of control over us...
http://www.radiolab.org/2012/apr/02/