i love kids. that’s why i’m not making one.
a soft-hearted, hard-hitting defense of antinatalism
Jun 14, 2025
i adore kids
i’m an excellent uncle-of-sorts, honorary godparent, babysitter whisperer, and sucker for baby giggles. this isn’t about them. it’s about you and your sacred, delusional desire to reproduce.
hear me out. i’m on your side. but also not.
there are plenty of good reasons to have children.
no, really. let’s be generous for a moment.
at their most beautiful, children are living expressions of love, belief in the future, and sometimes even wild, miraculous experiments in becoming better than ourselves. at their most primal, kids represent our cosmic relay baton. the literal dna scribble we pass forward as we vanish from the page. you could even call it noble. romantic, even.
or, let’s say, you’re simply curious. what would you look like if you were 50% someone else? would your child inherit your perfect eyebrows? your partner’s dimples? would they finally grow up to be the emotionally secure, creatively self-actualized hybrid of you and your trauma-healed inner child?
spoiler: probably not.
but let’s not knock narcissism. we’ll get back to that.
zooming out a few centuries, there’s also the medieval motivation: to carry on the name.
legacy. lineage. the coat-of-arms logic of perpetuating your noble bloodline or… your suburban last name. yes, the idea that “someone will remember me after i die” is touching. but let’s not pretend this isn’t also the emotional equivalent of carving “brooks was here” into the plaster before… well, you know that story. you want to be remembered, i get it. who doesn’t? but manufacturing an entirely new, sentient, conscious being just so someone visits your grave once a year is… quite a flex. borderline pyramid scheme, if we’re being honest.
now, i say all this lovingly. because the desire to have children is deeply human.
but i also believe it’s not a decision we talk about seriously enough.
philosophically enough.
ethically enough.
having a child is one of the few monumental life decisions that still feels culturally above critique. you can question someone’s career, their marriage, their tattoo of an ex’s name written in comic sans. but suggest that bringing new life into the world might be morally questionable? that’s heresy.
well, consider me your neighborhood heretic.
let’s talk about antinatalism.
the case for not making a baby
at its core, antinatalism isn’t about hating babies or shaking your fist at strollers. it’s a philosophical stance rooted in ethics. one that simply says:
“maybe it’s not morally okay to create a being without its consent, especially when that being will inevitably suffer.”
let’s pause there.
because whether or not you like it, you were born screaming.
we all were.
that first inhale of life? a terrified, primal gasp. you were ejected from the warm void into a world of light, sound, cold, need, and confusion. congrats! you’re conscious now! and unless you have access to past-life customer service, you didn’t ask for this.
consciousness is wild. it’s beautiful, yes, but also fundamentally disorienting. it’s the ability to marvel at the cosmos while simultaneously feeling like a weird sack of meat hurtling toward death, haunted by deadlines, loneliness, and that one time you said “you too” to a waiter who told you to enjoy your meal.
and no matter how blissful someone’s life is, it’s never pain-free. no one gets out of this unscathed. we all encounter grief. rejection. injustice. suffering. in fact, if you believe the buddhists, the hindus, schopenhauer, alan watts, or your neighborhood bar philosopher after two beers, it’s all suffering. that’s the gig. life is suffering punctuated by brief flashes of awe.
sure, there are sunsets.
there’s the view from the summit, the thrill of a kiss, the ecstasy of music.
but at the end of the day, you still return to your body.
your aging, aching, lonely, confused, craving, mortal body.
spiritual suffering (or: why alan watts wouldn’t procreate)
watts once said “you are an aperture through which the universe is looking at and exploring itself.” which sounds beautiful until you remember that this aperture also gets migraines, existential dread, and taxes. the mystical tradition across cultures, from hindu vedanta to mahayana buddhism to sufi islam, tells us that separation is an illusion. that ego is a performance. that we are all one, experiencing itself in infinite forms.
cool. but…
then why deliberately create another suffering node in the matrix?
if the game is to dissolve the ego, recognize the illusion of self, and return to the oneness of being, why yank another spark of the one down into this confusing bardo just to teach them that everything they think is real… isn’t?
from a purely spiritual standpoint, creating another ego-bound being just so they can eventually unlearn the illusion of ego seems like a messed-up escape room.
the western flavors of doom
if the eastern mystics weren’t convincing enough, let’s get political. let’s get american.
late-stage capitalism, crumbling institutions, ecosystem collapse, algorithmic reality distortion, a society increasingly defined by gig work, digital surveillance, and vibes-based politics.
you know it. i know it.
the left is delusional in its optimism. the right is delusional in its misplaced nostalgia.
and you want to drop a baby into that?
let’s call it what it is: you’re trying to raise a fish in a blender.
and maybe your blender is set to “low,” but the water’s still swirling.
there’s a non-zero chance that the generation your offspring produces will witness some kind of dystopia. financial collapse. climate migration. techno-authoritarianism. who knows? we don’t. that’s the point. but given that roulette wheel, isn’t creating a new life a bold (risky) roll of the dice?
the “but i want a mini-me” argument
here’s the part where i get honest. i’ve entertained the fantasy, too.
i mean, yeah, i kinda wanna know what a half-me-half-someone-else baby would look like!
would they have my stubbornness? their mother’s wit? would they be cute and weird and carry our love like a secret flame?
maybe.
but i also have a mirror. and photoshop. filters.
and i can project onto a dog just fine, thank you.
i get it. we all want to leave a mark. we all want someone to love us unconditionally.
but that’s not a child’s job.
more often than not, when we dig into our deepest motives for procreation, we don’t find nobility. we find ego. we find fear of mortality. we find a desire to matter.
to be remembered. to love or be loved.
to have something that’s “ours.”
and none of those desires are evil. but they are selfish.
even religion gets in on the ego trip. the western, judeo-christian-islamic tradition encourages believers to be fruitful and multiply. why? because it’s good for the religion. it doesn’t care about your kid. more believers. more disciples. more spread of the word.
sorry, but your womb isn’t a mission field. and your offspring aren’t pamphlets.
even ancient greek philosophers, from theognis to the stoics, saw childbearing as dubious at best. and these are people who thought vomiting after dinner was chill.
they weren’t exactly squeamish. but they knew: existence is heavy.
and dragging another being into this existential stew requires more than a pinterest board and a babymoon. it requires deep ethical reflection.
so… should no one ever have kids?
that’s not what i’m saying.
antinatalism isn’t a campaign. it’s not a moral purity contest. and crucially: it does not condone violence. this isn’t a cult. it’s a quiet, contemplative pause in the momentum of life. a radical empathy for potential life. not because it’s not valuable, but because it is.
the antinatalist simply asks: “are you sure?”
not from judgment. but from care.
if you want children, i’m not here to shame you. i’m here to challenge you.
so why do you want them?
have you questioned your motives? really? deeply?
are you ready to bear not just the burden of parenting, but the ethical weight of creating a being who will know love and grief? beauty and despair? in all reality, f**king pain… because of you?!
if your answer is still “yes,” then i wish you blessings and babysitters and a night nurse with the patience of a saint.
but if your answer is “…uhhh,” then welcome. you’re not weird. you’re thinking.
and maybe that’s enough.