5 Reasons Why You Shouldn’t Want Children

Your early twenties are for mistakes and exploring and finding yourself. You can paddle your way through and try new things. As soon as you cross the threshold into your mid-late twenties, you’re drowning deep in dangerous territory. Suddenly your social media is overflowing with engagements, marriages, and occasionally a baby or two pops up in your feed. While you are trying to swim against the current of societal approval, it dawns on you that you are an actual adult, and that you should be having children soon. That’s when you begin to really start thinking about these kinds of things; all this kind of important stuff.

The relentless cacophony of societal pressure drowns out critical and independent thinking. It tells men that they should be defined by their picket fences and the metaphorical size of their penises through financial success and social status. Women are conditioned to believe that their womb is their worth, that their beauty and youthful innocence are the most priceless possessions. These voices drone on and on until your inner child starts screaming, throwing tantrums and freaking out so hard that you crack; either by succumbing to the pressure, or by starting to think for yourself.

All this societal conditioning makes you feel like you’re wrong for not being ready to get married and have children. As if you’re this irresponsible and immature thing that doesn’t deserve to be a proper person. I mean how could you not want to have bundles of joy and sweet smelling poop with the love of your life? If you’re a woman, your vagina is most definitely evil, and your womb is a monster cave. If you’re a man, your heart is frigid cold, and your penis is too insignificant to produce good sperm.

Or maybe, just maybe, it’s okay to actually take your time to figure out what you really want. You don’t have to have children, and it shouldn’t be a compulsion. Parenting is a huge responsibility, and most people today are completely unequipped to be having kids.

Let’s list all the profoundly dumb reasons that people want children.

1. Because it’s what people do. People do a lot of dumb shit all the time. They kill innocent people, they buy things they’re told to buy that they don’t even need, they destroy the planet they’re living in, they do stupid, self-destructive things like intoxicating themselves with ecstatic stimulants because they haven’t yet figured out how to be happy with themselves. Instead of blindly following the herd, ask yourself what you want.

2. To live out your unfulfilled dreams. If you feel like a failure, it’s for a reason. Fix that reason; please don’t expect your child to fix your sense of self-worth for you.

3. To leave behind your legacy. Maybe you have the royal blood of great ancestors running through your veins, or maybe you’re secretly the descendant of a genius scientist or an enlightened master. Or maybe your children might be mediocre like you, if you are stupid enough to think that you should have them to satisfy the needs of your ego.

4. For your partner. People who have children only because their partner wants them make terrible parents due to their disinterest and indifference. Your child’s development will suffer from being insufficiently loved if one parent is not equally invested.

5. To give you purpose. A child is not a hobby or an inspiration or a cure for your loneliness. You can find meaning in so many other ways like educating yourself, creating things, solving problems, and trying to contribute to the world. A child is a human being who will have their own dreams, which they will need you to nurture. If you’re too busy finding your own meaning in your little infant, what about what he or she wants?

Children are not an obligation or a necessity or a solution. They are beautiful gifts from God or nature or whatever faith you believe in. If you have thought long and hard about this, and you do decide to have them, then it should be for the right reason:

To experience unconditional love.

This is self-explanatory, unless you’re too delusional to face the truth about your own selfishness.