I've watched most of my life as narratives have been pushed in popular culture, TV, music, magazines, online articles, etc that go out of their way to convince people not to have children. Just some examples of trends I've observed personally.
- Scare media about the cost of having children
- Scare media about the environmental impact of having children, even calling it irresponsible for the planet
- Scare media about the state of the world aka "how could you bring a child into this" when, at least in the western world, we have the highest standard of living in human history.
- Scare media about motherhood, things not working out with your husband, kids being brats who don't respect you and constantly living in a house of sadness.
- Scare media about fatherhood promoting the idea of women having a baby just to hook the father for child support and the divorcing him.
- Scare media about having to trade your career for a family
All of this while growing up and realizing more and more, by talking to everyone around me, people older than me, friends of my parents, my other friends in their 40s and on down the line...there is nothing in this world that brings people more joy than their families and their children. Nothing. It's devastating for the people who I know who can't have children despite all of their attempts and even then tends to lead to adoption in many cases.
All of the narratives, trend marketing and media capitalize on a story that people have been invested in pushing for decades that is at worst an outright lie and at best a half truth to accomplish some political goals.
People need each other. Men need women. Women need men. Children need both parents. And we are all better for it. No matter how broke you think you are or how much you think it will cost, you will figure it out together. People do this all the time with less than you have ever had in your life and they make it work. Together. And it's worth it.
As a man who's never wanted kids, and is now getting to an age where it probably wouldn't be a good idea, those weren't really the big factors for me.
Having a kid is just an unfathomably large commitment. If you bring a kid into the world, I believe you're responsible for creating the conditions where that kid can grow into a healthy, well adjusted adult, and that's seemed like an increasingly impossible commitment for the past few decades.
It's not that hard. Sorry you missed out on a wonderful thing.
You are not responsible for the world or its conditions. You just have to support the kid and be a good role model, that is 95% of the job.
You're definitely responsible for the environment you bring a kid into. It doesn't matter what is going on in the world. You're the parent and ultimately you're responsible for the environment where you raise your children. You're responsible for having the right resources to raise them trauma-free. Did you...not realize this when you made kids?
It's also enormously stressful and expensive. We're stopping at one where in past times a family like ours might've had 2-3. There are a variety of reasons, but cost in money, time, and housing are big factors. I'm very well off compared to most Americans, so I can see why if you're even marginally on the fence it has tipped into a no.
"Make it work" is a great thing to say on the internet, but not very good advice to people who are one broken down car or health issue away from not making rent, which is a LOT of young Americans.
Maybe all these things are true at the same time. More of a “is it better to have loved and lost than never loved at all” kind of dialogue.
In the midst of grief over any of the topics above, compounded by an indifferentand maladapted system, I think it’s completely understandable that folks could have a lot to say about these challenges.
> there is nothing in this world that brings people more joy than their families and their children. Nothing.
Counterpoint: Yes, you're giving the standard apologetic we all hear from parents. However, plain and simple, objectively it's typically the most stressful thing you will do in your entire life. It's so bad the US Surgeon General had to put out an entire advisory paper about it[1]:
> 41% of parents say that most days they are so stressed they cannot function and 48% say that most days their stress is completely overwhelming compared to other adults (20% and 26%, respectively).
It's a lot easier if you live near either your parents or your in-laws. Having grandparents around to help is the cheat code to making parenting easier. We didn't have that until our oldest was 7 and it was life changing.
But before that, it's exhausting and still by far the most rewarding thing you'll ever do with your life.
It's a tale as old as life itself. Some organisms succeed in coping with the environment they find themselves in. The genes and culture of these organisms gets passed on to the next generation.
yeah and? i thought it was generally agreed that the best things worth doing in life are hard? a life of comfort and hedonism isnt fulfilling. We've known this for thousands of year.
Having children itself can often be a form of hedonism. Let's face it: for many, the decision to have a child is very similar to the decision to have an exotic pet. People frequently/usually do it just for the social status boost they expect to receive.
And if we're talking about having children in the context of history: for basically all of history except the rounding error of the past century, children were your social security/pension/401k rolled into one. Children were literally your property, a form of wealth and certainly not a sacrifice.
> Having children itself can often be a form of hedonism. Let's face it: for many, the decision to have a child is very similar to the decision to have an exotic pet. People frequently/usually do it just for the social status boost they expect to receive.
I actually don't think I've ever read anything that made as little contact with reality as this. Its actually impressive. If you actually think this is in any way true, you need to deeply deeply reevaluate the way you perceive the world.
I've run the Carolina Code Conference since 2023 and we've setup Zulip as a chat system for conference attendees to network every year. It's a really cool platform and I wish it had more widespread adoption.
I graduated just before social media took off, but for us everybody was on AOL Instant Messenger. You left it on on your computer all the time, people updated their status messages for all to see and it showed when you were idle.
It was so much better than online by default as we are now.
When I hear that kids now are leaving public social media sites for private chats with a network of friends, which I personally have never used, I am picturing the AOL IM/icq experience.
I fixed Facebook on my feed at least. I started aggressively unfollowing people who post or comment about politics constantly (even if I agree with them). Not unfriending, just unfollowing.
What’s left is a feed with pictures of my friends and family, important news about what’s going on in their lives, and trash talking about college football.
Didn't work for me. It barely even show me content that my friends create. It's all reaction videos and conspiracy nonsense. Even if you block those channels, another one with a slightly different name pops up.
I remember feeling the same way about Slicehost back in the day after Rackspace acquired them. Loved Slicehost. Not too long after though, Digital Ocean appeared with everything I loved about Slicehost and has kept getting better ever since.
I feel like that's Fly.io now. They took all of the great things about Heroku but also dramatically improved and added new capabilities...while improving on pricing, particularly for lower traffic stuff. Love Fly.
I was working for Slicehost at the time, we were a tiny team working our butts off in a loft office in downtown St. Louis, with a few remote employees.
To my understanding there was a runway-growth problem. Could the founders raise and spend (efficiently) enough money quickly enough to keep the business viable? It would be a big gamble and the alternatives were to shut down (no way!) or sell. So they sold.
Rackspace wanted to take Matt’s and Jason’s know how (plus customer base) and go big, really big! That defocused our efforts a bit, plus there were corporate integration headaches (though not too bad). Eventually Linode, already a competitor, and later Digital Ocean filled the void.
All I can say is thank you. I learned to manage servers because of Slicehost and the articles on it back then.
I remember being excited by the merger because well, Rackspace had such a fantastic reputation at the time. People still tell stories about their service. The Rackspace Cloud was just up against an absolute monster in AWS and never really became competitive.
Thank you for the kind words, brought back some fun and interesting memories. I spent a lot of time helping to write and edit those articles, as did my coworkers, glad they helped you!
Not sure why people love fly.io over all the other competitors so much. I myself prefer render.com, for the simplicity and predictability of their billing, and their deployment model is so intuitive
> They took all of the great things about Heroku but also dramatically improved and added new capabilities
I also love Fly, but they were missing easy managed databases (which always seemed like the main reason to use Heroku to me). And now they have them they're very expensive (even compared to Heroku). Which is a shame because their compute is very cheap.
If there was one thing we would all decide differently here at Fly.io, like if you gave us a time machine, is how we did databases. Someday Kurt and I will write the post about how those decisions came to pass and how they played out.
We're doing Managed Postgres now (MPG), which is what we should have done to begin with, but it took us for-ev-er to get here.
It's a simple question of economics and observation.
In a free marketplace, when a product, service or company is no longer useful...it dies. This creates a natural incentive to constantly improve, operate more efficiently or expand into new areas where it can create value.
With government spending, this doesn't happen because there's no incentive for it to happen. Programs are created and then they grow, perpetually, forever.
My goodness, I still remember Bill Clinton proudly showing a balanced budget. I remember George Bush Jr running with one of his biggest campaign points around fixing Social Security.
How we got from that era of energy for fiscal responsibility to $39 trillion in debt is...maddening.
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