Dumb reasons to have kids
Some people have kids because they want to experience the joy of raising fellow human beings, others have kids because they want to have human properties to exploit. A good reason and a vile reason to have kids.
Then, there are also the dumb reasons.
People believe having kids is good for our legacy, our country’s development and, most importantly, mankind’s survival. And yes, I think they are dumb reasons.
Let’s start with legacy. We have children, our children have children, their children have children…. and repeat until our genes outlive our children’s children. Okay, then what?
Does it improve our current quality of life? Does it improve our current physical and mental well-being? Obviously, the answer is to both is NO.
You are so enamored by the idea of legacy, you mistakenly see it as a basic human need; you mistakenly believe it is just as important as eating and breathing.
It also doesn’t make sense. If you are all about leaving legacy, why do you choose genes? Not only they won’t make people remember you, they will also be “diluted” with others’s anyway. Surely, being a historically significant individual leaves more visible and lasting legacy. You are going to be remembered for a long time, regardless whether you have passed your genes or not.
If that’s your goal, you should focus on being extremely highly accomplished. You can be a statesman, a mass murderer… or both.
As an Indonesian, I find the idea of having more people can help developing our society is laughably overtly-simplistic. Indonesia is an extremely populous country. The most populous in Southeast Asia and the Muslim world, the fourth most in the entire world.
But, while it does have progresses, no one thinks it is a highly-developed country; it is still a developing one. In fact, in this regard, Indonesia is defeated by Singapore, a country which population size is about 3% of Indonesia’s (I hope I get my math right), which area size is only slightly bigger than Jakarta’s. Even Malaysia and Brunei, other smaller Southeast Asian countries, are more developed. In fact, there are many other countries on earth which have less people than Indonesia and “somehow” are more developed than it.
That’s because it is a matter of quality, NOT just quantity. Those other countries have higher quality human resources. What’s the point of having lots of people when they are poorly-educated and poorly-skilled? If anything, such arrangement can be burdensome.
And that segues to the topic of humanity’s survival.
Because of our ability to transform and exploit nature to fulfill our needs, many of us forget or refuse to accept that we are a part of nature, NOT above it. If we hurt nature, we hurt ourselves.
Let pollution ravages and the water will be too dangerous to drink, the air will be too dangerous to breathe in. Destroy the biodiversity and we will make our food supply even more vulnerable, which can negatively impact our health.
Nature can exist without us. But, we cannot exist without it.
If we let our fellow human beings to be environmentally destructive apes, our populousness would actually threaten mankind’s survival. Once again, it is not just the quantity of the humans, it is also about their quality.
Unlike the people who procreate because they want to have children as assets, those with aforementioned reasons are not driven by malice.
But, because they think too highly of their overtly-simplistic “thinking”, they are still infuriating to deal with.
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