Why We Should Stop Having Kids
This article might feel a bit heavy. It might even be a little depressing. But if you stick with me, I promise it will help you step back and think deeply about one of the most monumentally important decisions you will ever make in your life.
Lately, we hear a lot of noise about demographics. Elon Musk and various world leaders frequently sound the alarm, warning that declining population sizes and fertility rates below replacement levels in developed nations are a looming catastrophe.
But most of these conversations focus strictly on economics and numbers. Today, I want to skip the financial arguments about how expensive it is to raise a child and ask a much more uncomfortable, fundamental question about human existence:
Is it truly fair to bring a new life into this world?
Enrolling a Child for Sufferings of Human Existence
When we choose to have a child, we aren’t just bringing a cute baby into the world. We are signing someone up for a lifelong obstacle course that they can’t opt out of.
By default, we are forcing a new consciousness to go through the grueling cycle of modern existence: getting an education, hunting for a job, fighting to stay employed, finding a partner, and navigating a never-ending series of hurdles just to make ends meet. Worst of all, we force them to experience the brutal realities of human biology: physical illness, the decline of old age, and the grief of watching loved ones fade away.
We talk about this trajectory as if it’s a beautiful journey. But let’s be honest: human existence is incredibly hard. Going through life is never as easy as it sounds.
Yes, there are beautiful moments of happiness, love, and joy. But the sheer weight of grief, sorrow, and misery can easily wash those happy moments away, leaving us to question the very purpose of our existence. And the truth is, nobody actually knows that purpose. We arrive on this tiny rock floating in a vast, indifferent universe, fight desperately to survive for a few decades, and then we leave.
Get Kanak Agrawal’s stories in your inbox
Join Medium for free to get updates from this writer.
While our journeys are filled with both positive and negative experiences, the negative emotions of fear, anxiety, grief, and heartbreak, often have a heavy, overpowering gravity that completely overshadows the fleeting moments of joy.
The Guarantee of Suffering
If you strip away the romanticism of parenthood, the most profound reason to hesitate before having children comes down to a simple, terrifying “What if?”
- The Gamble of Health: God forbid your child experiences a severe or terminal illness. To bring a child into the world is to expose them to the very real possibility of intense physical suffering.
- The Certainty of Grief: Even if they stay healthy, they will inevitably have to watch the people they love get sick, suffer, and die. No one escapes the agony of losing someone they love.
- The Everyday Grind: Beyond the extreme tragedies, they are guaranteed to endure the mental and emotional toll of building a career, maintaining a family, and dodging life’s random cruelties, like accidents or betrayal.
The world is already a deeply flawed, often cruel place filled with war, exploitation, crime, and systemic selfishness. Why should we pull a brand-new soul into this environment?
Giving Up Your Life to Fund a New Suffering
The cycle doesn’t just demand suffering from the child; it demands total sacrifice from the parents.
Think about it. People spend decades of their youth building their own lives, educating themselves, and establishing a career. But the moment they have a child, they enter a secondary hamster wheel. They must now spend the next several decades working and making money simply to sustain the life of another person.
So many people blindly follow the script handed down by previous generations. They jump into parenthood without ever stopping to ask why. They don’t realize that by following the default path, they might inadvertently be making two lives miserable: their own, through a lifetime of sacrifice, and their child’s, by forcing them to inherit the inevitable sorrows of the human condition.
Final Thoughts
Having children is the ultimate gamble, but the person paying the price of a bad hand isn’t just you but it’s your child too.
Before we blindly push for higher birth rates to save economies, we need to ask ourselves if we are acting out of love, or simply out of habit. Life unconditionally distributes suffering to everyone. Maybe the kindest thing we can do for the next generation is to simply let them not bring into the world of suffering (sprinkled with moments of happiness and joy).
