On having kids.
A lot of my friends have had kids in the last five years, or are working on that now. To all of you, I say: Congratulations! You're undertaking a project greater than anything else in our society. Having said that, I'm occasionally asked whether I want kids, and then why not. So let me say this now: I don't want kids, ever. I don't dislike kids, and I don't dislike you for having kids. I just don't want my own.
Here's a great article on that very subject.
So this essay caused a bit of an argument in another forum (of course!) so I thought I'd copy-pasta some of my more in-depth thoughts over here.
I often hear "You're a great person, you should totally have kids! Your genes shouldn't go to waste!" To which I reply that I'm more than just a body, thank you very much.
At 28, I have no kids and no desire to have them- ever. Selfish? Perhaps. See, I have this idea that I want to be a college professor and educate the next generation. And I have this idea that if I have kids, in the next 10 years, I'll be having them while I'm trying to get into grad school, while I'm in grad school, or as a new academic who's trying to get his feet under him and pay off massive student debt. Somehow, this doesn't seem like a good time to have a kid.
Of course, I could wait until I'm established. At that point, my freshly-minted brat will happily distract me from my work, and I'll be an overtired, distracted professor rushing through my grading and without time for my students. That doesn't seem fair to other people's children, the people I'm teaching.
So tell me: Do my genes make me who I am? Or does physical genome, which can only be passed on through spooge, play in concert to my mental genome, which can be passed on to thousands of people through education? Is it still selfish of me if I want to take that part of me that people revere, my education and carefully-trained thought processes, and favor that over asthma, allergies, weak joints and a predilection for alcohol and stimulants?
Here's a great article on that very subject.
So this essay caused a bit of an argument in another forum (of course!) so I thought I'd copy-pasta some of my more in-depth thoughts over here.
I often hear "You're a great person, you should totally have kids! Your genes shouldn't go to waste!" To which I reply that I'm more than just a body, thank you very much.
At 28, I have no kids and no desire to have them- ever. Selfish? Perhaps. See, I have this idea that I want to be a college professor and educate the next generation. And I have this idea that if I have kids, in the next 10 years, I'll be having them while I'm trying to get into grad school, while I'm in grad school, or as a new academic who's trying to get his feet under him and pay off massive student debt. Somehow, this doesn't seem like a good time to have a kid.
Of course, I could wait until I'm established. At that point, my freshly-minted brat will happily distract me from my work, and I'll be an overtired, distracted professor rushing through my grading and without time for my students. That doesn't seem fair to other people's children, the people I'm teaching.
So tell me: Do my genes make me who I am? Or does physical genome, which can only be passed on through spooge, play in concert to my mental genome, which can be passed on to thousands of people through education? Is it still selfish of me if I want to take that part of me that people revere, my education and carefully-trained thought processes, and favor that over asthma, allergies, weak joints and a predilection for alcohol and stimulants?