I recently watched two grown adults (hopefully robots) argue on the internet about having children. They both lost the plot early on and chose violence, and let me tell ya, it was equal parts magnetic and humiliating to watch.

I get it though. The debate is like dynamite weeping its nitroglycerin. Mix the emotional charge of parenting, the yearning of those who can’t, the fear of an unknown world, and perceived selfishness of others, and you’ve got all the makings of a cage fight none of us can afford to miss.

The Almighty Algorithm knows hatred and anger are great for business, so you’d better believe it’s a cage fight you’ll never have to wait long to see. But putting our bloodlust aside for the time being, let’s doggy paddle through the choppy waters and answer the question: Who would want to bring a child into this world?

The Time Machine Conundrum

As a card-carrying member of Team Hope, I often struggle with the concept that the world is going straight to hell. No, I’m not particularly interested in having a fight with you over that… I am quite small and confuse easily; my performance in conflict, both physical and mental, is so poor it’s essentially folklore by this point. I will, however, make my argument and then run away like a coward.

If you believe this is no time to be bringing children into the world, let’s play a game, you and I. It’s called time machine. The rules are simple: we must find a time when it was much better to have children, and stay there. None of this jumping back and forth to get rich shit—you make your call and you stand behind it. Forever.

So where are we going? The 90s with its rock-hard stock market gains? How about the 70s where we can trade a poem and some beans for property? Maybe the 50s where we can walk into a bank and instantly attain a low-interest loan and a career that will set us up until the day we die?

What’s great is you can have a life where you don’t have to deal with any of our current horrors. But what horrors are you trading? What have you dialed back?

Depending on where you land, you may be rolling back 70 years of social advancement for African Americans, 60 years of women breaking into the workforce, and 40 years of gay rights. Don’t even get me started on video games. For God’s sake, friend, THINK THIS THROUGH.

Ok, so too far back is problematic. Let’s be reasonable and go back to 2000. That was only 5 years ago, right? (Checks math… carries the 1… shit). Oh, the halcyon days before social media gave us anxious depression and the opportunity to watch a person get shot in the chest while waiting for your toast to pop. Surely this is it. And it is, save for all the… you know… death.

Did you know that over the last 25 years, advancements in cardiac medicine and treatment have saved somewhere around 120,000 Americans every single year? Even if we don’t count the lives saved in areas of stroke, cancer, and respiratory diseases, just know that rolling back the clock to those good old days means a whole bushel of people are definitely going to die. Potentially you among them.

The next time you see a news report on skyrocketing dementia in the population, consider the other side of the coin: it’s closely related to us not dying from other things as readily anymore.

A controversial opinion: It’s not actually all that bad

There’s many reasons to romanticize the past. Maybe you’re remembering a time when you didn’t have responsibility? Maybe you belong to a group that traditionally had it pretty sweet a few decades ago? Maybe your memory is a total fantasy realm where you’ve picked and chosen what to remember and what to forget?

Any one of those can contribute to a general feeling that things were better in the before times. The thing about “general feelings,” though, is they don’t tend to show up in statistical data. It’s in that data we find a surprising result: if the goal is to raise a child in a time of abundance and safety, you’re in it. We needn’t roll the clock back far before we run headfirst into a timeline where we had to procreate like sea turtles because half of them were probably going to die. Things are good.

Of course there are atrocities being committed across the planet, and this is not a call to ignore them. It is, however, a call to accept that our level of awareness surrounding these problems has never been higher, which can lead to the conclusion that we’re irreparably fuckered.

So you’re saying have kids

Christ no. Kids are the worst. Sometimes. Sometimes they’re the best. Sorry, it’s complicated.

Look, humans are all so different. That we fight over this question is simply a factor of us not understanding each other.

Mental health starting points, financial situations, availability of support from friends or family, usefulness of partner, and general outlook on life all contribute to a critical baseline.

Of course somebody who was raised with love, makes bank, lives 3 minutes from support, has an awesome partner who’s down for adventure and generally sees life as working out is going to tell you to jump into parenting with both feet.

Meanwhile, somebody with chronic anxiety, living paycheck to paycheck, isolated, married to somebody with sloth energy, and sees most of life as stacked against them is going to have an aggressively different take.

You just don’t know

If there’s one thing that I love/can’t stand about humans, it’s our enduring belief that we know precisely what will unfold, followed swiftly by two things: the thing not happening, and us forgetting that we were wrong in the first place.

Chaos rules this kingdom, and despite the daily reminders of this fact, we’re still pretty sure what’s going to happen over decades. We’re consistently befuddled by 3-day weather forecasts but bet our lives on knowing the economy in 30 years.

Y2K panic, ozone layer depletion, overpopulation, dancing leading to the collapse of society… these are all memories of grave predictions that (at one point) we were certain would be our undoing.

Sometimes they were hilarious (remember when Kevin Bacon saved dancing?), while other times they were serious and led to mass action (ozone layer), but the fact remains… our predictions of certain doom were wrong. Whether the problem required debunking or a creative solution, we got there.

What are the chances that despite all our previous history, we’ve suddenly turned a corner and now we have it figured?

You’ve been no help, what do I do

I know. You’re standing there with a condom in one hand, $4000 stroller in the other, and you’re frantically asking me—a stranger on the internet—for guidance. Well, I can’t give you an answer because there isn’t one.

You really can’t know, and that’s what makes life so terrifyingly amazing. You simply can’t know what a child will do to you. They’ll replenish your faith in humanity. They’ll blow your marriage off the face of the planet. They are a pipe bomb in a washing machine… the only certainty is that shit will be quite different once the fuse burns down.

Having kids is the most awful, beautiful thing you will probably ever do. I have two. They have facial hair now. I’ve seen things. After all the lessons and wisdom, when somebody asks me if they should have kids, I still freeze up like an Etch-a-Sketch tasked with quantum computing. Goddammit babies, you just don’t know.

So here’s the only certainty I can offer: you probably can’t/shouldn’t speak for others on the matter. Perhaps the question isn’t “who would bring children into this world” but rather “what kind of world do you think you’re bringing them into?”

There isn’t one world. There’s worlds of uncontrollable wildfire, doomscrolling and microplastics in your fucking brain. There’s worlds of babies laughing at dog sneezes and strangers who help you fix a flat tire on the side of the road. We’re in all these worlds, they’re all happening at once, and the only control you might have in the matter is to decide which world gets your attention in this moment.

The question of having children isn’t a referendum on the planet, but more a mirror that tells us how we feel about suffering, hope, responsibility, control, legacy, and meaning.

You can believe the world has never been better and still choose not to. You can believe the world is falling apart and treat hope as an act of radical rebellion. Humans are like that and it’s the best.

Now if you’ll excuse me, this has taken far too long and I have to wrap this up. Somebody is wrong on the internet and I’ve been meaning to scream at them all day.