What surprised me about the lack of children

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JD Vance isn’t wrong about all of us. While most childfree lives don’t conform to his cliche of atomized self-esteem, mine does, more or less. Home is a rental apartment bachelor apartment of almost inhuman silence and order. With no asylum fees or SUVs to save for, the share of earnings that goes to food and wine would make Churchill turn up his nose.

But there are Bad things about childlessness too. Some of them surprised me. Since the world is so concerned about population decline, it might be a public service to broadcast them. Let’s scare some people in the delivery room, okay?

One thing no one warns you about when you give up children: It can induce a kind of premature antiquatedness. Childless men are expected to be cool (About a boy has a lot to answer for) but it’s through kids that people are keeping up with the cultural shiVscek. I had never heard of Charli XCX until the recent meme about Kamala Harris deciding to run. AVsceker doing some research, I still don’t understand what’s going on. What a Snapchat message looks like or what the logo looks like, I can’t imagine, and that app launched in 2011. TikTok? A closed book. Shein? I hadn’t heard of the brand until June.

There are parents in their fiVscekies who are much closer to the zeitgeist. This is not, or not just, one man’s backwardness. Forced to think of a trait that all the bachelors I associate with share, I would suggest the pervasive ignorance of modern mass culture. Ours is a world of old books, old movies, and old music. Even old manners. The scatological chaos of raising children loosens people up a bit. My team, meanwhile, is meticulous and almost bizarre: greetings with handshakes, as if we had just met; an analytical detachment even in the most personal conversation. The Men who behave badly the trope — beer stains, foul language — gets it completely wrong.

The life that this column tends to exalt, the life of big cities, depends on young people.

There’s another perverse result of childlessness. File it under “Suffering the Little Things.” If there isn’t much stress or inconvenience in your life, the little that there is becomes even harder to bear. There’s no chance to develop that crucial tolerance for triviality. Filing a tax return must be a drag for a father. But he deals with worse things all the time. For me? During that hour or two of paperwork, there are Montana survivalists who curse the government less.

This August, a personal dilemma over which coffee maker to choose, a high-end Nespresso or a mid-range one, enters its eighth month. What’s going on here? Well, Parkinson’s Law holds that work expands to fill the time available for its completion. Replace “work” with something like “thinking” and you get an idea of ​​the psychology of a man with more time than duties. It is possible to have absolute and serene certainty about the most important matters in life, namely family, and analysis paralysis over trifles. Stress is not comparable to parenthood, but it is not zero or predictable in advance.

And even that is not the biggest surprise of all. No, there is a more recent and more punitive one. I now accept that the pronatalists were right all along. No one can escape the second-order effects of an aging population. That means, above all, the tax burden on workers to support retirees, but not only that. The life this column tends to glorify, the life of big cities, depends on young people, whether as service personnel or as creators of new ideas or simply as unwitting purveyors of ambient energy. Much as I might prefer their zero-to-18 phase to take place elsewhere, in offshore incubators, on a terraformed Mars, I need them. The self-serving case for pronatalism is what has me hooked.

Vance reminds me of Liz Truss in a way. She took a good cause, supply-side reform, and tainted it for perhaps a decade with recklessness and thoughtlessness. Likewise, it will be a while before a public figure can discuss the population issue without risking association with women-baiting lunatics. A shame. That I wouldn’t waver on parenthood, I always knew. That I was so eager for the rest of you to get to work, I never would have guessed.

janan.ganesh@Vscek.com

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