What motivates someone to have children?

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But your honour, I was only following the orders of the selfish gene when I procreated. And I only reproduced the once, under pressure. And when you think of what women go through to have kids, and yet are still usually the biggest supporters of the idea, it's hard to believe it's all down to some whim of self-gratification. If a tiger is trying to kill you for its dinner, you'll likely do your utmost to stop that happening. Reproduction is just an extension of that survival instinct, the selfish gene's demands there are very nearly as hard to ignore.

I don't see that life has to have any inherent meaning though. I don't think it does, beyond staying as happy and comfortable as possible and hoping to keep enjoying the ride to a degree. That's pretty much all I do, and yet mostly I've not been particularly unhappy. Without kids, who will support us in our dotage? We'll be too worn out to fend for ourselves 100%.

It does matter, though. If life was nothing but excruciating suffering, it would be wrong to have children, but that’s not the case. Most people find life worthwhile despite the suffering.

When people have children, they typically make a lot of sacrifices. Raising children is by no means a selfish endeavor. It’s a huge expenditure of time, money, and energy.

I promise you, you are not. You are the 2D creature fiercely dismissing the existence of the 3D world, if you know the Flatland analogy. Of course we know the third dimension exists, having to live in it, but the 2D creature cannot interact with us on any meaningful level. We must accept that we too might be in a similar situation to the 2D creature.

True application of reason and rational considerations leads only to "hardcore" agnosticism.



I didn't miss it at all, I used to be you - until I understood the enormous scale of my error and hubris regarding what I actually knew and was capable of knowing.



Think hard - these are all things that can actually be investigated to a degree. They are all supposed to exist or at least have measurable effects in our 2D world. Why have you conflated them with ideas and systems that cannot be tested for?

^
Granted, while you could investigate the existence of fairies by looking for them, it's hard to know where you'd even begin to look for some extra dimension that by definition we're inherently blind to. But the result is much the same in either case - having scoured the planet for fairies and found none, there's still no way round the notion that maybe they didn't want to be found so they hid themselves on the Moon till you'd abandoned your search. Nobody knows how to absolutely disprove the existence of a thing, but that doesn't make believing in fairies or some external cosmic plan particularly sensible.

A functioning, rational mind must remain "agnostic" to all possibilities. I don't know about sensible. Is it really sensible to desire and act as though the most bland, miserable option is the correct one? The one where life is ultimately pointless suffering, speckled with moments of joy, if you are lucky? That nothing we do really matters? What is sensible about that?

Religion is either the greatest truth or the greatest delusion. Either way it is better to believe.

^
Interesting questions. I agree that the only rational way is to remain agnostic and never be 100% convinced about anything. I've held the view for a long time that faith is pretending you know something you don't know. But that's just the cognitive dimension of faith. There's also a behavioural dimension. For example, I might not know cognitively that it'll be worth my while doing a thing, I might be aware that I won't necessarily achieve my goal, but in my behaviour I'll go for it, I'll give it a whirl. That's behavioural faith. I think it's a good thing mostly, as long as it's informed by the cognitive process of weighing up the risks and benefits to a reasonable extent. But I think cognitive faith is more of a mistake. Nonetheless, if the balance of probabilities seems heavily on one side or the other, it's not much of a mistake to approximate by ignoring a small degree of doubt, and I think that makes for more expedient thinking, even if it is a little quick and dirty. So I think in a sense it's valid to pretend you know something you don't know, as long as you don't lose track of the fact that you're doing that.

Personally, I find the idea of eternal consciousness of any kind far more disturbing than the concept of oblivion.

There's a way of looking at the world where men who don't have children are seen as absolute losers, ie. they failed at the only thing they were put on this planet to do.

So you could say fear of being seen / treated as subhuman for not having had them, fear of getting beat up in a nursing home by caretakers without anyone to come to your defense or check on you, fear of just not doing what everyone's supposed to be doing, the desire to have and raise a son or daughter, the desire to have family, all of these things factor.

There are also people who became parents because sex feels good and they were too sloppy / careless to use birth control but these days it is more of a cultural goal, even vocation, to be a parent.

I imagine if oblivion is what you seek, there are ways to find it. But it'd be nice to have the option.

Having eternal life with the option to terminate yourself whenever you please would be the best of both worlds. That way you can live precisely as long as you want to. Though I don't think any major religions include this in their belief system.

^
Right, I guess most of us are scared of death and oblivion. The selfish gene and that blasted survival instinct. The trouble with being human is that we've been able to figure out that we're going to die. Lower animals presumably have no such problem. Religion has been a neat answer in the past, and still is for many people. But the priests and scriptures don't commonly say much about the afterlife, especially the "Good Place."

I don't know how painful it would get to survive forever. But so far so good.

Even the various descriptions of the good afterlives I've heard sound like they'd get really tiresome and repetitive after a while.

They said the same thing at Nuremberg, and how did that work out?

This coming from someone who believes in an "Invisible Friend".

God gave us the ability to think rationally.
Erm...

Using this ability of reason, we can approach a more realistic probability.

Consider this speculation:
Archeologists seemingly have identified when the concept of an afterlife approximately began through, burial rituals.
This seems to have coincided with an evolutionary development of the prefrontal cortex.
What this means is that previous to the evolutionary development, the concept of a "creator" was not possible.

Conclusion:
To me, this quirk of evolution is just that, and all the religious hocus pocus was a result of a simple "blind" evolutionary accident.

BTW, Studying human psychology is vital to understanding the irrational power of the spiritual/religious concept, imo.

We could draw such a conclusion comfortably if it wasn't for our incapacity to fully understand the universe. We know and understand nothing, especially on an individual level. We are inadequately intelligent to be fully logical.