I wonder whether perpetual adolescence (and you can count me as an adherent, or sufferer, or however you care to classify it) isn’t the only thing at work here.
In a way, raising a family is like voting in an election: Your individual contribution (or lack thereof) to the continuation of society, quite frankly, amounts to virtually nothing in the grand scheme of things. You can be like Darrell a few posts back and have 10 kids, and raise them all to be wonderful human beings and good, productive citizens, but 10 more good citizens really doesn’t amount to much by itself in a nation of 300 million people, and all of their children, over whose birth and upbringing you have no significant degree of control.
Note the operative phrase that I emphasized above. It means that having and raising children isn’t an investment in the future of your society, but rather a high-stakes wager on it. How high are the stakes? Only the well-being and happiness of your children in that future. If other people and their children take American society to hell in a hybrid handbasket, the 10 wonderful and productive new citizens you spent all those years raising will still be going along for the ride. Having children amounts to gambling that they can find happiness in whatever world awaits them, no matter how strange or grim – except (and here’s the kicker) that those same children are the ones who’ll have to pay off your bet if you lose. Yet how many would-be parents really take all this into consideration? Not many, I’d wager (no pun intended) – and precisely because they can neither predict not control the future, and therefore don’t give much thought to it. Rational ignorance is bliss.
