Having kids

I haven't. I'm 37 and have no kids. Twenty, ten, even five years ago, I would never have guessed I'd be child-less at the solidly middle age of 37.

I'm surprisingly ok with it. And so, it seems, are lots of other people of my generation. In 2012 a poll revealed only 42% of college-age adults planned to have kids in later life. That's down from 78% in 1992.

Wow! So, is humanity going to die out? Or just the middle- and upper-class white people in industrialized countries who are leaning in this direction?

Either way, says my internal Ted Kaczyski, that will be great. (One more reason I can't let anyone else ever read this blog, AMIRITE.) Yeah, also my internal Derrick Jensen, who, as far as we know, hasn't yet sent any bombs in the mail or led any protest dam bombings. He might though, because he believes civilization ("This Fucking Culture") is really bad for the natural world and needs to self-destruct--the sooner the better. And I'm a person who gets his point. A lot of people read Kazcynski's "manifesto" (dissertation) and thought he made a lot of great points.

Less people having babies means way less stress on our natural resources. Which could mean that humanity may be lucky enough to fall off gradually, as opposed to a dramatic, global-warming induced extinction event.    

But I do wonder about a sort of Jungian collective unconscious response to being so surrounded by people and our own industrial jungles. It's not that ..nurturing or receptive to life at all, let alone human life, despite our having created it out of our heads for ourselves. We have fake goals and fake rewards and do fake work for fake progress. And we call it civilized, all the while destroying the soil, water, and infinitely intricate species networks upon which we've built. So maybe the collective unconscious/mother earth in all of us is responding by noping right out of civilization. Modern life is not conducive to humans, so stop creating them.

Ok, so, head-nod to all the obvious, conscious ways modern life has most recently made having kids really difficult: the health insurance situation in the US, the loads of student-loan debt our generation has, the high cost of housing and low growth of wages. I'd say these are the top obvious reasons I haven't had kids.

Possibly industrial civilization wrote it's own demise when it invented oral contraceptives. And maybe that's what's really behind right-wing conservative opposition to women being in charge of their own reproductive choices. They know it will shrink human population and somewhat loosen the strangle-hold of patriarchy on the earth and its resources.