You Had Kids, In Large Part, To Keep Up With Your Friends

The social relevance angle of new life can't be ignored.

I’ve sat next to many a dude at many a bar and contemplated the vagaries of the universe with them. Some of these conversations are illuminating and some are pointless and drunken and come back to the 2006 White Sox faster than you’d imagine. Here is one such story of the former.

I had a friend who used to live down the hall from me. He was a nurse at the time. On Good Friday of (I think) 2018, he got wasted day-side at a bar near our apartment complex, and when I got back from walking the dog, he was in my (unlocked) apartment urinating in my sink, then passed out on my bed. It was scary and weird at the time, but hysterical looking back. He’s a good dude.

A few years later, he was in a new relationship and I met him at a bar on a Thursday for happy hour. He says, with a small degree of resignation: “Well, it’s like that point now where everyone you know is having kids, so to keep in the loop, you have to too…”

I haven’t talked to this kid in a few months, but to my knowledge he doesn’t have kids. It could be on the horizon, though. Who knows? And if it is, good for him. I hope it brings him much self-actualization and tremendous memories and (quiet part out loud) someone to wipe his ass when he’s older.

The one-off comment does bring up a major question of society, though: for generations upon generations, kids were ostensibly an economic necessity. You needed them to work from a relatively-early age. Post-WW1 or maybe more post-WW2, they became more of a “nice-to-have.” Naturally, you would see fertility rates drop when you didn’t need six kids on the assumption that 1–2 might die and you had a farm or a cobbler store to run. Still, we did well for a while. Heard of the, uh, “Baby Boom?” Recently we’ve started to wane, which is a true moral panic.

But it all begs the question: why do people have kids, and is there truly a good reason?