[yhavr]

> I don’t think my kids would be happy if I quit my high paying job to pursue my dreams or whatever

Wasting life on a lifestyle one doesn't enjoy, just to raise another generation of life-wasters? I don't get this ponzi scheme at all.

[jajko]

Raising kids well is extremely rewarding. Plus its very hard. But those rewards, you can't find them anywhere else. That happiness and fulfillment, dare I say, neither.

I've tried it before having kids - had total blast in European Alps - climbing, alpinism, ski touring, skiing, via ferratas, paragliding, but also ie diving in exotic remote places half around the world. ~5 bigger vacations per year. Traveled all continents except Antarctica backapcking style, ie 6 months in India and Nepal. Life-changing experiences, truly, but that backpacking part was the key to its intensity.

I've met folks who had way more intense lives than mine, since I was still working 100% and did all this during weekends, vacations and after work (or in-between work for long trips). Mostly they were some form of mountain guides who traveled world off-season. But even those folks, when they see me now with what seems like well raised kids so far, damn are they envious. I mean life that you hardly see on some 'influencer' instagram, those folks have no reason to brag about it publicly to compensate for something bad or trying to milk users for money. And most of them ends up in parenthood anyway for better or worse.

All those experiences means very little to nothing compared to experiencing my kids and see them growing up. Yes the hard parts are very hard and you question yourself and your whole life, but the amazing parts... mere words can't describe them. They give life to one's meaning that nothing else does, not even close. There is nobility to take hits for closest ones you love, to endure hardships, it builds and keeps character strong. Overcoming all properly hard challenges does that, do it for 2+ decades and it shows.

I am not claiming everybody should have kids, far from it, maybe not even half of population IMHO (I know, not sustainable, but we have overpopulation now so thats an afterthought). Plenty of broken people around, either inherited mental issues or ones acquired during childhood or even adulthood via traumas or drugs. Some could raise kids somehow but most are bad parents and then it propagates further down the line.

[rayiner]

What do you “enjoy”—and more importantly, why do you think you enjoy it? I suspect enjoyment is mostly socialized, and we enjoy or don’t enjoy what our culture tells us should be enjoyable or not enjoyable.

Prior to my dad’s generation, virtually everyone in my home country was a subsistence farmer. Most people still are. Are their lives less “enjoyable” than some childless millennial pursing his dreams of traveling the world?

I don’t think that, on average, the asians I know (south asians, to be fair) are less happy than the Americans I know. They just derive enjoyment and contentment from different sources.

[nostrademons]

I'm from a similar bicultural household as rayiner, though from comment history I'm guessing I come down more on the American side. I've got enough of a background in both cultures to parse out and explain the differences though.

It's not perceived as "wasting a life" or "not enjoying it" by the parent, and oftentimes not by the child either. Rather, it's different values, different time preferences, and different conceptions of self. Western cultures have a conception of self that is very rigid and individualistic. There's a hard boundary between your wants and everyone else's wants, and you're responsible only for your own desire. This is encoded in our structures of law, in contemporary business culture, in the concept of individual rights, in the goals of Western psychotherapy, and in the relationships between family members that we view as normal.

In most traditional Asian cultures, there is much more of a soft boundary between members of the same family. You are expected to consider the welfare of everyone in the family. And that leads to a sense of obligation between parent and child, and then between child and parent as they get older, and between sibling to sibling when it comes to dealing with the outside world. There is a comparatively stronger boundary between the family and the state, eg. many Asian cultures feel like it's okay to snub the rules of the wider society for the benefit of the family, while in American society this is considered grift, nepotism, and corruption.

Likewise, there is a difference in time perception. Americans have a hard boundary between the present and the future or past. This shows up in popular culture through lines like in Rent ("No day but today", "How do you feel today? Then why choose fear?", "Forget regret, your life is yours to live") or through popular aphorisms to "Let go of the past", "Live for the present", "The future is yours to write", etc. Asian cultures often consider the past, present, and future as one: the past informs the present, which becomes the future, and the "you" of today will soon become the you of tomorrow. As a result, it is perfectly natural to preference "future you" over "present you". And that shows up through things like savings rates (where Asians are consistently higher than Americans), long-term investments, business continuity, and willingness to invest in family and raise the next generation. Denying present pleasures for future gains is not a lifestyle that they don't enjoy; it's simply being smart, and the enjoyment comes from the anticipation of the future payoff.

There's a good illustration of the difference in the two cultures from two movies that both came out in 2018/2019, Crazy Rich Asians vs. The Farewell. Crazy Rich Asians is foremost a Chinese-American film. When the grandmother (who is considered the villain in the film) smugly says "We know how to build things that last", she's exemplifying the values and time preferences of Old China. And the film's climax and resolution is all about choosing present happiness over an indeterminate future, basically a victory of American values over traditional Chinese ones. The Farewell, however, more closely depicts the web of obligations in a traditional Chinese family, and is comedic to American audiences simply because the farces that the family goes through to preserve the feelings of the matriarch make no sense to Americans. Sure enough, Crazy Rich Asians was a smash hit in the U.S. but an utter flop in China, while The Farewell was a sleeper hit in America but did very well with Chinese audiences.

[pcwalton]

The emphasis on filial piety in east Asian cultures is undeniable, but I think this thread is overlooking the significant complication that east Asian countries also have some of the lowest birth rates in the world. Americans have more kids than the Japanese, for instance--not fewer--and birth rates across southeast Asia are collapsing, including in China.

[selimthegrim]

I am probably one of the very few people on HN who came from a very similar household to rayiner but descended from pre-1965 south Asians in the US so I can tell you that all his suppositions do not necessarily hold for that group

[rayiner]

Great summary. I’d add that it’s largely unconscious. It’s like, fish are happy swimming. Why wouldn’t they be?

I will have to check out the Farewell, didn’t know about it!