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JD Vance isn’t wrong about all of us. While most childless lives don’t conform to his cliché of atomised self-regard, mine does, more or less. Home is a rented garçonnière of almost inhuman silence and orderliness. There being no kindergarten fees or SUV to save for, the share of earnings that goes on food and wine would make Churchill tut.
But there are bad things about childlessness, too. Some have come as a surprise to me. Since the world is so exercised about demographic decline, it might be a public service to air them. Let’s scare a few people into the labour ward, shall we?
One thing no one warns you about forgoing kids: it can induce a sort of premature old-fashionedness. Childless men are expected to be cool (About a Boy has a lot to answer for) but it is through children that people keep up with cultural change. I had never heard of Charli XCX until the recent meme that Kamala Harris decided to run with. Having investigated, I still don’t understand what is going on. What form a Snapchat message takes, or what the logo looks like, I can’t picture, and that app launched in 2011. TikTok? A closed book. Shein? Hadn’t heard of the brand until June.
There are parents in their fifties who are much closer to the zeitgeist. This isn’t, or isn’t just, one man’s backwardness. Forced to think of a trait that unites all the bachelors I consort with, I’d suggest rampant ignorance of modern mass culture. Ours is a world of old books, old films and old music. Old manners, even. The scatological chaos of child-rearing loosens people up a bit. My crew, meanwhile, are fastidious and almost quaint: handshake greetings, as though we’d just met; an analytic detachment in even the most personal conversation. The Men Behaving Badly trope — beer stains, rough talk — gets it exactly wrong.
There has been another perverse result of childlessness. File it under, “Sweating the small stuff”. If there isn’t much stress or inconvenience in one’s life, what little that exists becomes all the harder to bear. There is no chance to develop that crucial tolerance for faff. Filling out a tax return must be a drag for a father. But he deals with worse all the time. For me? During that hour or two of paperwork, there are Montana survivalists who curse the government less.
This August, a personal dilemma about which coffee machine to go for, a top-end Nespresso or a mid-market bean-to-cup, enters its eighth month. What is going on here? Well, Parkinson’s Law holds that work expands to fill the time available for its completion. Replace “work” with something like “thought”, and you have a sense of the psychology of a man with more time than duties. It is possible to have absolute and serene certitude about the largest questions in life, namely family, and analysis paralysis about trivia. The stress doesn’t compare with parenthood, but it isn’t zero, or foreseeable in advance.
And even this isn’t the biggest surprise of all. No, there is one that is more recent and more chastening. I now accept that pronatalists had a point all along. No one can escape the second-order effects of an ageing population. This means, above all, the tax burden on workers to prop up the retired, but not that alone. The life which this column tends to exalt, the life of big cities, depends on the young, whether as service staff or as conceivers of new ideas or just as unconscious providers of ambient energy. As much as I might prefer their zero-to-18 phase to play out elsewhere — incubators on offshore sites, a terraformed Mars — I need them. The selfish case for pronatalism is the one that has hooked me.
Vance reminds me of Liz Truss in one regard. She took a good cause — supply-side reform — and tainted it for perhaps a decade through rashness and lack of thought. Likewise, it will be a while before a public figure can discuss the demographic issue without risk of association with woman-baiting cranks. A shame. That I wouldn’t waver on parenthood, I knew all along. That I am so keen for the rest of you to get on with it, I would never have guessed.
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