I Am Such A Tool Of The Patriarchy

Faithful Reader A.K. writes in to excoriate me for my post of last week about the 60-year-old who gave birth to twins. She writes

Your blog was spoken like a true man whose reproductive capabilities do not decrease with age. Congrats to you for that, by the way. Way to go, testicles, which simply keep on plugging long after your hair turns gray and your knees give out. However, some of us, ie: half the population on this planet, aren't that lucky.

At the least, I wish I had A.K.'s sense of humor, if not exactly her outlook.

Two points here. Firstly, I mostly, although not exclusively, date older women. Even the younger ones I've dated have generally not seen themselves as being Ready For Kids anytime this decade, if not for longer than that. That means that, for all intents and purposes, I have a biological clock as well. Of course it is not as hard-wired, in that I could always change my dating preferences if I decided that 1) women my age were too old to have kids and 2) I really needed to have biological kids. Still, I don't think of myself as the type of person to just start randomly dating women 20 years younger than me in order to capture their fertile years and seed the planet with my offspring. Maybe I will become that person, but if so, I join A.K. in excoriating , or at least relentlessly mocking, him.

Second, A.K. writes

...do me a favor, for the next 30 seconds, just try to imagine that you could only create biological off spring for 5-15 years in the early part of your life. Imagine the pressure you would feel to first determine if you want to have kids, then "find the right girl" then convince said girl to let you impregnate her. Imagine how that would effect every single decision you make for the first 30 years of your life.

But I wouldn't. I believe that you only feel that pressure if you let yourself. My general life philosophy, and something I hope to continue developing both for my own, selfish purposes and also for the purposes of trying to let you, Faithful Reader, live a happier life, is that There Is No One Right Way To Live. Everyone has different goals, aspirations, inspirations, hopes, dreams. Only you know what those are, and only you can have any real idea as to how to midwife them into existence (pun not intended).

And not just that, but you get to control it: you don't have to let it control you. If, at any point in the period between when I got to college and when I quit grad school, you had asked me where I would be in life on the eve of my 30th birthday, I can guarantee you that the answer I gave would not bear much resemblance to life as I currently live it. For one thing, they haven't even invented laser-guided robot bees yet, let alone the fact that I do not sit up into the wee hours, perfecting my evil cybernetic bee army, preparing for the day when I unleash my onslaught of steel stingers and extra-sticky honey on the world.

So my life hasn't developed along the path I thought it would, or even what I would have chosen, given the opportunity. But it's the life I have, I got it by making the decisions that seemed right to me at the time, and so I have no choice but to own it, and love it. I always assumed I would have kids by now, which has not yet, to my knowledge, happened. But it never occurred to me to be bothered by that fact, because, well, what point would be served by it?

And so, while I greatly sympathize with A.K.'s dilemma on this point, to me the solution is not to spend ever-increasing amounts of resources overwhelming the limits of our biology. Instead, adapt our expectations to a reasonably happy acceptance of the world around us. As a specific rejoinder in this case, I mentioned adoption in my earlier post; it's the closest thing to holy work I can imagine doing in my lifetime. If everyone felt like this, I believe the result will be less time, effort, and money wasted, and more happiness created in the world. A real win-win.