I have wanted to have kids since I was ten. I am in the process of having them as early as I can and will have as many as I can afford or until my wife loses interest. The main bottleneck is finding the right person for you, with shared values and overlapping timelines. Once you have that, and you want to have kids, why wait? Why have success, if not to share it?<p>I wanted to have kids to get fulfillment from the mentorship and difficulty. I like to be behind the scenes, helping other people find success and fulfillment, and primarily just providing a platform for them. I like to do it on a small scale, with big impact. I like to pay for things for the people I care about and watch them become independent of me. All of those things I learned relatively early on and led back to the pattern of paternalism and altruism in parenting. So I think I had the drive before I identified it as kid-having.<p>I am not surprised at all that a lot of people are choosing not to have kids. Many people seem disinterested in it and that to me leads to lose-lose situations between the parents and kids. Many divorces seem to be based on the fact that they only got married in the first place because of an accidental child and then tried to do the "honourable" thing. If you don't want to have kids, don't try to make yourself, just live somewhere where that is normal and OK.<p>As a person, I tend to find meaning in a few select activities. I like work, I work a lot, I enjoy it intrinsically and deeply. I always felt I would find meaning in kids in a way equivalent or more so than I do in work. I find no meaning in most friendships, institutions, "changing the world", cultural traditions, status, etc. I just care about learning, working and having a big impact on a small group of people around me (ie. family).<p>I think most people these days are too cautious when it comes to having kids though. You really don't need to both have six figure incomes, own a house and be in your mid-to-late thirties to be "ready". I think that culture is shifting back though, as people who wait until too late have more fertility issues and find it very tiring to keep up with the kids. It takes a village to raise a child, you can't replace the village with two rich middle aged people, that seems to just be a recipe for more misery than people who do it sooner.<p>I would choose this again 100%. I would always advise people, if you want to have kids, and your partner doesn't, find someone who does because those feelings don't go away. If you don't want to have kids, really really work to avoid having kids, because feeling like a victim combined with this process must be the definition of hell. It's not something you can be non-committal about. It's, do I want to be all in on this, or not, one must decide.