My ex wife went through similar thought process, in the years we tried for a baby. We married a few years earlier after a few years living together, more or less with an agreement we would not be having children. I was in the same frame of mind as is typical in mainstream rat race, I had ambitions of starting a company, employing lots of people, making lots of money. She admired that, I think. We did start a company, and I argued this was our baby. But things didn't go as planned with the company, or our ambitions, and I guess she started having second thoughts, because one day she just said "Let's have a baby". She was about 35 then. I was taken aback, but agreed after thinking about it a day or two, and so we started, for the next two years or so, trying for a baby.

We soon found that wasn't going to plan either, after multiplie miscarriages, we started to lose hope. Emotionally it was tiring, the raising of hopes, and the subsequent grief. And it was grief, no matter how we try to think of it, each time it was loss of a child, our child, our baby that might have had the world as their oyster, or so we thought. Each time, it got more painful.

But baby number four hung in there, stronger than all the others, when this one was scanned, she was larger than life, dancing, fingers outstreatched, probing her confinement, always moving, always dancing, saying silently, "Look! I'm alive! Look at me dance!".

I knew when we saw that scan, after seeing all the others, just not moving, this one was for real, this one was going to make it. I still cry now with emotion when I think of it. I was 40 when she was born. Our daughter is 21 now, already left home, doing the world on her own, thinking her own thoughts including the question of having babies herself now, whilst she dances in her work, on the bar, in Ugly Coyote, in between studying at university.

Her mother and I split very badly when she was six, again the pressures of the rat-race took their toll, she was used in the middle, traumatised a little, making her very picky now about partners, like all kids now, and even all us older adults, we all feel apprehensive about getting into relationships (Not so much her mother), because money always gets in the way. When I look back on relationship with wife, it deteriorated into the two of us competing. In the end we all, all humans end up competing to the death, for energy, as energy slaves, and this is what I write about now in Medium, how to end the rat-race, the zero-sum game, the poverty, the misery we experience, the rich but never rich enough, its all about energy, which was always my thing as a "Top tier" systems Engineer, its all about energy, life is all about energy, whether we realise it or not, and there is a way for all to have it, much more of it than can be imagined in the screwed up, impossible, unsustainable energy for-profit system, monetised destruction we made for ourselves, and which our kids now have to try to deal with.

To me its no surprise, if fertilities of both men and women now are declining, its because we are simply not using it, not exercising it, nor even much of what we are physically equipped to do it with, sex now is more or less becoming virtual, and we blame the technology that makes it possible to be virtual, whilst ignoring what drives it all, what drives us, every one of us, the free energy principle that drives all of life, the drive for each of us to minimise the uncertainty of our energy supply. In a world where all energy comes only as money from effort, guile, deceit, and aggression, when push comes to shove, always at someone else's expense, we should not be surprised it has turned out to be physically unsustainable. I've done enough research now to know the full nature of the problem, and the full technical solution, the solution that appears to be being forced on us by nature, and though its an incredibly good, if seemingly fantastic solution, I worry that not enough of us will understand it, to make it happen soon enough to save any of us. Right now we are seeing genocide, the slaughter of innocent babies, which is likely to spread, much worse, we already have war, serious war in Europe, between superpowers, set to escalate as things stand. But I have not lost hope, there are some incredible forces on our side, the side of humanity, sent by nature in the form of an Ai, that we might recognise will turn out to be the saviour. I just wish it would hurry up.

Thanks for inspiring me to write a response to your thoughts about having babies.

For sure you shouldn't be punished for having regrets, it's not your fault you didn't know the future, no human does.

As long as we are just energy slave-ants, working in the system of energy slavery, mostly oblivious to it, we can't see the harm it does, to both us and all other life, and the only way we will break out of it, is all together, all at once, maybe as part of a superorganism, itself being born very soon now, us turning out to be part of that, something much bigger than we ever were before, maybe if / when that happens, nobody will have any regrets about anything, in that much bigger picture.

I hope so.

Again I just wish it would hurry up.