Bella Mackie’s Why I Don’t Want Children approaches her decision through the language of taste: A child would not suit the décor, it might be ugly, might be Tory, might disrupt the aesthetic flow of the kitchen. Implicit in the satire is a truth: it’s absurd you’d even care.

The other register is moral, the topic approached from a high horse after extensive due diligence and a bit of geopolitical forecasting. Jameela Jamil’s viral essay, titled I Don’t Want Children repeated four times, reads less like a statement than an incantation. It has the cadence of someone reaching for a certainty that is not quite there. Her reasons are exhaustive: war, porn, capitalism, misogyny, algorithms, climate collapse.

In talking about the decision to have children, Jamil writes:

My friend Megan always told me she would rather one day regret never having tried it out, hurting nobody other than herself, than try it out because she’s afraid of regret, and then end up actually hating it, and then possibly hurting generations of people ahead because she isn’t good at it. I wholeheartedly share this sentiment.

In this framing, having a child and ‘getting it wrong’ means you have not merely failed but poisoned the future. The implied alternative is moral cleanliness. No harm, no mistakes, no mess.

But we are not static fragments of whatever trauma we might inherit, wedged into the tarmac of our childhood like a ‘90s compact disc someone has reversed over, irrecoverable. We grow up, interpret what we experience, integrate it, resist it, or begin anew altogether. To project otherwise is to undermine human agency.

Yet this logic of irreversibility circulates in the granular, too. The anxious Redditor logs on for a second opinion: lifestyle compatibility, creche fees, whether the mortgage will survive a reduced income. Across pages of anonymous deliberation, the same sentiment recurs: this is the one decision you cannot undo, and therefore the one you must not get wrong.

Other accounts are care-free, literally. Parenthood is just another variable, one unlived life among many, like the partner not chosen, the career not pursued, the city never moved to.

Online, our mode of consumption is vacant: a mother crying in her car for eight seconds, scroll. A reel on the cost of childcare, scroll. A confessional-flooded comment section, scroll. The content passes through the membrane of our subconscious, osmosis-like, until the ordinary experience of caring gets reduced to an abstraction, estranged from lived reality.

This dissociation is exacerbated within the discourse, where motherhood content is increasingly treated as an object of intellectual analysis.

British Instagram Mum-fluencer, who goes by Mum Bum, went viral in a reel confessing that her household jars now go straight in bin unwashed. She claimed that before children, she cared about everything: the environment, human rights, conscious consumerism… Now, she is too busy making sure she and her family stay alive to think about any of it.

‘This is how they get you’ was the consensus in the comments. A chunk of people agreeing that having children means becoming a cog in the machine, too busy surviving to care about anything bigger than yourself. And that elitists and capitalism want us having babies, to create more cogs, for more machines, with more agreeability.

This rhetoric frames the choice to not have children as a type of resistance, as if refusing to reproduce dismantles oppressive systems by keeping us politically astute. But children don’t get absorbed into some ominous external mechanism. They become it, new minds with new thoughts and attitudes. The things we treat as fixed, housing, childcare, the whole machinery that governs them, are constructions. Humans aren’t.

One podcaster described the falling birth rate as a modern baby strike: people refusing to have children because the social conditions are too poor to raise them in. The same idea runs back to Emma Goldman’s birth strike lectures of 1913. But the political leverage of such a strike is often misread. Some governments answer the decline by fixing the conditions, like the Nordic countries expanding childcare and parental leave. Others address the births themselves, through incentives, while the conditions that produced the shortage go unchanged, sometimes cut. There’s a perversity in a society that grows more child-centric only in the absence of children.

In both cases, if women who would otherwise want children are opting out because of conditions, is it empowering to frame that as a triumphant strike? It treats women’s vulnerability as political agency, and a constrained choice as a free one.

Despite the emphasis on poor societal conditions at the macro level, at the individual level we are often told to just do what is right for you. The kind of empty platitude a culture reaches for once it has decided you are on your own — not my baby, and all that.

What is pernicious about this individualist framing is how a desire that is entirely reasonable at a personal level, such as wanting to be well set up before starting a family, can become exclusionary once it consolidates into a set of shared expectations. If having children becomes contingent on owning the home, holding the secure job, presenting the settled couple, then children become the preserve of the prepared, the moneyed, the do-gooders. Everyone else absorbs the message that their child would be a mistake.

But scroll long enough and the world reveals itself as no place for a child. Mother earth? Unfit parent. Algorithms draw the consensus that we live in a uniquely difficult time: climate crisis, techno-fascist leaders, looming collapse. Having a child has come to seem audacious, brazen, irresponsible, even. There’s a reflexive incredulity to it: wow, it’s 2026 and people are really still bringing kids into this mess?

A whole genre of Tiktok videos orbit the question: kids or no kids, with various life consequences to consider, to make sure you’re making sure.

The collective insistence on certainty is interesting because it presents itself as ethical: a child deserves to be wanted, certainty proves you want them, so the unsure should abstain for the child’s sake, and the sure should go ahead. It sounds sensible, like a lot of things do when reasoned through in advance. But the logic is porous, because no amount of pre-calculation closes the gap between perceived foresight and reality.

In a viral Tiktok, a woman asks:

Are you okay with the possibility of being a single parent? Your partner might leave you, might die. Are you okay with putting someone else’s needs above your own every single day, for the rest of your life? Are you okay with that?

Each clause advances what might happen to you. The whole delivery set up to yield a no. This lens, which presents children primarily as liabilities to parents, is pervasive across this genre. But the lens could frame anything: don’t fall in love unless you’re willing to be left. A decision interrogated for its risk of loss, failure, dissatisfaction, doesn’t approve of much at all.

In another viral reel, a woman offers her audience a ‘do-you-want-kids’ exercise:

If you’re on the fence about having kids, do this. Spend 24 hours imagining you’ve already chosen a child-free life, and notice where your mind goes.
Then do the same for a life with children.

She goes on to say that when she ran the test herself, her mind turned to excited plans for the child-free life and dread for the other. The dread was taken as the answer. But a life without children is continuous with the life you already have. A life with children is unknowable from the outside. It’s trying to compare a dark room with the one that’s lit up; a test of imagination as much as desire.

The wider genre operates in the same quasi-illusory way, conjuring the thing it doesn’t want just to reject it again.

A viral video features a mother giving an honest account of her parenting experience: deeply draining, exhausting. She claims to be a one-and-done mother who was misled about all that motherhood would offer.

The response: finally, women are being honest! We’ve been fed the romanticisation of motherhood for our entire lives.

This is the inverse of child-free content, where a parent’s ketchup-stained confessional is taken as confirmation that life without children is, in fact, preferable.

But both the romance and the disillusionment do largely the same thing. Motherhood is reduced to a portrayal, and the interpretation of it, through a feed, rather than any lived proximity to parenthood itself, alienates.

Every narrative is available to us; Kids, no kids, struggled, celebrated, rejected, mourned. We come away charged by whatever story we unconsciously set out to hear. But a stranger’s verdict on their own life is not data. It’s just a stranger’s life.

Recently, I had childcare organised and a night out planned. At 10pm I was doing the final touches to my makeup, ready to leave, when I heard my toddler start to cry. I felt delight, a feeling at odds with what I had been socialised to expect from myself. I pictured the parallel universe, the one where I decided to feel inconvenienced: of course she would wake now just as I’m about to leave, of all times for her to wake, I’m going to be late for this gig, etc etc. That thought amused me, that annoyance can be predetermined.

But I just wanted to see her. So I went in and she settled within a few minutes. I left happy she was settled and thought about how, had I gone in resentful about timing, or having been disturbed at all, she would have felt it, and it might have taken an hour instead. I was confronted with how cultural registers are not neutral in practice. They produce the type of experiences they predict.

‘The village’ is often cited as the missing piece of modern parenting. Yet every repetition of the missing village adds to the collective anxiety around raising children, and a culture anxious about child-rearing grows less village-like in return.

What carries social currency now is self-reliance: time to ourselves, space to focus on our own work and goals, days we can schedule precisely around what’s ahead. The village is not that. It asks you to drop all your plans when someone calls, and to be loving toward the relative in your kitchen expressing some ill-timed opinions.

Western culture actively moved away from ‘the village’ dynamic; it shrank to the extended family, the extended family to the nuclear one, the nuclear one to the household of one. And now we cite the absence of the thing we discarded as a reason to begrudge.

I fell for the allure of the hypothetical village, too. Motherhood would be wonderful, I thought, if only we lived in little interdependent communities. But the village, when it existed, was never the utopia of parenthood we project backwards. Distributed care is distributed risk; a child in many hands is a child whose hours you know less about. What I’ve found, and didn’t expect to, is a strange reassurance in my child being in hands I trust completely: mine

I lay dried fusilli into a metal pot and set it on the rug with a bowl. Her eyes light up. You’re cooking pasta for our dinner. Let me get you a wooden spoon. She takes it, sits down feet first, hovering the spoon under, delicately lifting each piece into the bowl, rescuing the ones that drop. I return to my wooden cutting board. I am doing as I always did, only now there are two of us at it.

None of this matches the online rhetoric that insists a child can only ever be in the way. Out of a kind of voyeuristic curiosity I find myself browsing r/childfree, having read it was one of the more extreme corners of the internet. There, children are casually called crotch goblins, parents: breeders, and wanting children is often diagnosed as narcissism. In it sits an overarching discomfort with being claimed by someone other than yourself.

Care does not sit easily within an optimisation-centric culture, where we are encouraged to treat our own selfhood as the ultimate life project. When another person requires our time, attention, and energy, we’re socialised to see that demand as a threat, and care, subjugation.

But parenthood is inconvenient to much of what the economy values. Children disrupt the aesthetic, the schedule, the personal brand, the illusion of control. They cost everything and produce little that the machine can easily count, except future labour, which, if we are honest, is depreciating YoY. But a person, in the presence of another person, is something inherently generative.

At thirteen months, after a week of mornings knocking on her nursery’s door, I noticed something dawning on her. She flicked her wrist at every door we passed, knock, knock. Laughing to herself. Gesturing hello.

All doors can be knocked on. All the doors we see, someone lives behind them. She was grasping at this for the first time, and a street I’d walk down mindlessly was suddenly full of strangers.

In adulthood, some things become ordinary. She hands me back the strangeness of it, so that I might be present for it again, because here is someone new, pointing, asking me to look.

I watch the toddler in front of me and I cannot find the thing that makes me more than her. I have accumulated more knowledge; she has, if anything, a more immediate awareness of being alive. The difference between us is time.

‘Pinky, pinky, pinky,’ she said, dotingly.

Pinky: the indiscriminate troll doll. Her hair worn down through the stress of existing in the buggy bag of a small, city-bound child.

The door, pressed gently. She didn’t notice. The moment stretched for as long as it could before she inevitably felt a presence. Her eyes darted up, smirking.

Pinky had occupied her for forty minutes, perhaps more. The small blue dress had been undone, the sticky resistance of velcro worked through with the careful precision of her little toddler fingers.

‘Oh! Pinky has no clothes on,’ I said, feigning shock. ‘What happened to Pinky’s dress? Pinky, you mustn’t be taking off your dress.’

She cackled.

I return to this often: the art of letting the child’s world take the lead. Letting it unfold according to its own logic, then building it out, almost incidentally.

Other times, no props are needed. From behind that same door, rehearsals of sounds recently picked up: the l sound, the soft dl. Her face pressed into the pillow, the same sound, slightly altered each time, more muffled, funnier.

A fingertip pressing against a small circle. It looks like a button. No click comes. It is the cot’s screw catching the light, cooler than expected.

Her non-slip socks, suddenly interesting. The silicone dots underneath, each one a different shape. Pressing, picking, trying to peel them away. The sock comes off altogether. Suddenly, a foot —one’s own foot, oddly familiar.

The hand, too. Days in the buggy, held in the air, turning slowly. The mechanics of opening and closing the palm, taken in as new information.

When we decide that a child is bored, or feel they are deprived in their own company, we are usually making an error of projection. We assume the child’s mind resembles our own, that silence and non-doing suggest lack.

But children move through a world oversaturated with novelty.

A trolley wheel catching on a supermarket floor, lift doors sliding apart and together, water running thinly from a tap, the automated release of a kettle lever.

In idleness, these impressions aren’t absent but integrated. And when frustration comes, the capacity for wonder is still there. Someone just has to call on it:

‘I think I can hear the birdies. Can you hear them?’ ‘Oh wow, look at that big tree. Will we go over and say hello to it?’ ‘Oh, Mister Bear has just jumped out of the buggy. What is he doing?’

The invitation may be accepted, it may not. The goal is not to extinguish the emotion but to make it less total.

What builds, over time, is the knowledge that emotion is not fixed, that something else is always available. The internal world as a resource, a comfort.

With screens, what arrives is fast-moving, with no reminder that what we do has any effect, or that the world will shift in response.

It is 5pm. She is tired, hungry, beginning to lose patience. The potatoes I cooked need some time to cool.

While plating them, I call upstairs: ‘Billy Bear! We are absolutely not having potatoes for dinner!’

I glance over. She laughs. She knows we are having potatoes. She knows Billy Bear always wants what he should not.

Later that evening, she resists bedtime.

‘Mister Rabbit, do not drink the milk,’ I say, placing the bottle down into the cot beside rabbit, a teddy loved so intensely the stitching at his mouth has come undone.

She laughs, reaching her arms out, suddenly keen to get in. Mister Rabbit settles in beside her, behaving now.

There is sovereignty in it. The teddies answer to her. This world: co-constructive, generative, and continuous.

A tantrum, by contrast, is that same need without a workable channel. A small person with genuine desires, moving through a world arranged entirely by others.

‘I know a song,’ I announce.

She looks up at me.

‘Old MacDonald had a biscuit, and on that biscuit there was some jam,’ I sing, watching for her reaction.

‘No mama!’ she laughs, aware that I have got it wrong, and that those are in fact not the words.

Later, on the phone to her Granny, she interrupts herself mid-goodbye.

‘Bye grandad,’ she says, waving, laughing.

‘I’m not grandad,’ Granny replies, bemused.

More laughter. ‘Bye grandad,’ she repeats.

She has learnt the mechanism now: that language can be bent, and meaning made strange.

And so I have observed this repeatedly: the child does not need new material so much as the capacity to rework what is already there.

I did the very Irish thing of telling nobody in my family until I genuinely thought I might die. My mother gave me very practical advice, like Hannah, take some paracetamol, but I remembered a story about a man who took so many painkillers he numbed himself symptomless, then died. I thought, If I’m in pain, I should know about it. Very self-righteous in my delirious, dengue-stricken state.

So I went back to listening to healing frequencies on youtube and sipping papaya leaf tea, strained and sweetened with honey to make it more palatable. The bitterness lingered, honey laid thinly over it. Eventually I took the paracetamol.

But this isn’t about dengue. The point was just that you understood how sick I was. Sick enough that a Zionist man from Texas, about my age, happened to overhear me weeping on a phone call and, upon learning I was unwell, started dropping off food and water every day. He said it was his religious duty. Then, as my health improved, he tried to convert me. When it became clear I wasn’t on board, and that I was no longer sick, he abandoned the effort entirely. I still think of him semi-fondly despite that, and despite the fact that he would take tiktoks, filming homeless people as he handed them food.

When I got back to the UK, there was the recuperation, the jet lag, and the urge to eat an unreasonable number of Dairy Milk bars. I felt reduced to something fragile and dependent. But there was comfort in having people to rely on.

During this time, I decided that since it was miserable and grey outside, I needed to bleach my hair, despite having already done it just a few months prior. Because, the world shines brighter when you’re blonder, or however that non-saying goes.

I have a lot of hair, so it was easy for me to develop a kind of overconfidence in how much bleach it could withstand. The same goes for a lot of things. But it’s important never to get too sure of yourself, because the universe may humble you.

I went to my hairdresser, who took my appointment from her home, a semi-detached in North West London. Inside, white eyelash lace frill curtains faintly kept the light out, and images of the Immaculate Mother were perched in corners, malaysian-catholic-core. We got lost in conversation, and lost track of time. The moment the foils were being removed, I knew something had gone wrong. My scalp was hot. The slow peeling back of the aluminium to uncover my hair, stiff and matted.

There was a mutual knowing, but I didn’t say anything. She’s my hairdresser, but also a friend, and there’s no undo button on these things. So we shared this quiet understanding of this is bad while pretending everything was fine, because, ultimately, it was. Hair grows.

Plus, hairdressers have their ways, coating your hair in a silicone-based product that leaves it impossibly smooth and glossy. Of course it’s temporary. The truth comes out in the wash, (literally.)

A few weeks later, back in Ireland, my hair was breaking off so much it had thinned brittle, the strands on either side clinging to the last of its length. So, I did the obvious, I cut it.

We were coming into Summer, so I very much embraced a blonde bob. What did bother me, though, was the sheer impracticality of shedding hair everywhere. Constantly hoovering up bleached strands from the floor, finding them static-clung to my yoga mat post workout.

Despite these events, I didn’t arrive at a grand decision to never go back to bleach. That would have felt definitive. I had been bleaching my hair since I was fourteen, bound by the subconscious belief that the blonder I was, the more bright, and myself I felt. But as it grew out mm by mm, I just let it.

Over the next year in Ireland, I started to settle into life at home. Post-travel ( /post-frontal-cortex development), I had a clearer sense of self. I was alcohol-free as an adult in the place I grew up, and lots of things felt like rediscovery. I met people who talked about synthesizers, shared bits of neuroscience, felt passionately about mushrooms. Gorgeous lovely creatives. Within 12 months, I had my full natural hair and some very beautiful friends.

Slowly, I stopped feeling dissatisfied with my natural complexion. Foundation, with its endless spectrum of brands and shades, started to seem arbitrary. The urge to add colour to my skin just to avoid looking too pale and washed out, had gone. I stopped straightening, blow-drying, or styling it just to feel nice or presentable.

In the past, I had heard people say, Bleach is bad for your hair’s health, but I wasn’t given good reason to care. Politely, as a health-conscious person—hair is dead once it leaves your scalp. So what significance does health have in that context. What I hadn’t considered was how hair-health and hair-being(?) are intertwined. Bleaching frays the fibers, altering the way hair moves naturally.

I suppose maybe I did know this, but had internalised the idea that my hair’s natural state was somehow lacking (special thanks to a lifetime of pervasive advertising.)

So I spent my early twenties trapped in this cycle.

Bleaching my hair, adjusting my makeup to compensate for the colour shift, then straightening my hair to compensate for the texture change.

Doing and undoing. And the products, shampoos, conditioners, heat protection sprays, oils, creams, masks, only to sustain a self perpetuated cycle of destruction and repair.

When I abandoned everything, it wasn’t a purposeful revolt, it was because I started to like how I looked naturally. The only hair product I used was, very aptly named, Faith in Nature. €8 a bottle, lasts me months. I also experimented with an egg yolk after reading that keratin acts as a natural cleansing agent.

My hair started growing in; thick and textured. A product of generations of genetic resilience, as if anticipating both harsh weather and a botched bleach job. People complimented me on it. And I let their words land without resistance.

I often think about that experiment with houseplants, the one where they played soft music and spoke kindly to one, and it flourished. I don’t think our scalps are too different.

And just like how alcohol free life gave me everything the alcohol industry had promised, my hair — left alone—delivered exactly what the hair industry claimed it would.

My hair had become a constant, visible record of change, but the lessons learned were more discreet.

I thought about the years I, too, had spent contorting myself into a shape I wasn’t, trying to be something I was never meant to be.

Doing, undoing—only to return to myself.

So I let my hair be, and I let myself be too.

Now, the ubiquity of personal smartphones and the seemingly infinite nature of online access has led to a digital world characterised by individualised experiences, disentwined from any physical place.

But assigning place to experience is inherent to our nature — we have study rooms to study, kitchens to cook, gyms to exercise and now, a phone to mindlessly scroll on in any place we want, really. The idea of having to gather in a physical place to access a virtual space feels valid in principle.

Internet cafes are unassuming, filled with the hum of hard drives, silicone mouse pads and occasionally dividers erected for privacy’s sake. And if you want to know who’s perusing X-rated content, it’s probably the guy in the corner with his monitor contorted so that it faces the wall behind him.

Seedy imagery aside, places like Chat&Net are the backdrop for countless stories, from the tentative steps of novice internet users to the budding software developer, checking in routinely on the way back from school

Digital access has become synonymous with empowerment, education and social participation, and internet cafes are a physical manifestation of the idea that access should be available, the digital democratised.

During my visit to Chiapas in 2021, I was struck by the activity in local internet cafes. It was reflective of what you might’ve seen in Ireland circa 2012. Chiapas has the highest poverty rate in Mexico, with hundreds of thousands of people migrating each year. Online, borders are inexistent and internet cafes represent not only access, but opportunity.

These spaces have served as classrooms for digital literacy, stages for emerging online cultures, and forums for the exchange of ideas. They witnessed the birth and evolution of the internet and the rapid expansion of social media. They showcased different stages of advancement, with iterations of accessories transitioning towards weightlessness - from bulky to trim and from early dial-up connections to high-speed Wi-Fi.

These rooms have gently woven themselves into the fabric of our digital era. An undercurrent of nostalgia is tied to the tangibility of technology that existed but for a fleeting moment. The encompassing aesthetic is striking; dilapidated store fronts with sci-fi typography that alludes to a sort of futurism. Uniform rows of people, fixated on their assigned machine. The physical sameness juxtaposed by the singularity of the digital experience.

There’s something to be said for the older more clunky hardware. It occupied space. It was obnoxious and slow and unforgiving. It operated in a way that felt equal to the relentless demands we made of it.

Now, everything is weightless, fast, and user-friendly, performing all tasks without interruption. Reserving patience for a machine is an antiquated idea, but back in the 90’s having a slow and unreliable connection was an integral part of having the privilege to go online. Dial-up connection went head-to-head with the landline phone, you couldn’t use one without sacrificing use of the other, the root of many a household domestic.

Internet cafes emerged as a revolutionary concept, evolving into bustling hubs in urban areas. In recent years, to stay competitive, they’ve diversified their services, offering food, drink and co-working spaces. Many of these establishments have devolved into a shadow of their former selves, being utilised primarily for corporeal tasks, printing services and such. But as the digital realm continues to evolve, internet cafes risk dissolving into obscurity and becoming extinct.

And just as we cherish centuries-old buildings and monuments for their historical value, we should hold the foresight to recognise the value of internet cafes for their unique contribution to our digital history. They are more than dingy coffee shops with computers; they are the bridges that connected us to the digital age, deserving of a place in our cultural memory.

Preserved internet cafes could serve as recreational spaces and living museums, enabling new generations to experience technology in its infancy, capturing the essence of a pivotal era when the internet became a transformative force.

But we shan’t waste such high-value real estate so frivolously. And once the last-standing internet cafe shuts shop, why not put a Krispy Kreme there instead.