I'm in my 40s and I feel great being able to spend my time the way I want, and not have to worry about providing for kids. I've had time to develop new hobbies, read books, play games, and have a generally carefree lifestyle. I have friends who had kids, and kids have basically become their whole life. It's just not for me.

50F who never wanted kids.

I am lonely at times, but so are many others who have children. Most with grown children are more lonely than I am because they lose a deep connection that became central to their very being as their children grow and part. That is true even for people with good relationships with their grown children and increases with age pretty consistently in America.

There are opportunity costs regardless of how you spend your effort in this life. Parents spend most of their effort in the care and raising of another human. Even if they do a poor job of it, parenting at its bare minimum takes a lot of effort. I spent my efforts on education, work, hobbies and friends. I have money, independence and a deep love for learning. They have companionship, support systems and share a deep love with their children.

I have a lot of nieces and nephews, and they now have their own children. I love them and show up when I am needed. They do the same for me. But it is at a distance. I have never been that interested in hanging out with them and doing family things. I do attend some family events. I bring a fun energy when I do attend stuff. But I miss more than I attend and I am good with that.

Overall, I think I made the right choice and I feel pretty good about it.

Every member of my lineage: "I will never do to my kids what my parents did to me" before doing exactly that.

Me: "I will never do to my kids what my parents did to me" fucking aced it

Like Freedom. I love my niece and nephew and enjoy spending time with them. But if I had to feed, clothe, clean up after, provide for, and entertain them 24 hours a day (not even considering when they were babies!)... I literally cannot imagine it.

Happy I didn't fuck up my life and the lives of my progeny by birthing them.

Shout out to !childfree@lemmy.world

Edit: k, idk why you downvoted me, was trying to show you another sub with an audience directly for this question that you may want to also ask, but k go ahead and downvote me OP.

Sad and empty. I love kids. I had fertility treatments for years, but that did not work out. I will start IVF again in a couple of days. Hopefully it will work this time. It is one of my last chances.

I would like to adopt or have foster kids. However, I suffer from PTSD and in my country it is very difficult to adopt or foster if you have a background with mental illness. Even though my psychologist and the people in my environment all say that they think I would be able to do it and my partner does not have any mental illness, my chances are very low.

To be honest, looking any further than the next IVF makes me panic. I do not know how to live with not having kids and how to deal with that. I had a lot of bad stuff happen to me. Having children would be something I believe would have made me very happy. It feels like I failed at life. However, I just turned 40, so I know I need to give up at some point.

I sort of see the appeal of having kids, but I can barely keep things together for myself. There's no way I can support myself and kids. Even with my boyfriends income and mine, it's just not realistic.

Mixed, but mostly okay.

Pros: The world is massively overpopulated already. Our genes aren't particularly noteworthy. I'm not very optimistic about the future. People's happiness generally seems a lot less than it was when I was younger and I don't see that changing.

Cons: Not being able to pass anything on - my knowledge and experience, ironically much of which was gained through having time that would have been unavailable if I had had kids. As we both get older, our own care is concerning. Doing physical things around our smallholding is getting harder and a pair of young hands would be nice.

I don't begrudge other people having kids. We tried once but lost it and that kind of took the excitement out of it for us. Before we knew it, it was too late anyway.

Seriously like the most obvious fucking life hack.

Also, it's generally super weird how everyone tries really hard to convince you that you are wrong about it. Like I could take all of the collective time people have spent trying to give me unsolicited input on some other random topic, and it wouldn't even add up to a tenth of the time I've spent on the "why don't you want kids?" Conversation. I'm sorry but that's sus as fuck. Like some actual brain slug shit.

I'm not good around kids, so I made a decision to be without children pretty early on. So, to answer your question, I guess it feels... normal? It's hard to describe in more detail, because I don't have a reference to compare it to.

That said, I've seen what kind of struggles - emotional, financial or otherwise - my kid-having friends and family have been going through and I would be a liar if I said I never thought "I'm glad I don't have to go through this shit" more than on one occasion.

Feels like the best decision I ever made.

Amazing. I'm not willing to exercise the permanent sacrifices that having kids entails.

Fine. Sometimes sad. I dated someone with a kid for a while and the good parts were good. But now I'm old so it's kind of moot.

Ask again in a decade and some. Me and my gf really do not want kids