Expensive Genetic Voyeurism

Genetic voyeurism worth half a million euros .

Two children cost half a million euros until they turn twenty-five. This figure includes university, a master's degree, a period of youth unemployment, and three bouts of depression with a private psychologist. It does not include the cost of lost sanity or canceled vacations for eight consecutive years.

I know parents who calculated the opportunity cost of parenthood. They stopped investing 800 euros a month in the stock market for fifteen years. With a 7% annual return, they would have accumulated 260,000 euros. Their children are studying philology and theater. They work until they're seventy. The difference between love and ruin is measured in decimal points of lost returns.

The family economy functions like an inverted pyramid, defying gravity for decades. Parents sustain a structure that grows upward with no guarantee of return. For twenty years, the flow is unidirectional: money, time, energy, postponed projects. The children receive all of this as a natural right, like oxygen. When they become independent, most consider a debt settled that they never acknowledged incurring to be paid off.

But there's something the numbers don't capture, something that dismantles all economic logic. Parenthood is the last bastion where Westerners can experience a complete loss of control without calling it a mental illness. In a hyper-planned life, where every decision is optimized and every risk calculated, a child is the only variable that remains genuinely unpredictable. It's domestic chaos you willingly pay for.

This is the truth no parenting manual admits. Parenthood isn't altruistic sacrifice; it's high-intensity genetic voyeurism. It's watching a brain develop from scratch, how it cultivates preferences you never taught it, how it rebels against ideas you never articulated. It's the only longitudinal research you can fund with your own money without needing approval from any ethics committee.

My neighbor is sixty-two and cares for her ninety-one-year-old mother. She spends €2,500 a month on private nursing care and imported medications. Her only daughter lives in Melbourne with two grandchildren she's never met. Thirty years invested in a relationship that ended over minor political differences. Her daughter transfers her €200 every month out of guilt, not gratitude. Emotional distance isn't bridged with a Western Union transfer.

Children with special needs reveal the rawest side of the parental experiment. Severe autism, extreme hyperactivity, profound learning disabilities. A child requiring constant support can spend up to €3,000 a month on therapies, adapted schools, and specialized caregivers. I've seen marriages break down, homes mortgaged, family loans never repaid. Here, genetic voyeurism becomes pure tragedy. The DNA lottery sometimes deals out losing tickets with no possibility of return.

I also know the opposite scenario. Couples who avoided having children and converted it into financial freedom. They invest what they would have spent on diapers, buy properties to rent out, travel four times a year, and retire at fifty-five. By sixty, they manage two million in assets and a social life that slowly fades away. Money buys comfort, it never buys meaningful conversation. At sixty-three, they have prostate surgery on their own, with no one waiting for news in the hospital hallway.

The state partially subsidizes reproduction because it needs future taxpayers, not out of altruism. Tax deductions, public childcare, child benefits. But the bulk of the cost falls on families who accept the system without protest. We socialize the benefits of having a young population and completely privatize the costs of raising them. Children will pay taxes that will maintain the pensions of strangers, not necessarily those who sacrificed decades educating them.

I have all the bills stored in a torn shoebox: pediatrician, orthodontist, summer camps, textbooks, uniforms, tutoring, adolescent psychologist. Twenty-three years of multiplying expenses without pause or volume discount. The end result: a daughter studying psychology online and working as a night waitress. There is no demonstrable correlation between massive parental investment and subsequent filial success. The children of the rich also fail spectacularly. The poor also produce occasional geniuses.

I paid every bill without hesitation. Not out of blind love or programmed paternal instinct. For something stranger and less noble: a wild anthropological curiosity that isn't satisfied by documentaries. I wanted to see what kind of human being would emerge from my genetic makeup and my flawed parenting methods. It was a home laboratory experiment that cost me a fortune and two decades of interrupted sleep.

But here arises the fundamental contradiction that shatters rational economic analysis. This curiosity generates an addiction that no spreadsheet can model. Every small discovery your child makes, every new skill they develop, every foolish decision they make, acts like a dose of intellectual heroin. It hooks you into continuing to observe until the experiment ends, even if the cost becomes unsustainable.

The economics of parenthood work like a poker game where you don't know your hand but keep betting because quitting means losing everything you've invested so far. Each passing year increases the emotional sunk cost. Every euro spent makes it harder to quit. It's not unconditional love; it's the gambler's fallacy applied to human reproduction.

There is also the perverse calculation that families never verbalize. Parents who raised children so they wouldn't be alone in old age, a forty-year investment with the absolute risk of total loss. Children who may die before then, emigrate permanently, become addicted, or simply disappear emotionally without explanation. Loneliness is cured with consciously chosen bonds, never with blood shared by genetic accident.

The parents I know, even those who are financially ruined, would repeat the experience. Not out of masochism or selective amnesia regarding the suffering they endured. Because creating a human being from scratch and watching them develop is the only adventure that rivals the intensity of facing one's own death. It's pure addiction to the unpredictable in lives that have become too controlled.

Some will say that this view reduces parenthood to a cold, economic transaction. They're wrong. It reduces it to what it truly is: an existential gamble disguised as a natural act. You wager your financial stability, your free time, your relationship, and your mental health against the remote possibility of creating something that will outlive you and remember you with genuine affection.

The last bill that truly hurts doesn't appear on any bank statement. The emotional cost is paid in a currency that can't be converted into cash: sleepless nights, irresolvable arguments, accumulated disappointments, constant, gnawing fears. Parents who develop chronic anxiety because their adult children can't find work. Mothers who self-medicate because their teenager is experimenting with drugs. The psychological price of parenthood can surpass any known material ruin.

There is no objectively right decision because there is no universal criterion for success in life. Having children is gambling one's savings and remaining sanity against the remote possibility of lasting love and intelligent conversation in old age. Not having them is gambling one's hard-won financial freedom against the very real possibility of utter loneliness with no one to care about.

Both bets can be lost simultaneously. The only truly foolish thing to do is pretend that either option comes with guarantees. Money runs out, time runs out, children leave home or stay too long. What remains is the strange certainty that you chose to bet on something more intense than your calculated personal comfort.

On my desk lie three unpaid bills, and the calculator I'm using now only serves to confirm what I already know: that the experiment is still costing more than expected and that I'll keep paying until the money runs out or time runs out. The difference between the two options has become irrelevant.