My mother has stopped asking if I will get married. She has moved on to when — and in the same breath, before I’ve answered, to how many grandchildren, as though the wedding and the children arrived on the same form, checked in the same box.
I used to answer with a joke. I don’t anymore.
The Arithmetic of Inheritance
Somewhere along the way, the question stopped being about me and started being about something much larger wearing my face. Every mother at every dinner table asking her own version of when and how many is really asking a smaller, cosier version of a question philosophers usually keep for treaty rooms and lecture halls: what do the living owe the people who don’t exist yet? It just sounds gentler over chai. It is not gentler. It is the same arithmetic, done in a smaller room, by someone who loves you and has no idea she is doing philosophy.
The number I keep returning to is eighty-three trillion rupees. That is what this country owed by the end of March — spent before any child alive today could vote on it, still being paid off in someone’s thirties or forties by people who never signed for it. We call this inheritance. It is closer to a debt collector who hasn’t been born yet.
Economists have a polite word for what happens next: discounting. A rupee owed in 2070 is treated, in every formal model, as worth less than a rupee owed today — and so, quietly, is the person who will have to pay it. The logic sounds neutral. It is not neutral. It is a decision, dressed as a formula, about whose future gets to count at full price and whose gets a markdown.
Water, Climate, and Technological Debts
Look past the debt column and it gets worse the further out you look, not better. Pakistan’s water share per person has fallen from over five thousand cubic metres in 1951 to under nine hundred today — past the line the United Nations draws for scarcity, in a country that used to measure its wealth in rivers. Every tube well sunk this year is a small, specific decision that someone born in 2050 will inherit a drier country than the one we were born into — and none of them will have been in the room when it was decided. Summer, too, no longer ends when it’s supposed to; it simply stays, the way an unwelcome guest stays, until the season itself has forgotten it was ever meant to leave.
Somewhere in the same span of years, an algorithm quietly began deciding who keeps their job — a slow, polite unemployment that shows up as a hiring freeze rather than a layoff, easier to miss until you’re the name missing from the shortlist. And the same technology being used to write our resignation letters for us is being used, elsewhere, to manufacture abuse: real children’s faces — including children whose entire online lives were built by parents filming them for an audience — fed into models that generate the unthinkable without needing a single new photograph taken. Nobody currently arguing about what these systems should be allowed to do asked the seven-year-old whose face is already, somewhere, training data.
This is the room I am being asked to bring someone into. Not metaphorically. Actually.
Asymmetry, Treaties, and Philosophical Trusts
There is a philosopher — David Benatar — who spent an entire book arguing that coming into existence is always, on balance, a harm. Avoiding someone’s future pain costs nothing, he says, because there is no one there yet to be deprived of the pleasure we skipped. But the pain we hand them is real. Very theirs. Entirely non-negotiable.
I read it expecting to disagree. I did disagree, mostly. But I kept the asymmetry, the way you keep a splinter you can’t quite work out — pleasure denied costs no one anything; pain inflicted costs someone everything.
It turns out this isn’t just a private discomfort. It has a name, and lately, a small amount of institutional machinery built around it. Last September, at the United Nations, member states signed a declaration written for a category of person defined entirely by not existing yet — the first attempt at that scale to put future generations’ interests into the language of treaties rather than sentiment. It talks about safeguarding their needs. It does not talk about discount rates, or water tables, or who gets to keep a job when the algorithm decides. The gap between the declaration and the discounting is, roughly, the entire argument of this essay.
Edmund Burke, two and a half centuries earlier, had already put words to the shape of it: society, he thought, was not a contract between the people currently alive to sign it, but a partnership stretching backward to the dead and forward to the people who haven’t arrived yet to object — every generation a tenant of what it’s handed, never quite the owner.
Rawls asked something similar from a different angle: imagine building a society from behind a veil, not knowing which life you’d be born into — which decade, which body, which debt load. Nobody, designing blind, agrees in advance to be born already owing what they didn’t spend.
Somewhere between these arguments and my mother’s spreadsheet of grandchildren, the debt number stopped feeling like an economic fact and started feeling like a moral one.
Legacy vs. Amanah
Ask someone why they want children and, if they’re honest — properly honest, not dinner-party honest — somewhere in the answer is the word continue. A version of them, after them. Their eyes in someone else’s face at a dinner table forty years from now.
We call this legacy.
I want to be careful here, because it would be easy to write this as though wanting a child — or building a dam, or sinking a tube well, or training a model on the world as it currently exists — is a moral failure, and none of it is, not on its own. It is closer to an old, quiet selfishness we’ve agreed collectively not to name — a want being met at the expense of someone who does not yet exist to consent to the terms we’re handing them: the debt, the water that isn’t coming back, the algorithm that will have already redesigned the job market before they’re old enough to need one, a world that has gotten so unsafe for the smallest people in it that we have started designing school runs, and childhoods, and the internet itself, around the danger.
Here is where it gets harder, not easier.
Children, in the tradition I was raised in, are described as amanah — a trust, handed to you, not owned by you. Not something you make so a piece of yourself keeps walking around after you’re gone. Something you are asked to hold, carefully, for someone else’s sake, in a world you don’t get to vet in advance. I’ve started to think the word reaches further than I first gave it credit for. A budget is an amanah. A river is an amanah. A model trained on a child’s face is either handled like one, or it isn’t, and mostly, right now, it isn’t. The trust doesn’t stop at the front door of who you personally decide to raise. It’s just easier to feel it there.
The Choice to Stop
I have turned this over more times than I can count, because it refuses to resolve cleanly into an argument for having children or against it, for spending or for saving, for building the dam or leaving the aquifer alone. A trust implies you can honour it. I am no longer certain, some years, on some questions, that we can — to a person, about a world none of us built alone, cannot fix alone, and cannot fully protect them from, before handing them the keys anyway.
Someone will say this is despair dressed as philosophy. Maybe. But the alternative — that more is automatically good, more spending, more extraction, more people, because growth has never needed to explain itself — has never struck me as an argument so much as a reflex we’ve decided not to examine. I don’t think suffering is the only measure of a life, or a policy, or a country. I have one life. It has plenty in it. I don’t regret existing. That isn’t the question. The question is who gets to spend someone else’s future before they exist to have an opinion about it — and how rarely, structurally, we even pause to ask.
Loving them enough to not bring them into the world — that’s the whole of the argument, really.
So the love goes elsewhere, because it was never short on places to go. My cousin’s children call me by a nickname they invented before they could manage my real one, and it has outlasted every attempt to correct it. I pay the school fees for the son of the woman who helps run our house — a modest transfer each month, unremarkable on a bank statement, except it is currently the only reason he owns a uniform instead of a job he’s too young for. There is no shortage of children who already exist and already need someone standing behind them: a fee paid quietly so a girl two provinces away finishes class ten, a home opened to a child the state has already stopped filing paperwork for. None of it requires my body to manufacture a new one from scratch to prove the love was real. None of it waits for a UN declaration to decide it was worth doing.
I am not raising anyone to inherit the bill.
I am the last name that stops here, on purpose, out of something closer to mercy than to failure.