 Imagine if I was just doing this for the content. It's probably a bad sign when you tell a friend about a medical procedure you just had and their immediate response is, so are you gonna review it? And a worse sign when the answer is, duh, I started working on it months ago. But here we are, because I knew from the moment that I decided to get a vasectomy that it is something I would talk about on YouTube. And when I started making plans to end the channel and choosing which of my many incomplete scripts to actually finish, I knew that this was going to be one of them. Because I've always been an open book, and I think that transparency is much of why I've gotten any kind of following it all over the past four and a half years. So, certainly not gonna change that now. Unfortunately, despite the fun intro, this is not actually a vlog. I didn't get any dope doctor's office b-roll, nor did I film the surgery. However, I did do little video diaries at various points during the process, which I will be interspersing throughout this broader discussion of why I got a vasectomy and what it does and doesn't mean to me. So, before we get into the heavy shit, let's start with the very first one of those. So, I just got out of the initial consultation with the urologist who will be performing the procedure in about a month and a half because in New York, at least, there is a mandatory minimum 30-day waiting period between the initial meet and greet with your would-be bowl mangler and the actual mangling of your balls, which I think is a good thing, not only because, you know, you shouldn't make this on a whim, but it does feel a little different after talking to him, right? Like, I had wondered if you would try to talk me out of it or at least, like, ask me probing psychological questions about why I was doing it and he didn't do that. He made a joke, like, have you already had so many kids that you just can't deal with any more of them and I was like, is zero too many? And he said, all right. And then he just sort of walked me through the procedure, but he did impress upon me the permanence of it, right? And I know that some vasectomies can be reversed, but he said it's kind of a humpty-dumpty thing, right? Easy to break, hard to fix. And to that point, he gave me the number of a sperm bank, which is not something I'd ever seriously considered before, but now that I'm at this point headed rapidly towards no return, it seemed like, you know, I should do my due diligence, right? Especially because if it's not very expensive, there is no downside and a potentially massive upside. So I think I'm going to call them. So I gave them a call. It's an organization that was specifically recommended by my urologist and I talked to a lovely woman who walked me through the procedure and the prices. She was clear a little put off by the fact that I don't have children but want to do this whole thing, but, you know, she was very nice about it and it's kind of a frustrating amount of money. Like, I live in New York City and so I was expecting prices to be a little bit higher than the $3 to $500 that I was seeing in Google search results. But, you know, so it's like, it's $495 for initial visit and collection plus some lab testing that may or may not be covered by insurance. $325 for any additional collections and then an annual storage fee of $685. So like, realistically, we're looking at $1,500 for the first year and then $700 in perpetuity. And I say it's frustrating because I can afford that in a literal financial sense in that I have that much money in a savings account and I could take that out and pay for this, but it's not fucking money, right? Like, it's not money that I can just throw away without thinking about it. I didn't really expect it to be less but if it had been like $350 a year or something, I would have just said, yeah, sure. And if it had been the $1,000, I'd have said, absolutely fucking, literally not. But $700 is that really frustrating sweet spot. But, you know, if I have to choose between like the Adobe Creative Cloud and the potential for having a child, I'm probably gonna choose Photoshop. That's how I have some thinking to do. I didn't really have to think about it that hard for being honest. A couple of days after filming that, I was sitting right here when a child started screaming in the hallway. She screamed for 30 straight seconds and her clearly exasperated father begged and then yelled at her to stop. And I thought, in what fucking universe would I want to subject myself to that and knew that the answer was none of them? So I never called back. Which gets at the simplest but least interesting reason for all of this. I just don't like children very much and the older I get, the more my definition of child has expanded without changing that fundamental truth. One of the three The Week Air View merch shirts is inspired by my musings about how many kids I could take in a fight. And while that is not something I would really like to try out firsthand, I think I'd rather be in a cage match punching a bunch of other people's kids than a hospital seeing my own for the first time. And yeah, sure, that's a joke. But is it though? My mom once told me that I am narcissistic enough that I would definitely think my child was the best one to ever exist, just like everyone else does. And there is definitely a non-zero chance that that's true. It could be that I just don't like people very much and children are people. So I am projecting my feelings about everyone onto this hypothetical child who could well be one of the handful of people I quite like. But I'm not a betting man and literally someone's life is pretty high stakes. Child rearing is pretty high stakes. Again, this is someone's life that a couple of people have entrusted to them as a result of a biological process as opposed to like anything that would earn them that responsibility. Look, I have a general skepticism towards authority figures. Someone isn't worth listening to just because they're the CEO of a company and they're sure as fuck not worth listening to just because they don't use contraception. And yet somehow the latter gives them the right to control someone's life for nearly two decades. Kind of fucked up. And I'm sure most people agree that this control needs limits and that we should all be glad Jeanette McCartney's mom died and I'm sure that we all think the rehearsal opens some genuinely disturbing questions about the exploitation of children by the entertainment industry. I'm not really of the mind that all child actors are being exploited or that kids shouldn't be allowed to act. But I will never forget being on a student film set with a six-year-old who clearly had no interest in being there but was being pushed by his parents because he looked good on camera and they thought he was their meal ticket. But those are more obviously damaging versions of a pretty common practice, right? There are too many people who look at their children as some attempt at redemption a way to fix their own perceived failings. A new game plus run in the game of life. Or they create absurd expectations for their children, one that often make the kids miserable as they try to make their parents proud or ends up with them being eternal disappointments. A parent saying my kid is a doctor has the same energy as an art collector saying I have a Monet. I don't really see their kids as people but props. How many chefs on Chopped want to win to show their parents that their career choice wasn't a mistake? How many comedians have a set about how disappointed their parents are? Chefs and comedians do a lot more good for the world than anyone with an MBA ever has but pursuing their passions is somehow an affront to their upbringing. And I'm sure at least some of this comes from parents whose dreams resenting the fact that their kids don't want to do the same. Those are the same people who don't want student loan forgiveness because they had to suffer so everyone should have to suffer. They probably also resent me for not having kids because I'm not sacrificing anything and their vision of a perfect day off is basically just my every Saturday. Sucks to be them I guess. I recently had a conversation that really laid bare and disconnected a lot of parents from the humanity of their children. I was talking to an extended relative who lives in Europe. She has a son four or five years old with her best friend who is a gay man. The two of them co-parent each taking care of the kid for half of the week and I asked how she thinks that situation will change as he gets older and she suspects that he will eventually decide he just wants to live with his dad's full time and maybe he'll visit her every so often but who knows we'll see. And she didn't say any of that in a self-pitying way. She wasn't complaining or crying about it. It was a matter of fact thing and she is perfectly okay with it happening as long as he's happy. And I realized that I had never heard of a parent giving their child that level of agency and maybe it's more common elsewhere in the world but it was revelatory to me and a reminder that the way things are isn't the way they must be. There are other better ways of structuring our societies and relationships so it's a shame that we aren't going to give those to the next generation instead they're getting a hell that seems to be getting more hellish by the day which is certainly a factor in a lot of people's decisions to not have kids at this point. To be a parent in 2023 you need to either have a frankly unfounded optimism that things in general will improve a belief that your position in life will insulate you and therefore your offspring from whatever is to come or a general disregard for your kid's future. Whatever the reason if you're wrong the person who will suffer the consequences the most is the one who has the least say. I learned recently that there's a philosophy called antinatalism which is largely centered on the idea that no one chooses to be born and yet here we all are. Antinatalists then conclude that no one should be born kind of like a fun sort of devil's advocate position to take on the whole human experiment but I also agree with Jack Saint that trying to use a word like choice or consent in this context is radically inappropriate because what we're talking about is existentially different than the thing that those words are meant to convey but it is true that some people actively resent that they were born. Fun fact in 2002 France made it illegal to sue your parents for giving birth to you after three separate children born with older disabilities successfully argued that they were owed financial compensation for their parents actual choice to continue a pregnancy and that is all I have to say about that and some of those people do something about it and then the rest of us say they shouldn't have because life is worth living and most of us believe that. I ultimately believe that. Life is pretty cool. It's also all we have because there's no afterlife or God and I think that since most people are glad that they were born abstract idea that we all should have been consulted about our existence is silly. But just because life is worth living now doesn't mean it's going to stay that way. So we return to what you might call pessimism but I'm going to call realism. The only way things stop getting worse is for society to fundamentally change and that isn't going to happen because societies are made of people and people don't like change. The world would be better if fossil fuels that heat the planet in its inhabitants were replaced by clean alternatives. If neighborhoods were built in ways that de-emphasized car ownership and focused on walkability and quality affordable public transit systems. If factory farms were closed and people's diets shifted towards plant-based alternatives these could have transformative effects and would offer myriad benefits to the people who lived within those systems but for many people those would not outweigh the things that they would have to give up in return. There's barely even an appetite for the first thing on that list and at this point all reasonable people agree that the status quo is bad but it can't be a thing that relies on individuals. Like it was gratifying that the 2022 made terms were historically good for Democrats in large part because enough marginal voters decided that openly trying to destroy democracy is probably bad and so generally rejected candidates who did that but voting is literally the least a person can do and 53.1% of eligible adults still didn't do it. Voting matters as does reducing meat consumption and taking public transportation and all of the other things that reduce your environmental impact but also carbon footprint was popularized by a fucking BP ad campaign. It wasn't about trying to make the planet better. It was about making people question themselves instead of the companies who were and are actually destroying the planet. And I totally get how someone can hear that and just give up. Even the most optimistic view of climate change guarantees more forests will burn and cities will drown. The wealthier countries will survive but poorer countries literally might not. You think refugee crises are bad now? Imagine them after another 10 or 20 years of warming. And then think about the way that authoritarian regimes scapegoat refugees as an incredibly easy other on their road to fascism and how that will further erode environmental protections which is a vicious cycle that is somehow just a part of the impending doom that it feels like we're hurtling towards. And maybe you think I'm wrong. Maybe I am wrong. I would love to be wrong but I've got a 31 year head start on the race to that sweet sweet release and I am not feeling so great about my prospects near the end. So how can I in good conscience put someone at the starting line now? And I am well aware of the societal ramifications of more people not having children. On average every person must have at least one child if not more because unless or until we can figure out genuinely capable robo caregivers produced by companies with genuinely humane incentives under our current economic system the first of those is maybe possible and the second is absolutely not. Countries with sub replacement birth rates are going to have a real rough time as aging populations leave the workforce faster than they enter it. The right wing in the United States is just salivating at their prospect of using that to justify say gutting social security even though it could easily be paid for by taxing all income instead of just the first hundred something thousand. Them doing that is going to be bad for people including me. But just because on average every person should have a kid doesn't mean the average person should have a kid. Plenty of people shouldn't have kids. A lot of them do anyway. And I know that that line of reasoning can go to some dark places especially coming from someone who looks like me. But frankly I don't think all that highly about my own genetic cocktail and let's not forget what this video is about. What's this video about again? Alright let's do it. Let me go get that vestectomy. Alright so it's the day of we're actually like literally 20 minutes away from me getting sterilized. So that's fun. Over the last 48 hours I've been thinking about decisions. I don't make a lot of them in my life. I kind of let life happen to me and I'll make decisions as it comes as opposed to like actively seeking things out. This is the first major decision I've made in a long time. And I'm now feeling the weight of that in a way I haven't really for the past month and a half. It's not changing anything. I still want to go through with it. I still feel good in the decision. But I guess I'm glad I feel something because if I never felt anything that probably would have been a bad sign. But nope I feel it and still fucking doing it. That's onwards and upwards as they say. It literally just happened like a couple minutes ago. I'm still here. I wasn't comfortable. I didn't enjoy it. The needles were the worst part as the doctor said. It's the space occupying liquid within the needles. The needles themselves don't really hurt that much. I don't know smelling your own body burning but not feeling it is a weird sensation. Doctor listened to hot tuna. He didn't have a lab coat on or even wear a mask. It looks like he just popped in just to do this and then fucking walked out. It was fine. It was quick. But yeah it's done. It's happened. I am X amount of days away from fully being sterile. Now that that's out of the way, let's take the gloves off shall we? I'm going to preface all of this by saying out of eugenicist. I don't generally believe that there are specific types of people who shouldn't have kids. I don't like the idea of passing along my painful joints and fucked up brain to a new generation but I don't blame my parents for doing so. That said I don't think parenting is something that people should just get to do. It's kind of like buying a gun, right? If we're going to let them exist then people should be required to take classes and learn how to take care of them and treat them with respect and not hurt people with them. And if people can't show that they are capable of proper care and respect and not hurting people don't fucking let them have one. I don't get why some people need psychiatric evaluations to have vasectomies, but not to have kids. At the very fucking least, Czech would be parents for psychopathy, narcissistic personality disorder, or any of those other things that would make a person chemically slash physiologically incapable of caring for others. They are the obvious exception to my general rule about specific types of people and I really cannot stress how glad I also am that Jeanette McCarty's mom died. Look, I don't think sterility is a choice to take lightly, but the ramifications are pretty minimal. Worst case scenario, I don't have a kid that it turns out I want and that is a much better scenario than having a kid I don't the ripple effects of which can be endless. As they say guns don't kill people, children kill people. And usually they're adults by the time they do it, but the one thing every murderer has in common is that they were all children once. Shonku's 2010 film Beautiful Boy not to be confused with that Timothy Chalamet Steve Carell vehicle of the same name tells the story of parents dealing with the fallout of their son committing a mass shooting at his high school. Everyone turns their anger at the parents, driving them further apart and then ultimately back together as they face this reality that no one can or even tries to imagine. And they're forced to face the question of whether what happened is in fact their fault. And the answer is almost certainly no asterisk. The Carells played heartbreakingly by Michael Sheen and Maria Bello were clearly not great parents distant from each other and their son, but if mild neglect makes you an abusive parent then every parent is an abuser because life gets in the way and it's impossible to be there every single time you're wanted or even needed. Are there signs they missed? Almost certainly. Could they have done something that would have changed what happened? Maybe? Does that mean it's their fault? No. Asterisk. I have no doubt that parenting can be very hard. If I thought it was easy, then maybe none of this shit that I've been grandstanding about actually matter. I've thought at various points that I would actually probably be an above average dad, but trying to prove a point is an awful reason to do something like that and anyways above average isn't great. I would definitely be a worse dad than my dad who is great. The world would be an objectively better place if he were the bar. And so it genuinely frustrates me how little support parents and more importantly their children get in this country. If children are our future and by definition they must be. Society should be devoting serious resources to making sure they have whatever's needed to make the future better. Right? That seems blindingly obvious and I know the irony that America is pro-birth but anti-child has been discourse to plenty and I've got nothing interesting to add to that, but it's important to keep calling it out because it is frankly disgusting how little we as a country care about whether children can even eat. Politicians can't even agree that children living in abject poverty is a thing that they should maybe stop from happening and it's something they can stop. As part of COVID relief in 2020 Congress substantially expanded the child tax credit and it dropped child poverty by 40 fucking percent. And then at the end of 2021 the increase expired. That is unconscionable. There are so many things that we could do to help kids. For example, in schools and teachers offering universal pre-k expanding free meal programs, some states are doing some of these things. But there needs to be a genuine commitment from the top down to the improvement of child welfare and I don't understand how anyone can disagree with that and fucking yet. Child rearing is expensive. The USDA estimates that the average cost of a child right now for middle income families over the first 18 years of their life will be around $17,000, approximately $17,000 a year. Now, my household is definitively but not impressively upper middle class. I could afford to have a kid but not to give them a super exciting life doing things and going places. As with all but the wealthiest of people, I would have to choose between having a child and continuing to do many of the things I love. And it's not that hard a choice. And I guess that selfish not wanting to give up the pretty good life I've got for myself but parenting is hardly a selfless act. Even if we ignore the parents who use their children to whatever nefarious ends, it's still an investment. Honestly having a child is kind of like buying a house. They come with a whole bunch of responsibilities that make it harder to move around. Neighbors don't like it when you don't take care of them. Having one is part of the societal contract for those who wish to live the American dream and also offers a kind of long term stability that's probably nice. And they're expensive in ways that are both predictable and not while offering benefits from my tax dollars that I can't actually take advantage of. Subsidies for ownership I don't really love but I would be happy to pay more if it meant fewer children would starve. But they are for dramatically different ends. Yeah, a handful of people give birth to social media stars who then buy them houses but most folks will not get that money back. What they're paying for instead is long term support. My choice to not sacrifice now all but guarantees that I will be lonelier in my old age than my peers who procreate. I imagine a retirement without grandchildren is also more boring than one with. Is all that worth an average of $310,000? It might be. But as with any investment this can fail. Not every parent dies surrounded by loved ones just as not everyone who sells their house gets to break even let a long profit. And while it would be nice if every investment paid off you're not owed anything if it fails. And this I think is the part that younger generations increasingly understand that just because your parents fulfilled their legal obligation to keep you alive and perhaps their moral obligation to do it well they aren't owed a return. And if they failed the moral obligation fuck them. They don't deserve your money or attention and certainly not your forgiveness let them fucking rot. And look it's impossible to not get at least a little messed up by your parents. Even a literally perfect childhood will do some kind of damage. Abuse is not anything a kid doesn't like nor is it anything that is not purely positive for them. And you probably don't need to hear that but like in case I have any chronically online viewers who think I'm completely on their side here. I'm not. It is important that we use words properly. Case in point your children is abuse. Period end of story. Literally every scientific study that has ever been done shows it. To quote the World Health Organization Corporal punishment is linked to a range of negative outcomes for children across countries and cultures including physical and mental ill health impaired cognitive and socio-emotional development poor educational outcomes increased aggression and perpetration of violence. And while we're on the subject of linguistic accuracy fuck corporal punishment. It's one of those terms that makes me think of George Carlin's classic rant about soft language where we hide harsh realities in vague euphemisms. What we call corporal punishment is better described as sanctioned violence. I will gladly joke about taking on an octagon of infants all day. I would never actually hit a kid nor would I ask another person to hit a kid on my behalf. Not a lot of things in life are simple, but that one's pretty simple. If you are the kind of person who sanctions actual violence against children, you're not a good person. I think it's time to put the gloves back on. So, it's about 24 hours after the procedure and I don't feel great. You know, I've been sitting on peas most of the day you know, took some leave that didn't give me anything stronger I don't know what the difference between pain and severe discomfort is but it doesn't feel good is the thrust of it hopefully tomorrow will be better. It does feel like I have improved over the course of the day I feel like I felt worse 12 hours ago than I do now, but I was expecting three days of pain, so we're still on track for that. Alright, been another 24 hours and I'm feeling better you know, notably better, so that's good I'm not going to keep doing these updates I feel like I'm on the track to just be through this sooner than later and that's good because that's what I was told it would be I'm still sitting on peas but not as much as I needed to yesterday, you know, we're getting there So, it has been two weeks and I just had my follow up and the neurologist said everything is healed very nicely and I can finally sit in the bathtub and dissolve the damn stitches so that is what I'm doing at this point the pain is basically gone very happy about that and now it's just a matter of waiting another couple months before I get tested and then then it's done So, I had a bit of a setback turns out after you get surgery you should not run into a fence with the area that you got surgery on and I did so I developed a retroactive infection in the area and so it's been hurting for the past few days which isn't great it's not like horrible but it's certainly not good and I don't want that for the rest of my life so I went to the neurologist he told me what was up and he gave me an antibiotic so hopefully in a few days I'll be all good we'll see So, it's been about a week I've been on the antibiotic and I'm feeling a whole lot better so thank fuck it's a little worried there but I'm feeling better on with the rest of this What a time that was Speaking of times, did you know that trials for hormonal birth control for men stretch back 50 years and the drugs that they were testing in the 1970s actually existed since the 50s? I see this little tidbit repeated on my 4U page every few months from mostly women who want to point out a radical disparity in the way genders are treated by modern medicine because the reason that the drug never made it past clinical trials was that the side effects which included pain, weight gain acne, mood swings, changes in sex drive, behavioral changes and fatigue were deemed too severe The irony of course is that all of those and more are known side effects of hormonal birth control for women So what's up with that? Modern medicine? To their credit it is conceptually more difficult to stop millions of sperm from doing their thing than it is to stop a handful of eggs from doing theirs but it also seems like the kind of thing that would be done had it really been given the priority it deserves because it's fucked up that women have always had to take responsibility for contraception. Men can wear condoms, of course I've learned over the years that a wild number of them just really don't want to. Very weird to me because TMI but I can count on one hand the number of times I haven't used a condom since I have always run under the assumption that avoiding pregnancy is my problem. Not because I'm a feminist but arguably the opposite. I knew a kid in high school whose life plans were completely derailed when his girlfriend lied about her own use of birth control and got pregnant in an effort to trap him. And whatever fear I had that someone might try that on me was gone by the time I reached my 20s but by that point I was committed to handling it myself especially as it became clear to me that condoms have zero side effects and hormonal birth control as a whole bunch and I know some people prefer the regulation that comes from the pill but for someone who doesn't I'm not going to make them suffer that and I'm not the only one there has been a notable uptick in the number of vasectomies that particularly younger men are having after the overturning of Roe v. Wade. While the timing may imply that the Supreme Court's decision might have had something to do with my procedure I actually decided that this would be my birthday present to myself when I turned 30. It just took me a while to actually get her out to doing it. Which signifies that more men feel like they should be taking on the responsibility and there is a decent chance that if the pill but for men existed, many of those wouldn't be happening. Though birth control may well be on the chopping block next because the Supreme Court is a genuinely bad institution whose only real purpose is blocking societal progress and should be abolished. But even if there has been some encouraging news on the development front in 2022, it doesn't exist yet. For now there is only one real long-term contraceptive for men. It just seems to be the longest term. And as a result I get that it's not the right solution for everyone. But as with abortions, if it's the right solution it should be available without question or interference. Given that I cannot become pregnant and therefore will never be faced with an unwanted pregnancy myself, I've always felt that I had no right to say anything about someone else's choice. But if I ever had any reservations those were wiped out by the 2013 documentary After Tiller which follows the handful of doctors in the U.S. who perform so-called late abortions. It is a powerful film that is largely given over to the patients themselves who discuss what brought them to having abortions in the final trimester. I can't imagine having such little empathy that you could come out of that judging any of those women for what they did. Here's a good rule. You can judge someone's abortion if and only if you're offering to pay for their maternity care and then we'll raise the unwanted child. And that woman says no. It's still her right to terminate the pregnancy but if you find yourself in that exact situation, fair enough you can be mad about it. In any other situation, shut the fuck up. You don't matter. Certainly not here and probably not anywhere. It bothers me that three separate U.S. states require a man to get spousal consent in order to have a vasectomy because it is no one's decision but their own. And sure, I think that if someone is in a committed relationship that they should be on the same page with their partner about the whole thing. But if they're not on the same page they probably shouldn't be in a committed relationship. There are plenty of disagreements that you can have with a partner without poisoning the well. That is not one of them. And as such, I never discussed this choice with anyone. I just let people know that it was happening and maybe they asked why but in reality I got a lot more pushback on the fact that I'm ending this YouTube channel than the fact that I can't have kids anymore. And that feels like progress. And on the note of progress, it has been three months since I got the procedure, which means it is finally time to find out if it worked. Got this little jar here that I have to put a sample in, bring it off to the lab and I will know within the next 24 to 72 hours if this was all for nothing or did what it was supposed to do. I am wearing my skull t-shirt to represent all the babies I'm not having. So the next time you see me I will know and we can finish off this whole wild journey we have been on together. See you soon. I don't know what a lot of this means. Like I understand what viscosity is. I know what pH levels are I don't know what it means that mine are high. I don't know what it means that 20 HPF were observed. But I do understand the result, which is the thing that matters, right? No sperm scene post-vesectomy. Those are the words that I've been waiting all of these weeks, months, years to see. It feels like I beat biology a little bit, right? Like life this thing has had a very specific purpose and it no longer has that. I have taken control. It's an incredibly boring version of biohacking, right? But it is official. I will never have children. It's pretty cool. I'm taking a vesectomy. 7.9 out of 10. Thanks so much for watching. Thank you particularly to my patrons. My mom, my cat. Cat Zaraqata, Benjamin Schiff, Anthony Cole, Elliot Fowler, Kojo, Phil Bates, Willow. I am the sword, Taylor Lindy's and everyone else. I have one video left. I am ending on the best movie, everything everywhere, all at once. I'll have that out within the next couple of months. Looking forward to it. I hope you are too. Take care.