In the scheme of child-free things, my reasons are valid, of course, but somewhat simple.

I'd rather buy video games, expensive electronics, books, and nice food than diapers and formula and whatever else. Final Fantasy 14 is more fun.

Final Fantasy 14 is an MMO, wherein I have tons of friends, some with children, most without. Inside FF14 is a system of achievements, and there are third party sites that track achievement data and rank players based on scores in games.

A friend of mine, shall be known as S, is heavily invested in these achievement leaderboards, as am I. She is high up in our server rank, and I lag quite behind her due to her unnatural ability to min-max her time and micromanage her gameplay.

Queue the pregnancy announcement to our friend group last year. This was a good thing for her; she wanted a baby, she is well off with income and has a good job and invests wisely.

Important: she is THE breadwinner. Her husband does not work.

All through the pregnancy, it was all good news and hopeful wishes. I asked about her health, I wanted to know if she was doing okay. Smooth sailing. Bing bang boom, nine months, baby out in June. Healthy.

Then the backslide started.

Due to her new responsibility, of course, she can't spend as much time on the game. That's fine. It's her life, she chose this. She occasionally popped online when the baby was sleeping, waxed poetic about things. It was going well. She knew how things were going, had prepared for everything, S is a super smart woman and she's amazing at what she does.

Cue last month or so. Sleep is getting scarce for her. She's doing her best, but she's exhausted at all times. I'm like "well, babies ya know" and she says "yep babies la de da" but she's happy with her choice.

Cue this morning. She vented a bit. Husband, who does not work, isn't pulling his weight with the baby. I sit behind my keyboard thinking "......yeah, yeah I saw that coming." He's staying up all night playing games. He can help the baby when it wakes up, but no, she still gets dragged out of bed by the noise to calm the baby down. She has to wake up from naps to feed the baby. Husband is spending less time with the baby.

S goes back to work next month. Husband is going to become the full time caretaker. She feels like she has to run a "test day" to make sure he can handle it. I slam my face into the keyboard, holding in all of my feelings. I stop myself from saying all the things I want to.

All I see for her is bad, bad depression, a potential divorce, or an accident due to her husband's negligence. It's like writing on the wall and it makes me so, so sad.

Anyway that's all. I got a vasectomy and I'm spending my money trying to transition (MTF) and play more video games.

Final Fantasy 14 is more fun than babies.