Till Choice Do Us Part

Once upon a time I believed in fate.

I remember this vividly in the context of my previous relationship. I was in love, and I thought that a mysterious force was working in the background so that me and my girlfriend would be together. 

Of course, being an educated person, I didn't subscribe to a common superstition like the horoscope or tarots. My own superstition had to be more sophisticated. If you had asked me then, I would have spoken about the inner fate, which is an expression of the spiritual development of the individual, or something along those lines. 

Looking back now, I don't think that the love-is-fated angle added anything of value to my life. Sure, it was intoxicating at first. It's exhilarating to feel that the universe is on your side. Every little coincidence is a sign that you're on the right path. Every fresh moment of happiness is another confirmation of your faith. If you're feeling afraid or insecure, as I often did at the time, you can remind yourself that you're in the hands of fate. Whenever you're confused or undecided, you can let fate decide for you. ("Fate" being whatever will move the story forward at a particular junction. Should I move in with this person? Sure! It's fated.)

As always, there is a cost to buying comfort with untruth. When the honeymoon phase of the relationship ended, and we had to deal with real problems, the fate complex started to backlash. 

I mostly felt that there was no alternative to the relationship, because I could only be happy and fulfilled with this person. This made me feel alternately elated and miserable, according to how well things were going. 

For the same reason, I subconsciously believed that she would never leave me, which may have caused me to put less work in the relationship. 

Finally, when the relationship ended, I felt that I had strayed from the ‘course of true fate’, and because of this I would never be happy again.

The basic feature of the fate complex, regardless of how it’s constructed, is that the future is evolving towards a meaningful end goal (telos). If you buy into this conception, your choices about where to steer the future will be limited by your ideas about where the future is supposed to go; these usually hinge on some kind of narrative that describes the proper endpoint. This is not very useful. Ideally, your choices should be driven by three things only: the current state of the world, your preferences, and the things you learned from past experience. 

If you embrace the fate-complex, the stories you tell yourself about how things are supposed to go will distort your decisions. It is a typical case of narrative versus information. 

In the past, the marriage vow "Till Death Do Us Part" was meant to be taken literally. Marriage was an union sanctioned by God. Its telos was to last until one of the bethroted died (and even beyond). People still pronounce the vow today, but what they actually mean is: “till death do us part, or we are so hopelessly miserable that divorce is really the only option.” 

We no longer think that relationships have a predetermined end goal. Instead, we see them as mutual arrangements that should realise the values and preferences of both parties, and may be terminated when they no longer do so. 

These days I am entering a new relationship, but I no longer believe in fate. I believe in choice. 

Choice means there is no inescapable reason for you to single out a person out of thousands of possible matches, except that you wish to do so. 

Choice means there is no transcendental power making you or the other person be together, except that you both want it. 

Choice means that your partner will leave if you get lazy or screw up. (If you don’t screw up they might leave anyway, because life is hard.) 

Choice means that you can leave your partner if you’re unhappy. 

Choice means that if the relationship ends, you don’t have to kill yourself because you’ve failed to fulfill your destiny. 

From this perspective, choice is beautiful. It’s a gift borne out of freedom and responsibility. It’s like going to a field every day and always picking the same flower. It’s like saying to your partner: “I don’t have to be with you — but I want to.”

Obviously, there is always some degree of inertia and path-dependency in life. You don’t actively choose to pursue your career every day. Most days you just hear the alarm clock and go to work. And it’s easier to leave someone after a week than after you’ve been married for ten years and had children. 

But at the end of the day, you and your partner must choose whether you stay together or not. No one else can make that choice for you. Not even God. 

After dating for a month, I gave my girlfriend two pendants with our zodiac signs. It was a cheerful reminder that I don’t need the blessings of the stars to be with her.

So let us be together until choice do us part. May our self-awareness in its judgment strengthen our consent and fill us with its blessings. What choice has joined, let nothing but choice divide. Amen. 

Christmas Swifties

In what may be the start of a new tradition, I am posting my first Tom Swifties. (If you don't know what a Tom Swifty is, check out Wikipedia or Slate Star Codex.) 

1. "Russia should have two rulers" Tom said bizarrely 
2. "I am going to meditate now" Tom said preemptively
3. "I have a strange burning down there" Tom said candidly
4. "I wouldn't mind getting cannibalized" Tom said mistakenly
5. "I don't think the Virgin Mary went to heaven" Tom said unassumingly
6. "Oh, it's a negligible wound" Tom said in passing
7. "I told you I want my coffee BLACK" Tom screamed bitterly
8. "I should have worn the seat belt" Tom said aerodynamically
9. "I'm stuck" Tom said platonically
10. "God will understand" Tom insinuated
11. "There must be more life in the universe" Tom said misanthropically
12. "Tom said recursively" Tom said recursively
13. "I don't know when I'll be finished" Tom said indecisively
14. "There is no such thing as a first cause" Tom said atomistically
15. "Butt jokes are tired" Tom said analytically
16. "Jokes about butt jokes are better" Tom said meta-analytically
17. "Do I speak or am I spoken?" Language said through Tom
18. "I'm tired of standing" Tom lied
19. "Get that purple zebra away from my wings" Tom said acidly
20. "I will start a multi-million dollar podcast" Tom said arrogantly
21. "You need to warm it up first" Tom scolded
22. "Yes, I am connecting from the US" Tom said approximately
23. "One of you shall betray me" Tom said crucially
24. "I offer one hundred more" Tom said morbidly
25. "What's your IQ, 100?" Tom asked meanly
26. "Germany should abandon the euro" Tom remarked
27. "All we see or seem... A dream within a dream" Tom said poetically

BONUS:

"I'll reach that turtle in the end" Achilles said half-heartedly.

The Future Needs Virtue Ethics

 You have heard that it was said,'You shall not commit adultery;' but I tell you that everyone who gazes at a woman to lust after her has committed adultery with her already in his heart.

Matthew 5:27–28

Most of us would agree that this is too strict a standard for mere humans. If we substitute 'infidelity' for 'adultery' [1], we can concur that such an act is usually on the wrong side. But merely fantasizing about infidelity hardly counts as a crime. First, we don't have full control of our thoughts and fantasies. Second, we cannot enforce norms about what people do in the sanctuary of their minds. Most importantly, fantasizing doesn't hurt anybody. As Nietzsche put it: “The thought is one thing, the deed is another, and another yet is the image of the deed. The wheel of causality does not roll between them.”

But suppose that someone wanted to defend the Gospel passage. Let's leave aside the concept of sin and focus on non-dogmatic arguments. A virtue ethicist might say that by thinking about adultery, I am compromising my character and failing to realize the best version of myself. A Buddhist might say that unwholesome thoughts are dangerous for one’s peace of mind and should be cleansed (article). A consequentialist could try to prove that the fantasy does in fact hurt me more than it benefits me. How can it hurt me? By distracting me from more important things, desensitizing me to bad actions, or making me more likely to hurt other people (for example, by committing infidelity). An infidelity fantasy may be the first step in a process that could result in actually committing infidelity.

In general, it seems that these critics' standards are too rigid: it’s hard to see how a simple, inconsequential fantasy could corrupt my character. On the contrary, indulging in a harmless fantasy might be healthier on the long run than trying to repress it; and while almost everyone has such fantasies, there is no proof that having them will hurt people or increase the probability that they will act wrongly.

Let’s face it it: our imagination is a weak thing. Consider a hypothetical scale of intensity of experience, where 100 corresponds to actually having an experience, and an exceptionally vivid dream will perhaps go as far as 80. How far can our imagination go on this scale, unaided by drugs or technology? I would say no more than 20; others may see it differently. At any rate, an imagined experience is so much feebler than an actual experience that any effects on a person's constitution must be heavily discounted.

That many are bound to disagree with this point, is shown by the historical attempts to ban and censor any new medium that allows the reproduction and trafficking of fantasies. It happened to the novel. It happened to movies. And it happened to videogames (no citation needed). Whenever a new medium becomes popular, the fears about its potential to corrupt people results in a phenomenon sociologists call moral panic. 

At the root of these reactions we often find the same idea: fantasizing about bad things will increase the probability that people will do them. For example, fantasizing about killing someone or seeing a movie where people get killed or playing GTA may desensitize people to violence and make them more violent.

The latest moral panic targeted videogames, but there was nothing new about that reaction. The diffusion of the latest and shiniest medium was bound to reawaken the age-old concern. Meanwhile, research on the connection between videogames and aggressive behavior has given conflicting results, with evidence for a weak detrimental effect at best (see this meta-meta analysis).

But the fact that Timmy has been crying wolf the past fifteen times does not mean that the wolf can’t come this time. It’s dangerous to disconnect an alarm because until now it has given only false positives. The medium that corrupts people has never materialized, but it might be invented someday.

Meanwhile, I see a clear pattern in the evolution of media: the experiences they provide are increasingly more vivid and immersive. It is one thing to read a description of a battle. It is another thing to see that battle on a movie screen. Videogames take it a step further by making the experience interactive. The final step in this progression is immersive virtual reality (IVR): a complete simulation of the sensory experience, which is in principle indistinguishable from real life.

The question is: what happens when we invent the Matrix? That is the point where fantasy and reality truly intersect.

There are obvious dangers associated with this. With IVR, people could engage in fully immersive experiences of doing bad things without any of the associated consequences. One would interact with individuals who are in all respects identical to real people, except that they are just sims: Chalmersian zombies with no feelings or consciousness, all their actions directed by the simulation’s software.

There would be no hard consequentialist arguments against doing very bad things to those sims, just like there are no hard consequentialist arguments against murder fantasies. In fact, if I can prove that shooting up people in IVR makes me more relaxed and has no measurable negative impacts, that would be a favorable argument for me doing just that.

Yet something feels off about this. This is somewhat hard to admit, because I do enjoy playing GTA, and I actually think that it has a positive effect on me (e.g. it makes me more relaxed, hence kinder). However, killing someone in GTA is closer to a cartoonish murder fantasy than to an actual experience of murder. The proportions might be reversed in the case of IVR.

Of course, most people would not enjoy a hyper-realistic experience of murder, and when the novelty fades out, I predict that IVR videogames will turn away from gritty realism and veer more towards stylized worlds, where the boundary between fantasy and reality is exploited rather than discarded. But there would still be potential for creating programs that simulate all sorts of experiences in great detail — and not all of them would be nice.

What happens if you go through the entire experience of murdering somebody, except that nobody is actually murdered? Could it desensitize you to violence? Make you a worse person? Corrupt you somehow?

Or am I just buying stock in the next moral panic? 

For what it’s worth, my intuition tells me that there’s something wrong with doing nasty things in IVR, even if nobody gets actually hurt. But it’s hard to justify this on purely consequentialist terms. One could try to show that doing so has negative effects on the user, but proving these things is always difficult, and anyway that’s not my point. I wouldn’t like to be friends with a person who enacts violent murder fantasies in IVR, even if otherwise they seem perfectly sane and normal. Yet this person could argue that they did nothing bad and there is nothing wrong with them; which may actually be true from the consequentialist point of view.

Virtue ethics, however, offers an easy way out. It is not virteous to do bad things in the Matrix, even if nobody gets hurt. Why not? Because it does not comply with the aesthetic and intuitive ideal of a "good person" (admittedly, my ideal: this is subjective). It is not conducive to the actualizing of one’s highest potential. And it is probably not favorable to the development of one’s character. 

These are attempts to argue from the viewpoint of the doer when the deeds are decoupled from their effects. It may not be very solid, but it fits my moral intuitions.

Or maybe I’m just repeating the mistake of those English priests who thought that novels would corrupt the souls of impressionable youths and bring about the apocalypse.

Going back to our first example, some will suggest that having extramarital sex in the Matrix is a great thing, because it reduces the chance of committing infidelity in real life. Honey, why are you so mad? She’s just a sim! But I don’t buy it. Perhaps I am more of a virtue ethicist than I previously thought.

You have heard that it was said, 'You shall not commit adultery;' but I tell you that everyone who has sex with a sim has committed adultery in their heart.

[1] Consensual extramarital sex theoretically counts as adultery, so it’s better to narrow down the definition.

Things People Want

Consider these two lists of desiderata.  

A: Money, promotions, badges of honor, votes and endorsements, friends, sexual partners, servants or assistants, vanquished enemies, lives saved, items sold, sports records, likes and retweets, precious items, expensive cars, houses and their size.

B: Happiness, virtue, wisdom, serenity, learning, rationality, sanity, compassion, connection, positive impact, a sense of meaning and fulfillment, self-individuation, self-awareness, quality of relationships, love and respect, mastery, flow, kindness, sensitivity, spirituality, enlightenment, transcendence, creativity, heroism.

Both include things that people generally find desirable and worth pursuing. But, like me, you might feel that A and B differ in some important dimensions. 

For starters, Bs have higher status. If you're doing a job interview, you would not tell your recruiter that you'd like the job so you can get a fat salary, buy a car and hire five assistants. You are probably better off saying that you want to learn new things, have a positive impact and develop your talents. 

The most successful religions and moral systems encourage followers to pursue Bs, while marking As as empty or non-central at best, and harmful or corrupting at worst. 

Corporations get a bad rap because they are motivated by profit, which is an A. So they try to improve their reputation by signalling that they want to have a positive impact on the world and help people realize some of the Bs. 

If we looked at what people actually want vs. what they say they want, I suspect we would find that the former category mainly samples from A, while the latter mainly samples from B. In other words, people tend to signal that they are pursuing the Bs, even when they are pursuing the As. Or especially then. 

Conversely, explaining people's behavior by mentioning the As is considered cynical and mistrustful. "He is supporting the cause to make friends". "She only said that to get votes". "He'll do anything to impress a girl." 

Whence this distinction? 

There are important differences between As and Bs. First, the desiderata in A are related to zero-sum games. There is only so much money, cars or sexual partners in the world: if you get more, the rest of us are going to have less. This fact may be less obvious for some of the listed items. Likes and retweets, for instance, are virtually unlimited; and if you sell vacuum cleaners and I sell stamps, your selling more does not necessarily cause my selling less. However, if we model likes and retweets as proxies of the users' attention, we must conclude that their supply is limited. And everyone on the market is ultimately competing for the consumers' money. 

Furthermore, As often come in power-law distributions, meaning that a few individuals have a lot of them while most individuals have little or none. And many of them tend to concentrate according to the Matthew effect: the more money, sexual partners or followers you have, the easier it is to get even more. 

On the other hand, Bs are related to positive-sum games. If I become more knowledgeable, it does not imply that someone has become more ignorant; the general store of knowledge in the world has only increased. The same applies to rationality, compassion and mastery. 

The distributions of Bs, if we could measure them, would look normal rather than power-law. Yes, some people score high on self-awareness, serenity or kindness, while others score particularly low. But even those are within a few standard deviations of the mean: there are no people who are 20, 100 or 1000 times kinder or more self-aware than the average human, except perhaps the Buddha. 

Qualities like creativity, rationality and self-awareness are so consequential that marginal advantages determine significant differences between individuals. But ultimately their size is capped by the limits of human architecture. You cannot accumulate insane amounts of Bs the way you may do with As, as in Jeff Bezos having ~2 million times the net worth of an average U.S. household or Mick Jagger sleeping with 400 times as many women as the average man, plus David Bowie (citation needed). 

The other fundamental difference is that As are easily measurable, while Bs are generally not. In fact, Bs are mostly internal qualities which cannot be observed directly. They are also harder to define. I would have a hard time explaining what enlightenment, self-individuation or transcendence are, let alone try to determine whether someone has them or not. There is no objective, consensual method for determining how much of a B-type quality anyone has. 

The non-observability of Bs has some interesting consequences. For one thing, it is easier to be deceived about them, both because we cannot easily observe our level, and because it is difficult to make comparisons. The French say that everybody is satisfied with their wits, while nobody is satisfied with their purse. This is explained by the fact that one's income is easily ascertained, so it is harder to be biased about it. Given that wits are more difficult to measure, most people will happily assume they are above average and not think too much of it. Inequality on these attributes, while significant, will be less salient. 

It is not common to envy one's neighbor for their wisdom or serenity. First, it is hard to tell how wise they are (maybe they are just good at signalling wisdom). Second, the illusion of superiority ensures that we feel very wise, and there is little chance that reality will intrude upon us and correct our bias. Third, we know that a third party will have a hard time determining whether our neighbor is wiser than us. For the same reasons, it is more likely that we will envy them for having more money or friends. 

Let us take a step back and restate our observations.

As are related to zero-sum games, come in power-law distributions, accumulate according to the Matthew effect, and are easily measurable.

Bs are related to positive-sum games, come in normal distributions, one cannot have insane amounts of them, and are not easily measurable. 

The fundamental difference between As and Bs seems to be their ability to generate social conflict. 

For 90% of history, humans lived in foraging societies with egalitarian social structures. In this context, a person's fate was strongly dependent on the judgment and opinions of the community. At any moment, an individual who was deemed dangerous could be punished, ostracized or exiled; and in the absence of a strong central power or a system of codified laws, there was nothing in the way of her peers' wrath. Hence, it was very dangerous to stand out or inspire envy, and even more so to reveal antagonistic goals. The ancient proverb, "The tallest blade of grass is the first to be cut by the scythe" was especially valid. 

In horizontal, egalitarian environments of this sort, we would expect individuals to be very careful about their stated goals and aspirations. In particular, we would expect them to under-emphasize any aims or projects which could make them dangerous to their peers, and to over-emphasize innocuous or universally beneficial goals. Conversely, in stratified environments where some individuals hold significant power and are protected by laws and other social structures, we would expect high-ranking individuals to be more candid about holding competitive A-type objectives, and even to display them conspicuously for purposes of status-boosting, power signalling and intimidation. (Low-ranking individuals, on the other hand, would be still incentivized to appear innocuous, to avoid being punished or preemptively dispatched by the powerful). 

Robin Hanson has pointed out that the industrial era has brought about a revival of forager values [1] [2] [3]. In fact, since the French Revolution, the highly stratified regime of monarchic/feudal/agrarian societies has given way to an egalitarian ethos where everyone is entitled to the same level of deference and overt display of status and resources is generally frowned upon. Our social environments have become more forager-like; hence, we are less likely to reveal our interest in A-type resources and zero-sum games. 

Unlike in forager societies, we cannot be punished or exiled on a whim. But our peers still hold great power over us. They determine our standing and reputation, influence our self-worth and self-esteem, and can release or withhold precious resources. The social pressures shaping our persona are as strong as ever.

Don't Follow Your Dreams (Too Far)

Which professions do most people dream of? I don't have data for this, but we can assume that most of them score high on visibility, status and pay; are desired by a great number of people; and are probably very competitive. 

It follows that if you take the standard advice to 'follow your dreams', you will try to get into one of these professions, and you will likely fail. 

This injunction to follow your dreams is usually complemented by another which calls for persistence in the face of failure. This implies a negative view of failure: it is an obstacle that you must overcome, a challenge that life and other people throw at you to test what you are made of. If you persist in the face of failure, you have the moral high ground, and you will eventually succeed. But if you surrender to failure, you are a failure yourself, and you are not trying hard enough. I would like to challenge this notion. 

When you fail, it usually means that society does not want to sponsor your work. This can be framed as a case of information asymmetry. There are two explanations: either your work is valid (a "peach") and society is underestimating it, or your work is not valid (a "lemon") and you are overestimating it. 

Who is more likely to be right? Probably society: after all, selection processes incorporate the aggregated knowledge and expertise of many, while it is easier for an individual or a marginal group to be deluded about the value of their work. 

Yes, history records cases when underdogs were right and gatekeepers misjudged them, but this is the exception rather than the rule; and only exceptions make history. Most startups ideas are just bad, as are most books who end up on an editor's desk and most songs uploaded to Bandcamp. Even work which is not bad in itself (in the sense of low quality) can be excluded because it is not good enough for the market. A global and competitive market will have high barriers to entry. Some works may be excellent but lack a market. For example, even if I had the skills to write an excellent epic poem (I don't) I would not get the success that Homer or Dante had in their time, because nobody cares about epic poems today. 

In other words: "wide is the gate and broad is the way that leads to failure, and there are many who go in by it." This should convince you that if you fail, you should probably take the cue and move on, instead of wasting time and resources.  

Failure is good for you. It is a feedback message telling you that society wants you to focus on something else. Moving on is a sign of reason and maturity. It allows you to negotiate your role in the world and find an activity that is rewarding for you and useful to others. 

Those who made it to the top followed their dreams and persisted in the face of failure, and they feel compelled to remind you of that whenever they get invited to a graduation speech. Young people who listen to them assume that their policy is responsible for their success. But most people who follow their dreams fail, and those who blindly persist in the face of failure are hurting themselves more often than not. 

Capitalism has a way of turning irrational confidence into societal gains. The fact that 90% of startups fail is terrible news for whoever wants to found a startup. It also means that 90% of founders are overconfident. While failing a business is a serious blow for an individual, it is a small loss for society, which is more than made up for by the 10% of businesses that succeed and go on to create a lot of value. Consequently, as a collective it is profitable for us to encourage the 'follow your dreams' ethos, even if the behavior itself is damaging for most individuals who adopt it. 

(This is somewhat analogous to how the alarm call in certain birds species works. The act of signalling a predator might endanger the individual by attracting unwanted attention, but it might still be profitable for its genes if it increases the survival chances for its kin.) 

I do not mean to say that you should not be ambitious. You should aim high in your endeavors and try your best to do something great. And you should not give up too soon. But if you are trying to break into a field where failure is the likely outcome, you should aim to fail early (to save time) and fail safe (to save other resources). And when failure happens, don't be ashamed to take the cue and move on. 

Related: ‘Never Settle’ Is A Brag. 

Build Yourself a Theory of Happiness

When planning for the future, one of the greatest challenges is that we're bad at predicting what will actually make us (un)happy. In other words, we lack a theory of happiness. 

A person from an average-sized town leaves everything behind and moves to London, only to find that they are crushed by the loneliness, high costs and stress of the big city life. Someone who achieved sudden wealth buys a big mansion in a gated community, wherein she starts to feel lonely and alienated, and finds herself missing the communal living of her student years. Another takes up an important job at a fancy firm, where the stress and long hours drive them to depression. 

In these examples, the problem is not with the choice itself. Some folks may end up happier moving to London, buying a big mansion or getting the fancy job. The problem is with the process, which is often faulty. All these choices happen to score high on prestige and monetary reward. Sometimes, being unable to identify the predictors of our happiness, we resort to the substitution principle:

If a satisfactory answer to a hard question is not found quickly, System 1 will find a related question that is easier and will answer it. (Kahneman, p. 97)

Hence we unwittingly default to proxies which are easier to measure, such as money or prestige. The question "which job will make me happiest?" becomes "which job will give me the most money or prestige?" Many important dimensions are lost in this conversion. 

The other problem is that we are bad at simulating how our life will actually be like under the new circumstances and how we will feel about it. When we try to simulate the future, we tend to fall on the inside view: we roughly imagine what the future would look like and see what feelings these images evoke in us; then we use these feelings as a cue to our future feelings and satisfaction. This is an understandable heuristic, but it's ineffective. 

Here's a better approach. 

First, you need to test your ability at predicting your happiness. It may help to set up a diary where you try to predict your happiness at different points in time, or conditional on certain events occurring or not, and then rating yourself on the predictions. I may set up a framework for this in a future post. 

Then take a scientific approach. Gather the experiences of others and the results of previous research. Formulate hypotheses, such as 'I would be happier with job X than job Y'. Devise experiments to test them, such as getting internships for X and Y and tracking your satisfaction. Finally, use the results to update your beliefs and formulate better hypotheses. This is how you build a theory of happiness. 

It's true, we can't always afford the whole process. Experiments can be costly, difficult to implement, and ambiguous in their interpretation. For example, if you were unhappy during internship X, is it because you actually don't like the job, or is it because of contingent factors, e.g. you didn't like the company, or the project you worked on was unattractive? 

Nevertheless, I find it useful to keep this in mind as the golden standard of pursuing happiness. And to be conscious of the heuristics I use to approximate it and their limitations. 

Whenever I make plans for the future, I try to at least implement the first step: putting aside easy proxies such as money and prestige, taking the outside view and gathering objective information. This is already a long way from the standard approach of simulating outcomes in my imagination. 

More Reasons to Have Kids

In the previous post I explained what, according to me, is the best reason for why people have kids. There are more explanations of course, and they're not at odds with each other. 

I've been told that these explanations sound cynical. That was not my intention at all. I don't think any of these are intrinsically immoral. And I'm not opposed to having children (I might have them myself someday). 

Interestingly, there might be a social norm against explaining some life choices. We like to pretend that having children is something natural, a basic act that we do out of  'free will', or maybe out of love (which is one of my explanations). In short, it is a 'moral' action: moral in the sense that it has no personal motive. Just like it would be considered rude and cynical to ask someone why they are doing an act of charity (as the question seems to imply that there is an 'ulterior motive' beyond the will to do good) it might be the same with asking people why they procreate.   

I disagree with this view. Everything we do, we do for a reason. As a consequentialist, I (generally) judge actions based on outcomes, not on motives. And I don't think that an action is only moral if the agent doesn't get a payoff. For example, when it comes to charity, a dollar spent out of envy or narcissism is just as good as a dollar spent out of love or altruism or self-sacrifice.  

Anyway, here are the reasons (in no particular order): 

A genuine love and liking for children and the stuff they do.

Securing affection and admiration.

Having someone who will accept one’s love, care and affection. 

Fighting boredom and loneliness, giving meaning to one’s life or relationship. 

To acquire and exercise power. Most folks will never have as much power over another human being as they have over their children. 

To resolve psychological conflicts. Example: some people don’t like how their parents treated them, and they want a do-over.   

Conformism to peer pressure and social norms. Will be stronger in some groups and cultures. 

Rational herding. “Everyone around me is having children, so perhaps I should too, even if I don't fully understand the reasons.”

Regret aversion. “If I don’t have children now, I might regret it later." I expect this to be stronger in women.

Wanting someone to take care of you in old age.

Feel free to add yours in the comments.