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The story
It started with a post reading, “Once you’re past 50, you stop knowing what you’re even living for” — and spiraled into a debate on 5ch’s ‘anything goes’ live discussion board (Nanchan) about how having kids or not shapes the back half of life.
Posters who resented losing their freedom to child-rearing squared off against those dreading loneliness and emptiness in old age — and one self-described childless single with roughly ¥150 million (over $1 million) in assets chimed in with a confession of their own.
What people said
Might hit some people once they're past 40 too
Yeah, that day comes.
Once you get older, change stops happening on its own.
When you're young, stuff around you just keeps changing whether you like it or not, but once you're older you have to actively create change yourself — and you don't have the energy left for that.
If you've got kids, they force change into your life whether you want it or not.
Maybe once you're older they'll reach out to you first.
But even if they don't, you should be the one to call.
Nieces and nephews grow up, get married, and move out too, you know
Wanting freedom is a young person's thing.
Once you're older, freedom loses its appeal.
Honestly, it's actually pretty fun
Sorry, but overall, childless people just seem to have less fulfilling lives than people raising kids
You really know that many childless people over 50?
What kind of world are you living in?
Childless 50-somethings are gonna become more common once the 'yutori' generation (Japan's relaxed-education cohort) hits that age
Well, I'm over 40, so
of course I know a few people in their 50s.
I mean, if you're a normal working adult, isn't it pretty normal to know a handful of people like that anyway?
Only thing I've got is money, for what it's worth.
About ¥150 million.
No kids to leave it to, so yeah, there's an emptiness to it.
Guess I'll just live it up however I want with this cash.
Money you earned just to hand over in taxes, lol
Isn't it more like you've got assets, but also liabilities?
As an individual, that's the right call.
Pouring your resources into other people to find your worth is just proof you're empty inside
Marriage = happiness is an outdated equation.
Or rather, marriage itself might make you happy, but the kind of marriage a 'chii-gyuu' (this board's self-deprecating term for a dorky, unremarkable-looking guy) can actually land is just a 'weak man's marriage' — so yeah, staying single starts looking better.
And from the women's side, it's like this too
If you refuse to compromise and keep aiming higher, I think you'll just be miserable forever
Both sides thinking 'I didn't want to marry someone like this' while compromising, living together around the clock in a tense, bickering household — and then having a kid born into that kind of family?
What's happy about that, lol
It's just history repeating itself
If you compromise, it won't be tense
It will be, it's full of stress
Compromising by just not getting married is the easy way
That mentality is baffling
It's because you don't actually have kids.
Probably no wife either
One thing's for sure, that's not something a happy person would do
or are they gonna become an even worse 'ice age' generation (Japan's infamous lost-generation of job seekers)?
https://tadaup.jp/8rDSmaKU.jpeg
but would my own kid actually seem cute to me?
Depends on the person.
If it worked that way for everyone, child abuse wouldn't happen
For most people, yeah
It's fine to stay bad with kids.
Once you get older, you stop even having emotional reactions like 'not good with this' or 'this is hard.'
All that's left is emptiness that just keeps lingering.
The depression rate among elderly people living alone is seriously high, after all.
Background and Key Points
5ch is Japan’s largest anonymous message-board network, the descendant of the notorious 2channel, and Nanchan is one of its “live” boards where fast-moving, throwaway threads like this one flare up and vanish within hours. The demographic backdrop is concrete, not abstract: Japan’s total fertility rate has sat around 1.2 for years, the lifetime unmarried rate has climbed sharply since the 1990s, and “kodokushi” — dying alone and being found much later — is a recognized enough phenomenon that the health ministry and local governments track it. The “yutori” generation referenced in the thread means people educated under Japan’s relaxed, pressure-reduced curriculum (roughly those born 1987–2004), now aging into their 40s in large numbers without having married or had children, which is why posters expect childless 50-somethings to become far more common.
The thread doesn’t really split on whether kids are good or bad in the abstract — everyone agrees raising them costs freedom and money. The actual fault line is whether that trade buys insurance against the specific dread of a static, emotionally flat old age, versus whether a mediocre “compromise” marriage just imports fresh misery into the household and reproduces the same unhappiness in a second generation.
What the thread skates past is the money side of its own ¥150 million example: Japan taxes inheritances steeply, up to 55% at the top bracket, and an estate with no legal heir and no will can ultimately escheat to the state — a mundane bureaucratic fact behind the poster’s throwaway “guess I’ll just spend it,” not a purely emotional choice.
*This article is excerpted and summarized from the 5ch (Nanchan) thread “People Without Kids Are Screwed in Life”.
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