I love INFJs, but one thing INFJs in my life do that I still try to deal with is that they tend to assume I don't understand the things they do, and I'm a lost soul that needs to be enlightened.
If it makes you feel any better, I'm an INFJ and I think we all know ourselves better than anyone else knows us; it's pretty arrogant to assume that one knows what's best for someone else, particularly with regard to serious personal choices like having children. I'm with you, by the way, on the no-kids thing.
I chose immortality even though I want neither. With immortality, I could at least see what the future looks like some three hundred years out, might be able to satisfy all my curiosity with regard to the potential outcomes of the human race, whether all those dystopias being imagined now actually come to fruition, etc., etc. It's a thrilling idea, all of our rules being flipped inside-out for better or for worse (but hopefully better).
Nonetheless, I'd hate to outlive my loved ones and would ultimately burn out on being able to do everything I wanted in a way that would eventually become lonely and dissipated. Lack of actual risk would dull the highs I got from zip-lining or whitewater rafting, for example. That rush of adrenaline and the feeling of really being
alive is such an enormous part of my personality; I'm afraid immortality would strip me of it.
That said, I'm so horrified of having children that I still choose immortality, the lesser of two evils.
Seriously. I'm now twenty-six and all my life I've had to defend my choice to remain child-free. When I didn't play with baby dolls as a child, grown adults would ask me why I didn't like babies - only to promptly disregard my answers and insist that I would change my mind with maturity. Now, when nothing has changed at all, I
still get it from people. I would like to imagine that these women feel the way they do because they can't imagine feeling any other way, but it's an audaciously tactless thing to say out loud in an attempt to steer me onto the "right" course.
I can't get behind the whole, "I used to feel like you until Baby X came along," "No one is ever truly ready for children, and you'll feel differently when you have your own," "You don't know what love is until you become a mother" sentiment. It's more than a buzzkill or pet peeve at this point.
If you want to have kids, have them. Don't assume that I should also have them. Likewise, I'm not a smarter, more awesome person for choosing
not to have children - it's just the smarter, more awesome choice for
me. One would think we could leave it at that and all live happily ever after.
Then either be celibate or invent perfect birth control.
This statement strikes me as a little too black and white, very limiting. It's very easy to be sexually active without getting pregnant, thanks to faithful and correct use of birth control. There are choices involved here, ones that don't mandate an either-or decision between abstinence and child-rearing.