Rock-a-bye Really?

I've started to wonder what being sentient really means. As a person. As an agnostic. As a Jets fan...

The things that we want in life, are they derived from tapping into an inner well of needs and desires that defy causation? Are we too overwhelmed by the O2 : CO2 exchanging going on that we absorb some or all of these notions of need and desire from common sentiment? Are we being smart - matching what's available with what's missing from the list of our lives and then cramming it all in, regardless of squareness and circularity?

How do we know that we want things? Like babies. Let's talk about babies. Is it a combination of the congenital and the constructed? Because, really, if you think about it, babies suck away resources, destroy environments (both via global warming and disruption of living room feng shui), contribute to anxiety as they grow and stumble and get slapped by the world - like an incessantly inverting umbrella in a tropical storm-turned-hurricane - and in return they coo and, presumably, take care of us in our infirmity. Is that the trade off? Is that the reason we have babies? Because we're not really in race against extinction here, folks...

So if we'll be financially capable of supporting our damn selves in our infirmity, does that negate the need for children? And more pressingly, does it negate the DESIRE for children?

Are we constantly balancing some whisper from our chromosomes that wends synergistically through our loins to get multiplied by convention against some reasonable rationale for not budding off and jeopardizing our painstakingly accumulated resources? Does being sentient mean that we can override the innate, possibly vestigal elements of being human? Would we want to? Could we reason our way in and out of wanting to? Is that allowed?

I guess, in sum, how do we delineate between what's intrinsically human and what's intensely personal? And why do people have BABIES?!!