Eleven weeks ago I wrote a column about my experience of becoming a dad. I also promised to never write another "parenthood" piece again, on the basis that prior to becoming a parent, the mere mention of babies in newsprint was guaranteed to make me vomit all over the page in protest, paying special attention to the author's byline photo.

I held true to that promise. Really I did. And then a few weeks later I wrote an article on becoming jaded with popular culture, in which I had the temerity to mention parenthood again. Briefly, and only in passing – but boy did some readers go for me in the comments section.

"Oh Brooker, you smug, simpering, self-satisfied, mimsy, middle-class, latte-sipping, fleece-wearing, washed-up, shark-jumping, progeny-spawning embarrassment. I remember way back when you used to be relevant. When you wrote those columns slagging off reality show contestants. Remember those rebellious glory days? You said Anton du Beke looks like a man who jizzes sherbet or something and it was hilarious. Now look at you. You've become everything you used to criticise – literally everything. AND you've grown your hair a bit: the ultimate betrayal*. You've let yourself down, but worse than that, you've let me down – me, your cherished reader: the single most important person in your life."

I hereby resign from whatever contest of cultural significance these keyboard-bothering nincompoops think they're conducting. The key point these wailing children fail to appreciate is that becoming less relevant is my inevitable destiny. It's their destiny too, but they're way too full of snot and pep to notice. The real tragedy is not that I'm doomed to fade, but that I'm doomed to fade just to make room for these pricks.

Well prick away, cocksure Sharpington Sharp, because one day, you'll be so irrelevant you'll actually stop breathing. Your body will decompose to a grey, pulpy mulch that will fertilise the soil the next generation will nonchalantly trample over on its way to the hologram shop. And that's how I picture you when I read your comments – as a shovelful-of-putrefied-matter-to-be making the very least of its brief window of consciousness. Under those circumstances, your level of snark merely strikes me as tragicomic.

All of which is a longwinded and possibly over-defensive way of saying I'm going to mention babies again. And again and again and again. Look, I'm mentioning them now: BABIES. I'll mention them as often as I like. In fact I might ask them to print this entire column in a special Winnie-the-Pooh font, with a photograph of a mobile, just to make it more offputting to the cool kids.

A common theme in the comments expressing dismay at my shameful acceptance of fatherhood is that people go all sappy when they have a baby; ergo, every word I wrote from this point on would be shot through with gooey, complacent sentiment. I don't understand that. I don't understand why everyone doesn't gain an additional nine layers of rage the nanosecond they become a parent. There's the sleep deprivation and the stress, of course, but that's largely offset by the underlying sense of delight that babies radioactively plant in their parents' heads in a cunning bid to stop them murdering them. It's the rest of the world that's the problem. When you're suddenly tasked with steering a defenceless, vulnerable creature through life, the state of the planet instantly feels like less of a wearying joke and more of an outrageous affront to human decency. The world has slightly sharper edges than before.

Still, it's probably best not to succumb to this over-protective mindset, in case you turn into Sting and accidentally write the anti-nuclear-holocaust song Russians. "How can I save my little boy from Oppenheimer's deadly toy?" he sang, doubtless in the grip of new dadhood. "Believe me when I say to you, I hope the Russians love their children too." Nothing wrong with the sentiment, but no one ever danced to it at their wedding.

But I guess Sting wrote that because his son was precious to him. And I can relate to that now, just as I now understand why parents think their kids are unique and wonderful geniuses. It's simple: for the first six weeks or so, a baby is effectively little more than a screaming pet rock. It can't even hold its own head up, so any expectation you had regarding your child's abilities is instantly reset to zero. You get so accustomed to it doing nothing but yelling and defecating, the moment it does anything new – smiling or batting vaguely at an object – it's a miracle, like a chair has learned to tap-dance. How clever, you think, forgetting that "batting vaguely at an object" is hardly worth mentioning on a CV. All your baby has actually done – in geek terms – is receive the latest OS update, which fixes a few bugs (it goes cross-eyed less often), clears up some performance issues (it feeds more efficiently), and enables new features (object-batting now included).

Of course, everyone on the planet gets the same OS updates, at regular intervals, for their entire lives. Before long, he'll get the crawling update. The talking update. The walking update. And so on. Personally, I downloaded all of those years ago. I'm way ahead of the little idiot. Way ahead. I've already got the hair-greying update, and am hoping to collect the complete set of related physical "improvements", such as weaker eyesight and sagging flesh. Eventually, in a glorious climax, I guess I'll install and run the "afterlife" routine, encountering the inevitable fatal system error halfway through. Unless by then they've ironed out that final, unfortunate, inescapable glitch.

*Not that you'd know I'd grown my hair a bit from my obnoxious byline photo, which dates from 2006 and is a constant source of shame.