psychologically damaging mammals to the point where they dont wanna have kids is quite an achievement
and people say the soft sciences don’t matter…
I get that this is a catchy one liner but it always felt like reactionary bullshit. In fact I don’t think you need to psychologically damage people a lot at all for them to not want kids.
Personally I just straight up don’t want to, it isn’t about the money, it isn’t (at least not exclusively) about climate change, it just does not interest me at all.
We are just animals, and having children should be more desired.
I mean isn’t it just as reactionary to suppose people “just don’t want to do it”, I.e. that there is some non-material factor influencing human behaviour?
How is saying individuals have preferences about living their life reactionary? The reactionary part here is psychoanalyzing people that don’t want kids and trying to fix it, maybe just leave them be? There are a lot of people that would like to have kids in better material conditions and will explicitly tell you that in pretty much those words, why not just take people at their word when they say they don’t want kids?
If you did the same kind of psychoanalyzing to queer people and try to adjust their material conditions so they stop being queer you’d be called out for it but this is somehow fine.
No, I’m saying that nothing “just is”, and it’s not wrong to not want kids, but there are reasons behind not wanting kids, whether or not someone is readily able to see them is another thing entirely.
Sure, there are also reasons for why some people don’t like the taste of beer, doesn’t mean we have to hem and haw about it endlessly.
I think a lot of it is a result of density and perceived population size. If you’re used to seeing a lot of people around you in a small area, you’re not going to have the same desire to make more, maybe because it feels close to carrying capacity, or just doesn’t seem necessary.
Another factor is desire for uniqueness. The more people that are out there, the less certain you can be of having a special, meaningful life that’s not just a rerun of everyone else’s, and the more you feel like you’re in competition with the rest of everyone.
And then there’s just some people that don’t particularly gravitate towards parenthood, and in today’s age there isn’t the same social pressure bending people to have kids against what their will would otherwise be. And fewer accidental pregnancies, and more to do with your own life than just replicate more lives.
All these factors point to a human population that will decrease maybe rather rapidly in the second half of the 21st century. And this will continue until we fix the problems and reach an equilibrium, or face whatever the alternative prospect holds.
All these factors point to a human population that will decrease maybe rather rapidly in the second half of the 21st century. And this will continue until we fix the problems and reach an equilibrium, or face whatever the alternative prospect holds.
Maybe this is fine actually? Why should the human population increase indefinitely? I think a healthy, well governed world society could work with 1, 2, 5 or 10 billion people alive, the only reason governments want more kids today is because the global market economy is a ponzi scheme that can’t survive without an ever increasing pool of workers.
Yes, that was the assumption. Maybe if they fall too sharply it will cause problems, but a prolonged TFR of 1.5-1.8 is nothing to be concerned about.
We had enough people 100 years ago or 200 years ago or even 500 years ago, it’s not like you could have looked at the world back then and decided that it really needed 4x as many humans in it.
There’s a difference between having continuity as a species and pursuing exponential growth as a species, though the immediate physical and localized means are the same.
I think its that in an individualist schema children are a cost not a benefit. Obvs they have a sentimental value once you’ve had them but your life will be significantly more stressful, expensive and overwhelming and you get no reward besides hopefully liking the child (which not all parents do). You could save the effort and have someone you like around by making a friend.
In a world where children were reared socially and where their surplus labour was enjoyed socially we’d again be individually incentivised to have more children. But when the (material) costs of reproduction are a burden on individuals and nuclear families and the (material) rewards are primarily siphoned by the parasite class, it is a bad deal and the amazing thing is the desire is strong enough despite that that as many people have kids as do.
Wow who thought no hope for the future would lead to people not wanting kids.
Although in my case I’ve never wanted kids.
i used to say i wanted 5 kids when i was young… luckily i paused when the time came when that was a real possibility because i felt i was too damn unstable, and as i got older i started feeling like bringing a kid into this world just seems so reckless. i know it isn’t exactly… people have had kids in terrible dark times obviously or we wouldn’t be here today, but i couldn’t in good conscience. now i’m too old for it to be much of a question anymore, but i’m fine with it.
people have had kids in terrible dark times obviously
Not sure that’s an apt comparison… I’m not an anthropologist, but I cant help but think we are facing a much different future than any past generation could have anticipated for their own children. It’s hard for me to support the idea of bringing children into a world barrelling towards wide spread food and water scarcity… A world where we are placating to billionaires who are mentally younger than the kids they are having… A world where we’ve decided that protecting shareholder value is more important than protecting those same children from preventable harm.
Sorry for the the pessimistic attitude, I guess I’m proving what was already said about having no hope for the future.
What I really meant is people will have kids regardless of the situation because for some people it’s not something they think about. Even when the bubonic plague was wiping out everyone people still had children. There’s always going to be some people who either have more optimism or just don’t think about it at all.
Fair enough, sorry if that came across strong. I definitely get your point.
Not thinking about it at all makes the most sense to me.
The ignorance to the world around them, or the ignorance to how babies are made. Fuck, or both…
i have some sense that with higher child mortality back in the day they wouldn’t have thought about it the same way. there’s an inevitability to sickness when you haven’t invented germ theory of disease, but now we ought to know better and the capitalist covid response was what it was.
On a less dire note, maybe fertility dropping leads to something like a population equilibrium rather than completely overshooting our habitats’ carrying capacity.
Yeah that’s a valid point. I know people who are having s real tough time conceiving, so I’m sure that plays a part in the declining birth rates too.
To your point, it would be great if that was an inadvertent positive tho…
there’s twice as many of us as there were 50 years ago, i think we can handle a quarter of a birth per adult for a while without any biological problems.
i see no imperative to have 8 billion rather than 4 billion or any other amount, just don’t do genocide and eugenics etc.
Too late. I have invented eugenocide. And it’s inevitable due to a cluster of subreddits I’ve created.
By fertility here I mean how many children people end up having, not their medical status.
But yeah that’s a thing too, especially if people are trying for children later in life.
Even in the dark times of the past there was a hope that the future might not be so bad. People have no hope that the future will be good anymore.
I have one hope for the future
Yeah neither of us ever really wanted any to begin with, but even if we did, how the fuck could we justify bringing someone new into this world?
: “The human project ends with me! Nothing personal, but I just looooove money! What’s the point of existence if I’m not around to have sex with my pile of money? We will go extinct, and it’ll be worth it for my money!”
: “Huh, why does no one want to have kids? Sure, I don’t need humans anymore, but why?”
Part of me thinks the despair is also the point - old money knew they needed to keep populations up to keep their fortunes going.
New tech bro oligarch money believe they need to kill people off to protect their dragon hoards and set up their own little Ayn Rand/Bioshock fantasy cities run by AI Nazis, if you go over literally anything Peter Thiel/Bezos/Musk etc have written about.
Shit like this is why revolutionary optimism is important.
Meanwhile two of my partners friends are just going baby crazy. good timing y’all!
One of them, he and his partner i think she said met a month ago or something ridiculous? married and trying for a kid
One of them, he and his partner i think she said met a month ago or something ridiculous? married and trying for a kid
Oh boy, those poor kids
Knew a guy that met a woman who was aggressively Catholic and didn’t believe in sex before marriage so he proposed after a month. Think they got up to at least 3.
This is how 99% of mormon marriages happen
There are two seemingly contradictory explanations for collapse in fertility rates that I commonly see:
- That having kids is financially infeasible for many more households
- That economic prosperity and education lead to the collapse of fertility
But I think what squares the circle is that the second statement is actually describing societies with more developed capitalism, and that the seeming extra prosperity has come from cannibalizing social reproduction in pursuit of more intensive labor productivity. It’s how you can get a society where there is relative material abundance, but no spare time or cash to raise your kids.
Fertility rates track the “one map” pretty closely, and I don’t think that’s a coincidence. And the fact that China has now joined that group might warrant some uncomfortable reflection on our part about the trajectory their society is taking.
Fertility rates track the “one map” pretty closely
Maybe 15 or 20 years ago, but so much anymore. Latin America and South and Southeast Asia have approached 2.0 pretty quickly.
There are 25 countries left with a TFR over 4.0, and 2 of them are outside Africa. Those two are the most war-torn countries in Asia.
But I think what squares the circle is that the second statement is actually describing societies with more developed capitalism, and that the seeming extra prosperity has come from cannibalizing social reproduction in pursuit of more intensive labor productivity. It’s how you can get a society where there is relative material abundance, but no spare time or cash to raise your kids.
ding ding ding
this is the conclusion Marxist feminists were coming to in the 70s and 80s while studying the capitalization of reproductive labor
I think any trajectory that China is going through 1) must acknowledge your point that if the square is circled thusly then it follows that the more socialized abundance wouldn’t ping the birthrates as intensely
But 2) the trajectory goes back a bunch further than the sensibilities than citizens of the one map readily conceptualize. So the weight of history probably does weird things to the data that I don’t know about
Below replacement but yet there’s still kids no one cares about who needs a loving home.
Sitting at the breakfast table reading the newspaper (I had to switch to the paper because the internet is full of pictures of dead kids my government helped kill) about how tick populations are out of control from climate change and are drinking animals to death,
“You know honey, I think now’s a great time for us to have children.”
Just looking at the people I know, I’m surprised the fertility rate is still above 1 (half of replacement rate).
Very few have children, most aren’t in stable relationships, many of the couples don’t want children.
Yeah of the couples I know probably less than half want children and of those that do less than half are financially stable enough to do so
Interesting! Of the couples I know, it’s kind of the opposite. They’ve all decided to have children in the past ~5 years. There’s one couple that I know that is planning for no children, everyone else either already has kids or is actively trying. I find it very weird and try not to talk about it very much with people
On some level I know those couples exist but they are somehow mostly absent from my social circle.
There might also be a bit of a selection bias since my of the people I know form my parents generation are the parents of my friends. And obviously they have children
Billionaires must repopulate the earth as ayn rand intended
Atlas Shagged
is doing his best
Have we tried banning TikTok or Social media for under 16s? Have we tried more austerity?
How about banning porn and demonizing everyone who isn’t straight, white, and (the right kind of) Christian?
