Birth rates have dropped 20% since 2007. I don’t think we ever came back from the '08 crash. It’s just been smoke and mirrors.
I decided not to have kids after listening to literally everyone who had kids describe their experiences and not assuming they were weak, stupid or lying.
even if my own experiences as a child didn’t put me off forcing someone else to exist, hearing parents talk makes it completely baffling why anyone with a choice would choose to do that to themselves.
You literally cannot imagine the doses of oxytocin and dopamine when your kid looks you in the eyes and smiles for the first time. All the wonderful moments are like a goddamn fix.
It’s literally the only reason (most) parents don’t murder their kids when they’re being shitty little assholes.
But seriously, you simply don’t realize how heady a hit of emotional bonding-feel good cocktail it is until it happens to you.
And this is coming from someone who spent half the 90s candy flipping.
I literally never hear anything good about it.
It’s utterly exhausting and absolutely not something anyone should do without a support network, but it’s also the single most rewarding experience in my life. Nothing comes close. Making my child laugh for the first time was better than any drug I’ve ever done. But unless you’re in a good place mentally, socially, financially, don’t.
The brain chemicals hit so good
I could just do drugs
So true, honestly
Oh, I don’t know. I love having kids. It can be a lot, but nothing really touches the feeling of when you come home from work and they all rush to see you. I could see it not being for everyone, though.
There are valid reasons in the comments here, but a lot of people I talk to genuinely are interested in being parents, but don’t have the funds to even provide for themselves. It’s entirely about the money. Give people money and they will have kids. It isn’t hard.
Elon Musk: NO WAGES JUST BABIES
There’s no reason to believe this. You literally cannot pay people to have kids. theres no evidence that this would work on a large scale. when women have more education and freedom they choose to have less kids its that simple. most afab people simply dont want to be broodmares pumping out 2.5 kids.
I didn’t mean this in a transactional sense. I agree you cannot pay people to have kids and I agree that, with reproductive freedom and personal autonomy as an option, many fewer afab people will have kids than the historical average.
My observation is that it isn’t uncommon for single people and couples capable of becoming pregnant to express a desire to have children, but have reservations that are purely financial.
i love you you fully concede your point right? and then say “oh well people ive talked to say this”. like what am i supposed to say? what do you want me to say here? im too autistic for this response. im not being sarcastic im being sincere. im just too burnt out to even continue this weird neurotypical politeness game that makes no sense. you give me a personal anecdote that goes against all available evidence. im too fucking autistic i wish people just communicated in ways that made sense.
Oh you want babies? Well I want trains.
I propose a prisoner exchange.
People don’t talk enough about how having children is a privilege that the rich enjoy. Yes, you can have kids and be poor (and many do, no hate to our parent comrades), but it costs so much money to have children and if you do it whilst being poor you have to sacrifice so much that would be absolutely nothing to a rich family.
And then rich parents do shit like end pandemic protections because they’re sick of their kids being at home all the time
Anyone else remember how “having kids you can’t afford” was apparently the root of all social ills for several decades?
I remember that all over the TV.
“Oh you can’t afford it” " oh you don’t have time between your 2 jobs" “Oh you don’t have a a big enough space” " then don’t have kids"x3 So all of us growing said yeah legit Now they all surprise pikachu face.
Seeing a family with three kids is such an insane flex
good, fewer first worlders is probably the best thing possible for the climate
You caused me to look up per capita emissions and… well, the scale alone is rather horrifying.
It looks like North Americans emit almost 10x as much per capita as their neighbors in South America. And this is territorial emissions, meaning it doesn’t count emissions involved in the manufacturing of imported goods. (I’m sure if you shifted the emissions accounting to the point of consumption then China would look waaay better.)
Yep, that’s my reasoning. Sure, the idea of an individual carbon footprint is almost entirely propaganda to keep people from executing fossil fuel executives in the streets, but increasing your emissions by ~50% per kid seems like a big enough difference to matter.
That and not wanting to bring a child into a country that is on a perpetual slope towards ever-greater fascism.
Honestly first-worlders who gripe about carbon footprints being bullshit can be easily dismissed as idiots who don’t grasp the scale of the problem. Their personal lifestyle will have to change massively. A single cross-country flight emits more carbon than citizens of some poor countries emit in an entire year.
I want kids. Badly. However, I’m sterile. The state itself will also never let me adopt children. On top of that, my family could never afford it. Like, what the fuck else do you want from me, Elon?
Wait Why are you not allowed to adopt children?
I’m a polyamorous transbian that has 2 wives. You couldn’t find anyone in the state that would dare allow me to adopt a child.
Oh
Trans probably
I decided against having children because of the fear of bringing more children into a world that’s progressively growing more unstable due to climate change.
This. It’s becoming more and more impossible to live a decent life even within the imperial core and nothing points to that changing anytime ever, so having children seems like a pretty damn selfish and/or idiotic idea.
It’s a shame too, because I like children and really think there should be more inter-generational contact between people in different stages of their lives.
Also even if society wasn’t falling off a fucking cliff within the next fifty years, I wouldn’t really want to have children in a fortnite/YouTube kids/tiktok world either. Just fully blasting developing brains with skinner boxes and max engagement at all times isn’t fucking cool or good. Just let them watch sesame Street.
Besides being gay myself, I saw what was coming growing up and thought it would be especially cruel to raise someone in a doomed world and decreasing quality of life. I never had any desire of have kids.
Am childless, having a vasectomy in 5 days
Honestly I’ve watched my brother and his wife raise a kid for 7 years and another for 2, and it’s stressed them the absolute fuck out. Totally changed them. I also only know only maybe 3 or 4 people who have a good relationship with their parents. I have a bad one with my own mom. Just seems like you could put in all this effort, stress yourself out every single day for a long time, eliminate any personal time for yourself, have no guarantee that they won’t rely on you for even longer (like my alcoholic sister at 34 still living with my mom), they will probably turn out politically opposite to you (so in my case a liberal or fascist), and not to mention how expensive it would be + by the time they’re old enough to have their own lives, the world will be even more on fire and unlivable. I just do not see the upside
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it’s really not catastrophic for humanity
It’s already insufficient for maintaining population in half of the world and keeps falling further everywhere. Any socialist project would be forced to confront this issue or collapse in the long term. Capitalism is definitely choosing collapse.
Do we even need to maintain current population? Especially in the “half of the world” where it’s declining? Not that I’m Malthusian, I think how society is organized is massively more important than its population, but a little gradual decrease in the “west” seems neutral to positive overall
Demographic collapse in the West would be a net good, because it would destroy Western military capabilities, but overall - no. Society should be able to maintain stable population. Population decline is hard to stop at ‘optimal’ level, and once population have declined below some level, complex economic and societal organization becomes too hard to maintain.
Also, another half of the world is going in the same direction, just several decades later. Iran, for example, has already birth rates below replacement rate. In fact, we can expect Earth’s population to start declining in 10-20 years, and this decline would be accelerating.
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If we manage to stabilise world population at mid 70s level, it would be a great success TBH. Birth rate decline is accelerating and majority of population would be old people, who are able to work much less and require a lot more care, so the raw labour power would be much smaller. I bet all of the West would introduce euthanasia to deal with it.
Also, capitalism is working like shit, when the population is not growing, and if it begins to decline, it will crap itself much more than now, and it will accelerate decline even more, until this positive feedback results in either communism or agrarian traditionalism, and the latter currently seems more likely.
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And the other half of the world is meeting the gap.
It wouldn’t for much longer, birth rates there decline too.
Under current conditions, continual population growth will lead to collapse at some point.
Yeah, but we are going to switch to population decline in 10-20 years.
For example, projecting the 1995 global fertility rate out to 2150 results in a human population of ~250 billion.
We already have smaller global fertility rate and it continues to decline. Linear extrapolation and its consequences and so on.
I think it’s an issue that would be addressed by socialism regardless.
Soviet Union and other socialist countries had only partial solution. In fact, we can look at Korea with DPRK having a 1.9 fertility rate (and this is already less than replacement rate) and RoK with 0.7 fertility rate (which is a complete disaster long term, and it keeps declining).
I don’t think we ever came back from the '08 crash.
Job prospects have been about the same since the 08 crash: no one is hiring.
Not to mention wages have been going downward since the 80s
The children must be born. The children yearn for the
I wouldn’t want kids in this economy either.
