Funny, I just wrapped a blog post about this: https://green.spacedino.net/i-dont-worry-about-population-de...
Good presentation by the author that reaffirms my own opinions about the topic, specifically that while it sucks and cripples the social welfare programs our (deceased) elders built on the theory of continued population and productivity growth, it's also an issue we can fix with coordination between powers and workers. It's about building a new environment that puts families, rather than employers, first, and encouraging participation in the creation and maintenance of that environment by everyone regardless of age or demographic. The return of third places, social events, volunteerism, clubs, transit, public gatherings, stay-at-home parents, and more.
And as I've seen others point out in regard to the biological procreation imperative, we as a species are wired to breed. For all the whining from puritans about pornography, I'm of the opinion that its proliferation and normalization in fact reflects a deeply-held urge of humanity to have more time to have sex and live authentically again, whatever that may look like to the individual or family unit. Humans clearly want sex, and families, and time off, but the current global civilizational model is work > all, and thus families have taken a backseat to GDP growth at all costs.
I'm a single, gay man. During two of my last major existential crises, for about two weeks following, I noticed a marked turn of my thoughts and feelings towards having (biological) children. Stuff like, "If I'd had a kid at such-and-such age, how old would they be now?", "How would I manage if a child was suddenly in my life?", and "Oh god, my line stops with me panic". For a number of reasons, I am extremely unlikely to ever have kids; it would take a change in my prospects so massive that I can't really conceive of it. For this reason, I have come to feel that there may be a common (often irrational) biological impulse to procreate.
But now that I get to the bottom of my message, it occurs to me that it might be tangential, since you're talking about sex, which is related to but encompasses a far larger category of activity than just procreation. Speaking through my lgbt lens (and again, probably tangentially) this false conflation creates at least the dual issues of the incorrect ideas that sex should only be for procreation, as well as the the incorrect idea that queer people can't (or shouldn't) be parents. Here's hoping that both get nixed as we rethink the role of sex, and the importance of family, in society.
Just some rambling, don't mind me.
For what it's worth, I'm also a single gay man and think similarly at times about the path not taken, and why I chose not to adopt as I had originally planned in my 20s. It sucks, but I'm content with being the cool Uncle to my niblings and providing external support to my siblings as needed. Society needs more than just parents in order for children to thrive, and I believe queer folk are ideally suited to fill in a lot of those roles.
As for my comments on sex specifically, I'll admit I'm speaking through the perspective of someone who A) doesn't have it in order to procreate, and B) has a healthier relationship with it than many of my own peers might. It's not solely an act of procreation or hedonism, but it can fill both roles - though I will only ever know it from the perspective of pleasure alone.
I appreciate you sharing your thoughts like that. Thank you.
Disclaimer: my thought process tends to be somewhat autistic, I don’t mean any offense. As a non gay man I am just curious to hear your perspective.
From a strictly biological perspective, I think it could be argued that gay “sex” isn’t actually sex. Like, what makes it sex? Is it sex for pleasure? Or is it something adjacent to sex? That has some commonalities with sex, but isn’t actually sex. Like there is a part of sex missing from the equation. Why do we still call it sex?
I kind of assume it’s the kind of thing hardly anyone thinks about and the notion of thinking about it will just make everyone angry. Sorry!
In society an affair is still an affair even if no PV intercourse occurred. Sex comes under the category of “I’ll know it when I see it” / “just understood” things most humans do not realize has very fuzzy edges. The narrow definition is, from the autism perspective, one of the many useless definitions. You will be better served by (yet another) exhaustive list of edge cases.
Not the person you're asking, but I'm of the impression that colloquially, the verb "sex" includes more than strictly the traditional historical definition. I'll refrain from getting into specific details here, but I think the answer to this question is that many people use words in a manner that diverges from literal definitions.
There's a concept in linguistics that language is constantly evolving. As someone on the spectrum myself, with a tendency towards systemizing the world around me, I understand how frustrating this can feel. A particularly excruciating example is the transition of the intended meaning of "literally" to increasingly mean "figuratively", particularly in social contexts. Makes me want to tear the skin off my face, lol.
While this isn't strictly relegated to social concepts, I understand how frustrating it can be to struggle to navigate this phenomenon in social contexts and be misinterpreted as a bad faith actor.
At the end of the day, I try to deal with it by accepting that not everyone else experiences the world the way I do, and that it's as unfair for me to expect everyone else to modify the way they perceive, process, and utilize information (including language) to accommodate my idiosyncrasies.
Thanks for the reply. I do have similar impedance mismatches with the social consensus in a lot of areas. In everyday life I basically do what you are suggesting, but internally I end up having thoughts like this that I typically only feel safe sharing non-anonymously with people who are close.
I do sometimes wonder whether mass education and extensive media exposure from childhood have essentially brainwashed all but the most stubborn-minded of us, who are then labeled “autistic”.
On the topic, if we did take a strict definition of sex, this seems like a fruitful angle of attack for traditionalists. Like, today gay men are regarded as having lots and lots of sex, which is awesome. But if you take this other perspective, most of them are virgins, which is lame. I wonder why the traditionalists/far right haven’t taken this propaganda approach…
> internally I end up having thoughts like this that I typically only feel safe sharing non-anonymously with people who are close.
Ever tried flipping the lid on this? You'd start opening up a lot of people. Those who would try to use that against you or judge have no relevance since they are not close anyway.
> why the traditionalists/far right haven’t taken this propaganda approach ...
they have little, low quality sex and any debate about it would force them to face this, even though it barely matters to them but admitting weakness with something so brutally natural is way above their heads.
if they didn't "make" their partner orgasm, ever, are they real men or gay men in disguise? (their thoughts, not mine, I think they are gay for other reasons)
it's similar to how young people used to or still do laugh about older men needing Viagra.
b) traditionalists and far right have build a merry go round in a dead end, "Sackgasse" in German.
it's a top down dogma.
they cannot have arguments that extend established ways of reasoning before their kind has engineered context and research within which their reasoning follows proper logic (see Quillete (don't) for lots of examples, or rationalists and autistic people easily running with the magic money herd).
they end up having to face the secret life's and thoughts of their partners, realizing they were actively kept in line so that their superiors and peers can reign freely vs having to compete with them, which would extend their minds, freedom and literal happiness.
“they have little, low quality sex”
This is funny to mention, because studies on sex life show the opposite: https://www.peterhaas.org/why-church-attendees-have-the-best...
Your source is incredibly biased.
Here's a source that's less biased that your source cites: http://www.slate.com/blogs/xx_factor/2013/07/19/the_family_r...
[dead]
there's too many good licks in this one.
the issue is, of course, the lying:
from the article:
> We Don’t Participate in Pre-marital or Extra-marital Sex
Yeah, people say that a lot but if you know church people, you know that they are, on average, pretty much like all the other liars.
Except they might hope to get punished for their sins, which does make for some nice and regular kinky evenings, I guess, but that would only be true for people further to the right of the bell curve, if you believe.
Also: the suspense and excitement in fantasies definitely improves the experience. And living free of bullshit other than the classics in the Bible and the consequences of a virtuous and communal life don't sound too bad of a foreplay at all.
No offense, but I'm not particularly interested in helping wargame propaganda strategies for either side of culture war debates. I'm not particularly interested in seeing culture zealots succeed at dehumanizing people, regardless of alignment.
Edit: I understand you see the topic of discussion as an abstract strategic question. I don't, and I'm not particularly interested in embracing that framing. We seem to have different fundamental values and framing here and I'm unsure of whether it's productive for me to advocate my framing, when you may not be particularly interested in embracing my framing either. I certainly have no right to demand you must accept my framing, but if we've reached a values/framing-based impass here, then I sincerely wish you all the best in life, but I will respectfully decline to engage further - it doesn't seem productive for either of us to continue if we both come from frameworks that are mutually incompatible with one another.
Well I don’t think any influential people from any political jostling group are reading all comments on hacker news, so I doubt we are helping to war game anything.
Your second paragraph seems like ad hominem? Or are you suggesting that homosexuality emerges from lived experience, and therefore I should relate? I am confused.
I don’t really have a dog in the gay fight. The longstanding cultural view in the west going back a very long time was that it is a choice. Some political people today retain that view. The modern view is that it isn’t a choice. Some political people today hold that view. I just look at the sides in a detached game theoretic way and it just seems like the red team has a move they haven’t played.
Is that bad? I do understand not wanting to go there mentally, since it is definitely hard to hold views apart from most of society, even if the view is “things are less clear than what everyone thinks they are”. I think humans generally seem to have some preprocessing that drops view candidates that would put them in that position.
[dead]
I assure you, your thoughts on this are not unique or something hardly anyone thinks about, they're just not well reasoned. People have sex for a lot of reasons, and having children is, proportionally, almost never the primary driver. Sex is not the act of fertilization of an ovum by a sperm. If it was, we would call IVR 'sex', which obviously nobody does.
I never said sex was the act of fertilization, you are putting words in my mouth. I also never said anything about recreational sex, I of course agree that exists and is sex. You seem to be disagreeing while saying a bunch of things I agree with.
> I'm content with being the cool Uncle to my niblings and providing external support to my siblings as needed.
For what is worth, I remember when being a kid such uncles were superimportant to me and I remember them fondly.
> During two of my last major existential crises, for about two weeks following, I noticed a marked turn of my thoughts and feelings towards having (biological) children.
I have thought about this a lot over the years and your comment only enforces my opinion: we think more about procreation and having children when we are in more survivally stressful situation. That's why developed societies have less children and poor people have more: rich people or people with enough wealth to live comfortably don't have a lot of children because they don't face death every day and don't feel the need to spread their genes.
Not minded at all - I thought that was an introspective and interesting comment; especially as someone who doesn’t really want kids, but also isn’t sure, but is also aging out of that period of his life.
Sex is for procreation; even when done for sport, the biological studies show that changes happen hormonally that increase the chances of reproduction. Ergo, even when you don’t think sex is for reproduction, nature made it so that it is.
This is a strange take.
Sex is - barring IVF - required for procreation. But saying that sex has a purpose implies a creator. And once you require a creator then you're off in the land of theology and biological studies take a back seat.
This is a strange take, evolution resulted in sex as the means to creating the next set of offspring.
Evolution is a process. It can't assign a purpose to anything, because "purpose" doesn't exist outside the minds of people, similar to "justice" and "hope."
The "purpose" of sex is whatever we choose it to be.
The fertility rate is falling everywhere, even countries that have extensive childcare and maternity/paternity leave. Sweden grants 68 weeks of shared parental leave and their TFR is at 1.45.
There is nothing authentic about porn, what a strange comment. Sure, it hacks the reward system of the brain in the same way that a slot machine does, but this does absolutely nothing to promote families.
> There is nothing authentic about porn, what a strange comment. Sure, it hacks the reward system of the brain in the same way that a slot machine does, but this does absolutely nothing to promote families.
Disagree on both. Pornography, like any media, has a multitude of styles and types that can evoke different sets of emotions from the viewer. It's an art form that speaks uniquely to each individual, and I've found it to be a healthy way to explore my own interests as well as to connect with potential partners on shared interests. It's also seen plenty of use by married couples as inspiration or "mental lubricant", promoting intercourse (and raising the chances of procreation) in the process. While it's true that not everybody uses it in such healthy ways, and it's also true that some smut is incredibly toxic (particularly to the uneducated/ill-informed), on the whole it's an inseparable part of the human experience we'd do well to utilize for the art and tool it is instead of repressing it out of some misguided notion of subjective purity.
This is probably a common take by someone with survivor bias though.
Days show porn use and fertility rate negatively correlate. Makes sense from first order effects researchers see on ED rates, etc.
That's lazy reasoning. You can invert the cause and effect and it still makes perfect sense. In fact I'd say that's the more plausible theory. That people experiencing dissatisfaction for whatever reason are more likely to seek it out.
It’s also lazy reasoning to ignore all the self surveys of the youth though, the majority of them are saying it is harmful for their views of the other sex. You can decide not to believe a majority of people if you want, but rationalist assume the data is true.
You just put words in my mouth by inventing that scenario. I responded to what you wrote, not to some hypothetical that you didn't write.
> rationalist assume the data is true.
That is an utterly absurd statement. There is nothing rational about blindly believing any particular piece of data. What you are describing is a religious dogma.
If you want to bring a survey result in to argue that it supports causation in a particular direction then do so by citing it and clearly articulating the connection.
[dead]
> While it's true that not everybody uses it in such healthy ways
The vast majority abuses it, and I suspect it plays a huge role in dwindling relationships. It is much easier to keep enjoying intimacy with your partner if you're not busy running like a hamster on the hedonistic treadmill of pornography.
Drugs can be therapeutic as well, and profound. The vast majority abuses them like crazy. So many examples. We are addictive as a species.
> Sweden grants 68 weeks of shared parental leave and their TFR is at 1.45.
I speculate that a different thing is happening in Europe. Every time I hear European takes on issues, it feels like Europe is post-religion, post-values, post-meaning. Everything is relative; pleasure is the only personal goal, and not harming others is the only external goal. Why even have kids? Why get married? It's a lot of work, plus there's a widely-held belief that Europeans/Westerners in general bear generational guilt because of what colonizers did in the 1500s anyway, so it feels virtuous to voluntarily decline as a civilization, freeing up more oil and resources for the developing world.
The US and Canada seem more traditional in that a lot of people would really like to have kids and don't think it's pointless, but it's just impractical for economic reasons, and they're choosing to allocate what little resources they have towards a more comfortable life (relatively!) instead of having an economic struggle -- OR they do have kids but because they wait for economic certainty first, they start much later and as a result have way fewer per couple.
Of course, North America has a very loud segment that agrees with the European degrowth narrative detailed above, and Europe has a loud segment which goes against it.
The "generational guilt" theory does not check out to me at all. Coming from central Europe, I mostly hear about these rethorics from English-language sources. In non-english European media generational guilt for colonization is hardly a thing in my experience.
Generational guilt can exist, for about one generation. After that it has to be taught.
Generational despair, on the other hand …
That makes sense. Thanks for checking me on that. My sample is biased by mostly reading US and UK stuff, as a primary English speaker.
Why is fertility so low in Iran then? Or very Catholic Poland? It does not seem to correlate strongly with religion or belief systems.
The strongest correlation I see is urbanization. People in cities don’t have kids as much.
Iran specifically was super worried about overpopulation in the 80s and the government began a massive program to decrease childbirth rates. With things like government messaging on small families and providing free birth control. Here is a graph that shows it https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/countries/irn/ira...
Anecdotal observation / hypothesis:
- there's an inverse relationship between quality of life and density, even within individual households
- there's a higher premium on space in urbanized areas than in rural areas
- there's been a move towards urbanization across the world, high HDI, low HDI, high religion, low religion
I propose something similar to Parkinson's Law: Average family size expands (or contracts) to fill the physical space that is economically viable for a given individual/family.
Rationally, this couldn't be the only factor, given density and urbanization patterns predate the more rapid fertility decline in recent decades, but as one more factor on top of a pile of others that may also be contributing to the trend, I think it could plausibly play a contributing role in the decline.
Thoughts?
I think it matters in how you define quality of life, for one.
Take a family of five kids and give them a bedroom for each kid when young and they’ll end up clustering in one or two.
I think space and other pressures may have their place as causes, but are mostly downstream from whatever the root issues are.
>Take a family of five kids and give them a bedroom for each kid when young and they’ll end up clustering in one or two.
Do you have anecdata on this? I grew up with a single sibling, and we had to share a room as young children due to economic circumstances, but we were both very excited to get our own rooms when our parents bought a larger house.
I have no kids of my own and don't plan on having any, but I'm fascinated by this perspective.
My experiences is that below the age of six, they ALL want to cluster together. Above six it starts to sex-segregate naturally, and around teen years the desire for their own space soars.
But even then they often want congregation, but the ability to retreat. I sometimes think the perfect “large family” house would be tons of tiny bedrooms but lots of common areas. Almost college dorm-like.
Another anectdata - I’ve never met a family with same-sex twins where the twins did NOT live in the same room, even when there was ample space to not do so. I presume the triplet case is even stronger.
I have 8 kids, they cluster at night, sing to each other, recite poetry, and talk late into the night.
It’s more similar to how families slept for millennia.
sounds like a potentially abusive situation.
Educated women tend to have fewer children.
(Also fewer child deaths)
"it feels like Europe is post-religion"
You say that likes it's a bad thing?
Post-religion directly correlates with less friends, less peers, less in-built community, etc.
You can have all those things without. Many do. But it requires extra work that organized religion does for you, and we're talking about a problem where people aren't having kids because they are extra work
Surprisingly (for secularists), post religion means degrowth of the culture.
So it’s a good thing if you want Europe’s culture replaced by what the data show is happening, and it’s a bad thing if you think Europe’s traditional culture is worth saving.
Well where I am (Edinburgh) we have a superabundance of culture at this time of year - very little of which has anything to do with religion?
I’m alluding to the long term trends(one - two generations out, assuming they follow the behavior of the last two generations).
FWIW I'm French.
> I speculate that a different thing is happening in Europe. Every time I hear European takes on issues, it feels like Europe is post-religion, post-values, post-meaning. Everything is relative; pleasure is the only personal goal, and not harming others is the only external goal. Why even have kids? Why get married? It's a lot of work,
Yes, to all this.
> plus there's a widely-held belief that Europeans/Westerners in general bear generational guilt because of what colonizers did in the 1500s anyway, so it feels virtuous to voluntarily decline as a civilization, freeing up more oil and resources for the developing world.
Uh? I've never heard about it in the media. The only thing vaguely similar would be the focus on minimizing our resource consumption so that our kids doesn't suffer "too much" about the man-made climate change, but usually the focus is about buying less thing, using renewable energy, not making fewer children.
Maybe that claim is off base, although I wouldn’t expect that to be the overt media story anyway. More of what a typical 35-year-old upper-middle-class liberal “childfree” couple would ramble about to their friends when they’re justifying why “actually, not having kids is the green thing to do.”
Now that I think about it more, I shouldn’t have included that in my Europe hypothesis, as I’ve heard that kind of thinking in general but not more from Europeans.
I mean, this is a quaint narrative, but it doesn't explain the fact that fertility is falling everywhere on earth, regardless of current economy, colonial past, continent, race, or religion.
I will never have children because of condoms, birth control and now a vasectomy.
My sex drive would not have been less a few generations back. The results would have just been possibly very different.
Put another way:
It's falling in Western countries because we're commiting cultural suicide for the reasons I cited for Europe (the US is behind Europe, but seems to be on the same road). It's falling in countries like China because they moved like 70% of their population from farms to huge cities in the last 40 years, which causes their society to work much more like... the West. Places like Africa, etc. are falling as they get more access to birth control, work for women, etc.
I guess I should have said this: I theorize that the whole world is following a similar path, but different areas started sooner and are thus much farther along in their decadence. Africa is now where the US was in 1965. Europe today may be what the US looks like in 20 years.
Obviously though Western cultural beliefs are much easier to spread now than they were decades ago, so it could be that the developing world "catches up" much faster now. Maybe in 10 years, Africa will be more like US 2010 than US 1975.
Latin America is probably the region to look at since it's more developed than Africa but less so than the US and Europe, and has developed dramatically in recent decades. One or two generations ago people still had massive families, but now their rates are falling and in my experience educated, independent women are not particularly interested in having families, or only in having small ones.
I'm guessing you literally don't know anyone in Europe.
shrug I don't have personal friends on a different continent, but I read what they write all the time on HN and say on YouTube. Feel free to illuminate us with your first-hand counterpoints instead of a contentless ad-hominem attack.
You make lot of claims, I will address only one of them.
> Europe is post-religion
Some anecdata for illustration:
- Pope is based in Italy.
- my nice went to the first grade in Germany last year, that is a big deal there. Part of celebration was going to local church.
- it feels that US population is a lot more zealous with religion
- I’m not religious, but on average I do go inside of some church several times a year, because of “social occasions” e.g. when friends get married, when people die, and to my somewhat recent surprise when they start school. (Add several more, for tourist motivation to observe interesting architecture)
- based on reddit and HN posts, Americans atheists will never ever set foot into <insert some condescending way to describe a church>, because bridges had to be burnt.
The Pope is based in Italy, but it’s probably the most inconvenient papacy in history for one to point that out, since the Pope is from Chicago.
Personally, I’m not trying to pretend that Europe is substantially more opposed to the institution of organized religion, I just think it’s a touch more nihilist than the US at present, and more atheistic, and specifically that Europeans are a little more likely to agree with the following: “There is no objective measure of good and evil; everyone should do whatever they want to do as long as it doesn’t harm anyone else. Life has no particular purpose or meaning, though individuals are free to make up whatever personal goals they want.”
I supposed it's hard to measure but going to church doesn't mean a person or a social group is religious. People go to buddist temples but at best are just superstsitous.
Your argument paints with a very wide brush, which is likely the source of the downvotes. That said, I do think you're touching upon a decent theory whether you realize it or not:
What if the real issue isn't merely environmental or economic in nature, but simply the species itself pulling back on births because we feel we have too many people already? Maybe there's enough ongoing crises throughout the world (that we're increasingly aware of thanks to global media) that, internally, our drive is to reduce the population naturally through attrition? It could be to conserve resources, or until the environment supports such rapid growth again, or something else entirely, but it's plausible that the human organism is self-evaluating its current population numbers and deciding that, just like Big Capital is doing via layoffs, we can do the same with less people.
Just something to chew on.
I don’t think I would anthropomorphize the whole species like that, but I actually think some people are consciously pulling back for that exact “we have too many people already” reason. I believe it to be wildly misguided though. I think it’s a sick mind that perceives their own species as an invasive pest to be exterminated. Humans can be bad and they can be good. If you are dismayed, as I am, at how bad the bad people can be, I would argue that all the good people laying down and dying (either immediately or through voluntary infertility) does not solve that problem. If anything, that might increase the bad-to-good ratio. The actual fixes for that are MUCH harder: 1. Have more kids and raise them to know right from wrong. 2. Have a positive impact on the world to promote doing what’s right.
For instance, Fred Rogers did more for improving the world than 10,000,000 people guiltily refusing to have kids would have.
So did Mother Teresa, who, through her work, both increased the population and inspired others to do good.
Sounds like anthropomorphism of species/evolution.
Is consciousness necessarily being implied here? That sort of reflective decision making can be indirectly influenced by what we might consider economics, but economics is fundamentally a process of allocating scarce resources across non-scarce desires. Markets represent a form of collective intelligence, even without necessarily representing sentience.
Individual families making rational economic decisions about child-rearing costs, when aggregated across millions of families, could produce patterns that look like species-level decision-making without requiring any actual species-level consciousness.
Wherever I look, if people want children, they fuck and have children. Single moms everywhere; no problem; most fathers are living up to the minimum of paying until the kid is old enough and the moms are fine with it. what else to live for than fun and parental purpose?
the fertility rate is falling because people care less because that's what comes across from top down everywhere.
it's too many lies covered up by people who are responsible for the opposite.
if the top does not care for the best, then my children are doomed to stay far below their potential and will experience at least some mental illness and health issues that will diminish the enjoyment of their life to a pointless minimum. local hierarchies and the particular competences and values and characters are just damn pathetic and the same is true in most other orbits. it's choice and POV. and just my observation, btw
then you look around, how others raise their kids and how all those people turn out. no thank you.
and if that's what the top wants, lol, ok, go ahead. we are fine with less kids, whenever we want, if we want.
on a side note: I do believe this is all implicit to how the colonies decided to progress. genetic algorithms don't care about reproduction. lessons learned and saved. the code can be reassembled at any time. if this time is BS and "ugly (sad)", then all that competition is a waste and too many lessons will go unlearned. thus, let the sabotaging elements win as easy as they designed it and watch them burn like they ("the minds running on/emerging from the genome") did so many times before.
porn can actually help in this regard. especially if your reward system is broken, you grew up way too conservative and in a web of engineered, beaten paths for exploration, "so you become like we want you".
This friend speaks my mind. Population decline is, on the whole, Good for humanity, in many, many ways. It's just bad for an economic system predicated on permanent growth, forever. That system was always doomed - if it weren't for demographic decline, it would just hit hard resource limits sooner. On the whole, I would much rather human population gradually decline through falling births, than precipitously crash through rising deaths.
Humans all across the developed world work 40% fewer hours than in 1900: https://ourworldindata.org/working-more-than-ever. Yet, in the U.S., TFR has consistently been dropping since 1800: https://ourworldindata.org/working-more-than-ever.
> Working hours for the average worker have decreased dramatically over the last 150 years.
note the “average worker”.
If women were staying at home with children, they were not counted as workers.
If they were, the averages would just be higher, their jobs are nonstop at home.
I’ve noticed that, besides the magnetism and drive for sex (which would be sufficient for a species to propagate), many people also experience the biological imperative (wanting their genes replicated) as its own separate feeling.
This makes no sense to me – it’s not a feeling I can personally relate to. I’d like to raise kids because I’d enjoy getting to teach them and share things with them, but I don’t care whether they are my biological children or not.
So it’s something I’ve wondered about. The likely why makes sense, but I don’t really get the what.
For whatever it’s worth, I also believe the two are separate feelings that aren’t always in alignment. I have no desire to procreate (gay man), but following the birth of my first nibling I felt this profound swell of emotion and drive commanding me to nurture and support its growth into an adult. It’s likely why, in my teens and 20s before I understood the full impact of the 2008 crisis, I wanted to eventually adopt children myself.
Biology is weird.
I think your thinking also aligns with the ideas outlined in The Future is Degrowth (https://www.versobooks.com/products/2620-the-future-is-degro...). I found it to be a very approachable book, if you haven't read it yet.
> we as a species are wired to breed.
Wired to orgasm, maybe. Wired to breed, no. According to all the data.
Humans are very analytical and do tons of cost benefit analysis before breeding, and apparently, choose not to in many cases.
Seems like an inevitable consequence of easy-to-use birth control will lead to an increase of the direct desire to have children, as those that don't have that desire get bred out of the pool. Of course, that may take many generations.
> it's also an issue we can fix with coordination between powers and workers
Which is severely lacking in the most powerful nation on Earth
> It's about building a new environment that puts families, rather than employers, first, and encouraging participation in the creation and maintenance of that environment by everyone regardless of age or demographic.
Again, never going to happen in the USA at least.
The current human model is work > all because we are a capitalist system, and we reward greed because it's the best economic system we put up so far. There will be powerful interests fighting this and pushing all the costs of this heavy system failure onto their workers and consumers etc. and that's the whole problem we are facing...
“the ruling classes chose to ignore its symptoms out of convenience until the problem became insurmountably difficult to solve”
Not only the elite, but all the voters who don’t care because the elite told them large populations were dangerous. I still meet so-called smart college educated people that think a large population crisis is coming.
Here is an uncomfortable truth: religious people produce more children, regardless of their income, social welfare status and living conditions. They are thought from birth that marriage, family and children are gifts from "God".
In fact, Christians make it a _requirement_ to be "open to life" (i.e have children) before they agree to marry you in Church (in addition to banning contraceptives, abortions and porn).
They also believe that pursuit of wealth, status and greed is a sin and one should focus his attention inward , towards "God", "Family", and "Charity".. disincentivizing people from dedicating their lives to their careers and missing their chances of having kids. is it no surprise then, that they ten to have larger families?
What I'm trying to highlight here, isn't a celebration of religious practices but the fact that we need a massive cultural shift, first and foremost to resolve this issue and if I'm being honest, I don't see this happening anytime soon.. at least not in our hyper capitalist society.
I'm not sure many people (especially women) are willing to sacrifice their lifestyles, career aspirations and goals to have children.
Unless people are taught from birth that having kids is their sole purpose in life and that family, motherhood and communities are deeply celebrated by society, they will opt out of having kids.
100%. The mindset is everything. 100 years ago, if you picked the happiest 18-year-old woman in town, someone from a great family who was cared for, and never victimized by anyone, and asked her “are you sure you would like to sacrifice your opportunity to spend 4 years in a very expensive school and go get a job and work 5 days a week for the next 40 years, in order to bear a few children?” She would look at you like you were from Mars.
Today, both sexes are, for good reason, afraid of sacrificing any “work years” just to have kids, largely since costs have now become so high that doing so on one income is punishing. Even if you make $250k, which would be enough to live a great lifestyle as a single person, if you have a family and only one parent working, you have to live a lifestyle that much more resembles someone who makes $90k. (Divide those numbers in half for non-high-cost areas, result is the same) It’s probably worse if you are truly saving up the absurd amount of money that college is going to cost in the future (I’m not).
It’s crazy this was downvoted. This is basically a summary of all pew research on this topic - lol.