It's interesting that the same dynamic is playing out on a much larger scale with children. A child is far more helpless than a junior engineer - at least a junior engineer can feed themselves, wipe their own butt, avoid destroying the room, and generally keep themselves alive. Everybody wants to offload the cost of raising children to parents, because the economic benefits aren't realized for 25+ years yet the costs are very substantial (frequently, at least one parent's full-time attention, costing them an income). Prospective parents are saying "fuck that shit" and simply choosing not to have children.
The long-term effects are going to be much like the effect of the software industry turning away from juniors: total collapse. When you have no workforce, you'll do no work - hell, there is just...nothing, nonexistence, no consumers either. But the fertility bust operates on a longer timescale (I think the software industry will start feeling the dearth of juniors in ~5 years, the economy as a whole won't feel the dearth of children for ~5), and it's far more fundamental. Rather than one industry disappearing, all industries will disappear, likely refactored into something that looks far different.
It also reminds me of those ecological predator/prey/locust models that I studied in calculus class, where population dynamics for many species have a tendency to overshoot the carrying capacity of the environment. Each individual in the population makes their own reproductive & survival decisions, but the sum total of them leads to population collapse and a near total extinction, followed by recovery once the survivors find resources abundant again.
> When you have no workforce, you'll do no work - hell, there is just...nothing, nonexistence, no consumers either.
But for a beautiful moment in time, we created a lot of value for shareholders
https://www.insidehook.com/culture/story-tom-toro-new-yorker...
It's basically a "Tragedy of the Commons" situation across the board.
Sort of. With the salient point that nothing really exists, but the commons. The individual is nothing without the whole society around.
Also sort of. Some form of social organization seems to be necessary for humans to function. But humans are also pretty good (well - relatively speaking, it usually seems to require a war or revolution) at changing that form of social organization as technology, population, and environmental conditions change.
I think this is a very likely outcome. We aren't going to get continued population growth next generation; a significant number of the people needed for it will never be born. This is going to have ripple effects across wide swaths of political and economic organization. But you'll have pockets of population that basically barricade themselves off from the wider economic world and insulate themselves from its collapse, and then the people within them, along with whatever form of social organization they happen to adopt.
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> statistically women all try to get into a relationship with the same 1% of men - who sleep around and cause toxicity all around. The remaining 99% become bitter and consequently... Are even less attractive to women.
As a regular 30s dude, definitely not 1% by any measure, app dating had its rough spots but generally was a good time, I experienced no bitterness.
Instead I met a bunch of interesting people and found my partner. We now own a house and are talking about kids.
The real toxicity here is the idea that women at large are somehow responsible for anyone's lack of dating success.
For anyone reading this who might be dating and feel disheartened- the hard truth is that you have two options: you can either blame the group of people you're trying to attract for having faulty preferences, or you can reflect and work on yourself and your approach. Only one of these has any chance of helping you.
One thing I do agree with you on: bitterness is extremely unattractive.
For context, I don’t want this to sound bitter. The first time I was single as an adult was from 1996-2002 and dating apps weren’t a thing. The second time I was single was from 2006-2011 and I wasn’t really trying to date and spent most of the time getting my head back in the game and just hanging out with female friends until I started dating my now wife who I met at work. Even she had to make the first move.
That being said as five foot four guy, the chance of me having any success on a dating app at the time from everything I know would have been basically 0 no matter what. “Working on myself” would have done no good. I was objectively in great shape as a part time fitness instructor and I just run my first (and last) two half marathons before I met my wife.
Some guys just haven’t won the genetic lottery to succeed on dating apps. Again I’m not bitter as one of the relatively few straight male fitness instructors, it wasn’t hard to date during my first stint of singleness
FWIW, one of my (male) friends is about 5'2" and met his wife on OKCupid. She's about 4'10".
Dating is kinda like founding a startup or getting a job, in that you have to kiss a lot of frogs, but you only need to succeed once. The point's to eliminate all the unsuitable prospects in the pool and find the one that is a match for you.
Your comment is incredibly misogynist and sexist. Here's a more fact-based good summary for some potential reasons for the declining fertility rate: https://ourworldindata.org/global-decline-fertility-rate
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Perhaps there's a constructive version of this because I agree with the sentiment but it's a little harsh - dude is obviously feeling very betrayed and left out of society and either falling down the incel tunnel or doing recruiting for it.
There's some fallacies here like "anyone not acting in stereotypical Protestant gender roles must therefore be recklessly promiscuous" and that if some people don't want to have kids with some women then therefore -nobody- will do it.
Good luck out there everybody - the world changes in fascinating ways and it can definitely run some folks over but try not to get jaded and fall down a despair spiral.
> There's some fallacies here like "anyone not acting in stereotypical Protestant gender roles must therefore be recklessly promiscuous"
That fallacy isn't in there. Also, I would like to point out that almost all women have had more then 0 sexual partners before wedding. Hence your statement would actually be kinda correct of you remove the "recklessly". And that's definitely another contributer to declining birth rates/families - because neither of them will feel remotely as committed to each other then they would've otherwise.
None of these are singular causes. They're all contributing to the whole situation. Which is precisely why I never made any such fallacy in my earlier comment.
> Also, I would like to point out that almost all women have had more then 0 sexual partners before wedding
By the 1700s the pregnant before marriage rate was roughly 30%. So about a third of all women in the 1700s had premarital sex that resulted in pregnancy. So the actual rate is of course even higher.
https://www.jstor.org/stable/202859
People having premarital sex is not a new thing. Strong societal norms against something are not the same thing as it not happening.
https://historyandpolicy.org/policy-papers/papers/no-turning...
A lot of those marriages are a direct result of the pregnancy, too - one thing that did happen was the couple being pushed into marriage ASAP when the pregnancy was discovered.
> Also, I would like to point out that almost all women have had more then 0 sexual partners before wedding. Hence your statement would actually be kinda correct of you remove the "recklessly".
Having premarital sex is not everyone's definition of "promiscuous".
They’re not completely wrong though. Data does show clearly that online dating has extremely lopsided behaviors. Women really do tend to message the top cohort of men by attractiveness much more so. Men have a more expected distribution. I think that causes a lot of men to really resent dating and women because they struggle and put in enormous effort and get nothing back. Online dating is a very toxic modern invention.
He tried, but was rejected.
The rich and powerful can have all the gender roles they want. They are being phased out only among the peasants.