People don’t feel like they have an obligation to have kids anymore, which coupled with rising quality time between parents and kids means that having many children is not ideologically mandatory
It used to be the case
So basically, people want to not have kids and we are allowing people to not have them, as we should, and we also support life choices and ways of life that are naturally hard to have kids like the LGBT community
By removing social restrictions and obligations, we made people free, and people freely choose not to have as many kids, no matter how much money you throw at them
Steak_Knight on
📱
SoWhatKnowGenius on
Delayed marriage
ldn6 on
A lot of people, including me, just don’t want kids. There really isn’t an amount of money you can give me to change my mind. I have no parental instincts, wouldn’t be good at it and have no desire.
bleachinjection on
I think social media is a really big part of it. It’s basically a highlight reel of this things you can’t do, or do easily, when you have little kids.
The day-to-day reality is far more mundane, like, if I weren’t parenting what would I be doing on any given Tuesday that would be more meaningful? Probably not much. But it’s easy to miss that when your DINK friends are posting from a resort in Thailand.
ModernMaroon on
I really appreciated this article. It took me back to my early 20s. I was a dyed in the wool atheist. Had read Hitchens and Dawkins and Sagan. Seen all their interviews and debates. Was subscribed to every skeptic youtuber that was big in 2010-2016. And yet, I was unfulfilled. Something felt off. Secular humanism and related ideas wasn’t filling that void. I wanted community, I wanted spirituality, I wanted to know that the life I was living would mean something to myself and to the world in some way big or small. Atheism felt like a dead end in that regard.
It launched me on a journey that many others are now getting on in their late 20s and early 30s. I have a lot of friends who previously couldnt understand my spiritual journey at the time now asking me about the Orthodox Church, if I’d go with them, what’s it all about etc. etc.
There are somethings pure rationality cannot understand. There are some things money/economics cannot provide.
NotYetFlesh on
A promising title but unfortunately not a great revelation in there. It’s not even a deep summary of the debate about the relative contribution of material Vs psychological/belief factors to a society’s fertility rate.
I do agree with the premise that it’s not really about the economics and that’s why social transfers are not looking like a good solution. But economic factors also influence whether the prevailing social outlook is optimistic or pessimistic. And right now, even though our economies keep growing, the pressures of things like high housing costs, financial instability, inequalities and wage stagnation are really weighing down on a lot of people. Add to that general geopolitical and climate uncertainty and you’ve got a pretty pessimistic world.
But again, these things are responsible for a small part of the fertility decline. Economics mostly matters because in a world with low infant mortality, effective contraceptives and huge returns on human capital, concentrating resources in fewer children is just more efficient.
As far as beliefs go, I don’t think it’s fair to leave the question entirely to religion and philosophy. Since one can take for a fact that the social structure has an influence on people’s sense of meaning and purpose, we must keep asking ourselves why our societies don’t seem to be working in favour of people leading meaningful and fulfilling lives.
> Happiness does not necessarily depend on social structure or system of government as our contemporaries seem to think. To me it seems to be primarily a question of equilibrium between the world by which man is surrounded and the world which he carries in his heart. We live in an age of terrifying disequilibriums and should be equally unhappy under kings, presidents, Popes or tribunes of the people, whether organized in republics or empires, soviets or theocracies. Our science offers us one picture of the universe; our traditional religion another. Physics and chemistry have advanced a thousand years ahead of the social sciences and the education of the will…
> Ideals and standards are in a state of continual flux; professional standards and ideals, sexual standards, class ambitions, the kind of life that people aim for at different ages – all important elements in a stable society – are subjected to constant criticism and revision; everything is changing, becoming, perpetually fluid. New equilibriums unknown to us are perhaps on the way, in which future generations may perhaps find greater peace. But we are caught up in the grinding of the gears. **Some of us succeed in extricating ourselves, but the majority are crushed.**
– Fosco Maraini, 1951
martphon on
So you don’t have to read the whole thing:
>People debating whether to have children seem to be seeking certainty that life is a good thing, that more life would thus be better, and that assistance, if needed, will arrive.
Mister__Mediocre on
Next up: The realest real reason why people aren’t having kids.
9 Comments
People don’t feel like they have an obligation to have kids anymore, which coupled with rising quality time between parents and kids means that having many children is not ideologically mandatory
It used to be the case
So basically, people want to not have kids and we are allowing people to not have them, as we should, and we also support life choices and ways of life that are naturally hard to have kids like the LGBT community
By removing social restrictions and obligations, we made people free, and people freely choose not to have as many kids, no matter how much money you throw at them
📱
Delayed marriage
A lot of people, including me, just don’t want kids. There really isn’t an amount of money you can give me to change my mind. I have no parental instincts, wouldn’t be good at it and have no desire.
I think social media is a really big part of it. It’s basically a highlight reel of this things you can’t do, or do easily, when you have little kids.
The day-to-day reality is far more mundane, like, if I weren’t parenting what would I be doing on any given Tuesday that would be more meaningful? Probably not much. But it’s easy to miss that when your DINK friends are posting from a resort in Thailand.
I really appreciated this article. It took me back to my early 20s. I was a dyed in the wool atheist. Had read Hitchens and Dawkins and Sagan. Seen all their interviews and debates. Was subscribed to every skeptic youtuber that was big in 2010-2016. And yet, I was unfulfilled. Something felt off. Secular humanism and related ideas wasn’t filling that void. I wanted community, I wanted spirituality, I wanted to know that the life I was living would mean something to myself and to the world in some way big or small. Atheism felt like a dead end in that regard.
It launched me on a journey that many others are now getting on in their late 20s and early 30s. I have a lot of friends who previously couldnt understand my spiritual journey at the time now asking me about the Orthodox Church, if I’d go with them, what’s it all about etc. etc.
There are somethings pure rationality cannot understand. There are some things money/economics cannot provide.
A promising title but unfortunately not a great revelation in there. It’s not even a deep summary of the debate about the relative contribution of material Vs psychological/belief factors to a society’s fertility rate.
I do agree with the premise that it’s not really about the economics and that’s why social transfers are not looking like a good solution. But economic factors also influence whether the prevailing social outlook is optimistic or pessimistic. And right now, even though our economies keep growing, the pressures of things like high housing costs, financial instability, inequalities and wage stagnation are really weighing down on a lot of people. Add to that general geopolitical and climate uncertainty and you’ve got a pretty pessimistic world.
But again, these things are responsible for a small part of the fertility decline. Economics mostly matters because in a world with low infant mortality, effective contraceptives and huge returns on human capital, concentrating resources in fewer children is just more efficient.
As far as beliefs go, I don’t think it’s fair to leave the question entirely to religion and philosophy. Since one can take for a fact that the social structure has an influence on people’s sense of meaning and purpose, we must keep asking ourselves why our societies don’t seem to be working in favour of people leading meaningful and fulfilling lives.
> Happiness does not necessarily depend on social structure or system of government as our contemporaries seem to think. To me it seems to be primarily a question of equilibrium between the world by which man is surrounded and the world which he carries in his heart. We live in an age of terrifying disequilibriums and should be equally unhappy under kings, presidents, Popes or tribunes of the people, whether organized in republics or empires, soviets or theocracies. Our science offers us one picture of the universe; our traditional religion another. Physics and chemistry have advanced a thousand years ahead of the social sciences and the education of the will…
> Ideals and standards are in a state of continual flux; professional standards and ideals, sexual standards, class ambitions, the kind of life that people aim for at different ages – all important elements in a stable society – are subjected to constant criticism and revision; everything is changing, becoming, perpetually fluid. New equilibriums unknown to us are perhaps on the way, in which future generations may perhaps find greater peace. But we are caught up in the grinding of the gears. **Some of us succeed in extricating ourselves, but the majority are crushed.**
– Fosco Maraini, 1951
So you don’t have to read the whole thing:
>People debating whether to have children seem to be seeking certainty that life is a good thing, that more life would thus be better, and that assistance, if needed, will arrive.
Next up: The realest real reason why people aren’t having kids.