Long-time Motte / ACX / rat-adjacent lurker here.
I am hoping to get some input from some of the many pro-family posters on the Motte to help me get out an increasingly deep rut I've found myself stuck in.
The general thrust of my thoughts is that I assign a high probability to my access to status and resources becoming much worse in the near future.
I've thought about what this means for my previously held desire to enter a relationship and form a family and have come to some undesirable conclusions.
The most salient information about me:
Mid twenties, lower-middle class background
Midwit remote tech worker, upper-mid 6 figure net worth
Why I believe that the future is quite grim:
The current state of AI, while unlikely to cause 30%+ structural employment or ASI FOOM imo, seems likely to commoditize the majority of intellectual labor within one or two decades
For the subset of middle tier work where AI may not be capable of performing economically, unrestricted immigration policies and flight from the intellectual jobs seems likely to crush the income and working conditions of the remaining jobs
This means that the only real paths to accessing resources and status are going to be to either be sufficiently Elite Human Capital so as to be granted access to the moneyed class, or be born into money i.e the west economically becomes South Korea
As I'm not intelligent enough to win my way into increasingly narrow paths into the elite nor born into the upper class it then seems likely that my personal access to status and resources is going to plummet
It's well litigated on the Motte why South Korean TFR is rock bottom, but given this is how I model the future of the western world to look like as well, I also find myself struggling to justify forming a family under these conditions.
Below are some scattered thoughts.
While it's often claimed that singledom is a luxury good, I think it's quite likely that a relationship and family would be a net negative on my resources
As I currently spend underneath the poverty line, I can probably eke out a low-status low-resource lifestyle for myself if single, even in most of the non-apocalyptic worst case scenarios
I think this probably goes out of the window with a family, any potential partner of mine would either have less resources than me and rely on me to provide, or be roughly in my economic bracket and would desire a much higher standing of living, even before the fairly significant expenses of childrearing
This is not a huge problem in a world where I can obtain above average resources through my labor, but is very stressful to contemplate when it's unlikely I'll accrue the neccessary capital to support an entire family
Attempting to do so has the real risk of compromising my own ability to maintain the neccessary capital to stay alive, which makes me anxious about whether such a huge sacrifice is worth it
Similarly to South Korea I expect the lives of children to become much worse than now, a striver rat race for largely zero-sum access to status and resources that I'd be largely powerless to protect my children from
The alternative is a low-status low-resource life, and from my upbringing I'm well aware of how fundamentally awful a low-status low-resource existence can be
While I am personally non-conformist enough to tolerate such a lifestyle in the event labor becomes devalued, I'm not sure I can accept the repugnant conclusion that it's better for my children to live barely tolerable lives of suffering rather than to not exist at all
To be clear, I would prefer not to hold these views - I want to be someone that is optimistic for the future and that is capable of providing for a happy family, but this seems increasingly out of reach for me based on how the world is trending.
TLDR: please try to convince this highly neurotic autist that either
a) current middle-class access to status and resources is unlikely to diminish within my lifetime.
b) a committed relationship and family formation is still worth pursuing even with severely diminished access to status and resources.
p
Long-time Motte / ACX / rat-adjacent lurker here. I am hoping to get some input from some of the many pro-family posters on the Motte to help me get out an increasingly deep rut I've found myself stuck in.
The general thrust of my thoughts is that I assign a high probability to my access to status and resources becoming much worse in the near future. I've thought about what this means for my previously held desire to enter a relationship and form a family and have come to some undesirable conclusions.
The most salient information about me:
Why I believe that the future is quite grim:
It's well litigated on the Motte why South Korean TFR is rock bottom, but given this is how I model the future of the western world to look like as well, I also find myself struggling to justify forming a family under these conditions. Below are some scattered thoughts.
To be clear, I would prefer not to hold these views - I want to be someone that is optimistic for the future and that is capable of providing for a happy family, but this seems increasingly out of reach for me based on how the world is trending.
TLDR: please try to convince this highly neurotic autist that either
a) current middle-class access to status and resources is unlikely to diminish within my lifetime.
b) a committed relationship and family formation is still worth pursuing even with severely diminished access to status and resources.
More options
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