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Notes -
Stop lying about why you don't want children
If you don't want them, just be honest about why
Those in search of an invigorating blast of pop-nihilism could do worse than Seven, the feature-length directorial debut by David Fincher. (We do not speak of Alien 3, or indeed any Alien film after the first.) Set in an unspecified American city perpetually besieged by inclement weather, the film follows two detectives, Mills and Somerset, in pursuit of a serial killer calling himself John Doe. Each of Doe’s killings is modelled on one of the seven deadly sins of Catholicism: for example, the first victim discovered (gluttony) is a morbidly obese man forced at gunpoint to eat until his stomach bursts.
The two detectives act as foils to one another: the impulsive, idealistic and hotheaded Mills contrasting with the soft-spoken, jaded and cynical Somerset. Mills has only just transferred to the film’s unnamed city, while Somerset is on the brink of early retirement, his career coming to an end just as Mills’s is beginning. The captain of Somerset’s precinct admits he cannot understand why a talented detective like Somerset is retiring prematurely, in response to which Somerset endeavours to illustrate the scope of his disillusionment with the city and its inhabitants.
Mills’s wife Tracy invites Somerset to dinner, and subsequently confides in him that, unbeknownst to Mills, she is pregnant. Although she wants children, she is of two minds about raising a child in such a decrepit and violent city. Somerset admits that he once faced a similar dilemma, and persuaded his partner to terminate the pregnancy.
The film’s literal and figurative darkness, its almost relentlessly dour tone and the viciousness of its murder scenes might lead a casual viewer to assume he is being invited to agree with Somerset’s world-weary, ultra-doomer outlook. That Somerset is portrayed by Morgan Freeman, Hollywood’s go-to man for homespun folksy wisdom for more than three decades, certainly lends itself to this interpretation.
But there’s a wrinkle to this reading, which hints that Somerset’s perspective isn’t identical to that of Seven’s screenwriter, that the film can’t be reduced to a reactionary rant about how everything in the modern world sucks, maaaan. On the evening of the day the fourth victim is found, Mills and Somerset repair to a bar to drown their sorrows, where they have a frank discussion of their respective worldviews. After listening to Somerset fulminate about how apathy, laziness and greed have become the rule rather than the exception, Mills interjects that he isn’t buying it.
What to make of this exchange? Perhaps it only exists to hammer in how naïve Mills is just before the film’s climax, at which point the full extent of Doe’s sadism is unveiled for the first time.
But on the other hand, perhaps Mills has got Somerset’s number. Maybe several decades in the police force and witnessing the worst that humanity has to offer hasn’t made Somerset jaded and cynical. Maybe the only reason he’s retiring is because he wants a quiet life. He just wants to grill, for God’s sake.
But Somerset must have been aware that his impending retirement means depriving the city of one of its best detectives (which it sorely needs) for no good reason.
As ever with cognitive dissonance, when faced with a choice between changing our beliefs or changing our behaviour, the former is always the path of least resistance. So rather than admitting that he’s putting his own interests ahead of those around him, Somerset persuades himself that his absence from the police force won’t be keenly felt at all – indeed, won’t make a blind bit of difference. He doesn’t go full Robert Towne and claim that, in such a wretched world, the most ethical decision a police officer can make is to do "as little as possible". He more modestly claims that the world is beyond saving, and hence that police work is a fundamentally futile exercise, analogous to “picking up diamonds on a deserted island and saving them, in case we get rescued”. His cynical disillusionment is a carefully constructed façade, a defensive posture through which he hides his selfishness even from himself. The Last Psychiatrist would like a word.
And if this latter interpretation is true, it casts Somerset’s earlier conversation with Tracy in a very different light. By Somerset’s telling, persuading his partner to terminate her pregnancy was done out of mercy: that it would be cruel to their unborn child to raise it in the vicious hellhole that is the film’s unnamed city. But perhaps this explanation for his actions was another of Somerset’s defense mechanisms. Perhaps he had much more banal and selfish motives for not wanting to become a father (e.g. concern that a child would disrupt his lifestyle or his career advancement), which he rationalised away, insisting to himself that his motives for not wanting a child were noble, even heroic. Per Robert Trivers’s theory of self-deception, this may not even have been something he did consciously. “I persuaded my partner to terminate her pregnancy, because it would be cruel to bring a child into a world as wicked as ours” sounds a lot better than “I persuaded my partner to terminate her pregnancy, because I’m emotionally immature and unprepared for the responsibilities of fatherhood”, doesn’t it?
Yes. It does sound a hell of a lot better.
Richard Hanania has been beating the drum for many years about falling fertility rates across the developed world. Some of his proposed solutions for this problem I can get behind (I must admit I’ve never really understood the moral objections to surrogacy); others, not so much (I don’t endorse female secondary school teachers getting pregnant by raping their male students). But I absolutely agree with Hanania that this is a real problem which needs to be addressed urgently. Indeed, I agree with him so much that it’s a problem I can hardly even bear to think about: whenever I see a graph charting plummeting live births in South Korea, I feel depressed and hopeless for the rest of the day.
I can at least take solace in the fact that more and more people are starting to recognise that this is a real problem, not a paranoid conspiracy theory. A few years ago, when I suggested there was a very real possibility that South Koreans might literally go extinct in the next hundred years, people tended to scoff. For the most part, they’re not scoffing anymore. By the same token, it’s been a long time since I saw anyone seriously claiming that the world has a problem with overpopulation.
As with any complex problem which spans continents, it’s hard to pinpoint which specific causes might be behind falling fertility rates. Some pin the blame on the sexual revolution and its associated normalisation of divorce, contraception and abortion. Hanania’s timescale is more recent, arguing for a dramatic inflection point circa 2014, the year the iPhone achieved market penetration in a critical mass of Western users. Not coincidentally, as catalogued by Noah Smith, 2014 was the same year we observed a massive spike in gender dysphoria, teenage unhappiness, loneliness and so on.1
But regardless of what the underlying causes of the decline in fertility are, I think we have more than enough information to make an educated guess as to which causes to rule out. Below, I will provide an estimate for the number of adults who decided not to have children specifically because of their concerns about climate change.
Zero. The number is zero.
I’m quite serious about this. I don’t believe that there is a single adult anywhere in the entire world who was in a position to have children, but elected not to out of concern that having children will exacerbate climate change, or that climate change will soon render the world uninhabitable. I know there are people out there who will swear up and down that this really is the reason they’re not having children, and I don’t believe them, any of them. I think the percentage of these people who are accurately describing their true motivations for refusing not to have children is 0.00%.
Rather, I think these people (every last one of them) don’t want to have children for ordinary, banal reasons, but have come up with a narrative which makes this decision seem noble and heroic. The dead giveaway is – these people are never people who desperately wanted to have children, are they? You never get the impression that their decision not to have children is one that truly pains them, that they’re reluctantly but graciously making a tremendous personal sacrifice for the common good. As Somerset would put it, the fact that they don’t seem that broken up about their decision "doesn’t seem in keeping with martyrdom". On the contrary, refusing to have children is almost always the only "sacrifice" they’re making to combat climate change. They certainly aren’t giving up air travel, eating meat, or putting almond milk in their coffee.
The reason they aren’t giving these things up is the same reason they’re not having children: because doing so would disrupt their lifestyle.
The absolute nadir of this preening exercise in specious self-regard came five years ago, when that pair of insufferably sanctimonious twats,
PrinceHarry andDuchess of SussexMeghan Markle, were presented with an environmental award in recognition of their pledge to help fight climate change by having no more than two children. (Curious how one reconciles that with the family’s heavy use of private jets, but whatever.) As my mother pointed out, when Harry made this pledge in September of 2019, Meghan was thirty-eight years old. Allowing for the amount of time it would take her to get pregnant, and assuming an interval of at least a year between pregnancies it would be profoundly difficult for her to have more than two children even if she wanted to.But even if I accept these claims at face value, the strategy doesn’t make sense on its own terms. As pointed out by Scott Alexander five years ago, if even 1-2% of Democrats elect not to have children for the sake of the environment (but no Republicans follow suit), the immediate result of that decision will be a succeeding generation in which Republicans have a slight electoral advantage, as children tend to vote the same way their parents do. That generation will hence go on to elect conservative politicians who are cosy with the fossil fuel industry and who may not even believe in climate change, exacerbating the problem even faster.
I was persuaded by Scott’s argument. None of the people claiming they aren’t having children because of climate change will be persuaded by it, because they aren’t being honest about their real motivations for not having children. You cannot reason people out of positions they didn’t reason themselves into.
Some childless people offer a variant on the above excuse, claiming that the reason they’re not having children isn’t because of climate change specifically, but because of how terrible the world is in general, insisting (as Somerset does) that it would be cruel to bring a child into it. The examples used to illustrate the supposed awfulness of the modern world will generally be a vague mish-mash of Trump, Brexit, the “rise of the far-right”, assorted genocides (some of them even deserving of the label), and whatever conflicts are currently ongoing in the Middle East.2
For the sake of argument, let’s accept the implied principle that having a child is not a morally neutral act, but rather that it can constitute an act of sadism if the world is sufficiently awful. Let’s accept that our world is awful enough to meet that description, and hence that anyone carrying a pregnancy to term is being knowingly cruel.
Then, consider the following:
As I pointed out two months ago, as recently as the eighteenth century there were European countries in which fully half of all children did not live to see their fifth birthday. Do you mean to tell me that it is crueler to have a child now than it was to have one then?
If we take this claim at face value and follow to its logical conclusion, it implies that there is nothing particularly cruel about having a child today; that it is less cruel to have a child today than in eras past; and that having a child becomes progressively more cruel the further back in history one looks. Indeed, if it is cruel to have a child today (with its attendant low rates of murder, infant mortality, hunger, disease and so on) – this logically implies that just about every European parent in the fourteenth century was unimaginably sadistic, like some kind of unholy offspring of Jeffrey Dahmer, Josef Mengele and Simon Cowell.
If any of the people claiming this is why they aren’t having children had thought about this for two minutes, they would instantly realise what an absurd claim it is on its face. Along just about any metric you compare to mention, the modern world is safer and cleaner than it was in the past. If indeed it is cruel to bring a child into a sufficiently wretched and unpleasant world, then there has never been a less cruel time to become a parent.
But none of the people making this claim have thought about it for two minutes. They didn’t look at the state of the world and decide that, as much as they might want children, it would be cruel to bring them into a world as nasty and vicious as ours. Rather, they didn’t want children, and invented a superficially persuasive motive to make them look good to their fellow-travelers.
A very small minority of people actually are willing to bite the bullet I presented above. Yes, they will say, it is cruel to have a child today; and yes, it was more cruel to have a child a hundred years ago; and crueller still a hundred years before that. I speak, of course, of the antinatalists, a philosophical school which holds that, because any given human is guaranteed to experience more suffering in his life than pleasure,3 it is always an act of cruelty to bring a child into the world, and the morally correct thing is hence to abstain from having children, eventually rendering the human species extinct. Antinatalism is the modern incarnation of (and philosophical inheritor to) Gnosticism, a dualist offshoot of Christianity which held that each of us are immaterial souls who have been cruelly trapped inside our flesh prisons by a wicked deity called the Demiurge: thus, in the act of having children, we are condemning yet another soul to be trapped inside a flesh prison against its will. As deranged as this worldview might sound, it has real-world consequences, as when one prize nutcase attempted to assassinate Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, under the explicit reasoning that the Supreme Court’s voting to repeal Roe v. Wade would result in a spike in births across the US.4
I don’t have much to say about the antinatalist community, and am terribly relieved that they are too small in number to have much impact on politics one way or the other. (r/antinatalism only has about 200k subscribers.) While I’ve previously expressed an aversion to Bulverism couched in armchair psychology, I nonetheless find it interesting to observe the overlap in subscriptions between /r/antinatalism and other subreddits.
Not exactly a cheerful bunch, are they? It’s hard to escape the conclusion that their philosophical belief that every human being will experience more suffering than joy in his lifetime might be the product of – um, overgeneralising from personal experience.
I’ll go one step further. I don’t think the antinatalists, for the most part, are people who could have children if they wanted to, but are electing not to for moral reasons. I believe they are mostly profoundly mentally disturbed people with whom no one would want to have children, and who have erected a towering edifice of convoluted reasoning wherein this deficiency in fact makes them morally superior to the “breeders” in their vicinity. Their worldview is ultimately the product of sour grapes.
There are lots of good reasons not to have children. You might believe, for one reason or another, that you wouldn’t be a very good parent. You might even be justified in this supposition. You might suffer from a severe disease (Huntington’s, say, or cystic fibrosis) which you have a high risk of passing on to your children.
Then there are the less good reasons. Maybe you’re immature and refuse to grow up. Maybe you’re happy being a “dog mom” to your various “fur babies” (ugh). Maybe you’ve just decided that, bundles of joy as they may be, children just aren’t for you. I’m not going to say that reasons like this are perfectly fine, and will admit to finding it sort of contemptible when a person voluntarily allows their family line to end with them purely so they can “focus on their career” or whatever. But while I can’t respect someone who openly announces “I don’t want to have a children because I myself am a manchild, and having a child would cut into my Funko Pop budget”, I can at least credit his honesty.
But if, like Jameela Jamil, you don’t want children because you like being childless and don’t want your lifestyle to be disrupted by them, just come out and say that. Stop pretending that this has anything to do with climate change, or Donald Trump, or AI, or the Middle Eastern war du jour. And if you insist on pretending that you’re not having children because of climate change, at least respect our intelligence enough to commit to the bit. Sell your car, travel everywhere by bike, stop using air travel, give up eating meat. Otherwise, you’re fooling no one, not even yourself.
1 To this end, while an outright ban on smartphones would be effectively impossible (that horse has well and truly bolted) – if such a thing could be done, I think it would boost fertility rates far more than many would have us believe.
2 Because it’s not as if previous generations ever had to cope with conflicts in the Middle oh wait. This article lists 108 conflicts since 1914.
3 Citations for this claim have been repeatedly requested, but none are forthcoming.
4 Are you even a little bit surprised to learn that this profoundly mentally disturbed young man – member of a community which is the philosophical inheritor to the dualist tradition of Gnosticism, in which members brag about having sterilised themselves, and who thinks that having children is evil – now identifies as a trans woman? Thanks to Kat Highsmith for bringing it to my attention.
I don’t want to have a children because I myself am a manchild, and having a child would likely make both me and the child miserable (also my wife doesn't want children and it would probably make her miserable).
I get very excited about new things. I like new games, new stories, new ideas I have for a story I want to write or my own game I want to make. If it's long enough rarely follow through. If I don't have some sort of external thing forcing me to do a thing I don't want to do, like a teacher or a boss with expectations, then I won't. And even if I do I will get bored and slog through. My best writing I have ever done are a series of short stories where I sat down, I wrote it out in like 3 hours, and then finished it and walked away. Because I did it while it was new and fresh and exciting and then it was complete before the novelty had a chance to wear off.
I spend an ungodly amount of time in front of my computer playing games or browsing the internet. It's actually hurting my career and I am working on getting over that so I can man up and be a responsible adult. My entire life, my two dreams were to never grow up, and to fall in love and get married. I assumed that maybe someday I might want kids, but not any time soon.
I never grew up. I am happy playing my games and hanging out with my wife. I am mildly resentful of reality for requiring me to do real adult things instead of just getting everything for free, but understand on an intellectual and economic level that I have to do that, so I'll suck it up and be as much of an adult as reality forces upon me.
But I'm not going to voluntarily be more of an adult than I am forced to. Theoretically, I understand that having children is good and necessary for the propagation of the human race. I respect and admire people who do it well. I am pronatalist in theory, and I think that intelligent and kind people similar to me ought to have more kids in particular in order to spread our genes and culture. However, I don't think I have it in me. I suspect that if I had kids it would inspire me to work harder and do more to care for them. But I suspect that I would get bored and tired and resentful. I imagine a future me coming home from work and doing a bunch of chores and then wanting to play video games with my remaining free time and oh hey the kid is bothering me about something stupid and I'm just tired and bored and dismiss them. I imagine a kid who's really into sports or hiking or something that I actively dislike and take a bunch of time. I imagine a better version of me who sucks it up and pretends to care about their hobbies but I don't actually and they can tell because I'm not good at pretending.
The more tired and bored I am the meaner I get. I'm normally chill and pleasant or goofy and silly, but if things start to annoy me or I get bored I kind of shut down and gradually become more and more selfish until I can escape and get back to my safe space at home. My wife's siblings are all starting to have kids, and I hope to be a fun and exciting Uncle who can do stuff and play games with them for a few hours and then go home and unwind and recharge my introvert energy. There's orders of magnitude of difference between being around kids several times a month and being around them hours every day. There is a nonzero probability that I would manage and my whole world would change the way it supposedly does and I would be a good parent. But I think there's a >50% chance that I would not. I don't think I'm ready for it, and I don't feel any more ready than I did 10 years ago. Maybe I'll change my mind in another 10-20 years, but unless AI manages to solve aging then it'll be too late by then.
I think the world we live in is fantastic and wonderful. Politics is shit, but it's always been shit. Technology is amazing, AI is going to make so much cool stuff as long as they can manage to avoid having it kill everyone. If you want kids, have kids. But only if you have the resolve to do what it takes to be a good parent. I don't think I do, and I don't want to roll those dice on an unsuspecting kid who doesn't deserve me at my worst.
I have nothing to offer, other than that reading this made me feel sad.
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Is there any Motteposter who doesn't feel like this? It's just that when you have a demanding upper-middle-class career and kids "ungodly" is 90 minutes a day, whereas when you are single in grad school it's 4+ hours a day.
Procrastinators of the world, u
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I think the first and equally important step is admitting that you don't actually want them.
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The problem is that the causality could go both ways. If you ask why someone doesn't want responsibility, the answer might be that some part of their mind is resentful towards the world.
It isn't necessarily a question of how cruel the world actually is. It might be a question of how much sway such tendencies hold over a person.
Personally, I think that "I didn't do X because life is evil" sounds an awful lot like saying the quiet part out loud, and stems from something deep and as yet poorly understood inside of the human mind.
You mean that people who say this are tacitly admitting they themselves have evil impulses?
Mostly unconscious questionable impulses, would be more accurate for the people you describe. I think we all have a part of us that is capable of this, but I don't yet have any systematic thoughts on how those impulses take over, nor in what situations they can clearly be described as evil.
If you read school shooter manifestos or journals, you'll see a lot of parallels. This is the main basis for why I suggest that you don't dismiss these claims so easily. Something about the claim that "life is not worth living" is a recurring feature that I've noticed, or think that I've noticed.
I suspect that there is an underlying philosophy of evil which some aspect of the mind is prone towards believing in, perhaps because of the specific way in which that part of the mind works (ie. it may be an accidental but high-probability outcome) and in certain (as yet unknown to me) situations it takes over.
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Linked sources and their own linked sources do not substantiate this claim (that the specific opposition to repealing RvW was an anti-natalist one). Do you have a source that actually substantiates this?
I know I've seen sources which demonstrated this was Roske's motivation and remember sharing them with my brother, but I can't find them. I did manage to find this collection of screenshots from his Reddit account:
It doesn't seem open to debate that he is an antinatalist (or was at the time of writing, anyway), although I admit this doesn't prove that was his motivation for trying to kill Kavanaugh. Will try to do some more digging and see what I can find.
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This is not inherent to Gnosticism anymore than it is to Christianity. Some sects believed this but not all. It's not conceptually different then believing we are inherently flawed due to original sin in fact it basically is this except they view the sin as being different and invert the garden of Eden story. In different gnostic traditions the original sin is the creation of the world or alternatively the rape of Eve by Yahweh in any case this does not inherently lead to antinatalism or nihilism and the two extant Gnostic religions are not such. Foundationally it's far more about inverting the Garden of Eden story and dualism （though usually more functionally polytheism). Of course just as in Christianity there's a winnowing effect where the antinatalist sects quickly die out.
Leaving aside the fact that 'original sin' in the sense you seem to mean it is a peculiarly Roman Catholic concept, yeah, there's a huge difference between that and having been maliciously incarnated by a demiurge. Actually I thought for a moment about how to illustrate just how radically-different those two things are but came up blank.
Most Gnostics don't/didn't believe we were maliciously incarnated by a demiurge. The Cathars did syncretizing the concept of a demiurge with Satan and other aspects of the Catholic church. The Nag Hammadi creation texts and the extant Gnostic religions have a much more complicated cosmology and a concept much closer to original sin in the sense that in some of them the material world becomes irrevocably tainted after the rape of eve but not before. In others the world is created bad as an act of rebellion or irrevocably tainted because it's creation was not authorized by God and Yahweh lacked the authority. In some Yahweh is evil, in some he is simply fallible and overcome by lust or pride. and in some the world is created by other entities. But it's a very broad concept I think we have something like five Gnostic creation myths of which we can read the full texts of.
Anyway Gnosticism is a broad category which is a lot more than Cathars, and I wish people on the internet would say Cathars because most of the common internet use of "Gnosticism" is essentially just referring to them.
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I agree that there is world of difference between sentiments like "Nobody is perfect" and "we all have the capacity for evil", and the sort of aggressive nihilism that seems to permeate a lot of these movements.
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I was basing my description of Gnosticism on Montaillou and The Perfect Heresy.
Which is entirely accurate but a lot of these things are specific the Cathars rather than all Gnostics in general. I don't mean to be too nitpicky but its was one of my pet peeves because the internet in general seems to view all of Gnosticism as just the Cathars when it's a much broader category.
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You bring up historically dark periods in which humans didn't stop having children. I don't even think you have to travel through time.
Right now in Africa the human condition involves suffering on a scale incomprehensible to the average western mind, where family members of Ebola victims lynch the doctors and aid workers trying to stop outbreaks while war and rape cyclically consume every attempt at building civilization.
This is the one of the few places on the planet where people are having more children.
I've never been convinced of many of my friends' reasoning behind not having kids either. Some are honest about their desire to travel and build pools in their backyard, at least.
Why would you even want a pool when you don’t have kids?
Asking the real questions.
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To show off to guests, of course. Or to cool off on hot days. Knew a guy out in the desert who'd jump into his pool several times a day over the summer months.
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From my perspective, actually, pools are deathtraps for young kids and a maintenance nightmare. I want them less as a father. I had a lot of fun at them as an unattached adult, where I can read, tan, and cool off repeatedly.
There's a reason every retirement home has a pool but almost no preschools do.
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Good post overall, addressed a lot of my interjections as I read through it.
The thing is I think the premise is sort of a category error: "Be honest about why you don't want children" is basically resolved as "because you just don't want to, not some hallucinated moral justification." But "You don't want children because you don't want children" is not exactly an insightful notion: as your post notes, nobody in the past seems to have had this problem. And from first principles, Darwinian dynamics imply normal people do want children, as the ones that don't will mostly be wiped from the board each generation, selecting for those that do. Yes, there's some conflation between wanting sex and wanting children, but it would be silly to contend these are fully independent: we have abortion now, yes, but they had abortion in the past, too, it was just post-birth abortion, so I think the distinction is more one of modern sensibilities than one that would be of Darwinian relevance. Having children is pretty much universally seen as a good thing, if not an outright divine blessing, in human cultures across time and space. Further, even if you cut the abortion rate to 0, we'd still have well below replacement fertility.
So why did people stop wanting children? Many contend they didn't: they stopped having children, yes, but they didn't stop wanting children.
I think there are many reasons, but one reason I think is significant but rarely noted is that the campaigns against teen pregnancy have, thanks to the rise of rationalism, finally been successful. In the past, when Christian norms reigned, sex education was basically a crotchety old woman badgering you to behave yourself because an invisible man in the sky said so, and obviously teenagers don't care what some crotchety old woman says about an invisible man in the sky, so they do what teenagers do, have an oopsie, then a shotgun wedding where we all pretend to not know what's going on, and then you're left with a healthy family. Traditional sex education, in a nominal sense, completely failed to do its job -- though in a Darwinian sense, it very much succeeded! But today, rational autists have analysed the situation and concluded "Oh, if we want to prevent teenagers from getting pregnant, having a crotchety old woman tell them about an invisible man in the sky is obviously an ineffective tactic. What would actually be effective is showing them lots of pics and footage of sexually-transmitted infections!" Well, as it turns out, the rationalists were correct, and the teenagers did indeed finally start behaving as the tradcons say God intended, and now we're facing the judgment of Darwin. The fertile demographics, of course, have largely eschewed this rationalist nonsense, and continue to use the ineffective form of sex education, as God intended.
I think the education issue is part of the story as well. A teenager in 1600 could just start adulting at 14-15 and be just fine. You didn’t need to be able to read or do high level math, or even geometry. You just became a blacksmith, or a farmer by following dad around. Modern people need an almost absurdly long education in highly complex skills that massively cut into prime boot knocking years that happen in the teenage years. A 16 year old male and 16 year old female are biologically the most horny humans around. But, those kids are not free to indulge even if they want to. Instead, we make them sit in classrooms learning about mollusks in preparation for taking the SAT with a view to going to college where they will learn higher levels of skills that hopefully within 5-7 years after graduation will have them earning enough money to get a two bedroom apartment in which, by the time these humans are ready to have children in the financial sense, they have much lower libido and the woman has missed half to 2/3 of her fertility to the education system. Then everyone is like “wait, why no kids?” It’s because by the time a person stable enough to have kids, they’re too old to have kids. Hence fewer kids.
You only "need" that education in the sense that credentialing inflation and an unwillingness to let people (or, more accurately, racial groups) fail has made all degrees before the bachelor's worthless (and is currently in the process of destroying that signal, too). The vast majority of jobs can be done with a few weeks, or at most months, of training, assuming the worker already knows how to read and write and do arithmetic, which most kids can do by the time they graduate middle school (and, for the ones that don't, an extra four years of remedial classes are not going to help).
The Amish demonstrate that it is perfectly possible to be economically productive with an eight grade education. We just make it illegal to drop out until 16, strongly encourage people to remain in school until 18 by making it free and putting all sorts of limits on working while underage, and then pipeline people into college while making it illegal for employers to just give applicants IQ tests and gatekeeping lots of jobs under the legal requirements of a bachelor's degree.
The notion that four years of Shakespeare, algebra, chemistry, and history, followed by another four years of specialized study, are in any way necessary or useful to do a modern job is mental.
For a natalist subculture to exist, it needs an alternative to the evils of the education system. We need a path for kids to skip college, and a cultural narrative that says this is good and proper rather than making you a low status loser.
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Yeah, the most significant change in education IMO is the normification of leaving your hometown for university. Catastrophic social norm by Darwinian standards.
That problem matters as well, but my main issue with over-educating is that it basically means that by the time a couple is ready to settle down and is financially stable enough to think about having kids, they are too old to have said kids, or at best one or maybe two. Add in the much longer dependent stage means committing to a much longer project that’s actually quite resource intensive, which means that parents need even more resources to devote to their children. It’s actually insane how many obstacles we put in front of the couple who might want to have kids.
I wouldn't say that. Even if you do grad school, you're still out by 25, unless you do a doctoral degree of some sort, which is a pretty tiny percentage of the population. There's plenty of time to have a couple kids starting then.
The problem is that 25 isn't the starting point! The issue is you typically went off to another city for university, which made you lose contact with your high school girlfriend(s), then go to yet another city to actually settle down after that, so you lose contact with all your university girlfriend(s), and so by the time you're 25 you likely don't even have any serious marriage prospects because you and everyone around you keeps relocating to different places. This is a ridiculous social model.
If everyone would just stay put for a while, I think the issue would resolve itself. For example, the Mormons don't have much issue settling down and getting married, and they're not exactly operating under an 18th century apprenticeship mentality. But they do all go to the same university (BYU), so while they are relocating in a technical sense, they're all relocating to the same place, so it doesn't really count in the same way it does for normal kids, where everyone scatters to the four winds after high school graduation and never sees each other again. That, and BYU is a university that actively encourages them to marry, rather than presenting marriage as some icky distraction from study.
It’s not just college, but finding work after college, paying off debt, and earning your way to either owning a home or at least renting a nice enough apartment that you’d feel comfortable having a child in. This takes a while. So if you’re doing the typical 4-5 years post high school, then an internship or two or a shitty entry level job that you’re working insane hours to get up the ladder from.
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If you are on TheMotte and had the attention span to read the above comment without using GPT to summarize, then please have children. Have as many as you think you can manage and then one more on top of that.
Smart people should build things. What are you building? Code? A 401k? How about a human being? Imagine building one of those. Then stop imagining and get on it! It should be at least as important to you to build a human as it is to build a portfolio.
If you don't like children, ok. But you've never met your children. The children who will be like you and the person you love the most.
It's going to involve sacrifice. Ok, so does everything else worth doing in the whole world.
When smart people stop building things, society collapses. And the best, most important thing a smart person can build is other smart people.
Do people here do this? That would be disappointing.
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Your first paragraph is maybe the funniest thing I’ve read on here - and frankly a reward for reading the above, which was itself somewhat easy because goodness do I love Se7en.
I shall not be having children but my fiancé has two boys (now 16&17) and I am influencing them for the better.
They’ll be fine.
The rougher patches have been addressed and all that’s left is … all of everything else.
I approve of that too. Washington never had natural-born children either but I wouldn't say he had no impact on the future.
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It's weird that that the people most strongly against anything with a whiff of collectivism (not necessarily you, unfortunately the everyone have kids NOW movement has mainly those types is it's squeaky wheels) suddenly find it in their hearts to "Think of society!"
What society? I was told it it didn't exist; from Thatcher's mouth to God's ears as is proper in these days.
IMO, If you want people to have kids, you gotta recreate the collective structures of the past, and not just the rose tinted 50s nostalgia about gingham dresses and whites only drinking fountains. Back in the old country people had lots of kids at least in part because they could count on the neighbors letting them sleep on the floor if the roof blew off their house, from the richest to the poorest. I spent ate a lot of lunches in random people houses around town, because that where I happened to be around lunch time.
Re relative value of pursuits, maximally cynical mode: The wretches of the earth seem to have no trouble popping out kids, I remember them picking up extra shifts in my tradie days so they wouldn't have to be around them. That being the case, what is the value of adding more dead weight to the biosphere? More people to watch TikTok clips of top ten funny family guy moments funny? Why shouldn't I build my portfolio? What use is all that other bullshit that doesn't trade on the market and is therefore without value ie garbage? Should Newton have stopped playing around with all that calculating bullshit and had 8 kids that statistical would be two-ish standard deviations smarter than the average bear? Off the top of your head: Did Marie Curie have kids, and if she did what did they do, and if she did and they became cobblers or something, who gives a fuck?
Ending maximum Cynicism:
She did, and they were also historically significant people; I think one of them also won a noble prize in physics. And even if they weren't, fuck that guy for bringing it up like it's a problem. When you die, either it's all gonna go away or whatever is after isn't going to be counting medals and comparing stacks. Maybe newton should have taken a moment away form the alembic after all, although that is also a bad example. I think he didn't have kids for other reasons.
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It takes two people for that.
I'm not the one saying no.
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Yeah, that's the plan. I will say this though: I don't want to have children, then have them deal with poverty or a bad mothers. I'd need to find: 1) A good job (working on that, almost there hopefully) 2) finding a women who'd be a good mom (I'll do that once I find the job).
Reproduce, yes. But it should be done responsibly.
I don't really think so. Failing spectacular catastrophe, 'poverty' isn't really a problem any more, at least when it comes to nutrition, access to healthcare, education, and so on. Quite the opposite, really.
Bad mothers, yeah. But would you rather have some unpleasantries in life -- which often result in growth, anyway -- or not live at all?
The world will never be what children deserve and this attitude is prone to running away with those who hold it.
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Your #2 gives me sweaty palms.
You’ll find her when you find her!
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Agreed. But I would say that people need to pursue these goals, not just expect them to happen. I think most people get the "job" thing. People go to secondary school, study long hours, go to residency, internships, put in a lot of time and effort into getting the right credentials and getting the right job.
The same amount of effort needs to go into getting the girl. And not just dating, but actually discerning marriage with the girl. It shouldn't take more than a year to learn enough about each other to see if you can actually be spouses, and if at any point you think you can't be spouses then break it off.
For some reason people take this part of their lives unseriously when in hindsight it's the cornerstone of all other joys in my life.
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I agree, but am curious as to why you think, as it were, that any of that matters. Why is 'society' a god worth serving? How deep do our sacrificial obligations to it run?
If we all are to die right now in a flaming meteor, then ok. Society doesn't matter that much to you.
If you hope to grow old and die peacefully at the end of a lifespan as long as you can achieve, then you want to have stability as you grow older and weaker. This means able-bodied people younger than you who have been inculcated in a community that values taking care of the weak and elderly. This means having children and educating them.
So that's the selfish case.
The less-selfish case I guess is that human lives are one of the most precious resource in the world, consciousness is rare, sapience more so. A universe without anyone to observe it would be tragic and absurd.
Stable societies produce happier outcomes, better lives for these sapient Earth observers. If you think life sucks, the better thing to do is make it less sucky instead of abandon it, creating more suffering in the interim as society collapses.
My real reason is just that I found someone I loved. And because I loved him, I loved the world. I loved the world that could make such a person, however fucked up his life had been. In my husband I saw that the awfulness of the world cannot mar the beauty of a human soul. And I liked him so much I wanted more of him - more people like him. And he thought I was a good thing, too. He thought it was good I exist and because of that I began to come around on the idea myself. And if it was good that I existed, and it was good that he existed, then it would be great for there to be more people like him and like myself.
And so I embarked on this mission: to make more people who have the best qualities of us both, who are coached on their weak-points by the two people who can empathize the most with them.
Thanks, that's mostly what I wanted to know. Still curious though about tradeoffs and where our personal obligations to sacrifice for the society begin and end.
You're not caught in traffic, you are the traffic. You don't have an obligation to "society" you are society and you have an obligation to yourself.
This seems to suppose that the society in which I find myself -- and perhaps more importantly its leadership -- has incentives which are nearly-aligned with my own, which seems pretty debatable both presently and historically.
You're going to need to be more concrete than that.
Let's say Social Security goes away before you are 65. Or even total anarchy. Are you better off with one or zero kids, or if you have four+. If you have 4+, at least one is likely to still have a fondness for you and might let you stay with them in your twilight years. If you have 0 kids you get to look forward to working until you cannot and rotting in a ditch after.
From where I stand, having kids is more upside than down. Sure I could afford more things without them. But I had the time of my life playing fetch with my 3 year old yesterday. I
I don't know how to explain it to someone who doesn't have kids. I have taught two little humans how to read. And for one of those humans it was a hard slog, I had to keep changing programs every year, trying to make an inch of progress at a time. I researched, I made schedules and lesson plans and sat down every day with a book and my girl and I persisted.
There's the mental cocaine of having your toddler call you "mamma." But there's more than chemicals. There's the concerted effort to help someone every day become a good adult human, and whoever you are it takes all of you. If you're good at research it takes research. If you're good at meal prep it takes meal prep. Whatever your thing is, you pour it on your kid and it's satisfying. It's climbing Everest, it's running a marathon, it's what life is for, the challenge you are supposed to be doing. The school of love you need to be a whole human being.
If the word society is tripping you up, just do it for yourself.
Yeah no, I have a lot of kids and another on the way and no plans to stop for a while yet. I get that part. I'm just hung up on the bit about society, yeah.
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Among the vanishingly small number of people who have actually made major lifestyle changes because of climate (some of whom exist in my social circle), I think having fewer children that you might otherwise do is common. Normally this means one instead of two.
I agree that anyone who flies for leisure travel and claims to be restricting family size for climate reasons is lying.
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All of the confusion and anger and petulance about all this is just the natural state of human psychology. In the past, hormones, necessity and the needs of others usually overrode individual preferences re: children.
Consciousness experiences life in a random universe as pain. Here I quote the Princess Bride, "life is pain and anyone who tells you different is selling something". The anti-natalists only echo the poet "That which my father gave to me, but which I gave to no man.".
People, by and large, fear death much less than pain. Eternal pain is the nightmare, hell. And life, with all its pleasures and joys, is still on net painful for practically everyone. In fact, the pain is entirely incidental to the processes of life and disconnected from any real feedback mechanisms. Hence Camus' charge that the first question of philosophy is whether to continue living.
Some percentage of people don't think it's worth it, and should check out. A life dedicated to hedonism, social climbing or political activism is not a happy one. You can't outrun pain, it's inside your head. People externalize, wirehead, rage at the nature of things. Refuse to procreate. I don't think it's cell phones, it's just the natural progression of people without struggle or direction.
Or, you can accept a life you did not choose, take your place in the family tree, among your people and grow a few new branches. Normiemaxxing, as the kids might say. This is evolution. All of this civilization, the video and corruption and economy and all the religions, all of it is just humanity driving its own evolution. We progress by differential fertility.
One thing I should note is that most religious faiths encourage some form of non-reproductive service as a means of getting acolytes primarily loyal to the church and unable to pass any wealth/status down to offspring. Much of the form we se anti-natalism taking in our modern day is just the new eunuch class from a relatively recent heresy of a very old religion. "LBGTBBQUIAST(&*%^#)&^" is just monks in the new monasteries which are universities which are the old monasteries.
The avoidance of pain is the central tenet of our societies.
Young men will be taught to avoid the trades because that work will 'destroy their bodies'. The average PMC/liberal idea seems to leave these 'dirty' jobs to brown people, whether it's fixing roofs or raising children.
Union-membership became a suspicious thing when the members realized that their college-educated left-wing allies would rather hire foreign labor than improve wages and work conditions at home.
I would rather my son gets into the trades and suffer some kind of disability in his 40s than literally live in the pod, eating bugs with his AI girlfriend.
Meanwhile, traditionally feminine homemaking work such as laundry, cooking, sewing clothes, maintaining heating has seen incredible improvements in ease and efficiency. Young women come out of years of education with only rudimentary ideas of what being a parent is like, and are shocked that unlike the rest of their life to that point, they may have to be uncomfortable whether by physically bearing and delivering a child, or by having to breastfeed, lack sleep, care for a helpless being. The process is only harder for our generation because the previous generations of women have pulled the rug on the support system that used to exist for new mothers, choosing instead to focus on their own personal satisfaction.
Being a mother was seen as some kind of 'duty', now it's very much optional.
Not sure I'd phrase it quite like this but agreed that it's a major factor. In practice it looks a lot to me like a desire for what amounts to palliative care until death.
As I have argued before, the values of "liquid modernity" and the liberal striver class are incompatible with building healthy relationships and by extension incompatible with human flourishing.
It is trivially true that eating healthy is less enjoyable than stuffing your face with junk.
It is trivially true that there are downsides to having kids.
It is trivially true that a life of responsibility is presents risks that a life of perpetual infancy does not.
At the end of the day good things justify themselves and that is why it is important to reject the values that might prevent you from embracing them.
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Just out of pocket, but have you seen Severance? The quest for the avoidance of pain is one of the key themes and plot points of the show. In trying to eliminate pain from the human experience, they build an entire edifice of torture.
No, I'm afraid not. I'm unlikely to see it either because I'm just not in the habit of watching TV. I like the idea of watching more TV and have several series I've been meaning to finish, but who has the time?
But thanks, that does sound interesting.
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You yourself claimed elsewhere in this thread some burdensome trauma about not being ready to live in the face of women suggesting you were.
The statement and phrasing are trivially correct.
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Yes, I agree with the original post for the most part, but this is a big part that I feel a lot of "just have kids" discourse is missing.
I thought that there might be something uniquely painful about current civilization that causes widespread suffering. I only get statistics since the 1950s for suicide rates, which have been held more or less constant, and it appears that people in Africa still kill themselves, too. So maybe it's not so uniquely painful after all. The human condition extends further back than this.
With so many jokes about working until you're dead, or reading people's clever nihilistic responses to questions like "how's it going" and "how are you", I think there is a certain amount of despair that is inherent to anyone living in any civilization. It seems to me that if you're not really getting much joy out of life in the first place, there is little community structure to give pressure to have kids, and actually having kids even after having sex is an endeavor, it's natural you're not going to go to the extra effort when you're barely hanging on yourself. The first, nihilism about working until you're dead, has been around for a very long time. The other two are new. I really think that if those two were retroactively applied to people in the past, those people in the past, too, would possess a plummeting birth rate.
Edited to add: With so much abundance provided by the government, I think it's also been shown that nobody in particular needs anyone else, like actually needs them, relies on them for support, relies on them to have kids so that they can continue to eat and live from the labor of the next generation. I think we're a purpose driven species, and lacking a purpose makes for a directionless life.
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Huh?
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Just let it happen. I agree with the antinatalists on one count: They shouldn't have children. If they hate life so much, there is a good chance they'd pass that on to their children one way or another, be it cultural or genetic.
I love life. My kids clearly love being alive. We'll see how it holds up long-term, but I'm rather confident I'll pass on the joy of life to them. If not, they, too, can simply choose not to have kids. There is beauty in this; Aside from just functionally adapting to new circumstances, this way we select for people who, whatever changes may happen, can be happy in the new world we have wrought.
The bigger issue to me is the significant disinformation and ignorance around pregnancy and child rearing that makes people postpone it too much, makes parenthood far more difficult and unpleasant than necessary and ultimately causes people who might have had 3-4 children in another time, instead end up with 1-2.
For example, I know a couple who started late but not super late (after 35), and found out that the wife has a condition that makes conceiving much more difficult. They did eventually have a child after trying for quite some time, but the most interesting part for me was the following: Everyone I talked with about this just completely refused to consider the age component. The wife had a condition, and that condition is the reason, so it can't be age, right? No. The condition is something that can be trivially looked up to both increase in prevalence with age, and to worsen with age. There is a very good chance that had they simply started 10 years earlier, they'd conceived without trouble, not even noticing the yet-to-fully-develop condition.
And this can be generalized. People don't magically have a lower chance to conceive with higher age for no reason. There is always a mechanism - a lot of different mechanisms - and almost every one you can find, you will see that it correlates with age.
It is frankly staggering how few Western women are familiar with the term "geriatric pregnancy". Some of them even get offended when I mention it, like I'm making a value judgement.
I was talking about this with a woman a while back (it came up organically) but put my foot in my mouth when I mentioned that female fertility drops off precipitously at about age 35. She was a career woman who was very much hitting her "Oh no I've made a huge mistake" phase and I supposed it would be helpful to give her a nudge in the right direction. Except it turned out she was already 35, which I had totally failed to consider because she was East Asian and looked 28 at the oldest.
The meme never lies.
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People don't want children because children here suck ass (or, they are too expensive, same thing). "But climate change" is the left wing cope, the right wing cope is "make motherhood high status". There is no viable solution.
I don't think there's a viable societally-general solution, but my local solution of being part of a religious community where motherhood is high-status seems to be working out fine. Good luck to everyone else, I guess, and hopefully we'll still be here when you're ready to try something other than whatever it is you're doing now.
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What does "here" mean exactly?
Most of planet earth in 2026.
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Presumably, "in America" or "in the Western world". As soon as you have a child, you are a slave to it by proxy. You have to raise it as the powerful members of your community wish it to be raised, or face social and governmental wrath. This has always been true, though state capacity increasing has made it worse -- getting disapproving sniffs from those who don't like the way you raise your child is not as bad as disapproving sniffs plus stern letters from "educators" and visits from CPS or the local police. And, the way they want children to be raised has gotten more and more intensive. Full time personal supervision of them. Not just school but all sorts of "enriching" activities. Every sort of safety measure. Supporting them until they finish undergraduate. Etc.
Yeah I've transitioned from having my first child in Australia as a nuclear family to having a second child in SEA with a far-larger extended family present, nanny and a culture that's generally more childfriendly. The amount of quality of life I've received back due to moving is insane, and it's better for the kids as well. Nuclear family two working parents trying to negotiate a child is absolutely punitive.
Can you please explain in what sense is Southeast Asian culture more child-friendly than Australian culture?
People way more comfortable interacting with strangers' small children than in Australia since there are more small children around. Essentially everywhere has ample childseats. Carseat legislation has tradeoffs but less enforcement makes being ad-hoc with children a lot easier. Difference in wages means that most service jobs are way more staffed here so you get a lot more active assistance with children whilst dining and whatnot.
I think the more likely explanation is that the pedophile predator threat is part of the public consciousness in Australia but not in SE Asia. And I doubt the fertility rate is higher in SE Asia than in Australia.
Do you mean restaurants and third places in general?
Malaysia 1.6 per capita to Australia at 1.48 which isn't a huge gap, though also going to likely be magnified by me going from a relatively big city to somewhere more suburban. There is a massive increase in child-friendly infrastructure here, though.
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I am pretty sure parents have a lot of freedom though? The limitations that are forced upon parents, as far as I know, are as follows:
I think the last two are the only unreasonable points. But those are both specific to certain countries and don't explain why all of the west is seemingly facing the same issue. Otherwise, they all seem fine. You can homeschool if you have the resources. You can teach them your faith, although stuff like female circumcision is banned. You can teach them to not have sex before marriage. You can teach them a trade, you can try and make them expert sports players, or you can tell them that the world is a dangerous place and they should stay with you for as long as they can. In these cases, you may expect your kid to not fit in with others, as you are effectively raising them for a different culture. You can be cold, and passive, and distant, as long as you keep up with the basic duties of food, clothing, shelter, and education. Other parents may sneer at you and you may feel isolated. But legally you have a lot of wiggle room with how you want to raise your kids.
No one is going to take your kids away if you don't sign them up for a sport. And are you seriously saying that a group of 10 year-olds cannot play alone outside without it being called child abuse?
This is another thing that may be expected but it is not a policy that is enforced. You have the legal right to kick out your 18-year-old son, and refuse to save up for his college degree. The only thing you will face is judgement. But the government is not going to come after you for it.
Talking about minimums is irrelevant. First because people don't want to have a child with a minimum viable life. Secondly because to make sense of it you have to compare it to conditions in high fertility societies. For example: having a child means you have to plan your vacations around the school year for 10+ years, this does not matter if you don't have vacations and you will never be able to afford them anyway.
Also, downthread you say:
this is how low fertility happens, it's almost all a consequence of good things that we like that ends up making children suck as a side effect. Take the vacations example above (I'm not saying that's the main thing by the way), why does it happen:
Or take child seats laws, which make children suck as a side effect: do you want children to die in car accidents? Do you want to kill children? Are you a child killer? You must hate children if you want to abolish child seats laws.
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You can sanewash it all you want, though the fact that you were able to come up with an 11-point list without much trouble kinda works against you.
It's quite possible this will get the police and/or CPS called. Even if it doesn't, if something happens with one of these 10 year olds -- e.g. one or more gets a minor injury, or they trespass on the wrong neighbor's lawn -- the parents will be questioned about why they weren't supervising the child. And with that sort of question, there's no acceptable answer; the question is simply making the point that there was a transgression.
Most of the points are reasonable and essentially boil down to "ensure your children grow up healthy and with a basic education". The unreasonable points seem specific to America and thus don't work when you are trying to generalize to all of the west.
There is an argument that corporal punishment has a place in parenting, but as far as I can tell most parents are not capable of using it responsibly, so it seems reasonable that it is illegal.
You still have a lot of options on how to raise your kids.
Yes, the unreasonableness was advanced one seemingly reasonable point at a time.
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Having to provide constant supervision for up to 13 years, depending on the specific local, is in fact extremely limiting, especially if there are a lot of rules about babysitting and so babysitters are difficult to obtain outside of 8 - 5 childcare hours (and difficult within those hours too outside of specific programs. I expect to obtain ~4 hrs of outsourced childcare over the next two months).
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American child protection services (CPS) have powers way beyond that of most other government agencies. Children can be removed from parents for the time of the investigation, and returned months later, the quintessential 'process is punishment' phenomenon.
The intersection of child healthcare and government can also be very gruesome. Government may decide that a child should not be allowed to get medical treatment in another country as in the British case of Alfie Evans.
If you bring a child to an American hospital and you disagree with medical decisions there, they may call CPS on you if you want to leave. It gets really difficult to find adequate healthcare for your child if you disagree with the current political directions of health authorities, like under the COVID regime or the ongoing 'soul mixed-up at birth' transgender craze, which means you may get denied certain other services like access to a daycare or public school.
Anybody in your vicinity may disagree with your parenting, some American adults will call CPS on parents because unattended children play outside. This may not necessarily lead to the aforementioned dreaded removal, but it definitely weights on families.
This is all a result of the Civil Rights Acts of 1964, which made it illegal for Americans to choose their neighbors, and created a culture under which functional adults have to defend themselves from the assumption that they belong to the 10% under-functioning fringe that nobody should never ever officially discriminate against.
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From a biological point-of-view, I would propose that one of the big factors in the urge to reproduce is the perception of time.
There's this idea that power outages lead to baby booms but apparently that's not substantiated, there are reasons that would explain that couples actually are less likely to mingle in a crisis.
Nevertheless, in the relative perpetual safety of Western country and perhaps the world at large except for sporadic hot spots, young people get to age without the constraint of time. Children are of no help in the modern workplace so is this not something that the average adult would look forward to from an economic point-of-view.
Old people seemingly keep getting older with only limit what fraction of the GDP we dare not to sacrifice to their care.
Now that the passing of time is merely punctuated by the latest iPhone release, for many young people there is no external, environmental cue that it is time to settle down. There is probably a contagious effect of being presented with a friend's baby, some kind of baby-FOMO, but some communities may be completely childless and that effect delayed. Taylor Swift has been a childless female celebrity for 16 years, and we often hear of the advances of Science™ purporting to push later and later the inescapable biological realities of motherhood.
Perhaps the best way to address this problem would be to inject in media some reminders that death is inevitable, our time on this planet is fleeting [and it is time to repent].
Another aspect of this denial of death in Western culture (and environment) is the obsession with safety. Parents can quickly turn into criminals or social pariahs if they don't demonstrate the utmost care in dealing with what has almost become a rare resource, children. Likewise the justice system will waste an offender's time rather than inflicting a little bit of pain (corporal punishment).
Pain is seen as a bigger problem than waste (of time). A recent parenting trend is 'gentle parenting' where the adults are encouraged to essentially negotiate with the child as a human being with rights. In practice this means a big waste of time where a good shout or slap can bring immediate results. Obviously when there is more than 1 child involved, the simplest of tasks can be endlessly delayed.
I can't help but connect this to some kind of male/female dichotomy. Industries that are male-dominated want to get the work done asap (making a MVP for a start-up, pumping an oilfield), while industries that are female-dominated like education seem to take longer and longer decade after decade to get the job done. Hard to tell effect from cause here but I feel a connection.
Interestingly, men are the biologically stable version of mankind. Perhaps women are seeking in their environment what they are internally lacking, and we've gone too far in giving it to them.
As a person of a certain age, I assure you death is still around. Quite a few of the parents of those in my social circles are facing it (or have already died)
Yes but to a lot of people that doesn't really kick in till they're after reasonable baby-having ages which removes a sense of urgency and also makes sharing resources pretty arbitrary depending on the exact family structure. I've gone from a Western country where my parents fucked off to a beach community in another state as soon as they hit 60 to an Eastern country where there's 5 generations living within 5 minutes of eachother even amongst upper middle class people who have the resources to bail if they wanted to. Raising kids in the latter situation is way easier than in the former situation.
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I think the real answer is that most people are just very short-term in their thinking, especially during the most fertile years of their life. In the past, they had kids because sex feels good and they just didn't think much about the long-term consequences of pregnancy. Now, they think too much about the pregnancy itself, and not enough about the long term benefits of having children.
They have to be. People have to contend most immediately with what’s right in front of them. Even with foresight the tendency to remain idle is difficult to overcome, because why address things that aren’t presenting a problem? The solution I’ve always had for this isn’t to think 10 years in the future, it’s to think about the big picture in general.
People who don’t have kids because they “aren’t prepared” to have them don’t take stock of the fact that you can almost never be prepared for it until it happens. “I’m too immature,” well guess what, you’re about to grow up really fast now. Sure there’s always finances and other things to work out, but when it comes to family planning, there’s far too much expected parents happen to overthink.
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I wonder if these declarations of noble childlessness are more common in public forums like the internet?
From my experience being an annoying pronatalist, if you ask people face to face why they aren't having children, the most common answer among those who could have children (married or coupled people) is something along the lines of 'eh, not sure I can be bothered' which seems like the real answer.
Relevant cartoon
People are pretty good at finding the motivation for doing what they've always done in the face of difficulty, as Albert Camus noted- imagining sisyphus happy and all that. People are pretty bad at picking out what they've always done from a large set of equally easy options, as existentialists also noted, even when that's what makes them happy.
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Wait! I want to comment on the cartoon too!
While basically sympathetic to the artist's point, what mainly occurs to me here is that in the first three panels people were living a lifestyle that let them be home with their kids a lot.
Both parents out of the house working, and especially if it's for low wages, is indeed hard. Also lack of family or community around to help with that. Also can't let them play alone outside. Also you're gonna need a bigger car if you want more than two, and those things don't grow on trees. Also also also...
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I think the truth that the cartoon hints at but doesn't explicitly show, is that all of those couples were having sex, for all sorts of reasons, but that meant babies in the first three panels and it doesn't in the last one.
The solution to the fertility crisis is simple but not easy. It's ban birth control and let nature take it's course.
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I think in an ideal world if you choose to not have kids, you forfeit your right to social security; since you depend on others and successive generations to fund your retirement.
How do they prove you're unmarried by choice? Shall the government introduce marriage centers (analogous to job centers) that bids you to marry the first bottom of the barrel man or woman they match you with?
That’s why I said ideal world. I was anticipating precisely that objection.
So what exactly happens in the ideal world?
Marriage proposals are all submitted and answered in writing by law. Unless you can produce such a document, the authorities will assume that you're unmarried by choice. Just an idea.
Argentina tried this, there were women who took money to reject marriage proposals.
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The salient difference is that children used to just kinda of happen to you in the course of living your life before contraception. Now children have to be deliberately opted into to a larger degree
Doesn't fit. Birth rates did not collapse until after the baby boom (by definition), but the only contraceptive method which is that recent is the pill. Birth control has been around for a very long time. Condoms and natural family planning date to the 1800s. Ancient cultures like the Greeks and the Romans practiced infanticide. And anyone who understands how babies are made can make use of sodomy, fellatio, and coitus interruptus.
I ask you to reconsider this. Condoms used to be unreliable and uncomfortable. Natural family planning necessitates a level of human agency that most normies lack, plus it entails the woman having sex on days when her desire level is at the lowest, which is hardly practical. Coitus interruptus is also unreliable.
Plus abortion was a lot more taboo and limited availability. My dad's a Boomer and his 7 siblings were largely married/had their first child by 22. In his reckoning it's just a mix of 'women had fuckall options for escaping the family home without getting married' and 'pregnancy used to occur a lot more abruptly in the dating phase and people would just snowball that into marriage a lot of the time'
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No, the baby boom is called that specifically because birth rates were already falling before and it was a reversal of the trend, producing a significantly large generation.
When you account for the fall of infant mortality, fertility rates were significantly more stable prior to the baby boom.
I think the problem is we assumed that the fertility rates would arrive asymptotically at whatever replacement was for the infant mortality of the future/present time, but fertility rates did not stop falling. They were only reversed for a short time by the baby boom before falling again at around the same rate.
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So butt sex, blow jobs, and the pull out method? See this is why every generation thinks it was the one who invented sex, once you start talking about things this way.
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While I agree with the body of the argument, what you are asking for is for people to stop lying to themselves. Why stop when it makes them feel better than the alternative?
Why would a drug addict stop using heroin, when it makes them feel better than the alternative?
I understand your point, but it's a poor analogy. Heroin is a controlled, addictive physical substance where the political will to control it does not exist and the physical goods are directly traded legally and illegally for money.
Lies are infinite, have no physical form and cost nothing to produce, although you could argue about the financial value of such.
Right, there are obvious differences.
I'm really not sure how to answer the question "why should people stop lying to themselves if it makes them feel good in the short-term?" The question seems to contain (or at least imply) its own answer.
The problem is that you can't really police what people believe, or choose to believe, inside their own heads. I've been on this point and sort of wrestling with it for a while - I'm perilously close to thinking that trying to change people's minds with facts and evidence is a useless endeavor, as people will just do whatever they wanted and then make up whatever justifications they want for it afterward. I'm of the opinion that most people don't have strongly held beliefs and are perfectly capable of functioning under doublethink, or even triple, or quadruplethink. Pointing out the inconsistency and acting like being correct is some huge deal is what's unnatural.
I can't stand communists, and would rather every single person who espouses that ideology be killed. I have a bit of history there. But I don't bother ever bringing this up or mentioning it when I see the extremely online self-professed communists carry the flags and wear the t-shirts. I know their values, belief, and knowledge is paper thin. They know about as much about communism as they know about Uzbekistan, or the price of wheat, but it makes them feel good to be part of something and allows them some form of legitimacy and credentials for hating the rich. Bringing it up and questioning their beliefs only to find out that there's nothing there and you're just harshing their vibe is wasted effort, doing so makes you the strange one who are missing the obvious social cues.
Complaining about people lying about their self-professed reasons to not breed seems pretty pointless in my opinion. What will change if they are honest? If they don't want to have kids, they don't want to have kids, the end, and whatever excuses they make up about it is their business.
Granted, I'm pretty sure they're lying about not wanting kids either. My mind kind of translates automatically that both genders don't want kids because they haven't met someone they want to have children with. Or alternatively, because having one requires sacrifice, and modern society is great at telling people sacrifice is for the lesser mortals even as people like Elon have enough progeny to staff a soccer team.
As Scott would say, "If It's Worth Your Time To Lie, It's Worth My Time To Correct It".
I want to respond to you in more detail, but I haven't fully woken up yet. I'll come back to you after another cup of coffee.
Take your time, I'm also half conscious. The comments in the Scott post I find more insightful than the post itself, much like a lot of the content he's written since the move to ACX.
I'm genuinely confused at what he expects, though; Scott has been blogging long enough to sit through multiple (American) presidential elections, and the fights around each. In my experience, I've seen virtually zero cases where any political discussion where people were corrected about something they were wrong or lying about has resulted in them changing their minds or who they were voting for. The reasons I've heard from people of the broadly defined sides of the political aisle are many, but even beyond their reasons, to reach to a meta-level beyond that and to analyze if those people are true believers or are just making mouth noises is next to impossible.
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I can't help but note that Elon is a terrible example of someone who sacrifices much to have children. Elon's contribution to his children, as far as I'm aware of from media osmosis, is a visit to the sperm bank and a payout that is a pittance to him yet enough to make the mother's time worth its while.
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I thought the movie took place in Seattle. That would explain the rain and even the desert at the end. Eastern part of the state has some.
There is a desert in Washington state?
there's a little bit of desert environment yea
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Climate map of Washington State
There's a large amount of "cold semi-arid" in the vicinity of the Kennewick and Moses Lake urban areas, with a negligible patch of "cold desert" near the latter. However, satellite photographs indicate quite a lot of agriculture in that same area, so "cold semi-arid" possibly should not be considered to count as "desert".
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The screenwriter said he was inspired by his time living in NYC, and at one point Mills's wife says the city is much more violent compared to "upstate", but IIRC it's never actually specified which city it is.
I always assumed it takes place in NYC. Then this thread reminded me for the first time that there's a desert in the story as well.
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Their apartment gets rattled by that train. I thought that was some east coast thing. I don't specifically know about Seattle but I don't suppose they were getting rattled like that by light rail in the 90s. Google backs up my vague feeling and says Seattle had no light rail or commuter trains in the 90s.
oh, a rattling train does change things. I haven't seen it in ages.
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There's a strong form and a weak form of your argument.
The strong form is "Literally nobody is choosing to have children because the world sucks; they're lying and just don't want to have kids." I.e, your headline.
I think this presumes too much.
The weak form of your argument is that people who say they don't want to have children because the world sucks blah blah blah may or may not actually want to have children (or at least would consider it) but have been persuaded not to and climate change is as convenient an excuse as any. But they really do believe that adding more kids to the population is both a burden to the planet and cruel to the children. I've met some of these people. Do I think a different life path might have led them to choose parenthood? Well, yes, but you could say a different life path could have led anybody to anything.
You are probably correct that essentially* no one is choosing not to have children solely because of climate change. But I think there are many, many people who are anxious, uncertain about the future, genuinely do think the world is a pretty shitty place, and are at best ambivalent about having children. These people could probably be persuaded to have kids eventually, but they've fallen into a doomer mindset and now are self-justifying their decision.
* "Essentially" because when you're talking about the entire population of the planet, or even of the USA, "zero" is much too strong an assertion. Somewhere, there probably is someone who really would start pumping out kids if AI produced a miracle solution to climate change tomorrow.
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On the off chance that I become an oyster farmer and run for senate 10 years from now, let the digital record unequivocally reflect that I am 100% in favor of attractive single female teachers """""raping""""" their male students to get pregnant.
It's not like attractive single female teachers need to resort to such measures in order to get pregnant though.
One would think, and yet…
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I am generally not for marriage age gaps of -10 years, nor am I for it when these teachers are cheating on their husbands, but the cruel way in which Americans punish these women is absurd. Realistically they should just lose their careers and only go to jail for a few years if their husband presses charges for adultery. At least adultery actually has a victim. Why do Americans refuse to have adultery laws but yet they have all these absurdly cruel victimless crime sex laws? There is nothing actually being done to the teenage boy when he consensually has sex with his cougar teacher. Don't Americans see that when they assign these heavy handed sentences to such women, that they are the criminals?
This is due to the American mania for consistency in stupid beliefs- in this case, that men and women are the same.
I, once adjusted for differing sexual morality standards, don’t particularly disagree with your point that statutory rape of a young man by an adult woman isn’t a thing thé same way it is of a young woman- although it remains disqualifying for a youth-oriented position. But in America treating transgeessions differently depending on the sex of the victim is not a stable equilibrium, and most people would rather overpunish unprofessional teachers than under punish rapists.
Isn't that adjustment extremely relevant here, though? If I were to define statutory rape of a teenager, I'd just call it seduction of a minor. Sexual morality is fundamentally tied up in defining the crime. The fact that much of secular society can't admit this muddles the conversation a lot.
Yeah, the practical consequences of seduction will vary for boys and girls, but in practice that seems to be (more than) adequately covered by consideration of mitigating factors in sentencing.
Yes but also no- I don’t consider the boy being a teenager a relevant factor even if they both did a bad thing.
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So Americans want to sacrifice innocent women in the name of feminism? Why are they so feminist?
Women 99% of the time cannot rape men. If they pull it off, they also threatened them with a deadly weapon which is enough of a charge I think. Also Americans overpunish „rape” since they have expanded the concept far beyond what it actually means. So wanting to not overpunish „rape” is another aspect of their excessive cruelty.
This woman isn’t ’innocent’ although she’s also not a rapist.
By that standard, nobody is innocent.
I don't have much sympathy for fornicators running into consequences, even if those consequences happen to be ridiculous.
I am sympathetic to that, but it is ultimately a self own, because you live in a society where you are almost forced to fornicate, so it's not the big evil you think it is. Let's say you marry early. You can't marry that early because the type of people who prosecute the woman won't let you marry until 18. Can you marry at 18? Is your wife older than you? Exact same age? What are the odds of that? Is it natural? They won't let you marry a 16 year old when you're 18, they'll throw you in prison like the 28 year old woman with the hopes that Travonius tears you up a little if you catch my drift. So if your wife is a normal amount younger than you, you're probably 21 or 22 by the time you're allowed to touch her ... when did you start feeling horny, 12? So just wait 9 or 10 years, no big deal? No sympathy for„gooners” either, so if a boy looks up lascivious girls his age, or his future wife's age, during this time, your FBI will arrest him and sentence him as an adult to some United States justice. It's okay, I mean you can have sympathy for horny people? They're just young men anyway, and everybody hates them.
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I thought there was broad social consensus in the US that such women are usually punished rather lightly.
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IMO it's a straightforward projection of female vulnerability, the fear of being overpowered and exploited by a stronger man, onto male children, whom they imagine as equally helpless. Americans would jump out of their seats if they saw this German film where, an adult woman, stark naked, shared a scene with her then 12yo male co-star, even though the on-screen relationship between their respective characters was presented as an inherently unhealthy one.
FWIW I wouldn't be thrilled if a grown woman made sexual advances on my 15yo brother or son if I had one. Now I don't think the physical consequences of that relationship would have any pronounced difference if the boy in question was 14 as opposed to 16 (age of consent in my country), if he personally enjoyed it. But age of consent laws exist for a reason, there is still the moral quandary of blurring healthy boundaries at a critical stage of development.
Jumping off topic, I think @FtttG is hitting on something big here:
A very astute and widely applicable observation that can extend to any ideology that calls for radical upending of current societal arrangements. Its adherents don't actually want that, not really. They really just want to play the game the way the winners do. So naturally, they gravitate towards an arrangement where they're the winners. No incel would favour overhauling current dating market dynamics if he magically transformed to chad.
I think the problem is that Americans are cruel. Your logic is „I wouldn't be thrilled” and the laws exist „for a reason.” Yes, I wouldn't be thrilled if someone goes past me at 150 kmh on the highway. The speed limit exists „for a reason.” Mm hm. Maybe he has a reason to be in a hurry but if he is stopped by police, too bad.
None of this logic works if I find out the man is incarcerated for 10 years. You must actually do something wrong to justify that, not something which is „not thrilling.” You are basically destroying the lives of these women for no reason. If you fired them as teachers and left it at that, fine, the rules exist for a reason. But you need a very good reason, not a vague, I'm not thrilled reason, to incarcerate someone. At least if you aren't cruel.
I think there ought to be laws against cruel people, because such people don't thrill me. They ought to feel their own cruelty.
This is inherent in punishment. If punishment didn't cause harm to the target, it wouldn't be punishment--you're basically arguing to never punish anyone.
And it's not "no reason"; the reason is that sex with underage people, especially when the age difference is drastic and the teacher is in a position of authority, is harmful to the lives of the victims, even if they don't immediately step up and say "yeah, I was harmed by this".
False dilemma. Obviously there are degrees of punishment. It's cruelty when you go overboard. I agree teachers who hit on their students should be fired, but it's cruel to put them in prison, especially for more than 1 year.
I believe in no victim, no harm. If you can't find a victim, there is no harm and should be little to no prison time.
There are victims. You just have bad standards for what counts as a victim. It should not require physical harm to be considered a victim.
I'm a victim then. When do I get to put the people who offend me and make my life bad in prison? I would much rather have sex with a 28 year old woman when I was 15 than deal with a lot of what people do to me.
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Yes, antinatalism is just one example of the general trend wherein politically radical people are almost invariably those who are least satisfied with their lives. An antifa meetup will not exactly be swimming with charming, good-looking people, but neither will a gathering of white supremacists.
If you're interested in this topic I highly recommend Eric Hoffer's The True Believer. I was a bit disappointed to find that I'd been scooped seven decades in advance.
Thanks for the rec. Yeah, I suspect a big part of why incels are so viscerally hated by other similarly maladjusted groups (transgenders, ANTIFA, /r/okbuddyliterallyme) is that they serve as an ugly, unfiltered mirror to their own insecurities and resentment over social/sexual rejection, but without dressing it up with pseudo-intellectual scaffolding or progressive moral language. Ironically, even when they larp as world-saving radicals online, they still submit to reddit leftist taboos for updoots (social acceptance). On the other hand, incels just say the quiet part out loud. That raw honesty makes them intolerable.
“They hated him because he told the truth” is rarely a good explanation.
Like, if you go online and see someone railing about how you are his class enemy, how you’re part of a conspiracy to keep him from getting pussy…how are you going to feel about that? Is it going to have anything to do with his perceived “raw honesty”?
I don't think that's really what he says? I think he's saying that this is narcissism of small differences in action, more than unflattering truth, and that incels lose out by departing from consensus as to their problems(it's not my fault because I'm ugly is a very different explanation than it's not my fault because of capitalist cisheteropatriarchy, even if they both revolve around justifying a lack of agency).
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Maybe I wasn't making my point clear. Yes, many incels do spend too much time inside their heads and spiral into neurosis and paranoia. But the visceral hatred I was describing from other similarly maladjusted groups (like the antinatalists and Ryan Gosling bros) usually kicks in long before that point, precisely when the mirror gets held up without the ideological coping mechanisms. Their "raw honesty" is that they're unhappy and insecure because of their low social/sexual status, not because the sky is falling and fascism is on the rise™, it's an unflattering mirror to the Ryan Goslings' and ANTIFAs' own lived experiences (the Gosling larpers are just reddit approved incels with a glorified martyr complex), that if their own lives looked like a John Hughes' movie, they wouldn't be in those spaces to begin with. They've probably silently felt at lease some of the things the incels speak of online, but don't feel comfortable to confront those feelings and question their socially approved priors.
Side note: I'd recommend checking out /r/DebateIncelz to really understand the incel perspective in a somewhat neutral and sane environment without the usual caricatures coming out of .is. The problem is these guys don't articulate their experiences without chimping out on unmoderated spaces, that doesn't make those experiences not true (from their pov at least).
Edited some sentences.
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The laws against young men having sex are mainly there as a logical/equal-opportunity side-effect of society's desire to punish sex with young women.
It's not that complicated.
Why are they like this though? Is it their cruelty or something else?
Because women lack agency and protecting them from predation in time periods when they often have no choice in which authority figures they are exposed to is a worthy goal.
The only good solution to this is a traditional marriage regime, not this monstrosity Americans made.
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If we are talking about adultery laws and "absurdly cruel victimless crime sex," what does that have to do with laws against young men having sex?
Like, based on the original example of an older female teacher, it seems completely off-topic. What do you mean?
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Uncompensated sex with young women, that is.
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I was an attractive youth and got some attention from pretty, relatively-young female teachers, but nothing over the line even given the much wider latitude afforded by society at the time. This was gratifying and is especially so in retrospect as I understand it better, whereas in the moment I didn't really know how to interpret anything and wasn't sure.
But when I was 16 I did babysit for a while for a military wife whose husband was often away, and she came on to me pretty strong. She'd touch me a lot and suggest that maybe sometime she could get another babysitter and the two of us could hang out. That kind of thing. Again, I wasn't fully sure about what was happening, and had the sense I should probably tell my parents about it, but chose not to. I didn't feel threatened, even though it was weird, and maybe a little exciting. She was very cute and probably about 28.
In retrospect it bothers me more. I am very glad she didn't push harder. I'm pretty sure I'd have refused, and probably gotten out okay, but it would have been severely traumatizing. And if I'd gone along with it, that would have been worse. Talk about life regrets! I care a lot about my sexual integrity and have never slept with anyone but my prior and current wife. I'm physically sick at the thought of that being taken from me when I was, mentally and spiritually, very much still a child who didn't exactly understand what was going on. And that's beside the damage to her family, and the community more generally if it were discovered, which I can only suppose it would have been eventually.
Perhaps in other cultures, where the rules of human engagement are spelled out clearly and boys are prepared for such things by 16, there could be room for older women pushing them into it. But having been close to something like that myself, I have no sympathy for the ones who do it in our culture.
I can respect that you have strong personal values around sex and relationships. But you're still describing a values violation and deep regret, not a clear physical assault. Feeling profoundly disgusted or used after a regretted encounter is real and common, but I highly doubt that you would've felt the degree of bodily violation, physical illness, and scathing hot showers to wash off her touch following that encounter, if you went through with it.
As a man, the closest analogue I can imagine to that level of visceral violation by a woman would be something like being pinned down by a morbidly obese landwhale with horrible breath, and having my dick forced to get hard inside her. This is precisely why most cultures throughout history — even highly patriarchal ones — have had no real concept of a female rapist. The evolutionary dynamics and physical consequences are simply not symmetrical.
This seems like a fully-general argument against, uh, laws? I can't think of any that don't come down to what amounts to values. Murder has been legal and even encouraged in plenty of societies, for example, though with certain (values-based) restrictions.
Your personal values and what the law permits don’t necessarily align, and laws naturally shift as social structures change. Feudal societies heavily discouraged sex before (or outside) marriage largely to guarantee paternity and stable households. Post-sexual revolution and a working female population, most of these risks are now ameliorated. That said, the thrust of my point is the specifc kind of rape trauma a female victim would go through doesn't match the facts you described, nor do most cases of female-teacher-fucks-male-student. And at 16, you could've probably easily overpowered her if she tried to force herself on you.
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The harm does not become the fault of the person who has been harmed just because he could have had values under which it would not be harm. This is the autistic argument that only tangible, physical, consequences count--who cares about emotions? Physical consequences are not the only kinds of harm that count.
By your reasoning even forcible rape largely causes harm by values violation. Which is true; if you had values which said that being raped is good, there's actually little permanent physical harm from a lot of rapes (outside of pregnancy). It doesn't matter. It's still harm. You can't just dismiss harm for depending on someone's values.
The emotional harm of active, forceful penetration is not analogous to values based emotional injury from regretted but consensual sex, even if both can be painful. And that sounds like a strawman of my reasoning. Forcible rape causes harm through both physical violation and emotional trauma. But the physical component (the overpowering and loss of bodily autonomy through force) is not optional or purely values-dependent. Values matter. Emotions matter. But they don't make every negative feeling equivalent to violent assault.
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So you're in favor of criminal penalties for misgendering, then? Because that (and safetyism more generally) is the logical conclusion to giving this argument any legal weight.
This is why we tend to set hard boundaries on "what a member of society is allowed to consider harm". 1A is like that- it absolutely oppresses the easily offended and the incorrect, who are forced to suffer the existence of [thing they don't like].
Of course, we only cover specific things there, so a Karen not consenting to your child walking down the street alone can effectively order him arrested for that crime, even in nominally liberal countries.
Those people have to be oppressed in this way- forced to suffer the existence of things that disgust and terrify them- for a pluralistic society to function. As a (classic) liberal, I assert this is justice.
No, I think these need to be looked at at the object level. Rape and underage sex cause psychological harm that we should respect, misgendering causes psychological harm that we should not respect.
Rape is in a separate class for reasons that aren't merely psychological, of course.
While I don't deny that "forcible confinement" and "assaulted so hard you suffer lifelong injury" do have psychological effects (in a way entirely dissimilar to underage sex, doubly so when the underaged is male), we punish rape because those things have physical consequences- things we have an objective measure for, and an objective remedy.
That's not something you can do for psychological harm, which is why it's a useful vehicle for concern trolling to justify whatever you'd like without actual evidence. Because I guarantee you that I can absolutely find "evidence" to substantiate misgendering being just as psychologically harmful to someone as actual (to say nothing of pretend) rape is (and not infrequently claimed to be identically harmful, for that matter).
I could hear an argument that psychological harm is something we should respect, but it would need to be done in a way that doesn't max out the scale in favor of the interests of people with a biological predisposition to catastrophism the instant it's switched on.
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The view you're in favor of isn't logical. Logic would imply protections for men like anti-adultery laws, but they aren't interested in making the law logical and fair. It's trad-hat on for girls, and, thanks to Ginsburg, boys, and hippie hat on for men. We can get scammed by women, cheated on, whatever, we just have to grow up and deal with it, but as soon as it's one of their protected categories it's 10 years of prison per irrational tear cried.
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Our statutory rape laws are (generally, in the US) written as strict liability and don't require physical violence (which would probably trigger additional charges), seemingly because we do see it as a values issue. And I'm not sure that's wrong, personally.
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Is this a joke? How would you not know what sexual intercourse is when your IQ was fully developed and you had been alive for over a decade and a half? It's not difficult.
How did you manage to conclude that I didn't know what intercourse was? There are dimensions to sex vastly more complicated than tab A into slot B. There are personal, social, spiritual considerations and learning to navigate those isn't simple. Especially when it's your mom's friend who's pushing you.
Thanks for the clarification. That made it easy to flag you as "Too retarded to be worth interacting with in the future" though I'm not one for blocks, myself.
Ok, sorry, heat too high and light too low I guess. Sorry for comparing 28 year old women hitting on 16 year old boys being bad to believing in witchcraft. But do you get my point, how your logic can come off as magical? I accept what you're saying but the context here is these women face 10 years in jail or so. I understand they might have causes you some slight discomfort as a teenager, but that can't justify a decade of incarceration. People cause me emotional discomfort and self image issues almost every day, and it would be a very different world if even some of them could be locked up for 10 years for causing me discomfort. I just don't believe a woman hitting on you at 16 can be much more harmful than how I feel when someone says I'm retarded.
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You said:
(posted before edit adding three additional sentences, but probably still partially a valid response)
I think it's probably indicative of some kind of deep pathology that the details of the physical, mechanical angle was immediately imagined to be the only thing I could possibly be having trouble understanding, with zero consideration of everything else involved in sex.
It's simple, right? Benis and Bagina. What's not to understand, kid?
How about "How is this going to affect your self-image, relationships to family and community, and ultimately your (notional) future marriage?" I was very aware of all that in play, plus much more, and no, I didn't understand it. Nor frankly was I quite willing to believe that this married woman and friend of my family was trying to have sex with me, and had to overcome a very high threshold of giving her the benefit of the doubt, which was also kind of awful.
I'm just not sure how far the word "consent" should be stretched.
(1) When I grant my consent to sex, I mean that I understand that this woman wants me to repeatedly insert my penis into her vagina until I achieve orgasm.
(2) …and subject me to a small but nonzero risk of disease, fatherhood, and child-support payments (as outlined by this stack of legal rulings).
(3) …and subject me to a small but nonzero risk of lasting psychological harm (as outlined by this stack of scientific studies).
(4) …and subject me to a small but nonzero risk of stigma as a statutory-rape victim.
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What pathology exactly? I've heard this in the wild, not aimed at my myself but from your crowd in this discussion, and it didn't make sense. I have a very loving marriage, what deep pathology are you talking about exactly? How would you know if you didn't know what sex was at 16? How does that make you a sex expert? If anything it makes you delayed at sex and romance matters. Are we just making the laws for the delayed at this point, normal people be damned?
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Because generally that relationship is inversely proportional if you’re a smart kid.
Then empirically, they aren't that smart.
I think it was pretty smart of me to not have sex in high school.
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Dude. If you go into AP high school classes and ask the boys there, the last breast they ever touched would be in a KFC bucket.
But they know what sex is.
Not complicated, as long as they're not doing the male feminist thing like the GP is. They know if they want to do it or not, and assertions that they're traumatized by the offer are destructive when listened to from either gender.
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FWIW I am male and as a youth I had two incidents along these lines in which adult women attempted to groom me. One was a camp counselor and the other was a teacher. Fortunately nothing happened and both of these women were nice enough to back off once they realized I wasn't interested sexually.
I'm not going to say that I was traumatized by these incidents, but they were mildly disturbing and I do think that female on male child molestation is more destructive than is thought by the "where were these women when I was a child" crowd.
When I was in eighth grade, my history teacher- young, female, quite pretty in retrospect- had a crush on me and it was blatantly obvious, she never did anything but it was incredibly awkward and I was not a fan of the experience.
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Idk, it doesn't make sense intuitively that much, causing you discomfort by unwanted advances doesn't mean they deserve to go to prison for years. I've never seen any compelling evidence that these women should go to prison, unless they cheated on their husband, but that's not why they go.
I would definitely agree with that and I am certainly not claiming otherwise. My point is that there is an element out there which seems to think it's basically a nothingburger if an adult woman in a position of authority seduces an underage male student. In my opinion, it's not.
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Talk about moving goalposts. We're not talking about causing discomfort by making unwanted advances, we're talking about sex, and some of us are still backward enough to think that's a big deal.
There is no way to consistently think sex is a big enough deal that are willing lock up single women for having sex with a 16 year old boy consensually, but you refuse to log up adulterers in general. Adultery actually has a victim, the Hanania meme does not.
An adult woman can't have consensual sex with an underage boy by definition. Adults cheating on one another don't need society to step in. Adults fucking kids do.
16 year olds aren't underage boys, if you define underage boys to be people who can't consent to sex with women. The cutoff here would be 12 or 13 on average. Really it depends on puberty timing and IQ but if you have to project that onto age it would be 12 or 13 I think.
Okay, then adults stealing from one another don't need society to step in. Legalize stealing? It's not like the one spouse consents when the other cheats. If they do, maybe that's another matter. It's polygamy more than it is adultery and it's a separate discussion as to whether to tolerate it. If they don't consent, they're being victimized and I think they need society to step in. What are they going to do in 2026, beat the cheating spouse? Kill them with stones? Then society steps in on the side of the cheater. Something has to give.
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I think your definition is wrong. Whatever age you decide on as the cutoff, it means that the society assumes consent when both partners are above this age, modulo literal mental disability.
Below this age? The lack of consent is not automatic (and if it is, it's the fault of a badly written law), the assumption of the lack of consent is. The couple has to prove their relationship is healthy when challenged, but they should be able to prove it.
I would be fine with two cutoff dates, with the lower one separating "definitely a crime" from "could be problematic".
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Wow. If we were in a bar I would demand some more details. Unless your expression was telling me don't.
Shared my similar story here and you're welcome to ask questions though I don't think I have much more to say about it.
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The tribute that vice pays to virtue. We should want them to keep making excuses, because a world where no excuses are necessary is even worse.
I suppose that's a point. On the other hand it frustrates me, because if you're not having children because of how awful the world is – well, look around you. From a historical perspective, along most legible metrics (dirt, disease, violence etc.) the world has never sucked less. How much better does it have to get before you start making babies?
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I really don't see the intellectual continuity from gnosticism to modern anti-natalism other than they both oppose having children. As far I can tell they have as much in common with each other as either does to the shakers.
If you’re pursuing the religious vocation, then it makes sense to me. With the exception of Paul and Barnabas as prominent figures in the church, tradition suggests all the apostles were married and thus couldn’t completely devote their lives to God.
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I think the fact that both tend to justify their worldviews on utilitarian grounds, and that most antinatalists are at least implicitly dualist means they have more in common than you might think.
Since when are gnostics utilitarian? And in what sense are secular anti-natalist's dualist?
Antinatalists justify their worldview on the grounds that, because every human being is guaranteed to experience more suffering than joy in their lives, having a child cannot be justified on utiliarian grounds. The Gnostic equivalent is the belief that it is cruel to trap a pure soul inside a flesh prison. In both cases, the admonition not to have children is justified on the grounds of the suffering that the hypothetical child would endure were it to be born.
I agree that antinatalists aren't intrinsically dualist, but there seems to be a great deal of overlap between the worldview and support for gender ideology, which I view as dualist in practice. Trans people are overrepresented in r/antinatalism.
I mean sure, you can word gnosticism in terms of utilitarianism but that doesn't make them utilitarians, gnostics are virtue ethicists like everyone was back then. They put the most value into the virtues of wisdom and knowledge, hence the name. Once you accept the premise of gnostic belief about the world being a prison then the conclusion simply follows from that regardless of ethical system, in this case all ethical systems share the same conclusions given gnosticisms premises.
Also, I figured you were using dualism in the zoroastrian sense rather than the cartesian sense, this is maybe a bit more reasonable of a claim however I still don't think most anti-natalists in that sense either, nor would I say standard gender ideology is either, baring the gender angels types.
I think the conception of "gender identity" as something wholly unrelated and untethered from one's anatomical sex is functionally indistinguishable from an immaterial soul. Ergo, gender ideology is a dualist worldview.
sex realism and gender atheism in the house!
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I live in a filter bubble with a median age of 12(not a typo). If you want children badly enough, you can have them. Economic reasons? I know people supporting double digit numbers of children and a SAHM, without obvious signs of poverty, on salaries of notoriously high paying jobs like 'welder' and 'teacher'. Health reasons? How much time you got for miracle stories that are more about the miracle of listening to doctors? 'Oh no one can keep up with more than one kid' I know a woman who had seven under eight while her husband business travelled... and she had a broken leg. 'Combining with education is too difficult' Lol no, lots of people around me are PhDs and have multiple children.
Most people just don't want kids. Eventually they'll die out. The Past is a Future Country was a strange prophecy, but I haven't seen an intelligent counterargument.
Except for one thing you don't list here: as they say, it takes two to tango.
While a fair point, this was largely aimed at the married or dating but not wanting to take the next step(or, very similarly from my perspective, stopping at two).
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I think you are correct, and that the fertility rates have fallen because people's preference for children has declined. What is more interesting is why their preference declined.
As a simple model, this is wrong. The driver of falling fertility we don't really see is an increase in voluntary DINKdom.
What we do see is smaller families (and in particular 2 instead of 3+) among couples who do have kids - and per surveys most of the 3->2 shift feels involuntary - and (since 2014 or so) reduced coupling.
The vast majority of people still want marriage and children, and the vast majority of them will have at least one child if they find themselves with a biologically suitable partner. There is not a large number of people who want a childless marriage, and no evidence that this number has increased. It is possible that there has been an increase in the number of people who want neither marriage nor children, but anecdotally most of the increase in singleness is involuntary due to FUBAR dating markets. We don't know how many people want children without marriage because it isn't (for good reasons) an available option for the social classes with the intelligence and conscientiousness for what they want to affect their behaviour.
The other thing that has changed is the perceived marginal cost of an additional child in a 2+ child family.
According to https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/40841398/ the average number of children that a US mother will have declined sharply in the 60s and 70s, but has been rising fairly steadily since 1980. The big driver of decreasing TFR is the childlessness rate, which was less than 1/20 in 1960 but is now more than 1/3.
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It is not wrong. Increasingly late marriage age follows collapse in marital fertility.
What are you talking about? The data I've seen suggests that married people have as many kids as they want. Which is now 1 or 2.
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https://www.themotte.org/post/3555/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/410740?context=8#context
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I agree with this for those who actually dont want to have children, however as far as a childless world goes - the main reason for this is because people are not getting into relationships or having sex in the first place. So any policy that tackles childlessness needs to tackle why people arent pairing up to begin with. Perhaps thats an aside, but still something worth pointing out.
You're right, reduced rates of relationship formation are a major contributing factor. Which implies there's a face-saving element to it: "I'm not having children because of climate change" sounds a lot better than "I'm not having children because I can't find Mr./Mrs. Right".
Meh, kind of. But its not like not being able to find someone is all that bad either. Single and non married are a significant and rising portion of the population. At this point, its fairly normal, even if it doesn't give the same social brownie points.
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Seconded for the relationship formation argument. Its the only true constant variable cross society, even factoring in economic incentives for and against having kids. Italy, Spain, Greece never had a population control policy and thier birth rates plummeted. France maintained relatively (for western white society) ok birth rates, as did Nordics for awhile. Thailand has abysmal birth rates while Vietnam putters along decently.
Economic incentives, social mores about cohabitation, overstudying culture... they all form the ceiling and floor of a fairly generous action space people can act within to socialize pairbond and eventually have kids. The real problem is that many modern societies treat dating as a clear cleave between two phases, working vs schooling, and once you're working your schooling dating experience if any counts for nothing. People reset their preferences on the moment for what they want, which while valid for any number of reasons often boils down to "I changed my mind for reasons I don't care to understand or reflect on" which ISN'T valid. Discover why you changed or you'll never understand why you keep failing!
I will concede that smartphones really changed the game for information accessibility and preference shaping. That is directly shaping not antinatalism - those assholes are unhappy regardless of whether they have kids, just like all the childless celebs who openly launder their mental illnesses that stop them from "wanting" kids in the first place - but socmed IS shaping partner expectations. Men don't actually want to date a gamer egirl thot, women don't want a sensitive artsy softboi. Both are lessons only learnt after dating a bit and realizing ones own preferences and adapting to real life.
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What if people are not getting into relationships and having sex, because they want less children?
Why avoid relationships for this? You can just get the tubes tied or snipped in that case.
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Because children are less of an inevitable consequence of sex due to contraception the most attractive can play the field for longer and more efficiently, screwing incentives across the whole stack
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did we miss the entire sexual revolution? pills condoms homosexuality implants all let you fuck childfree. no, people aren't having sex because people think sex is either so sacred it must be had with the perfect partner that doesn't exist and if its not sacred its just inefficient masturbation so just jerkoff to ai waifu at home and avoid the mess of other people.
I think they fail to find the perfect partner because the come to marriage at an age when romantic pairbonding parts of the brain are less sensitive. They come to marriage late because they only want one or two kids. Teenage girls always seem to be madly in love with their boyfriends, and the romance just isn't there by the age of 27 in the same way. I think that's physical.
Possibly it's because those women get jaded by past experiences and/or exposed to more and more anti-male propaganda. But on the other hand, it seems to be the case that teenagers feel the effects of hormones more strongly. So yeah, likely there is a physical component as well.
Not just hormones. I think there's a critical period or something for marriage and modern people miss it and don't realize it. It's probably between about 14 and 22, give or take. For women. Men are probably a little later, like 17 and 25.
That’s also my suspicion. If we’re talking about the college-educated demographic, if one does not have a long-term partner at graduation, the chances of future marriage and parenthood are probably dropping drastically. I’m guessing there is research bearing this out.
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Women marrying before 22 was never the default in cisHajnal societies (and transHajnal societies where women married younger didn't really do love marriage) so 22 as the upper end of the optimal range for female love marriage is too high.
My own marriage is a point in favour of the "dating jadedness, not chronological age" thesis - my now-wife and I did the whole teen romance thang with all the cringe you would expect in our mid-20s, having both only been meaningfully on the dating market for 1-2 years (in my case, late acquisition of required social skills due to likely autism).
This is just about every Motte poster, methinks.
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Having gotten married in my 20s, fresh out of college myself, I think it provided an opportunity for us to grow together as we started careers, before we were individually as rigidly bound to careers, friend groups, and other obligations. It was a very flexible time in our lives.
I don't regret it, but I can see that friends that are still looking in their 30s and 40s are hauling more baggage that has to fit in the wagon when they get hitched. Not even bad baggage, necessarily: sometimes it's that you both would have friend groups you've made and standing plans five nights a week.
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Well, it was for the people who lived in the Hajnal area before about 1500 AD. Hajnal societies only emerged in the early modern period. They're historically abnormal and are going extinct, so maybe not a great exemplar to use.
Not true.
Maybe the range is a bit larger then but I doubt it extends past 30. It probably depends on the person.
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I think the general thinking is more that they were morally incompetent - multiplying because the Catholic Church told them it was virtuous to do so, and they couldn't even conceive of a consequentialist utilitarian argument about whether or not to have a child.
This only addresses the "having a child would be unethical because they'd contribute to climate change" line of argument, not the "having a child would be unethical because the world is going to burn and they'd die of thirst in their teens" line of argument. If you genuinely believe the world is going to end in fifteen years, I think it's intellectually consistent to be spending your remaining years in comfort and even hedonistic decadence, even as you say that the world is going to get so bad in a short enough time-frame that any child would curse you for bringing them into the world by the time they were old enough to do so. It's… convenient, but it's consistent.
On an unrelated note, I don't think the Gnostics were as a rule always antinatalists, though some of them were.
They weren't and the two existing moder Gnostic religions aren't
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The Gnostics were anti-sex, in the sense that they believed that a celibate lifestyle was morally superior to the alternatives for everyone, with marriage being a second-best compromise. If taken seriously, this becomes anti-natalist in practice.
Paul spends a lot of effort in the Epistles trying to convince the early Church that marriage (and marital sex) were okay, suggesting that the uncorrected early Church tended to agree with the Gnostics on this point.
"Marital sex is part of a second-best compromise and it would be better if married couples had the bare minimum amount of sex for reproduction, like the Protestant couple in the Every Sperm is Sacred sketch" is a very common error that crops up in Christian thought over the centuries, to the point where I am not sure if it is an error.
The currently existing Gnostics the Yazidis and the Mandaeans are not particularly anit-natilist.
Paul's views were pretty complicated on marriage, he says this in Corinthians 1 chapter 7
Now while he does exhort the married to stay married this is hardly a full throated endorsement given than he says the unmarried should not become married and he wishes everyone be unmarried and childless. There have been plenty of anti-natalist Christian movements based on versus like this just as there have been plenty of anti-natalist gnostic movements. The Gnostic concept isn't inherently anymore anti-natalist then verses like this and the idea of original sin. All Abrahamic religions value the spirit over the flesh.
For anthropic reasons, they wouldn't be. I hope you can see why that doesn't disprove the historical argument.
Yes I do. But a lot of people are then arguing that Gnosticism inherently trends to anti-natalism which I don' think it needs to philosophically and I think the fact that we have incredibly ancient extant Gnostic religions prove it.
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Yeah, I was considering including a paragraph saying that the people claiming that they aren't having children because it would be cruel to bring a child into a world like this would presumably claim that people in the past were ignorant and foolish, but Now We Know Better. But the post was already too long as it stood.
From reading Montaillou and The Perfect Heresy, my understanding is that the ordained men of the church were forbidden from having children, but not ordinary parishioners. But I think the theological position of the church was that conceiving a child is evil, even if it's a necessary evil.
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Humans are tougher than cockroaches. Literally, we conquered the high arctic and the depths of the sahara where they can't go. The belief that humans won't persist through some postapocalyptic wasteland, perhaps your children conquering this mad max world, is... well I guess about as unreasonable as believing it's going to happen.
I mean, sure, Homo sapiens might not go extinct, but I think it's reasonable to have qualms about having a child if you believe they've got a 90% chance of dying in the apocalypse, even if you grant that 10% of humanity might survive and eventually rebuild something civilization-shaped.
One of the only things I know about my children's future is that they will die, and that it will probably be ugly. I'm a lot more concerned with the meaningfulness of their lives.
Sure, the Reaper comes for us all, but I wouldn't have a child if I knew, eg through embryo screening, that it would almost certainly die of a horribly painful disease before turning fourteen. I don't think most people would. If you grant the assumption "civilization will almost certainly collapse with bodies piling up in the streets within fifteen years", the prospects of a child conceived today would look an awful lot like our screened embryo with the horrible genetic malformation. Needless to say I don't grant the assumption, but it seems, on its own terms, to add up.
Glad we agree that it would be an absolutely insane thing to assume, but if I actually had reason to believe that I'd plan accordingly, and still have children. It's happened many times before and probably will many times again.
I'd also have the kid who's (allegedly) going to die within fifteen years, though that gets back to moral foundations that I don't expect to share in common with most here.
To get me to shy away from having kids, I'd need to be convinced, and I mean really convinced, that there is little chance of saving them from fates worse than death. Getting hoovered up by Cthulhu for example, or forced into some kind of AI-run entertainment/nutrition pods where they have no opportunity to learn about nature or real history and instead have their minds' semiotic webs wrecked by bombardment with false impressions.
If an asteroid were definitely going to hit the earth in 18 months we'd still have another kid and cherish our time with him or her.
An asteroid hitting the Earth has the benefit of being instantaneous; I had in mind a slow, painful death from gradual organ failure or similar (which seems similar to the possibility of a slow death from malnutrition and dehydration in the event of social collapse from runaway climate change). I agree it's more defensible to have the child if your only consideration is an early cutoff, the suffering was an active ingredient in my reasoning. Though with a child whose projected death is at a somewhat older age than 18 months you'd run into the dilemma of whether to tell your six-year-old kid that they're for sure going to die before they grow up, which seems like a very cruel choice for any parent to have to make either way.
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That's a severe lack of confidence in your kids. Are these people marrying the weakest partner they can find? Is this more blue tribe weakness-as-status-symbol, like ARFID and long covid?
Most apocalyptic scenarios don't select on any meaningful definition of "strength" - nuclear war certainly doesn't and nor does the kind of pandemic with a 50+% fatality rate.
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An element of the climate change narrative is that it's not just bad, it's only going to get worse, forever. This removes hope and stoicism that would normally spur people during a war or during the era of high infant mortality.
I don’t think it’s really about the climate. If these people were really concerned about limiting climate change, there are lots of things that you could do that would make an impact. I don’t see them limiting their ownership or use of modern technology. I don’t see them choosing to live without fashionable clothing, hair and skin care products, or modern home decor and appliances. They have all of that, but apparently having a baby is bad for the environment. I have long suspected that they really don’t want the baby because it would require changes to their lifestyle.
They correctly intuit that their personal consumption is a drop in the bucket next to big industrial pollutors.
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Yeah, the "we didn't have kids because it's bad for the environment and anyway now we get to spend all our time and money flying around the world (which is terrible for the environment)" couple is fairly iconic at this point.
My understanding is that in fact they simply don't see themselves as the inheritors and stewards of a way of life that is worthy of perpetuation. This is easily-attributable to any number of facets of the leftist memeplex. Tangentially, they don't feel that they owe anyone anything and have no problem squandering the accumulated blessings of their ancestors for one big party before they 'go out clean' and end their lines forever.
It's interesting to observe. Doesn't bother me until it's someone I know.
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Uh, all of those things are in the climate-activist portfolio. I couldn’t say what the actual rates are like. But then, lots of people who are sympathetic to that argument do end up having a child eventually. People aren’t always rational.
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