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Let's talk babies! There's a viral video going around on X about a young lady who supposedly never wants kids, then gets to hold one of her friend's babies. She immediately breaks down crying, and declares she wants eight kids!
I find this story fascinating because I relate to it on such a personal level. For much of my early life, even up until my late 20s, I also was staunchly someone who never wanted kids. I would proudly declare this intention to the older people in my life, and they'd look at me with a gleam in their eye and say "sure kid, just give it a few years." I resented their calm certainty I'd change my mind, but turns out they were right.
For me though, it wasn't JUST growing up. It was, as the woman above experienced, spending time around young children. Once I got to babysit my niece and nephew regularly, I realized that kids are incredible to be around! They're so full of joy, laughter, and just general excitement about life, in a truly infectious way.
Personally I think that a huge reason we have so many difficulties in the culture war, in fertility, and I'd go so far as to say mental health, is because our society is no longer oriented around children. We separate young kids from every other age demographic besides their own, and their parents. Most teenagers / young adults spend years or even a decade without ever being around a small child for more than 10 mins. I know I did.
There's something deeply wrong in that setup, as I genuinely believe a huge part of the human experience lies in spending time with the little ones. They really do have the kingdom of Heaven, there's just something so pure and untouched by the difficulties of life in their way of being.
I also suspect that our general breakdown of communal sentiment is tied to a lack of being around kids. I think that as you spend more time around kids, you naturally care more about your community, safety in your neighborhood, and wanting to form safe groups. Novelty in the form of partying and drugs becomes less interesting because you get all the novelty you need from raising young ones.
Either way, while I know it will have to play out over long time scales, I do genuinely hope we can get back to a society where having lots of kids and spending time with them at all ages is far more common than today.
I'd say our social tools peak in a small loosely related group (tribe or village) that's multi generational and limited in number so people spend time with kids, elders, peers and the whole group is below the Dunbar number.
The issue is were much much wealthier because we can specialize to an enormously finer level than that set up allows and once specialized, we maximize value by rearranging so that we're physically near other specialists.
My deep regret is that the Internet didn't let us establish specialist networks over wide geographic areas that let us stay in villages for social lives while teaming up globally for productivity. Instead we tried to turn the globe into our village which is making everyone miserable.
It's interesting to what extent this is purely a luxury practice of the managerial class; how much of it is MBA's who NEED to see all their reports in their little cubicles from their fancy desk in order for their dick to get hard.
It's not getting solved either; even if WFH is cheaper and equally productive, the people who have been selected to decide how the economy actually is regardless of the facts have decided "My first priority is feeling like a big business man doing big man business".
The strivers would always congregate in order to get ahead, but the other 80% of those who just need to go along for getting along purposes would probably want to live walking distance from their family instead of paying 100000000000$ a second for a studio.
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