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In my eyes there is a simple explanation for dropping birth rates, which all these reports fastidiously ignore: adult life without children has continuously gotten more fun, while adult life with children has at best remained about the same, and the millennial generation is the one for which the enjoyableness of the former has finally conclusively overtaken the latter. We are in fact the first generation in the West to have completely shed the taboo on adults engaging in frivolous play outside of a handful of sanctioned categories that can be seen as healthy or the like, which I am occasionally reminded of when my mother asks me on the phone what I have been up to and I slip up and mention some game I tried whereupon she inevitably switches to a tone of anger and disgust and reminds me of my age.
If you want people to have children again, you either need to find a way to feed adults with children comparable amounts of dopamine to what is available to those without, or ban the whole spectrum of international pleasure travel (outside of boring package holidays priced so you can afford them once a year), escape rooms, hip restaurants, Tiktok trends and Steam accounts for the over-25.
I do think that there are small things that could be done on the margin that are related to the above while not being quite as drastic, but these still would require sacrifices from a people very used to having its cake and eating it too: most significantly, removing most of the relatively novel legislation that is purported to enhance the safety of children but gets in the way of the parents' dopamine acquisition, such as mandatory child seats in cars, legally required supervision, or liability for harm done to or by unsupervised children. It should be permissible once again to put five year olds on the laps of their 12 year old siblings in the back of your car, and let them roam the streets freely when the parents want a break from them, as was the case for me growing up; and if they climb a tree and fall down, or get injured in a car crash, that ought to be considered tragic but not intrinsically treated as someone's legal fault.
I think what won't work is to nag or threaten people about it. Only three kinds of people care about fertility rates: people with children, politicians, and (in the West) some political thinkers largely of the highly online "save EVROPA" type.
People with children have already made their choice. It's people who have no children who need to be reached if fertility rates are to go up.
Politicians have tried to fix fertility rates and even in very authoritarian countries have failed.
The political thinkers who care about the issue are very small in number.
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This is an excellent point and a specific case of a general form problem. The same could be said about sex. Porn and masturbation can be endlessly optimized, AI, VR, devices like fleshlights. Sex with your wife or girlfriend is more or less the same as it was fifty years ago for most people unless you get into things like strap-ons and such. One is much more constrained by reality and biology, the other is much freer to endlessly optimize and improve. Learning a language or a musical instrument is mostly about as hard as it was fifty years ago (yes, apps like Duolingo and Youtube can improve this somewhat) but video-games are orders of magnitude more entertaining now. I even see it a bit with children vs puppies. We aren't genetically engineering children to be extra cute, extra docile and so forth, but we have actually done that with dogs. It's unsurprising that a certain amount of people would choose to be dog moms. Generally, real life experiences like relationships, children, skills like musical instruments or woodworking, advancement at your job, doesn't really work that differently from in the past and is often limited by real-world constraints. Especially with AI I think this will be a major life problem people have to face
Or if they get into you.
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Day in the life before kids
Day in the life after kids:
The "before" is probably a little tight since you're at six hours of sleep assuming it takes an hour to get dinner. You might have to cut down to an hour or two of vidya every day. Otherwise accurate.
Speedrun some counter service fast casual slop near the office or home to get that number down.
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"Day in the life before kids" rather sounds like the day in the life of an unemployed trust fund kid.
The second item is literally "work"
You can totally do all those things while having an 8 hour per day wageslave job. Of course that's assuming no overtime but there's a ton of jobs that end after 8 hours.
Yea I basically lived that life for a decade:
Woke up @11 Worked 12-815 Video games / reading / movies for 2-3 hours Worked out 11-1 somewhere in there Jerked off Sleep @2-3ish
I changed the schedule up just enough here and there with real human interaction, but 5 days a week this was me.
I can kinda see how Jim Norton jerked himself off enough to marry a tranny. Two years with mostly normal sexual thoughts now.
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