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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.
1To 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.
2Because 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.
3Citations for this claim have been repeatedly requested, but none are forthcoming.
4Are 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.
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.
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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
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.
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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.
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?
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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.
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.
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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.
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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.
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?
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.
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.
Because generally that relationship is inversely proportional if you’re a smart kid.
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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.
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.
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.
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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 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.
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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.
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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.
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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".
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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?
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.
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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.
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.
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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?
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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.
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 just don't understand 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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