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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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