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I'm not talking about "contemplating NEETdom". As @JTarrou's parable of the "skint Mexican" aptly illustrates, there are other options. I'm talking about prioritizing things other than personal autonomy and "number go up".
If doing so goes against the liberal striver ethos, that only reinforces my point that the liberal striver ethos is simply not conducive to forming families.
The problem is that anyone who wants you to prioritize things other than personal autonomy wants to run your life for his own benefit, and anyone who objects to "number go up" wants to impoverish you, again for his own benefit.
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I was half joking, but the fads of the middle class are a reflection of their nature. If it was prestigious to have a million kids, all self respecting bourgeois would do it. But as soon as you put these people in charge of everything, which Liberalism certainly did, the mammonism becomes the whole of the law and we naturally gravitate to looser sexual mores that don't allow family formation.
It's that same tendency that prevents those same people from contemplative idleness. It takes another man than the bourgeois to prioritize legacy, and unfortunately the goal of Liberal society is to turn everyone into bourgeois man by any means. We must distribute college degrees and contraceptive pills to all Afghanis, otherwise they're not truly free, etc.
I think the "liberal striver ethos" is written deep in the hearts of a certain kind of men, and that it may be easier to remove those men from some positions of power they are ill suited for than to disabuse them of their tendencies. Tendencies which I should say, are tremendously useful if directed to productive pursuits.
Half-joking here but also half-serious. It's the triumph of the Protestant Work Ethic and the Calvinist spirit. If worldly wealth and success meant God was blessing you, then mo' money mo' blessing. So they made work and success the most important things in life, and then God got taken out of the picture, but work remained as the idol.
Thus all the discourse about "but what would you do if you retired?" and the mixture of disdain and sheer incomprehension for people who don't make their jobs their life, or don't say that they love their jobs instead of just "need to work for a living", and consoling themselves that this means they, the Mammon-slaves, are instead High Value Human Capital and Economically Productive Drivers with Low Time Preference unlike the high time preference slackers who only want to enjoy life and not toil and moil for as many hours in the day for as many years until the grave as they could.
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