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So anyway, I was discussing the great replacement theory with a far-righter earlier, and I said that immigration had little to no effect on native birthrates, citing Japan and Korea as examples.
That pointed to a far more likely culprit, education as a whole (not just women’s). South Korea and Japan can’t seem to stop "investing in the future" by making their and their kids’ lives hell. Naturally, to escape the vicious cycle, they end up abolishing the future.
Isn’t it weird that a prominent justification for making money in our society is ‘sending my kids to college’? Anyone who refuses to do so is shamed with accusations of selfishness and not wanting their kids to succeed. They then choose the alternative path where kids aren’t even in the picture, so they’re free to be selfish in peace. We’re copenhagen ethics-ing humanity into slow painless extinction.
Trads like to assign the blame to female education, but most of the arguments apply to men as well. People are wasting 5-15 years of their lives on a very expensive vacation, at best, when they could be having kids. We want them to make that important decision early, and nothing sobers a young man quicker than staring decades of drudgery in the face.
It’s time to abandon our rosy view of Education as just an intolerable burden on the living. The unborn are its primary victims. Your children cry out: “Mum! Dad! Why do you let my Evil Professor keep me here? Why can’t I liiive? “
Say No To School. Choose Life.
I'll second @Primaprimaprima. It seems to me that although having kids is very rewarding, it also sucks in so many ways that I am not at all surprised that people in the developed world who both do not have an urgent and clear need to have kids as a form of social security and who are not strongly under the influence of pro-natal tradition tend to not have many kids. Why would they?
"Because people have always done it!"
So what?
"For society's sake!"
That's pretty abstract and I have more immediate things on my mind.
"To continue your genes!"
I like the sex part of continuing my genes, but when I imagine the raising a kid part of continuing my genes so far at least it hasn't seemed worth it to me.
I think that some people spend too much time wondering why people are not having more kids when they really should be grateful and maybe even a bit surprised that people are having kids at all. I think that one will not understand this issue properly if one takes people having kids as some kind of natural baseline, "the way that things were and should be", and then gets surprised that it is not happening as much any more in the developed world.
What if there is no innate universal human desire to have kids? What if it just seemed like there was because for most of human history humanity has been under the influence of ineffective contraception practices, pro-natal economic pressure, and pro-natal social customs?
I think that modern lifestyles and family structure make it particularly difficult to raise children for a number of reasons. In a nuclear family there are only two adults doing all of the childcare, at least when they aren't paying for daycare services, as opposed to an extended family or multifamily household where the various aunts, uncles, and grandparents can take turns being responsible for all of the young children, giving their parents a much-needed break. There's a reason "it takes a village to raise a child" is a well-known saying, and yet the way we live nowadays does everything possible to prevent this.
Immigrant families tend to be larger in part because they often have no qualms about packing a dozen or more people into a single suburban house that was intended for a single nuclear family (packing is not really the right word, given that this is often still more living space per person than they get back home) and can alternate who gets groceries, does household chores, and takes the kids out to the park, not to mention living in a much nicer neighborhood than if they had not pooled their resources.
Additionally, growing up in a larger household means greater exposure to young children and their needs. More and more upper-middle class women in developed countries have never even held a baby before they have their first child, which adds an additional layer of anxiety at the weight of that responsibility that is simply absent in most traditional societies, where her equivalent would have from an early age been cooking for, keeping an eye on, and picking up after her younger siblings, cousins, or the neighbors' kids. The last vestige of this was teenagers working as babysitters to earn a little money in high school, which may still be a thing in some parts of this country, but certainly not in my coastal, urban, PMC, zoomer bubble.
Now I don't necessarily think that addressing these issues would immediately restore fertility rates, because there is a deeper challenge born (heh) out of the number of desirable lifestyle options that the wealth of developed countries permits other than raising a traditional family. I leave sorting that one out to natural selection, which is working overtime on it as we speak.
Perhaps the problem is we haven't rejected trad lifestyles enough. Need to accelerate the gay space communism more. If we graduated from polycule cohabs to polycule cohabs with kids we can keep our depraved lifestyles while having a network of lovers around to help with the the child rearing.
Before you say there's no precedent for this allow me to bring up the Eskimo.
Eskimo didn't have much privacy huddled together in their igloos during winters and it came with somewhat corresponding social mores: intimate moments that couldn't be hidden, more partner sharing, seeming indifference to cuckolding, comfort raising kids communally. Also apparent dedicated sex parties.
We could be missing a pretty big prize here by being insufficiently freaky with our modern ways.
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Some people just really want kids and don’t understand how other people don’t, and frankly I think the opposite is true as well- some people really like the making of kids but don’t want any, and doubt anyone is another way.
To the extent this is genetic there is selection pressure for the former.
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Because kids are great? It's a hard sell these days, but kids actually can be a fun, rewarding life project.
One thing that's changed about having kids is that it used to be more fun. Your friends had kids too, the kids could be left to their own devices for most of the day while the adults hung out. You were allowed to have a life and identity outside of your children.
Now, children demand all things they see advertised at them, subject everyone around them to their obnoxious media habits, expect the adults to entertain them, or sit like a lump on an ipad and scream if it gets taken away briefly. All your childless friends don't want to spend time in a child-safe house full of child-friendly media. If the children do actually go outside, it must be in the form of organized events with signed waivers and fees and disciplinary talks when one kid makes physical contact with another kid. Kids have become a thing that you buy ipads for that resents you for being straight and white and killing the planet.
This. The generational progression has been rather pronounced, from my local observations. I should add that it also tracks with the availability of entertainment. My grandparents and my dad's older siblings grew up when electricity and airconditioning were novel. My dad grew up with Saturday Morning Cartoons, Bruice Lee, and Star Wars, with video games requiring a trip to an arcade. I remember not having video games and the Disney Channel being a temporary luxury, but by the time I was in school, cable and VHS copies of everything were plentiful, and whether or not I had access to a NES was entirely dependent on which cousin needed to pawn one for drug money this month... right up until my parents could swing for our own, after which point I spent way too much time on cartoons and video games. And also I was obsessed with toys and wanted just about everything I saw on TV.
My GenZ cousins had even more plentiful video games, and if they hadn't been hit with time limits during early school ages, would have stayed glued to them for hours at a time. My 7yo nephew was given a tablet with Youtube access before he could talk, and still demands to have it when eating or traveling. I feel obliged to add that I often wanted to keep watching TV at mealtimes, but back then my parents actually refused. These days, they put the table across from a 70in smart TV and they have to have something going most of the time.
Safetyism is a completely separate topic, I suppose. The conspicuous correlation between the availability of entertainment, and how absorbed people are by it, is easily observed. Have we made any progress toward safeguarding against superstimuli?
I don't think so. I think that'd take at least thirty years.
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This must be how PMC and other alphabet people have kids. It's not been my experience. There are waiver laden indoor play space birthdays to be sure. My preference is a grassy backyard with a bounce house and beer on the patio with the other parents.
...and hot-dogs on the grill. Amen.
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This is asinine and ass-backwards. Nobody should be surprised that people are having kids. They've been doing it for millenium, and will continue to do so for millenium. Every species on God's green earth has been reproducing to the best of their ability for as long as they can. This is not surprising, so don't make it some noble instead instead of the barest minimum standard just because you don't want to meet the standard.
What if the moon were made of cheese? What if I were god-emperor of all mankind? Why should I think zebras, and not horses, when you say there are hoofbeats in the distance?
Is this an argument? You seem to be just stating that you're correct without providing any justification, and then mocking @Goodguy for his opinion.
What could be a stronger argument than an unbroken trend for thousands of years?
Surely if having children was just a passing fad, we'd not exist.
This must be one of those core differences between traditionalists and others. There are many awful things that have been happening for thousands of years and I’m glad we ended them.
Status quo bias is one of my biggest frustrations with the world.
It certainly is. Nothing ever happens.
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Some people have done it for millenia, but it doesn't mean that most have. Actually, if you take account of those who died as children, most people ever born have never got any children. You are the result of those who chose to have children, but it does not mean that most people have done it in the past.
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For the majority of humanity's history people didn't have a choice in the matter. They wanted to have sex and kids were inevitable byproduct of it. Also for some time children were profitable investment of resources. Both of these reasons became invalid, hence demographic transition.
Surely those few nations and peoples that don't fall for this selection trap will inherit the earth, and with them carry whatever factor makes them have offspring with or without tying it to the pleasure of sex.
This is not the first time people invent a way to cheat our reward mechanisms and it likely won't be the last either.
Though I must say I personally have extreme difficulty relating to this argument given the only reason I even care about sex is kids and not the other way around. But it certainly seems most people don't share my disinterest given some ruin their lives over it.
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It's a very inefficient and ethically dubious way to make new people.
Beings that start without well formed motives and worldviews is an ethics of consent issue, and the consequences of that issue has been every "think of the children" argument against personal freedom ever.
Still, people evolved to have kids. They want to. So assuming we don't outlaw it for reasons like those- I wouldn't be too surprised to see bio-conservative reproduction methods numbering in billions of births per year 1000 years from now...
But it's still inefficient. Nine months and a child that starts as a complete dependent? That you have to watch grow through all the pain and suffering of being a new mind? I would expect other methods like forking and spawning new teenage AI minds to be thousands of times more common at least. This is 1000 years we're talking about. We could easily have 10 more AI booms in that time even if this one fizzles.
Reality is not under any obligation to make sense. The obligation is upon us to make sense of reality.
I didn't even understand what you meant by this until I started seeing the responses because it didn't even seem like a response to my post...
And now I see why.
You see my brain's response to what you have just said is...
"That's enough culture war for this month. Time to go read all the ML papers my gay lovers have recommended to me so we can continue building our children together."
It seems clear to me now that we are living in entirely different realities.
This explains why you would say something like -
When from where I'm standing it is you who has clearly failed to make sense of reality.
Do we really? Is the speed of light in a vacuum different where you are from?
You're free to find biological reproduction "inefficient and ethically dubious" just as I am free to believe that the world would be a better place if you had been aborted or run down your mother's leg in the seconds after your father came. The thing is I don't because I am not like you. I actually take the old cliche about each person born being a small miracle or crowning unlikelihood, dead seriously. Who do you think you are to judge?
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Careful, you might be handing the keys to a lunatic like Karl Rove with this sentence. To the point of this conversation: if the transhumanists get their pod babies that will be the reality that you'll have to make sense of.
if
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Yes, but that's a very laconic "if".
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Not the OP but I'd say "damn right it's an argument". As the old saying goes, "the future belongs to those who show up", If you want to stake out a position that, on the face of it, would seem to contradict pretty much everything we know of both evolution and human history you at least need to offer up an alternate theory.
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It's pretty clear that the desire to have kids is not universal. My source: the many people who never have children or express a desire to have children and in fact go to great lengths to avoid having children.
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