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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.
Low birth rates are caused by urbanization, this has been well understood for at least a century.
Ok, what else, I have to close the contest soon:
education
female education
female workplace participation
feminism
urbanization
modernity
excessive parental investment
immigration
irreligiosity
birth control
high house prices/ cost of living generally
quality of available entertainment
socialized pensions
Do any of these cover the obvious point that having kids is just really not a desirable thing at all? On an individual level, I mean - it is desirable that humans continue as a species, but this requires sacrifice on an individual level.
Having kids requires an insane investment of time and resources, for a payoff that can mostly be gotten easier from other sources (e.g. if what you’re after is companionship, you already have your spouse, why do you need to make more people on top of that?).
A typical argument for why having kids is a good thing in and of itself is that it provides “fulfillment”. But it’s an empirical fact that most people don’t require any fulfillment beyond what is provided by Netflix and Grubhub. Certainly the average human has no need for anything resembling a “life project” or a “continuance of legacy”.
In a vacuum, most people will choose not to have kids; they need some external impetus that makes it more desirable (e.g. strongly increased social status), or they need to simply be forced to in one way or another. In a state of nature, lack of access to birth control is a pretty good impetus - people won’t choose to have kids, but they will certainly choose to have sex - but that’s largely a solved problem in any modern country. So you can partially put me down for “birth control”, partially for “quality of available entertainment”, partially for this and that, but blaming any of these factors ultimately obscures the fact that wanting to have kids in the first place is the deviation in need of explanation.
This is my wife and I's position. We're child free by choice. I've even gotten a vasectomy to prevent this possibility. When I look at my friends or siblings who have had children it seems like having children has had a clear negative impact on their quality of life in terms of the things we care about. Hell, having a dog is almost more responsibility and imposition on the way we want to live our lives than we're willing to tolerate. Forget raising another human.
I think "people are by and large no longer raised in a memeplex that views having children as the terminal goal in life" is underrated as an explanation for why people no longer want to have children. It turns out when you tell people they should be able to live the kinds of lives they want to lots of people are no longer interested in having children!
Please don't take this as a personal criticism.
A few threads back I said the following:
I got some good pushback on that post, but ... here you are making my point for me. Having kids is an imposition on the way you want to live your life. Raising children requires putting the good of others above your own in a way that requires serious effort and self-sacrifice and that doesn't sound so appealing to the folk who inhabit modern times.
I suspect the data above about women who want to have kids but aren't is falling prey to known issues with polling -- women say they want to have kids, revealed preference says they actually don't. My own guess is that having kids maybe seems like a nice idea and it costs nothing to say you want them, but by and large at any given moment it's too daunting and difficult and hard. People don't want to do hard things anymore without obvious benefit to them.
What more is there to say, really?
I missed the initial thread but this sort of attitude is exactly why I continue to maintain that utilitarianism is fundamentally evil/incompatible with human flourishing. For the umpteenth time, utility is not fungible and the moment you start acting like it is you're fucked because utilions and qualia don't exist.
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Isn't the trick to want to live your life to facilitate and optimize for children?
Adding one child to our DINK lifestyle was just about possible. Child care was expensive and when he was small the extra stuff when traveling or out was a pain. Once we had two, something needed to change.
Now single income with 4 kids, my wife is a homemaker. We only travel where we can drive. We're we are now in New England this hasn't been terribly limiting.
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