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ZorbaTHut  1yr ago (text post)   Edited 1yr ago   38189 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 12, 2022

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Are Pets Replacing Kids?

I have noticed a growing trend of people talking about their pets like children, and pet owners being increasing referred to as parents, mother or fathers of their pets, and the pets as children. Often this goes as far as to referring to multiple pets being referred to as siblings, or even pets referred to siblings of actual children. For examples on social media, you can look at asinine "feel good" animal related YouTube channels like "The Dodo". I'm hardly the first to comment on the phenomenon, a quick internet search for "furbabies" turns up countless articles. However, while most media coverage on this phenomena is playful and positive, my intuition has long been that this isn't just a harmless, fun phenomenon, but rather these 'parents' are really using these pets as a substitute for children. Perhaps attempting to fulfil an unrealised, subconscious need to raise offspring in a social environment hostile to the raising of actual, real human children.

Like any good researcher, I set out to find information to support my prior assumptions. I looked at U.S. data mostly for its abundance, however the overall quality of data is pretty poor, it's particularly hard to find reliable data on the historic rates of pet ownership and data relating to the pet industry going back further than 30 years or so ago.

Based on the APPA's APPA National Pet Owners Survey, the percentage of households with a pet has increased from 56% in 1988 to 70% in 2020. In absolute numbers, the number of pet cats and dogs increased from 108 million in 1996 to 188 million in 2022. But it is not simply the number of pets that are relevant, but the relationship owners have with the pet. Perhaps the most shocking statistic I saw was the growth of the pet industry. The US pet industry has grown from $53 billion in 2012 (~$68 billion adjusted for inflation), to $124 billion in 2021, the industry doubling in size in just a decade! A near doubling also occurred in the prior decade too. The growth has been driven in large part by the increased demand for luxury pet products. The US fertility rate dropped from 1.91 to 1.66 from 2012 to 2020 during this time. By comparison, the US baby products industry was worth $29 billion in 2022. Some (unreliable) survey data says that three-quarters of US pet owners consider their pets 'furbabies'. It should be noted that Millennials slightly overrepresented in many of these pet statistics. US pet owners are also more likely to be female (60%).

Now onto my speculation on the issue. Despite a lot of hand-wringing over the economic costs being the major driver behind young adults not having kids, those same young adults seem to be willing buy a pet and spend significant sums on them, treating them as a pseudo-child. Perhaps a pet is still a cheaper alternative than a child, but in my opinion the economic argument still doesn't hold up. As I like to point out, the fertility rate of the US was higher during the Great Depression, the worst economic period in modern history, than it is today. So the social factors must be playing a greater role, something that has been discussed quite extensively on theMotte in the past so I won't go into detail here. To summarise briefly, but technology, contraception, sexual liberation, feminism, the two-income trap and modernity generally may all have played some role. But humans are still ultimately biological and social creatures, and I think there is likely some innate driver to engage in parental (maternalistic/paternalistic), childrearing behaviours, for both men and women, but particularly women. When social pressure and event stigma prevent people from having children, they have substituted in the closest available, non-stigmatised alternative, pets. What I think is troubling is what will be the long-term consequences of using pets as surrogate children, because pets are not, in fact, children. Using pets as surrogate children is possibly contributing to the fertility crisis, providing a band-aid solution to the unrealised desire of childrearing. Children, as actual thinking humans, can form meaningful relationships with their parents and others, and contribute to community in ways that pets can obviously not provide. Thus furbabies may be accelerating the atomisation of society. When parents enter their elder years, they can rely on the support of their adult children to help. Children will also ultimately provide net economic utility to society, where as pets, as much people might love them, do not.

I personally find the whole phenomenon of pets as surrogate children disgusting or fundamentally morally wrong on a deep, visceral level. It feels so unnatural and perverse to me. I do love animals, including pets I have had in the past, but I would never dream of treating them remotely as people or children. As pessimistic as this is, my instinct that the rise of furbabies is hyper-representative of the cultural, social and moral decline of the West, and is strongly associated with the fertility crisis and the demographic collapse many Western or developed states are or will experience.

However, while most media coverage on this phenomena is playful and positive, my intuition has long been that this isn't just a harmless, fun phenomenon, but rather these 'parents' are really using these pets as a substitute for children.

Well, duh.

As others 've mentioned below, having a pet is basically the equivalent of all the fun parts of having a small child without any of the unfun parts.

Alternatively, it's all the worst parts of having a small child with the additional downside that when they "grow up", people will get another one.

But you still gotta clean after them, and there is none of the milestones of first word spoken, first day at school or first walking attempt.

Related post from May.

EfficientSyllabus prompted a very interesting discussion back then.

I think this is a symptom of economic abundance more so than a surrogate for children, given also that many families also have pets. Dogs in particular can be expensive and time consuming. You are not going to get a dog unless you have some disposable income and free time. I hear a lot also about the loneliness epidemic in America. Maybe pets are a solution to it. Maybe also vanity too.

Plenty of people who don't have the time or money to get dogs get them anyway.

That ticks me off the most, really. I can't get worked up about the fertility arguments, but I hate seeing stories about bad pet owners.

Makes sense, they aren't going to complain to Child Protection Services. Get the animal to alleviate a little of your loneliness and if it gets a little worse treatment that it should in other situations it won't be telling anyone.

As I like to point out, the fertility rate of the US was higher during the Great Depression, the worst economic period in modern history, than it is today. So the social factors must be playing a greater role, something that has been discussed quite extensively on theMotte in the past so I won't go into detail here.

This doesn't explain what you want it to, because during the Great Depression the U.S. was 56% urban (1930 Census data), and modern "suburbs" did not exist. Nowadays, north of 80% of the populace lives in an urbanized area. Cities have been fertility shredders for centuries, so just moving people to the cities explains a sizeable chunk of the fertility decline.

That doesn't conflict with what I was saying at all. My point was that it's unlikely that it's simply economic factors this is the primary driver of the long term decrease in fertility. Urbanisation may well be the primary driver, though I might aid that cities aren't magical, the causal effect will have to be how cities affect community/social roles and how that impacts fertility, which is pretty much what I was saying.

It could be social roles, it could be physical environment, it could be personal choices/views about when is "proper" to have kids, it could be other things, I don't know. All I know is picking rural people up and plopping them in the City lowers their fertility for some reason.

Reading the replies to this post has convinced me that pleasure is unironically a bad thing and that the very concept of pleasure-for-its-own-sake should be regarded with the same moral suspicion with which we now regard cigarettes and junk food.

This shouldn't be surprising; if you want pleasure for its own sake and are willing to maximize for that exclusively, I have some opioids to sell you.

Any true hedonist knows you have to maximize pleasure over the long term. That said pass them over. Shockingly not every person gets addicted and ruins their life, you can have a great time with illicit substances if you have some discipline and a healthy life outside of your use.

Gentlemen, I present to you the devil's hormone: Dopamine

Of course, it was.

Ask your local classical philosopher or ancient religion about hedonism and it's consequences and you will indeed get the same exact answer as you would for drugs and indulgences.

The virtuous man doesn't hack his reward system to get infinite rewards at no cost to himself, he uses the tool nature gave him to train himself to do what is right.

There were the Epicureans, but even they advocated a kind of long-term hedonism, and at least Lucretius argued that social life, including family life, was one of the best methods for sustained happiness. They constrasted such "static" pleasures with the "dynamic" pleasures, like drinking, wild sex, and consuming rich foods, which they thought had consequences (emotional and physical) that were at least as bad as the pleasure they gave. I have heard that the Epicureans were less suspicious of family life than Plato in The Republic, though Plato was pro-reproduction.

Maybe.

Your links do a decent job showing correlation of pet ownership and, more importantly, pampering. Causation’s going to be a bit trickier.

Is it possible that inability to find a house (inflated market) or a partner (many, many potential reasons) is suppressing child rearing, but not pet ownership? The latter remain a significantly lower commitment not only of money but of space and attention.

I also suspect that the rise of the Internet has warped luxury—or at least “impulse”—markets in general. Much like the video game industry has been completely transformed by digital distribution, luxury pet goods may just be reaching a wide range market. This seems like something that could be tested on other markets like clothing or entertainment which lack a link to child-substitution.

I admit causation is hard to prove. It's not like you can really just ask someone "hey, are you using your pet to fulfil you subconscious desire to have a child?" and get a genuine answer.

I think the key difference is that it is not simply pet ownership rates that have increased, but how people treat those pets, spending more on them (there are some ridiculous pet products now, like pet wet wipes) and pampering them like you would a human. My point was never to argue that pet ownership is causing a drop in fertility, but rather pet ownership, and treating pets like kids, is a reaction to low fertility rates.

It certainly feels like almost everyone in my building has a dog. I sometimes see a cat or two in someone's window, but dogs feel more popular to me. Of course, having a pet doesn't exclude having children, and having children seems to entail having a pet at some point because kids love cats and dogs.

I think pets add life to an otherwise lifeless existence. I don't think there's a conscious pet/kid substitution going on. It's just the best we can do for now.

I think the good news is in any industlrized society, including ours, there will always be a certain % who will wants to have children despite careerism and other issues. Like most individual differences in life, there is probably a genetic component to it in that some people are wired to want to have a lot of kids and others are not.

Agree 100%. In older mass media, "think of the children" was an archetypal motivator in community and political action. But today, living with children in a big American city, it does seem like making the world nice for children is a lower priority than dog parks, dogs relieving themselves on public property, automobiles, allowing crazy vagrants to roam the streets, library worker unions, teacher's unions, squeezing every bit of life expectancy from the gerontocracy, etc. The mandatory masking for children in schools and daycare -- while adults were free to go to work and bars maskless -- was a major black-pill on how society is treating children.

I'm reminded of this old quote from Plutarch:

On seeing certain wealthy foreigners in Rome carrying puppies and young monkeys about in their bosoms and fondling them, Caesar asked, we are told, if the women in their country did not bear children, thus in right princely fashion rebuking those who squander on animals that proneness to love and loving affection which is ours by nature, and which is due only to our fellow-men.
  • Plutarch, Pericles. 1st century A.D.

According to William Durant, who I believe, a major underlying cause of the Fall of the Roman Empire was a gradual decline in population, in turn due to people deciding to have fewer children. This started with the elites, but eventually reached the provinces. From his Caesar and Christ:

A serious decline of population appears in the West after Hadrian. It has been questioned, but the mass importation of barbarians into the Empire by Aurelius, Valentinian, Aurelian, Probus, and Constantine leaves little room for doubt.3 Aurelius, to replenish his army, enrolled slaves, gladiators, policemen, criminals; either the crisis was greater, or the free population less, than before; and the slave population had certainly fallen. So many farms had been abandoned, above all in Italy, that Pertinax offered them gratis to anyone who would till them. A law of Septimius Severus speaks of a penuria hominum—a shortage of men.4 In Greece the depopulation had been going on for centuries. In Alexandria, which had boasted of its numbers, Bishop Dionysius calculated that the population had in his time (250) been halved. He mourned to “see the human race diminishing and constantly wasting away.”5 Only the barbarians and the Orientals were increasing, outside the Empire and within.

What had caused this fall in population? Above all, family limitation. Practiced first by the educated classes, it had now seeped down to a proletariat named for its fertility;6 by A.D. 100 it had reached the agricultural classes, as shown by the use of imperial alimenta to encourage rural parentage; by the third century it had overrun the western provinces, and was lowering man power in Gaul.7 Though branded as a crime, infanticide flourished as poverty grew.8 Sexual excesses may have reduced human fertility; the avoidance or deferment of marriage had a like effect, and the making of eunuchs increased as Oriental customs flowed into the West. Plantianus, Praetorian Prefect, had one hundred boys emasculated, and then gave them to his daughter as a wedding gift.

According to William Durant, who I believe, a major underlying cause of the Fall of the Roman Empire was a gradual decline in population, in turn due to people deciding to have fewer children.

https://web.archive.org/web/20151018140823/https://www.utexas.edu/courses/rome/210reasons.html

\126. Loss of population

\158. Population pressure

Supposedly the same fate befell Sparta a couple of centuries before, because Spartan women were expected to perform various economic / quasi-managerial tasks at home, while at the same time also completing combat training, which altogether depressed the fertility rate.

Also, there were supposedly many eligible single men in the Late Western Roman Empire who joined monasteries or became hermits as Christianity gained a larger following, which also eroded the fertility rate.

The mandatory masking for children in schools and daycare -- while adults were free to go to work and bars maskless -- was a major black-pill on how society is treating children.

That's nothing compared to Hong Kong, which is looking at introducing vaccine passes for 5-11 year olds and requires mask wearing almost everywhere outside of your own home (including e.g. sitting on your own outside at a public civic park, where you are also banned from congregating in groups of more than 4) to protect the 30% + of the old who don't want to be vaccinated.

I mean, the rules didn't differ so much in places where the elderly did get vaccinated. Once you agree to the premises of corona containment, nothing other than a perfect vaccine with universal uptake can stop the madness.

The rules may not have differed much (though most countries were never as extreme as HK with masking) but the fact that severe pandemic measures are still in HK in autumn 2022 is unusual.

it does seem like making the world nice for children is a lower priority than dog parks, dogs relieving themselves on public property, automobiles, allowing crazy vagrants to roam the streets, library worker unions, teacher's unions, squeezing every bit of life expectancy from the gerontocracy, etc

It would seem as if pets, dogs in particular, have too many rights, and people have too few rights. Long sentences for non violent offenders, boys overly disciplined in school and by parents, yet dogs are allowed to be defecate in public . It does strike me as an inversion of a functioning society.

yet dogs are allowed to defecate in public

To be fair we seem to be heading towards giving you this right too

A dog can charge up to me, invade my personal space, menace me with its natural weapons... 'don't worry, he's friendly' say the owners, nary a leash in sight. Every fiber of my being wants to meet this violence with violence; a million years of ascending the food chain tells me to kill this predator to protect my small vulnerable offspring and wear its skin...

But I'm the bad guy if I want people to leash their dogs so they don't knock over and/or bite the kiddos.

yet dogs are allowed to be defecate in public . It does strike me as an inversion of a functioning society.

I guess that places san francisco at the vanguard of the struggle for human rights.

The mandatory masking for children in schools and daycare -- while adults were free to go to work and bars maskless -- was a major black-pill on how society is treating children.

Children, and especially teenagers, are the most discriminated-against group in society today; a utilitarian approach to anti-racism would start with them.

If we believe that parents want to give their children the same kinds of opportunities they grew up with, and literally every parent says this, the generation who needs to decide whether they're having kids right now (1980/1990s-born) grew up after the point where child rights were completely and utterly decimated. No wonder nobody wants to have them! If you have to have them on a leash, and they'll never mature under your watch beyond obeying simple commands... well, you're describing a dog, and dogs are cheaper. And better, because they're physically incapable of saying "no" and even more disposable than even kids in the 1930s were: can't afford them, drop them off at the shelter, and if they were still there you could pick them back up afterwards.

It's literally 2010s-era "I'm not having children because I'm saving the climate" except this time it's "I'm not having children because they'd have to suffer through 25 years of modern society". Same thing in Asian countries (it will eventually become a thing in India for the same reasons)- sure, you can have a kid, but if you do that you've signed your future human being up for 15 years of slavery your neighbors have cargo-culted their way into for no socioeconomic benefit whatsoever. It's honestly surprising to me that reproduction in Japan even exists; I don't think it's a coincidence that a culture with an absolute hellscape with respect to healthy family life also produces the highest-quality pornography in the world.

The only "freedom" these human beings have these days is to stay inside and play video games; forced to exist as 2 arms and a head is enough for a reasonable adult to seek death instead, and as such it's not a surprise that suicide is usually more deadly to the under-18 set than accidents. Which should be the first indication that that demographic really isn't "living" so much as "existing", but that's OK because they haven't lived long enough to know better.

Your right to enjoyment of your own property is non-existent; with CPS being abused by concern trolls to the point where they'll arrest you if you so much dare to play in the front yard. Freedom of movement doesn't exist either; god forbid you walk or bike to your friend's house or the corner store because the State can just show up and arrest you for no reason. Want to go home for lunch? Same deal.

[By contrast, elementary-aged children in the 1920s were more than capable of doing all of these things, in working conditions far worse than school, and far more dangerous than modern life in general, tends to impose. The claim that they're not capable of getting from Point A to Point B just doesn't wash.]

Your right to bear arms is limited so hard that if you exercise it and are caught you'll never be able to do so legally again. Kyle Rittenhouse was put on trial in part for, functionally, being subhuman (edit: temperature) while armed; the emphasis on "but 17, therefore he's not a human, and should be charged for daring to act as if he was" was everywhere.

[Contrast Boomers that grew up in rural areas, who have formative experiences hunting rabbits in the woods at 10 with a rifle, and teenagers with gun racks in their trucks to go hunting after school let out. Sure, you had to store your guns in the office, but you can at least argue that's reasonable to reduce theft.]

Taxation without representation; income tax applies to them but voting doesn't.

I could go on. The only justification for this shit is "it's fine, because they're subhuman" (who hold that pop-psych belief that you don't pass the paper-bag test until 25 specifically for that reason), and while we can certainly argue about to what we should take away from subhumans to the extent that we're right about their tendencies for violence, nonsense, and disorder, my argument against this is the Progressive one: offer these people reasons not to do these things and you'll see better results. It's so bad that even the teenagers themselves will accept the rest of society's behavior as justified for this reason, though humorously you might argue that's just a logical consequence of subhumanity.

And I'm still not entirely sure where it came from.

  • Was it really the Satanic Panic, where Karen lost her mind because "muh D&D and pedos around every corner"?

  • State agencies adopting extreme aversion to risk allowing themselves to become weapons of the bored housewife concern troll?

  • Was it the cratering of the laber pool in the 1980s that solidified the segregation of the youth from the general public?

  • Was it the dramatic increase in crime because the CIA was selling crack on the streets?

  • The 24-hour news cycle and the Amber Alert (where 99.99% of its uses are custody disputes)?

  • Teenagers running amok killing their classmates because they correctly assessed that their life didn't matter to anyone and had no social buy-in (which is itself likely an emergent phenomenon; spree shooters in 1998 would have been born in 1980 and thus grew up post-enclosure)?

  • All of the above?

Even better is that, because abolition and miscegenation are (at least popularly) linked for what should be obvious reasons, anyone who dares attempt improve the standards of the under-18 set in society is clearly doing it just because they secretly want to normalize sex with them or otherwise expose them to danger for selfish reasons rather than actually wanting this class of people to have a life worth living for once.

How do we meaningfully improve things for kids? Let them work at 10 yo again?

I don't think it needs to be quite that drastic (also, working youth not making enough to afford their own apartment tends to be a moral hazard, contributes to a 3.7-income trap, and as such needs barriers).

Anyway, there are ultimately 3 problems that stand in the way: infrastructure (transport required for even trivial tasks), safetyism (State abusable by concern trolls), and moral hazard (the people who create these problems are not the ones that will ultimately pay the price for them).

Some things (from "already done in some places" to "is politically very difficult") in the North American context:

  • Take steps like Utah has to limit the ability for concern trolls to use the State as a weapon against children walking down the street or playing in the yard. This should ease pressure on parents who do live in areas that have parks available but don't dispatch their children to them for fear of CPS. Dispatching your kid to run the odd errand now also becomes feasible, depending on location.

  • Fix the parks so that kids actually want to go to them and ensure technology is there to encourage meetups. Structures there don't have to actually be dangerous, but they do have to seem like it to be fun. Might require cleaning up tents.

  • Subsidize and improve medium-speed personal transport options (which should counter the suburb problem somewhat). The powered bikes that you can ditch at mass transit stops are a good start, but if you managed to issue every kid in a school district one (they're about as costly as a cheap laptop, and would cost about as much as a comparable technology deployment) you can dilute the inherent theft problem (not that technology doesn't already exist to just key students to their own bikes) and don't have to constantly re-buy them as they get taller. Traffic accidents will probably go up as a consequence of more bikes on the road, though, so it'll require a body politic that doesn't (for lack of a more polite term) instantly wuss out at the first couple of injuries with the new tech, and it's currently illegal in most polities.

  • Fix the education-social pipeline so people who've lost patience for school closer to when their biological need to belong to a society develops (about 16) can leave it and do something else that pays better than minimum wage, and harmonize training requirements for jobs with reality. If the best solution to crime reduction is "just give them a future; show them that participating will get them The Good Life(tm) in a reasonable timeframe", well, that would probably do it.

Re-creating the initial conditions for the "good life, back when kids were competent to do things we pretend they can't do now and didn't need to be hand-held through everything" isn't a panacea, but it's probably a good start. If the conditions are allowed to persist for long enough, and those conditions really were the cause of the former, then that emergent behavior should come back and we won't have to deal with so many nervous wrecks who "mysteriously" never developed the ability to do things on their own.

And I'm still not entirely sure where it came from.

Was it really the Satanic Panic, where Karen lost her mind because "muh D&D and pedos around every corner"?

State agencies adopting extreme aversion to risk allowing themselves to become weapons of the bored housewife concern troll?

Was it the cratering of the laber pool in the 1980s that solidified the segregation of the youth from the general public?

Was it the dramatic increase in crime because the CIA was selling crack on the streets?

The 24-hour news cycle and the Amber Alert (where 99.99% of its uses are custody disputes)?

Teenagers running amok killing their classmates because they correctly assessed that their life didn't matter to anyone and had no social buy-in (which is itself likely an emergent phenomenon; spree shooters in 1998 would have been born in 1980 and thus grew up post-enclosure)?

All of the above?

Suburbanization, I think, as accelerated by the violent crime epidemic. Car-based suburbs are basically human settlements bereft of any sense of community, unwalkable neighborhoods, and have harmful psychological effects on children.

Kyle Rittenhouse was put on trial in part for, functionally, being a nigger while armed

Come on man. Not only are you ruining an otherwise not-terrible post but it's not even an apt metaphor for the situation.

Also, if you're not hiding your power level, you could shill your Substack and book while you're at it.

I almost wrote this exact response. I was pleasantly surprised through much of the first half that the quality of the argument was much improved but it just kept digging.

I like this post, but I think it could do with some more explanation/details (for example, analyzing the Karen phenomenon you've hinted at, data for the "virtually all Amber Alerts are custody disputes" thing), and maybe a cooler temperature (for example, was the hard-r necessary?).

I remember that a history teacher in my college was wanting to put together a lecture about the rise of the teenager category, and I've heard that the idea of the teenager was in part invented/socially constructed by marketers (something he might have mentioned, along with changing conditions).

dog parks, dogs relieving themselves on public property, automobiles, allowing crazy vagrants to roam the streets, library worker unions, teacher's unions, squeezing every bit of life expectancy from the gerontocracy, etc.

masks for children and not adults

Roman Empire demographic screed

The Venn diagram overlap of “could better benefit kids” and “the fault of pet culture” contains almost none of these things. Maybe choosing to build a dog park over a playground. The points about unions don’t even fit either circle unless I’ve missed recent developments in the Library Cults.

Every DINK with a pet are two votes that should been a pro-child vote balancing out the other forces in politics, but instead they are absent from the fray. When you have so many adults in their prime ages of energy raising pets instead of children, it changes as a whole what the culture values.

The points about unions don’t even fit either circle unless I’ve missed recent developments in the Library Cults.

In my city, libraries have been basically non-functional since the pandemic. The official hours are ridiculously limited, but every time I actually go during those hours, it has been closed. They have rules requiring at least 4 staff members be on site all the time, so if one staff member calls in sick, and they are below the number, the entire thing closes. This is despite staffers admit they spend most of their time doing nothing. They are having trouble hiring, but despite shelving books being a task many people could do, only people with the official sheepskin are allowed to be hired, which is generally a union thing to create barriers of entry and higher pay. Of course, the library workers job can itself suck, because they are lower priority than the rule "always accommodate vagrants lest we get publicized doing something that creates bad optics."

Wow, that’s absolutely ridiculous about the libraries. I had no idea. Thank you for clarifying.

demographic screed

Do you have arguments against the parents thesis, or do you think labeling a text you disagree with a "screed" is sufficient disproof?

I don’t think the parent presented much of a thesis at all. If he wanted to say “demographics is destiny”, he could have ditched the first half of the post.

Nothing wrong with his quotes.

I agree, but I’m sympathetic to the degenerate hedonist a bit more than you. Kids are expensive, stressful, time consuming and have high variance. You can dodge the shackles of instinct by diverting those feelings towards a creature that will never grow up, talk back, or steal your laptop for heroin money. Yes, society will collapse because of this, but it’s a free rider problem. Maybe kids are great qualitatively but they are certainly low status.

Pretty much. "collapse will come but it won't be my problem" Kids are low status unless you are in Hollywood. Then it seems to be reversed.

It also dies in about a decade unless you happened to make it a parrot (which might talk back or swear a blue streak at your funeral if you're based enough).

Kids are expensive, stressful, time consuming and have high variance.

Having kids, especially infants and toddlers, is distinctly type II fun: "miserable while it's happening, but fun in retrospect." Think skydiving or similar. IMO the availability of easy and effective family planning makes it really easy to look at that description and decide that misery doesn't sound fun, and hedonism seems like a better short-term choice. I think it's similar in that regard to, say, unhealthy-but-tasty food and living metabolically healthy.

I don't know that I consider birth control to be a net negative, but I can at least see how given the choice people might decide to not take the leap that turns out better primarily in hindsight. I would agree with other posters that this can probably be countered with a reasonably small amount of culture shifting to make child rearing and families higher status, and perhaps a bit more general encouragement to temporary discomfort that makes things better in the long run.

Having kids, especially infants and toddlers, is distinctly type II fun: "miserable while it's happening, but fun in retrospect."

As a dad, this has not been my experience with infant and toddlers, except for the first two months of the first child. The journey itself is intensely rewarding. Has it been your experience?

First baby screamed All. The. Time for the first 7 months or so, and continued to be fairly high maintenance thereafter. Second baby exists partly as a distraction for first baby, and is also much calmer and more enjoyable as an infant. I do not think this is on account of anything we did, as far as I can tell.

Feedings continually interrupting sleep are a form of torture, and that was the first few months of each baby.

From maybe 9-months-old onward has been net fun, but I think the bigger tradeoff is the growing senses of connection and meaning vs the reduction of individual freedom. More and more family member needs and schedules mean less and less opportunity to do adventurous things on a whim ... but now everything we do as a family, I get to experience empathetically from all their perspectives at once, along with the dual experience of watching how the activities change them, and the additional motivation from that has me actually getting off my butt and doing interesting things no less often than I did when it was simpler 20 years ago.

Fellow dad here; my wife had it ... not better or worse, but definitely different. She felt a bond with the newborns that I didn't fully match until they started talking, but on the other hand every pregnancy was exhausted suffering for her.

One terrible week when one child was sick at about 1 month was pretty bad. Other than that it's much more of the hard but intensely rewarding here.

Another unexpected benefit of being here is there aren't nearly so many subreddit s to spill personal information.

I would say that the overall experience has definitely been positive, but it also brings a lot of not-always-fun tasks like late-night doctor visits, dirty diapers, and scheduling parent-teacher conferences. Doing things together is lots of fun, as is watching them learn and grow, but I'm still learning to work with the way the interaction is almost entirely interrupt-driven and impossible to schedule ("I fell down, I need a band-aid right now!").

As someone who's taken care of pets, my experience is that it's also rather interrupting. Either it's an emergency (cat throws up) or it's something that makes me have to put down something I'd rather be doing lest I procrastinate into near-infinity (walking the dog).

Having kids, especially infants and toddlers, is distinctly type II fun: "miserable while it's happening, but fun in retrospect."

I would call that what it is: not fun. You can have fond memories of things that aren't fun, but that doesn't make those things fun.

I think your food analogy kind of undermines your thesis as well. We all understand that we should eat vegetables and not junk food, but very few people are able to say they do so because they enjoy vegetables more. The reality is: vegetables suck, you just have to eat them. So that isn't exactly doing a great job of supporting the idea that having kids is fun.

The reality is: vegetables suck, you just have to eat them

I recognize the higher-level point you're making, and I think it's a valid point, but on the object level I think you might need a steamer or an air fryer. If your experience is that vegetables suck, you may get a lot of mileage out of figuring out ways to cook them that you actually like.

If I have the choice between a bag of doritos or a bowl of lightly steamed broccoli with lemon, pepper, and a sprinkle of msg, I'll generally take the broccoli (assuming both are already prepared). As snacks go, chips are cheaper, and much more convenient, and much easier to mindlessly eat with one hand while doing something else, but I don't think I actually experience more enjoyment while eating chips than I do while eating vegetables that I cooked according to my own preferences.

This may not be your experience, but knowing that the meal is healthy can enhance the enjoyment of the meal like an exotic spice.

Maybe kids are great qualitatively but they are certainly low status.

This seems like a solvable problem: make having kids higher status. You can't just unilaterally declare something to be high status by dictatorial fiat, but there are things you can do to push in that direction, or even more easily, stop pushing in the opposite direction. I think this one of my main complaints against the Blue Tribe, and all this stuff about the destruction of the family unit, is that they seem to be deliberately lowering the status of children and families. There's a qualitative difference between removing oppressive structures that force people into certain lifestyles, and actively disparaging those lifestyles and mocking people who like them.

Nobody should be forced to be a stay at home parent and raise seven children, but if somebody chooses that lifestyle then we should celebrate them as a strong person and a valuable contributor to society. Not mock them as backwards and oppressed and quaint. Everyone who mocks and disparages traditional families and cultures lowers the effective status of those lifestyles and makes other people less likely to choose them. People shouldn't be forced between a high status job versus a low status family, they should be able to have a high status family, provided they actually do a competent job of raising kids. But traditional families are yesterdays fashion, and red-coded which makes them automatically distasteful to the blue tribe. Families didn't used to be low status, but in the process of destroying gender roles our society has completely and utterly ignored the collateral damage, resulting in the current situation. Victory at any costs indeed.

I agree that we should not be mocking mothers with lots of kids, but how do you go about celebrating them without implicitly denigrating women with few or no kids as lazy or selfish?

Edit: I guess the answer to my question is that you would celebrate it until you got to a point where both outcomes were more or less normalized within the culture, so that being a prolific mother was respected, but choosing to produce few or no children was understandable and normal.

They sort of do this in Turkey. Daytime television is filled with marriage shows, only legitimating dating and flirting within the context of marriage and reproduction. When the AKP (Erdogan's party) took power, they shifted the entire cultural/media apparatus to be more pro-family, buying up channels and manipulating the programs they showed. This naturally came at the cost of the rights-based understanding of gender equality. Government leaders announce that they're doing everything for the family, that they want people to reproduce.

https://doi.org/10.1080/19436149.2018.1443838

For your information, daytime marriage shows were banned in Turkey by decree by the broadcasting regulator a couple years ago (at the absolute peak of their popularity). For corrupting public morals. To be honest, those shows very quickly degenerated into reality TV shows full of casting agency models trying to achieve fame through scandals.

I want to highlight this comment because I move back and forth between a comfortably-well-above-replacement-fertility subculture and the mainstream USA- there is a tradeoff between women's rights/women's lib/gender equality/free gender roles and fertility rate. I do not see any possible way around that, either. If you have a 3.5 tfr then a good portion of women of childbearing age are either going to be pregnant or caring for small children at any given time, and it is simply not a rational economic decision for most women to prioritize their careers while having multiple children. And an individual woman who has four kids probably got started before she could get settled into a high status career where it would make sense to make careers a priority even with multiple kids. You can't generally trade off against that by asking the husband to make career sacrifices, either, for biological reasons.

The thing about degenerate societies is that no one is in charge, just institutions careening down their tracks. You’re lower status not (only) because you’re a stay-at-home mom, but because you aren’t a practicing lawyer/doctor/girl boss, like in the tv shows. You have less time to post TikTok’s about the hip brewery you found or how great your guru is or how tasteful your 1 bedroom soho loft is. The status game is global now kiddo and if you think individual players making individual decisions can beat back moloch I’ve got a good essay for you.

In blue spaces kids are a luxury good, for people both rich enough to afford them and attractive enough to bag a secure LTR. This is fucked and bad and doomed long term but it’s a pretty reasonable outcome if you understand some of the market forces.

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I'm not convinced that this is truly the Molochian equilibrium in the long run. The whole race to the bottom via market forces occurs in highly competitive industries because any industry that chooses morals or slack over profit gets outcompeted and replaced by the more ruthless ones that optimize for profit alone. The market forces in culture cause cultures and ideologies which deliberately propagate themselves and suppress other cultures to spread, while cultures which are tolerant and allow dissent get replaced. Things which are more likely to spread are more likely to exist, even if they sacrifice things we like in exchange for spreadability. It's just the tautology of evolution applied more generally.

So in a cultural sense, people who sacrifice families for careers will have more wealth, and thus more power and status in a society that rewards wealth with status. And thus this ideology spreads conditional on society, or significant subsets of society, conveying status for wealth. But actual evolution still exists, so this is inherently unstable. People who don't reproduce will get replaced by people who do reproduce. We see this via demographic shifts, as some races and cultural subsets reproduce much more than others and their relative populations increase. Now, maybe some of those people will be culturally captured by the Molochian culture giving status for wealth, but some of them won't, especially if they have a culture which has anti-bodies against this particular meme.

I don't think the Molochian future is one where anti-family leftists take over everything and then the human population dies out, it's one where all the anti-family people get replaced, either by an offshoot that re-prioritizes family, or more likely by a new culture driven by immigrants or Amish or something who resist the temptation to change cultures, keep having large families, and eventually grow to large enough numbers to impose their own views on status

Why do comments like these imply that the culture which prioritizes career and the single life over parenthood is evil, by comparing them to Molochian processes like immoral business practices. Preferring childlessness is not necessarily 'anti-family'. Its a bit irritating to me that a place like this which should have people with different outlooks on these topics seems to be in overwhelming agreement about them. Why is the culture giving status for wealth considered "molochian", but not the culture giving status for having a big family. Am I mistaken about what "molochian" means, because this seems to be a case of consensus building.

The original post describing Moloch from Scott in case you haven't read it: https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/

Moloch is neither evil nor good, on its own. Moloch is the blind idiot God, a process that does what it does for its own bizarre reasons that are difficult (though in some cases possible) to comprehend, is extremely powerful and difficult to resist, and does not care about you or the things you care about. It's often hard to even notice, because it's not a real person doing things for a reason, it's an emergent property of numerous people doing different things. It's the structure of incentives driving in a direction that almost nobody actually wants to go. In some instances, it will actually do things you like, though mostly by accident, and usually people only use the term for negative things. But I would argue that evolution is probably the number one notable Molochian process and I very much like many of the things it's done for me and the human race, and all of the various positive traits I have, though it's also responsible for zero-sum and negative-sum features and drives that lead to ruthlessness that I don't like. So I don't necessarily think describing something as Molochian necessarily implies that it's entirely evil, but it is usually implied at least that it's negative, or else a different term would be used, so I sort of see your point.

To address some of your other points, I agree that preferring childlessness, as an individual, is not necessarily anti-family. But I think a large subset of modern culture is anti-family, either explicitly, implicitly, or both. Just check out /r/childfree, though that's probably a bit of a weakman, I think the much more common situation is just people disvaluing children and disincentivizing it in others. Poor maternity/paternity leave, poor ability for someone to take a decade off work and then come back without crippling their career, lack of shame and social sanctions against men who impregnate women outside of marriage, or for women who get pregnant outside of marriage, lack of respect for dedicated parents who choose families instead of careers. Lack of support for homeschooling, increasing idealogical capture of schools as moral authorities replacing parents rather than as educational supplements, expansion of the welfare state and the governments role in caring for children rather than the parents, etc. All of these contribute to worse incentives to have children, which I would describe as anti-family incentives, and then people rationally respond to incentives and choose to not get married or get married later, and have fewer children, or children in less stable homes (family does not mean maximize total fecundity, it means raising happy healthy families, which massively benefits from two parents)

So I wouldn't describe people who choose not to have families for personal reasons as necessarily anti-family, but I would describe the general culture that's obsessed with careers, money, and casual sex as anti-family.

My point was that this is Molochian on a memetic sense, in that it spreads via culture and is bad for the people living in it. If the culture giving status for having a big family was memetically Molochian, it wouldn't be getting replaced so easily. But I think that it is genetically Molochian, in that as certain people have fewer children they will get replaced by people who have more. I don't think western society being wiped out and replaced by immigrants and/or Amish and/or some cult that explicitly requires all women to birth at least 10 children is a good thing, but is the direction I predict the pendulum going if the anti-family culture goes too far. I actually think that a reasonable balance involving children incentivized but not mandated such that we end up at or slightly above the replacement rate of 2.1 would be a useful anti-body against this outcome.

My point was that this is Molochian on a memetic sense, in that it spreads via culture and is bad for the people living in it. If the culture giving status for having a big family was memetically Molochian, it wouldn't be getting replaced so easily. But I think that it is genetically Molochian, in that as certain people have fewer children they will get replaced by people who have more. I don't think western society being wiped out and replaced by immigrants and/or Amish and/or some cult that explicitly requires all women to birth at least 10 children is a good thing, but is the direction I predict the pendulum going if the anti-family culture goes too far. I actually think that a reasonable balance involving children incentivized but not mandated such that we end up at or slightly above the replacement rate of 2.1 would be a useful anti-body against this outcome.

I think the reason that the culture giving status for having a big family was replaced was because in the past having a big family symbolized high income and good health, because those were the attributes that allowed people to achieve a big family, there was also not the option to not end up with a big family if you had the means because getting married and raising children was seen as a religious duty, and negating or defying the procreative purpose of sex was seen as sinful with all that that implied. Nowadays when people have the freedom to separate sex from baby making, most people do not desire big families and prefer to get married later. I don't think you explained why the culture giving status for career and money is bad for the people living in it, I think that the default conclusion would be that it is better for most of the people living in it than the pro family culture, otherwise how would it have spread the way it has? You would have to explain that it misleads or lies to people and that they would be better off in a pro-family culture.

In blue spaces kids are a luxury good, for people both rich enough to afford them and attractive enough to bag a secure LTR. This is fucked and bad and doomed long term but it’s a pretty reasonable outcome if you understand some of the market forces.

People are willing to spend quite a bit on luxury goods provided they signal status. I don't think it's impossible that kids could be seen that way, but it's certainly not the case right now: IMO there's some lingering anti-natalism from a few decades of the environmental movement that defines children as "selfish." In a decade or two I could imagine the general sentiment shifting.

traditional families are yesterdays fashion

Very true despite what feminists will say about having no problem with women that want to be moms. It is either or. My wife’s cousin, maybe 7 years back was in elementary school and the teacher asked what every kid wanted to be when they grew up. Her response of “a mom” earned her parents a concerned call from the teacher, chiding them that they should encourage her to have bigger aspirations. Of course she just came out as a lesbian last month, so mission accomplished I guess.

All real experiences are being replaced with more optimized simulations. Real experiences have limitations to how much you can optimize them. Pets can literally be bred for cuteness, docility, smallness etc, not so with human children. Streamers can optimize friendship, sex workers/OF egirls for sexuality, retirement homes for elderly care, recorded music for friends/family singing. Real experiences limited by blood relationships, geographic proximity, reciprocity and non-specialized providers just won’t be able to compete in the future (present) and it seriously troubles me

Cats are very well adapted to mimicking human infants but they aren't really in the same league.

Isn't it about desensitization/addiction in general? When people haven't learned normal coping mechanisms, they would always find a way to wirehead themselves, virtual or not (drugs, alcohol, food). Low prices would drive substitution, sure, but the deeper problem is why people do -- or do not substitute in the first place. Why some people would binge read blogs and books, and other - binge quarrel at forums with no definite goal.

I don't think this is true at all. No one is happy to pick streamers over real friends or onlyfans girls over actual sexual partners. Everyone knows they are a poor substitute at best.

That's definitely not true. There are in fact people who would rather watch streamers than have real friends, or jerk off to an onlyfans girl instead of having a girlfriend. I think those people are profoundly unhealthy and wrong, but they exist.

Ok maybe they exist but they're rare. I don't think we have an issue of these "hyperoptimized" alternatives being seen as generally preferable. The real appeal is that they are so low effort not that they are super optimized.

Nobody thinks being obese is better than being fit, but pizza is still outcompeting healthy foods for an increasing portion of the population

Basically: single-purpose specialized experience providers often leveraging technology will outcompete everything real eventually

We just.... All kinda forgot to have kids for a couple generations and then we were all too old. Out with a wimper indeed.

This feels accurate.

Personally, I've always (until somewhere around the mid 2010s) waffled on the question of whether or not I want to / should have children. In hindsight, I think it can be summed up as "Yes, but the more I think about it, the scarier it gets."

The problem is that there are some prerequisits I'm just ... not super interested in. In middle school, I had this tendency to fantasize about having children, but would handwave away where they came from. I think the book I published in high school could be interpreted as a self-insert parenting fantasy, that I suddenly realized was that halfway through and so the SI got uncomfortable about it in awkward infodummps because that's what was happening in my head. (In said book, the protags somehow wound up looking after not one, but two adorable space-orphans, withddout a shred of romance or sexuality to be found.)

This feels like the opposite of the rest of The West, where people have prioritized sex and romance over children, yet somehow it still feels like "we just kinda forgot for a couple generations" applies to me, too. Really deprioritized, in favor of the all-important Education.

I believe that one of the traditional ways of seeing young couples buying pets is as training for having children. "When a girlfriend suddenly decides the couple needs a dog, the husband doesn't realize its his dad skills being tested" and so on.

Perhaps this was the tradition at some point, but given that rates of pet ownership and pet spending have increased, while fertility has decreased, it's likely that this tradition becoming irrelevant and is not driving this change.

Or it's that young couples mostly perceive themselves as failing this test.

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