“Whatever else we may be as creatures that go to and fro on the earth and walk up and down upon it, we are meat.”
“Why should generations unborn be spared entry into the human thresher?”
“…nonexistence never hurt anyone and existence hurts everyone.”
“Every one of us, having been stolen from nonexistence, opens his eyes on the world and looks down the road at a few convulsions and a final obliteration.”
“…this new Adam and Eve are only being readied for the meat grinder of existence…”
- Thomas Ligotti, Conspiracy Against the Human Race
Also more intelligent; back then people just had kids whether they were broke or not.
Stupidity == Altruism ???
“But all my friends are having kids and I feel like I am missing out while they chat.”
Yes, FOMO is old.
Meanwhile these boomers have multiple houses, affordable insurance, savings…
Very few help their kids.
What do you mean you don’t want to raise the next generation of wage slaves? How will my children buy their second yachts?
Uhhh… Having a baby is one of the most selfish things a person can do. They’re choosing not to foster or adopt. They’re doing the exact worst thing they can do for the environment.
And why are they doing it? Because they like kids, or because they want a family, or because they want someone to take care of them when they’re old. All selfish reasons.
My favorite reason, they want someone that looks like them. Heard that when I said I’d consider adopting, the other person was like “but don’t you want someone who looks like you?!”
Uh, no, my cat looks nothing like me but I still somehow mustered empathy for it. I don’t understand why people feel like they would love an adopted kid less, and it makes them horrible people.
Its fundamental to the urge to reproduce. Its literally the driving force of evolution.
Too many people are no different than animals. They reproduce just to reproduce. There is no regard for their situation, their competence or the impact on greater society. But these primitive people are more into “muh lineage”.
Savages, obeying their primal instincts like that. Next they’ll be trying to eat food and avoid predators.
Nothing wrong with sex but having kids is not a necessity like eating and safety. You would think people would be able to rationalize this day and age that having kids is a drawback for most of us and the planet.
Also… the future kinda sucks.
And it isn’t looking better.
Unfortunately, the people who don’t see the issue with the future are also the most likely to have more children who will likely also not see an issue with the future.
There’s also an entire subgroup that just don’t think that far. One of my very working class friends group has 3 kids, but when asked about his thoughts on the future has said things like “the climate is fucked anyway.” Somehow it hasn’t occurred to him his children have to live in that future…
I’m not broke (yet) but I’m selfish
Housing crisis, affordability crisis, corporate exploitation, job precarity, climate crisis, biodiversity crisis, water crisis, PFAS laden rain and microplastics in our bodies. AI drones and nuclear annihilation in an era of ecological overshoot and collapse.
So many great reasons not to have kids.
100% selfish
And that’s okay
I’ve only got one life to live and I’m not going to spend it dealing with some entitled, petulant little gremlin that I’m legally required to raise for two decades.
Same. I’m not broke, but I see no reason to put more people on this planet.
You could end up with a selfless great kid. It still doesn’t change society has abandoned helping families and wants everyone to “pick up their bootstraps” while billionaires and mega corps eat up society. Who wants to work full time and raise children at the same time with no support and expensive childcare?
It’s not just the money, it’s also the low value of human life and knowing the world just wants more bodies for the
meetmeat grinder.Society had always been optimistic about the long term future until recently.
Up until the early 2000s, it really did look like the future would be better. Sure, wages have been stagnant since the 80s, but it really looked like with a lot of smarts and a little luck, you could land a great job and be set.
And then job security quietly went away as well.
Corporate “persons” on the other hand are thriving.
You get more of what Congress, and states subsidize through tax breaks.
“meat grinder”.
meet grinder
is a different thing.
And notably distinct from Grindr meat
Meet Grindr meat!
We’re not broke or selfish. We don’t want kids and also don’t feel it’s fair to bring a life into this world with the current state of things.
I’m broke and selfish. Also I hate kids. Also why would anybody choose to bring new life into this shit world that will only continue to get worse?
Finances aside, it’s still not selfish.
Having a kid can be selfish.
I argue that both are selfish decisions, but having a kid eventually drags someone else into that didn’t consent.
I wrote a blog post about it after I got a vasectomy. I’m not an anti-natalist but I think its a point to consider.
My father would beg to differ. Some of the things I’ve heard: “who’s going to take care of you when you’re old”, “the
undesirableimmigrants with 5+ children will take overand ruin Europe”. He also told me I was being selfish when I was barely 18 for stating I didn’t want to have children because carrying a child for 9 months and childbirth terrify me. That shit still terrifies me to this day, on top of all the other reasons why I still don’t want to have children.Also, according to him the feelings a parent has for their child are “unexplainable”. That must be why my mom and and his mom were more a part of my childhood than he was!
What’s wrong with being selfish? I didn’t want kids, full-time kids are annoying and a huge responsibility. If someone doesn’t desire children, it’s very much ok to dedicate the energy and resources of raising several kids to themselves.
People are selfish, reproducing doesn’t exempt you from being selfish, people can have kids for selfish reasons too.
I admit sometimes I’ve thought it would have been cool to raise a human from zero, trying to make them a good person, and be a demigod to them on their first years because they didn’t know better; but I still think the world needs less people, not more. Since the 70s we were warned about overpopulation and the environment, and we just added another billion people anyway.
1970 world pop was 3.6B. 2025 8.2B
We just added another 4.6B
Largely in the global south who will be migrating to the West en masse
Actually based on the press conference the other day birth rates are down because… Airport breastfeeding spaces need to be renovated!
Malaga airport seemed have decent spaces for feeding when I last went through
Yeah, I was referencing a press conference by some gop members in I think it was Chicago airport where one stated that we should renovate the feeding rooms to fix the birth rate.
___By “we’re broke” they mean not making $400k a year.
An important fact is missing in this chart: working hours. That also explains why the curve goes up in the lowest segment: those people are probably not employed or not full time employed. After reaching a certain income level, you start having a lot more childcare options that you wouldn’t have with a lower income.
The birth rate would be much closer to the 2.1 you need for a stable population if there were affordable or even free childcare options, because Stay-at-home-Mum/Dad is only possible if either the partners income is high enough or the income of the other party is so low that it doesn’t matter.
Also. most civilized countries have laws protecting pregnant women from getting fired and have a lot more paid leave for them. US companies would push women to give birth in their toilet break and write them up if they take too long if they were allowed to.
If that’s how much money you need to maintain a family, then yes, that’s how much money you need to maintain a family.
The definition of “broke” changes depending of what you are expecting people to do.
I would like to buy me a summer house but I’m broke.
Crazy that virtually nobody is above the 2.3 replacement rate.
That is… until you have exactly one kid and realize how much work it takes. I wonder what happens to that chart if you look at “Hours employed by household”.
Betcha the low end is underemployed and the upper end is full on leisure class.
Betcha the low end is unemployed and the upper end is full on leisure class.
Lower end have more because of limited access to contraception (which costs money) among other things. But yeah, the whole “being broke” excuse is bullshit. Poor people have more kids and even people that are doing great don’t have that many kids. Theoretically you could hit replacement rate by making everyone a millionaire but I don’t know how that could work.
Theoretically you could hit replacement rate by making everyone a millionaire but I don’t know how that could work.
I doubt this would work. Financially, my family is towards the middle of that chart now. We were lower when we had our first kid and only a bit improved when we had our second. And honestly, it was pretty touch and go whether or not we would have the second. Our first was a handful as a baby and it left us wondering if we could handle a second. Thankfully, he calmed down a lot (or we just got used to the new normal) by the time he was pushing 18 months. After we had the second one though, I fully embraced the “cut my nuts off” solution to birth control (vasectomy). I don’t regret that choice at all. None of that was ever about finances. It was simply about the fact that raising children is hard and takes a lot of time.
Ultimately, I think the decline in birth rates isn’t about finances or selfishness, it’s just a change in social norms. Society has spent decades training people to the “nuclear family”. Movies, TV, and other media has pushed the “2 kids and 1.5 dogs in a home in the suburbs” for so long, that people internalized it. So, folks who do want to have kids shoot for that. Having 4 or 5 kids is now seen as an oddity, rather than the norm.
There is also a much better acceptance of women as something other than a walking womb to be filled. We no longer look at an unmarried woman in her 20’s or 30’s as some sort of spinster to be shunned. Sure, negative stereotypes still exist (e.g. Crazy cat lady); but, it’s much rarer for fathers to be selling off their 16 year old daughters to 40 or 50 year old men as child brides to be kept barefoot, pregnant and in the kitchen for the next 30+ years of their life. Women are expected to have full lives now, which may or may not involve raising children. As one might expect, many have taken full advantage of that and simply chose to not have any. This move from what amounts to sexual slavery to being treated as an actual person is going to mean there are fewer women having children and many of them delaying until they are actually old enough to make an informed decision about it.
Theoretically you could hit replacement rate by making everyone a millionaire
I might argue its a cultural shift as much as an economic one. We spent the 80s and 90s shaming people for having kids before they were “ready”, with “ready” meaning first “graduated high school” and then “graduated college” and then “owned a home” and then “had sufficient savings and health care”.
I ended up waiting to have kids until I was in my late 30s. And I only really have the time and energy and finances to support one. Would love to have a house full of kids, that’s not happening this late in life.
