Ngl people that care about the number of babies being born are just weird
Where I live, it’s a thousand dollars a month to rent A ROOM. The not particularly nice one bedroom apartments closest to where I live are 1700 a month. Food has never been more expensive. How people supposed to afford kids which are notoriously expensive to have?
We had a population explosion during the last 200 years that’s only just starting to taper off. I was taught about it in school 30 years ago, except back then it was called a “demographic transition” and it was hailed as a sign of a country becoming economically prosperous. The “fertility crisis” is a moral panic manufactured by neoliberal capitalists.
That population explosion was enabled by a vast cheap energy bonanza called fossil fuels. Now that they are running out and getting more expensive and lower quality, everything is getting more expensive because fossil fuels are the basis of everything.
Things are expensive. That’s all there is to it.
Oh, and it’s a permanent situation. Renewables can’t replace fossil fuels, if they could, why didn’t we have 8 billion people a thousand years ago when we had all the solar, wind, and renewable energy we have now?
Space won’t save us either. It’s going to get uglier.
Ah yes, 1000 year old civilizations, famous for having modern high efficiency photovoltaics.
It makes zero sense to say we had “all the solar, wind and renewable energy we have now”. Electricity wasn’t discovered until 500 years ago and made useful much more recently, in the early 1800s.
Sure we had windmills and watermills, but surely anyone can see that harnessing the power of the wind or water for a dedicated task is a very different proposition to generating energy that can be directed to nearly anything.
Renewables can’t replace fossil fuels everywhere they are used, but they can directly in an awful lot of cases and more cases can be adapted to use electricity rather than fossil fuel (trains going from diesel to electric, etc.)
So more to the point, what are you on about?
Solar is better than its ever been and will get more efficient as tech improves. Fossil fuels are also massively subsidized by entrenched interests
Things are expensive. That’s all there is to it.
We are currently experiencing the biggest wealth inequality in history and you think things are expensive just because they are expensive? Or because of fossil fuels being replaced by renewables?
There’s a new billionaire made every 30 hours.
Go find one and say thank you for being my overlord.
why didn’t we have 8 billion people a thousand years ago when we had all the solar, wind, and renewable energy we have now?
Because…power delivery and storage is also a thing? Like, electricity, and batteries? Which make renewable energy way more accessible. Ever heard of electric cars?
While cheap energy certainly played a huge role, medicine and other technology play an equal part.
They also kinda had fossil fuels back then, oil could be found on the surface. Why didn’t have the Romans a billion population, when they could find oil on the surface?
its not because I’m selfish, its because I hate people
“I can’t even take care of myself, but I’m going to bring a bunch of children into the world to suffer my consequences anyway.”
No, THAT shit is selfish.
… it’s mostly because I know I’d be a shitty parent. I don’t want to damage them.
Technically correct. It’s selfish not to have anything because we’re broke. The alternative is going to debt and not paying it: it’s selfless in the sense you’re putting yourself in a worse position
Economy is probably the most commonly cited reason, but the world being a shithole has to be up there somewhere.
I mean, I decided to not have kids because I don’t want to subject anyone to the existential horror that is life, and I feel no obligation to crank out miniature replicas of me.
My logic is along the same line.
I didn’t ask to be here, nobody asked if I wanted to be here. Being here, I kinda wish I was given that choice so I could say no.
Why would I force someone, who I supposedly love, to suffer through gestures at everything this? I love my potential children more than to condemn them to dealing with the children of those wealthy enough to have them.
There are some who believe that choosing to come here is like the show Severance.
You in the beforelife chose to come here for reasons unknown. You in the present life forgot all about that. And when you die, you will resume being the you of the beforelife, meaning the present you won’t get any justice.
Which is why some believe we’re on a prison planet.
We’re all just playing the Roy simulation at Blips and Chitz
I default to mindless math bubble does a chemistry. So long as there is no evidence of anything else, we’re just obliterated when we die and there’s no before or after.
But this place sure does suspiciously resemble some form of Hell.
“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
What do you mean you don’t want to raise the next generation of wage slaves? How will my children buy their second yachts?
Also more intelligent; back then people just had kids whether they were broke or not.
Stupidity == Altruism ???
You got it the wrong way round. 100 years ago, people were having kids precisely because they were broke.
100 years ago, if you had kids you had to feed them for 5-7 years and then they’d be adding to the family income. They’d be working the fields or the mines or in factories or any other job like that.
And when you got old, the only thing standing between you and dieing from being worked to death in the poor house was having kids that would take you in and support you.
Today the math is flipped on its head: You have to support your kids until at least 18, more likely 25 or 30 until they make it through education. Then they don’t contribute to your household income at all because they have their own household. And when you are old you get retirement benefits and live off the work of everyone else’s children too.
So 100 years ago, if you didn’t care about children and were broke, math told you to have kids.
Today, if you don’t care about children (no matter if you are broke), math tells you to not have kids.
Simple as that.
And since these changes happened gradually and society adapts its standards slowly, it’s been a gradual shift.
“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.
Meanwhile, Ukrainians are still having kids.
Westerners: “This world is too horrific!”
Oh no I’m 100% selfish for my reasons of not wanting kids. I could have billions or trillions in actual dollar bills (not assets or whatever) and still not want kids.
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.
