Comment by rayiner | Hacker News Reader

Comment by rayiner | Hacker News Reader

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> we don’t think our lives would be substantially improved by having children.

By that logic you should evade your taxes and park in handicapped spots. Having kids isn’t an individual choice, it’s a social obligation like paying taxes.

And that’s not a moralistic point but a basic economic one. Any sustainable society needs people to have and raise 2.1 children on average. That’s self-evidently true in subsistence agricultural societies. But our society is still closer to those than to some hypothetical post-scarcity one where robots do all the work and replacement humans are created in artificial wombs. We can afford some people to be childless, but it can’t become a widespread thing.

You can paper over that temporarily with immigration, but you’re really just outsourcing a key social function to immigrants. Those immigrants then have to bear the burden of raising kids a toxically individualistic society that’s hostile to children.

>By that logic you should evade your taxes and park in handicapped spots. Having kids isn’t an individual choice, it’s a social obligation like paying taxes.

Doesn't that then beg the question; if a society can't convince it's enough of it's members of the value of that obligation, does that society/culture really deserve to continue to exist as is?

The Christian sect known as "Shakers" illustrate what you describe: They had a rule of celibacy and as a result have essentially died out; their Wikipedia entry says that as of 2021 their total membership was three people.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shakers

Unless those 3 people (and those in recent decades who have now died) were hypocrites and broke the rules, then the only way the sect has survived this long is immigration (we'd call it "converts" in this context, since they're not a country). However, while it's kept them alive since the 1800s, 3 people is pathetically small.

> Having kids isn’t an individual choice, it’s a social obligation like paying taxes.

I get what you mean, but fuck that idea into the flaming sun.

All we need now is the state and society to force us to have children, on a planet with 8 billion souls.

Fuck that idea. Do whatever you want with your life, but don't go forcing it on other people and saying it's "social obligation". When has individual choice become a radical, antisocial idea?

> Fuck that idea.

It’s not an “idea.” It’s like saying “paying taxes is a social obligation” or “having a job if you’re able bodied is a social obligation.” At bottom those assertions rest on factual observations about society and the economy. If everyone evaded taxes civilization as we know it would quickly collapse. If able bodied people dropped out of the work force en masse, the economy would collapse. If we found out that the last child had been born in America, your retirement funds would quickly tank. These are such fundamental facts that societies have added a moral or religious gloss to them, but the underlying facts don’t go away even if you strip away that gloss.

If you won’t do those things, someone else will have to pick up your slack. Unless your retirement plan consists of hoarding canned food and ammo, or perhaps drifting out to sea when you can no longer work, you’re going to be depending on the children of the people who did the work of raising kids. And until we have robots that can wipe old people’s asses, that’s going to be an inescapable fact of society.

> Do whatever you want with your life, but don't go forcing it on other people and saying it's "social obligation".

Now that’s an “idea.”

> When has individual choice become a radical, antisocial idea?

You’ve got it backward. Until five minutes ago, everyone agreed that everyone has a social obligation to carry out the various work necessary for society to function. “Do whatever you want with your life” is a blip in human cultural history. It’s a blip even in the history of western civilization. And to date every society to adopt that notion has essentially doomed itself to obsolescence.

That's caricature level gaslighting, even when accounting for your terribly low standards.

> Unless your retirement plan consists of hoarding canned food and ammo, or perhaps drifting out to sea when you can no longer work, you’re going to be depending on the children of the people who did the work of raising kids. And until we have robots that can wipe old people’s asses, that’s going to be an inescapable fact of society.

All of these "outlandish" alternatives are seriously entertained by at least some members of the class of people who frequent HN.

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