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Comment by l33t7332273 | Hacker News Reader

I think a big part of this is a cultural shift to no longer being culturally obligated to marry young and start a family.

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Anf brainwashing that everyone should have a career while in reality most people end up simply with jobs and not careers. Believing lies has a societal cost.

Evolution will weed that culture out in a few generations.

The future belongs to Mormons and Muslims.

And real poor people, not middle class westerners complaining about housing and student loans.

Poor people in Asia and Africa still have large families.

So did the Irish, until it wasn't necessary to have 9 kids for enough of them to make it through childhood to take over the family farm.

Yeah, much of the big family thing is a numbers game. You get 7 kids to be sure to have 2-3 surviving ones.

Birth rate always drop in times of riding political instability and decreasing quality of life.

Honestly, I think it's simply that people have much more interesting lives these days. Babies and entertainment are substitute goods.

I feel this can be easily dramatized in either direction

Imagine sitting down for 9 hours typing, then going home and scrolling through porn and getting high and thinking that's much more interesting than conquering a village, sailing the coast of a new continent, having sex with a beautiful virgin, and teaching your sons to reach even further into greatness.

Or on the other hand, the hard reality redpill that your life in the past would be manual labor on a farm as a peasant, making a lord rich.

I still lean towards a romantic past - working hard with your village friends, then going to the pub with them, and coming home and making babies with your wife, in a home you own, with a tended garden and many children, sounds better than writing Ansible playbooks and jacking off to pornhub. And this is the life of a loser in the past, compared to a "winner" of the present.

Maybe it's anomie, people don't have children when they don't believe in their civilization

The losers in the past died of diarrhea aged three.

If you made it as far as wife and kids, you were a winner.

If wife made it as far as the third kid without dying of sepsis, she was an ultra winner.

By that standard, most people conceived in the present don't even survive the womb

Well, ditto the past - not only were diet and other conditions harsher, the Church was happy to prescribe, mix, prepare and administer abortifacients.

eg: https://daily.jstor.org/abortion-remedies-medieval-catholic-...

and that's Saint Hildegard of Bingen, Abbess and founder of two monasteries handing out the Ye Olde abortion pills.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C9K9PfjRjxM

This is not true. The medicine was for miscarriages (it was referred as “spontaneous abortion”).

It's explained in the article that you linked. Some women did take the medicine to induce an abortion, but they did not do that with Hildegard's aid or assent.

There is a helpful discussion around this here: https://www.reddit.com/r/Catholicism/comments/q88veb/is_this...

Read it how you wish, Hildegard is clearly ambiguous on the application and specifically includes the “she aborts an infant which is a danger to her body” which certainly goes much further than, say, Texas.

I don't know why you're forwarding a false dichotomy here, there's a lot more than doomscrolling and writing Ansible playbooks if you don't have children, and there's a lot more work to having children than tending an idyllic garden. And it's not as if you won't be up at 9 pm fixing production issues and rewriting Ansible playbooks even with children. In other words, one does not replace the other.

> and coming home and making babies with your wife

You mean raising lord’s kid?

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

> I still lean towards a romantic past - working hard with your village friends, then going to the pub with them, and coming home and making babies with your wife, in a home you own, with a tended garden and many children, sounds better than writing Ansible playbooks and jacking off to pornhub. And this is the life of a loser in the past, compared to a "winner" of the present.

Why are so focused on porn? Modern life is amazingly diverse with activities: jumping with parachute, sports, dancing, games, science clubs, I could go in forever. Maybe instead of lamenting try to actually do something except for jerking off and writing ansible for 9 hours?

> You mean raising lord’s kid?

From the link to wikipedia you sourced:

> A majority of historians[citation needed] have concluded that the idea is a myth and that all references to it are from later periods.

> [citation needed]

I'm not saying it didn't happen. I am saying there is not really that much evidence.

Also from the wikipedia link you sourced:

> Scholars in the 19th and 20th centuries gave the historical basis of the "right of first night" a good deal of attention.[clarification needed][37] Historians David M. Walker and Hector McKechnie wrote that the right might have existed in medieval Europe,[7][53] but other historians[who?] have concluded that it is a myth, and that all references to it are from later periods.[54][8] Over time, the Encyclopædia Britannica and the Larousse encyclopedias dramatically changed their opinion on the topic, moving from acceptance to rejection of the historical veracity of the idea.[55] French writer Louis Veuillot wrote a book in 1854 disputing its existence.[56] After an exhaustive historical study, German jurist Karl Schmidt concluded in 1881 that it was a scholarly misconception.[37] After Schmidt, many of those who believed in the existence of the custom based their opinions on anthropological studies of tribal societies, though according to W. D. Howarth, this was a misguided argument because of the disparity between the tribal societies and medieval European society.[57]

Well, that's why I avoid dramatization. Anyone can daydream - it takes discipline to think on the margin.

What do I have? What do I want? How can I beat use the former, to achieve the latter? Those are the questions of practical importance.

OK, as someone who spent quite a long time living in a village with several pubs, let's dig into this!

If you want to be able to go to a pub, you have to allow for one to be built within walking distance. The absolute worst thing about American suburbs is that they have decided to enforce puritanical idiocy by not interspersing pubs with houses, which mean the DUI rates are ridiculous. And the places in the US where this is not the case are the most expensive, in a turn that surprises no-one.

As for Ansible, I think I'd rather do the farm labour, to be frank.

Interesting? Give me some examples. This problem goes beyond the east vs west. This is about humans failing to learn from the past. Add modernity and progress|regress.

Sports, science, literature, movies, skydiving, games, online games, learning, I can go on forever about different modern activities.

Most of this was around before the modern era in some form or fashion.

There is nothing new under the sun.

If you weren’t born rich, like Newton or Darwin, you were unlikely to be able to afford to learn and do science. Forget about being able to travel to the other side of the world without a huge risk of dying of malaria, dysentery or any of the other myriad diseases whose risks weren’t yet mitigated. Most people also couldn’t afford to travel even to countries nearby. Games: obviously no video games, but personally I wouldn’t miss them. ;) Other games, like poker, chess, mahjongg: true, they were there. Skydiving: nope. Learning: much more limited. E.g. there was so little communication between Asia and Europe that for most Europeans you’d need to move to Asia for months or more to even find a teacher. Beside languages, education in general didn’t use to be available to as large a percentage of society as now. Illiteracy was the common case. According to [1], in 1701 in UK 54% of population was literate, in Western Europe: 31%.

[1]: <https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/estimated-historical-lite...>

One of my grand mothers was a teacher and yet she bore 9 children. She lived through WW2 in the Asia/Pacific. All her children got were engineers, couple of doctors and a successful entrepreneur. What's more interesting than that? The truth is that inequality, modernity and self-love is going push us into a demographic collapse. Being a wirehead/hobbyist is definitely less fulfilling and less noble.

Pumping out children is ... noble? How?

They are raising those who will be changing your diapers.

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