Hell is other people – Why individualism shrinks the next generation | Hacker News Reader

Hell is other people – Why individualism shrinks the next generation

woodfromeden.substack.com

24 pointsjseliger29 comments

Did AI write this? Rigid, poorly written, makes every mistake your high school English teacher told you to avoid. "I think.." followed by conjecture with no supporting evidence.

Example (includes misuse of the colon):

> I think the fertility decline of the last decades indicates one thing: That hope was based on wishful thinking. Whatever the exact reasons, one thing is clear: Women don't love being with their children limitlessly. If they did, they could have chosen such lives: in current Western society, staying at home with children doesn't mean starving to death (at least not outside of metropolitan areas).

This actually is a conjecture/opinion piece, which is what teachers are usually trying to shape into other forms, and I found it very well written AFA clarity for casual reading, almost like it was written in another latin language with less brown book syphilis. Maybe not a (monolingual) native speaker, but probably not similar to an AI's training set.

> Government-funded cooperative breeding is one solution.

So the author sees the shrinking of the next generation as a problem to be solved, with less individualism. But is the shrinking of human population and environmental impact a bug or a feature? This essay is an argument for individualism for environmentalists.

Seriously, the whole "demographic crisis" is a figment of the ponzi scheme imagination.

It also doesn't square with the productivity gains of technology.

If one person can do the job that used to take ten, how on earth is a minor dip in work participation[1] going to 'cause collapse'?

[1] More than offset by 20th century developments like women entering the professional workforce.

Sub replacement fertility crisis is real, it's not a figment of imagination. And immigration only works if you have a place to draw immigration from.

Also, with the advent of AI and eventually AGI, it may be preferable to have smaller populations since the generated wealth can be distributed more in far more significant amounts.

Religious conservatives are not too happy with such ideas however, since it takes away one of the ways in which a religion grows.

It's estimated that 25% of the global population is subsistence farmers with little to no connection to the global market. AI is not going to impact every demographic, using it as a guideline for policy (or human psychology) is too risky to be useful. The dynamics of resource competition have not changed now that ChatGPT exists, people will not start tailoring their families towards AI unless it becomes a matter of survival. As-is, not a single person I know is convinced that AI will replace human labor in any meaningful capacity. The consensus seems to be, religious or otherwise, that AI is not a limiting factor in population growth.

It's as if an anthropologist read Plato's Republic and developed an ambition to be a philosopher king. "Government-funded cooperative breeding", quite a sequence of words to clobber together. Sounds utopian.

"You will eat the bugs and have the babies"

We still hold the ideals of the enlightenement in high regard. Individualist freedom is the ultimate ideal, and it s very popular. The reduction of the populations is an inevitable development, and should be welcome. There seems to be a fear of depopulation, as if highly-populated places are doing better. They don't. The western world is inheriting immense amount of material resources which are divided in fewer hands

Both in the US and Europe, the populations that have most embraced individualist freedom have become highly reliant on immigrant labor from places that don’t embrace those values. In the US, places like New Hampshire and Vermont are facing significant labor shortages that they can remedy only by importing people from Catholic countries. Same thing in Europe, except the labor force is Muslims. The reality of these “Enlightenment” societies is that they are only viable due to cultural and population arbitrage. I.e. you couldn’t viably have a “closed system” where everyone shared those values.

It’s not enough to say that a smaller population would be okay. Leaving aside the economic catastrophe from inverted population pyramids, why do you assume fertility rates suddenly increase in a highly individualistic society once the population shrinks by whatever level you consider acceptable?

but the point is not to be self-sustained, in the past it was colonialism, now its financial dominance. Immigration is a way to outsource childrearing

I agree, but you’re saying it like it’s a good thing. To me, a culture that is only sustainable through reliance on other societies that don’t share that culture is not anything to hold in high regard.

While I agree what we currently have in the west is not sustainable, I disagree the reason for it is individualism or Enlightenment. Other much less individualistic countries have the same or even worse problems with fertility (Japan, South Korea, China, Russia,...). To be honest without the technological development of western societies, which happened because of Enlightenment, the countries which have highest fertility rates today would have much smaller population rise if any, because most of the kids would die at child birth.

In my opinion the problem of low birthrate is because of (in random order):

- career obsession culture (you're a failure if you don't climb up the ladder, which has done a lot of damage especially to women in general)

- prolonged childhood (30s is the new 20s)

- prolonged education (spend a quarter of a century in child care and schools, mostly with people who themselves have no work experience outside those institutions)

- moral relativity and everything traditional is believed nonsense without even trying to understand it

It's a stretch to claim that the Latinos who immigrate to the US don't value individual freedom.

I didn’t say that. Latin America is an offshoot of European society as well. But they’re certainly less individualistic and more familial than Americans or Western Europeans.

Europe's demographics issue is worse than the US despite being less "enlightenment" or freedom influenced.

China/Japan/Korea are far less individualistic than the US but have much worse birth rates. Russia also has terrible demographics and doesn't fit into this narrative.

The determinants of birth rate are probably more mundane than that.

Birth control access Education Rapid industrialization Societal expectations around safety and parental involvement Women working Access to entertainment Cost of housing

If you build a zoo and put monkeys in it, and the monkeys don’t reproduce then it’s generally accepted that there is something wrong with the zoo.

Wider cooperation in child-rearing is different than a desire to have lots of children. When you have cousins or neighbors that share their places, food and attention with each others' kids, it's a bigger world for the kids, better community overall.

We just don't need that many children to carry on the family name anymore. We may also have evolved to have lots of children because sex is fun and compelling. So contraception might have been desirable to any society that simply didn't need to defend itself and had good health care.

US ideal family size is 2.7, about one whole kid than the total fertility rate: https://news.gallup.com/poll/511238/americans-preference-lar.... Almost half of Americans, 45%, think three or more kids is ideal.

The logistics of child rearing could certainly help explain why there’s a gap between the number of kids people want and how many they end up having.

I am curious what the ideal number of kids is amongst women per the number of pregnancies and births they have had.

I bet there is quite a dip in ideal number of kids after going through pregnancy, childbirth, and infant rearing for the first kid, and the second kid.

I haven’t seen the data, though it should be possible to figure it out from the GSS. The Gallup data shows a moderate dip in the percentage of people who want three or more kids from 18-29 (52%) and 30-49 (42%). https://news.gallup.com/poll/511238/americans-preference-lar.... That could be partly a decrease in ideal family size during the period when people are parents. But it could also be ethnic differences: the 30-49 generation is whiter than the 18-29 generation. Only 41% of whites want 3 or more kids, versus 53% of hispanics and 57% of blacks.

In my observation it’s often the opposite. My wife didn’t want any kids when we first met, then wanted one immediately, then was sad after we decided to stop at three.

In my circles, every single woman, including my wife, did not want more than 2, and that was mostly so the kids have a sibling and so we can experience parenting a boy and a girl. This extends to my parents’ generation too. It is almost bizarre to meet someone with more than 1 sibling who is not 60+ years old.

Out of 20+ couples off the top of my head, I only know of two couples that had 3 kids, and that was because the first two were the same gender, and they wanted both genders.

I guess we stick together. Out of six people with kids in my office, three of us have three kids. (Nothing like my wife’s office, where three kids was table stakes, 4-5 was typical, and one guy had 10.) On my street there’s about a dozen houses, and one other family has three kids, and another has two but would have a third if they could swing it financially. Until last year, there was a third family on our block with three. Out of families at our church with young kids, probably half have three (we’re not Catholic). One of my law school friends has three, though most did stop at two.

If you want a flavor of what living in small tribes is like, look at the NextDoor for small town USA. People leave these tiny communities for many reasons, but one downside is the toxicity of the town gossips always in your business.

IMO a major solution is learning pods, funded by school vouchers. The monopoly factory schools pushed by the government manufacture misery and a hatred of learning. Let 100,000 flowers bloom of experimental schools, and the same cohort of 8 to 20 children growing together. If there’s a bullying or other issue, switch pods. Go to the r/teachers subreddit if you want to see some real truth about what is wrong with kids these days.

Declining birth rates are only a recent phenomena[1].

[1] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/births-and-deaths-project...

From a strictly evolutionary standpoint, our culture or civilization(however you want to frame it) hasn't adapted to the modern world because other people will pass on their genes. There is no fertility crisis in many places around the world, less developed places and places with different cultures.

> Government-funded cooperative breeding

We already have that in the USA, it's called single motherhood and >50% of all new children being born are to this group.

If any mating stategy is going to be institutionalized and government funded, it's going to be the female dual mating strategy (alpha fucks, beta bucks) (where females get genetic material from 1 group of guys or sperm donors and resources from another group of guys), not enforced monagomay or breeding coops as OP calls it. And we already have this.

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