Child rearing is a possible solution—it is our evolutionary “purpose” to reproduce, after all, and most people in the developed world today aren’t doing it.
Disclaimer: I’m as pro-kid as you can get, just haven’t met a partner who would be on the same page as me yet.
When I was talking about it with my friends, our guess is, people with kids are getting worried. If others aren’t having kids, then their kids might suffer big time in a long run, thus the renewed pressure to keep suggesting the idea to others. Obviously this doesn’t relate to you, just weird how it started in the last few years.
A bit personal, but throughout my life, I’ve met more dead-beat fathers than caring ones. So, I’m incredibly jaded when it comes to giving advice. Statistically, I wouldn’t try to change one’s mind to have a child, because I’d feel bad for the kid if things go south.
Once again, I’m still pro-having kids, but I don’t get why it became such a major discourse compared to 2010s.
Anyway, I have a bunch of kids, and I think from a motivational perspective, yes, kids give you meaning for some years.
But they can also help you with something else due to the necessary self-sacrifices, which is getting a out of egocentric thoughts, such as what you're going to do with your life. Read a book on biology. You are a bunch of cells put in the world to cooperate to feed and reproduce before they self-terminate to leave space for the offspring. That's it. Stop fretting. :)
(Helping society and thereby the offspring of other bunches of cells is pretty noble too, by the way.)
And I say this as someone who doesn't have kids either, and as someone who used to not be so excited by the prospect, but I've witnessed how it's transformed my friends and family members.
- The 2010s represented a progressivist left-ward shift in America and the excesses of that movement are provoking a reactionary conservative shift in the populace in the 2020s: https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/seven-reasons-america-is-heade.... This is cyclical is the same thing happened from 1960s to 1970s.
- The concept of population collapse entered mainstream discourse in the early 2020s and is now being accepted as the major concern for humanity moving forward, a 180-degree turn from the previous concern of overpopulation. This is something unprecedented in human history as no human has ever existed in an economy or society where the population was decreasing so all the "rules" we know about life are suddenly subject to change unless birth patterns change significantly.
It’s a product of the rise in white nationalist/supremacist movements and white replacement theory. Pro-natalism with the explicitly racial content omitted (though even their often tied to overt appeals to eugenics and/or framing it as intra-societal/cultural competition, which is itself only a shade different from racial/ethnic competition, but for some reason doesn’t produce nearly as strong a negative reaction) is a face that can be shown to audiences that aren’t ready for the full-strength message.
I’m not saying every vocal pro-natalist is a white supremacist (most of the high profile ones are, though), but that the rise in white supremacy and the prominence of white replacement theory within the rising white supremacy is a big part of the explanation of why pro-natalism is a lot more prominent right now than in the recent past.
There are probably other related factors too, like increased awareness of population decline, but I think both reasons are intertwined.
Also there is a biological urge, so it's probably not that much of an uphill battle. Though unfortunately people also contend with biological clocks and realize that they want kids when it's already too late. I feel very bad for those people, and so if you can re-normalize the idea of starting a family, then maybe you can reach those sorts of people while they still have time.
Many parents are completely unwilling to hold their children to account/tell them no/let them fail/etc. The experience of the people around their children means nothing to them. Teaching their children to be a part of society does not matter: All that matters is their children get what they want because their children are extensions of themselves.
But if people look at these things objectively, there is essentially 0% chance of any of this happening, let alone in our lifetimes or anytime remotely near it.
And when you look at the people spreading/making such predictions the timelines always coincidentally come just before their expected end of life.
When you accept the fact that you, and near to every other person alive today, will be dead in 80 years (and mostly far sooner) it rather significantly changes your perspective on life. Want to transfer your consciousness? Not gonna happen, but having a few children is at least a reasonable second.
Some people just believe in (and sometimes achieve!) fulfilment through other means. Problem is, that is objectively bad for economical and cultural growth of the humanity. No single country has been able to resolve that problem without religious beliefs or kinda forcing women to have children (by either taking all their opportunities away or them not having any by default).
And this is in the context of ever more people complaining of loneliness, lack of fulfillment/meaning, and more. These issues are almost certainly causally related.
Help yourself, help society, and even have a voice (of sorts) in the future of humanity.
My question, once again, is why tech circles started focusing on this and pushing it as ideology just recently? Wasn’t a thing in 2010s, people more or less respected personal choices as long as it doesn’t harm others directly.
In general though I think cultural shifts often lack any clear reason. People like Musk or Gates chiming in on the issue are almost certainly effects rather than causes.
Re: Musk — no real opinions about him wrt other ventures, but surely no sane person can look at him as a decent father figure, no? It just sounds like a “populate Earth for populating reasons!” completely disregarding the well being of the kids part. Which, I find, fairly sad.
As for anybody's parenting - I have certainly raised my children in ways that would offend the sensibilities of this group or that. But it's what I think is right. So under this mindset, and a bit of the Golden Rule, I do not criticize other's parenting outside of obvious extremes.
One answer nobody else is willing to broach is that Elon Musk and friends are hyper-breeder crazies who think the white race will die out if white men don't all pump out as many babies with as many women as possible, and they literally own multiple tech and social media companies to push such a narrative.
HN is more influenced by chud ideology than it should be.
People just have more stuff to do, and convincing a woman they should sacrifice at the bare minimum 6 years to give birth to 3 kids is just… yeah, good luck. The only argument is “do it for the greater good!”, and as a society, we have shown that most people don’t care about the greater good the second times become a bit hard.
Some tech circles have been entertaining the whole “trad life” idea, but it’s pretty laughable the second you start talking to real people. Not all women want to be depended on others if they have a choice.
But in this case one frustrating thing is people don't know what they don't know. My wife was quite lukewarm on having children but shortly after our first she wanted at least two more. They really change you in ways that are impossible to describe without cliche, and I think this is, by nature, even more true for the mother.
Division of labor, as it were.
But if the argument starts with “you’ll understand when you have kids!” to convince people to have kids… well, it’s like blindly trusting people. And again, it is coming from a person who will have children when the time comes. And relatively speaking, I’m doing ok financially, and it’s one of the problems I can take care of for the future of my children.
For every good parental story, there are quite a few unfortunate ones as well. The problem with the information access is, people tend to realize that chances of it happening is not 0. So you have all the opportunity loss, combined with the potential regrets and problems that add up for every new child… the math doesn’t add up for having multiple children. Also, doesn’t help that the average age of having the first child is already at 30s.
Anyways, I think I’m just generally angry that pseudo-intellectuals (including ourselves) are scared to propose other solutions. Because they will always be very unethical (lab babies, taking rights away and etc.) or very uneconomical.
For what purpose?
> it is our evolutionary “purpose” to reproduce
Yes evolution selects for having children survive to reproduce, but that’s not a purpose, that’s just “that which continues, continues”.
> and most people in the developed world today aren’t doing it.
Plenty of species have evolved such that when they sufficiently saturafe their environment and resource carrying capacity, reproduction rates drop through behavior changes based on various signals.
I doubt it, that's because to most people it does not feel purposeful, it's a chore. Most people who say it's purposeful are generally the most vocal ones, and I suspect the minority.
And I'm someone who, for most of my adult life, thought I'd be childfree...
The problem is that it's a one-way street if you decide to have a child. Now if only one had an option to 'trial-run-before-one-commits' that would be ideal. I suspect (but not sure) that most people will still opt not to have them.
Also some people will just always be unhappy. The grass is always greener syndrome.
> you can always give away the kid
a child is not a goddamn pet or a commodity that you can just give away
> In some countries you can even sell your kids, but it is frowned upon in many Western societies
A common country where that happens is Pakistan/Afghanistan where young boys are sold to be prostitutes. I am GLAD it's frowned upon as it should be everywhere in the modern world.
> fostering is the trial run you are looking for
Again, children are not pets, fostering is the same as raising a biological child, if you're doing it any different and treating the child differently, in my opinion, it's tantamount to child abuse.
Frankly this comment lacks any humanity, and hopefully you choose not to have or foster children.
Anyone who chose to have kids most likely did so with purposeful intent.
But it's also a problem for some. For example, it means moving out of expensive cities, it means worrying about making lots of money (if you live in the U.S.), it means child care is thousands a month, it means health care is thousands a month. It means you have to be responsible and not drink every day. It means potentially not sleeping for a year.
Personally, seeing the stress of my workmates, and how they became more dependent on their jobs, on the shit of the jobs, and how now they're more competitive on the job, and worried... I'd personally choose to write that off.
But I know people who found meaning through child-rearing, as you say!
Untrue: e.g., in the US, "Among women and men aged 40–49 in 2015–2019, 84.3% of women had given birth and 76.5% of men had fathered a child."
I highly recommend it.
There is no biological purpose. We are just a multitude of chemical reactions falling down the entropy slope in a slightly odd way.
"Purpose" is a concept entirely made up out of whole cloth for hairless apes who accidentally invented language and that allowed them to do a lot of thinking outside the confines of their biological processes.
We are perfectly free to CHOOSE reproduction as a "purpose", but nothing about biology actually cares. If you don't reproduce, oh well, something else will take that spot in the ecosystem.
What if we have judged the healthiest of a society on the wrong metrics. And the right one is birth rate?
We might say things are bad for a society if it’s too dangerous or not enough food so the birth rate goes to near zero and as a result it dies.
How is a society that has people being too busy or occupied with other task that neglects reproducing a better society than the latter?
Obvious too much of a birth rate is bad, but too little could also be a sign of an unhealthy environment.
I would think life expectancy would be a better measure of a healthy vs unhealthy environment.
A society with a 120 year life expectancy and 0 birth rate isn't healthy.
A society with 20 life expectancy and 6 birth rate is unhealthy but for different reasons.
While it’s much more difficult to find countries with high life expectancy with low birth rates (assuming we define “low” as any birth rate lower than necessary for the society to not die out)
I agree with you the 2 need to be balanced, but I assume any society with high life expectancy would also have a sustainable birth rate.
This latter comment of yours was down voted by idiots to the point where it's dead, so I could not respond to it directly.
Anyway, specifics aside, it is actually a good idea - for a variety of reasons.