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Comment by anovikov | Hacker News Reader

TL;DR: decline in birthrate due to social media and dating sites will mean everyone will have to work till death.

You misattribute the cause of the declining birth rate. Younger people are making the smarter (and some would say more humane) decision not to bring a child into this increasingly human-destroying society.

That's certainly part of it. Another significant factor is that many people have come to the conclusion that they simply cannot afford children. It costs something around $30k to give birth in the US, the cost of housing grossly outpaces inflation, wealth concentration is at or near an all-time high ...

Many people are struggling to keep themselves afloat, and adding a family to that mix would be ruinous.

Regressing social policy is why my wife and I decided not to have children over the last couple years.

I’m simply not interested in raising children into a society keen on appealing to devout contrarians or the religious.

Anecdotally, based on the sentiment from friends, this doesn’t seem uncommon.

The decline in birthrate is because of social media and dating sites? Source? It already started way before those existed. In some countries for many decades (Japan for instance).

And working till dead was normal throughout almost all of human history.

Sub-replacement fertility began in the 70s in Germany, 20 years before the web, and it is unbroken until this day.

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