Is this parental nihilism downstream of ideology, or the other way around?
And screens are easy.
Secondly—Do you always take the stairs when available or the elevator?
Because continental philosophy in the wake of the world wars has alerted us to the fungibility of every asset class regardless of abstraction, all kinds of religiosity and spirituality have declined. Schumpeter, Buffett, Fisher and Derrida are all in agreement that this is all there is and all there ever will be. This has produced an antithesis in the public mind to value quality over quantity.
In our rapidly changing economy, however, quality over quantity approaches lead to a lot of wait-and-see outcomes. If you can conceive of reproduction by people as a capital good produced by a business then you'll be shocked at how well the notion of a capital strike fits the outcomes.
Yeah, guess what, like needing to work 2 full-time 40 hour jobs and having to deal with commute and chores on top of that, not to mention overtime or on-call. Modern capitalism is fundamentally incompatible with raising children, but by the time it crashes down it will be too late.
But hey, the current generation of Boomers enjoys a stonks-go-up portfolio.
Meanwhile modern capitalism will allow me to work as little as I want after a decade or two of accumulating capital.
Huge improvement all in all
That's not an improvement at a societal scale, that's the thing. Without those in working age actually working and generating economic activity, the system becomes nothing more than a house of cards waiting to collapse.
Capitalism, especially modern rabid capitalism, depends on the illusion of infinite growth - an illusion that can only fail, given modern demographic trends and resource scarcity. And it is completely unsuited for the coming era when a lot of work will be done outright by machines.