The first one isn’t misogyny. Minus the specifivity of the “$2 million” part, its the Jewish tradition of what is required for a man to be able to propose. “Having kids is too expensive” is just the straight-up truth for anyone who isn’t uncommonly comfortable relying on charity and/or society.
Like, are we going off the avatar, pretending a woman who says those things is crazy? Because she’s absolutely not, and neither are the men trying to live up to those items, at a minimum.
expecting a 2 million dollar home, is legit crazy.
but sadly incredibly common. i own a condo worth like 800K, and repeatedly get informed that it’s ‘cheap and shitty’. it’s fucking insane what some people expect as their ‘minimum’ lifestyle.
They think they are shooting you down, when really they are shoving you out of the way of the bullet that is themselves. “You know where to find me when you grow up" is a line I had worn-out by the end of my teens, yet I never get to leave it out of my repertoir for long.
The world is swimming in children of all ages. The only “favor” having them young migh do is forcing them to grow up a little earlier, and only if you’re very lucky, they are still whole enough to both resent you for it and forgive you. People think their adult children still idolizing them is a good result, but those children are NOT grown.
My favorite is when they tell me I’m the immature one because I don’t want to be their daddy.
And what sucks is there is nobody who isn’t a bullet. Everyone is like this now, at least in my dating pool. People don’t grow and self reflect as they age, they just double-down on their bitterness towards others. When they talk about ‘growth and self reflection and emotional maturity’ all they mean is they are more uncompromising in what they demand from others. They never think that maybe their ‘standards’ are totally absurd in light of the limits of economic, emotional, and physical reality of other people. Those limits only apply to themselves!
My favorite is the lady who tells you she doesn’t care about money, or material things, etc. but her ‘bare minimum’ is you drive a 70K car, own a luxury home, and have some very prestigious job/career/education. meanwhile she’s a mid-level office worker driving a beat up Toyota… and she seems absolutely nothing contradictory or hypocritical with this ‘standard’. And she also thinks men are just all ‘using her for sex and can’t commit’… I wonder why… almost as if when you are a shallow transactional person you only end up with other shallow transactional people…
Home (at least somewhere they are welcome to stay, and comfortable staying…)
Income (Don’t budge on this one)
Vehicle (or at least used to public transit/walking/biking enough to not treat you as a chaufer)
… all anyone needs to bring to the table on a material level. People will tell you about their standards all day long, but most are hypocrites - they are more flexible than they’ll let-on and/or are probing for push-back, checking to see who will “wear the pants” in a relationship.
If you’re inflexible your-self, with zero tolerance for bullshit or even a sense of humor about it, you’re going to have a bad time.
People say “single people are single for a reason”, but almost always pretend its unique to their age group or dating pool/whatever, but really its just-about equally true at all ages, and always applicable to onesself. Hardly anyone is single just-because their shitty ex was so shitty - shitty people attract shitty people, and its easier to make a new lover into a shitty person than to un-fuck what previous relationships and they have done to themselves, trying to hold-on to what they saw in so-and-so to the point that when its over they can’t let go of all the bad “surprises” that awaited them.
Don’t think of yourself or your experiences as so different from theirs. If you’ve had fewer, longer-term relationships than they, you still likely had many events where you and previous SO’s fell in-and-out of love - you just happened to work through them until you didn’t. In many cases, by most people’s criteria, maybe you shouldn’t have, and in just-as many, maybe your partner “should have” walked-away - its when “should have” wins-out over attachment that the relationship is dead, even if it doesn’t know it yet.
That said, if someone demands to be treated like a pet, that’s between you and them, and no, I’m not referring to furries or people who are self-aware, but the “don’t you dare shatter my fantasies”-types. I don’t have the patience to constantly pretend I am also surprised that the inevitable happened, but I’ve seen plenty who do. The ones that realize it aren’t always so-bad off, unless its “I gotta pretend for th kid’s sake”. Generally, don’t have kids with the poor, the disrespectful, OR the crazy, yeah?
No. I’ve had lots of kinds of relationships. dozens. short, long, one night stands, casual to we’re going to get engaged serious.
and the all end because of bullshit. hypocrisy, lying, cheating or otherwise being dishonest about themselves or their intentions.
I don’t bullshit or lie to people, I think it’s pretty easy to do, personally. But I understand that for many people relationships are built on bullshit and lies, and nothing of substance and they don’t know anything else is possible.
my favorite is the women who wanted to be no strings casual, but got bitter and jealous if they found out I was seeing someone else, but thought it was total legit for them to sleep around with whomever they wanted, but if I did that it was misogyny or abuse and when I laughed and walked away they were enraged, because the rules mutually agreed to only apply to her, not to me, or something.
You don’t build on the bullshit and lies, but around it. It’s a pain-in-the-ass, but so is dealing with a snitch who is incapable of lying. Personally, I tell my wife and kids to throw me under the bus as needed to get them out of awkward conversations and commitments they don’t want to make. “My dad won’t let me do that” works a treat. The latest was “my dad won’t let me commit insurance fraud”(like I particularly care about insurance fraud, but my limits are surprisingly more restrictive than some we know who would never admit it).
cool. i’d want nothing to do with you or your wife if that’s how you interact with other people. you sound like your both happy being shitty to other people together.
Nah, my wife is much more like you, and it’s often exhausting, although she’s learned a bit across the decades.
You’re a little old to be equating the capacity to lie to get by, doing even the bare minimum to preserve your own and others’ dignity, and feelings, with “being shitty”. As if euphemism and metaphore are just “cool story-telling tricks we developed for some reason”, or human recall doesn’t make AI hallucinations look almost par for the course of actual intelligence.
I don’t know how Jewish it is, but it is part of a general trend of how society treats marriage.
Generations back, marriage was considered the beginning, a cornerstone for building an adult life on. Now, it’s shifted more towards a capstone, a thing that you can add to your life once you get your shit together. That has shifted expectations in dating, as well as expectations of how independent young adults need to be.
And it has pushed back expectations of what it means to be ready to have children. And once a higher percentage of parents have more money when they have kids, it also subtly shifts the expectations of parenting, as well:
“Having kids is too expensive” is just the straight-up truth for anyone who isn’t uncommonly comfortable relying on charity and/or society.
What’s wrong with relying on society? Having a good family and social circle is basically the most important part of being ready to have kids. My wife and I waited till we were rich before having kids, but we still heavily rely on our family, friends, and neighbors to enrich our children’s lives, while also being there for them and their children: rotating babysitting duties if some parents want to go on a date or even go out of town, rotating dinner hosting so only one family has to cook and clean, getting the kids together so that they can play and socialize, etc. We can’t do the parenting thing in isolation, but I don’t think society expects us to.
because you shouldn’t have to be rich af to have kids. or a house, or stable employment.
and yet, society is telling us that you will never have any of this, unless you were lucky enough to be born rich.
very few people will ever become rich.
i see this myself all the time. i date and i meet women who basically think you are a loser/undatable if you aren’t millions in the bank, then whine people are ‘lazy’. meanwhile they don’t have millions in the bank, and are still having mommy and daddy pay their mortgage/rent in their frickin’ 30s.
lady, i worked my ass off my entire life, why the hell would i ever want to date someone who is still dependent on their parents for basic adult costs?
Having a good family and social circle is basically the most important part of being ready to have kids
Well, bad news for you there, too: since we’re all busy working and commuting and moving states for jobs and our third places are disappearing for various reasons, because our connections have moved globally online instead of locally offline, we are all further away from our families of origin and have smaller social circles to help support our physical lives.
Relying on society, when it works out, still usually leaves you with over-extended or strained relationships(especially with friends and family), and kids who will never understand just what was so important about their conceptions and births that couldn’t have waited until you were a little more ready and not constantly stressed to the breaking point - kids who are absolutely right.
Ask me how I know. If I look at it from the stand-point of the heart-attack that seems due any day now, maybe there was some urgency, but without trying to shoe-horn kids into a lifestyle that wasn’t ready for them and ultimately had to be abandoned in-favor of doing whatever it takes to keep them happy and healthy, external/internal consequences be damned, then my health outlook might not look so bleak.
All that, and have you seen divorce statistics? Jesus FUCK, have you SEEN divorce statistics? … and it’s somehow still okay to throw massive financial insecurity into the mix, the SINGLE GREATEST driver of divorce? Sure. Aim for the stars, kid. The world is your oyster and all that.
Relying on society, when it works out, still usually leaves you with over-extended or strained relationships
No, framing that as the best case scenario is just a complete lack of imagination. I’m closer with my friends and family now because we have regular meetups and more scheduled social contact. The idea that this kind of stuff would strain my friendships is actually pretty foreign to me. We do things for each other, and that brings us closer rather than piling up one-way resentment for the people who give more than they get.
I find life to be less stressful when I’m around people I love. And that was always true, before I had kids, too.
All that, and have you seen divorce statistics. Jesus FUCK, have you SEEN divorce statistics?
College educated couples who got married after the age of 30 are exactly the sort to buy a house before having kids. They’ll also have locked-in friends and family who they can count-on, and likely owe them favors. Other than grandparents and single people, these ARE the society you want in your corner.
As someone who did it in the reverse order, I promise you, you’re gonna burn a friendship or familial relation or three out of need, ones that otherwise would have lasted generations, and know as its happenning you’ll be living with that regret the rest of your life. You may be able to pay them back, but almost certainly neither in-kind or in any way, or on any time-scale, that makes the relationship what it once was.
As you get older, relationships ossify - it takes life-changing events to have any chance to undo extinction events or straight “I’m burned-out on their shit”.
So yeah, I have a lot of people who know that I, and my kids know, our family owes them and I will do anything in my power to do whatever I can to help them should they ever ask. They even would likely still help with whatever I asked for, even non-sense(“we’re square”)…
… BUT, they stopped coming to fun “note-worthy” things we invite them to many years-ago. Any sharing in our modest successes(or just relief that x milestone was reached) is tainted by all the dirty-dirty of all the sausage they’ve helped us make to get to here.
I’ve been dumping friends the past few years. because they are indeed, ossifying into miserable old cunts. and i don’t regard having a social life being worht the misery of listening to someone who is 34 rant on and on about how evil everything is like my parents did. it just sucks and i’d rather be alone doing something productive and interesting with my life.
and that doesn’t include the people i’ve dropped one became conspiracy theorists, incredibly bitter, or just trapped in social media delusion alt reality… ugh. it’s so miserable to be around people who just can’t think of anyone/anything other than themselves. and as you age… damn that is what most people become, entirely selfish and self-absorbed.
I’m talking about friends that are to be rightly missed. Still close-by and friendly, but not like it once was. Anyone remotely like you’ve described in my life moved-away or died. They rarely-offered and more importantly never-accepted help in the first-place.
I’m more afraid of being thought of as one of them than worried about bothering to ditch anyone like-so.
As I age I find it incredibly awful/amazing how other people I meet now, basically lecture me about myself. Without knowing anything about me. They just make up a story in their head about me, and run with it.
Oftentimes they will straight up ignore what I have told them about myself, or twist it in these fantastical ways that are clearly projections and fantasies of their fears, but are likely them self-reporting about their own shame about themselves.
Still better to not have to face it out-in-the-open this side of (recognized/recognizable)change for the better. Don’t see where I said anything about you, but you didn’t hold back about me, did you? Am I supposed to thank you?
Life looks infinitely more boring then, having kids seems like a natural time filler
Anyone saying they’re not having kids because of climate change or anything like this is just making excuses for the fact they’d rather not be taking care of a kid when they could be doing something fun or entertaining
people dont’ want to have kids because the kids are considered detriment to their own personal pursuits and money for themselves.
where i live… people dont’ want kids because they want to travel and own nice things. and yet they will complain to you how unfulfilling and unhappy their lives are… and just chase the next nice thing or next travel destination that people have decided is trendy.
what kills me is people… want kids but they are under the delusion that it should come at no cost or change to lifestyle. that’s not how anything works. every change you make has opportunity costs.
Anyone saying they’re not having kids because of climate change or anything like this is just making excuses for the fact they’d rather not be taking care of a kid when they could be doing something fun or entertaining
Sounds like you asked all of “them”. Me included. Or at least a representative sample size, in which case I’d be interested in your methods and the statistics.
I would also argue that we have over regulated and are strangling ourselves
admittedly this is oversimplying but ultimately there are more disincentives to having kids than not having kids, and having unlimited entertainment I would argue is part of that
People in developed countries, with access to American-style Pizza = no kids, prove me wrong
If we look at birth rates of developed, industrialized nations, we see the same picture everywhere: a steady downwards trend, with the big chunk happening between the 60s and 90s, so basically, when quality of live became decent and the economy recovered in those countries, post-WW2.
However, what is super interesting is the Wikipedia article above: Both births and total fertility go down with child mortality. The obvious conclusion is, if less of your kids die, you don’t need to birth so many kids, and interestingly, the less kids you seem to need overall.
So, based on this alone, I believe “high quality of life in strong economy” is much stronger correlated with decreasing birth rates than the invention of the iPhone. I would argue that it is more a case of one not needing that many kids to survive due to improved social and economic situation, and maybe access to education (including sex education of course, less accidents, more family planning).
Sure, entertainment is probably contributing a bit, but I don’t see it that far up the list.
Personally, I believe that if you have kids out of boredom, maybe you shouldn’t have kids, but idk, get a gym membership or something. How can we say that gifting someone a dog for christmas that may or may not be mistreated and discarded when the novelty weary of is bad, but kids out of boredom is ok?
have you got a gym membership? I do, it doesn’t take up that much time but one can go back to the 50s/60s/70’s and see what were people doing? At 11pm what were you options for entertainment, I remember in the 90’s it was like, read a book, watch TV, or listen to the radio, not exactly thrilling
In comparison now I have an unlimited entertainment vehicle in trolling the fediverse (1.07K Posts/3.04K Comments god damn), I put in ~an hour at the gym every few days, compared to easily hours on the fediverse every week, some nights I put in more time on the fedi than the gym in a month, and that’s JUST the fedi, not even mentioning youtube, telegram, mistral/claude, torrents, movies, music, programming, etcetc
How can we say that gifting someone a dog for christmas that may or may not be mistreated and discarded when the novelty weary of is bad, but kids out of boredom is ok?
I mean I would say it’s largely just life, this comes into the overregulation/helicopter parenting, loads of kids would come home from school then just run off for hours until it was time to come home or just for dinner before running off again, parenting shouldn’t be a full time job, requiring 24x7 supervision and checking at all times
Ironically because of iphone they now sit inside getting fat watching youtube and tiktok
We have simultaneously loaded ourselves up with high standards (both with regards to raising kids and the equipment to provide for them) and easy cheap entertainment/calories
It’s completely understandable why we’re fat and not particularly enthused about raising kids
Man, don’t get too hung up on the last sentence, that is more my personal opinion on how one should approach life, I don’t expect anyone to share it, I haven’t discovered the ultimate truth. Yet. So, my clearly marked personal opinion:
Don’t get me wrong, I hate helicopter parenting as much as anyone. “Back in my days”, we’d fuck off into the woods after school, doing all kinds of bullshit, and as long as we were home at dinner time and didn’t lose any teeth, all was fine. On the other hand, I can’t say that that stopped me from becoming a weirdo. I have seen plenty of people have kids who wanted them and really should not have kids, and I have seen some people go above and beyond for their children, although they were in bad situations, or got them by accident and so on.
If one gets a kid out of boredom, I would argue one is exactly the kind of person who parks their kids on youtube in order to watch their own tiktok slop in peace. Or the kind of person who gets a pet and then neglects it. Only that tying up a kid at the highway truck stop is, much to my surprise, still illegal.
Now, to the facts: the data looks pretty clear to me. Higher standard of living, more education, less kids. I don’t know why this is really seen as such a bad thing, since apparently, not all people have the inherent drive to have kids, and in a more “developed” society, there is no hard push that one has to have children or else. Not pushing people who don’t want to do something is good, in my not very humble opinion.
The first one isn’t misogyny. Minus the specifivity of the “$2 million” part, its the Jewish tradition of what is required for a man to be able to propose. “Having kids is too expensive” is just the straight-up truth for anyone who isn’t uncommonly comfortable relying on charity and/or society.
Like, are we going off the avatar, pretending a woman who says those things is crazy? Because she’s absolutely not, and neither are the men trying to live up to those items, at a minimum.
expecting a 2 million dollar home, is legit crazy.
but sadly incredibly common. i own a condo worth like 800K, and repeatedly get informed that it’s ‘cheap and shitty’. it’s fucking insane what some people expect as their ‘minimum’ lifestyle.
They think they are shooting you down, when really they are shoving you out of the way of the bullet that is themselves. “You know where to find me when you grow up" is a line I had worn-out by the end of my teens, yet I never get to leave it out of my repertoir for long.
The world is swimming in children of all ages. The only “favor” having them young migh do is forcing them to grow up a little earlier, and only if you’re very lucky, they are still whole enough to both resent you for it and forgive you. People think their adult children still idolizing them is a good result, but those children are NOT grown.
My favorite is when they tell me I’m the immature one because I don’t want to be their daddy.
And what sucks is there is nobody who isn’t a bullet. Everyone is like this now, at least in my dating pool. People don’t grow and self reflect as they age, they just double-down on their bitterness towards others. When they talk about ‘growth and self reflection and emotional maturity’ all they mean is they are more uncompromising in what they demand from others. They never think that maybe their ‘standards’ are totally absurd in light of the limits of economic, emotional, and physical reality of other people. Those limits only apply to themselves!
My favorite is the lady who tells you she doesn’t care about money, or material things, etc. but her ‘bare minimum’ is you drive a 70K car, own a luxury home, and have some very prestigious job/career/education. meanwhile she’s a mid-level office worker driving a beat up Toyota… and she seems absolutely nothing contradictory or hypocritical with this ‘standard’. And she also thinks men are just all ‘using her for sex and can’t commit’… I wonder why… almost as if when you are a shallow transactional person you only end up with other shallow transactional people…
Home (at least somewhere they are welcome to stay, and comfortable staying…)
Income (Don’t budge on this one)
Vehicle (or at least used to public transit/walking/biking enough to not treat you as a chaufer)
… all anyone needs to bring to the table on a material level. People will tell you about their standards all day long, but most are hypocrites - they are more flexible than they’ll let-on and/or are probing for push-back, checking to see who will “wear the pants” in a relationship.
If you’re inflexible your-self, with zero tolerance for bullshit or even a sense of humor about it, you’re going to have a bad time.
People say “single people are single for a reason”, but almost always pretend its unique to their age group or dating pool/whatever, but really its just-about equally true at all ages, and always applicable to onesself. Hardly anyone is single just-because their shitty ex was so shitty - shitty people attract shitty people, and its easier to make a new lover into a shitty person than to un-fuck what previous relationships and they have done to themselves, trying to hold-on to what they saw in so-and-so to the point that when its over they can’t let go of all the bad “surprises” that awaited them.
Don’t think of yourself or your experiences as so different from theirs. If you’ve had fewer, longer-term relationships than they, you still likely had many events where you and previous SO’s fell in-and-out of love - you just happened to work through them until you didn’t. In many cases, by most people’s criteria, maybe you shouldn’t have, and in just-as many, maybe your partner “should have” walked-away - its when “should have” wins-out over attachment that the relationship is dead, even if it doesn’t know it yet.
That said, if someone demands to be treated like a pet, that’s between you and them, and no, I’m not referring to furries or people who are self-aware, but the “don’t you dare shatter my fantasies”-types. I don’t have the patience to constantly pretend I am also surprised that the inevitable happened, but I’ve seen plenty who do. The ones that realize it aren’t always so-bad off, unless its “I gotta pretend for th kid’s sake”. Generally, don’t have kids with the poor, the disrespectful, OR the crazy, yeah?
No. I’ve had lots of kinds of relationships. dozens. short, long, one night stands, casual to we’re going to get engaged serious.
and the all end because of bullshit. hypocrisy, lying, cheating or otherwise being dishonest about themselves or their intentions.
I don’t bullshit or lie to people, I think it’s pretty easy to do, personally. But I understand that for many people relationships are built on bullshit and lies, and nothing of substance and they don’t know anything else is possible.
my favorite is the women who wanted to be no strings casual, but got bitter and jealous if they found out I was seeing someone else, but thought it was total legit for them to sleep around with whomever they wanted, but if I did that it was misogyny or abuse and when I laughed and walked away they were enraged, because the rules mutually agreed to only apply to her, not to me, or something.
You don’t build on the bullshit and lies, but around it. It’s a pain-in-the-ass, but so is dealing with a snitch who is incapable of lying. Personally, I tell my wife and kids to throw me under the bus as needed to get them out of awkward conversations and commitments they don’t want to make. “My dad won’t let me do that” works a treat. The latest was “my dad won’t let me commit insurance fraud”(like I particularly care about insurance fraud, but my limits are surprisingly more restrictive than some we know who would never admit it).
cool. i’d want nothing to do with you or your wife if that’s how you interact with other people. you sound like your both happy being shitty to other people together.
Nah, my wife is much more like you, and it’s often exhausting, although she’s learned a bit across the decades.
You’re a little old to be equating the capacity to lie to get by, doing even the bare minimum to preserve your own and others’ dignity, and feelings, with “being shitty”. As if euphemism and metaphore are just “cool story-telling tricks we developed for some reason”, or human recall doesn’t make AI hallucinations look almost par for the course of actual intelligence.
No wonder you’re single.
I don’t know how Jewish it is, but it is part of a general trend of how society treats marriage.
Generations back, marriage was considered the beginning, a cornerstone for building an adult life on. Now, it’s shifted more towards a capstone, a thing that you can add to your life once you get your shit together. That has shifted expectations in dating, as well as expectations of how independent young adults need to be.
And it has pushed back expectations of what it means to be ready to have children. And once a higher percentage of parents have more money when they have kids, it also subtly shifts the expectations of parenting, as well:
What’s wrong with relying on society? Having a good family and social circle is basically the most important part of being ready to have kids. My wife and I waited till we were rich before having kids, but we still heavily rely on our family, friends, and neighbors to enrich our children’s lives, while also being there for them and their children: rotating babysitting duties if some parents want to go on a date or even go out of town, rotating dinner hosting so only one family has to cook and clean, getting the kids together so that they can play and socialize, etc. We can’t do the parenting thing in isolation, but I don’t think society expects us to.
because you shouldn’t have to be rich af to have kids. or a house, or stable employment.
and yet, society is telling us that you will never have any of this, unless you were lucky enough to be born rich.
very few people will ever become rich.
i see this myself all the time. i date and i meet women who basically think you are a loser/undatable if you aren’t millions in the bank, then whine people are ‘lazy’. meanwhile they don’t have millions in the bank, and are still having mommy and daddy pay their mortgage/rent in their frickin’ 30s.
lady, i worked my ass off my entire life, why the hell would i ever want to date someone who is still dependent on their parents for basic adult costs?
Well, bad news for you there, too: since we’re all busy working and commuting and moving states for jobs and our third places are disappearing for various reasons, because our connections have moved globally online instead of locally offline, we are all further away from our families of origin and have smaller social circles to help support our physical lives.
Relying on society, when it works out, still usually leaves you with over-extended or strained relationships(especially with friends and family), and kids who will never understand just what was so important about their conceptions and births that couldn’t have waited until you were a little more ready and not constantly stressed to the breaking point - kids who are absolutely right.
Ask me how I know. If I look at it from the stand-point of the heart-attack that seems due any day now, maybe there was some urgency, but without trying to shoe-horn kids into a lifestyle that wasn’t ready for them and ultimately had to be abandoned in-favor of doing whatever it takes to keep them happy and healthy, external/internal consequences be damned, then my health outlook might not look so bleak.
All that, and have you seen divorce statistics? Jesus FUCK, have you SEEN divorce statistics? … and it’s somehow still okay to throw massive financial insecurity into the mix, the SINGLE GREATEST driver of divorce? Sure. Aim for the stars, kid. The world is your oyster and all that.
No, framing that as the best case scenario is just a complete lack of imagination. I’m closer with my friends and family now because we have regular meetups and more scheduled social contact. The idea that this kind of stuff would strain my friendships is actually pretty foreign to me. We do things for each other, and that brings us closer rather than piling up one-way resentment for the people who give more than they get.
I find life to be less stressful when I’m around people I love. And that was always true, before I had kids, too.
Divorce rates have been dropping over the last 40 years, are especially low for college educated couples who got married after the age of 30.
Take a deep breath and realize that lots of people are living lots of different lives. Try to imagine that some of us are happy, too.
College educated couples who got married after the age of 30 are exactly the sort to buy a house before having kids. They’ll also have locked-in friends and family who they can count-on, and likely owe them favors. Other than grandparents and single people, these ARE the society you want in your corner.
As someone who did it in the reverse order, I promise you, you’re gonna burn a friendship or familial relation or three out of need, ones that otherwise would have lasted generations, and know as its happenning you’ll be living with that regret the rest of your life. You may be able to pay them back, but almost certainly neither in-kind or in any way, or on any time-scale, that makes the relationship what it once was.
As you get older, relationships ossify - it takes life-changing events to have any chance to undo extinction events or straight “I’m burned-out on their shit”.
So yeah, I have a lot of people who know that I, and my kids know, our family owes them and I will do anything in my power to do whatever I can to help them should they ever ask. They even would likely still help with whatever I asked for, even non-sense(“we’re square”)…
… BUT, they stopped coming to fun “note-worthy” things we invite them to many years-ago. Any sharing in our modest successes(or just relief that x milestone was reached) is tainted by all the dirty-dirty of all the sausage they’ve helped us make to get to here.
I’ve been dumping friends the past few years. because they are indeed, ossifying into miserable old cunts. and i don’t regard having a social life being worht the misery of listening to someone who is 34 rant on and on about how evil everything is like my parents did. it just sucks and i’d rather be alone doing something productive and interesting with my life.
and that doesn’t include the people i’ve dropped one became conspiracy theorists, incredibly bitter, or just trapped in social media delusion alt reality… ugh. it’s so miserable to be around people who just can’t think of anyone/anything other than themselves. and as you age… damn that is what most people become, entirely selfish and self-absorbed.
I’m talking about friends that are to be rightly missed. Still close-by and friendly, but not like it once was. Anyone remotely like you’ve described in my life moved-away or died. They rarely-offered and more importantly never-accepted help in the first-place.
I’m more afraid of being thought of as one of them than worried about bothering to ditch anyone like-so.
You are one of them. To them at least.
As I age I find it incredibly awful/amazing how other people I meet now, basically lecture me about myself. Without knowing anything about me. They just make up a story in their head about me, and run with it.
Oftentimes they will straight up ignore what I have told them about myself, or twist it in these fantastical ways that are clearly projections and fantasies of their fears, but are likely them self-reporting about their own shame about themselves.
Still better to not have to face it out-in-the-open this side of (recognized/recognizable)change for the better. Don’t see where I said anything about you, but you didn’t hold back about me, did you? Am I supposed to thank you?
I mean it’s not just the women either, men could be in the picture as well
I think post 2007 our smartphones and computers with internet have unlocked near unlimited entertainment ( Welcome to the Internet - Bo Burnham )
In comparison to say 1964:
https://youtu.be/KbukeJZftOs?t=467
Life looks infinitely more boring then, having kids seems like a natural time filler
Anyone saying they’re not having kids because of climate change or anything like this is just making excuses for the fact they’d rather not be taking care of a kid when they could be doing something fun or entertaining
people dont’ want to have kids because the kids are considered detriment to their own personal pursuits and money for themselves.
where i live… people dont’ want kids because they want to travel and own nice things. and yet they will complain to you how unfulfilling and unhappy their lives are… and just chase the next nice thing or next travel destination that people have decided is trendy.
what kills me is people… want kids but they are under the delusion that it should come at no cost or change to lifestyle. that’s not how anything works. every change you make has opportunity costs.
Sounds like you asked all of “them”. Me included. Or at least a representative sample size, in which case I’d be interested in your methods and the statistics.
People in developed countries with smartphones, unlimited high speed internet and time = no kids (insert variety of reasons here)
Places with no such luxuries (having kids):
https://www.visualcapitalist.com/cp/mapped-countries-by-fertility-rate/
I would also argue that we have over regulated and are strangling ourselves
admittedly this is oversimplying but ultimately there are more disincentives to having kids than not having kids, and having unlimited entertainment I would argue is part of that
I mean, you could say that for a lot of reasons:
People in developed countries, with access to American-style Pizza = no kids, prove me wrong
If we look at birth rates of developed, industrialized nations, we see the same picture everywhere: a steady downwards trend, with the big chunk happening between the 60s and 90s, so basically, when quality of live became decent and the economy recovered in those countries, post-WW2.
https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php?+title=Fertility_statistics https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/countries/usa/united-states/birth-rate https://www.abs.gov.au/statistics/people/population/births-australia/latest-release
Counter-point: Zimbabwe is a country with very high mobile phone usage, and really high birth rates. I have no idea about trustworthyness of Zimbabwe sites, but they all seem to agree: https://technomag.co.zw/zimbabwes-mobile-penetration-passes-100/ https://www.zimbabwesituation.com/news/zim-mobile-phone-usage-climbs-up/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Zimbabwe
However, what is super interesting is the Wikipedia article above: Both births and total fertility go down with child mortality. The obvious conclusion is, if less of your kids die, you don’t need to birth so many kids, and interestingly, the less kids you seem to need overall.
So, based on this alone, I believe “high quality of life in strong economy” is much stronger correlated with decreasing birth rates than the invention of the iPhone. I would argue that it is more a case of one not needing that many kids to survive due to improved social and economic situation, and maybe access to education (including sex education of course, less accidents, more family planning).
Sure, entertainment is probably contributing a bit, but I don’t see it that far up the list.
Personally, I believe that if you have kids out of boredom, maybe you shouldn’t have kids, but idk, get a gym membership or something. How can we say that gifting someone a dog for christmas that may or may not be mistreated and discarded when the novelty weary of is bad, but kids out of boredom is ok?
have you got a gym membership? I do, it doesn’t take up that much time but one can go back to the 50s/60s/70’s and see what were people doing? At 11pm what were you options for entertainment, I remember in the 90’s it was like, read a book, watch TV, or listen to the radio, not exactly thrilling
In comparison now I have an unlimited entertainment vehicle in trolling the fediverse (1.07K Posts/3.04K Comments god damn), I put in ~an hour at the gym every few days, compared to easily hours on the fediverse every week, some nights I put in more time on the fedi than the gym in a month, and that’s JUST the fedi, not even mentioning youtube, telegram, mistral/claude, torrents, movies, music, programming, etcetc
I mean I would say it’s largely just life, this comes into the overregulation/helicopter parenting, loads of kids would come home from school then just run off for hours until it was time to come home or just for dinner before running off again, parenting shouldn’t be a full time job, requiring 24x7 supervision and checking at all times
Ironically because of iphone they now sit inside getting fat watching youtube and tiktok
Like this is the housing we used to live in:
http://romseyaustralia.com/houses.html#7
Now we can’t build a house for under a million
We have simultaneously loaded ourselves up with high standards (both with regards to raising kids and the equipment to provide for them) and easy cheap entertainment/calories
It’s completely understandable why we’re fat and not particularly enthused about raising kids
Man, don’t get too hung up on the last sentence, that is more my personal opinion on how one should approach life, I don’t expect anyone to share it, I haven’t discovered the ultimate truth. Yet. So, my clearly marked personal opinion:
Don’t get me wrong, I hate helicopter parenting as much as anyone. “Back in my days”, we’d fuck off into the woods after school, doing all kinds of bullshit, and as long as we were home at dinner time and didn’t lose any teeth, all was fine. On the other hand, I can’t say that that stopped me from becoming a weirdo. I have seen plenty of people have kids who wanted them and really should not have kids, and I have seen some people go above and beyond for their children, although they were in bad situations, or got them by accident and so on.
If one gets a kid out of boredom, I would argue one is exactly the kind of person who parks their kids on youtube in order to watch their own tiktok slop in peace. Or the kind of person who gets a pet and then neglects it. Only that tying up a kid at the highway truck stop is, much to my surprise, still illegal.
Now, to the facts: the data looks pretty clear to me. Higher standard of living, more education, less kids. I don’t know why this is really seen as such a bad thing, since apparently, not all people have the inherent drive to have kids, and in a more “developed” society, there is no hard push that one has to have children or else. Not pushing people who don’t want to do something is good, in my not very humble opinion.