>> They don’t want to have kids because they believe the future is going to suck.
They dont have kids because they are spoiled, rich and selfish living in modern affluent countries and dont have real problems. Think I'm wrong. Then why is it that some of the poorest and toughest places have growing populations, and the wealthy ones have declining ones.
Poor people are built differently, e.g. often afflicted by superstition/religion. This cultural narrative is a psychosocial adaptation to a high death rate to induce survival of the population. It often includes niceties such as coercion or violence.
With high (educational) wealth come increased and more abstract insights into our condition and world, higher ambitions and standards. Everyone would be disturbed by a proximal looming threat, but only with more advanced knowledge you can increase your mind's field of vision to places and times that are further away.
E.g. everyone knows the fossil fuel party must end soon. The only hope is supposed innovation that may or may not happen and might even bring existential risk itself. And even then we'll have to live with the knowledge that we have extinguished or prevented trillions of other life forms through no fault of their own in not even 200 years. Not even to speak of the human suffering that is baked in. We're just waiting for it to unfold.
Whether this disturbs you or not depends on your psychological profile. But the point remains that the modern thought and mood space is vastly more complex than it was in simpler times.
To some significant degree, want and hardship create motivation. If we (vaguely specified) aren't distracted by that, we start noticing hardship and want elsewhere, e.g in our cushy lives.
Life for our great-great-grandparents sucked much worse on absolute measures than for us. They didn't say "this sucks, let's die" and they also needed children to support them. Wealthier societies with a social safety net downplay the need for children in the family.
I do understand that the future physical world looks worse than the present one. But hey the survivors are the ones who rule. You can make the choice to take a weakness mindset out of the gene pool and that's fine, there are too many people already.
One has to wonder whether we can reach a "permanently" stable equilibrium (universe permitting), where we can have our cake and eat it too, or whether we're doomed to eternal oscillation. I won't have children that might see it, but I'm cheering it on regardless.
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[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 27.3 ms ] threadThey dont have kids because they are spoiled, rich and selfish living in modern affluent countries and dont have real problems. Think I'm wrong. Then why is it that some of the poorest and toughest places have growing populations, and the wealthy ones have declining ones.
Your not having kids cause your living in fucking ratopia and pretending that the world is hard. https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/the-doomed-mouse-utopi...
With high (educational) wealth come increased and more abstract insights into our condition and world, higher ambitions and standards. Everyone would be disturbed by a proximal looming threat, but only with more advanced knowledge you can increase your mind's field of vision to places and times that are further away.
E.g. everyone knows the fossil fuel party must end soon. The only hope is supposed innovation that may or may not happen and might even bring existential risk itself. And even then we'll have to live with the knowledge that we have extinguished or prevented trillions of other life forms through no fault of their own in not even 200 years. Not even to speak of the human suffering that is baked in. We're just waiting for it to unfold.
Whether this disturbs you or not depends on your psychological profile. But the point remains that the modern thought and mood space is vastly more complex than it was in simpler times.
Ratopia has no poverty, no education, no environmental concerns. It's just space and abundance... the population peaks and then declines.
It makes a very clear point that lacking struggle, populations decline.
In mice in the setting of the experiment.
It's not clear at all that this applies so easily to our situation. You can probably fill a library or two with research on this though.
Life for our great-great-grandparents sucked much worse on absolute measures than for us. They didn't say "this sucks, let's die" and they also needed children to support them. Wealthier societies with a social safety net downplay the need for children in the family.
I do understand that the future physical world looks worse than the present one. But hey the survivors are the ones who rule. You can make the choice to take a weakness mindset out of the gene pool and that's fine, there are too many people already.