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I think a big part of this is a cultural shift to no longer being culturally obligated to marry young and start a family.
by l33t7332273 3y ago
I think a big part of this is a cultural shift to no longer being culturally obligated to marry young and start a family.
- ekianjo 3y agoAnf brainwashing that everyone should have a career while in reality most people end up simply with jobs and not careers. Believing lies has a societal cost.
- hiAndrewQuinn 3y agoHonestly, I think it's simply that people have much more interesting lives these days. Babies and entertainment are substitute goods.
- wesapien 3y agoInteresting? Give me some examples. This problem goes beyond the east vs west. This is about humans failing to learn from the past. Add modernity and progress|regress.
- wiseowise 3y agoSports, science, literature, movies, skydiving, games, online games, learning, I can go on forever about different modern activities.
- cpursley 3y agoMost of this was around before the modern era in some form or fashion. There is nothing new under the sun.
- yakubin 3y agoIf you weren’t born rich, like Newton or Darwin, you were unlikely to be able to afford to learn and do science. Forget about being able to travel to the other side of the world without a huge risk of dying of malaria, dysentery or any of the other myriad diseases whose risks weren’t yet mitigated. Most people also couldn’t afford to travel even to countries nearby. Games: obviously no video games, but personally I wouldn’t miss them. ;) Other games, like poker, chess, mahjongg: true, they were there. Skydiving: nope. Learning: much more limited. E.g. there was so little communication between Asia and Europe that for most Europeans you’d need to move to Asia for months or more to even find a teacher. Beside languages, education in general didn’t use to be available to as large a percentage of society as now. Illiteracy was the common case. According to [1], in 1701 in UK 54% of population was literate, in Western Europe: 31%. [1]: <https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/estimated-historical-literacy-rates https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/estimated-historical-lite...>
- wesapien 3y agoOne of my grand mothers was a teacher and yet she bore 9 children. She lived through WW2 in the Asia/Pacific. All her children got were engineers, couple of doctors and a successful entrepreneur. What's more interesting than that? The truth is that inequality, modernity and self-love is going push us into a demographic collapse. Being a wirehead/hobbyist is definitely less fulfilling and less noble.
- idiotsecant 3y agoPumping out children is ... noble? How?
- mensetmanusman 3y agoThey are raising those who will be changing your diapers.
- sdsd 3y agoI feel this can be easily dramatized in either direction Imagine sitting down for 9 hours typing, then going home and scrolling through porn and getting high and thinking that's much more interesting than conquering a village, sailing the coast of a new continent, having sex with a beautiful virgin, and teaching your sons to reach even further into greatness. Or on the other hand, the hard reality redpill that your life in the past would be manual labor on a farm as a peasant, making a lord rich. I still lean towards a romantic past - working hard with your village friends, then going to the pub with them, and coming home and making babies with your wife, in a home you own, with a tended garden and many children, sounds better than writing Ansible playbooks and jacking off to pornhub. And this is the life of a loser in the past, compared to a "winner" of the present. Maybe it's anomie, people don't have children when they don't believe in their civilization
- Earw0rm 3y agoThe losers in the past died of diarrhea aged three. If you made it as far as wife and kids, you were a winner. If wife made it as far as the third kid without dying of sepsis, she was an ultra winner.
- sdsd 3y agoBy that standard, most people conceived in the present don't even survive the womb
- defrost 3y agoWell, ditto the past - not only were diet and other conditions harsher, the Church was happy to prescribe, mix, prepare and administer abortifacients. eg: https://daily.jstor.org/abortion-remedies-medieval-catholic-nun/ https://daily.jstor.org/abortion-remedies-medieval-catholic-... and that's Saint Hildegard of Bingen, Abbess and founder of two monasteries handing out the Ye Olde abortion pills. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C9K9PfjRjxM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C9K9PfjRjxM
- 3y ago
- BurningFrog 3y agoEvolution will weed that culture out in a few generations. The future belongs to Mormons and Muslims.
- rs999gti 3y agoAnd real poor people, not middle class westerners complaining about housing and student loans. Poor people in Asia and Africa still have large families.
- jen20 3y agoSo did the Irish, until it wasn't necessary to have 9 kids for enough of them to make it through childhood to take over the family farm.
- BurningFrog 3y agoYeah, much of the big family thing is a numbers game. You get 7 kids to be sure to have 2-3 surviving ones.
- failbuffer 3y agoBirth rate always drop in times of riding political instability and decreasing quality of life.