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Comment by freddie_mercury | Hacker News Reader

I live in a developing country. People regularly kill animals to eat. They will have chickens, ducks, rats, fish, turtles, dogs, and pigs that they raise and eat.

There is no "communing with nature". There is no "paying the blood price". There is certainly no "greater love and understanding of nature" or "meaning in their lives". It is just eating, living, surviving.

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Suicide rates tend to be lower in developing countries. Don't you think that lifestyle is part of the reason?

https://amp.businessinsider.com/images/535557fc6bb3f78245a35...

And you think this is the only lifestyle difference between the countries? There are millions of confounding variables.

To quote a smart person I know: “Yeah, sure, you could give up, but then who’s gonna feed the kids?”

When your life is hand to mouth, there’s not a lot of room left for suicidal stuff. Too busy surviving. Especially if there’s people depending on you.

Even if you’re suicidal, you don’t have the luxury to go through with it. And even if you’re depressed, you don’t have the luxury to give into it. Because if you do, then you don’t eat and neither do yiur kids. No choice but to keep going.

Life’s fun like that.

Or, such places handle social interaction better. Birth rates decline in developed areas. My pet hypothesis is that “developed” countries/areas are only developed through extracting so much from workers that only a selected subset may reproduce.

Or, y'know, developed countries have more access to birth control...

I think this js the main reason. Most people here get children unplanned and the minority of them are rich.

You’re pointing out the mechanism. I’m talking about why people choose to not have children. This is not a disagreement.

The point of your parent comment is that the people in the developing world might also choose not to have children if they had realistic access to birth control - thus making the “why” incorrect. It could just be that having kids isn’t actually worth it.

It's not only one cause - declining TFR has to do with a ton of different things, access to birth control being one of them but far from the only one.

Birth rates decline because of female education. This is such an established fact that your pet theory sounds like a crazy conspiracy theory "the moon landings were faked".

Right, I forgot about that. But there’s still room to ask why women don’t want children.

Really? Is it such an established fact? I seem to remember it still being a point of extreme contention, academically, only a few years ago. I haven't been in an academic setting discussing population growth and human movement for a while, but it's crazy that it would go from being one theory among many in an incredibly complex system to an established, unassailable fact in a decade.

Does Argentina have a much worse education system for women than Brazil?

> Don't you think that lifestyle is part of the reason?

Or lifespan. Cancer rates are also really low in many super-impoverished countries. Few survive long enough to get it.

A low caloric diet prevents cancer. “Eat less and you won’t get cancer.”

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2829867/

I have noticed that too and I think it one reason may be that once you're freed from the "carnal" struggles of basic day-to-day survival, you tend to run into existential dread sooner or later and question the pointlessness of it all.

The struggles of developing countries are just another form of the distractions that people need to keep themselves from nurturing suicidal thoughts.

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