Are you a late bloomer in work or love? Maybe you’re right on time
wsj.com
wsj.com
Less people are able to move out and start families due to student loans and wages not keeping up with cost of living.
This isn't a matter of 'well , in time you'll have everything you want'. It's more like you may never have what your parents had.
https://www.lshtm.ac.uk/newsevents/news/2023/uk-drops-new-gl...
"A new analysis of global rankings of life expectancy over seven decades shows the UK has done worse than all G7 countries except the USA."
"According to the OECD, state the researchers, the UK recently became the second most economically unequal country in Europe after Bulgaria."
Me personally, I dont even think I'll be reaching retirement age if I continue to live in the UK, and thats not through not wanting to work, but thats because of the how the UK has become. Everything has just got too expensive living in the UK now.
More people died during the period of time energy prices rose rapidly recently than during the covid pandemic in the UK, but you cant point this stuff out to people in the street because they'll have a go back, a form of denial of the situation in the UK.
Its become very dog eat dog, quality of work in decline but costs still going up.
Crime in my experience is also off the scale and the attitude of the police now means I no longer report crimes to them.
So yes this sort of article is portrayed as positive spin but is in fact deceitful spin.
Do you have a source for this? I was looking at https://www.statista.com/statistics/1115077/monthly-deaths-i... which made it seem like that wasn't the case. I've seen https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2023/05/10/expensiv... which shows that more people died from high energy prices than from covid, but only since energy prices went up, not in total.
Any source for this? And this seems possibly meaningless at face value.
Total deaths have generally been increasing in the UK since 2011. [1]
I assume that's because of an aging population.
And just glancing at this graph of total deaths with 5 year average [2] I think it's doubtful that excess deaths from the energy crisis exceeded pandemic deaths.
So the statement would have more value if it were about excess mortality rate.
There does seem to be some evidence that non-covid excess mortality rate increased due to the energy crisis (and possibly exceeded covid excess mortality at the time) [3] but I don't think it's clear by how much (especially when you consider there was increased non-covid excess mortality even in the summer).
Other sources speculated on different causes for the excess mortality but it doesn't really seem like anyone knows. [4]
There are some BMJ articles that might better explain it but they're not on sci-hub yet.
[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/281488/number-of-deaths-...
[2] https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsde...
[3] https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2023/05/10/expensiv...
Anecdotally, seems there's a lot of British and European expats here in the Valley and they don't seem too keen on returning. We've been getting a lot of international applicants (but work from home was supposed to mean Europeans could avoid moving to the "dangerous" US but work for American companies?).
Post 2016 the messaging from most commonwealth countries (UK, Canada, Australia) seemed to be that they were going to be the ones benefiting from a brain drain of Americans leaving the country. Canada was supposed to become an "AI Superpower" and Universities in the UK were supposed to be where innovation was going to happen next due to the perceived hostility of the United States to foreign talent. I recall someone pitching the "Silicon Roundabout" and that Cambridge and Oxford were going to be the new Stanford and MIT.
It's interesting, in retrospective, to see how wrong these predictions were. Top destination for UK nationals in Academia was, and still is... the US [0].
[0] http://spectrum.ieee.org/at-work/tech-careers/the-global-bra...
Very high cost of living, inflation, uncertainty due to layoffs, salaries down due to a combination of lack of raises and stocks going down, housing price still increasing despite the high interest rates, which have made real estate even more unaffordable. To top things up the green card priority dates for my immigrant class have gone back, so I have even more uncertainty of when I will achieve permanent resident status.
I don't know the circumstances of the people that you describe, but Europe is looking way more attractive than the US. The whole reason why I left Spain was lack of jobs and low salaries, but Covid and remote seem to have incredibly improved the situation (I know from second hand accounts).
The only reason I'm holding on is a combination of sunken cost fallacy and an unjustified optimism in the future. It took me years and tons of effort to move my family to this country, so I'm not ready to give up just yet. I'm also aware than my bad experience is in part due to random circumstances, and if the situation improves (both for me personally, and for the country as a whole) my experience will be different.
Still, I give it a 50%/50% chance that in 3 years I will hate my situation here, give up and move back home.
That said, I’m not sure there is much literature on the negative economic side of tourism, or work tourism specifically. My suspicion, is that while it tends to create inflationary pressure, it still increases local wealth generally, and rarely are there very extreme negative situations (like locals who live in regions that can grow quinoa that can no longer afford it resulting in serious nutrition issues).
Plus, some countries in LATAM have the same issues we dislike about the US but magnified (e.g. inequality).
> I don't know the circumstances of the people that you describe, but Europe is looking way more attractive than the US
The US is giant. I always find it funny when people try to use anecdotal evidence of their lived experience in a single expensive city in the US to describe the entirety of the US, when that is absolutely, unequivocally, not representative of the vast majority of the US. Check out the prices of an apartment in Seattle[0] vs Austin[1], or NYC[2], or Pittsburgh[3], or Indianapolis[4].
When I lived in Seattle, I was paying around $1900 a month for a microstudio with around 600 square feet. According to the website I pasted below, that would get you a 4 bedroom apartment in Indianapolis (which sounds about accurate, I'm currently spending less than that for a 1400 square foot 2 bedroom apartment on the east coast).
In other words, it would be like if I moved to London and then declared the entirety of Europe (not just the UK because the US is around 96% the size of all of Europe[5]), and then declared that Europe just isn't for me because of how expensive it is in London, and how the culture is and... etc.
Now, I'm not denying your experience and I believe you 100% having lived there myself. I also am not going to pretend picking up and moving across the country is something you can just do at a whim's notice. I'm only cautioning against extrapolating your experience on this single city to describe an entire country that is almost the size of the entire continent of Europe.
[0]: https://www.renthop.com/average-rent-in/seattle-wa
[1]: https://www.renthop.com/average-rent-in/austin-tx
[2]: https://www.renthop.com/average-rent-in/new-york-ny
[3]: https://www.renthop.com/average-rent-in/pittsburgh-pa
[4]: https://www.renthop.com/average-rent-in/indianapolis-in
[5]: https://www.mylifeelsewhere.com/country-size-comparison/euro...
E.g., around CalPoly most people just... Went home after work? No meeting up to do something, have a drink, etc. They just went home and stayed there. I found it super strange.
Other than that I explicitly address in my comment that my experience is particularly bad and I'm willing to give this country a fair try. However, if the answer is to cut my salary in half and move to Pittsburgh, at that point I rather return to southern europe.
Software developer or equivalent income capable tech job, remote, university city/town. It's a fairly easy set-up (unless you're already very rooted somewhere). They're relatively inexpensive to live in (you can actually buy a real house at $100k per year!), and there are tons of safe choices (specifically with a low murder rate). Primary downside is far weaker food/nightlife/etc. vs what you get in major cities.
Exaggerate, embellish, etc., sure, but not outright lie.
Yes. From the Left as well as the Right. Jeremy Corbyn is an example of the former.
>> ... from what is now a center-right Labor Party, post Blair.
Labour Party.
It seems traditional party politics were not the primary factor. There were Leavers on both Left and Right. Centrists were less likely to be Leavers than those on the wings of their party.
Demographic factors were more determining of a Leave vote than political affiliation: Age (older vs younger), region (England/Wales vs Scotland/N.Ireland), population density (rural vs urban), income (low earning vs high earning)
How do you measure conformity across a country?
TV Set top boxes being paused at 8pm on Thursday, wifi connected devices seeing a weakening signal, social media posts.
The internet is a security services and big businesses surveillance tool wet dream.
Whats been interesting since is how various websites and their algorithms are being used to challenge your view point. What Eli Pariser highlighted in his Ted talk 12 years ago (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B8ofWFx525s) has grown to all the major US tech companies because if everyone has their nose in a device connected to some website, the state can control people in deniable spooky hacker ways.
Remember intelligence is a cheaper and easier form of nipping problems in the bud before you have to puts boots on the ground, beit military boots or police boots, and at least here in the UK every element of the state is involved in surveillance, including the NHS and the educational system.
https://www.ft.com/content/80ace07f-3acb-40cb-9960-8bb4a44fd...
That's in addition to the sudden shock from the invasion of Ukraine, making it politically necessary to switch fuel even at cost which your linked article starts with.
Economy in the west is not that stellar mainly due to much more focus on social aspects, more paid time off, free education including universities, free healthcare, we take care of the poor, disabled etc. Of course none of this is free, we all pay for it. Economies in the east have their own issues, relatively poor and corrupt is never a good mix.
Some people don't give a fuck about anybody else, its just me or just the closest ones, and for those US system looks much better and numbers alone do support it. Only to the point when societal issues hit back. Or you want to raise kids, and they want to study on university. Or not to worry about your health issues, which will inevitably come to all of us unless you die suddenly without any prior health issues.
So yes its by choice, but I don't think most folks understand that choice, done for them in the past, without them having a say.
A global pandemic happened simultaneously with this.
* while salaries are higher than eg most of Europe, they're still nowhere near the US - US salaries are often at least double (or more, a lot more)
* their cost of living and taxes are high
* they're backwards and insular (maybe you think the US is too, but the US has 350 million people, Australia has like 25, lol, so insular takes on a whole new meaning there)
* they're not as diverse as the US (sure, London is diverse, but still, the diversity of the US smokes them all, so many different cities here with so many different demographics, climates etc etc)
I'm saying that as a Scandi who's lived in UK, Canada, Australia and now US. Of course the US has a lot of problems too, but as a destination for skilled immigrants, the others don't even compare IMO.
Care to expand on this?
You need to distinguish between which education systems produce people who innovate, vs which countries' capital markets companies get floated on. Compared to the US, the EU doesn't have any large cohesive stock market.
We will soon see how differing national attitudes to strong/weak regulation on AI (vs say data privacy) decide where the investor money goes; just like how national energy and regulatory policy on crypto mining in the last 5 years decided where mining moved to. There's lots of fashionable chatter about AI regulation, but I'm going to predict that there isn't anything like even a weak transnational treaty, meanwhile the 2024(/25) US/UK/Canada elections will see AI-driven exploits pushing the limits.
And the UK is now chasing the tail end of the crypto boom with a promise to have weaker regulation. [0]
[0]: Prof G Markets: ... Andreessen Horowitz’s London Office https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cPVQPAb6_Ic&t=25m47s
Few years ago we acquired something in Montreal related to AI, and it's interesting because when we tried to get the team to relocate to California many weren't interested. A lot of the key personnel ended-up moving, but they still kept a significant presence in the city. Even today, when hiring they'll have engineers indicate early in the process they won't ever move (despite pretty much everyone considered for that office being eligible for an O-1 due to the nature of the work being done there).
What's interesting is we opened a satellite location in Toronto and it was a completely different experience. First thing people asked coming into interviews was about relocating to the US and if we could sponsor their visa. The demographics also skewed heavily toward recent immigrants to Canada.
The irony was, the Toronto location was opened specifically to house developers that simply couldn't pass the higher bar for US immigration.
Anecdotally, as an American expat in SE Asia and Australia for the past 14 years, I've NEVER met a British expat who's keen to return. Tax, crime, weather, etc.
Anecdotally, a very good friend of mine who's an Indian national did his BS and PhD in EE (specifically in VLSI and Semiconductors) from a Tier 1 program (ie. Cal, MIT, Stanford, UIUC) and was working with a major Semiconductor company. His F-1 wasn't converted to H1B (or his O-1 app was messed up) so now he's heading back to India with a chip on his shoulder and 10+ years of experience in a technology we are trying to regain expertise in.
This same story happened with Chinese immigrants 10-15 years ago, with the 2008 recession causing a number of Chinese nationals to lose work sponsorship and thus return to China. A lot of those guys ended up founding major startups, becoming professors at top Chinese institutions, and advisors to the Government there.
My neighbor was a corporate guy downtown, opened up a brewery as a side hustle in a very run down neighborhood, shortly quit his corporate job and he has 3 locations now.
I think there is a failure to think outside the prescribed paths. There are some with disabilities and trauma that prevent them from doing anything but surviving, and I understand that and feel for them. But there are plenty - the majority - of people who are able bodied and need to invent their own futures.
Or maybe just be a victim forever but I don’t think that’s a good outcome.
More than 50% of small businesses fail in the first year of business according to well published and cited industry data. These are all people who tried to "invent their own futures" and it did not work out. That also doesn't mean that the remaining percentage were successful. Many of them have their owners working much more than corporate full time for less money then they'd be working on a cushy 9-5 job.
For an opposite anecdote to yours, a family opened up an ice cream shop around the corner. They had good business and made ok money, but closed after 2 years. Why? Not only was the end of the day profit not great, they were heavily sacrificing time with their own family in order to run the day to day operations. They could have hired more people to handle those day to day hurdles, but that would have meant almost no take home pay.
We should encourage people to "invent their own futures" but we also have to be realistic, because we don't have good safety nets for what happens when inventing your future fails, which means you have to make your own safety net. It's also not always trivial to re-enter corporate gigs after you've been doing something else for years, especially if closing of your small business has burned you out.
It takes much more than just a good idea to make a small business succeed.
this is in fact what 99% of people will tell you in real life if you try it.
10 years later those same people will either forget they said anything, or pretend they were on your side all along if you make it.
The people who succeeded eventually landed on one with staying power, and the people who didn't eventually gave up. I bring it up to say that a single owner can be responsible for multiple business failures, and like you say, no one remembers those once you're successful.
Because you simply go "oh they just keep trying" and I'm sitting here thinking, "well that's interesting, they're losing all this money and can just keep trying?"
Edit, regarding OP's flagged response: Wow. Hope you have a nice day.
People today talk about FAANG jobs and such but right after I graduated, all of FAANG (except Apple) were crazy oversized startups losing money. I was one of the few who stuck it out in the tech industry because I just wanted to program for a living, and I was willing to take lower salaries doing PHP than I would working at KFC. I ended up freelancing for about 5 years because many employers couldn't figure out how to make apps profitably, right until venture capital came to the country and the first unicorns appeared.
And now I have way less fear, way more risk tolerance, so much knowledge about things. Taking risks and doing new things is less risky to me because I can always make my own future. I have enough connections and history to take jobs, or raise capital for something new. It might work, it might not, but I’m willing to try and it’s so much more fun. Of course I want the lottery ticket but I’ve had enough singles and doubles to be very comfortable. It required many 60 hour weeks and sacrifices but I feel so alive, all the time.
So what is the point of your anecdote?
My immigrant parents worked their ass off in their small business, 24/7. No health insurance, no benefits, and no barely anytime to spend with their kids.
The sad truth is that employees that can’t afford the cost of living have little leverage and might be replaceable by employees that will work for even less (because they have to, not because they want to).
In some ways this is in direct conflict with working-class people being able to assemble a stable life where they can depend on being able to work diligently and have some stability in life. I think the total wealth of society could be greater if we adjusted some laws and the tax code to make it more possible for working class people to have a real shot at a stable life through diligent, hard, work.
The problem with this is that, ultimately, if you view yourself as "working class", as opposed to being an entrepreneur, then your shot at a stable life through diligent, hard work is not dependent on the laws and the tax code, it's dependent on the overall business environment and what kinds of employers you can find. Which means, on luck.
If you are a lucky working class person, you will be able to find an employer who (a) recognizes your diligence and hard work, (b) is able to manage the business risks of the company so that they can afford to reward you accordingly, and (c) does in fact reward you as you deserve, i.e., is willing to share the benefits of the business with you even though you're not an owner, you're just an employee.
I'm not saying there are no such employers out there; but my description should make it evident that they will be rare. Far too rare for all diligent, hard-working working class people to benefit from them. The diligent, hard-working working class people who aren't lucky enough to find one of those employers will have to live with whatever they can get, which will range all the way from "okay but not great" down to "sweatshop".
The only way to escape this crapshoot is to be an entrepreneur--i.e., to own at least a piece of whatever business your livelihood depends on (and in practice it has to be a large enough piece that your voice will carry weight in business decisions). In other words, dealing with unavoidable business risks due to the fact that the world is always changing and businesses have to adjust, is something that, all things considered, you are better off not outsourcing to an employer.
> The only way to escape this crapshoot is to be an entrepreneur--i.e., to own at least a piece of whatever business your livelihood depends on
If everyone is an entrepreneur, then all of the production is being done by entrepreneurs. That means the "actual jobs" are now being done by entrepreneurs, i.e., people who own their own businesses (or a significant share in them) and produce as owners instead of employees. There is nothing at all impossible about such an economy, although of course it would be a loss for many entities in our current economy (such as large corporations who owe their profits to rent seeking, buying favorable regulations from the government, artificial monopolies, etc. instead of to actual productive advantage).
> That means the "actual jobs" are now being done by entrepreneurs, i.e., people who own their own businesses (or a significant share in them) and produce as owners instead of employees.
I think you might be surprised by how few people actually want to be business owners. Lots talk about wanting to be a big baller, but to actually put your capital on the line and put in the hours year after year with risk of losing it all, not to mention being where the buck stops for all decision making - it's just not something most people want to do, if they can avoid it.
I'm not surprised by it at all (though I'm not the poster you were responding directly to--that poster might be, I don't know).
I'm just pointing out that you can't avoid the tradeoff I described: if you are not a business owner, you are putting yourself at the mercy of those who are, since you are going to have to be employed by one of them. At the end of the day, business risks are real and cannot be avoided, and those who do not want to be directly exposed to those risks must realize that they are forgoing the associated rewards.
Sorry, but I'll trust the data around economic equality above random stranger anecdotes online.
Yeah, I myself am doing wonderful as well, but I'm not so narcissistic as to imagine that's some special property of "not being a victim".
What a bleak outlook to have of one's fellow man.
How are these two contradictory things?
Put another way, at the individual level, there is still lots of opportunity. But at the aggregate level there is a squeeze.
But even if we go with your scrambling goalposts, small business start rates have declined markedly over the past 50 years at the noted high rate of failure:
https://www.cbo.gov/publication/56945
So yes, all signs point to it actually being more difficult for small businesses to succeed.
> All the stats I've seen are that there has never been less poverty in the world.
because the prescribed paths work for a larger population. it doesn't need ingenuity, and less luck. hence why it is generic advice.
economies cannot support everyone being an entrepreneur. if you want to be a go-getter that's fine. you're in like company here. but its dumb or at least disingenuous to think of this as a predictably available example for all.
Alternatively, recognize that you have two anecdotes of people succeeding. It doesn't mean there aren't systemic issues, and people can both strive to succeed in the current system and push for its change.
It's dull reading tl;dr: bootstrap yourself like my friends.
Especially among the highly educated in our western system, people desire guaranteed paths. “Check these boxes and get this, get this credential and get that.” Everything in reality is hustle and sales.
As another anecdote a former gym trainer is now a firefighter. She tried a long time to be a firefighter but couldn’t break into it despite passing all the tests - there is a whole application process following all the tests and credentials and it’s quite complex. So after a few years she started sniffing out where the firefighters hung out, their bars, and went out there and spoke to them, told them her story, made connections. She did get accepted following that because the people who could make it happen helped her, after she took the initiative to think outside the box and meet them in a unique way.
All the successful people have a different story. And your definition of success can vary greatly. But to say society is making success impossible is simply untrue - I see so much opportunity and so many upcoming people all the time. Unless you are disabled or traumatized or have some other issue, I can’t take someone who blames society for their lack of “being where they want to be in life” seriously. Not in America at least.
It's not impossible. It's harder than it was 20-50 years ago. Real wage growth has stagnated since the 1970s. The cost of higher education has grown at a faster rate than wages can keep pace. Young people (those under say 35) can't afford to buy homes, with the rate of home ownership amongst this age group dropping by ~20% since 1993. The median age of a home owner is now 56 years old, the highest it's ever been.
It takes but a moment to look up these things and realize there are systemic issues at play, but no, continue to share anecdotes and hyperbole.
I think you and the person you're responding to are dealing in absolutes. In some ways it is harder, but in others it's easier. The world's knowledge is literally at people's fingertips now. Almost any creative skill someone has can be leveraged to make money. In many ways it's the easiest it's ever been to start a business or make money.
But, as you mention, homes are priced insanely high. The flight to the coasts has caused anything within 50-100 miles of the ocean to go crazy price wise. That is much harder on people.
Healthcare is a mess. One of the biggest small business unlocks the US gov. could do is pass universal healthcare. So many people are tied to companies for healthcare, and boom we would see if we could break that tie would be like the tech boom all over again, if not greater.
There are two ways to read this sentence. One optimistic, people can monitize their skills! The other pessimistic, anyone with the same skills as me can easily compete with me. Thats why it seems that skills that are highly specialized are rewarded most these days. And the average joe doesn't have highly specialized skills, otherwise they wouldn't be average. And if prices are a race to the bottom through vigorous competition, you will find that the largest capital owners will be the biggest winners, since they already have a leg up.
Homes in some areas are higher. Others they have increased with inflation and are more affordable due to lower interest rates.
The "life is so hard these days" crowd is living in a bubble. They live in a coastal city and have debt from their expensive school that they may be struggling to pay back. [Not coincidentally this describes lots of the media].
Reality is that the majority of people don't go to college. And the majority of those that do graduate with reasonable debt into jobs that pay well enough to pay it off. Simply put, it's easier to live today than virtually any other time in American history.
If the US passed some sort of halfway decent universal healthcare bill, then I would walk of my job that same day.
> So after a few years she started sniffing out where the firefighters hung out, their bars, and went out there and spoke to them, told them her story, made connections. She did get accepted following that
You’re saying that people tear down successful people by saying they’re privileged or have connections (but implying that they’re not successful because of these things and rather because they took a risk), and then immediately say that if it weren’t for the connections, she wouldn’t be successful? Seems contradictory to me. There’s no recipe for success, so discounting the luck factor also seems disingenuous.
Don’t get me wrong, it’s great that your friends “made it” but I doubt that it’s solely their own doing without any “insider” help. It’s the same thing now, applying for companies - if you don’t have a referral, you’re not getting to the front of the line for callbacks.
Personally, I’m against glorifying hustle culture and this sort of risk taking, because it implies that everyone can do it and if you’re not successful then you aren’t taking enough risks.
> Especially among the highly educated in our western system, people desire guaranteed paths. “Check these boxes and get this, get this credential and get that.”
But that’s how it used to be - and it’s not so anymore. I think it’s a valid complaint.
When people say "oh, they're successful because of their connections," they generally don't mean because they went out did a bunch of customer acquisition work, they mean because they have a dad who's a bigwig at Amazon or something.
If what you have is the only means of survival, your appetite for risk is strongly diminished. So when someone claims that “you would have made it if you took risks” is a little two-faced.
There is a difference between "anyone can" and "everyone can at the same time".
The economy grows only a few percent a year. That means the society as a whole is an almost-zero-sum game. In the long term, things will get better. But in the time scale relevant to individual success, they remain mostly the same. If you are successful, most of that success is at the expense of other people. The majority can't be successful at the same time.
It is tough when the pessimism is there. But I look around me and see so much to be positive about and hopeful for.
And 3% of 23 trillion is a lot of new cash. But yes, it all goes to the rich, or whatever. Don’t bother being hopeful, don’t bother trying something new, you can’t overcome whatever etc. etc.
Also, 3% of $23 trillion is not that much, if you divide it by 330 million. That's what success looks like if we are talking about success for everyone at the same time.
That feels like quite a lot to be honest.
Yes, guaranteed healthcare and land.
Option 1) you can have a likelihood of being able to provide healthcare and decent home for your kids.
Option 2) high likelihood of not being able to provide either for your kids.
I am not referring to the 0.1% of people who have the option at tech startups paying generous pay and benefits.
Why aren't you those people? Why don't you have their story?
Let people afford a home and family-raising, and without a lifetime of student loan debt required for BS jobs.
And stop trying to twist the forced economic exploitation of us, to sell us your avocado mindfulness spa package, like a gratuitous insult thrown on top of everything else.
Basically, the typical process of getting iterative raises has become fighting to tread water. Saving cash or cash-derived assets is somewhat meaningless because you're guaranteed a future where the savings buy a fraction of what they do when you put it away.
The message is around things happening in their due course rather than in some sort of age-delimited set of phases.
While idealistic, it's more optimistic than the feeling of having failed many of us feel as we compare ourselves to others.
Now we're in our mid 40s and it's far too late.
Except when it isn't and we're left wondering "why didn't I think of that?".
It's dropped by much yet, but I anticipate life expectancy to drop further - and become more significant in relation to previous generations as economic adversity increases, also making adequate medical care harder to come by.
Deadline is early 30s for kids and 50 to buy a house
Also, it doesn’t actually matter much when you have kids. As long as you have a fertile partner and sufficient resources you can basically have them whenever.
The time to have kids depends on what parenting style you want. If you want a more hands off approach where you mostly just prevent kids from making stupid decisions while they decide their own course in life, it’s fine, perhaps advantageous being an older parent. If you prefer though to micromanage your kid and learn about life with them as you go along and get in arguments with them about the best way to do things, being younger is better.
That’s a natural consequence of economic mobility.
It would suck in a different way if everyone always had more than their parents in absolute (inflation-adjusted) amounts and obviously, not everyone can have more in percentile terms.
The average Australian in 1984 could buy a home that cost 3.3 times their annual income. In 2023, it's 10 times what the average person earns in a year.
However, there's only some aspects of life in which you truly have choice later in life. The cold hard truth of biology (especially female biology) is that probabilities of successfully having children start declining pretty quickly at a certain point.
And if you don't start saving for retirement early enough? You won't have a pension. If you don't buy a house when you're (relatively) young? At some point you'll find it very hard to get a mortgage.
It's great to write a relatively shallow piece about how you don't need to hit milestones so early - but that's a symptom of an underlying system which is increasingly disenfranchising young people and not giving them the opportunity to have ownership in society.
The less you want, the fewer milestones you need to hit.
I used to think my dad was boring because he never really wanted to do anything. Worked the same mid-level job for 30+ years, had no friends--just took care of us. A couple years back he passed away, smile on his face. Told me he did everything he ever wanted. Told me not to work so hard.
I think about this all the time whenever I'm stressed about claiming my "ownership in society."
But that's not really what this article says. If they had someone who said "I thought I needed kids, then I didn't and I'm totally happy with it" that would be aligned with that message. But to have someone who says "I didn't have kids until I was 50" is a bit dishonest, because biological realities make that almost impossible (for women, anyway).
It's really uplifting to show lots of examples of people who took a different path and found happiness in a less conventional way. It's less uplifting to show lots of examples of people who did the conventional stuff, but later in life, because statistically that is unlikely to be possible for most people who leave those things until later. It feels more like building false hope.
Doesn't feel like a good answer to the complaint that young people today can't possibly hit all the milestones their parents did, and their grandparents took for granted.
The same amount of life, the same amount of effort and dedication, in a seemingly improving and more advanced world, still buys you less life milestones than it did for your elders. If anything, this sounds like a social analogue of a textbook case of inflation.
Now, that same age couple might only have a claim on about 1/167Mth of America. That’s about 40% less land or share of other inherently-constrained resources per American. Other countries have had more pressure on their populations.
It’s no surprise that “buying a big lot with a freestanding house” was a lot more attainable when there were 40% fewer people chasing that dream. Part of it is inescapable math.
https://www.russellsage.org/sites/default/files/inflation-ad...
Inflation adjusted housing prices were basically steady from 1950 to 2000. Yet the US population went from 150 million to 300 million.
It is surprising that for most of the 20th century housing was very affordable and then something changed in the late 20th century that culminated in two housing disasters in the 21st (the first is the housing crash and now a housing market that basically excludes all but the rich).
When rates fall under 4%, house prices will naturally be higher in desirable areas because a lot of buyers are buying on monthly payment, not headline purchase price. Cheaper mortgages make for more expensive houses.
Now, when I showed you this is totally wrong, beyond any doubt, you changed the story. Now it's the interest rates that determine housing cost.
This is like trying to have a discussion with an antivaxer. No matter what they say, you prove them wrong, and then they change their story, pretending like the nonsense they said before never existed.
Look up a chart of mortgage rates. You're still wrong. Bye!
EDIT: in the 50 years since 1970s the US economy wasn't still - technology made huge leaps across all industries, and lots of wealth has been created. One would think this would offset the population growth, but it seems that it didn't.
This makes housing into a lucrative investment, which probably drives prices up even further. Nobody wants to see the value of their investment fall, so they fight against anything nearby that would decrease it (NIMBY).
Sure, my grandparents had a nice house, but they also worked the mines (literally). Would I say that the work they do is less effort than making $200k+ sitting in bed writing some code, while drinking Starbucks?
If you don't adapt to the times, you're going to have a bad time no matter what era you are in.
That being said, I admit it's not as simple as international competition only. Quite a few life supporting institutes (healthcare, education, housing) are downright dysfunctional for various other reasons.
It's bad enough that we have to work for most of our waking hours for ~45 years, but this used to achieve a middle class existence and relative security, an essential basis to form a family.
Now you can be a working couple (twice as much labor as before) and struggle to achieve middle class basics. And even if you do, the world is so volatile that it can be taken away from you on any given day.
People tend to foolishly believe that their wants and desires are in some static container that once filled will lead to satiation as opposed to the reality that the more the container is filled, the bigger the container gets and at the same time it gets harder and harder to add to the container.
I didn't inherent his tranquil mind. My life just looks so much different than his.
Self-acceptance though is totally good to practice. I would go back in time and do more work on myself so I could accept the good things in my life faster with more integrity. But I can't, so I have no choice to but to accept that maybe I'll be a slightly older father. I can't actually change that but I also am not under any illusions that being an older parent would be better, all else being equal. That's just absurd. All else isn't equal though. I personally think siring a child at ~50 is fine but only if you think you'd be a better parent.
I think most people would be far better parents if they waited until at least around 30. At 50, I think their only problems would be their health and lifespan, which is not as big of a deal in my opinion. If you know what you're doing as a parent and have your finances straight, your kids don't really need you after graduating from college anyway.
I became father at 38, second time at 40. I am much better father than I would be 10 years ago. I've done some cool shit before this happened, reinvented myself few times, tons of extreme/adrenaline sports, backpacking around the world, bought house for parents, and I have very little left to prove to myself and absolutely nothing to anybody else.
I understood exactly what makes me 'tick' and long term happy, understand myself and women much much better, so I could pick (hopefully) a lifetime partner and mother of our children more appropriately. All this takes time, for some like me a bit more to grok properly. Not even going into career and financial stability, those are obvious and not that important once you are above 'poor' threshold.
Its fine for a guy to be parent a bit later, just be sure to use that extra free time to make yourself the best version of yourself, and not waste it on shallow stuff like couch binge watching or parties, grow out of such things since there are much much better things to do in life, like rock climbing. And recognize toxic/broken relationships, take a (hard) lesson and move away from them, unfortunately you can't fix broken people.
Obviously though, suggest a better option than self acceptance if you know one.
I feel like the message of the text is: It’s the right time when you feel like it is.
Certainly, true for many things in life.
Having children later in life has risks for mother and child.
It sounds more like a rationalization because the current situation is not in favor for having children.
But I cannot accept this feel-good writing and leaving out the real issues that need to be fixed like student loans, housing etc.
All in all, I'm happy that we did end up having kids, but if I could go back through my life and rearrange things in some godlike way that let me still marry the same person and have the same children, I'd definitely have kids earlier.
I feel like it's hard in my 40s to have the same energy that I did 10 years ago, and raising kids is definitely something you have to pour energy into. Also, my mother died a year and a half ago, in her mid-70s, and I really feel like both she and my kids would have benefited from having longer together. My father is 80 now and while he remains healthy, it seems very unlikely that he'll actually see his grandchildren grow up. My father-in-law died when his first grandchild was an infant.
I think it'd also be nice to have my late 40s as a time when I could really heavily concentrate on my career because my kids were old enough to handle a lot of the small day-to-day things by themselves, since this feels like probably my prime earning time.
None of this is stuff that makes me say, "I screwed up, I should have made any sacrifice to have it different." Overall, life is great. But if you're 28 and you're thinking, "I could go either way -- wait a decade to have kids or have them now," I'd personally recommend "have them now."
Alas, parenthood experience is both rewarding and challenging in ways that are near-impossible to properly communicate to non-parents. Perhaps that's for the better, as otherwise humanity would've gone extinct long ago.
To each their own, but I doubt this would be a good idea for most people (or their kids). 28-32 range seems like a more reasonable compromise. Then you at least get your 20s (or most of them) to have some fun, figure yourself out, get your career going, have a failed relationship or two, etc. before taking on 1000% more responsibility and limiting yourself in many different ways.
Also, just speaking for myself personally, I'm 38 (with a 4 year old) and actually feel healthier and more energetic now than I did during my 20s due to taking diet, exercise, sleep, and other health/lifestyle things much more seriously. I don't know if I'll continue to feel this way into my 40s, but I guess my point is that age definitely isn't the only factor--I'm not even sure it's the most important.
It consists not only of physical health but also economic stability and other factors.
33 seems totally fine. But generally people tend to be a little more cautious for pregnancies after 35 (mothers's age).
This is a collective action problem. Everyone benefits in terms of room with a smaller population. But yes, the individual benefits by defecting from the collective action.
> if a house if a concern, is to buy a house to raise your children in.
Not raise in, live in. It would be economically convenient to pass your house down to one of your children at the point when you are downsizing for retirement and they are wanting to begin a family.
When people have kids later, it's because they're not ready. Some people are never ready because they are needed more elsewhere. Family will consume all of your free time, money, and effort. It's a big sacrifice.
Say more?
and there are many more of those who have much weaker access to opportunities because of no college degree.
I've stopped believing it'll happen, hope just leads to suffering. I'm far too broken and messed up as a person.
This is unfortunately more complex than simple, easily fixed social issues and the like.
The older you get, the harder it is to make new romantic relationships.
You can sort of make up for this by having extensive experience younger in life, so you can more aptly navigate the fewer opportunities you'll have as you age.
If you don't have that skill, good luck.
I don't think therapy is capable of really teaching this either. You can read a book about how to play soccer, but you actually need to spend ten thousand hours with the ball. If you start playing soccer at 3yo, you'll be a natural. If you start at 30yo, well, it can be done but it's not going to look very traditional and it's going to be much harder.
I think the "pickup artist" movement and the rise of people like Andrew Tate illustrate the problem well. Applying a deliberate strategy to engineer romantic relationships usually ends poorly, but I can see why so many men are attempting it.
A description I stole (I'd give credit where due, but I don't remember the source): Advertising is designed to make the person you are envy the person you could be with their product. That is, advertising attempts to steal your satisfaction and then offers to sell it back to you.
Take cars, for instance. I have a car that drives just fine. Ah, but with the car in the advertisement, the girls look at me with interest. If I want that, I need to go buy that car. (Maybe those ads are the reason that the first sign of a midlife crisis is going out and buying a fancy new car.) The point of the ads is to make me want to buy a car when I don't actually want a car. Same, and equally obvious, with beer, soft drink, and potato chip commercials. It's more subtle with some other kinds of ads, but it's still there.
This has been going on for decades - for all of our lives, in fact. (The difference now compared to the 1960s is that we don't have the same thing going on in cigarette ads.)
What's happening now is that more and more people have maxed out, either financially or emotionally. Financially is "I can't make enough money or borrow enough money to continue to play this game." (The decline of the middle class may drive this, at least in part.)
The emotional part of maxing out is when you realize: "I've tried that kind of thing a bunch of times. Buying this one isn't going to satisfy me. I don't actually have to buy it to find that out; I already know."
A related phenomena is the realization that you can't actually have it all. You can't have the fulfilling job and the high pay and lots of vacation time and the nice car and the nice house and the boat and lots of money in the bank. Women can't have the nice career and be there with their kids (neither can men, but for most families, the women are the ones getting pinched on that particular front.) You have to choose what is more important, and try to get that, even if it costs you other things that you also want. "You can have it all" is a lie, and people are starting to see that.
I guess I mean it’s more about not building wealth: go live your life, don’t save for a pension. Don’t strive for a bigger house to build roots and a family, just rent one in a cool city and have fun! Don’t buy a car outright and maintain it like your fuddy duddy parents, just lease one and be happy.
Still a badly thought out comment I’m afraid but I can’t quite put my finger on it
So maybe you're seeing a sub-species of the broader thing I'm seeing.
The step up in happiness and utility from owning no car, to any car that just about works well, is enormous.
The difference between a clapped out Honda Civic and a brand new Tesla is pretty marginal.
It's the same with most things. Owning a home in Kensington is nicer than, say, Willesden, but there are enormously diminishing returns.
The most important thing in life, to me at least, is safety and stability. In family, in partner, in friendship, in housing and possessions.
Advertising focuses on trying to extract value. There's not that much value to extract when I buy a 20 year old car.
Wanting to attract and competing to attract a desirable mate is a basic mechanism of nature that enables the propagation of species. Those ads might use it specifically to show cars can help, but the underlying desire would still be there without the ads.
The more possessions and money you desire, the harder you work to buy more things in the economy, pushing up GDP, and driving up the value of stocks, real estate, etc. that rich people own.
Wouldn't it be the opposite?
Wanting possessions definitely fuels you to work hard, but you know what gives people even more drive? Existential threats like not being able to afford food or keep a roof over your head. A man with his own house and his own car and no debts is a man you don't have much leverage over. A man who needs to keep sending you a monthly flow of money in order to have shelter, entertainment and whatever else is a man who you control on a fundamental level.
the problem is that harder work doesn't necessary bring success in rent seeking economy.
Just acknowledging the trend as I see it
Now several years later and I'm very happy where I'm at. And I've come to the realization, if I had gone directly into CS in college, there is a fairly good chance I may have gotten burned out by now and moved on to something completely different. So the "right on time" idea resonates with me, but YMMV.
Now what are the chances that a woman would get pregnant at 51?
It is what it is. While I’m an only child and will never have biological grandchildren (married and by choice), my aunt who is 82 years old has been able to see her two daughters get married and have six kids and between those six kids have four kids.
The tradeoffs are real.
> This time, quitting her job led to a debut solo album, television appearances and sold-out shows
And for every one of her, there are thousands of singers in obscurity that are probably just as talented making $.0006 per play on Spotify and doing free gigs for tips at the local nightclub.
Life is what it is, but not meeting those deadlines have real consequences. I’m no wunderkind. While I was on a perfect timeline up until I was 32 - graduated at 22, house and married at 28, etc - it’s probably because I did feel pressure that I had to start over between 32-34 (2006).
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36377647
So, yeah I was a late bloomer and while please play the smallest fiddle for me:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36306966
But, myself and my best friend since high school were on similar paths through high school and college - top of our classes (we went to different schools), went to the same college on academic scholarships, etc. I know what the road not taken looks like. He got married at 26 and been married for 20+ years and didn’t give up half his stuff because of divorce at 32. He captured the upside from real estate and didn’t make as many dumb decisions before he was 35.
Again, I’m not jealous nor have I ever been.
While he has literally 6 times more saved than I do for retirement and he is one day younger than I am, I made the best of my situation of being an empty nester and a remote worker so I don’t have to retire to enjoy the life of a retired person (see the second link). You play with the cards you are dealt.
I told him a long time ago that I realize that we aren’t on the same road and I’m always pushing for him. We are both in a good place now.
I spent years and years comparing myself against imaginary milestones, putting off my happiness for some constantly shifting goal instead of focusing on trying to cultivate daily moment to moment experiences that make me happy.
I had a recent shro trip that really gave me perspective for how much of my life I've spent just being anxious, thinking I couldn't be happy because I wasn't living the /right/ life.
There is no /right/ life. And you don't one day reach an expiration date on fullfilment.
In both the stories about men having children or dating later in life the age of the woman wasn't included for some reason.
Or did you not read past the first 2 paragraphs?
I guess you’re right about that. There’s so many illogical people on the internet without reading comprehension. I thought you speaking about a specific kind of discussion.
My interpretation seems to be the most correct one based on the juxtaposition. He finally found the “right one” but “she couldn’t get pregnant.”
Of course, he could have lied or not looked into his own fertility issues. Being skeptical should always be a given when reading articles like this.
But also, what you’re saying goes against what many other people here have been commenting (i.e. “it’s well known that men can have children late in life”).
And let’s say that he did have fertility issues. My point would still stand, the mentioning of her age wouldn’t derail the discussion. (Which I think you’re agreeing with)
the counterpoints to that are that everything you observed are based on pervasive assumptions. which would be reflected in what everyone else wrote. which are perpetuated by the same health professionals and individuals that don't look into men's fertility realities first.
but for example, why do we know its just "she couldn't get pregnant", were their other partners? was there an accident in the past? was one of her ovaries taken out in a procedure? the article doesn't say, the only thing for us to assume is that they tried and tried and tried and eventually one egg stuck.
mentioning her age shouldn't derail a discussion whether she was 25 or 43 or other. that part we agree on, or at least I agree on, I think you're suggesting that she was closer in age and "therefore it would be okay", which is different than my observation entirely.
Ideally, the numbers Stanford listed (married at 26...) would have been preferable to me at least. It might be good to figure out why people miss that and figure out how to improve it rather than counting on the last resort of fertility treatments in your 40s.
Careful to read it as "settling that" -- no one should feel like they're "settling", for something other than what they want. :)
(This can involve changing your mind about what you want, though.)
In Western societies at least, often it is women working on their careers, which may take at least into their 30s before they've reached the desired level. It is a choice that these women make, so I don't think it can be "improved" unless different choices are taken.
There isn't enough data to conclude one way or another. We need to know how many of those people over 30 still desire children but tried and failed, and then tried IVF and failed (or couldn't afford it), and/or tried adoption but couldn't afford it or failed.
You need a lot more data to come to the conclusion you did.
You're also missing some big ones:
- people over 30 who have overly busy work schedules that prevent them from dating even though they want a partner and possibly kids
- people over 30 who really want a romantic partner but can't find anyone who likes them, or lack the skills to engage in a healthy romantic relationship
- people over 30 who for career reasons are stuck in a place that likely does not have any compatible partners within reasonable distance
- people over 30 who want kids but aren't financially ready and voluntarily not having kids until/unless ready (but would if they suddenly make bank at 35).
I don't really know what I'm talking about here, but why would adoption cost that much more than having a biological child? Just reducing it to numbers you already skipped thousands of pregnancy, delivery, early infancy doctor costs. On the other hand, adopted children may be more likely to need therapy or other care later in life.
Besides, isn't the government desperate for children to be adopted? The state has to pay all their expenses until then, and obviously it's in the best interest of the community for them to be adopted. I don't see why they would have any incentive to charge a lot of fees.
Most unwanted kids are aborted, so there are fewer left to adopt compared to a century ago when orphanages were a major part of the community.
The issue is in the interpretation. Your sampling is biased so the immediate conclusion is false. If you want kids and are over 30, your chances are better than 50%.
The society that figures out how to properly overlap child rearing in an educational environment will survive. I’m fascinated with how much the world is going to change in the next century with most of the world set to shrink and be dominated by the elderly.
I see more of the population in the US going the way of Asian cultures (I am first generation Indian) where you have multi generational house holds being more common. It is going to be a painful cultural shift, especially for the highly individualistic American culture - but that is the only way I see future generations surviving.
A bachelor at 30 in the 60s or 70s was likely to stay a bachelor their entire life. Today the average age of marriage for men has risen beyond that.
Cue the quote: there are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statics
But having kids is the one thing where age matters. If you have a kid at 50, there's a good chance you are going to need assistance when they're barely in their twenties. I've had a few friends like this whose parents were very old, and they needed to take care of them when they didn't even have their own stuff together. I think it's better to either have kids early or not at all.
I’m on a plane across the country because my mother just died from a stroke at the age of 61. I’m 32. She’ll never see grandchildren from me (her only child) and she’ll never see what I amount to fully. There’ll be no reconciliation for the terrible childhood and whatnot. I figured maybe when I had kids that maybe things could be more fixed. It won’t happen now. My father will likely die soon because he doesn’t have a strong will to live on his own and is in much worse health than my mother. He should’ve died three years ago when he had a heart attack but he got very lucky that the ambulance came when it did.
I would’ve had kids already but due to the insane market we’ve had going on in the USA - I couldn’t afford to start a family and had to divorce my ex wife due to financial issues. I’m an exceptionally well earning person - in the top 1%. But my wife wasn’t and so we couldn’t afford to start a family in the Bay Area and decided to move on. We didn’t want to be stuck with dealing with greedy landlords and no privacy.
I hate articles like this because it tries to normalize what isn’t and should never be normal.
Intellectually I understand why society values breeders. I understand the need for fostering the betterment of humanity by having a future generation. I just disagree that it requires or merit biological birth unless we have a population crisis. As far as I am aware, the US does not have that problem, so I won't judge someone for forgoing baby making.
I hate the pretense that baby making for normies is anything other than creating workers for the ruler class. Maybe they're optimistic that somehow their children will become part of that? On average, that's simply not the case.
Compare this to a child-free lifestyle. I know many child-free people. Fundamentally, their lives at 50 are not so different than their lives at 30. The main differences are they have more money, but they’re also fatter, uglier, have less energy, and are more jaded. The law of marginal utility dictates that, while they are still happy, they enjoy their life less over time.
My decision to have children was less about breeding and more about not living an ever-shittier version of my late 20s life.
Is travel at 50 really fundamentally different than travel at 30? Other than having a bit more money, my opinion is not really. In many ways, travel at 30 is better, even with less money.
They wouldn't be limited to options that don't build. You can have children and build a family, but you can also choose to dedicate your resources to building a business, or a skill, or knowledge, or whatever. Doesn't matter that you lose energy as you age and make lesser contributions, because you're kind of transforming it into something more persistent that you value. That could be a family, but it doesn't have to be.
> Is travel at 50 really fundamentally different than travel at 30? Other than having a bit more money, my opinion is not really. In many ways, travel at 30 is better, even with less money.
Even with relation to travel, maybe you dream of having a deeper understanding of one or more cultures or pieces of history and each travel contributes a bit to that.
It seems like you think the point of traveling is just to enjoy the travel itself, a momentary pleasure, but I don't see the point of travel if you return in the same state as when you left. It's only when something changes, when a contribution to something was made, that a travel was worthwhile. I don't think that ability to contribute to something (interpersonal relations, business, knowledge, etc.) is all that much affected between being 30 and 50.
I don't think the vast majority of people achieve this with the vast majority of their travels. Kind of curious what are some examples of that in your own life, especially the 'when a contribution to something was made' bit.
I have felt several times that "Is this just it now? We're not going to do anything terribly different, just work/eat/hobbies/occasional trip, pretty much on a loop, while our health just keeps getting worse?" I do feel having children would change that, but for various reasons (not all of them great reasons, imo) we still haven't had them yet.
I hate to point out that it doesn't always- your children may hate you (difference in politics or lifestyle) or abandon you. Or they may be simply too resource constrained to do anything other than visit you on holidays. I guess the lifestyle in most Western cultures has normalized elder neglect and loneliness anyways. Though I recognize there are many examples to the contrary. On average most families relegate care of the elderly to homes or caretakers if independence is no longer an option. I guess I don't see the point of children if they don't actively care for you till death. Do I expect too much, or just reject the Western norm?
Personal anecdote only: My life at nearly 40 is a tremendously better version of anything before it, even my 20s. No drama, way more peace of mind, little to no job stress, some disposal income, many hobbies both old and new, and most importantly... time. I'm not constantly focusing on the needs of kids, just what my partner and I feel like doing (both in the instant and in life in general).
I lost my job recently and feel great. Time to breathe and regather, without having to worry about making kids homeless or moving them outside of their school system. Don't wake up to crying babies and come home to shouting matches and needing to cook for 4. No homework help, just learning whatever we want to. Or taking the night to just relax and watch TV, try a new board game, go out somewhere new, take a new class, spend time in nature. It's pretty great. Every time we see or hear about someone else's kids, we feel absolutely sure in our choice -- not that we ever doubted it to begin with.
Far from feeling meaningless, I get to pursue work and hobbies that bring fulfillment, because they're well considered and taken for want, not need, and not dependent on the financial or time constraints of someone else.
It's only shittier if your stop growing. At this age I'm still contemplating a new degree, making new friends, evaluating new careers and cities (and frankly lifestyles), all with the financial resources and mental and emotional maturity I never had in my 20s. It's pretty great, and it was the exact outcome I hoped for. I knew I didn't want kids as early as my early teens, and got a vasectomy in by mid 20s. Both turned out to be terrific decisions.
Probably this sounds selfish. In truth I've always really valued community, and spend most of my adult life working in nonprofits and mission driven orgs, along with making a ton of friends all over the world. I love people, just prefer adults with their own interests rather than kids that I have to groom into something. The idea of living vicariously through them has no appeal to me (as someone subjected to the same from my own parents, in a nearly joyless childhood).
Another big reason I didn't want to create children (as opposed to adopting) is that there are way more than enough Americans already, each of whom consumes dramatically more resources than a child raided elsewhere. From a social and global standpoint it's not really sustainable, and probably quite likely apocalyptic, to keep having kids without really having a plan for their future in regards to climate and democracy, both of which are in rapid decline. That seems more selfish to me than not having them at all. Adoption seemed like an accept middle ground, but my partner didn't want kids (adopted or not) so I didn't pursue it.
Are there people who just settle into a routine after 30, never really changing much again? Sure, but that could happen with or without kids. That's up to you to prevent, as a parent or not. But I know more happy childfree couples than I do parents. Maybe it's a self selecting crowd. The happy couples probably don't want to spend time with kids, so we find each other. Likewise, the happy parents tend to fade from my life and have their own play dates and whatnot. To each their own...
That being said, I'm not saying that it's impossible for you to have a fulfilling life at 40 years old. My point is that, in my experience, 70 year olds with kids seem more fulfilled than 70 year olds without. Perhaps that's just a reflection of me and my role models.
But statistics aside, I think there is also a deliberate tradeoff there in terms of optimizing for the present vs the future. Some folks think of children as an investment for their future, someone to take care of them and provide companionship when they're older... but often at the cost of surrendering several decades of their mid-life for child rearing.
Conversely, for those who don't want kids, some of us choose to frontload our life's pursuits towards the prime middle years instead, traveling and doing stuff and meeting new people etc. while we're still physically healthy mentally sharp. Some chronic illness is always around the corner, and being stuck with disabilities in a nursing home, with or without kids, doesn't really excite.
Not having kids means planning for the future is a bit different, not just in finances but also risks and costs. We can choose to make a planned exit at some point without that decision being blocked by next of kin, opting for some happy accident doing something fun (space travel? free solo climbing? or just medication). I'd much rather shave off a decade or two of my life if that means a higher quality of life for the preceding decades... quality, not quantity :) Even without something that drastic, planning for retirement looks very different when you have no college funds or weddings to save for. Even homeownership (which is largely out of reach for my generation anyway) ceases to be as important a consideration. You can live more fully in the present time, instead of forever optimizing for some future state that may or may not ever come.
And that's to say nothing of where society will be in 40-50 years... probably not gonna be pretty, lol, and not something I'd want to subject kids (or myself) to unless we make drastic improvements.
In the meantime, though, what we have is the here and now. Might as well live it now instead of worrying about living it someday later.
"As far as I am aware, the US does not have that problem"
Not true, we don't have a replacement population. This means all of your welfare programs and retirement programs will not have enough people in the younger generation to pay into them and support them.
"I hate the pretense that baby making for normies is anything other than creating workers for the ruler class."
Where did you pick this view up? Yes people have to work to survive. What do you think society would look like if you just did away with all the modern conveniences and the "ruling class". Do you just assume you'd be able to sit around doing nothing or pursue your "creative goals"??? No, you'd be gathering firewood and hunting all day, hoping you don't die of starvation or freeze to death.
This is such a silly naive stance. I hear it all the time and it sounds so childish. I assume it's some Marxist trope young people pick up from college sociology class and think they sound smart. What you want is a class of plebs doing the manual labor for you so you don't have to do be a "worker". Someone has to do the shit work, just not an elitist like you right?
My suggestion to you is to find an actual purpose and stop stewing in your hateful anti-humanist outlook. Having kids can be that purpose, but you could actually just go out and do something to be helpful to other humans too.
You're drawing an association the ruling class and modern conveniences. Those are two incredibly different things.
I have a really hard time believing that because a small group of people have a disgusting amount of wealth, somehow modern conveniences are "divined" from that
What you want is for those plebs to provide that to you, while you essentially become the new ruling class that sits around benefiting off the working peasants.
I love how you hardcore Marxists only take the good parts of what you say while conveniently leaving out the guy that's gonna be wallowing in the ditch for you.
Uhh no? I just think that the people working in ditches should be compensated a living wage, preferably through forcing the ultra rich to pay their fair share in taxes and redistributing
So step 1 for sustainability: remove said programs, as the alternative is either A) acknowledging they are just a pyramidal scheme or B) removing individual freedoms and forcing people to have children they don't want to have, just to support the programs you want to have.
You're right, they are pyramid schemes. Which is why I think it's dangerous to put important programs like this in the government's hands and make your population reliant on them.
but also, yes, I totally agree with you that some of this "oh you're a late bloomer, you'll want to do it when your older" stuff comes off as condescending if you actually just don't want to own a house with 2.5 kids.
This is less true now, but perhaps only for now.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/09/world/middleeast/israel-u...
https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2023-02-06/ty-article-ma...
>The coalition agreement PM Netanyahu signed with ultra-Orthodox party Shas promises to broaden the reach of Israel’s rabbinical courts far beyond family law – and grant them a status equal to that of civil courts
I recently read Vaclav Smil's book, "The rise and fall of manufacturing in America." With the fall of manufacturing in America, I think America gave up on the one social agreement that makes capitalism work. If you keep your nose clean, stay out of trouble, and give 40 hours solid work a week to an employer, you can and should have the means to support a family and have a modest life. In my opinion, that's the only thing that keeps capitalism afloat if the top 2% keep to that agreement.
We're entering a new era of Victorian living. I think it's hard to argue against that. Politics are swaying each and every way to divide and conquer the majority.