Edit: the replies - y'all are out of touch. Visit an average family in the Midwest with a household income of < $100k/yr that doesn't own a home yet.
If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39341055.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
I mean you could have a canned answer for such threads, but I liked and learned from how you handled this.
Thank you, again :)
There are certainly regional differences in housing affordability, but the average American lives in a home that they own by the time they're 35.
[0] https://www.census.gov/housing/hvs/current/index.html
[1] edit since there's some confusion—here's the direct link to the table I'm citing from, entitled "Quarterly Homeownership Rates for the U.S. and Regions: 1964 to Present"—https://www.census.gov/housing/hvs/data/histtab17.xlsx
[2] "Homeownership Rates by Age of Householder: Fourth Quarter 2022 and 2023"—https://www.census.gov/housing/hvs/files/qtr423/tab7.xlsx
If you look into the "definitions" section it defines "Housing Unit. A housing unit is a house, an apartment, a group of rooms, or a single room occupied or intended for occupancy as separate living quarters."
and "Householder. The householder refers to the person (or one of the persons) in whose name the housing unit is owned or rented [...]"
49% of people aged 30-34 aren't homeowners, 49% of us are homeowners or renters.
> The avg American is completely priced out of owning a home right now.
You haven't disproven this statement in any way, you've just linked to some statistics that show we can still afford rent.
> Homeownership Rates. The proportion of households that are owners is termed the homeownership rate. It is computed by dividing the number of households that are owners by the total number of occupied households (table 5 and 6)
Here's the table: https://www.census.gov/housing/hvs/data/histtab17.xlsx
And for the benefit of others, here are the definitions: https://www.census.gov/housing/hvs/definitions.pdf
* EDIT: I was also citing "Homeownership Rates by Age of Householder: Fourth Quarter 2022 and 2023", which is likewise about homeownership
Just own it dude. You pulled the "49% of people aged 30-34" thing from this chart https://www.census.gov/housing/hvs/files/qtr423/tab7.xlsx or some variation of it and you misunderstood it.
Wait, this is saying less than 50% of people aged 30-34 live in a home that is owned or rented by them (or their spouse)? I can't imagine a region where this is close to true, since probably near 100% where I live either own or rent. Is there a regional breakdown for this? And where do these people live? With their parents or in a shelter?
The title of the tables I'm looking at are "Homeownership rates by Age of Householder", which makes it pretty clear what they mean.
1 homeowner and 1 renter = 50%
1 homeowner and 2 renters in the same apartment = 50%
1 homeowner and 200,000 renters in the same apartment = 50%
1 homeowner and 2 renters in 2 different apartments = 33%
It's a ratio of homeowners to the number of buildings the rest of us rent out.
Homeownership by age of householder restricts the reference set of housing units to those which are occupied by a householder in the specified age group.
I live with roommates and I'm not on the lease here, so IIUC I would be considered neither a homeowner or a renter for these purposes.
or else a bunch of roommates, some of whom may not be on the lease.
After reading all of the back-and-forths here, I just wanted to thank you for continually being the clarifying force in this discussion, even amidst the downvotes and fallacies.
As a 41-year-old urban homeowner, I knew I was in a lucky category, but I didn't realize how difficult it actually is to know how lucky based on the available data.
The narrative on Twitter/TikTok that every Millenial and GenZ is starving to death and on the brink of being homeless is really exhausting.
While it may be too doomer, it’s worthwhile to listen and understand the struggles of people who aren’t you to understand what’s coming. Certainly home ownership is rarer even for millennials and Genz is likely going to have even lower rates (its a little too early to compare since they’re too young for it)
Maybe shifts in housing dynamics happen first in cities then spreads to the suburbs, then the exurbs, then rural areas. Or maybe it's just due to how cities are governed, how many people live there, and how much new housing you get in any one year?
Bay Area in 2000 was complaining about illegal immigration, bilingual education, and the lights not staying on, all of which are contemporary issues facing the rest of America from 2015 onward. Bay Area in 2010 was in relative boom times from the tech industry, which again is spreading nationwide as tech jobs start getting more dispersed (though it may reverse thanks to RTO). Starting in 2012, housing prices became utterly unaffordable, which again started spreading nationwide around 2022.
Give it another 5-10 years and yes, people will probably be walking through a Walgreens in western Minnesota shoving everything they can into their bags.
Looking at the data, certainly not: https://x.com/noahpinion/status/1649492485968891904?s=46&t=C...
These aren't automatic, though. Who's to say they aren't produced by policy that's often done first in SF first?
A lot of people in the rest of the country tend to think "Oh, that's just dysfunctional California politics, we'll vote in different policies and things will go differently for us." Yes, you will vote in different policies. No, things will not go differently for you. California voted in different policies too - remember that it's the source of the Reagan Revolution, the hippie generation, the Chinese Exclusion Act, all sorts of policies that took hold nationally but are now the antithesis of what California stands for.
At the root of this is a misperception of the power of politics. Most ordinary people think that laws are laws and the people who make the laws have ultimate power. California (and U.S. history in general) proves that laws are reactions to specific social and demographic forces, and the laws reflect the shape of those forces. Economics drives politics and technology drives economics.
There's a peculiar form of blindness that strikes the Urbanite, as if there are no other places to live.
The people who live in flyover country are barely even recognizable as human, so you might as well ask me to move to Mars! How the hell am I going to be seen in public drinking my $12 microbrews or pretending to appreciate the Moma so that other people know I'm the correct class of person? God, what would my parents think? I'd rather die than live there, so that place doesn't even exist for me.
“It’s those damn young people”. “It’s those damn urbanites”. “It’s those damn techies”. Replace that kind of thinking with religious or racial terms and consider how you’re looking at a very large and diverse group of people.
High population density also (generally) means more social activities, which can be important for some people (like myself). Living in a rural area kinda scares me because I'm afraid I'd be quite lonely.
On top of that, for those of us who don't have the privilege to remote work, living in a city is often necessary to have a job.
And famously illustrated!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/View_of_the_World_from_9th_Ave...
The trouble is:
1) no local jobs to speak of (unless you want to clerk at the farm & feed or assistant-manage the McDonald’s out by the highway)
2) nearest hospital that can do more than stabilize you before shipping you somewhere better, is over an hour away.
3) the schools are really, really bad
4) no local services or amenities. Hope the nearest state park (if any) is really good. But if it’s a midwestern one it’s probably not.
Remote work, being young and healthy and willing to take a little extra risk, having no kids and planning to have none, and being kinda a home-body (or being really into readily available rural midwestern outdoor activities like hunting and fishing), can make it a viable way to go, but that’s a lot of qualifiers.
In our medium-ish sized midwestern city there are smaller slightly-run-down houses in the low $200Ks, but universally in bottom-half school districts for the city. Solid choice if no kids, though. But also local tech jobs pay at most 50% of big-city equivalents.
Depends on the state and locality. Some rural schools have good opportunities.
But pretty much agree on the other parts.
The algorithm has turned (some) people into whiners and doomers. It really sucks to watch them take defeatist attitudes on everything in life.
I see lots of these young 20-somethings on Reddit thinking their lives are over. It's absurd. They have their entire lives ahead of them, and all it takes is one break into a career.
They even think climate change is going to "kill all of us" before they're elderly. That's not even what the science says.
On the topic of having children, though - people aren't having kids because they're choosing to focus on themselves.
There are ten times as many forms of entertainment today as there were in the 1980s, and people can endlessly consume content in their hands. You can go glamping at a music festival, post it on Instagram, and hook up with new friends and romantic partners you meet. All incredibly easily. Our culture has become built around experience and consumption.
I know people in their 40s that are partying, going to clubs and concerts, doing bar crawls, cruises, visiting abroad, jet setting, and climbing the corporate ladder while living incredibly active lives. They don't want to give up their lifestyle to suddenly have to raise children.
I know a lot of people who spend their money on experiences because they genuinely believe they won't get a retirement, so they might as well enjoy their life while they can. I'm part of this group. I don't think the world will literally be over by then, but the future looks bleak. We've also been drilled from birth that you should never have a child if you can't afford it, and people are taking that advice to heart. And because you can't afford your home on a single income anymore, more and more parents are having to rely on childcare, which is itself expensive.
The issues are just compounding. If you just want to believe that everyone is too enamored by their phones to procreate... that's your prerogative, but yikes.
to be fair it was unthinkable the day before yesterday too. in the history of human civilisation, that kind of setup has only been possible in a handful of countries, for a few skin colours, for a couple of decades. fueled by burning cheap fossil fuels taken from poorer countries
Note that despite the above, in 1950 women did often have jobs. It wasn't the "ideal" and it was less common (and even less common if you had kids), but plenty of women had jobs.
The gist of it is: There are worlds and circumstances into which people want to bring kids. We mostly failed to create that world and those circumstances. If tou want to know what a solution looks like look at western democracies with high birth rates. E.g. France, Ireland, New Zealand, Denmark.
The rest is probably due to individualism. Kids cost time and energy and capitalism tells us we should live our best lives. And the best live does not involve herding 6 kids, even if they are your own.
We created this world willingly, and the low birth rate is a consequence — and so is the need for migration if we wanna stay wealthy. The thing is: now that the genie is out of the bottle we are not gonna be able to force people to have kids. We can just create circumstances in which they are willing to.
I am in my 30s and I am unsure if I will ever be able to retire. I am sure however that I will have to change my job and career multiple times throughout my life. Despite me being financially well off, I am not sure if I would be able to support kids in the future. This is not about being whiny. I just think if I had kids it is my responsibility to throw them into a world that can sustain them. This one can't.
That kind of thing, at least to me, seemed to get old pretty quickly. Probably more importantly though, is that we all get old at some point. When fewer and fewer people have children of their own, what happens when the bulk of people get past retirement age? I think it's a huge problem from both an economic standpoint (if there's no productive workers to keep things going, is the state really going to be able to support you in better than awful conditions as you age?) and from an individual and cultural standpoint.
Our house prices, North of Dallas and deep in the suburbs - far from the bay areas and Seattles, have doubled. That includes my home. People in our profession usually have to live by big cities, like Dallas. But the homes are ridiculously priced and it's insane. My juniors have no hope of owning a home that is big enough to raise a family without years of saving. And they're college educated engineers, some of them married with dual incomes.
I just drove by a new development [in TX], with brand new homes that start at 1800/mo for a 3 Bedroom. Financing by the developer.
So if you get out of Dallas or Austin you will find affordable housing.
Ad hominem means "against a specific person". He made a general argument. Might be good or bad, but in no way it was an ad hominem. Arguing how a group of people conflate or tend to misrepresent this or that, is not an ad hominem.
Unrelated; what do you think "ad hominem" means?
https://www.longtermtrends.net/home-price-median-annual-inco...
Here is a statistic that is a better measurement of affordability: "Home Price to Median Household Income Ratio."' It shows homes are less affordable. If we could see the 25th percentile it would likely even paint a bleaker picture, at least if you believe those stats.
I can count how many times I walk into an ACTUAL house, like a free standing house not a condo, apartment, or townhouse - on one hand over ONE year. I think I have 2 friends with houses out of 20+ here in Denver, and I'm of course including condos/ths, anything purchasable. Almost everyone I know over 30 lives in a 1-2 bd apartment. And this is hackernews where I can pretty much assume someone like you is so far from the average American reality you have no idea what's going on.
There's already a post right above this from some compsci engineer talking about how, oh no, there really are a lot more americans making over $100k than you'd imagine!!
You don't have any real humans in your life to use THAT anecdata from? You sound like you're vastly out of that age range, your "you're too confrontational uwu" style of writing and you're obvious lack of knowledge related to the topic at hand.
What's your cities population? Is it even 100k? How much of your anecdata is actually related to this convo, in the sense of what percentage of your midwest people are even relevant to it? I've lived in at least 8 MAJOR (Houston, Denver, Dallas, Austin, Portland, San Josa) since 2008, those population centers absolutely dwarf whatever you can come up with in the mw to affect this stat.
This is like when someone on here chimes in with their amazing $120k house in Oklahoma. Owning a house at 25, whether you're in BFE Alabama or not is also not common.
Nor is being married at 25, anymore.
Since I can't reply to your later comment yet, I might just do it here. I live in the city proper. It's Columbus OH just to make it easier for you. I'm sure you'll find a way to reason that's not a major city but it is (multiple Fortune 500 companies HQ'd, major league sport team etc). I live ~10 minutes from downtown and the house was 290k.
I moved into programming from bartending after dropping out of school. I am absolutely not ignorant to the lifestyles of all of my friends who aren't engineers.
In fact it's the polar opposite. I am vastly aware of how ignorant my engineer friends are to real people. Like all of my $300k+ friends who have massive houses and 4 kids and 2 suburbans and wonder why a huge portion of their friends, like me, aren't giving them playdates or "cousins" to their kids so they have to go find dad-friends at the kids soccer games who their only real commonality is .. kids.
Also if true, that is insane that the average american lives in a home that they own by the time they're 35. That is so far and wide not the case here in Australia.
Here in Australia, we don't have fixed rate mortgages for the life of the mortgage we have variable and fixed upto around 1-5 years. Our interest rates have gone from around 2-3% to over 5.8% and the value of homes since COVID have gone up enormously, some 30-40% across our cities and nationally combined 27%.
I know we're just talking about the US here I assume, but I earn a chunk above the average salary and I be considered "at risk" in affording the average cost of a home. I know plenty of people who bought their house 3 years ago right when COVID kicked off, of which they would not have been able to afford it today given the increase in just house prices.
Australia has made a bunch of home-ownership-unfriendly decisions which the US hasn't – e.g. in the US you get a mortgage interest deduction on your primary residence, in Australia you only get it on investment properties (joint filing for married couples, which the US has but Australia doesn't, also helps here); in the US owner-occupier mortgages are normally no-recourse, in Australia they are almost always full recourse; US government policy encourages long-term fixed interest mortgages, the Australian government has no comparable policy
Some of it is also geography – Australia is very centralised, with most people living on the coast. Each state has its population dominated by a single metro area which also serves as the state capital – quite unlike the US where majority of the time the state capital is outside the state's largest metro area.
Australia's comparative lack of rainfall inland is a factor, but political culture, and hence decisions by politicians, also plays a big part – suppose NSW moved its capital to (say) Dubbo or Bathurst? Many government jobs would leave Sydney, followed by many consulting/etc jobs which provide services to the government - right now, central and western NSW has plenty of affordable housing, but a big shortage of jobs providing incomes to pay for that housing. Never going to happen: it would require a degree of originality and thinking outside the box of which Australian politicians are constitutionally incapable.
Australia kept its record low interest rates in place during COVID, then we had runaway inflation to record high’s like many countries did and our reserve bank failed to increase interest rates even slightly to help with the increases to inflation. We increased overseas migration significantly to help drive growth in the economy which has created an enormous shortage of housing supply. As a result, interest rates have soar’d coupled with record high inflation our cost of living has skyrocketed including housing prices. As I said since 2019-2020 house prices have increased 30%+
Our country has always been centralised to the coast and isn’t necessarily the reason for these costs
That said - we bought our house (NSW Central Coast) in late 2015 for AU$550K. At the peak of the COVID price surge, those property value websites were saying it was over AU$1 million. Now they are saying it is only AU$850K. Still gone up a fair bit compared to when we bought it, but also fallen a fair bit off the peak. Of course, those websites are not completely accurate, but what they say is consistent with sale prices of comparable properties in our neighbourhood
In a sense they already have, most NSW government departments moved their offices from the Sydney CBD to the Parramatta CBD, which is about 25km west. This helped a tiny bit.
Meanwhile, my multi-millionare ex-boss is struggling to buy a house, because he's being outbid by chinese "students" (lol) to the tune of +$500K over the expected price.
It would help a lot more if they added a zero to that number
> because he's being outbid by chinese "students" (lol) to the tune of +$500K over the expected price
I believe that’s a real problem but only in certain suburbs. If you are a well-off Chinese businessperson or government official, and you want to get your money out of China - in case Xi Jinping suddenly decides he doesn’t like you any more - splurging on a residence for your kid at uni in Australia is a good way to do so while complying with the laws of both countries. Still, while it is a real issue in some areas, at a national level I don’t think it makes a huge difference - there’s lots of housing in Australia which isn’t that close to a university campus
Well that wouldn't be so bad to get rid of but ...
> in Australia you only get it on investment properties
WHAT? That's blatant landlord-pandering!
Giving an interest deduction to owner-occupiers is a common policy to promote home ownership. But it's not a "level playing field" with landlords unless you also assess income tax on the imputed amount of rent they are saving by owning.
I do think we should decentralise, but it will likely look more like Newcastle and Wollongong growing, which will probably feed commuters into Sydney more than they already do.
Also note, Canberra kind of fits your description - a regional "town", servicing the government. And it's also very expensive. As in, recently reported to be the second most expensive place in the country to buy a house, after Sydney. I think our issues are far more political as you point out, so other fixes are just bandaids, but anything that impacts home prices will be unpopular with the dominant voter bloc.
The Goldfields Water Supply Scheme pumps water over 560 km from Perth to Kalgoorlie; Dubbo is only 380 km from Newcastle. If you were serious about turning Dubbo into the state capital, you would have to give serious thought to building a pipeline to pump water from the Hunter, and then Dubbo would only run out of water if Newcastle was running out of water. (You could also build a pipeline from Sydney to Dubbo, which is only about 20km further, but much more mountainous terrain in the way.)
> I do think we should decentralise, but it will likely look more like Newcastle and Wollongong growing
Newcastle and Wollongong aren't really that much cheaper than Sydney. They are coastal, and everyone wants to live on the coast; also, Wollongong has physical growth limitations due to the Illawarra Escarpment. There's a lot more land on the other side of the Great Dividing Range, and water supply issues could be addressed with sufficient investment in water supply infrastructure.
> Also note, Canberra kind of fits your description - a regional "town", servicing the government. And it's also very expensive. As in, recently reported to be the second most expensive place in the country to buy a house, after Sydney.
Canberra is in some ways Australia's version of Washington DC. Although, DC has a very different social history – e.g. DC has historically (but as of last census no longer) had an African-American majority; and, DC is physically a lot smaller than the ACT is. But, what I am really talking about is an Australian analogue of Sacramento, Albany, Springfield (Illinois), Salem (Oregon), Carson City (Nevada), etc – which is something Australia doesn't have.
All that said, Queanbeyan's median house price is >$50K cheaper than Canberra's, by some measures beneath the average of Australian capital cities. And it is only 20 minutes drive from Canberra. In Sydney or Melbourne, that's what many would call an inner/middle suburb.
The stats seem pretty similar here – 50% of 30-34 year olds owned their own home in 2021: https://www.housingdata.gov.au/visualisation/home-ownership/...
According to [1] relative monthly fertility rates for women drop from 1.0 at age 30 to 0.65 at age 35 to 0.1 at age 40.
If your society wants to raise birth rates, you can't rely on 35-40 year olds to do it.
[1] https://www.britishfertilitysociety.org.uk/fei/at-what-age-d...
Plenty of other commenters had already pointed out that fallacy of OP's argument, so I decided to take on the idea that homeownership rates have significantly changed instead.
Exactly....it'd be hilarious if figuring out this abstract phenomenon is the key to figuring out the object level phenomenon.
To be clear I agree that affordable home ownership is a big problem, but not being able to afford home ownership is a very different thing from not being able to afford housing, and substituting one concept with the other is just an intentionally dishonest way of muddying the waters of any discussion on the topic.
majority of those 66% are older generation who benefited dramatically on homes prices increase. New gen is priced out.
35yo still could catch low rate mortgages, and lower prices homes 10 years ago. Today's 20yo (new generation) is in very larger scrunity.
Also, you didn't support your numbers about age distribution with any kind of references.
Gen Z doesn't have a monopoly on spending their 20s in a scary financial situation. Let's see what the numbers look like in 10 years—if prior trends (the data I linked to above) are anything to go by, I expect them to be roughly the same as they always have been at about 66%+/-3%.
If you can figure out a way to afford the liability and it's important to you, great, otherwise it's sort of illogical.
It almost isn’t worth arguing about, though, because the reality is that society is ultimately made up of people that have kids. All the rationalizations in the world won’t change the basic facts of biology.
Inflation has made baby products really expensive (did I mention stagnant wages?), and this is before daycare, which can be cost as much as rent in some locales, unless you're willing to subject your child to informal daycares. None of that is consumerism.
No one should be surprised that a country with a threadbare social safety-net and inflation outpacing childcare costs experiences a fall in birthrate - this can be explained in market-dymamics terms
It's a liability if it's a liability. A consumerist liability is buying a brand new car with a loan if it seems like my income might disappear before the payments do. Not knowing how long you'll be able to keep paying rent in the place you've spent your entire adult life is just a logical consideration. Though people are obviously choosing to be consumers too, often it's just the basics that seem out of reach.
However, if you've always wanted kids and it's always been your biggest priority, and there's never been any contravening forces that would make you question that, and you've lucked out and found someone who's completely on board with that, and your income has been stable, and your expenses are manageable, and your parents are nearby and still together, then sure you're choosing to consoom over having kids.
A child would also be a liability for a monk.
I don't want to have kids because I lived through the "just suffer through poverty" experience and it's a great way to raise kids that have to support the psychiatry industry the rest of their lives. Poverty literally breaks a kid's brain, and you CANNOT hide money problems from your children.
That life is one "hey we didn't do good this quarter so you're being let go" away from happening for most of us. So yeah, a lot of us don't want kids.
Lower-income people within a country seem to have more kids in general: this is very much the case for the US. People with higher incomes and on average, then, more robust financial situations, are the ones more avoiding kids.
The US is, like most places, far richer than it has been historically, and this is even more dramatic globally: a generation and a half ago, most people lived in extreme poverty (<$2.47/day), today less than 10% do. But we see that as countries get richer, they have fewer kids. I don't think it's a good explanation that risk of poverty is what is usually preventing parents from having kids, even if they subjectively feel it is.
He has presented hours of thoughts on data spanning multiple decades from countries across the globe and comments identified correlations.
Education being highly correlated with reduced population growth is a data confirmed observation, and not a declaration of prime causation.
But then wonders what the drivers are.
And Finland's fertility rate has completely collapsed, to 1.32 children per woman in 2022.
As societies urbanize and become more educated, children become (economically speaking) a huge burden, not an asset, and that fundamental shift affects birthrates worldwide.
Perhaps just reminding would-be parents that if the educated and resilient stop reproducing, they are depriving the world of a thriving and resilient new generation. A clear directive that under-population is a growing concern and a few additional incentives for parents would go a long way too.
Taking a philosophical angle, why is it the "right" choice to serve our genes, the economy, or to create a younger generation to care for the elderly? It is not unethical to unburden oneself of those obligations today, but you can imagine a future where it is.
Also, living without children or even a partner at all has become significantly more viable in the past 40+ years or so. It wasn't until 1974 when women in the United States could unconditionally open bank accounts out of their free will: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equal_Credit_Opportunity_Act. To not marry and have children would've practically been a form of ostracization. So many people, especially women, "settled" into marriage and family life simply because there was no other option. I think the decline in birth rates is a fair tradeoff to forcing fewer people into a lifestyle they did not want which would inevitably result in broken families and broken kids. What society needs to figure out is how to decouple productivity from raw human headcount, as well as how to avert potential humanitarian disasters that may occur when the decoupling happens.
A lot of them are, actually. I'm Irish, we're having a housing (and general cost of living) crisis. I know Portugal and Germany are too.
I don't know about other countries in the EU regarding housing specifically but there's a block wide cost of living crisis going on right now. Life is hard for people in all kinds of ways because of covid, war, climate change.
Note: I'm not trying to claim any of this is the cause of declining birth rates, that's beyond my sphere of knowledge. The purpose of my comment is to note that cost of living issues are not unique to the US right now.
> Although the average number of lateral relatives varies across race and class groups in the U.S., the cousin decline is either imminent or already happening across all of them.
My suspicion is that once the standard of living reaches a certain baseline level (which e.g. even many "poor" people in the US hit) reproduction takes a back seat. This is clearly in part due to an increased availability of birth control and the ability for women to enter the workforce and make these choices for themselves, which wasn't even an option under more patriarchal societies.
I think there's something more subtle there, too. There's so much more to do now for young people in developed countries, even those of relatively modest economic means. This might manifest as furthering one's career, or in pursuit of hobbies, or in travel, or in consumption of entertainment products, or in higher education... or any number of ways. Child rearing takes many of these options off the table, or it curtails and constrains them severely.
It seems like having fewer children is a pretty reasonable response in a world that is more enjoyable and potentially personally rewarding than any has ever been before.
[0] https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2023/12/cousin-re...
Sure, one could move away from Stockholm into smaller towns up north, but then your career will suffer. Also not something most are willing to consider just as they've gotten a foothold in their respective careers.
The next couple of decades are going to be real interesting, and I don't mean that in a good way...
When you come from nothing its easier to give your kids a better future than you had.
Some animals don't breed in captivity. Some human populations also didn't breed because they were in captivity. Even though people have it better number wise, it's still possible to feel trapped.
2011 to 2020 ownership rate has fell from 82,6 to 73,9% in the general population, and from 69,3 to 36,1% in under 35yo. Also people is expending more than 40% of their salary to rent [0]
And those are numbers from 2020 (ownership) and 2022 (rental), but I guess that today, specially on big cities, that's way, way worse. I just checked my neighborhood prices (in Madrid) and, since late 2021 when I rented my current apartment, prices have raised +30%, and lots of posting are now for "temporary rentals" of less than one year. That's a model thought for touristic apartments that offer way less protection to the tenant (they can raise prices at will), less stability (they can kick you out no notice) and allows landlords to avoid housing rental laws (for repair, maintenance, etc.).
So it used to be "AirBnBs around me raise housing prices", and now it's "You can only rent AirBnBs".
0: https://www.bankinter.com/blog/finanzas-personales/porcentaje-espanoles-vivienda-propiedadRaising kids is hard work. Ideally you have them young and live close to your family so that you have grandparents to help with childcare.
But our society tells people to wait as long as possible to have kids, and to prioritize career over other things - so once people do have kids, if they ever do so, then often grandparents are too old or far away to fill that traditional role. So lots of people are stuck paying thousands a month for daycare.
Just one of many ways that our system finds innovative ways to extract money out of people for things that used to be free or part of being in a community.
I would bet this plays a large part - people today respect the difficulty in a way past parents previously did not. Birth rates are certainly declining but I would bet the rates of accidental infant/toddler death are down as well.
That said, I personally know parents that are just taunting SIDS with the way they ignore infant sleeping best practices even though they’ve read the books to know better.
Nowadays there's a widespread expectation that parents should organize activities, drive their kids' education, just be way more involved in their lives.
many families hire a live-in helper, who is typically a low-income migrant worker from a neighbouring country. due to space constraints only the most privileged can hire two or more. as it is with asian tradition, parents primarily involve themselves in the area of discipline and education, and everything else is left to the nannies. the low-income families who cannot afford a helper or the living space for a helper suffer from a lack of enforcing discipline or providing for a growing child and low-income children often grow up maladjusted to the modern working society.
singapore unfortunately, still suffers from a low replacement rate, so the foreign domestic worker (FDW, as it is known) policy while enough to move the dial away from the danger zone that is south korea, is still not enough to ensure singapore is growing comfortably. however, at this point i don't believe allowing
(the FDW policy is generous and broad-based enough to extend to working adults with elderly, which means that subsidies for domestic help pretty much extend to working adults through a significant part of their working life. families often qualify for significant subsidies taking care of multiple generations through several decades.)
However, some of the spaces created for the legal live-in helpers [I've seen in Hong Kong and Singapore] would be considered substandard in the US. I'm talking closet size rooms with no windows big enough for a single bed and a few shelves.
If the US would allow this domestic help and possibly the same rooms, child care would be much easier.
Issue with this now is how concentrated certain industries are. Here in the UK, if I want to work in software, you need to move to a handful of expensive cities. London, Oxford, Cambridge, maybe Bristol or Manchester. Maybe some others if you're happy in a non-software job. Certainly not the rural farming town I grew up in, or anywhere within hours of driving.
So people move away. And now I'm faced with either delaying kids so I can get reasonably set-up in a city where a 500sqft flat costs £300,000 or moving away from all my friends and maybe even further from my family to afford a house.
It's really not that hard. You just have to change expectations and lifestyle. I never thought of it as "work" per-se but rather an obligation and responsibility to people brought into the world. It's amazing really. It's probably not for everyone and if someone sees it the same way as doing actual work then maybe it isn't for them.
It’s work.
If I had a kid, I'm sure I'd love them, and derive joy from them, but I don't believe the trade off is worth it. Maybe I'll end up being wrong about that, but I'd rather grow old and regret not having kids than regret having them. I think people shouldn't have kids unless they are really sure they want to be a parent. Anything less sounds like a big mistake.
Anyhow, have you actually talked to your childless peers about this? Hopefully there are at least some with whom you feel comfortable bringing up this kind of topic, with people who will give you a thoughtful, non-judgmental answer. I think you might find that they all have a variety of reasons for not having kids, and money may not be a big factor.
The - natural - way - of - being - a - human!!!
Natural, like sleeping. Eating. Sure, sometimes kids stress you. But then, nature has made sure that you'll mostly remember the good moments. You don't have to be overly perfect to have kids. Just don't be an overly bad person and talk to them often. Whatever environment they get born in: they will be ok with it. You don't need to be grandiose. Do what you naturally can, what you enjoy. And they'll enjoy it.
Humans are made to adapt to having kids. Kids are made to adapt to non-perfect parents. Just avoid the obviously bad stuff and all is good. Your life is good. You looking back on your life will be good.
What if they prefer Instagram, Cycling and Reading Books rather than raising children? Why are you so concerned about other people's lifestyles? Are you going to pay their rent or help them with their chores?
I decided to have a child, and it was a conscious decision I made with my partner, fully aware that our previous lifestyle would be no more. Deciding not to have a child would have been equally as valid.
I find it funny that this discussion elicits so much passion from people that decided to have children. Do you need validation from other people to justify your own decisions?
Whenever I am asked about it, I say that you should not have children unless you are absolutely certain that you want a child in your life, and that your life is stable enough to accommodate one. The world sucks even in the best of times. To condemn someone to existence when their lives will be made more difficult is selfish and cruel.
What happened that after a few hundred thousand years of having families we suddendly need to be "absolutely certain" to have kids? Human nature is the EXACT other way round. What we currently see is an outgrow of pure hedonism. It kills societies (literally, at least in the sense of "no new life").
Concerning "being fully aware that our previous lifestyle would be no more": this in itself partly shows the problem. So our casual life choices are in such a way that it is completely uncompatible with having a family? Sure - when you're 20, you might not be ready. But do we, as a society, promote lifestyles that even when you're 30 are impossible to combine with having kids? Then maybe our lifestyle as a society is wrong, what we tell ourselves to be "good life" is wrong.
And then again... maybe we take having kids too seriously? I really can't say having missed out on much since having kids (and no, we have no nanny). We simply did the stuff people "fear". We went out for dinner together two weeks after our first one was born (together with the baby). And we repeated, until today. We went on those 10 hour flights. We explored foreign countries. We visit museums with modern art. We spent months abroad. Is it always easy? Nope. But it was, overall, not too different from the life before. Kids get used to stuff, parents get used to stuff. Most of us can do it if we let go of the instagrammy thought of having to be perfect. And this is how society always was and always will be.
EDIT: In the current medical climate where child mortality is very, very low, of course, as a society we CAN afford to have less kids overall. And as long there are a few people who LIKE to have 3 or more kids, we can afford to have some more people having no kids as all. I don't promote growing society ad infinitum. But having sub-replacement birth rates will NOT make our countries better for sure (and the economy is my very LAST concern). France 10-15 years ago can lead as an example with a healthy rate of births, wealth and personal freedom.
Do not over-think it. Just be careful to pick a partner who shares the same values and then get on with it.
The natural way of being a human for thousands of years was to hunt and gather, and then die before 40. But that didn't stop us from progressing past that point.
If kids stay one year olds forever no one would have kids, you'd go insane. But that's not the case.
I’d settle for a much higher tax rate for the voluntarily childless to very inadequately offset the lack of contributing to the next generation. Probably the best way to implement this is that the child tax credit should be much bigger.
This argument cuts both ways.
Glory to our future!
After reading your post, I’ve reached the same conclusion regarding your opinions.
If most Homo sapiens had the same attitude, the species would have gone extinct since forever lol.
You can have any personal goal you'd like, but from the evolution perspective, the purpose of any living organism is to survive and to reproduce, hence preserving its own species. That's why.
And maybe Earth would be a better place.
And these are all pretty weak reasons — people with kids do all of the things you’ve mentioned.
Sure .. although some of those children will be older than the people they look after.
This morning my father delivered "Meals on Wheels" to 20 other elderly locals.
He was born in 1935 and will be 90 next year.
There are many older people, not all of whom immediately become bed and wheel chair bound at 60.
Presumably OP is in US and is not planning to have any kind of state pension or socialized healthcare when they are old?
That said, while they do require some sacrifice, at least for myself -- it has been by far the most enjoyable part of my life so far.
Obviously someone making that much could afford to have kids, but assuming tech hub (e.g. SF) cost of living, it’ll take a few years of salary like that to accrue enough financial padding to be certain that a chain of unfortunate events won’t put them out on the street once the cost of raising a family is added in.
This is why you see a lot of high earners waiting until the last second to have kids, if they do. Financial security like you have while making good money without kids is hard to let go of.
That's an underappreciated point. Kids in daycares and kindergartens get sick a lot. Those places are pathogen swapping grounds. Especially early on, you may have your kid 2 weeks in, 2 weeks out on average. And the "on average" is a killer, too - you can't schedule when your kid will get sick, so you're effectively on-call all the time anyway, and have to have a job compatible with you just taking off in the middle of the day and getting a day or two of leave, on the spot, at random.
Most coworkers with kids I've spoken with complain about costs of daycare, babysitting, and Montessori schools. We pay for none of those as they aren't necessary. If even one parent works from home, it's a solved problem. If both do not, evaluate the costs. Many times, you actually lose money by both parents working.
I have a child and we do fine on one salary. Would love more, but either my aging body or god one has determined that would be decidedly more expensive.
ETA: Anyone on the fence who wants a kid - go for it. Don't try to keep up with the Jones' or try to budget them out. Kids are awesome. They're little blank slates who don't need much more than love, attention, education, and sustainance. If you keep waiting for when it's right, it'll never happen.
Yet the message sent to potential parents is so far from that, I won't blame people foregoing having kids.
There's a strong movement pushing for smaller governments and less public and social expenses in general, that directly makes it worse (kids are sick all the time, they need schools, public transportation, libraries, public services in general). You're arguing for giving up on daycare when so many companies are pushing back to office rules.
To your point, if a couple is at the point they couldn't afford lattes if they had kids, I don't see them properly raising that kid without a ton of aid, and looking at the comments we usually have here, most will point the finger at them for not being responsible enough instead.
For many, having free time replaced by family time with their kids is great and all they need/want.
"Selfishly" from the outside perspective, it makes all my friends with kids flakey, late, and one-track.
It takes a huge effort not only to avoid the consumerism side of children, but also to try and maintain your individuality.
The most successful parents I know in this regard are also conveniently the wealthiest.
I do think 'selfish' was too broad and strong of a claim. I was focusing solely on the thought of people who make way more than enough money claiming a child would ruin their lifestyle/break them. In reality, there are tons of other reasons a person may not want a child that aren't selfish at all.
If you would have told me people choose not to have kids because they already feel they are contributing to bettering the world through some other mission, it would make sense. If you're a doctor or scientist or even a nurse or something where you feel your career is a calling, I can understand feeling stretched thin enough to not want to have kids.
But that's not what many of my anti-kid friends say. They basically say it would interfere with their netlfix watching, video game playing, luxury travel lifestyle.
It's not that kids would take away from other meaningful ways of connecting to humanity, its' that they'd get in the way of their consumption.
Who will buy your products and services 20-30 years from today?
If the question sounds ridiculous, trust me it isn't. You can look at demographics of China, or if you don't particularly care about that but care about finance, long duration government debt.
Won't someone think of the poor capitalists!
That's a sad excuse to bring a life into this world. A world that suffers from the side effects of capitalism, ironically.
Many (most?) people definitely don't have the luxury of having a parent stay at home.
I agree. Having kids in incredibly rewarding and fulfilling.
Would you have another kid if you knew it would make your current kid significantly worse off? It's the same argument as that, except that you count the spouse as part of the equation.
If you make conscious choices to keep having kids even though
1. You don't need them to help on your farm or to support you in your old age, 2. Each additional kid further immiserates your spouse and the older kids
aren't you the selfish one?
There is more to life than being a parent.
If you're in the minority, maybe you're the one who's out of touch?
It's not that they can't afford having children—many of those who are less fortunate than them still have children. It's just that they think the cost of raising children, which likely affects their current lifestyle, is not worth it.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/241530/birth-rate-by-fam...
I’m not saying it’s easy, but it’s possible. It’s a matter of priorities. I’m glad my parents made the hard choices they did.
There is more to do in a life than work and raise children.
I similarly grew up at the poverty line as my parents got crushed by double-digit inflation. Based on personal experience, I didnt want the same for my kids -- so we have 2 though we'd love to have 4.
Why risk one medical bill ruining everyone’s life?
They aren’t that cute.
And I mean poorer in terms of actual living conditions on the ground.
Unfortunately I have shorted the children market by not breeding when younger. What's the appropriate way to invest in 2.5 children? I presume they are a very illiquid investment.
The other problem with cousins is that brothers and sisters move to distant locations so cousins are often inaccessible even if you have them.
or just old enough to harvest whatever it is you're farming
more like 5-10 years
In those places, the older kids help raise the younger ones, and can also help the parents with their labor/begging/crime/prostitution.
Certainly that does sometimes translate into not having babies at all.
The primary reason for low birth rate is availability of cheap and effective contraception (and cultural changes that led to most people being ok with using it). Change my mind.
The real questions here is why people given opportunity to not have children jumps at it.
My personal opinion is that children are not that great - too much responsibility, too little support from society, too many of them behaves like little psychopaths most of the time (this can be probably cured with strict discipline but stress free upbringing seems to be in vogue). And the things that children "give" in return are rather questionable (especially for people with low emotional needs like me)
Most people probably like the "idea" of children but the practical side of having them is mostly boring ungrateful work that takes greater part of you life away and there is inherent risk that it can never end (I do not understand how anyone would not take into considetation the consequnce of having special needs child)
Point taken, but that opportunity was not there until about 60 years ago. I don't think people unwillingness to have kids changed, they didn't have much real choice back then. Well, their willingness to have sex was stronger than willingness to not have kids ;)
BTW: 2.1 is still quite good. Here in Poland (a formerly pretty much catholic country), we are at birthrate = 1.3 now and still going down.
Personally, I think it is that expectations rise, both for your own life and for that of children once your purchasing power increases. It's harder to give it up than to not have it in the first place. Having children increasingly has to compete with a lot of other rewarding things that require far less commitment and far lower costs.
The same great-great grandfathers second wife likewise "lost" a brother that was almost certainly taken into care while she and her older brother were left to fend for themselves as teenagers after being orphaned when their father died after having cared for them alone for a few years after their mother died.
My grandmother's mother - married to one of the children of the same great-great grandparents - lost contact with her siblings in her early teens when they were all taken into care when her dad proved unable to deal following her mother's death. While she found a couple of her sisters again later, her dads failure to cope means even now we've not been able to figure out what happened to the rest of her siblings.
While divorce is more common, abandonment, be it intentional due to the difficulty of obtaining a divorce, or unintentional (poverty, disease, death), or absence for noble reasons (e.g. going off to earn money to support the family) still left a lot of people raising children on their own in often awful conditions.
There's a marked increase in the number of situations like that for each generation further back in my family tree among the people I can track.
Folks often start out heavily in debt, then they must work competitive jobs which grow more competitive over time to tread water. The combination of sleep debt, social isolation, and general anxiety of going bust is a subjective difficulty which belies the relative comfort of modern life.
This is born out at least partially in the data where "occupational burnout" affects some 65% of employees in the last year.
https://www.supplychaindive.com/news/employee-burnout-2023-p....
E.g. my grandmothers half brother worked in New York Harbour from he was 9. Most of her uncles and aunts worked from early teens, and often moved from home at that age because their parents couldn't afford to keep providing for them and needed them to get employment. Often in backbreaking work that ruined their bodies, and in some cases killed them young.
People might well have a subjective experience that they have it tough, but if so we're failing in teaching people history.
I haven’t helped to provide any cousins, so they don’t have any. Money is not the constraint for me. I’d probably have a better chance of having kids if I had less money, as it would imply I focused on building relationships instead of a career.
Lots of people without a lot of money have kids. They value having a family over other things and make it work.
I grew up poor and people never "thought" about affording kids, just had them and figured things out along the way.
It seems it's a self-filtering mechanism in the upper classes, that put all kinds stops before having kids (e.g not ready/mature enough yet, not financially stable, etc) and usually end up having one at most.
So while yes, affordability has rarely been a concern, perhaps people are more educated now and realize what having kids would mean for their life, and how much worse it would make their life? And instead of living life for the purpose of being some child making vessels, they want to actually ... I don't know, LIVE?
Rich world problems, though. In poorer countries and our poorer past, you'd have been working alongside her as she wouldn't be able to do it all on her own. Poor people have little choice but to bring children into this world. They would not survive without them. Opting to not have children is a luxury.
> perhaps people are more educated now
Or less educated. We seem to have come to believe that children are porcelain dolls that will break if they have to lift the lightest of fingers before they turn 18, even though there is no basis to that. It's just a cultural display.
Very much so.
Sadly, hand-in-hand with some strange Peter Pan syndrome of many adults remaining eternal children or what's worse, outright demonizing having children, arguably one of the most beautiful things you could ever achieve in life.
I'm deeply grateful to have been given the chance to be alive and for all those experiences as a child.
> And instead of living life for the purpose of being some child making vessels
someone needs therapy...
Also, the logical consequence of your position is all poor people should be banned from procreating, trickling off to enormous chunks of third world countries.
Bizarre position.
You know what they have in common? They're all religious.
The lack of children is a cultural thing based on how much you value kids over things. That's basically it. Those who value children have them. Those who don't don't. I don't understand why this is controversial. Look at Israel.
Ok, but the poster is baffled not about why people aren't having kids, but about why his coworkers aren't having kids. Now since HN is out of touch they poster is probably just as out of touch and you would assume that they worked with people as financially out of touch as they are - therefore:
Among people making enough money presumably to afford having kids why no kids?
And yet somehow places I visit (which lately has been between NY, Ohio, and Florida) has young families living in houses. I am not saying there's no challenge but your comment would imply that these houses are standing empty because nobody can afford them when in reality each one coming to the market is immediately snapped up mainly by families looking to expland.
But this is always the case... ~20 years ago when I bought my first home, interest rates were close to 8%, it took a big chunk of my income, and we had to move way out to the sticks in order to afford anything. People are always having to make compromises if they want to buy a home, save for retirement, start a business, have kids, and all the other high-risk things that people want to do in order to seek a better life. Yes house prices are higher today than they were 20 years ago -- and incomes aren't necessarily better -- but if someone absolutely wants to buy a home, there will be options and tradeoffs.
There are many towns and cities in the US with extremely low housing costs. Most of West Virginia is a good example as well.
The reason Shreveport always comes to mind when I think of cheap housing is because I always remember that John Carmack and John Romero owned a little lakehouse there and that's where they lived while making Doom.
When Bobby Jindal was running for governor the first time against Kathleen Blanco in 2004, she put out an ad that featured the nappiest, hair sticking up picture of Jindal you could possibly imagine and coupled it with the tagline “Wake up Louisiana, before it’s too late” (implied subtext: and you elect a black man)
I do hear she regretted this on her deathbed stricken with cancer. But more to the point, a friend of mine was at a polling place in Shreveport during that election and witnessed a fistfight between two voters in the parking lot over whether Bobby Jindal was in fact, black or not.
To your point, if more progressive people were willing to live outside of coastal cities, they could affect social change in places like Louisiana.
What it sounds like you are saying is that racism makes towns/cities outside of the coastal areas unlivable. That is simply not true.
I'm pretty sure engineers can still afford kids, it's just very time consuming and you'll have to settle for less in term of vacations/neighbourhood/purchasing power/carrier/&c.
But yes, most people can't afford having kids that's a given
It’s 100% a cultural norm issue. I was raised in Canada but have lived in Israel for the past 20 years. The vast majority of my Canadian friends have no kids, and the ones that do have at most 2. In Israel, all of my friends (secular/non-religious) have kids, usually 3 or more. The idea of whether you can or can’t afford a kid does not cross people’s minds. You get married, and you have a kid. If you don’t get married, and you can, you still have a kid. It’s just what’s expected. I have numerous friends who are single and made the choice to have multiple kids via donors. When it is the norm in society, it’s just something you do. I am sure social pressure has an effect. You see your friends having kids, then you want to have kids too, and then your kids become friends with your friends’ kids, and it expands from there.
Financially, life in Canada is much easier as a parent when compared to here, but socially, life in Canada as a parent is much harder when I compare it to here.
I have 3 kids - for me personally it was the best choice I have ever made, but I accept that I no longer have my own life. I live for my kids and I wouldn’t change it for the world. It probably helps that most of my friends are in the same situation.
If you're referring to people of child bearing age though the rate is lower.
My friend with the most kids (5) lives in the Midwest had a household income of well under $100k/yr when kid #5 was born (he's a cop, she worked irregular hours because 5 kids). Now that they are older, she might work more and he has been promoted, so it's possible they are above $100k/yr, but if so, it's not much above that.
Prior to kids, they bought a fixer-upper and made it livable over the course of several months of days-off. Granted he had several advantages here: he worked construction jobs to pay his way through college (in-state tuition was laughably low in the early aughts), and his father was a finish carpenter, so the know-how was available, and he graduated with less than $10k in debt.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/241530/birth-rate-by-fam...
People complaining about money and kids and meanwhile their Great Depression era ancestors are looking at them with unending shame.
https://apnews.com/article/affordable-housing-rent-eviction-...
Completely idiotic approach of cargo-culting previous generations without a pinch of logic. There are highly developed countries (as in overall higher than US, say here in Switzerland) where this mindset is absent long term. Thus most population lives in rent for whole life, nobody is bothered by it, and generally Swiss are among the happiest nations in the world, consistently.
That isn't saying child births here are booming, in contrary, but that has absolutely nothing to do with home ownership and being priced out from owning homes. People simply grok how difficult raising even 2 children well is (as in by far the most difficult project you will ever do, spread over 20-25 years of consistent draining efforts with no guarantee of success even with best effort, while you also need to put some good effort into marriage too), society not really helping that much these days, and decide against it.
Don't blame them, as Bill Burr says there are simply too many people. Rather lets lift whole mankind from poverty and the topic of population explosion will vanish on its own.
Let’s also assume a hypothetical 30 year old buying a house in 2023. 30 year fixed rate is 7.00%. The median US home price is $417,700. Assume 20% down.
Looking up inflation, a 1981 dollar is 3.37 2023 dollars.
The 1981 homebuyer pays 57% of the 2023 homebuyer’s down payment, and only pays 19% more each month. And that’s cherry-picking the absolute worst time to buy for that generation.
Down payment 1981 (inflation adj.): $47,440.60
Monthly payment 1981 (inflation adj.): $2,650.50
Down payment 2023: $83,540.00
Monthly payment 2023: $2,223.17
Everyone online complains about wealth being the reason they won't have kids, but it's not the case. Once people make one step up in their career, they want to make another and kids become an impediment. No matter the country, you'll find higher numbers of kids when people (and especially women) are deprived of education and work opportunities. Then you also have eccentric billionaires that have a dozen kids, but they're statistically irrelevant.
If you want families to have kids, cut wages, don't let women work, cram them into undesirable homes, and most importantly, ignore people who say they'd have kids if only they made a little more money. They won't stop once they get a taste of better living. They'll be very stressed out people, but they'll have kids.
Owning a house isn't a pre-req to have a kid
* Life is a hellhole. My children must witness my (and my hypothetical spouse's) deaths; witnessing death is a fucking hellish experience, I motherfucking do not desire to force that experience on anyone let alone my children.
* The world will continue. The Earth has spun and travelled around the Sun for time immemorial and will continue to do so regardless of any decisions I make. My existence and any existences I might create are utterly and absolutely pointless in the grand scale of the universe.
* The human world (in contrast with the world at large) is a fucking hellhole. I have absolutely no desire to bring new life into this human world and tell them, with a straight face: "Welcome! This is hell I brought you into. You will suffer many tragedies, you will be wronged so many times you won't bother keeping count. No, I can't help you. Have fun." What the hell am I, a sadist?
* I have many other activities, dreams, and goals I wish to accomplish that do not and perhaps even run completely counter to having children. Life is short: I only have so many hours left and none I can or will spare for offspring.
* I find the idea of compromising my life with a spouse to be a violation of fundamental human rights. Who am I to demand my spouse to bow to my wishes? Who is my spouse for them to demand I bow to their wishes? The answer is noone: I and any hypothetical spouse are noone. All men are born equal, with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Thusly, I swore to never marry and (also consequently) never have children. I am far too busy with my own life, kindly and sincerely please fuck off.
So yes, I can afford children. Many children. No, I won't have children. I can't wait until I am automagically ejected from the marriage market I never even wanted to be a part of.
I don't even think you are in a bad place from a mental health standpoint. Hell, I bet you would be a fun person to have a couple of beers with.
I have a child by the way. Not a sadist, but in my hubris I imagine I am able to raise a child and protect him or her from a some of life's misery, and provide an interesting living experience.
In a sense, in my hubris, I am tempting fate, in hope fate doesn't turn its ugly head in my direction and decides to bite me in the ass.
Have a nice day, kind sir.
Consider this: despite life being "a hellhole full of tragedies", hopefully you don't resent your parents for giving birth to you?
My view is that life is both: full of tragedies and hardship, yes. But also full of wonders and joy. It's a full package, you seem to be only seeing one half of it. And to be clear: children are the same. A package, with joy and love and laugther but also hard work and tiredness and effort.
Hopefully this comment does not sound condescending to you, I am really trying to help. Have a very nice day.
Some of the tragedies are also guaranteed and unavoidable from the moment you are born.
My conclusion is the result of a long internal deliberation fraught with weighing the countless factors which compose life. This conclusion is mine and mine alone and everyone else should draw forth their own rather than take mine as gospel or inspiration.
I simply do not value life highly enough to be worth forcing another life into experiencing it. I am perfectly happy to have my bloodline and heritage end with my death; it is not worth continuing whatever the arguments put forth.
> Some of the tragedies are also guaranteed and unavoidable from the moment you are born.
That's a grim perspective of life. For your personal life, do you think that the happiness you've experienced worth the tragedies that have happened to you? If so, don't you want another human (your child) to experience the same?
If it's not worth it, what makes you keep on living, then? (Assuming that you do.) Or do you wish that you had never been born in the first place?
Also, what is it with accusations of my mental state? It takes a sound mind to derive a logical conclusion to the question of having children or not. If you're automatically assuming "people should have children" as a "universal fact", I would question your mental state because you are relinquishing your ability to think.
I've said elsewhere before that humans aren't special, but if there is anything that could set humans apart from other lifeforms it is our seemingly special ability to question and in some cases defy instincts and so-called "universal facts".
That's nonsense. Poor people always had kids, still do. What changed is that people aren't able anymore to make sacrifices, huge in time and money for kids.
I am not saying there that it is wrong to give women such freedom, nor that it is right. Maybe there is an alternative cultural setting where women emancipation doesn't bear such consequences. Maybe not. Maybe it is an unavoidable result of our societal progress. Or maybe a flourishing of the society cannot, and shouldn't, be measured in births-to-deaths ratio.
These things I consider unknown. But the cause of the current state of affairs is as stated.
This is incoherent; children are not expensive.