https://twitter.com/juutsid/status/1720518455458214044
tl;dr: millennials are afraid of failure.
I wouldn’t even put it on poverty, because large population booms have happened under impoverished conditions elsewhere without issue.
But there’s a huge social taboo against pregnancy at virtually any age. Children are treated like luxuries. They’re enormously expensive to have and to raise, and everything about childhood is commodified to shit. Add to that how people are all terrified of one another. Men are told to put their prospective spouses on a pedestal, so they’ve all got to be supermodels with PhDs and rich parents. Women are inundated with the grossest men imaginable in dating markets that reward you for being an annoying creep. Everyone is told to hate one another constantly by a media apparatus that profits off your alienation.
We also seem to absolutely hate kids, in this modern moment. They’re constantly presented as violent, parasitic, gross, vulgar monsters.
So much of this is just mass media bombarding us with bad advice and bigoted worldviews. How is anyone supposed to procreate under these conditions?
I wonder what the correlation is to those previous booms vs now when medical bills for child delivery(like all medical bills) are higher than ever? I’ve done no research but I’m pretty sure it’s more expensive than ever just creating a kid. (USA based observation)
If you want ANY hopium for the US.
Whole Washington is doing some good work.
The path to victory is in the west coast, lads.
Ngl I think it’s selfish and cruel to the child to have a child in the current world. Why the fuck would I have a kid as I’m facing down a planet that may not be inhabitable in 10-20 years, in a dying empire that limps closer to collapse every day. Where they’ll grow up in fear of getting shot or permanently disabled by covid just to go to school.
And that’s if I could afford to take care of kids in the first place, when I can barely afford to give myself a decent standard of living.
In order to convince me to have a child I’d need the following: Free child care, free healthcare, triple my current wage, a house in a walkable area because kids can’t drive and thus shouldn’t be in car dominated areas, gun control, a better education system, and Climate Stalin.
Strongly influential on Geoff & Wainwright’s Climate Mao, presumably.
The appeal of Climate Mao to radical critics of capitalism continues to strike us. Since it is clear to them that the capitalist nation-state has proven an irremediable obstacle to climate action, let alone anything approaching climate justice, the appeal of Climate Mao is almost visceral.
Feels like “Most people are poor as shit” is a pretty good indicator. No need to write a whole article about it.
outside of famine/war conditions, birth rates have historically been (much) higher among people (much) poorer than most americans. I think the difference is more that social support structures are weak, “standard of living” expectations are high, education is both expensive and necessary, and contraception/abortion are widely available and relatively destigmatized
People are poor but if you are poor and have kids there is a huge stigma attached to it if you were raised middle and upper middle class.
Yeah this is a huge part of it. Boomers were able to give their kids good lives. Millennial can’t even give their kids the same standard they have. People want to give their kids a better life than they had, but this is impossible without a house and a yard and extra money for game consoles and extracurricular and playmates and all the shit that was taken for granted in a 90s childhood.
hm the fed’s survey of consumer finances says the median household wealth in the us is $192,900 as of 2023 and that seems pretty high
Fewer people are pairing off as couples, too. Nobody has time for a social life when they’re juggling multiple jobs, there’s no Third Places, all the social media and dating apps suck, people are more alienated from one another than ever, and to top it off absolutely everything is getting ridiculously expensive. If people don’t have a person to fuck and a place to fuck and the energy to fuck they’re not gonna fuck, and that’s step one of having kids.
The other factor here is that the main popular entertainment within the imperial core countries is television and videogames which are distinctly antisocial entertainment forms that do not offer opportunities for bonding. These aren’t non-existent elsewhere but they’re less dominant.
I have a better answer:
