We Expect 300k Fewer Births Than Usual This Year in the US

If you aren't from the neighbourhood for the first group, you're not trusted, and if you don't just know certain things, you aren't trusted by the second, because each group quietly assumes you're really part of the other. It's what we used to call class, and that's what I meant by being alien to each other.

There are exceptions. The most interesting ones are religious communities. Few people who belong to a church would accept being called poor no matter what their income was, and religious people with middle class jobs have lots of kids as well.

The other anomaly is the new institutional who have the iron stability of things like academic tenure, teachers unions, municipal and state employees, who only receive that stability at an age just as their fertility starts to wane, and usually after sacrificing it to get there.

It would be hard to argue that public policy has been anything but anti-natal for the last 50 years.

It's one thing to live in a city, work for awhile to bank up capital, and then move somewhere with a low COL area to live comfortably with some supplemental income from the region with knowledge of that nest egg if investments you currently have.

It's an entirely different story to live in such an and accumulate enough capital to purchase a home. Often, jobs are few and far between that are competitive, even after adjusting for COL. Employers in these areas often have less competition for positions and therefor have more leverage. Acquiring debt in these areas when you start your career could make it difficult to climb out of. Its not true with all positions. A lot of healthcare positions can pay better in these areas due to what are essentially government subsidies through medicare/medicaid. You'll occasionally have some industrial organization doing specialized work people with advanced degrees can prosper in but they need to strategically target these areas.

We are still at risk of nuclear destruction. Not only are the old weapons still around but we are making new ones for some crazy reason. (Check the Doomsday Clock, I'm not the only person who has noticed that atomic war is still threatening this planet.)

You have to take the long view: For approximately a million years we lived in very stable societies (as judged by the artifacts and art left behind.) In fact the people of Sentinel Island and some other places still live this way.

Very recently, since roughly 10k to 15k ago, we started doing agriculture and cities. Since then things have been rough: wars, famines, societies collapsing, etc.

Despite that, in the last 400-500 years, we have developed science and technology, which has increased and accelerated civilization but not stabilized it.

Now of course some people have had it pretty good for, say, the last century or so (I date it from the ready availability of hot and cold running water in the tub. If you can take a hot bath you're ahead of the game, IMO.)

And that's great! And more and more people are getting in on that, which is also great!

But if you want to say, as you did, that "Pretty much every single generation other than your parents (assuming you’re 25-40) had a tougher time and lived in a world with a more uncertain future. Every generation, going back millions of years." that's wrong. It's only going back a few thousands of years, at most, and then only for a small fraction of the people on Earth.

That's before the problem that luxury the few are enjoying is bought at the cost of the life or our whole planet! Is it really so great after all if some people get to live well for a generation or two but then everybody (that survives) has to live in post-apocalyptic hell?

Sentinel Island will be destroyed by the rising ocean in a few decades or so. The folks that have lived there for some 40,000 years will die or be forced to migrate. That's on us, not them.