991–1000 of 1001 posts
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It’s literally the only purpose of life to pass on our genetics to our offsprings in a Darwinian sense.
Please don't post the same sentence 3 times in one thread.
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> Many of our child-free friends are going to go through a lot of loneliness when they're old I've seen this "kids are insurance against loneliness" logic repeated often, but I don't believe this bares out in reality. I personally know plenty of child-free older couples who remain quite happy and social. I also know plenty of parents whose kids don't speak to them anymore or whose children have lives on the other sid…
So why do you have children? Can't synthesize a reason?
and life is beautiful.
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It's just hard now. Before I had kids I had a network of friends and had a great social life. Now it's just me and my wife. If I want more friends I'll have to have more kids I guess? I have 4 now. One (my first) is severely autistic. Financially the cost? I pay about 6,000 a month in daycare. 2k a month in healthcare expenses. Then community wise. Every time I've gone to take them to the movies, or to a restaurant o…
> It's just hard now. Before I had kids I had a network of friends and had a great social life. Now it's just me and my wife. If I want more friends I'll have to have more kids I guess? I have 4 now. One (my first) is severely autistic. Maybe this disappointment is at least a bidirectional thing?! For me it's quite hard to find somebody in my contact list who has children today AND did not turn into a mostly pointles…
really depends on what you call friends. i am not very social and have very few friends (i don't have a "contact list"), but these are strong friendships.
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There might be a confounder though, with the causality working backwards. Rural housing is way cheaper than urban housing. Urban cultural offering is way more lively than rural cultural offering. If you want kids you need space, and have no time for fun, so you optimize. You stop paying for cultural offering you don't need, and opt for cheaping housing you do need. Doesn't mean that urban/rural life makes you have ch…
From my observations, its more the friends that never left rural village we grew up in that have children. My urban friends don't really have children maybe because urban life i stressed but you also have so much stuff to do so maybe kids isn't really a thing one think about, it's more about building up a network.
For me it's different. For one it's like you said: friends that never left the rural areas have kids more often.
But also friends that I grew up with in urban environments, left to rural environments around the time of having kids. Those that didn't, stayed.
It seems that those who preferred to spend more for the cultural offering of the city stayed and optimised their time to enjoy that cultural offering by not having kids (bars, cafes, museums, hobbies, sports, travel, career).
While those that preferred family life, chose to optimize for that by moving to a place where housing was more affordable, allowing less time spent on career, more time spent on family.
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> Few women want to have kids. I'm using an app right now I'm on an app where you can discuss wedding dresses and most women are interested in having children! I'm joking of course. But a dating app embedded in hookup culture isn't a representative sample of women.
Not all dating apps are focused on hookup culture. Besides, that's how people match these days. If you say the culprit is hookup culture, then most people are into that culture and don't want kids.
No, what I'm saying is that an app to hook up isn't representative.
Neither me nor the women I've dated have ever been on dating apps, yet we're together and want kids. We're not in your sample of potential app users. Neither are my parents who had kids. Or virtually every parent who is in a relationship with kids. None of them are in your sample of potential app users.
Yet everyone who doesn't want kids and wants to date, is possibly in your sample of potential app users.
It should be obvious what type of user is likely to join this app, and what type of user isn't. Far more people join for a hookup than for a relationship.
Even if 50% of members join to find a partner on the app to have kids, and 50% just want a hook-up, the former leave as soon as they're successful, leaving the latter group. By definition you're not expected to find a large pool of people on there who want a partner and kids, compared to the number of people who just want short-term hookups.
So are the people you see on this app representative of society? No.
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Please don't post the same sentence 3 times in one thread.
Noted for next time. What are your thoughts on the subject matter while you are here?
In principle I agree, in a darwinian sense the purpose is to pass on genetics. That's not really a matter of opinion I'd say, although perhaps I'd have chosen a different word than 'purpose', I tend to agree.
But what's the point of saying that? What larger point are you making? If I say water is wet, sure you'll agree, but why did I mention it in the first place? I didn't understand your post in that sense yet, perhaps you can expand.
W.r.t. the darwinian 'purpose' though: I also agree with some posters in this thread noting accurately that our darwinian sexual drive can be satisfied without passing on genes. (ample birth control & pornification of just about any sexual niche you can imagine). So while our sexual urges are to support passing on genetics, the world around us can pacify that urge to the point it's satisfied without passing on your genetics.
As such our darwinian instincts aren't effective in the same way as they used to be. Plenty of men are satisfying many of their urges, ultimately dying childless, much more so than in the past.
Second, plenty of parents satisfy their urges with 1 or 2 children instead of 8 in the past, insufficient for replacement-levels, but sufficient to pass on genes.
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Agreed. By just about every measure, we're much better off than the past, yet have fewer kids. Statistics have supported this correlation (richer -> fewer kids) for a century, across the board around the worldwide, yet people often still get the causality exactly backwards: it's too expensive to have kids. Real median incomes have risen, decade after decade. And because of this, consumption in key categories has impr…
> The cost of kids isn't unaffordable per se Deopends on country and social support Id say? In western EU countries, parental-costs are estimated to 180.000 - 200.000 EUR per head that parents will pay for the first 25 years.
That's the whole point in these affordability discussions.
Take homes, We often speak of homes being so expensive, $1m average in Silicon Valley or whatever. That's not because it's unaffordable, but precisely because for the people who bought these homes, they were able to afford $1m or whatever the number is. If people there could only afford $500k, they'd be 500k.
If it's 200k it's because that's what we can and believe should spend. And that's completely different from the past, when we could spend less, and decided we should spend less. My grandparents generation for example who had 5-10 kids certainly wasn't spending 1-2m on their children.
Fact is that median income has gone way up, while children per person went way down. We thus have more to spend per child, we can afford MORE, to spend more. And the fact that we do (evidenced by the 200k per child figure), is not evidence of unaffordability, to the contrary!
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Female/leftist projection at its finest. There is no single group more entitled than the AWFL.
There's a book about male domestic violence perpetrators which you really ought to read. It's called "Why Does He Do That?". Author is Bancroft. The vast majority of men in the US are not abusers. But he describes a degree of entitlement to women -- their bodies and minds -- that, in my decades of clinical experience with families and couples, applies to most men in our culture. It's a little parable: > Once upon a t…
Sure, women having to deal with a few "entitled" "predators" sucks and we should do something about that but the vast majority of men have no such entitlement - although obviously this is different in the context of a marriage.
There have always been certain rights granted to and duties expected from men and women. Leftism and feminism have weakened the expectations placed on women (and to a lesser extent men) and now the scales are unbalanced.
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No, they don't. That's the UN prediction, because they assume that somehow, magically, all countries below replacement will simultaneously, near-instantly increase in fertility rate by huge amounts over the next couple of years. Look at the graphs, they're nonsensical. If you look at the actual trends of those rates, peak population is ~2050, maybe sooner.
> near-instantly increase in fertility rate by huge amounts over the next couple of years Nothing like this on Wikipedia. Do you have a better link? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_population_projections