• A_Random_Idiot@lemmy.world
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    11 months ago

    they arent choosing it.

    They are being forced into it because its the only fucking way to have a chance at NOT being homeless and crippled.

    • TK420@lemmy.world
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      11 months ago

      Oh no, make no mistake, I chose it.

      However, even if I wanted them, how the fuck does one even afford them?

    • Plopp@lemmy.world
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      11 months ago

      Don’t get it twisted, many of us absolutely chose to not have kids because we don’t want them.

      • ANGRY_MAPLE@sh.itjust.works
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        11 months ago

        You can both be right, you know. Many of us also agree with what this person was saying.

        I used to want kids. I will refuse to have kids unless I can afford them, and until I can GUARANTEE that their human rights won’t be stripped away by the whims of stupid people who are completely disconnected from reality. I won’t bring a new life into a world that’s rushing towards climate oblivion, either.

        I’ll sterilize myself before I’m ever forced to have kids.

        • Krauerking@lemy.lol
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          11 months ago

          And there is part of the problem in the eyes of those with power… That thought that you have a choice in sterility. A choice to not have kids didn’t used to exist and you attempting to keep warm and have some pleasure basically guaranteed that you would have more eventually. So that must be stripped in order for you to continue the cycle of having kids not by choice and add to the population that gets fucked over.

        • Plopp@lemmy.world
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          11 months ago

          OP: everyone in group x does y

          Me: not everyone

          You: you’re both right - not everyone

          ?

      • Ataraxia@sh.itjust.works
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        11 months ago

        Agreed. These people are trying to leverage something many of us absolutely aren’t interested in to push for necessities such as fixing inflation, universal Healthcare etc. Except that if those things were fixed it wouldn’t change the birth rate much at all. That’s why Republicans are forcing people to be breeding machines. Educated well off people know better to engage in an activity that is detrimental to their physical and mental health. And making a human means you’re responsible for them until you or they die. That’s the biggest mistake people make. They make a human, then wash their hands of then.

  • Daft_ish@lemmy.world
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    11 months ago

    Less of a choice and more of a survival tactic. Plus, my foregone children would thank me.

    • Rediphile@lemmy.ca
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      11 months ago

      Those with higher income levels are the ones deciding to have less kids, whereas those with the lowest incomes are the ones having more. Source

      If people are being forced into not having children for economic reasons, wouldn’t it be the opposite?

      But I don’t disagree about it being in the best interest of my future children not to exist with the way things are heading lol.

      • Fedizen@lemmy.world
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        11 months ago

        If having kids causes you to be poorer what would the results look like?

        The reality is that the more kids you have the worse you are at capitalism: You can’t work as much, you can’t take on more demanding jobs and you’ll make life choices that are less lucrative to care for the kids.

        • afraid_of_zombies@lemmy.world
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          11 months ago

          Yeah but you also don’t get trashed at the bars every weekend and you live longer healthier life. It isn’t as clear cut as you are making it. I agree being a dad has hurt parts of my career but it has probably helped other parts.

        • MonkeMischief@lemmy.today
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          11 months ago

          Can only speak for myself, but thankfully I have no interest in more demanding, lucrative jobs to improve my stats in such a rigged and inherently evil game as modern capitalism.

          Doing just well enough with a loving family sounds well-lived to me. They can keep their McMansions and rooftop wine tastings.

      • mattreb@feddit.it
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        11 months ago

        The source you linked tells that more developed countries have less kids, which is almost unrelated to how “affordable” having a child is, which infact have the opposite trend.

          • mattreb@feddit.it
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            11 months ago

            Thanks much better, however “Correlation does not imply causation” which is obvious in this case (and as the source itself say, the correlation is probably about education instead etc). The problem is much more complex and trying to explain it with a simple correlation is a bit naive, however you can’t deny how much of an economic struggle raising a kid is for the average income family…

            • Rediphile@lemmy.ca
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              11 months ago

              I never claimed having kids wasn’t a financial endeavor. I’m just pointing out that people with more income have on average less kids… because they do. I didn’t suppose the cause of this correlation at any point. But yes, I’d agree education is a huge part of the cause of this correlation.

      • Eximius@lemmy.world
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        11 months ago

        When contraception is expensive, career paths look bleak and sex is the one fun activity you have… surprisedpikachu.jpg

    • vivadanang@lemm.ee
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      11 months ago
      • low wages
      • no unions
      • housing is either a lifetime’s savings for down payment on mortgage or a never ending escalator of rent fees
      • states taking reproductive rights away
      • states threatening contraception
      • climate change dooming the future
      • war - war in ukraine, war in palestine, war in africa, civil war being threatened by the chud down the street

      Gee Mr Wizard, why don’t millennials want babies instead of avocado toast?

  • PugJesus@kbin.social
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    11 months ago

    “Why aren’t the poors having more workers??” - the same people continually reducing the status and security of the working class

    • IninewCrow@lemmy.ca
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      11 months ago

      If given the option or the opportunity … the wealthy wouldn’t mind the reintroduction of slavery and outright ownership of people

  • jpreston2005@lemmy.world
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    11 months ago

    “When we advise clients about having children, we honestly don’t even give them the full real details and the real numbers,” said Shannon McLay, founder of The Financial Gym. “It’s one of those things if you see the math of it all, it might make you decide to not have children.”

    what a whole generation of pulling the ladder up behind you will do to a society. Party of family values doing everything they possibly can to destroy familes.

    • Ultraviolet@lemmy.world
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      11 months ago

      In other words, “we trick our clients who paid us for financial advice into having children they can’t afford”.

    • lolcatnip@reddthat.com
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      11 months ago

      Holy shit, what an incredibly unethical thing to do. “We’re lying to the people who come to us for advice because if we told the truth they might make a decision we don’t like.”

  • AwkwardTurtle@lemmy.world
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    11 months ago

    Because we can’t afford our own lives, how are we supposed to support children? Not even taking into account for how absolutely fucked we all are. Our planet is dying, how can we bring children into this world if it’s all falling apart?

    • Ataraxia@sh.itjust.works
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      11 months ago

      I mean a lot of us wouldn’t even if it they paid us. We finally live in a time where we know better and can choose not to be barefoot and pregnant (unless you live in tx).

    • G020B@lemmy.zip
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      11 months ago

      But you can’t forget that your children can save the planet, if your generation won’t.

      • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world
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        11 months ago

        My parents set the house on fire, I’m looking for a fire extinguisher, and some newsie wants me to know that if I just had kids they could grow up to be firemen.

        • TheSanSabaSongbird@lemdro.id
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          11 months ago

          I don’t think that’s what is being said at all. I think what’s being said is that if the future belongs to the next generation, it’s in all of our interests that intelligent and responsible people do not simply give up and allow the idiots to dominate the future. In other words, we all have a stake in the coming generations and simply opting out because we find it somehow inconvenient is not a moral decision.

          This is not to say that we all need to have kids, but rather, is to say that we shouldn’t necessarily fault those who do choose to have them. Again, if the children are our future, it would be nice if at least some of them were raised by responsible, intelligent and well-educated parents.

          • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world
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            11 months ago

            intelligent and responsible people do not simply give up and allow the idiots to dominate the future

            That would ring truer if not spoken by an idiot who dominates the present. CNBC is replete with these know-nothing goobers, and even assuming I bought in to their selective breeding strategy for repopulation after the apocolypse, I sure as hell wouldn’t endorse their target audience to handle the job.

            This is not to say that we all need to have kids, but rather, is to say that we shouldn’t necessarily fault those who do choose to have them

            That’s fair on its face, but more as a practical consequence. At some point you have to ask, what would we even do about people having more kids than we’d like. And the answers - from trying to shame them by screaming at them to doing old school Nixon-era sterilizations of whole populations - are incredibly grim and gross.

            it would be nice if at least some of them were raised by responsible, intelligent and well-educated parents

            If you want responsible, intelligent, and well-educated parents tomorrow, you’re going to need to house and feed and educate and generally provide quality of life for kids today.

            But we hate kids today. That’s why, despite the economy growing at a steady clip for the last 20 years, we’re at record high child poverty with 1 in 5 kids living in poverty in the 40 richest countries. The current generation does not want to pay money to see them grow up health, strong, and capable.

            Given the poor treatment they’ve received, why would Zoomers be expected to have lots of kids of their own? They have known nothing but declining standards of living, with a promise of worse to come.

      • Ataraxia@sh.itjust.works
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        11 months ago

        What an asshole thing to do. Hey we had fun using up this planet now here, we made you to clean up up the mess. That’s what AI and robots are for. Not humans.

      • FrowingFostek@lemmy.world
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        11 months ago

        Man, fuck them negative votes. Humans do best understand pressure. We need humans to solve this crisis because, humans manufactured it. We make more humans and roll the dice.

        • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world
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          11 months ago

          Humans do best understand pressure.

          Pure selection bias. You primarily hear about the humans who did well under pressure, because the humans that didn’t do well rarely make for popular reading material.

          We make more humans and roll the dice.

          I would argue that by the time a child born today is old enough to participate in the solution, the dice will have already landed. Either they’ll be living in a city/country/planet whose prior generation has positioned themselves to preserver, or they’ll be dying in one whose prior generation didn’t.

          Having more kids won’t solve the problem. We’ve got 8B people already. One more or less won’t tip the scales.

          Not having more kids won’t solve the problem, either. So no point in getting mad at folks who did choose to have children.

        • el_abuelo@lemmy.ml
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          11 months ago

          When the problem is too much of something, the solution is less of it. Make of that what you will.

          • FrowingFostek@lemmy.world
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            11 months ago

            It’s time to put funding into solutions. Making less people isn’t the solution. Managing our resources responsibility is the better solution.

            Don’t stop making people, start making better quality people.

  • CrowAirbrush@lemmy.world
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    11 months ago

    Put the value back into my income then, ye cunts.

    I make the same number as my dad used to. His was a different currency but the number was the same which makes it awfully simple to put everything into perspective.

    His house: 350 Mine: a little under half the size: 900

    I’m already down 550 in comparison.

    His insurance: 90 Mine: 160

    I’m down 620.

    His medicine cost and doctor visits: basically zero. Mine: 385 and half the medicine comes out of pocket nowadays.

    This difference is hard to put into perspectice as the 385 is once a year and medicine depends on the situation.

    Him: unemployed wife, groceries cost about 200 for a full month, owns a car and has 4 children.

    Me: wife works and has a hobby that makes money, no car because no money left. Groceries: we eat about 2/3rd of what they did and pay 200 a week. No children.

    We are down 1220 if we forget about insurance and medicine. I don’t make 1220 more than he did.

    Fuck this hellhole, you stole our life and i hope there is a hell for you scumbags.

    • zik@lemmy.world
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      11 months ago

      you stole our life

      Don’t blame your dad - however much you resent him it’s not like he has any influence over the economy. Instead blame the super rich who have real influence and are actively pushing policy to widen this social divide.

    • Russty@lemmy.world
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      11 months ago

      You’re choosing to be wilfully ignorant about inflation. You don’t make as much as he did in a real sense.

  • M500@lemmy.ml
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    11 months ago

    My wife finally are in a point where we can afford to have children, but we are kinda getting a bit old to have children. So we are also choosing the dual income no children life style,

    But a big part of that is our age and how long it took to get to a comfortable place financially.

    Now we want to focus on saving for a house and retirement.

    • Rediphile@lemmy.ca
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      11 months ago

      Those with higher income levels are the ones deciding to have less kids, whereas those with the lowest incomes are the ones having more. Source

      If people are being forced into not having children for economic reasons, wouldn’t it be the opposite?

      • insomniac_lemon@kbin.social
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        11 months ago

        Because those dots are countries (with vastly different social and economic structures) not people. The people in the lower-income countries probably don’t depend on money in their lives as much as people in richer countries do. Your source also lists other reasons.

        Also I’d say go back in time here in the US and you’d see something similar here with farm families, but that makes less sense now when land/housing is expensive and giant expensive machinery (that you probably wouldn’t trust anybody else with) does much of the work. That and 100 other factors that make it not work like that.

        • DarthBueller@lemmy.world
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          11 months ago

          The person you’re responding to seems singularly determined to ignore the legally-empowered social construct of borders to a point it seems ideological.

          • insomniac_lemon@kbin.social
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            11 months ago

            Weaker, also if you look at the same source with a graph of 2005-2021 you will see that it’s going down faster for below-poverty-level the most (bringing them closer together, 95/70/45 in 2005 to 72/60/46 in 2021). I also don’t think it’s a coincidence that the peak of this graph (before it starts falling for all-but-the-richest) is in 2008.

            But also I think this data would probably look different if people living in multi-generational households (or otherwise having family who provide free childcare) was taken into account (which is to say that people aware they have no support will be more reluctant to have kids). On a different note, income alone is leaving out other important factors like the cost-of-living/housing in their area.

      • DwightAllRight@ttrpg.network
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        11 months ago

        This is copy paste from your replies elsewhere in the thread. F-off with your purposefully misleading comment. That just says more developed countries have less kids, which we know. That has nothing to do with internal trends.

        • Rediphile@lemmy.ca
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          11 months ago

          This was actually the first comment I made and then copy pasted to the other one as it applies to both. Regardless, the internal trends are the same. Here’s a source for USA. Sorry if that doesn’t fit your worldview.

  • Socsa@sh.itjust.works
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    11 months ago

    Why the fuck would I want to subject my own children to the inevitability of human suffering? I’m not going to make the same mistake my parents made.

    If the world collapses because there are no more children, I’ll consider it my greatest accomplishment before ending it all on my own terms.

  • vladmech@lemmy.world
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    11 months ago

    Living that DINK life and still having trouble keeping out of debt. I can’t imagine having to cover for kids, too.

    • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world
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      11 months ago

      choosing

      Is doing so much heavy lifting in that headline.

      Might as well be “More Titanic passengers choosing life rafts to ocean liners”

  • Szymon@lemmy.ca
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    11 months ago

    Gee, it’s almost like it’s important for the long term success of society to have systems in place that make sure it’s not a burden to create new people to take over for your generation after their bodies are too old and broken to keep working and society functioning.

    Then again, the decisions have already been made by the people with the power to make them, and technology/automation are in line to replace workers. They’ll be a little loud and problematic until the numbers naturally even themselves out, but we’ll be left with an enlightened society of capitalist asset owners being supported by a massive technological network.

    • Mycatiskai@lemmy.ca
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      11 months ago

      It would be a shame if a new Luddite movement came and broke the machines putting humans out of work they want to do.

      Or give us a universal basic income and let humans do what they want to do to make themselves happy while the machines do all the work.

      • vivadanang@lemm.ee
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        11 months ago

        Makes a fascinating short story:

        Jimmy thought his job at the data center was easy, clock in, watch the cameras, do the rounds, clock out. Good pay, low effort…

        then 10,000 people showed up with hammers and crow bars. Jimmy was about to have a very bad day.

        • Mycatiskai@lemmy.ca
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          11 months ago

          What value is a universal basic income to the shareholders? That is the question to ask in this capitalist hellscape.

        • tinkeringidiot@lemmy.world
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          11 months ago

          Maybe one day many, many years from now when there are far fewer humans and machines have taken over nearly all production. UBI isn’t feasible on this side of the coming demographic boogaloo.