Being Single in Your 30s Isn’t Bad Luck, It’s a Global Phenomenon

meiam

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Our economic system relies on the principle that future generations will earn as much or more than preceding ones in order to pay the social security, healthcare and national debts incurred by their forebears.

Not enough kids, the country runs out of money, or the elderly do without care. And the more specific bad news is that when that shit hits the fan, the people who are going to be elderly is likely to be us.
That's only a problem if you assume that there won't be any increase in automation. If automation continue it'll mean that production will increase even without an increase in population. So say you need to ship something using 50 truck, right now you'll need 50 drivers. But with self driving truck you'll only need one or two operator to guide all 50 trucks. So the total productivity is the same, all 50 truck arrive at destination, but you need far less people to do it. So even if population drop massivly, it won't be a problem since automation will more than make up for it.

In this sense droping foncondidity is an incredible blessing, cause the alternative scenario is that there's more and more people for less and less jobs, that either gets ugly very quickly or require massive increase in welfare state (universla basic income) which will be far costlier than taking care of elderly.
 

Sneed's SeednFeed

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Not marrying, not having kids can be a choice. I read of a woman who, I think had herself sterilized so as to never have kids interrupting her mountain climbing career. At 55 she maintained she felt she made the right choice for herself and more power to her. But you'll also find women in articles asking aloud, now that they'd had a blast in in their 20s, why have all the best male prospects dried up and now it is difficult to find a serious mate in their 30s. They don't know that those men are looking for women in their 20s. Someone ought to tell them it works like that so they make informed choices.
I don't think women are as ignorant as you hold them to be, and this idea of the 'woman hitting the wall' is a conservative boogeyman. I think the prospect of being in a marriage to avoid it, is equally as poorly thought out and possibly more damaging than this idea of living a libertine lifestyle to see you not fulfilling the nuclear family model when you hit your 30s. Despite all your saying of the contrary, being in a marriage and wanting to divorce is psychologically, socially and economically more difficult than being single and searching for a relationship, if both are the worst options in this regard. This is still about realising what you want at its core, and no amount of information can make you enjoy something that you might not enjoy when you get to it - experimentation is the only way.

The idea of 'market availability' is also a meme considering that dating is once again mediated by a variety of factors. Men who want women in their 20s might find them attractive but that doesn't mean they'll want to settle down with them, men could just weigh sexual attractiveness in such a context, since no survey will ever account for the factor of personality in choosing a partner, or really for the love factor. Or for the fact that what you find attractive could be socially conditioned and consequently skewed in favour of sexualising youthfulness for men and leaving women to do whatever in that domain, since again, massive cultural industry, massive social pressure paired with gender expectations.

You thinking that it's an innocent statement to make to your daughter ignores all the social expectations your daughter might already be feeling the pressure of, and can just as equally contribute to her unhappyness if that doesn't work out (which statistically, with divorce rates being what they are, is not in her favour). Letting her find out for herself is the morally responsible thing to do as a carer, since no one wants a helicopter parent, and no one wants their parents asking questions about when they're going to get in a relationship and give them kids. Exploring and finding out what you want across relationships to understand what means actual happyness for you is more valuable than seeing relationships as some sort of logical operation to maximise happyness. Love is not quantifiable, love cannot be planned for, and love in general cannot be predicted.
 

Agema

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That's only a problem if you assume that there won't be any increase in automation. If automation continue it'll mean that production will increase even without an increase in population. So say you need to ship something using 50 truck, right now you'll need 50 drivers. But with self driving truck you'll only need one or two operator to guide all 50 trucks. So the total productivity is the same, all 50 truck arrive at destination, but you need far less people to do it. So even if population drop massivly, it won't be a problem since automation will more than make up for it.

In this sense droping foncondidity is an incredible blessing, cause the alternative scenario is that there's more and more people for less and less jobs, that either gets ugly very quickly or require massive increase in welfare state (universla basic income) which will be far costlier than taking care of elderly.
Historically, automation has simply resulted in people needing to do different types of work. In the old days, they worked in fields. Then agriculture became more efficient and they started to work in factories. The factories got more automated and they started to work in call centres. Who knows what will be next?

Alternatively, automation will occur and there won't be a new form of work created, so people won't have jobs. And I guess at that point we're potentially going to have to radically rethink how society pays for itself. I guess we're going to have tax the relatively small remainder that have jobs, but I doubt the owners of all those automated processes are going to just hand over their money, and if today's world is any measure, they're bloody hard to tax.
 
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McElroy

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Little to do with what? I was saying it is evidence of anti-natalism.
It's not, you're simply wrong. An anti-natalist would never have an abortion because they would sterilize themselves at the first possible chance and use all available contraceptives before that.
Dunno if it has been 6 years since the ad, but would you write that there has been a sea change attitude there since then? That the pro--choice crowd is not actually anti-life at this time? It doesn't show by your last statement. There is no treatment that stops down syndrome. They're testing for it and aborting it almost universally. That explains why there are nearly none born.
I think dressing up "anti-congenital defect" as "anti-life" is dishonest. There's an easy way to stop Downs and some other chromosomal defects: screen and abort. You are not pro-disability, right?
It's extremely unlikely that there is any kind of "rising epidemic" of mental health problems. The fact that more people are diagnosed with mental health problems today than in the past does not mean those problems did not exist in the past.
In adults maybe not, but the prevalence of mental health issues has been on the rise with kids and adolescents during the past 20 years. Curbing that would be pretty cool.
Having to give up or severely compromise your career is a sacrifice. Having to take time away from things you enjoy is a sacrifice. Having to compromise things you enjoy or which make you happy because you no longer have the money to afford it is a sacrifice. Being stuck in the same relationship for decades because you can't raise kids alone is a sacrifice.
If one raises naked whisky yoga on Goa to the same level with raising a family, then our culture is a failure. You put it like parenthood comes in the way of things, but those concerns can be reconciled with. Work is obviously involved, but loafing about isn't priority no. 1 for most people.
 

meiam

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Historically, automation has simply resulted in people needing to do different types of work. In the old days, they worked in fields. Then agriculture became more efficient and they started to work in factories. The factories got more automated and they started to work in call centres. Who knows what will be next?

Alternatively, automation will occur and there won't be a new form of work created, so people won't have jobs. And I guess at that point we're potentially going to have to radically rethink how society pays for itself. I guess we're going to have tax the relatively small remainder that have jobs, but I doubt the owners of all those automated processes are going to just hand over their money, and if today's world is any measure, they're bloody hard to tax.
None of that explain why declining population is a problem. Okay, let's say plenty of new jobs are created as a results of automation, but those jobs go unfulfilled because there's not enough people, what's the problem? Will people go hungry? No automation took care of food production. Lack shelter? No automation will build house (also declining population will make housing much much cheaper). Healthcare? No automation will take care of that too. So the number of elderly people will be higher than working people, except all their basic requirements will be met by automation.

The new job that will be created has a results of automation will just be for luxury that won't necessarily need to be met. So maybe the new job will be like personal pop idol, where everyone has their own personal idol who record song and give personal concert, but as results of the low population not everyone can have their own personal idol and some people have to share, what a catastrophe!

As far as tax, that also doesn't affect pop number. Outside of luxury item, labor cost is pretty much always the most important factor in the final price (housing is the only exception where scarcity of land is the driving factor, but that's going to improve with declining population). Take that out trough automation and the final price of the product will cost a lot less. So even if the tax base goes down, population will keep production constant or even greatly increase it, this will push price way down (not to mention there will be less people buying things, so even a reduction in production could lead to price decrease) and everything will be cheaper.
 

Drathnoxis

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I was able to pretty much write an entire paper for a college English class on how he's missing the forest for the trees here. What about the radiation, dust storms, and temperature? I know the logistics and infrastructure to get there is important, but it's like half the equation to making a survivable Mars colony.
Wouldn't the solution to those problems be to basically live underground? Though I think power would probably be a problem. Those dust storms wouldn't be very good for your solar panels and wind turbines.
 

Terminal Blue

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In adults maybe not, but the prevalence of mental health issues has been on the rise with kids and adolescents during the past 20 years. Curbing that would be pretty cool.
Again, I don't think it's possible to adequately separate the diagnosis of mental health conditions from their actual prevalence.

Teenage suicides in the US, for example, rose during the 80s. It became a major factor in the "satanic panic". Lobbyists and religious groups blamed rock and metal for the rising suicide rate and claimed it was influencing kids to kill themselves. A decade later, in the 90s, there was another moral panic around Marilyn Manson, who became a kind of singular hate figure for the religious right. Again, these attacks often included claims that rates or suicide or self-harm among teenagers were caused by music. Cut forward another decade, and this time it's emo.

It may be that mental health issues in kids and adolescents actually are on the rise. Honestly, it kind of wouldn't surprise me. Kids today are far more aware of the world around them thanks to the internet, and face a very uncertain and frightening future. However, we can't really compare these kids accurately to previous generations because, in previous generations, people were utterly, utterly blind to any kind of mental health issues. Almost everyone I knew in high school self harmed. Several of us went on to attempt suicide. The level of obliviousness and neglect from adults of the time still makes me angry to this day.

If one raises naked whisky yoga on Goa to the same level with raising a family, then our culture is a failure.
I agree, our culture is a failure.

If you go to a restaurant and the two items on the menu are a bowl of spaghetti and a bowl of shit, you're probably going to choose the spaghetti.

Conservatives screaming about how much shit is piled up in the kitchen because noone is eating it, or trying to put up posters showing smiling people eating mouthfuls of shit, might initially persuade or guilt a few people, but long term you can't polish a turd. The sad fact is, the only reason anyone ever ordered the shit is because, in the past, certain people weren't allowed to order the spaghetti.

Our culture was incredibly dependent on discrimination. It relied on the idea that women would make all sacrifices and do all the work of raising children with no expectation of reward. It expected women to act as unpaid domestic servants while men got to do all the fun, exciting rewarding stuff. Women have fought incredibly hard against the prevailing unfairness of our culture, they have fought for the right to live independent lives and to be treated as full human beings and overall they are winning, but our culture has utterly, utterly failed to adapt.

You aren't going to stop women ordering the spaghetti. You need to change the menu.

It's also ironic that women are supposed to make sacrifice to fix something which currently isn't a problem (there is no concern about population in most developed countries) but meanwhile the planet is literally dying, and our culture cannot even adapt to prevent that. Now that is failure.
 

Dalisclock

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Wouldn't the solution to those problems be to basically live underground? Though I think power would probably be a problem. Those dust storms wouldn't be very good for your solar panels and wind turbines.
There are solutions to all of these issues. The inherent issue is that pretty much everything has to be imported from earth until local production can be set up, but local production can't be set up until you have either sufficient people living there to mine resources and build the factories(or you have robots to do it all for you but we aren't there yet). Life support will have to last the entire time, running out of fuel will be a slow death in space(or a quick death on the Martian surface), etc.

And considering we've never sent a human beyond the moon yet, nor do we have spacecraft capable of sustaining human life for months without resupply at this time.....yeah.

Arguably a moon base should be built first just so we can test and refine just how we have people build and live on other planets before we send people on a potential death mission to Mars. The Moon is perpetually 3 or so days away at any given point. Mars is like 6 months at best speed(which is heavily dependent on planetary alignment). Any screw ups on the way to, at or on the way back from mars would likely be game over for the crew, because no rescue would be possible in time.

Elon Musk is trying to sell the "We'll have robots build everything and giant spacecraft will take 50 people per trip plus supplies. And then we'll have 1000 of them" glossing over how fricken huge his mars craft is and the rocket needed to lift it would dwarf the Saturn V needed to put men on the moon 50 years ago and how building bigger rockets creates it's own problems(ask the Russians about their Moon rocket....yes, they did build one. It was not pretty). And how riducuousl the idea of 100 lauches per year is.


Space Travel is hard. Pretending it isn't makes it harder.
 

Agema

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None of that explain why declining population is a problem. Okay, let's say plenty of new jobs are created as a results of automation, but those jobs go unfulfilled because there's not enough people, what's the problem? Will people go hungry? No automation took care of food production. Lack shelter? No automation will build house (also declining population will make housing much much cheaper). Healthcare? No automation will take care of that too. So the number of elderly people will be higher than working people, except all their basic requirements will be met by automation.

The new job that will be created has a results of automation will just be for luxury that won't necessarily need to be met. So maybe the new job will be like personal pop idol, where everyone has their own personal idol who record song and give personal concert, but as results of the low population not everyone can have their own personal idol and some people have to share, what a catastrophe!

As far as tax, that also doesn't affect pop number. Outside of luxury item, labor cost is pretty much always the most important factor in the final price (housing is the only exception where scarcity of land is the driving factor, but that's going to improve with declining population). Take that out trough automation and the final price of the product will cost a lot less. So even if the tax base goes down, population will keep production constant or even greatly increase it, this will push price way down (not to mention there will be less people buying things, so even a reduction in production could lead to price decrease) and everything will be cheaper.
Right... but here you're talking about massive reorganisation of our current socioeconomic system.

We distribute the production of society through money, where money basically represents work done (labour) or capitalist profit (the proceeds of owning the means of production). If we remove lots of labour, all those people need a new form of income - and if there's no work, it means welfare. Someone's got to pay for welfare, so it has to come from capitalists. Are they going to pay it voluntarily? History suggests not. So how do we force them to? We'd need massive international agreements, ending of tax havens and tax exiles, etc.

Let's imagine everything becomes half as expensive tomorrow. That means we can buy twice as much, but we don't live in a post-scarcity society: there's still only so much iron, wood, concrete, food, etc. Twice as much money running after the same amount of stuff to buy just means inflation. Competition for those goods will drive prices up roughly double so that we're back where we started from.

In principle, people of working age are net contributors to the government budget, and the elderly are a net drain (state pension, healthcare). Let's say for convenience 60% of the population are working age and 20% elderly (the remainder are children, who we'll treat as government revenue neutral, paid for by their parents), and the two balance out so that it requires tax from 3 workers to pay for one retiree. Then that demographic ratio shifts to 55-30. At this point, you have to decide to maintain that 3:1 ratio and tax workers more, or decide that revenues from ~1.8 workers need to cover each oldster, so the elderly lose care and services. At the same time you may have debt pressure. Imagine your government is paying 10% of its annual budget in debt interest. The economy shrinks 20% as there are fewer workers, so those debt interest payments become 12.5%. Actually, probably worse, because the interest rates will go up as the debt is more risky. This again means tax increases or service cuts.

How this works out is to imagine that GDP/capita grows at 2% real terms, so one would expect the population should expect a 2% improvement in standards a year. But the thing is, if we tax workers more, they see less than that 2%. Or we cut services for the elderly, so they get less than 2% a year. Either way, sections of the populace don't experience the full fruits of economic development. In a worst case scenario, they go backwards.
 

gorfias

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It's not, you're simply wrong. An anti-natalist would never have an abortion because they would sterilize themselves at the first possible chance and use all available contraceptives before that. I think dressing up "anti-congenital defect" as "anti-life" is dishonest. There's an easy way to stop Downs and some other chromosomal defects: screen and abort. You are not pro-disability, right?
Antinatalism: Definition
Antinatalism, or anti-natalism, is a philosophical position and social movement that assigns a negative value to birth. Antinatalists argue that people should abstain from procreation because it is morally bad. In scholarly and in literary writings, various ethical foundations have been presented for antinatalism.Wikipedia
I think there is room in that definition for someone that gets an abortion as you are preventing birth. You can write otherwise and I'll just think you are wrong. As for screening any un-born and having them killed for the slightest defects (which is what that ad was about: that these kids, despite downs, were high functioning. Like columnist George Will's son) should be, at least, controversial. When you've virtually ended this kind of birth, through screening and abortion, sounds like there is little controversy there in a society in which this is happening.
I don't think women are as ignorant as you hold them to be, and this idea of the 'woman hitting the wall' is a conservative boogeyman. I think the prospect of being in a marriage to avoid it, is equally as poorly thought out and possibly more damaging than this idea of living a libertine lifestyle to see you not fulfilling the nuclear family model when you hit your 30s. Despite all your saying of the contrary, being in a marriage and wanting to divorce is psychologically, socially and economically more difficult than being single and searching for a relationship, if both are the worst options in this regard. This is still about realising what you want at its core, and no amount of information can make you enjoy something that you might not enjoy when you get to it - experimentation is the only way.

The idea of 'market availability' is also a meme considering that dating is once again mediated by a variety of factors. Men who want women in their 20s might find them attractive but that doesn't mean they'll want to settle down with them, men could just weigh sexual attractiveness in such a context, since no survey will ever account for the factor of personality in choosing a partner, or really for the love factor. Or for the fact that what you find attractive could be socially conditioned and consequently skewed in favour of sexualising youthfulness for men and leaving women to do whatever in that domain, since again, massive cultural industry, massive social pressure paired with gender expectations.

You thinking that it's an innocent statement to make to your daughter ignores all the social expectations your daughter might already be feeling the pressure of, and can just as equally contribute to her unhappyness if that doesn't work out (which statistically, with divorce rates being what they are, is not in her favour). Letting her find out for herself is the morally responsible thing to do as a carer, since no one wants a helicopter parent, and no one wants their parents asking questions about when they're going to get in a relationship and give them kids. Exploring and finding out what you want across relationships to understand what means actual happyness for you is more valuable than seeing relationships as some sort of logical operation to maximise happyness. Love is not quantifiable, love cannot be planned for, and love in general cannot be predicted.
I don't think young women ignorant. I think them flat out filled with dis information. The "30 is not the new 20" video at the beginning of this thread is partially about that.

I hear you about no one wanting their parents hovering around nagging, "when are you going to give me grand kids". There is a difference between being a pestering nag, and being an involved, rather than aloof parent. I just don't know how to circle that square yet and know, as you point out, it can backfire. Example: I thought her crazy for turning down a great job opportunity for what I thought stupid reasons. She did not like the culture. The men wore suits. She ended up getting a job that is almost as good. I've seen her place of work. It looks like a nursery school play ground from the future. I was told if I pressured her to take one job over the other, I owned it if she wasn't happy with the choice. So, how to be involved, not aloof, but not pestering. You could be right, that there is no way.
 

Chimpzy

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If you go to a restaurant and the two items on the menu are a bowl of spaghetti and a bowl of shit, you're probably going to choose the spaghetti.
Gotta say I love your plate of spaghetti/shit food metaphor. Will steal that idea for future use.
 

Drathnoxis

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There are solutions to all of these issues. The inherent issue is that pretty much everything has to be imported from earth until local production can be set up, but local production can't be set up until you have either sufficient people living there to mine resources and build the factories(or you have robots to do it all for you but we aren't there yet). Life support will have to last the entire time, running out of fuel will be a slow death in space(or a quick death on the Martian surface), etc.

And considering we've never sent a human beyond the moon yet, nor do we have spacecraft capable of sustaining human life for months without resupply at this time.....yeah.

Arguably a moon base should be built first just so we can test and refine just how we have people build and live on other planets before we send people on a potential death mission to Mars. The Moon is perpetually 3 or so days away at any given point. Mars is like 6 months at best speed(which is heavily dependent on planetary alignment). Any screw ups on the way to, at or on the way back from mars would likely be game over for the crew, because no rescue would be possible in time.

Elon Musk is trying to sell the "We'll have robots build everything and giant spacecraft will take 50 people per trip plus supplies. And then we'll have 1000 of them" glossing over how fricken huge his mars craft is and the rocket needed to lift it would dwarf the Saturn V needed to put men on the moon 50 years ago and how building bigger rockets creates it's own problems(ask the Russians about their Moon rocket....yes, they did build one. It was not pretty). And how riducuousl the idea of 100 lauches per year is.


Space Travel is hard. Pretending it isn't makes it harder.
True, and a moon base would help facilitate easier launches if the Mars rockets were constructed there, but I think it's good somebody is actually trying rather than just going "eeegh, too hard."
 

Thaluikhain

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True, and a moon base would help facilitate easier launches if the Mars rockets were constructed there, but I think it's good somebody is actually trying rather than just going "eeegh, too hard."
Talking about trying, mind, not the same thing.

We're not going to have a settlement on Mars any time in the foreseeable future, just not going to happen. One, it's too hard. Second, almost anything you can do with a settlement on Mars you can do cheaper, easier, safer with a settlement somewhere else. A Mars colony just happens to sound cool, but nowhere near cool enough to actually have one.
 

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True, and a moon base would help facilitate easier launches if the Mars rockets were constructed there, but I think it's good somebody is actually trying rather than just going "eeegh, too hard."
My issue is more that Musk talks a much bigger game then he's showing right now.

It's fine to talk up a Mars base, but considering he still hasn't put a human in Space yet(something NASA and the Soviets did 50 years ago) and SPACEX has existed for 18 years at this point, I have to wonder if when he says "Hey, we're gonna have a man on Mars by 2030 and a million people by 2050" he means "I'll have a man on Mars by 2050 and a million people in a couple centuries".

He comes across as kind of a loudmouth who promises a lot more then he's shown capable of delivering.

Not that he's the only one. In 2017(right after taking office), Trump apparently asked NASA if it was possible to have an American on Mars by 2020(so it would be in time for the election). NASA had to patiently explain to him that 4 years was just not possible. Hell, it's 2020 and we still can't put Americans in Space from our own launchpads and are stuck paying the Russians for rides until the Dragon or Orion are crew rated.

 
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Dalisclock

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Talking about trying, mind, not the same thing.

We're not going to have a settlement on Mars any time in the foreseeable future, just not going to happen. One, it's too hard. Second, almost anything you can do with a settlement on Mars you can do cheaper, easier, safer with a settlement somewhere else. A Mars colony just happens to sound cool, but nowhere near cool enough to actually have one.
Not to mention we could actually, you know, try to keep our own planet from becoming uninhabitable before we worry about trying to colonize Mars. It would be far easier and resource efficient, assuming we had the political will to do so and stop trying to pretend Climate Change isn't a thing happening now. At least coal is on it's way out the door(and the pandemic is actually killing it faster), so that's a little bit of good news.
 

Agema

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True, and a moon base would help facilitate easier launches if the Mars rockets were constructed there, but I think it's good somebody is actually trying rather than just going "eeegh, too hard."
In a way. But what do we actually get out of it?

There is literally nothing worth going to Mars or the Moon for except bragging rights at this current moment. No resources, no income, no human development. It is the biggest white elephant imaginable. It's like taking a year out to train and climb Mt. Everest when you've got a family to feed. You actually deserve your spouse to divorce you and take the kids, not congratulations on your aspirations.

Okay, I kind of like the idea someone will, because it's nice to do inspiring and amazing things. I just wouldn't waste my time thinking it'll make a lick of difference to all the shit the human race really needs to deal with to improve global development and happiness.
 

Sneed's SeednFeed

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Imagine thinking that you need to go to the moon rather than a modest change in your socioeconomic circumstances to deal with social phenomena.
 

Drathnoxis

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In a way. But what do we actually get out of it?

There is literally nothing worth going to Mars or the Moon for except bragging rights at this current moment. No resources, no income, no human development. It is the biggest white elephant imaginable. It's like taking a year out to train and climb Mt. Everest when you've got a family to feed. You actually deserve your spouse to divorce you and take the kids, not congratulations on your aspirations.

Okay, I kind of like the idea someone will, because it's nice to do inspiring and amazing things. I just wouldn't waste my time thinking it'll make a lick of difference to all the shit the human race really needs to deal with to improve global development and happiness.
It'd be a good way not to keep all of our eggs in one basket. Like if some calamity strikes, say a global pandemic, it won't destroy the entirety of the human race. I fail to see how the billions of dollars that go into the entertainment industry is more worthwhile.

This is pretty off topic though. I made a new thread to continue discussion of offworld colonies.
 

McElroy

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Antinatalists argue that people should abstain from procreation because it is morally bad.
This isn't the same as abortion. Not having one child doesn't mean one thinks procreation is bad. It just means that at the time other things are more important. I certainly am a natalist myself (should be evident from my comments in this thread) and I'm pro-choice too. There is nothing paradoxical about it. The way you frame it makes it sound like the only natalists are the ones who only have unprotected sex and no abortions. If we look at procreation there is no meaningful difference between contraception, abortion, or what the hell -- celibacy. Maybe you look at contraception and abortion on their own and see a difference there -- alright, makes sense -- but there isn't one from a natalist/anti-natalist perspective.
I agree, our culture is a failure.
Y'know, I did say "if". It doesn't take much of a revelation to figure out that the culture that enables one's egoism won't stay that way if they just indulge in it. In general people lack the will to try to actually change their attitudes, and the ones who claim to have it are usually populist dumbasses ready to do more harm than good.