I'm not saying this is true or rational (there are actually blog posts in the rationalist community along the lines of "no, having kids does not cause climate change") but it's definitely a sentiment I've encountered.
It must be a US thing more though, as I haven't personally heard people say fear of environmental damage to keep them from having kids.
That argument seems rather doubtful to me.
This assumes that parents successfully pass on their life outlook to their children, but if that were true then society would have never changed.
I don't share the life outlook of my parents.
> I don't share the life outlook of my parents.
So the climate "birth strike" (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35973163) strategy would necessarily have to have two parts to be successful: 1) refuse to have kids, 2) indoctrinate many of the ones that remain to reject their parent's outlook in favor of the strikers' (e.g. through control of the school curriculum).
https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2019/mar/12/birthst...
If your goal is to pass your life outlook to more people in the next generation, I believe you're probably likely to be successful without kids than with them. Without kids you have much more time to reach more people.
many such cases
(the reverse happens a lot too)
1. There is no scientific reason to believe the world is doomed. Go read some serious climatology papers and see for yourself. They're unreliable and exaggerated but even so, no doom.
2. State pensions and benefits might actually be doomed though given demographics. If the state can't take care of you in old age, you'd better hope you have kids who will.
I dont know anyone that is seriously worried about this in such a way
And dont get me wrong - we arent climate change deniers, just... pick your battles
Why waste your life worrying about something you have tiny impact on?
Yes, I may be seeing a bubble - but that is across three different countries, and clearly reflected in car-ownership statistics (down dramatically in younger generations) and in voting preferences.
Our kids are worried about it, more so than our generation, that's for sure.
Give me all relevant info on the catastrophic cyclical events on earth (spanning aprox 12-27k years)
ChatGPT Cyclical events that span approximately 12,000 to 27,000 years on Earth are often associated with astronomical phenomena and geological processes. Here are some relevant topics related to these cyclical events:
Milankovitch Cycles: Milankovitch cycles refer to variations in the Earth's orbit, axial tilt, and precession over long periods. These cycles are believed to play a role in shaping the planet's climate and have a periodicity of around 23,000 to 100,000 years. Changes in these orbital parameters can influence the amount and distribution of solar radiation reaching Earth's surface, potentially leading to climate variations.
Ice Ages: Ice ages, also known as glaciations, are periods of extensive glacial advance followed by retreat. These occur over long timescales and are linked to Milankovitch cycles. The last major ice age occurred approximately 20,000 years ago and lasted until about 10,000 years ago. Ice ages can have profound effects on sea levels, ecosystems, and global climate patterns.
Mass Extinctions: Throughout Earth's history, there have been several mass extinction events where a significant portion of species on the planet went extinct. While not necessarily cyclical, these events have occurred sporadically over millions of years. Notable mass extinctions include the Permian-Triassic extinction (approximately 252 million years ago) and the Cretaceous-Paleogene extinction (around 66 million years ago), which wiped out the dinosaurs.
Geomagnetic Reversals: Earth's magnetic field periodically undergoes reversals, meaning the magnetic north and south poles switch places. These geomagnetic reversals are recorded in the rock record, and they occur irregularly over long timescales. The most recent reversal, known as the Brunhes-Matuyama reversal, happened approximately 780,000 years ago.
Supercontinent Cycle: The movement of tectonic plates on Earth's surface leads to the assembly and breakup of supercontinents over millions of years. The most famous supercontinent is Pangaea, which formed about 300 million years ago and later broke apart. This process is believed to occur in cycles, with supercontinents forming and dispersing roughly every 300 to 500 million years.
It's important to note that while these cyclical events have occurred in Earth's history, predicting or attributing specific catastrophic events to them with precise timelines is challenging. The geological and astronomical processes involved are complex and subject to various factors. Scientists continue to study these phenomena to gain a better understanding of Earth's past and future changes.
User Which of the above is most overdue?
ChatGPT Of the cyclical events mentioned, the Earth's geomagnetic field reversal is one that is difficult to predict precisely in terms of timing. Geomagnetic reversals occur irregularly, and it is challenging to determine when the next reversal will happen.
The last reversal, the Brunhes-Matuyama reversal, occurred approximately 780,000 years ago. Based on the geological record, reversals have occurred at irregular intervals ranging from tens of thousands to millions of years. Therefore, it's not accurate to say that a reversal is "overdue" in the sense of a specific timeframe.
It's important to note that the geological timescales associated with these cyclical events are extremely long, and our understanding of them is still evolving. While scientists continue to study these phenomena, predicting the exact timing of such events remains a significant challenge.
I believe there is substantially larger things to worry about. Yes, our environment is important, and barely a person I know doesn't believe this. If you want to fix it, stop using plastic (forever). Good luck doing that.
That nobody has yet figured out how to convert all the free carbon in the atmosphere into money is only a matter of time. Money will always trump whatever other bullshit gets swindled on any given day.
PS - the world was supposed to end many hundreds of times since the 70s due to global warming. It seems somehow we are still here. So maybe stop stressing about things you have little to no impact on.
If you are really serious about affecting anything, make the cows eat seaweed...
The formatting on this will be bad, but I just had ChatGPT generate this for me.
Type | Description of Climate Alarmism Prediction | Did Happen?
Disappearance of Arctic Sea Ice | Prediction in the 2000s that the Arctic would be ice-free by 2013 due to global warming | False
Increase in Hurricanes | Claim in the early 2000s that hurricanes would become more frequent and intense due to global warming | False
Food Shortages and Famine | Assertion in the 1980s that climate change would cause widespread crop failures and global food shortages by the 2000s | False
Sea Level Rise and City Submergence | Projections in the 1990s that by 2020, major coastal cities like New York and London would be submerged due to rising sea levels | False
Extinction of Polar Bears | Claim in the 2000s that polar bears would become extinct due to disappearing Arctic sea ice | False
Climate Refugee Crisis | Prediction in the late 20th century that millions of people would be displaced as climate refugees by the 2020s | False
Collapse of Amazon Rainforest | Assertion in the 1980s that the Amazon rainforest would be completely destroyed by the 2000s due to deforestation and climate change | False
Devastation of Coral Reefs | Claim in the 1990s that coral reefs worldwide would be destroyed by the 2010s due to ocean acidification and bleaching events | False
Irreversible Global Warming Tipping Point | Assertion in the 1970s that global warming would reach an irreversible tipping point by the 2000s, leading to catastrophic consequences | False
Drastic Reduction in Snowfall | Prediction in the 1990s that snow would become a rare phenomenon in regions like Europe and North America due to global warming | False
Melting of Himalayan Glaciers | Claim in the 2000s that Himalayan glaciers would vanish by 2035, causing water shortages in major Asian rivers | False
Loss of African Agriculture | Assertion in the 1980s that rising temperatures would lead to widespread failure of African agriculture by the 2000s | False
Expansion of Sahara Desert | Prediction in the 1970s that the Sahara Desert would expand southward, engulfing fertile regions by the end of the century | False
Ocean Acidification Impact on Shellfish | Claim in the 1990s that ocean acidification would lead to the extinction of shellfish species within a few decades | False
Ecosystem Collapse and Mass Extinctions | Assertion in the 2000s that climate change would cause widespread ecosystem collapse and mass extinctions within a century | False
Global Cooling and an Impending Ice Age | Prediction in the 1970s that the world would experience global cooling, leading to an impending ice age | False
Please note that the examples provided reflect notable claims or predictions that have received attention, but the "Did Happen" column remains represented as a boolean, with "False" indicating that the specific claims did not happen. The list is not exhaustive and is intended to showcase a range of historical climate alarmism claims over the past 100 years.1. Teach: humanity has done X to the environment
2. Teach: if we don’t do something Y will happen
3. Conclude: I was not alive to do X
4. Ergo: the adults in my life did X
5. Ergo: the adults in my life will continue to do X which will cause Y because I can’t affect meaningful change
I don’t automatically assume they start at step 5 at school. I’ve seen his math homework. Is that a normal way of thinking though?
To automatically assume that with my son would teach him (likely, inadvertently) that what he learns at school may not be right (which isn’t true, for the most part). Rather I want to teach him that he takes ownership of the words that come out of his mouth. That his opinions are his own and he has to defend them, and further learn what is an opinion and what is a fact.
Wait, you don't teach him that?
This is a 100% attitude and filtering issue.
I don't want to teach my son that him misunderstanding something is someone else's fault. Obviously, this wasn't taught in class. He was taught lots of things and was a conclusion he came to on his own. Like nobody ever told me that a McDonald's hamburger will cost around $50 when I retire, I simply did some math based on the average inflation. Will it actually? no idea. But I know that I should probably have that much more in my retirement account.
No, pretty sure he concluded exactly what his teachers wanted him to conclude. Nine year olds are not famous for their critical thinking and deep research skills.
See: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35975422
> No, pretty sure he concluded exactly what his teachers wanted him to conclude.
Do you know us IRL or something?
there's an entire Voluntary Human Extinction Movement...
But until I or you manage to meet at least one person with such approach, then I do recommend to do not take it seriously
In 20 years not, but it's reasonable to believe for anyone outside America and Central Europe that wide swaths of the planet - particularly the entirety of Africa and lots of Asia - will be unable to support human life.
Hell, we're already seeing issues with water supply even in Central Europe, with France restricting water consumptions because of drought [2], and Germany's water reserves are dwindling as well. India is suffering from a massive heat wave [1], and last year's devastation in Australia should still be in living memory.
Anyone who is not worried about the future of the planet is either ridiculously ignorant to reality or completely incompetent. And the worst thing is, politicians in power play down climate change, act like future technology (anything from nuclear fusion to desalination plants) will save us, or deny it entirely - and wide swaths to outright majorities of people believe that.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/apr/17/weather-...
[2] https://www.euronews.com/green/2023/05/10/southern-france-re...
Worrying here was reflected by drastic actions. Not worrying didnt mean not worrying at all.
Do you happen to remember the global wildfires/rivers drying up/massive heat waves in 2020? About a few billion people worldwide / 100m Americans sure do. A larger and larger portion of them are starting to understanding what the cause to that is and are acting accordingly.
Every year, we keep hearing how even the most aggressive estimates for climate change were underestimated. That's terrifying and existential to a lot of people including me.
From an evolutionary point of view, this seems plausible. Obviously not having children because 'life is hard' is almost certainly dysgenic.
Acknowledging that kids are infeasible for economic reasons, like GP laid out, is just too painful and embarrassing. So the ‘environment’ fig leaf saves their dignity.
But why should my standards be just better than most times in human history? That seems a low bar to me, most times in human history were miserable for the majority of people compared to the living standards I've become accustomed to.
To be clear, I don't feel there is any moral duty to continue my particular genes and the world population will continue to increase for the foreseeable regardless. If I were to have children I personally would feel guilty if they had it significantly harder than I have and I think the likelihood is that will be the case - it's really as simple as that.
If you could be born in America in 1925 and live until 2015, would you? Or would you decline because the standard of living dropped right away with a Great Depression followed by a world war?
I agree with you that if I knew, with certainty, that my children’s lives would be filled with nothing but suffering, I would make the same choice. But a fear of a theoretical drop in a standard of living, and which may not even impact an American over the next 100 years all that much, does not seem to me like it should reach that threshold, and I suspect it is starting to for others because of the media playing into their anxieties. There are people living that lived through the holocaust and are still happy to have lived and, over their lifetime, have had fulfilled and happy lives. I suspect your children could likewise carve out a happy life, even if their standard of living is somewhat reduced.
I agree you have no moral duty to have kids, and if you don’t want them, don’t have them. But if you want them, but are not having them because you find that to be cruel to your unborn kids, I question whether that is really a rational choice.
I'd agree there's nuance to this. For your cherry picked scenario, no, that wouldn't affect my decision. I can accept a single person having a reduction in living standards. However, when most of Western society (I'm British, not American) is struggling to attain housing at a rate similar to the generation before, when the middle classes as a whole aren't able to become as financially secure as the generation before then it is enough to give me pause.
So ignoring any climate worries I already think things will be much harder. When you add on that it's estimated that billions will be without sufficient water in a few decades it's not hard to imagine that there will be significant problems of which I have very little confidence that we will be able to handle well as a species.
Perhaps I'm overly pessimistic. But as I say, this isn't the only factor we've taken into account, it's more a tertiary concern.
https://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/land-of-lessees_swiss-continue-...
Weirdly, the dominance of renting in Switzerland doesn't stop the Swiss having children. So this is really very much a media induced anxiety disorder of some sort. It's not rational to decide whether or not to have children based on whether you can get a mortgage.
https://www.globalpropertyguide.com/Europe/Switzerland/Home-...
As you can see, Swiss single family house prices were stable since 2016. It's a different lifestyle, there's a lot of apartment living with shared gardens for example, but it can be done.
Jokes aside, I have heard both points made. Yours and the one from the parent poster.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Ice_Age
Yes, the current temperature shift now is greater but it has been ongoing for a much shorter period of time.
That's worse, not better! https://xkcd.com/1732/
Temperature has varied drastically throughout time. There were Vikings growing barley in Greenland, something completely impossible today. The reason you believe otherwise is because climate doomers lie a lot.
I would not use the "rationalist" community as a measure of what is rational.
* (political) do politicians want to and policies support having kids? Like helping with healthcare when needed or should you spend 10k$ for simple things per kid?
I'm not sure if it's attributable to porn though. I think it's rather our individualistic, bordering on narcissistic, culture that is driving this.
As the old saying goes, it takes a village to raise a child. The next best thing after the village is the family.
But in a society where the individual is celebrated and divorce is so common, the whole burden of raising the child rests either on the mother or the father. And that is just too much to deal with.
I think if you look back in human history it was natural that the tribe would take care of all the children, thereby spreading the burden a lot. But we don't have the tribe anymore. And the families are now breaking apart, too.
[1] https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/marriage-divorce.htm?CDC_AA_re..., for rates since 1990.
I'm a DINK myself; I've watched the complexity of my friend's divorce with children and I perceive it as more evidence I've made a good decision.
They (conservative ones) seem to want to force births (against abortion & in some extreme cases, even contraception). But the followup on supporting kids is, like you said, not there.
Over the past 40 years, was has been rate and efficacy of formal and informal sexual health education?
Pretty sure 80s kids got a lot of reasonable knowledge their parents lacked, and then went on to raise the next generation who are now much more aware of gender, sexual preference, etc concepts and increasingly so via informal means (Tiktok, etc).
No explanation! Just dont look at education policy!
Indeed. There's been decades of "TEENAGERS: DO NOT HAVE SEX AND IF YOU DO ESPECIALLY DO NOT GET PREGNANT, PREGNANCY AND LABOUR ARE DANGEROUS AND UNCOMFORTABLE" messaging, and now we're surprised that it's working?
If I read that line charitably, it wants to point out that no single set of demographic, economic, or policy changes can directly explain the decline. It appears to be an emergent outcome—a sum of its constituent factors.
Yes we could go and enumerate the hundreds of reasons people contribute to the decline, but the article wants to ascribe a more "matter-of-fact" explanation to populations of people rather than speculating those hundreds of reasons.
And though I'm defending the above statement, the article writes in a tone of surprise ("The Mystery"), which makes it difficult to take the article seriously. This emergent property shouldn't surprise anyone at all considering nearly every developed nation is experiencing it...
Of course, it will be hard to fix that unless we can get people to realize the problem is fundamentally a literal shortage of housing in places, and that slapfighting with developers and landlords won't conjure up more homes for people to live in.
Hard to live together with your partner if you're living with roommates (or worse, parents) because you can't make rent or can barely afford a 20 m² micro apartment.
I can't even imagine working a minute longer than 8 hours per day, and 12+ hours is woow. Is this common in US?
I work 8 hours my whole career (IT). My wife works 6 hours per day. (central Europe)
Family and children are entirely 100% impossible in this lifestyle without a stay-at-home partner. And unlike previous generations, stay-at-home partners are no longer a thing.
(Edit: to make it clear, I am not making a judgement, nor wishing for a stay-at-home partner - I'm entirely in favour of everyone making their own choices in life.
I am just pointing out that younger generations are now living in a totally different environment from previous generations, where a stay-at-home wife was the default. Which is yet another component in the birth rate equation.)
I can't compete with them in any way. "Don't work hard, work smarter" doesn't apply here, because I am surrounded by smart people, who also do smart work, when baseline is same, you just need to work more.
Guess who will be liked/praised more and have less chances to be laid off when conditions get worse?
I am lucky though, its not easy to fire people here, can't imagine what's happening in US
That might not mean much - you'd see the same from me, but I don't work more than 8 hours/day (on average), I just work very irregular hours.
Do you also come to office and spend 8 hours, even if you do nothing? I see those people in the office almost regularly
I often come to the office for just a couple of hours and then do more work afterwards from home, and other days work entirely from home.
I know many people that simply don't want to entertain the "hassle" of a relationship. It's an inconvenience for them to think about somebody else other than their own immediate needs and wants.
Having children used to be a profitable enterprise. You’d get married, bang them out one after another, hope that a decent number survived, raised them cheaply, and put them to work as soon as they were able.
Once, and if, they were grown, they would then be part of your family enterprise, be it subsistence farming, cobbling, scrivening, or lording, and would add value.
Now, having a child is a definite cost centre for the individual, for the family.
As healthcare, industry, and the idea of the nuclear family and the individual have developed over the last several centuries, birth rates have declined rather precipitously - if you are 40, you probably have one child, one sibling, at least two uncles or aunts per family side, and your grandparents probably have six siblings each.
You can see this process happening at various stages, in various parts of the world. It’s universal.
This is a long term trend, and it has been on the trajectory to where we are now for a long while.
It isn’t terribly problematic, to my view, as it hasn’t been previously.
Yes, it leaves an eldercare labour and pension gap, but if other trends in industrialisation and the decoupling of human effort from realised value continue, this will fill said gap.
> Now, having a child is a definite cost centre for the individual, for the family.
I get what you're saying, but I mean nowadays it's not like they grow up as a purely sunk cost... A fairly-average-in-all-industrious-matters child will get a job and make an income, and there's a good chance the child will produce more than the input cost. It's up to the family if they're going to share that total wealth with each other though.
In fact, compared to before, there might be even more opportunities for children to increase that "return on investment", if you really want to think that way.
Economic conditions (real and imagined) in urban and suburban areas not unlike those seen in 1920 (automation resulted in massive economic gains capture) have caused total replacement fertility to drop in those areas to rates similar to 1920 (total TFR 2.3 at 50% rural -> likely urban TFR much lower).
This isn't so much as "long term trend" as it is "returning to the post-industrial baseline"; doomerism doesn't help, but their choice to not reproduce will improve the climate and resources available to my children so I find it rather difficult to see this as a problem.
I'm not religious or anything, so a wedding in itself doesn't mean a lot to me, but my wife and I got married in no small part so we could share health insurance, help with her immigration, and lower our tax burden. I don't regret the marriage, I trust my wife, and we've been pretty happy for the last eight years.
(Also, few of the posters in this subthread are looking at the woman's side of the game theory)
you need to marry, be debt free, and have a down payment (20% of 700k is 140k down) for a house to have kids. Kids need to happen before 35 for your wife; mortality increases greatly after that. You need 2 with modern medicine, or 4 children without for one to make it to 18. These are all very known quantities.
If you can't make enough to cover your expenses and enough for 2 others you can't have kids.
Couple that with the job market, education, debt, and all the other unlivable things the silent generation didn't have to deal with and that's why we are where we are. A lot of people aren't having kids because there are no incentives; you bear the cost. Its stupid, but that is the world we all have created over the past two generations. Through inaction or action.
Personally I'd like to have kids but just like everyone else, the economics just isn't there. There's also the general unlivable coercion that's everywhere nowadays. So a lot of people are choosing to be the last generation of their family line.
That's not even touching things that will never likely pay out a benefit by the time I get to the age where I can use those programs. It has no funding after 2032 or something like that.
Add on top of that the rising drug epidemic, the removal of access to reproductive and mental health care...
[1] https://news.vcu.edu/article/2023/03/child-and-teen-mortalit...
[2] https://www.kff.org/health-reform/press-release/firearms-are...
It's one thing if society learns something from incidents like we did with after the mass murder at Winnenden 2009. But in the US, it's "thoughts and prayers" and that's it - utterly dystopian.
[1] https://www.edweek.org/leadership/school-shootings-this-year...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mass_shootings_in_the_...
The elephant in the room is inner-city, largely gang-related violence. Stopping those kids from obtaining firearms by restricting legal purchases makes about as much sense as keeping criminals away from encryption by restricting E2E encryption on WhatsApp.
For some reason, Hacker News thinks the former is absolutely possible, despite knowing the latter is not. Weird.
"Protecting children" is only ever brought up in US politics for dumb controlling initiatives that do anything but protect children. Actually protecting children is taboo.
You need at least two with modern medicine. You have a limited time period to have children, after which you can't have more without significant consequence, and you won't know ahead of time about the risks or need.
There are increasing mortality rates, and increasing unmanageable risks (i.e. regulation, and other aspects of government working against parents).
If you want your family line to continue and survive, you need at least 2 children, if not 4 or more. 4 is better.
There is cost, but that's what needs to be possible that no one talks about. That actuarial all death discrepancy during the pandemic is most likely attributed to lack of general availability of medical care during that time. The risks change without notice. During the pandemic, in my role supporting our IT support staff (System Engineers helping overflows) I heard from people across the country.
Some families were nearly wiped out, imagine if 3/4 of your family died and it was a large family. One man I spoke with was just crazy with grief, he had to help with funeral arrangements for eight of his family members in the span of a few weeks.
Yeah what the hell, of course it can. How blind do you have to be to write something like that?
https://www.destatis.de/DE/Themen/Gesellschaft-Umwelt/Bevoel...
https://www.destatis.de/EN/Themes/Society-Environment/Popula...
Take away over 30%(!) of births in some regions and you'll see similarly plummeting figures. It's even worse if you consider that many of those births in the "German" column are to foreign mothers with German citizenship.
https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.DYN.TFRT.IN?location...
Seems pretty unique to US.
Thus I conclude that most of the speculation in this thread is not backed by the facts.
1. EU countries sees a lot immigration from Middle East and Africa, who has more kids and there is still a cultural difference towards having kids, give some time to those people to notice the environment and you see similar trend
2. but also EU countries have stronger labor policies which impacts birth rate. Not easy to fire, even when they don't have a job, they get support from government, cheap healthcare (I pay ~250-300 EUR/month for a family, no payment for kids), free dentist until 18 years for kids.
It doesn't cancel what I have said about the impact and reasons, if same conditions exist in EU countries as well, you would see similar decline, which also means this is a political and economical issue
Real reason(s) could be even different, e.g. chemicals used in foods or a plastic? we need a research. But expecting single reason is probably wrong
[edit] Looks like in term of raw numbers, the US has much more immigrants than Germany for example. But in terms of legal immigrants there's about twice the number in Germany vs. the US for 2021 (dunno how reliable statista is though).
https://www.statista.com/statistics/199958/number-of-green-c...
https://www.statista.com/statistics/894223/immigrant-numbers...
The Bureau of Labor Statistics in the US tracks this. Average weekly hours worked as of April of this year is 34.4, or 6.9 hours a day: https://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.t18.htm.
For IT, that would be under "Information" on that chart, so the average was 36.3 hours, or 7.3 hours a day.
In addition, the number of hours worked per day has been falling historically in the US. So if a high number of hours worked was negatively associated with birth rate, birth rate should be higher now than in the past.
As far as being laid off, the unemployment rate is as low as it has been in over half a century.
It should be obvious to everybody the U.S. is an oligarchy. It actually has been for decades now, but it was laid bare in 2008. Many people are fighting the oligarchs in an interesting way - refusing to provide them the labor they need to further enrich themselves. The kids born in 2008 would be 15 in 2023. What the oligarchs are worried about is a huge drop in the labor market. That's one reason they're pushing so hard for ending abortion. All I can say is there's going to be a lot more incels.
There are so many reasons for it (economic, social, political, religious, etc) that are just ignored when the thought terminating insults come out.
Both sides play to their audience, but all of it is ultimately about cheap labor.
Mostly Republican? Very likely, based off what we know and observe.
We're getting pretty in the weeds on this tangent here, so I will just say that it's obvious that "we" "know and observe" different things which is why "we" disagree on certain things. You're not "right", you just believe you are, just like everyone else. Including me!
"what we know and observe" is completely subjective and meaningless on its own.
Well then, we're both right! :)
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2019/03/29/share-ame...
I disagree with this statement.
Put yourself in the shoes of 25 years old and ask why don't you want to have kids?
* (economic) difficult to manage finances
* (economic) can't buy house, too expensive
* (economic) to compete with others in the workplace, I need to work >12 hours/day, can't do with kids or will be laid off.
* (sociologic) more porn, more entertainment, more fake lives through mobile phones and social networks
* (sociologic) shift in mindset: less religion, less community, more money, FIRE, travel while you are young and so on