I have to disagree here. Having more money to spend on consumer items is not the only reason to not want kids.
For me it's not about money but about time. I don't want to waste time raising kids that I could have used pursuing interesting opportunities to enrich myself. Which are usually not things that make me financially richer either. And also, I just don't want them. There is no attraction to fatherhood for me.
But I would not call myself consumerist at all. I don't buy that much stuff, don't have a car, only a $100 second-hand TV, buy a new phone once every 4 years or so... But I do have a really interesting life. I couldn't do without that.
And once people become parents their "sex" life becomes pretty much null and void too.
There is definitely a correlation between high standards of living and smaller families yes. But I don't think this is because people want to spend more. It's just that they don't really need a big family for "pension" reasons, don't usually care about religious directives anymore (think the big catholic labourer families of old) and want their life to be more than about having kids. Women don't just want to be a baby machine anymore.
And I think it's good. For environmental reasons our population should be stable, not growing rapidly. 2 children per couple is perfect.
I don't think having a family would be as valuable even.
That’s not even mentioning the fact that you can share your hobbies with your children.
In fact if I'd want a child I'd adopt one and give them a better life. I think it's better to lift an orphan out of poverty than to reproduce myself.
But I'm just not interested in either.
None of my friends who have kids have done this out of a sense of community or purpose though. It was a choice driven by their own desire, just as selfish as my own reasons not to have any.
what does this actually mean? people say this but i dont understand it.
What is so special about creating life, anyway?
Human life is a prerequisite for everything humans create.
Try explaining these concepts to children. Now that’s a challenge!
> And once people become parents their sex life becomes pretty much null and void too.
I can guarantee that’s not true for everyone. Of course, maybe even some single couples get bored of having sex, and maybe even single men see their libido drop with age!
> For environmental reasons our population should be stable, not growing rapidly.
That’s a common trope pushed by degrowth activists like Greenpeace, but not actually true. Technology gives us means to so more with less, so we are far from the limits of even what Earth can support, let alone our solar system.
Could be but I don't want to :) even in work I don't have the patience for training others because it slows me down.
> I can guarantee that’s not true for everyone. Of course, maybe even some single couples get bored of having sex, and maybe even single men see their libido drop with age!
Of course it's not the case for everyone but on average it is for sure. All my friends say they simply don't have enough time or opportunity. Let alone doing more wild stuff like going to sensuality resorts or swinger clubs. It becomes more of a standard up/down "let's get this over with before the kid wakes up" kinda thing.
> Technology gives us means to so more with less, so we are far from the limits of even what Earth can support, let alone our solar system.
Well it hasn't actually delivered that. Right now we're doing more with much more.
Look at the ocean full of plastic, the ever rising oil use. The climate crisis.
If technology can give us those means it should really start doing so pretty soon before we really screw the world beyond repair.
I cannot imagine what system of ethics you are operating from that you would have to ask this question. The point, always, is to provide the best possible life to the greatest number of people, without regard to where those people come from. My goal in life is to maximize human happiness, I do not care what nation a person is from. Unless I'm misreading your words, or you chose your words clumsily, you seem to want a system that works for some set of people but not another set of people. But I'm curious, one what basis would you chose one set of people, and then why would you care about them at all, rather than care about some other group? If you're not going to care about the happiness of all people, then it seems to me you should be consistent and not care about anyone's happiness. But if you honestly care about one group, but not some other group, I'm curious on what basis you chose the group that you care about? And do you really care about them?
"You're only playing a game of managed extinction in cooperation with your country's new settlers"
I think you meant to write "One generation has apparently found it is possible to maximize their happiness without having children, and now gratefully receives help from new arrivals so as to take care of them during old age, as they have no children to care for them."
Catholic (-ish) ultra right wing nationalism, would be my guess. Surprisingly popular in some places. You can pretty much read stuff like that in the newspaper and, to a degree, on billboards.
> I'm curious on what basis you chose the group that you care about? And do you really care about them?
I have two answers for this
1) It is not that, say, I care more about the danish than the syrian.
It is that I find sad that a culture would decide to implode, no matter what culture it is.
This works on a set of assumptions, all of which might be false, but are justifiable (it seems to me) if not correct (for that is harder to predict)
* Receiving a big influx of immigrants that are 20 years or older * Having them and their descendants compose the bulk of your population after a certain year (say, 2070) * Those 2 points significantly affect the makeup of a culture
And moral weights: * That the existence of a culture itself has moral weight comparable to the well-being of individuals
--- 2) There is also the perhaps more immediate issue: If indeed immigrants make the largest part of the population of a country when you are old and need help, can you *really* keep them from voting in a pattern that reduces your ability to get help? For example, from taxing your accumulated wealth now that you are no longer working, or to cut your benefits.
This fear is not unreasonable, and one might be saddened of the (apparent) shortsighedness of not addressing it. Or angry (if one thinks this will happen) that the current middle class and poor of the european country are being sold out by the rich of that country -- they get more labour today, and to live confortably in their old age.
Again it is a matter of weights, you can think that the increase in welfare for the immigrants in question outweights (or even far outweights) these costs and risks (one is a cost only if you value the culture independently of the people, another is a cost only in a probabilistic sense). But neither is absurd on the face of it, and it seems reasonable to be sad that "a culture is doing this to itself".
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The point here is to establish a degree of reasonableness to the other side, so that both sides can start to reconcile their values rather than dismiss them, not to state which side is right (a thing that I frankly do not know)
Where consumerism is high, procreation is low, as children and parenthood are antithetical to the ethos of consumption. This ethos infects and corrupts every domain of the culture and conspires against families by creating a mutually enabling thicket of disincentives, consumerizing and commoditizing everything, including sexual intercourse and sexual relations, in general. Contraception and sterile "sex" are paradigmatic of consumerism. Perhaps it is not an accident that Dante places the practitioners of such a lifestyle in the same circle of Hell as usurers: the former take something fecund and renders it sterile, while the latter take something sterile and pretend to render it fecund.