Agreed except people encounter loneliness and lack of purpose for reasons besides choosing not to have kids and doing so is absolutely not guaranteed to resolve those feelings - you can build community, engage in service, etc

Same. My wife and I very much enjoy being child-free in our late-30s, but we avoided joining child-free groups to avoid the "parents are breeders" crowd.

It strikes me that both these views are selfish, in that they focus on direct impact on one's life. But what about the broad impact on society for the descendants? What if by abdicating procreation we create conditions where only communities that force childbearing survive? Ought we not figure out a system where we can have both freedom and equality, as well as a sustainable population?

> Ought we not figure out a system where we can have both freedom and equality, as well as a sustainable population?

That would be great, but I never heard any realistic proposals how to make educated women with good opportunities want to birth and rear 3+ children.

Make it so that they don’t birth and rear but instead birth and then rear with a partner who will contribute equally. Also financial subsidies so that a child becomes at least neutral in terms of cost. Social help to make raising a child less exhausting. Improve the climate to that we can be positive about the child’s future. All difficult but not impossible.

> Make it so that they don’t birth and rear but instead birth and then rear with a partner who will contribute equally. Also financial subsidies so that a child becomes at least neutral in terms of cost.

Countries like Sweden and Norway have equal non-transferable paternity leaves and "free" daycare/education/healthcare. They birth rates are still nowhere near replacement levels. The hard truth seems to be that majority of women with education and opportunities don't want to spend their best years on children and bear the cost to their health from multiple child births.

> Improve the climate to that we can be positive about the child’s future.

Please. Now is objectively the best, safest time to have children. When western societies had high birth rates the expectation was basically "it is a coin toss whether a child will survive until adulthood and then they will have to deal with wars, famines and epidemics".

> Please. Now is objectively the best, safest time to have children. When western societies had high birth rates the expectation was basically "it is a coin toss whether a child will survive until adulthood and then they will have to deal with wars, famines and epidemics".

This argument is rather one dimensional. If you're trying to solve the problem in modern developed society, you can't look to what happens at a more primal level, you need to address the actual concerns people are living with.

We have more choice and visibility into options and unfair power structures now, and unless your solution is to remove choice again, then looking back to a time when people depended on children for survival and safety isn't going to offer much relevant insight. Instead it's going to lock you into positions with no way out.