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this post was submitted on 29 May 2026
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psychologically damaging mammals to the point where they dont wanna have kids is quite an achievement
and people say the soft sciences don’t matter…
I get that this is a catchy one liner but it always felt like reactionary bullshit. In fact I don't think you need to psychologically damage people a lot at all for them to not want kids.
Personally I just straight up don't want to, it isn't about the money, it isn't (at least not exclusively) about climate change, it just does not interest me at all.
I mean isn't it just as reactionary to suppose people "just don't want to do it", I.e. that there is some non-material factor influencing human behaviour?
How is saying individuals have preferences about living their life reactionary? The reactionary part here is psychoanalyzing people that don't want kids and trying to fix it, maybe just leave them be? There are a lot of people that would like to have kids in better material conditions and will explicitly tell you that in pretty much those words, why not just take people at their word when they say they don't want kids?
If you did the same kind of psychoanalyzing to queer people and try to adjust their material conditions so they stop being queer you'd be called out for it but this is somehow fine.
I think a lot of it is a result of density and perceived population size. If you're used to seeing a lot of people around you in a small area, you're not going to have the same desire to make more, maybe because it feels close to carrying capacity, or just doesn't seem necessary.
Another factor is desire for uniqueness. The more people that are out there, the less certain you can be of having a special, meaningful life that's not just a rerun of everyone else's, and the more you feel like you're in competition with the rest of everyone.
And then there's just some people that don't particularly gravitate towards parenthood, and in today's age there isn't the same social pressure bending people to have kids against what their will would otherwise be. And fewer accidental pregnancies, and more to do with your own life than just replicate more lives.
All these factors point to a human population that will decrease maybe rather rapidly in the second half of the 21st century. And this will continue until we fix the problems and reach an equilibrium, or face whatever the alternative prospect holds.
Maybe this is fine actually? Why should the human population increase indefinitely? I think a healthy, well governed world society could work with 1, 2, 5 or 10 billion people alive, the only reason governments want more kids today is because the global market economy is a ponzi scheme that can't survive without an ever increasing pool of workers.