The birth rates are not declining because people are "making the ultimate personal sacrifice to reduce your carbon footprint" you fucking nitwit. People are not having children because they live in a soul-crushing hellscape and can barely afford to keep themselves alive, let alone a child.
Better for population to plummet due to declining birthrates than for it to plummet due to famines induced by global warming crop failures, warfare, and nuclear winter (it's going to plummet due to famines).
I agree with you. Opting out of reproduction is one of the most sensible and most impactful things that the average person can do right now.
The world is an absolute dumpster fire, and the future isn't looking too bright.
Charlie Kirk: We have millions of young women that are miserable. You know, the most miserable and depressed people in America are career-driven, early-30-something women. It’s not my numbers. It’s the Pew Research numbers. They’re most likely to say that they’re upset, they’re depressed, they’re on antidepressants. Do you know who the happiest women in America are? Married women with lots of children, by far.
Is there possibly a third variable in this? Perhaps something to do with the acquisition of resources? Correlation doesn't equal causation, after all (they don't really address it in the immediate aftermath).
Rosin: But if you move the discussion outside politics and into just sheer demographics—how many humans, ideally, do we want on Earth?—a whole different conversation is beginning about a potential crisis coming that we are not paying attention to, at least by some people’s accounts.
Insufferable. Same rhetorical device used to cry about white genocide.
Oh yeah I knew right from the headline and particularly from the second opening paragraph as soon as I read the words "Western countries" it was going to go straight to white genocide bullshit.
You'll never hear these dipshits expressing horror at the actual rapid population decline of, let's say, FUCKING PALESTINE. That's just totally fine they're not really people.
Also making cuts to programs like SNAP and other social safety net programs aimed at helping families, and in particular children, goes a long way towards making having children less affordable. Again, something political. These fucks want people to have more kids while cutting down any sort of help they could have to raise them and then turn around and whine about how kids aren't being raised right these days and blame the parents.
Can't exploit children if they get a good upbringing
One of the many contradictions of capitalism: it needs an ever-increasing population to maintain its growth, but it strongly disincentivizes having children for the vast majority of people.
Referring to the intentional decision to not reproduce as "the ultimate personal sacrifice" is so aggressively heterosexual and patriarchal. So like, does that mean that I am damned to live a pitiful, empty life because of my infertility? What about gay couples? Orphaned children and the adoption thereof are never mentioned once in the entire article and the challenges of parenting are only briefly touched on, so its not about the experience of raising children, its about producing more humans. The interview sucked and the author's point was that declining birth rates are bad because of a bunch of nonsense reasons like the potential extinction of humanity. They offer no concrete solutions. Its white supremacist anxieties mixed with a breeding fetish dressed up as erudite concerns about economies and quality of life.
This segment about 2/3rds in is pretty illustrative of how utterly detached these people are:
[Spears makes an argument that population growth is a primary driver behind scientific progress and improved quality of life]
Rosin (the interviewer): This is actually a quite beautiful notion of humanity or vision of humanity, just this idea that collective knowledge is a good; more of it is better. I think I’ve come to associate, particularly at this moment in time, you know, collective action as oppressive or—at least, I have a lot of examples of it now in my world, where masses of people getting together can also cause disinformation and push us backwards. And maybe that is just very present in our minds right now.
Spears (the interviewee): Yeah, I mean, it’s not the whole story. It’s not just about innovation. I think that there are other ways that strangers’ lives are not only good for them, but good for you. So, you know, here’s another way of looking at it: We’re used to thinking of other people as, potentially, rivals that consume the resources that we want, and part of what I’m trying to say is that we should think of other people as win-win.
My theoretical children deserve a better future than the hogshit this society will provide them with
Many people are starting to see it this way.
: “I’m laying off everyone! I just don’t need workers anymore, and why invest all but the bare minimum in my business? Don’t give me that look poors, I just don’t need you anymore! Now hurry up and die! No one owes you anything, it’s called freedom!”
: “Why aren’t you having kids?! What do you mean I turned that into a status for just rich people too? You OWE me kids!”
~~should you be having more babies~~
People should have the rights and means to have babies if they choose to
we have an obligation to the people who are born, i have yet to see a hypernatalist argue for fulfilling that obligation because they all just want wage slaves and dead soldiers. oh and 
thinking he can do eugenics by mailing women his sperm.
Yeah have more souls to torture under the clusterfuck your policies are helping create.
More individualizing the "solutions" to systemic problems.
Get a load of this guy in here basically regurgitating the shit we are dunking on.
I'm saying this piece is doing that. Like "stop being selfiah, and have kids already". Ignoring the material conditions that lead people to have fewer children and making it an individual responsibility to " fix" the problems (real and imagined) that are the result of our decaying capitalist system.
No you are doing the other thing. The strawman that this dipshit Dean Spears is presenting that the only other alternative is "woke" anti-natalism. You seriously need to read the rest of the comments in this thread. You not having kids is not going to help anyone that wants to have kids. Individualist liberal bullshit is not the answer AT ALL. Not having kids is nothing revolutionary it's just a personal choice or should be if everyone was allowed to make that choice based on adequate material conditions. You are the one missing the fucking point.
I'm not antinatalist lol. I don't have kids, but only because we couldn't. Fuck, dude we spent a lot of money trying if you need to know. Maybe I'm misunderstanding the context here, since I only read the excerpt you posted. And yes, material conditions is exactly what I'm talking about: people can't afford it, people lack the requisite hope for the future. Ignoring those systemic problems and saying "people should just, like, have more kids" is a form of individualizing a systemic issue. It's akin to blaming plastic pollution on people using straws. I'm not at all saying not to have kids, I'm saying that if you want people to have more kids, the system needs a major overhaul.
Opting out of reproduction is one of the smartest and most impactful things that the average person can do right now.
The world is an absolute dumpster fire, and the situation only seems to be deteriorating.
This is bullshit individualism. The smartest and most impactful thing an average person can do right now is engage in revolutionary socialist organizing. Way to completely miss the point of our critique.
You not having a kid is not going to meaningfully impact the massive systemic issues that cause this problem. Your take is just as bad as the guy in this dumb ass op ed.
I said "one of", not "the."
Your comment does not refute my assessment.
It is very far down the list of most impactful things one can do and tying one's intelligence to whether they do or do not have children does not sit well with me for a number of reasons.
I beg you to actually try to have a grasp on material conditions and societal coercion before you talk about things you clearly do not understand.
tying one’s intelligence
Smart and intelligent are not synonyms. Replace "smart" with "wise" if you prefer, which would also reduce ambiguity.
you talk about things you clearly do not understand.
Frankly I find this insulting. I could just as easily say that you are the one who doesn't not understand. But I won't because I'd rather not be inflammatory. I'll just say that we'll have to agree to disagree on this and leave it there. I'm not going to engage on this any further.
leave it there.
No I think you should engage with the other posts in this threads that already explained why your thinking is flawed. You instead chose to avoid them and just regurgitate one of the points already critiqued in the comments here.
Banned? DM Wmill to appeal.
No anti-nautilism posts. See: Eco-fascism Primer
Slop posts go in c/slop. Don't post low-hanging fruit here.