Just a rat in a cage...

Wait until she discovers school loans or taxes.

Better systems don't tie healthcare to jobs, so that's one stressor that better places don't have, that threat held over people. They also have paid leave from work and lower cost childcare. Their populations can still decline but they will adapt to manage it and people are happier there. Any chance for those improvements are with the Dem platform and a sustained supermajority, it only gets worse with maga.

So too when you get older. Around 35, life starts hurting for seeming no reason.

In general, serious commitments of any kind limit your life choices. "Entrapment" is when someone else tricks you into it.

Responsibility is entrapment yes. It's a choice and trade off that some people make, some know about the terms and conditions beforehand some don't

I'm saving for money before I even try to have a family. I have savings but I am saving for more.

Survival is necessary to have freedom, unless you are seeking freedom from life.

And people seem to be able to be miserable in any life. A steady paycheck certainly helps me be less miserable, and unless you are a trust fund baby I don't see how you are going to go have so many adventures without a source of income.

Oh for fuck's sake, this is my first time seeing a post from this community - are you guys usually that unhinged or what?

No kids, but with no guts or financial sense I'm as trapped as if I had kids. I quit my job and spent two years draining my savings and barely traveled or lived any kind of interesting life. I got a new job that started at 40% of what I made at the job I quit, moved back in with my parents and have gotten addicted to not paying rent. I could move out and live a life of poverty or continue to not spend $2k/month on rent and live fairly luxuriously. I'm nearing 50, never married. My married friends are getting near empty nest status but they understandably want to spend time with their spouses. I'm 5 years away from being eligible for "senior living" where I'll relive my 20s smoking bowls and playing video games with my friends.

I watched the movie Babes with my wife last night, and it perfectly encapsulated this tweet.

And I surprisingly enjoyed it despite being childfree myself. It didn't gloss over the shity parts of parenthood like most movies do, and it was honest about how much it can suck.

The problem is as /u/DupaCycki@lemmy.world pointed out, an issue of capitalism. The movie unfortunately and unsurprisingly didn't address that, it sort or just carried on with the status quo assumption that the current situation and system doesn't need replaced. That's the only bit I didn't enjoy.

IMO the best replacement system I've seen proposed is the Aandrisk system of hatch/feather/house families from Becky Chamber's "The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet" series.

For those unfamiliar, Aandrisks are humanoid reptiles with feathers for hair, and they divide their lives into three sections, hatch family, feather family, and house family.

Everyone is "born" as hatchling, being raised in groups of a dozen or two, in hatch families. They aren't really considered people until they are physically mature. Generally they aren't actually siblings, but instead come from donated eggs.

Once they mature they leave to go form feather families. These basically are polycules of people in their 20s to late 30s that are there for community, sexual relations, and to explore the world. They don't raise kids, they live their life and gain experience. Any offspring they do produce gets dropped off at a house family.

House families are older groups, often formed from old feather families who are looking to settle down and stabilize. They take in eggs from feather families and raise them to maturity.

It's got an elegance we are very much lacking in humans, especially with capitalism being in the mix.

True, but it's not a having kids problem. It's a capitalism problem, as usual.

The same case could be made for hobbies. You need money for hobbies, so they trap you in the system.

Destroy capitalism and suddenly having kids is great (relatively speaking, subject to personal preferences).

It's one form of entrapment but in this economy even being childfree im living paycheck to paycheck

Personal freedom always only really was available for criminals and vagabonds. Maybe royalty and stuff as well but I think they were more or less trapped in the system as well with what they were allowed to do or how to behave.

My point is for most of human history survival and safety naturally was way more important than personal freedom, which actually lead to the development of all the systems we have in place now and which only now made it possible to experience this personal freedom to begin with which of course you lose when another person is completely dependent of you.

So having personal freedom really is something special and luxurious and not the default state which you have to give up for kids. It's more like you have to give up having kids to have the possibility of personal freedom (but even then most people don't have or had it).