Thank God a man said it so that I stop sounding insane/invite people to scrutinise my own life/personhood to find what's wrong with me and how high my standards are. If I read one more time about women delaying family making, I am going to gauge my own eyeballs out because all the women I know would love a partner and, I am sure, would sooner be the ones asking for kids. Men my age (29) meanwhile live an adorably delayed adolescence. I used to go on apps a lot, before I got tired of the futility of attracting male sexual attention (it leads to nothing that covers any of my needs), and there is no shortage of men 10-20 years older than me (in real life too, not just on the apps actually) who see me as the appropriate partner for them at that stage in their life. I am not saying there is anything wrong with age-gap relationships between adults, but I am deeply suspicious of men at that age going for women in my age bracket. What were they doing earlier, and why has society fed the illusion that younger women still find them attractive? Elon Musk doing a disservice for the average Joe.
This is a problem that can't be addressed within an autonomy-focused liberal framework. The only first-world country with sustainable fertility rates is Israel, which sees having children as a *duty* and an ethical good.
The rest of the West treats reproduction as a neutral question of personal choice - "it's good to have children and it's good to not have children" - which appears to be a guarantee of fertility collapse. Technocracy doesn't touch the sides.
If we want to improve the birth rate, this government seems to have an odd way of showing it: restricting child benefit to the first two children, and worshipping at the altar of the triple locked pension. I realise that the pensioner vote has to be nurtured, and the UK pension is lean by European standards, but there needs to be more joined up thinking by policy makers
I was surprised that this piece didn't contain a counter to the environmental argument for not having children - namely a counter to the notion that developed economies are presently operating under a model of infinite growth with only finite resources and therefore some natural depopulation isn't a bad thing. Environmentalism is most popular amongst 20 and 30 somethings, who are of course also the age most likely to be having children. I would have expected a piece like this to dispel this environmentalist notion, whereas all this piece does is state that maintaining a TFR above the replacement rate is good, without also countering the notion raised above.
I start by thinking there are too many of us, but I doubt what's going on is rooted in some global planetary awareness of the harm the West in particular does. I'd like to puzzle out the real source of the problem. What I see is women being far more burdened when it comes to raising children from the get go. The crying need is for something that will bring some sort of balance to society through the partnership agreement, especially. It would be best if men could do something biological to pay off our debt to women, but I can't think of anything. That means we're going to have to compare apples and oranges, and that means women are going to have to understand us much better than they usually do.
I'm a senior now and married a long time but I never felt comfortable picturing a white house with a picket fence. I see problems and want to fix them, raising a family has always seemed more a planned vacation than a life goal. You women seem to be lamenting your plight but you don't seem to understand that we men have our own dreams and that satisfying us both is getting more and more difficult.
Thank God a man said it so that I stop sounding insane/invite people to scrutinise my own life/personhood to find what's wrong with me and how high my standards are. If I read one more time about women delaying family making, I am going to gauge my own eyeballs out because all the women I know would love a partner and, I am sure, would sooner be the ones asking for kids. Men my age (29) meanwhile live an adorably delayed adolescence. I used to go on apps a lot, before I got tired of the futility of attracting male sexual attention (it leads to nothing that covers any of my needs), and there is no shortage of men 10-20 years older than me (in real life too, not just on the apps actually) who see me as the appropriate partner for them at that stage in their life. I am not saying there is anything wrong with age-gap relationships between adults, but I am deeply suspicious of men at that age going for women in my age bracket. What were they doing earlier, and why has society fed the illusion that younger women still find them attractive? Elon Musk doing a disservice for the average Joe.
This is a problem that can't be addressed within an autonomy-focused liberal framework. The only first-world country with sustainable fertility rates is Israel, which sees having children as a *duty* and an ethical good.
The rest of the West treats reproduction as a neutral question of personal choice - "it's good to have children and it's good to not have children" - which appears to be a guarantee of fertility collapse. Technocracy doesn't touch the sides.
If we want to improve the birth rate, this government seems to have an odd way of showing it: restricting child benefit to the first two children, and worshipping at the altar of the triple locked pension. I realise that the pensioner vote has to be nurtured, and the UK pension is lean by European standards, but there needs to be more joined up thinking by policy makers
I was surprised that this piece didn't contain a counter to the environmental argument for not having children - namely a counter to the notion that developed economies are presently operating under a model of infinite growth with only finite resources and therefore some natural depopulation isn't a bad thing. Environmentalism is most popular amongst 20 and 30 somethings, who are of course also the age most likely to be having children. I would have expected a piece like this to dispel this environmentalist notion, whereas all this piece does is state that maintaining a TFR above the replacement rate is good, without also countering the notion raised above.
I start by thinking there are too many of us, but I doubt what's going on is rooted in some global planetary awareness of the harm the West in particular does. I'd like to puzzle out the real source of the problem. What I see is women being far more burdened when it comes to raising children from the get go. The crying need is for something that will bring some sort of balance to society through the partnership agreement, especially. It would be best if men could do something biological to pay off our debt to women, but I can't think of anything. That means we're going to have to compare apples and oranges, and that means women are going to have to understand us much better than they usually do.
I'm a senior now and married a long time but I never felt comfortable picturing a white house with a picket fence. I see problems and want to fix them, raising a family has always seemed more a planned vacation than a life goal. You women seem to be lamenting your plight but you don't seem to understand that we men have our own dreams and that satisfying us both is getting more and more difficult.