this was from /r/all, this was a foreseen crisis that a lot of millennial and now zoomer women have been very unmarried and chronically single and will at some point become unable to have kids (approaching that point now?)
honestly I’ve never been super focused on becoming a parent, I thought it was something that might happen, but I’ve also been pretty single throughout life and considered an intentionally celibate life
It was really always just about meeting the right person, and I’ve met some “ok” people I’m just not sure who would be the “right” person for me
The parents of some of these kids seemed to give them no warning that they have a timeframe to have kids within though
Memes are an idea that came about before the Internet form of memes. It’s the idea that ideas are like genes, and they can survive or die.
One way memes can replicate is by being ideas that spread easily. However, that’s not all there is to it. Genetics can have high reproduction rates but be deadly to the people who engage with them. Look at the people of easter island who destroyed all the life on the island to build giant heads, killing themselves out in the process.
I think the antinatal memes out there, the antimarriage memes, they’re the same. Spread easily, but I think they kill themselves out quickly (Give it a few decades and everyone with this stupid meme will be dead and childless, peacefully in their beds).
So let’s say that all the people who don’t believe in healthy relationships go off and do their own thing. “their own thing” results in catastrophic failure to procreate or even culturally pass on their ideology.
You protect yourself by not getting married, by not having kids – guess what happens? The your story ends there. You’ve protected yourself so much that you protected yourself from existence, and every idea you have ends there…
Life is about taking the right risks. Take no risks at all and you are never rewarded – you just die. Take big stupid risks and you are also never rewarded, you just die. It’s about figuring out the risks that’ll result in the outcomes you want out of life with the lowest chance of loss.
Not to refer back to my own book again, but I have a chapter on attraction, and it starts with a statement including the following sentence: “Just because it’s important, powerful, and amazing doesn’t mean it’s necessarily perfectly safe.” but despite that and many other warnings, the book implicitly and explicitly says it’s a thing worth fighting for, because it’s so important.
There was a sentence, “Many of your deepest-rooted fears and ambitions are written into your blood, in a library that was passed down by millions of generations of successful creatures going all the way back to the single celled organisms that first spawned within the primordial ooze.” that really helped me realize we are the holders of a torch that goes back billions of years, and it almost feels like a violation against nature to selfishly and willfully extinguish that flame. Who are you, such a tiny speck of dirt almost indistinguishable throughout history, to make that decision for such a long line?
This viewpoint makes us both incredibly important but just one little pixel on a line that goes back further than we can imagine.