this post was submitted on 03 Aug 2025
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The crazy thing about the modern economy is that we're - on paper - significantly wealthier per capita than our predecessors. But the social expectations of our progeny are so much higher (I'm not having six kids and expecting them to all just become subsistence farmers like I was) and the social infrastructure has degraded so rapidly (sending my son to a public school in Texas feels like borderline child abuse). Children are viewed as a strategically planned luxury - like a vacation home or a retirement account - instead of a natural consequence of two people having lots of unprotected sex in their 20s.
What's more, what we have normally viewed as a valuable domestic asset - a large number of young, healthy, educated people - is increasingly booked as an expense bordering on extravagance. Meanwhile, what we have normally viewed as an expense - a large, heavily manned security state - is now seen as a critical cost-saving tool to mitigate the risk of foreign 20-year-olds sneaking into our country to do highly profitable labor.
All this in a set of countries regarded as the wealthiest in human history. We're too wealthy to have kids. It's all so fucking backwards.
My parents raised me on an acre in a house that my parents built with them both having reasonable salaries. My partner and I make more combined than they ever did we would never be able to give kids a life even close to as good as we had growing up.
So we aren't having kids, we will just live as good a life as we can and her nieces will inherit what we have when we die.
I mean, if your parents built a whole house by themselves, that's incredible. My parents just bought a new home way out in the Houston 'burbs, which forced my dad to spend hours commuting every day when he wasn't overseas on contract.
I'm in a smaller house inside the loop and I'm paying maybe 2-3x as much for a postage stamp of space, but my commute is 15 minutes. If I'm feeling crazy, I can even bike to work. That gives me far more time to spend with my son.
That's not even to say there aren't expenses and struggles. Daycare is looking like it'll run me a full second mortgage payment. If we weren't both professionals, it likely wouldn't be worth the cost of care to keep up two incomes.
But you don't need a acre to raise a child. My mom grew up in a smaller house than I own, and she had four sisters.
These are, fundamentally, decisions we're making driven by cultural expectations.
You absolutely don't need an acre to raise a kid, but I don't think people can raise kids as well today as they could 40 years ago because the world is falling apart from capitalist greed.
I mean, I can't imagine telling a survivor of the Great Depression "Yeah, sure, have six kids. Now's the time. Because in a century we're going to have cheap energy and enormous food surpluses and highly advanced industrial machinery and we won't be book-ended between World Wars or have a smallpox or syphillus or polio epidemic."
Like, sure, fuck capitalism. But we've had capitalism for 400 years.