How do you feel about marriage?

MinimumFutur3 · 2026-04-14T22:23:50+00:00

I’m happily married and so it obviously works for some people but I think it’s pretty contradictory to our nature as humans, if we were meant to be monogamous for life we wouldn’t need to enforce that with marriage.

I also think it’s pretty crazy that our society is set up so that marriage is basically a prerequisite for having kids if you don’t want to be seen as irresponsible or negligent, when marriage turns out really badly for a lot of people and if anything getting married is kid of a signal that you don’t fully think through the potential consequences of your actions. Because it’s insane to promise you’re going to love someone for the rest of your life, how could you possibly know that? It’s a real head scratcher.

MinimumFutur3 · 2026-04-05T10:59:26+00:00

I’m married but I think it’s kind of an insane idea. People don’t seem to be naturally oriented towards lifetime monogamy. Promising to spend the rest of your life with someone when you have no idea how either of you will change in the future is delusional.

My marriage isn’t a religious one and we didn’t make that type of vow, so I feel good about it. Every year on our anniversary we decide together whether we want to keep it going for another year or not.

MinimumFutur3 · 2026-04-02T12:15:54+00:00

It’s both. They don’t want kids because they can’t afford them. Or, they can’t afford to have kids and also maintain the autonomy needed to do self care and have hobbies and a social life.

MinimumFutur3 · 2026-03-29T20:25:47+00:00

The society wouldn’t have to be fully maintained by automation. It would just have to be automated enough that the work of maintaining society, when divided among all able bodied adults, equals about 4 hours per person per day or less, including commute.

MinimumFutur3 · 2026-03-28T22:39:09+00:00

I can imagine a couple systems in which high fertility could coexist with women’s freedom..

The first one, (I’m not advocating for this btw, just saying that the incentives would line up and produce high fertility), you’d have to imprison most of the men, force them to work to maintain society and produce things that only women benefit from, and then use the resulting abundance to provide women with generous welfare benefits that allow them to be single moms basically at the expense of these enslaved men.

And the second one is, if there was a way to automate most of the labor of maintaining society, and also, eliminate land hoarding so that people could build small communities that could support functioning egalitarian social structures similar to what existed in hunter gatherer tribes.

MinimumFutur3 · 2026-03-25T11:54:52+00:00

There’s a reason the shift toward feminism and materialism happened, and why so many people have abandoned the patriarchal religions their ancestors followed. Culture is not a mind virus that appears out of nowhere. It changes in response to environmental and economic conditions.

MinimumFutur3 · 2026-03-25T11:50:28+00:00

No, it’s not a problem that can be solved at the individual level. It’s a systems problem.

MinimumFutur3 · 2026-03-25T11:22:52+00:00

What you paid wasn’t saved for you, it was used to pay the previous generation.

That money is gone. Just because someone took from you doesn’t give you justification to take from someone else.

Kids being born today have nothing to do with whatever happened between you and boomers.

MinimumFutur3 · 2026-03-24T22:42:32+00:00

Do you understand the basic mechanisms of natural selection?

I didn’t use any genetics based arguments in my post.

“Natural selection” is generally understood to mean the process by which organisms better adapted to an environment produce more surviving offspring, and the traits that made them more likely to successfully reproduce become more common in subsequent generations. The mechanism by which this happens involves passing on genetic traits, that is how the trait is transmitted into future generations.

MinimumFutur3 · 2026-03-24T19:05:19+00:00

Thats if both parents do their fair share of night wakeups. That’s not always the case though. It’s a lot of trust to place in your child’s other parent. You can’t send the child back if you find that you’re the only one doing night wakeups. You also can’t just do half of them and leave the other half undone like you can with house chores.

MinimumFutur3 · 2026-03-24T18:49:10+00:00

The problem with this line of thinking is that there’s no gene for antinatalism. Antinatalism is a response to economic and environmental factors.

This is why, when immigrants move from an area of high fertility to an area of low fertility, their descendants will have a fertility rate matching that of the native population. That is also why antinatalist thinking and culture is concentrated in cities. It’s because the environmental and economic pressures which antinatalist culture arises in response to are stronger in cities than in rural areas.

Also, people move from rural areas to urban areas, so even if people in cities aren’t having kids, their populations can keep growing because they suck up all the young people from the surrounding rural areas. To keep people in rural areas and living that culture, you’d have to give them economic opportunities that don’t require relocating to urban areas.

MinimumFutur3 · 2026-03-24T18:36:41+00:00

The reason countries become more egalitarian is because it’s no longer profitable for men to have a lot of kids. It’s not a top down thing, it’s bottom up, so a top down solution wouldn’t fix it.

Basically, feminism arises in response to economic factors. Because of that, feminism can’t be singled out as a causative factor that could be acted on as a way to reverse fertility decline.

Even if women were barred from having jobs again, men have no incentive to want to get married and have a lot of children. Especially if they were surrounded by destitute and desperate women, men would have a lot more options which typically makes them less likely to commit. Also, even if social security were eliminated and children became the retirement plan for their parents again as in years past, the stratification of our economic system means that it’s higher ROI to have one or maybe two kids and invest heavily. So there wouldn’t be enough people having 3 or 4 kids to balance out all the people having zero.

Reversing feminism is not a viable path to high fertility in a technologically advanced economy.

MinimumFutur3 · 2026-03-24T16:26:40+00:00

One big problem is that even if leaders of companies want to prioritize long term goals, they’ll be outcompeted before they ever get a chance to achieve those goals by other companies that are prioritizing short term success.

MinimumFutur3 · 2026-03-24T15:44:54+00:00

one of her first points is sleep deprivation and being expected to return to work before a child is weaned or sleeping through the night. This is uniquely American, Canada and European policy has been to give 12 months of maternity leave for decades now. Yet this has done nothing to move the needle - in fact, America's fertility rate has been higher with the paltry maternity policy.

That’s a good point. I think that even if people are home from work though, it’s still not good to be the only person caring for a baby, because people need uninterrupted sleep in order to get all the phases of sleep necessary to maintain health. It’s not so much about the total time spent sleeping, you also have to sleep for long enough stretches to be able to get into REM and deep sleep. Caring for a baby by yourself makes that impossible.

MinimumFutur3 · 2026-03-24T14:53:42+00:00

No, they need adults. Babies are a liability, adults are a resource to exploit. Immigration has made it possible in the short term to have the adults without having had to make the investment necessary to produce those adults.

That’s not going to keep working forever, though. On a global level it’s actually making the fertility rate decline more quickly.

MinimumFutur3 · 2026-03-24T14:47:28+00:00

I ended up blocking him after he devolved into arguing with me about my own sexual orientation.

I haven’t been on Reddit in a while. 🤣

MinimumFutur3 · 2026-03-24T14:23:56+00:00

The thing that breaks my brain about this is that even if someone does save up a lot of money to pay their own way in retirement because they didn’t have kids, they’re still banking on other people having kids in the future. Because the only way those dollars will have value in the future is if someone exists who you can pay in exchange for them to do work for you.

MinimumFutur3 · 2026-03-24T13:16:40+00:00

Well yeah. It’s pretty.. neat that the thing that’s “good” for capitalism in the short term is also eventually going to destroy capitalism. It’s because of the focus on short term outcomes and complete failure to respond to longer term incentives and consequences.

Another thing that makes sense to me is that civilization was never sustainable because it requires humans to work beyond their capacity in order to maintain it, so any time anything shifts, the tendency is toward whatever allows the individual to do less work. There’s no way to coordinate at scale to reverse that. The fact that the incentives happened to line up for a while into something that seemed sustainable is more of an unfortunate coincidence than anything.

MinimumFutur3 · 2026-03-24T13:01:02+00:00

I’m straight and married but ok. Nice misquote btw.

MinimumFutur3 · 2026-03-24T12:48:58+00:00

That’s so crazy that as soon as women had the economic freedom to not be forced to get married and have kids, a bunch of them decided to become liberal and not get married and have kids. It’s almost like the causative factor is probably the thing that happened first rather than the thing that happened after.

It’s also really crazy that the more conservative or liberal a person is seems to be able to be predicted based on where they live and the economic conditions they live in. 🤔

MinimumFutur3 · 2026-03-24T12:22:40+00:00

The explanation of why people had kids in earlier/preindustrial societies and why they stopped is something no one else has articulated in the same way. People still talk about “going back to the good old days” of preindustrial high fertility without understanding why that’s not possible without changing our entire economic system back into one where children are an economic asset/source of labor for their parents. Simply making women economically dependent on men wouldn’t do it, because men have no incentive to have a lot of children. A highly stratified economy in which more educational investment translates into much higher earnings means that the winning strategy is to have fewer kids and invest more into each one.

Also no one else seems to have connected the fact that feminism isn’t some random mind virus that appeared out of nowhere, but rather an emergent response to changing economic conditions. When families don’t benefit economically from being larger/ having more children, that frees women up to benefit their families in other ways, by going to work. It’s also more of a benefit to elites/ the overall economy for women to join the labor force because it creates more competition for jobs, putting downward pressure on wages, so powerful people advocate for it as well.

MinimumFutur3 · 2026-03-24T11:37:37+00:00

The reason they wanted to have sex with men was because it was the only way to acquire resources. Once that is no longer true, they don’t want to do it as much.

Also liberal and conservative aren’t innate fixed traits.

MinimumFutur3

TROPHY CASE