I’m truly happy to have one kid so I’m not seriously engaged in your whinefest competition.
Key word being one. Having a kid is so obviously a massive economic handout to you non-breeders that my dopamine receptors won’t bait me into having a 2nd.
Kind of laughable for us as males to be talking about this at all. Women signing up to have their bodies highjacked and ripped apart to produce future ass wipers are the real heros here.
what % of childless individuals do you estimate are married or cohabitating?
I’d wager fairly low
LOL I’m not the one whining but please let me be the first to line up to give you a medal for your truly heroic and selfless contribution to the human race!
that post comes with an extra dose of virtue signaling, classic
You are welcome. If everyone adopted your position of not having children then civilization would literally end. Clearly a bad thing imo but can see how unreasonable minds would disagree.
so much this
huge tell
this would be a huge mistake
this is a really bad post
there are already huge disincentives to having kids
I’ve not taken this position at all, and even if I did your premise literally isn’t true.
I don’t yet (my parents (divorced) are in their early 70s and both are in pretty good condition) but my dad has strongly hinted that he is not planning on being a burden to his kids. not sure how serious he or how much planning he’s done about this is but he did not seem to be joking. 
Being a childless couple is literally the GOAT way to play the game as currently structured. My wife is the one making the final call about whether we have kids or not, but right now it’s leaning no and I’m not at all sad about it lol.
Deriving from this chart:
we get…
At the surface level, this is about 55% of couples not having kids, but what we don’t know is how many of those couples are older and have adult children that have left the home; probably a lot but certainly not all of them.
Other interesting data here: 22 million married couples w/ children, 9 million single parents w/ children, meaning that 29% of households w/ children (not insignificant!) are not benefiting from a dual income, before even accounting for whatever fraction of those married couples don’t have dual incomes.
But my point more broadly is that being in a dual income household is not some unique benefit for parents; that opportunity is equally open to people who wish to cohabit without having children. Anecdotally, that includes my sister & her husband, or my parents’ family friends that we had Thanksgiving dinner with this year. Lucky duckies, they’ve been married for decades with no kids & working good jobs until retirement, they’re probably loaded af.
And more broadly than that, this kinda reminds me of the Obama “you didn’t build that” moment and how badly conservatives misunderstood it. Like, everyone who doesn’t move out to the woods to live completely self-sufficiently does in fact benefit from living in a society, and that society would not exist without, glibly, adding new economic productivity engines (aka workers/consumers aka humans) into the mix to replace the ones who age/die out of it.
There are absolutely massive incentives to not have kids right now. And looking at birthrate stats backs this up conclusively. As annoying as breeders are to you, and I get it honestly, they’re getting hosed even harder than you are. What they’re doing is a metric fuck ton of totally uncompensated very hard work + risk that society as a whole will benefit from almost exclusively. The parents have zero legal right to any benefit from having children whatsoever.
Daycare right now is like 2k+ a month. That’s legit a crushing expense in this economy. It’s that or the lower earning spouse QUITS THEIR JOB FOR 5-6 YEARS MINIMUM AND RUINS THEIR CAREER TRAJECTORY. Either option is absolutely devastating.
The only reason my wife and I are even considering kids is her mom taking her aside earlier this year and telling her “I know you’re both very busy so I can help watch a baby if you have one”. Another one of our friends’ mom did the same thing around the same time so I have a feeling something like Reader’s Digest mentioned that as a way to get yourself some grandchildren.
There are not massive incentives to not have kids
The historical deal for having kids was you were a subsistence farmer and your offspring were where you got labor that wasn’t being done with your own body. Today having a child costs vastly more as a % of your household income and you get absolutely no benefits whatsoever. That’s one of the major reasons the birthrate in the developed world is so much lower than it is in places where people are still doing subsistence farming.
In one society children are the core retirement financial product and in the next they are a pure luxury good with zero economic upside.
Virtue signaling isn’t bad when it’s backed by actual virtue.
The childless should direct their anger not at those with children, but at their elected officials who refuse to provide basic shit everyone takes for granted in every other country with safe drinking water.
So we are having a who’s the bigger leech debate.
Kid free that expect the state to wipe their asses and live off the largess of the taxes of the next generation that did not pay for in blood sweat and tears.
Breeders that get their asses wiped by their children or someone their children pays for (directly or out of their inheritance). Their children help pay for the current Ponzi scheme of taxes services and benefits. On the other hand those children hasten the end of the planet.
Answer. We are all leeches. There is no right or wrong answer. If want to get technical we should all just take a cyanide pill at age 75 or whatever.
?
I don’t get this at all. This needs to be one of those firing nuke type situations where both of you need to turn the key. No one should get a tiebreaker vote on this.
I would gladly opt out of society if I had the choice. Nothing about the modern US experience is remotely ethical, moral, pleasant, or not vomit inducing.
Thought very seriously about getting a cabin somewhere in alaskan wilderness and getting by with satellite internet and subsistence living.
One thing in this debate people are ignoring that the current population is clearly not sustainable for a viable planet even in the next 50-100 years, so arguments about “extinction” by not having kids are pretty rofl and misinformed. Our own planet will kill us far faster than aspy single guys deciding to have cats instead will.