I’ve been wondering recently what impact banning social media would have on birth rates. I’m confident it would be positive but I’m not sure on what magnitude.
I genuinely don't know what to do in my smaller suburb where the verbs aren't "look" "eat" or "drink". I wanna do. Museums are mostly boring to me, there's little interaction. I don't meet people at the library or gym. The volunteer things ive done had a weird gap where younger people and older people have more free time than middle aged workers and parents so I had few peers at those too.
I'm open to any and all ideas. Feels like things never truly changed back after covid as far as community events and social opportunities.
$10-12 beers and $15 cocktails gets expensive over a few weekends.
The obsession with their birth rates is one of the creepy reasons why young people don't want to go out.
I'm a bit confused here, as someone who doesn't go out and never did. Do young people get accosted about generational birth rates if they go out?
But I do think this is overstated. I have a small number of children and the main reason that we don't have more is that its incredibly expensive over the course of a lifetime to raise a child who isn't going to be some wage slave somewhere or worse, end up in poverty and treated like shit by the world. If our society was genuinely dedicated to allowing a slower pace of life and ensuring the unconditional dignity of human beings, we'd probably have more kids, but having more now feels like pitching them into the meat grinder.
As a mid 30s millennial, it sure did feel weird back in my early 20s when older people from my rural hometown asked why I hadn’t found someone to marry and started a family yet. I had yet to even figure out who I was and how to be responsible, upstanding adult but somehow I’m supposed to take on a partner and N children too?! How does that make any sense? The chances of it ending in disaster of one sort or another are just too high, and that was obvious to me even in the midst of the naivety of a freshly minted adult.
Flash forward to today, and yes I’d like to do those things but I’m now in so much better of a position to do so that it’s difficult to even express. I’m glad I didn’t succumb to the pressure.
Sex is decoupled from birth rates, due to access to 100% effective birth control (IUD/morning after pill/abortion). Hence there is no reason to think it would have any positive effect. I would be surprised if even a single person I know had had an unplanned kid.
In 2022, the US overturned the constitutional right to abortion. Abortion is now outlawed in 17 US states, restricted in 8.
Politicians in some of these states are also trying to ban IUDs and the morning after pill.
This doesn't really track. People still get pregnant accidentally all the time. And people also still decide to have babies on purpose if they meet someone they like. Social media may be screwing up the latter process somewhat and getting rid of it could improve birth rates.
Birth Control isn't the whole problem. I would argue its not part of the problem at all - if people are choosing to not have kids, you don't have a birth control problem, you have a society problem. Unless you just think more human agency is bad? Seems like a weird take to me.
But that didn’t occur to me, since as far as I know, pretty much all relationships don’t happen like that anymore, and are usually planned prior to going out using dating apps or other personal networks. In which case, it’s not just instagram reels that would have to be gotten rid of, but also matchmaking services.
Contrarian take (not saying I believe this) but what if AI companions actually engage the mind more? Is there some positive path available here?
And yet if I’m inquiring into a subject matter I have scant knowledge about, and want to learn more about, I voraciously read the output and plan my next prompt thoughtfully throughout.
The dividing line is intellectual curiosity. AI can stimulate the mind in ways people may not have thought possible, like explaining subjects they never grasped previously, but the user has to want to go down that path to achieve it.
Social media doomscrolling, by contrast, is designed to anesthetize, so the result should not surprise.
I am not trying to use it as a companion though. Not only do I have human ones but it feels super weird and creepy to try. I couldn’t suspend disbelief since I know how these things work.
> I’ve been wondering recently what impact banning social media would have on birth rates. I’m confident it would be positive but I’m not sure on what magnitude.
People can and do use anticonception. They do not have kids just randomly out of bored stranger encounter anymore.
