Dealing with the school system alone is awful.
Just a rat in a cage…
Wait until she discovers school loans or taxes.
In general, serious commitments of any kind limit your life choices. “Entrapment” is when someone else tricks you into it.
Yeah, but she’s right in that employers definitely exploit that sometimes. They know you can’t just walk away from a raw deal on a whim because while you may be willing to risk yourself, they’re keenly aware that most aren’t willing to risk their children’s food and shelter
Thank you. Every choice in life limits other choices. Yes when you have children, you then have to care for them. What lifestyle you must live is up to you though. The ones that must keep up with whoever is the ‘in group’ are always going to have a harder time than those to learn to go for what they really want and need in life and not what a TikTok tells them they do.
So too when you get older. Around 35, life starts hurting for seeming no reason.
Yep, that’s about when life takes the gloves off and starts kicking you in the nuts/muffin just for fun.
Better systems don’t tie healthcare to jobs, so that’s one stressor that better places don’t have, that threat held over people. They also have paid leave from work and lower cost childcare. Their populations can still decline but they will adapt to manage it and people are happier there. Any chance for those improvements are with the Dem platform and a sustained supermajority, it only gets worse with maga.
Yeah universal healthcare and affordable childcare would unlock huge amounts of productivity, but the fact that our oligarchs haven’t implemented those things says it’s not actually about productivity, like they claim. It’s about control.
Responsibility is entrapment yes. It’s a choice and trade off that some people make, some know about the terms and conditions beforehand some don’t
Oh for fuck’s sake, this is my first time seeing a post from this community - are you guys usually that unhinged or what?
It’s not like it was designed with that as the end goal, but that is exactly how it functions.
They’re not wrong though. Did you see that Simpsons episode as to why there isn’t any picture of Maggie in their family photo album? Because it’s “do it for her”.
“Having kids traps you!” is right in line with the attitude of the community.
That’s just how certain people think. Social attachments, legal obligations, and interpersonal debts are all engineered plots to ruin your carefree life.
I’m generally fine hearing people like this say they don’t want kids. I would not want that kind of person as a parent.
Survival is necessary to have freedom, unless you are seeking freedom from life.
And people seem to be able to be miserable in any life. A steady paycheck certainly helps me be less miserable, and unless you are a trust fund baby I don’t see how you are going to go have so many adventures without a source of income.
I’m saving for money before I even try to have a family. I have savings but I am saving for more.
True, but it’s not a having kids problem. It’s a capitalism problem, as usual.
The same case could be made for hobbies. You need money for hobbies, so they trap you in the system.
Destroy capitalism and suddenly having kids is great (relatively speaking, subject to personal preferences).
Destroy capitalism and suddenly having kids is great
Depends on the system. The reason why capitalism has proliferated is it allows selfishness, which is part of human nature. Honestly, is there a better economic system, which also rewards selfishness like capitalism?
I think OOP is referring specifically to the cultural pressures everywhere telling you that you need to have kids. The people pushing that the most are conservatives who are straight up puppets for billionaires
The “life script” (to happiness?)
They need more labor and consumers. Every American is more profit for the corporations that rule us.
Also more soldiers to send off on needless wars like the Vietnam War, Korean War, Iran War , Afghan War, etc…
All the wars Injust mentioned didnt substantially change any of the lives of the peoples of the countries that participated in them.
Vietnam is still a somewhat socialistic state, North Korea and South Korea still exist till today, Iran is still ruled miliarily by the IRGC and parliamentarily by the Iranian clerical elites, and the Afghanis still dont care at all about nato and are rulled by the Taliban…
Just more soldiers into thhe needless meat grinders, and more slaves and consumers to do the bidding of the richest people in society.
There will be more and more needless wars with dozens of innocent , impressionable adults thrown into the different meat grinders. There will be mroe and more people turned into personal toys for the rich or into their slaves and consumers …
It is not until the average person gets fed up and knowledgable about how this circular and awful system fucks them , their loved ones, their communities and the kids of their communities over and says "No More! " will we see a substantial change to be subsubstantiated.
You need money for hobbies
some hobbies. Other hobbies can even make you money.
Other hobbies can even make you money.
My hobby is data entry in spreadsheets for banks and oil companies.
A hobby that makes money is a job, once you start to depend on it it starts being stressful and stops being a hobby. I’ve been through that cycle a couple of times.
Okok, what i wanted to say; a lot of hobbies are free or next-to-free.
I’ve completed sailing course recently, and I’m still in awe that one of activities that the instructors do in their spare time is handling the private yachts between ports, like bringing one from Greece to Spain. Seems like an awesome side gig.
No kids, but with no guts or financial sense I’m as trapped as if I had kids. I quit my job and spent two years draining my savings and barely traveled or lived any kind of interesting life. I got a new job that started at 40% of what I made at the job I quit, moved back in with my parents and have gotten addicted to not paying rent. I could move out and live a life of poverty or continue to not spend $2k/month on rent and live fairly luxuriously. I’m nearing 50, never married. My married friends are getting near empty nest status but they understandably want to spend time with their spouses. I’m 5 years away from being eligible for “senior living” where I’ll relive my 20s smoking bowls and playing video games with my friends.
Or stick around, grant the parents a graceful exit, then inherit the house?
I’m not in a hurry to get turned down by old ladies. I won’t inherit the house, it’ll be sold and the proceeds split with my brother. My parents are passing 80 and are on a health kick doing youtube calisthenics and homeopathic remedies with the hope of living to 100.
I watched the movie Babes with my wife last night, and it perfectly encapsulated this tweet.
And I surprisingly enjoyed it despite being childfree myself. It didn’t gloss over the shity parts of parenthood like most movies do, and it was honest about how much it can suck.
The problem is as /u/DupaCycki@lemmy.world pointed out, an issue of capitalism. The movie unfortunately and unsurprisingly didn’t address that, it sort or just carried on with the status quo assumption that the current situation and system doesn’t need replaced. That’s the only bit I didn’t enjoy.
IMO the best replacement system I’ve seen proposed is the Aandrisk system of hatch/feather/house families from Becky Chamber’s “The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet” series.
For those unfamiliar, Aandrisks are humanoid reptiles with feathers for hair, and they divide their lives into three sections, hatch family, feather family, and house family.
Everyone is “born” as hatchling, being raised in groups of a dozen or two, in hatch families. They aren’t really considered people until they are physically mature. Generally they aren’t actually siblings, but instead come from donated eggs.
Once they mature they leave to go form feather families. These basically are polycules of people in their 20s to late 30s that are there for community, sexual relations, and to explore the world. They don’t raise kids, they live their life and gain experience. Any offspring they do produce gets dropped off at a house family.
House families are older groups, often formed from old feather families who are looking to settle down and stabilize. They take in eggs from feather families and raise them to maturity.
It’s got an elegance we are very much lacking in humans, especially with capitalism being in the mix.
If the offspring are dropped off at house families, where do the babies at hatch families come from?
It’s the same family, but called differently depending on perspective.
If you were just “born”, it’s your hatchling family, if you’re in the last third of your life, it’s your house family.
More information if you’d like: https://wayfarers.fandom.com/wiki/Aandrisk
OH. That makes sense then. Neat idea op.
Human communes kind of worked this way in the past.
Outside of my crippling OCD, I’d probably really love living in a commune.
Sorry for your OCD but to be completely honest I dont see how humanity can improve our current living situation without living in communes of some sort.
we currently live in large cities, large municipalities, and large countries where most people barely know eacj other and barely feel anything for each other . We are ruled by police officers, bribed politicians and multimillionaaires, multimillionaires who could launch nukes to eradicate 99% of the population of species on Earth at a moments notice. And on top of that we work longer hours these days than most of our ancestors ever did work and at a moment’s notice any of us could lose our jobs leading to homelessness or the loss of our social standing or the los of our loved ones… This is throoguhly divorced from the original style of livong that humans used to have back when our ancestors started creating these same municipalities a nd social communities. But humans are social creatures - most humans need a ‘tribe’ of some sort that they can defend, work for, work with, love, and be loved by. Why would we firther divorce our species from the original forms of communitiy which humanity found to be so beneficial back then. Humans spent easily 95% of of our species existence living in small tribes, small communes and small villages. Such a lifestyle and such colmunities are practically in our blood at this point.
What I think is that if yoy did ever live in a tribe you could call your own maybe theyd help you with living a lifestyle that would help you to treat your OCD or theyd craft their lifestyles in ways to help you and them communicate and spend time together even with your OCD. Hopefully 🫂
I wish you and all of us the best on this journey forward cause what we have today just isnt working for most people as far as Im concened.
It’s one form of entrapment but in this economy even being childfree im living paycheck to paycheck
Yeah being a “dink” or even just solo and childless/free used to be a ticket to easy street, now it’s just regular street.
🫂Same. I thought it would be different lool 😅🫂
Exactly, and it makes the idea of “having children” sound even more absurd.
I feel as if this further justifies universal access to voluntary birth control, abortions, and sterilizations globally.
Because all because someone and their parrtner(s) have a breeding kink that doesnt mean thatt they have the time, psyche , or money to raise a child. Esoecially in today’s world where living paycheque to paycheque is the default for most people. So that means all humans have gained the right to delay producing children , even forever, cause how do we know if things will improve economically? Things probably wont improve. The majority of humanity has seemed to be OK with this current ‘paycheque-to-paycheque’ status quo for decades…so…
It’s one form of entrapment but
in this economyunder capitalism even being childfree im living paycheck to paycheck.
Personal freedom always only really was available for criminals and vagabonds. Maybe royalty and stuff as well but I think they were more or less trapped in the system as well with what they were allowed to do or how to behave.
My point is for most of human history survival and safety naturally was way more important than personal freedom, which actually lead to the development of all the systems we have in place now and which only now made it possible to experience this personal freedom to begin with which of course you lose when another person is completely dependent of you.
So having personal freedom really is something special and luxurious and not the default state which you have to give up for kids. It’s more like you have to give up having kids to have the possibility of personal freedom (but even then most people don’t have or had it).
I might say it’s just a luxury of youth. Get older and even being a criminal or a vagabond still gets expensive. Eventually, it’s not the kids that weigh you down. It’s your own old bones.
The only real “liberation” is death. And there’s no fun in that.
I prefer renegade.
The jig is up, the news is out, they finally found me!
