Now why are childless people childless? It turns out that being childless is a conscious decision in only 10 percent of cases, with fertility issues accounting for another 10 percent. For the other 80 percent, Kevin explains, it’s “what demographer Stephen Shaw calls unplanned childlessness…. The infrastructure that gets ordinary people educated, employed, paired off and raising kids has just broken down.”
And this section I need you to read in its entirety:
I view this as fundamentally a conservation project. If the Bengal tiger suddenly and dramatically stopped breeding, we wouldn’t say, “Wow, I’m so glad the tigers are prioritizing their mental health!” Or, “They’re spoiled; they’re just not made of the same stuff as their tiger ancestors.” And we certainly wouldn’t say, “Good, there are too many Bengal tigers! Bengal tigers are ruining everything.”
Instead, we’d look at their environment and try to figure out what changed, what’s disrupting their ability to fulfill this most basic imperative.
And it is a basic imperative. If you’re built to do anything at all, you’re built to fall in love and have children and raise them. And there’s no more punishing verdict, there’s no situation in which a person is more psychologically vulnerable, than when they take a chance on that. You can tell a kid who’s afraid of rejection that it’s not life and death, but it is life and death.
When you ask someone to love you, to marry you, to have a child with you, you’re asking them: do you want my eyes, my nose, my hairline, the way I think, the way I walk and talk? Do you want that to go on into the future or should it go away forever? And for hundreds of millions of men and women, it feels like the whole world is telling them, nope, not you.
For men, it’s usually near the top of the funnel, just getting swiped left 10,000 times at a glance. For women, it often comes later in the form of situationships that can last for months or years and never quite come around to yes, I want you in particular. I want my kids to be like you. I think your thing should go on….
I get why so many people are angry. We’re just not built to be hurt like that over and over again, with no end in sight. And a system where that’s the fate of an ordinary person is a broken system.
Bottom line for me is I don’t want any of that for my kids. I have to think of something better. Yes, there are political and economic dimensions to this issue…. But I’m not trying to have grandkids so they can fund Medicare.
I want my kids to have kids so they can learn that Christmas morning is actually better as a parent than it was as a kid. I want my daughters to have sons and my sons to have daughters, and to care intensely about what happens to them, and watch as that transforms their whole perspective on the opposite sex.
I want them to see all the little imperfections and embarrassing things that they were insecure about as kids in this other person who’s just the best and realized that all of that was completely okay and not a big deal, and it didn’t make them unlovable.
You’re supposed to observe your life again in the third person. You’re supposed to see yourself as a little child through your father’s eyes, your mother’s eyes, maybe through God’s eyes. You’re supposed to see yourself saying and doing things your parents said and did. And you’re either supposed to understand that and forgive it, or you’re supposed to recognize that it was wrong and make it right. Maybe both.
And these are psychological loops that don’t close in any other way. Of course, life isn’t fair. Things don’t always work out. But it should be normal, it should be typical to have these experiences. Parenting is as fundamental to the human life cycle as puberty, and just as transformative.
I believe that the mainstream institutions that used to get people educated, employed, married and supporting a family are in terminal decline and have become hostile to life... ..
In my community nobody has to worry about any of that. We share the same worldview, and we’re normal.
Oh, and another marriage has come out of our community: the soon-to-be bride and groom met inside the School of Life and are getting married next month.
I can sit here and wring my hands in my email newsletter about the challenges we face, or you and I together can try to do something.
I choose the second one:
