I think it’s rare for people to be that precise with things like that. Most will call it Medieval/Middle or Prehistoric, I’ve never heard anyone say “Classical Antiquity” before in my life until now. I rather use what most people do so they understand quicker, but yeah, in more formal contexts I’d prefer the precision
Then why do people like Elon Musk, Trump and so many other rich/upper class people usually have 4 or more children? I don’t think technology, things becoming easier or more comfortable lower birthrates, if anything, they increase it as we saw in the baby boomer era, which had a fertility rate similar to those in medieval times 2000 years ago, so. I am sure people said the same thing as you every 100 years whenever there was a downward trend in the fertility rate, no? “It’s because people are happier, more comfortable now, more educated too”. But imo, those things make you want to have more children, not less.
I think this is a common observation because most societies that become big start to get ran by greedy evil oligarchs and leaders who stagnate the economy for the working class. It does still talk a lot about humanity’s nature as a whole, but not the individual, because, we all can see how our baby boomer grandparents had so many children when their living standards were higher than ours. They’d have 7+ children in average, a home at 19 years old, economic stability, more social lives, physical human contact, not isolation in front of a machine online, all without a college degree like my grandpa, who had 10 children like that. He lived really happy. I wish having children was easier, I’d like to have 1 or 2, teach them how to play videogames like me someday, but it won’t happen, because it’s insanely expensive, I am 28 and still cannot afford a home even after working for 3 years as a software engineer who graduated from ITESM, the “top #1 college in all Latin America” a college a lot of Americans and people from other countries send their children to, has a very hgih reputation. I was a good student too, I was the dude of that meme that says every group has these 3 teammates: the dude that does 91% of the work (that was always me because I had to maintain a scholarship that paid 80% of my debt and I am poor asf so), the dude that helps the first guy by doing the other 9%, the third guy who does nothing but is motivated asking questions and willing to do the presentation, and the 4th guy, the one we all didn’t even know was part of the group, but he showed up in the presentation day. I noticed so, so many people procrastinate and don’t work or try hard in school at all. They are so lazy, and I guess I can’t blame them as I used to anymore, it is not worth working for this world and system.
You also see people like Elon Musk, having more than 10 children. Trump has a lot too. A lot of rich people have so many children, like both of my grandparents, or the politicians and doctors with no free time I know in the family, most have at least 3 children and so on, and they’d have more if they had the same wealth as my grandparents, but they never achieved it either. Not even by being the co-founder of an hospital, like my uncle, who has 2 children, but also has fun collecting motorcycles, built a gaming room for his son, a room with 6 high-end computers for his friends to join him in videogames right there, a LAN party room. He had the entire Disney Infinity or Skylanders figurines collection to play with, forgot which. Those you place on a console, like Amiboos in a Nintendo Switch or UB Funkeys… I don’t think technology or becoming educated are the problem, it’s the lack of money/resources 100%. The only reason my uncle, who is crazy rich, he has gifted my mom 2 of his SUVs because instead of repairing them he buys a new one, only had 2 children because of time. He got his wealth gradually, he probably struggled at first unlike our grandparents who could make it young, and he’s also a gynecologist who’d be busy all the time. My other grandpa was also a gynecologist, and he had 7 children, a house with a pool and enough bedrooms for the children, etc.
I don’t think the existence of the Internet, smartphones, videogames, or whatever you want to name that our grandparents didn’t have back then, are the issue. It’s the lack of money, and that’s thanks to Reagan who convinced and influenced multiple countries, including mine, Mexico, of adopting his Trickle Down Economics theory, of lowering taxes to the rich, who used to pay about 70%, some say 91% in rare cases, of taxes back then; today, they pay near 0% and they are not creating jobs as we were promised they would, they are instead replacing us with AI. People today are unhappier than our baby boomer grandparents as much as they talk about how hard it was to live back then. There is no point in having so many commodities when you are still not happy, and one important thing to be happy is human contact. There are clearly way more virgins and incels today than before. People staying inside homes, doomscrolling memes and posts that don’t make them laugh or smile anymore, but make them feel like crap, depressed, jealous of what others have and display in their instagram. People are also slowly being informed of how fucking crap their lives truly are, the moment they see and explore others’ lives online. Remember than about 50% of humanity is not in the Internet yet. That 50% of humanity are most likely the poorest in the entire world, the people starving to death in the streets, or the boney children you see in TV. No way they can afford a phone of any brand or kind, not even the cheapest one. Just wait until those people join and chime in with their opinions, life experiences and cultures. They will be the wildest stories and posts you might ever see, I bet.
So I think it’s simpler: When people have a lot of resources, birthrates rise. If they don’t have enough resources, birthrates drop. It’s not about how easy, how comfortable technology has made us or whatever, that’s a lie, and that’d be something the government, those greedy rich assholes would try to convince us of it being the problem so we stop blaming them and continue fighting sideways like they want us to. No, it is the rich the cause people are not having children; they are creating an artificial difficult living standard, which is having to work 5x times LONGER than your grandparents to get even a quarter of what they had at your age. It was so easy for them to do that. Just own both the home, the land it is on, and the jobs. Imagine a rich CEO who owns all the jobs in a small city; he decides the wages and the costs of living so easily. He can dictate the mental state of his people; he can control their sanity, their anger, their fertility rate. They are getting angrier and protesting? Increase wages a little, but also increase the cost of food and housing by a lot in silence, on the side. As we can see, wages are never adapted with inflation. Inflation rises, but wages have been the same since decades ago.
No one here has donated more than 100$ USD in total to politicians or candidates they wish got elected. You NEVER, and still DO NOT have a real democracy. You NEVER had democracy or true freedom. We have all been forced to elect either politician A which appeals to empathy, or politician B which appeals to sympathy, both with a touch of apathy for the other, both ready to answer for the interests of the rich, not ours. You will never be able to compete against the millions, if not billions of dollars the richest 1% have. They get to decide who rules us, not us. However, this is the only place where I have hope for humanity. Zohran Mandami proved that you can defeat the rich with words, no matter how much money they spend to attack you. Young people today trust content creators and influencers more than traditional media, and that is a good thing. Traditional media has proven to be against us, not for us. They are owned by the rich, just like Jeff Bezos owns the Wall Street Journal, or New York Times, forgot which one was it, I don’t care. I rather listen to people who are more relatable and honest and humane. It’s so easy to verify and confirm the things they’re saying are true or not, or the right thing or not. Just boil everything down to the question “Is this the best choice for humanity in the long-term?”.
After you turn 30, your chances of having children with disabilities increase significantly too. So, time is ticking.
The ideal society, in my opinion, would be that one that is highly educated and capable and motivated of adapting to the fertility rate, to what humanity can currently afford. That’d be jumping between having 1 child or 3. A fertility rate under 2.1 means the population is declining, which could be a good thing if overpopulation is being problematic like it happened in China during the early 2000s and their 1-child policy which I am not very well-informed about (I remember believing they’d kill your children if you had twins or more when I was a kid, lol. Anti-China propaganda was so much more effective back then), we need time to build more houses, we need time to prepare more jobs too, people would have only 1 child, which is still better than 0. If society needs to keep the population constant, people would be recommended to have no more than 2 children, which is still better than 0. If we need to grow and expand, we could have 3 or more children, whatever the experts recommend at the time. Still better than 0.
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Everyone, relax. This is good news. You have to start thinking like them, like capitalist pigs who believe in Trickle Down Economics:
Rinse and repeat. That’s what Trickle Down Economics truly looks like. It’s 100% justified and the most moral thing to do for Humanity. Anyone trying to tell you otherwise is 100% a Jeffrey Class supporter, aka, a pedophile apologist. Just like Nazis, they are better with their heads opened to the truth.
This is what the Class War looks like, and to me, it began with Luigi and was built up for decades through all means. It’s obviously going to be a very, very slow burn. We might only hear 1 warehouse fire story a year for the next decades, but, the more people realize they will never have even a quarter of what the average baby boomer had at their age, like 6+ children, a home at 19 years old, or at least a happy decent family of two or four without a college degree, and then find out where their money truly is. The fact they got nothing to lose; the fertility rate is 1.5 today in the USA, not 6.0 like it used to be for centuries before WWII; 15 million unused housing units because people cannot afford their cost, 770k homeless people in the USA; over 25 trillion USD spent in the military over the past decade, when we only need 930 billion approx to fix World Hunger over a decade too, enough for those hungry people to get their shit together and become self-sustainable… People complaining about about housing, rent or healthcare costs, complaining about AAA videogames rising their price by 10 or 20 mere bucks, complaining about RAM prices, eggs, gas…
The years where, those young people turn 30, or whatever is the retirement age in your country, with no retirement plans, no cash, no future ahead… After you turn 30, the chances of bearing a child with a disability increase significantly, and as someone whose little brother has Down Syndrome, we have to help him with a lot, like cleaning him, keeping an eye on him while he eats so he does not choke on food because his tongue is always out, he cannot speak or express himself very well, so, sometimes it’s hard to tell what’s wrong or if someone did something to him… This life, this challenge I have dealt with as a brother, is something that would easily push so many to commit suicide. They wouldn’t be able to bear this weight, especially with the economy and the insecurity Mexico has; 30,000+ people die every year here, which is a rate of 24.85 people dying per every 100,000 inhabitants, based on its population size, (US - 20,000± people - rate of 5.7, to give you an idea. Places like Europe go as low as 700 people a year, rate of 1.14. Canada reports 900 people a year, rate of 2.27. Etc.) The way people talk about Down Syndrome online, I am surprised I have not completely lost faith in all of Humanity yet. Sometimes I feel human extinction could be the best thing to happen, but I don’t let those moments of incredible anger define me. I am sure the Average American doesn’t want that either, but, the more difficult it is to keep that boiling pot in place, the worse it’s going to explode and spill someday. Punching your pillow or wall will stop being relieving enough. The more time keeps ticking and the more you see you won’t really make it will eat and burn a lot of these people inside for so long.
Even when you see the most heinous trolls and debate lords online who defend ridiculous shit like the Jeffrey Class, “Trump is innocent regarding the Epstein Files because there is no evidence, image or video of him fucking a kid, and if there is one, it’s AI,” “pull yourself up by the bootstraps. You just want everything handed to you for free. Socialism, communism means being super lazy and dirt poor, nothing else” people who cocksuck landlords or people with 6 yatches while they themselves only have 6 teeth left… You slap them with realities like these, which are backed up by statistics and undeniable truths we all can see with our own eyes everyday; do it with a more cynical tone than theirs, CHANGE THE TOPIC to Class conscience shit no matter what, they always try to deviate, so do the same, while addressing the silent readers first, it always blue-screens those assholes who put up an act of being morally or intellectually superior than others. Those narcissistic incel red/blue MAGA/imperialist losers who fit the “Socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat, but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires.” Those mouthbreathing fools have become so easy to humiliate with this, and if you leave after 1 or 2 replies, so you don’t feed them further, it’s even more effective. Make it sound like they are worth less than the average baby boomer who was a religious nutjob, just because they had more money. These morons measure success and intelligence with money, hence why they cocksuck billionaires. Capitalists’ egos are the most brittle right now, and you all should ABUSE that to weaken them and even convert the youngest. Trust me, this is the language they speak; might and humiliation, whoever does it best “wins” the appeal of those who still doubt their loyalty. It is what it is, just adapt, and behind scenes be yourself with your friends and family, never lose your cool.
I used to admire my cousin when I was young and dumb, called him my brother, but the more I saw his toxic narcissistic ass ego get humiliated and pummeled by logic, like the fact his daddy bought him his Audi car, his apartment in the 9th floor, the expensive med school, ITESM, “the #1 college in all Latin America” being the reasons he attracted a lot of “his friends” who aren’t anywhere near anymore since his dad had to get divorced because dude had a second family in secret, my goddamn Godfather for the First Communion when I forced to be religious by my school as a child; he slowly turned into a mini Andrew Tate, dude’s a Mexican living in Mexico who ended supporting Trump online because he was told that’d rise bitcoin’s value. He didn’t make shit, it was a pathetic waste of time, he sold Humanity for like 30,000 MXN pesos of profit over the span of a year of waiting, that’s literally half of a monthly salary for a junior doctor like him, he is in shambles. The more I realized I was admiring or listening to a moron, the more I abandoned him and now he’s on the brink of suicide, he has told me recently, and it was because dude had the bar so high, to keep the image of being a rich asshole; he cannot keep a job because he hates driving a lot under the >35C° sun of Monterrey or Cancún where he gave up his only job which was paying him 70k~ a month, dude is an idiot, he hates working for the wages they are offering because he is so narcissistic he thinks he is worth millions of dollars, yet cannot make a few thousand even with cheap pathetic shortcuts like getting into crypto or scamming people online using AI. These people are on their way out, do not let them drag you with them. You can do your best and try to educate them, be chill and cool while conversing with them about these things, do not raise your voice or insult them because they are family, but if they don’t change or try, do not bother. It’s not worth sacrificing your sanity for them. It’s them who should be on the frontlines of this war, fixing their fucking mess, not good people like you. You don’t deserve to risk your life for these idiots. Keep finding a way to stay away from their mess, but do not stay quiet, everything you have said online does matter, as much as people say it doesn’t, we are all a culmination of what we have read online, watched or heard in TV, papers and more for years. To think YouTube, Twitch, social medias, even the toxic ones like X, do not have some value in what can be analyzed and all that, it’s a stupid belief only trolls who don’t want you to get empowered with messages want you to believe. That’s all, grab what you think could work for you, ignore or insult what you hated, I won’t care, I am just brainstorming.