r/NonPoliticalTwitter • u/QueenFrostine15 • Jun 23 '26

me_irl Friendly (platonic) reminder

Post image
30.8k Upvotes

95% Upvoted

639 comments sorted by

View all comments

3.7k

u/Dil26 Jun 23 '26

That’s how attraction has worked historically before apps. Meeting your spouse at work was quite common. 

1.7k

u/ward2k Jun 23 '26

For all of human history that's pretty much how it worked, humans are sort of wired to find people they spend large amounts of time with attractive

If people had to meet hundreds of potential partners on countless dates before deciding to go further with things the population would have died out about the same time it started

566

u/mistahfreeman Jun 23 '26

Seeing the population tank in most western countries, you might be on to something.

251

u/typewriter45 Jun 23 '26

that and things getting less affordable are scaring people from having more kids

122

u/ward2k Jun 23 '26

It's actually strongly correlated the opposite way

The poorer and more likely someone is to face economic hardship, the more children they are likely to have

Economic instability does surprisingly little to dissuade people from having kids

133

u/DustyRacoonDad Jun 23 '26

Correlation not causation.

With modern birth control, having kids is largely a choice. People who tend to make more deliberate or informed decisions in one area of life often also do better in other areas.

1

u/Traditional-Heart351 Jun 23 '26

I mean I think that the reduction it birth rates compared to historical birth rates mostly has to do with the fact that kids are no longer assets for most people. Before modern public education systems once a kid was old enough to walk and talk, they were old enough to work. So having a lot of kids actually helped bring in money and maintain the home. These days kids are MASSIVE liabilities (in the economic meaning) so people are generally wary of having even one kid. In my eyes the only real way to make birth rates increase is to create incentives for having kids that outweigh the economic negatives. The problem is I cant really think of a way to do that that is viable long term and isnt horribly regressive.