[bigballsbjorn]

children will massively compromise your lifestyle, not just financially but they require a lot of "labor" from you. this is probably the most important piece of the social contract and if you are breaking it you should be penalized.

[zrn900]

> but they require a lot of "labor" from you

Unpaid work. If that work were paid enough through tax incentives and state aid, people would have been having children. But it's not. If they have children, they will be working intensely at their day job in an economic environment that expects ever-increasing productivity from everyone, and then doing more work when they get home. Japan did that. People started collapsing where they worked or stopped having children. Now they are trying to reduce workload, increase financial security and increase wages.

Germany set itself on the road to depopulation.

[bigballsbjorn]

why would it be paid? you get the value back through the social contract. monetary incentives for children are empirically proven to be very ineffective. so the ship will go down regardless. why not to punish the culprits out of spite?

[zrn900]

> you get the value back through the social contract

That was in the earlier decades when there actually was a social contract. Now the entire society is a profit extraction machine that has people working until they drop.

> monetary incentives for children are empirically proven to be very ineffective

On the contrary. Monetary incentives made immigrant families raise numerous kids. The problem was that natives of Germany weren't doing it. Or, maybe very few from the very low income segments were doing it.

[triceratops]

> monetary incentives for children are empirically proven to be very ineffective

Money is like violence. If it didn't work you didn't use enough.

> why not to punish the culprits out of spite?

Is there a difference between penalizing the (by choice) childless and lavishing money on those who have children? Seems about the same to me.

[bigballsbjorn]

doesnt make sense unless money has no meaning anymore.

[em-bee]

children will massively compromise your lifestyle

why though? if you feel that way then in my opinion there is something wrong on your expectation of your lifestyle. or rather, on what our society projects what our lifestyle should be like.

but in my opinion we are also doing it wrong. we delay having children for to long, and we spend our 20s either working to hard or enjoying our freedom, and then we have children in our 30s and 40s and then in our 50s we are to old to enjoy the rest of our life. if we had children in the early 20s then they would be grown up in our 40s and we would be able to enjoy our freedom then. get the hard stuff, including raising children out of the way first.

of course, in order to do that, we need a society that values and supports that. and that's what we messed up in the west. in china it is much more normal to have children early, and people are more supportive and tolerant.

[bigballsbjorn]

its true tho, basically all the time after working your 9-5 you have to invest into your children. i personally still want to have children in my mid 20s. i don't really care about the downside due to my ideological conviction. but even if you are a rational actor and respect the social contract you must bear the burden.

[em-bee]

yes, but this should not be seen as a compromise of your lifestyle. especially if, as you say, you actually want children. you are doing yourself a disservice. looking at children as a burden will only grow resentment.

sure, having children means that my freedom to do something else is limited. but i don't see that as a burden. it's a choice. and i don't regret that choice one bit. i wanted this experience, even if it went differently than expected. in that sense, expecting that you won't have time for something else is good. but make it a positive choice, not something that you only begrudgingly accept because you feel you have to. if your children feel that you felt forced to have children they will resent you for it. it diminishes your love for them, at least in their eyes.

children can be a challenge, they can demand sacrifice, but every minute i spend with them also enriches my life, and when they are grown up and have children on their own i will look at them as a challenge that i have mastered, not a burden that i took on to fulfill a social contract.

[bigballsbjorn]

i dont really have resentment toward having children. my only resentment is toward having to pay into a social system where the majority of recipients don't understand why having no children is breaking the social contract.

[thefz]

So you want others to be miserable like you, to feel better?