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Fewer young people are meeting these 5 milestones typically associated with adulthood
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this post was submitted on 16 Aug 2025
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To help pay for your retirement.
I know that was a rhetorical question, but regardless, here's the answer. Eventually people get old, and it's generally good if there are enough younger folks to pick up the slack when older folks really can't anymore.
Our society is essentially a house of cards. If there suddenly aren't enough supports remaining at the base, those higher levels might start to collapse, and that tends to take the rest of the structure down too.
That is the most selfish and hateful reason to have a child. Your children are their own person, not your retirement insurance. If this is the typical breeder line of thought, no wonder there are so many abandoned elderly folk.
Ok, so first off, I was really talking about social security here, (though it really doesn't matter either way). You can call it hateful or selfish, but it's really just a mathematical issue, morality doesn't factor in. The fact is for Social Security to work at a national level, you need people paying into it for people to be drawing out of it, that's the whole system, that's all it is.
You may have heard that people are growing increasingly worried about social security, as birth rates are down and there's a growing fear that we could end up without enough people paying into it for the system to remain viable. So what's the solution to the problem? How do you balance that equation? You have more babies, that's the entire solution; it's not rocket science, it's arithmetic.
But hey, besides social security, there's the personal angle too. This is probably what you were thinking about. Some people might expect their kids to help support them in their old age. Is this line of thought immoral and selfish? [Spoiler] Of course it fucking isn't! Caring for each other is just what a loving family does. You do realize that the whole "help support me in my old age" request is a request, right? Your children are much more likely to do that if they feel that they've been loved and cared for and supported over the course of their lives. Just to say this again, this plan relies on caring for someone for an entire lifetime, not a small commitment, that's a necessary condition for your kids to care for you in your old age. Meaning, nobody is trapping children into being their retirement plan, this isn't like "one simple trick to guarantee an early retirement". Honestly though, having children is an excellent way to acquire reliable insurance, as the best insurance a person can have is having other people who love you who can help you, after all, that's the only reason any of us survived childhood in the first place.
TLDR: If you want retirement insurance, have a kid. It's the loving thing to do and it can support others as well as yourself.
Yeah, so. Here's the thing. I lived through a social security collapse in a country (not the US, obvs) with a youth boom. Trust me, having lots of bodies around did not help when the oligarchs horded all the wealth to escape hyperinflation and there was no work to go around.
It is of no use to have over half of the population in productive ages (19 - 45) if more than half of them are unemployed. And guess what, it didn't help the elder either as they were the first casualties of a collapsed healthcare system. We had an abandoned elders crisis, along with several other crises, admittedly.
But I guess my point is, not even at a macroeconomic scale is having children any form of insurance. I know myself, as the cousin who have had to provide end of life care for more than one elder relative. Whom, I should point out, had way more children than my mom and dad, yet I was the only one with enough compassion left to care for distant relatives when their own children wouldn't even shell out spare change to pay for food.
Ok, but corruption is a different issue. I don't disagree that corruption and hyperinflation can make a social security system collapse. But simply not having enough money will also do that. So, either of these conditions would be enough to break the system, which means you do need both of these things under control to make it work. And it seems that we agree that letting that system collapse is a bad thing. With that in mind, I maintain that having kids is still a necessary condition to make the system work.
It's also outright counterproductive if we see large increases in unemployment due to automation (including, but not limited to AI).