Worst than going to the hospital alone and spending old age alone is doing that after doing all the work of having kids. I will be alone and I'm taking care of that but I know people relying on children that don't give a fuck about them.
this post was submitted on 29 Dec 2025
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Fight fire with fire. Time for the Chinese Kids to start spamming their parents with AI-gen'd videos of Men and Women regretting getting married.
Cheaper to just interview random couples.
~~Childless~~, child free.
This is such an important distinction, tbh
They're each trying to put their own spin on it, there is no actual distinction in the words, just in the subtext/implication.
The former implies it's a lacking of a necessary thing, the latter implies it's the avoidance of an unnecessary burden. It's completely subjective whether a child is one or the other to someone.
It's a broadcast of one's own biases to consider either of these terms more 'valid' than the other.
At the very least, if you're trying to persuade to have kids, people who have chosen to not have kids, those people are not childless, they are child free. Their will is to be without child. They are not failing at having kids, they are succeeding at not having them.
I am dubious of your intermediate and final claims. For something to be necessary, it means that one cannot go without it. Is procreation a biological imperative, with strong positive reinforcement from the individual's biological feedbacks? Sure. But is it necessary? Strictly, no.
I don't think you can make the claim that someone saying it is not necessary is inherently biased. To claim that procreation is not strictly necessary is a neutral, objectively true position. The bias in the perspective of "child-free" is the implied framing of the lack of procreation as a personal or moral good. Procreation is, again, unnecessary, and is (in many ways literally) a burden. Whether one frames that unnecessary burden as positive or negative is at issue here.
I don't appreciate the claim that people must be biased in order to observe simple facts, denuded of emotion.
My parents and extended family: "why don't you find a nice girl to [blah blah blah]"
Me: "haha yes I'll get right on that"
Me: having mega gay sex in addition to actively not wanting children, even if I was medically a good candidate to father them
Parents/extended: "I just don't understand"
Me: upgrades to ultra mega gay sex
Ultra Mega Gay Sex Pro Max FE Special Edition+
💦
Out of curiosity, what is the second level upgrade or evolution?
asking for a friend
I imagine that Xi probably doesn't care all that much whether you're having mega gay sex, but I expect that he is very interested in whether you are also employing that dingus in ways more-conducive to sustaining future state output.
Shaming people into having kids works so well
They rush to have children who are then cherished and not resented
/s
The one child policy really gonna be up there with killing all the sparrows long term...
It was in place 45 years and only gone a decade.
You can't just flip a cultural switch and expect them to become bunnies overnight. And that's not even getting into the economic part.
Kids are fucking expensive.
When workers aren't paid well, people stop having kids. That shrinks labor supply in a generation, workers can command enough pay to have kids, and population will stabilize.
The wealthy hate populations dropping, because they have the luxury to plan ahead and know eventually it leads to more powerful workers.
It's why it's a constant boogeyman and reproduction has been prioritized thru virtually all of recorded human history.
The one child policy really gonna be up there with killing all the sparrows long term...
Except that killing the sparrows was a bad idea.
Getting rid of pests was the problem, and it was a real one...
Killing all the sparrows was a legitimate attempt to help that backfired.
Overpopulation was and still is a problem.
One child would have theoretically been managed, but ignored how people act individually and the desire to have a son. An honest and legitimate attempt to mitigate a real problem backfired.
I feel it's an apt comparison, even if I didn't explain enough at first
Yeah… the difference is that one (sparrows) was just a bad idea due to a total misunderstanding of the problem. The sparrows weren’t the pests, the bugs they eat were.
The other (one child) is a good idea that was poorly managed due to unexpected cultural mores. Even so it would still be effective once people are “incentivized” to give up on the foolishness of prioritizing one sex over the other.
Well, you might not understand it, but you learned how to repeat it at least
We'll call it a win I guess.
Good thing the government, led by the vanguard and guided by the Immortal Science, wisely choose to implement a one child policy for so long.
Parents (not being able to tell the videos are AI-generated): "See this? This will be you in 30 years if you don't get married and have kids very soon!"
Kids (able to see the videos are visit AI-generated): "Suuuuure!"
The fact that it's AI generated tells the kids that it doesn't happen in real life.
What ghouls. Let people live the lives they want.
what if being shitty to their kids is how they want to live ?
Why would anyone in their right mind bring a child into this chaos right now? Humans probably need a good ole fashioned hard reset. First we need to fix oil dependency and the climate. That's a start.
Chinese Nationalists are probably feeling more powerful than ever before. Imagine MAGA but worse, because their supreme leader has been around for longer and their party has been around for lifetimes.
Nice to know the ungodly toxic, overbearing and boundryless parent is a universal phenomenon.
How is life in China actually? There must be a reason people don't want children. I imagine work culture, bad pay, bad prospects, and inability to secure housing are top among the reasons.
There must be a reason people don’t want children.
Yeah, kids cry and shit a lot. You don't need a reason not to want them, you need a reason to have them.
They also take up all your goddamn time with storytime and cuddles and teaching them how to ride a bike or type their name out on a keyboard or playing lego or making crafts or going on adventures or eating cheese
And doctor appointments, and driving them to school and from school and standing next to them watching them stand there not doing anything just in case the fall down and hit their head on the floor and cooking 3 different breakfasts for them because they changed their mind 3 times and so on and so on. Yeah, it's very rewarding for some, not that appealing for others.
NYT put out a video 3 weeks ago covering a few guys that couldn't get women. The video says there's 30 million more men than women in the country due to the one child policy.
But that figure could be inflated
Not that I am disagreeing with your assessment, but I think low child brith rate is pretty universal in developed country.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_total_fertility_rate
Yes, education is a big factor in reduced birth rate, but I doubt it's the biggest factor. If educated people lived in societies with good conditions for raising and bearing children, I imagine they would make the informed decision to get children.
It would take more than financial incentives I suspect. It's the time cost that is so demanding and it would likely require a restructuring of society that either results in people working much less hours, or a more community-based child rearing approach.
None of those reasons are why I decided not to have children. My reason is: my wife and I like to play computer 8 hours per day when we got home from work.
I believe China has too much housing right now. But the rest seems to be reason enough.
People who leave and get citizenship elsewhere are never allowed to return. It's a single party dictatorship with no sign of civil rights, some minorities are actively being sterilized and eradicated.
If you're a wealthy Han Chinese then I bet it's great.
Don’t get carried away. The reason is the opposite of what you think.
Their birth rates dropped dramatically because they raised so many people out of poverty with socialism. But now capitalism demands that they generate more workers.
Pretty deep irony, because very recently they weren’t allowed to have more than one child.
They actually had massive overpopulation after industrialization and then limited it with the One Child Policy, then later the Two Child Policy, but one of the repercussions of the One Child Policy and the inability of women to inherit wealth was that female babies were murdered at birth and a large gender ratio disparity formed. Now that the population has started to decline while average lifespan rises due to improved medical science, two new problems have formed:
-
The ratio of elderly to young is skewed, meaning one young has to take care of more elderly or do their equivalent of work.
-
The dictatorship's most recent leader has realized he personally benefits from more manpower regardless of the consequences and suffering that increased population will cause.
You’re correct. It’s an oversimplification…but not a big one.
Cold hard predicative and replicable facts are better than “it must suck in China so they don’t want kids, bro”
It’s an oversimplification…but not a big one.
It's a massive oversimplification that seems to whitewash China's policies.
Every country that undergoes industrialisation and urbanisation has a big drop in birth rates. Same in capitalist and socialist countries, there's no essential difference in how it plays out (the tempo is different from case to case for many reasons, but the trend is the same). But China additionally made the rates plummet through govt intervention.
So you stressed and praised the part that wasn't truly crucial for the outcome (socialism), but ignored the part (one child policy) that drastically contributed to the outcome and that can't be presented as nice or intuitively desirable (regardless of whether it objectively was or wasn't a good decision). That's not simplification but selectiveness.
(Yes, it is true that many lemmings who live outside China just project their own "China sucks" logic onto the Chinese, and their approach is wrong, I agree with you on that count.)
Yes…because those things create wealth. Sounds like you agree but are trying to find an argument. We know birth rate and wealth/poverty are directly related…it’s is what it is. Once upon a time it was just understood that was the case…before everybody injected personal politics into everything.
For the purposes of my comment I’m ambivalent about the political “vehicle”…I’m just plainly stating what happened: social policy raised billions out of poverty….then the capitalist elements of the society demanded labour. We know it’s not the other way around. If you think I’m assigning value to either capitalism or socialism, you’re projecting.
Meh…what, in your headcanon, am I “selecting” for? I don’t even know if you got “offended” about socialism or capitalism, I don’t want to debate something I didn’t say.
AI is a shit show.
Maybe work on fixing that 16% youth unemployment rate, think that'll work a lot better then showing them slop
Absolutely unhinged lol
china's long history of controlling their ~~citizens’~~ prisoners’ reproduction
Have a feeling this will backfire simply because comedy
Hopefully this is about as effective as the war on drugs, because the world needs less children.