Wow that was long and surprisingly nuanced. One thing I’ve thought about recently looking at my own daughters is that they are bombarded with a lot of fake “this is the good life” that rarely includes children.

As a consequence perhaps the right time to have them will never eventuate. A lot of our Gen X contemporaries who put off child rearing for this reason ended up with heartbreaking fertility issues.

However I don’t think a smaller population is necessarily a bad thing.

https://archive.is/BgoLl

> Anyone who offers a confident explanation of the situation is probably wrong.

Hear hear! Words to live by for even moderately complex issues.

The best you're likely to get in this is the constructed rationalizations of puppets who are blissfully unaware of the strings that tug at them. And this applies to everyone involved— the people for whom having kids is just what you do, as well as the people who have an intense anxiety about it. The decision for each individual probably happened long long before the explanation that justifies it.