Economic worries are prompting young Europeans to delay or forgo parenthood
Economic worries are prompting young Europeans to delay or forgo parenthood
When demography expert Daniele Vignoli asked young couples for their thoughts about having children, a theme emerged: uncertainty about the future. In an experiment that Vignoli conducted in Italy and Norway in 2019, he showed a total of 800 couples in their 20s and 30s newspaper headlines about the...
Whereas previous economic shocks such as the oil crisis of 1973 caused a temporary dip in fertility, the 2007-2008 banking meltdown was different because birth rates continued to decline even after the economy started growing again, says to Daniele Vignoli, professor of demography at the University of Florence in Italy. He believes the turbulence a decade and a half ago marks the point at which people’s uncertainty about the future began to take hold.
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The world is burning, wars are raging, microplastics in our bodies, fascist are gaining power, depression is a staple for internet culture.
I don't know what it could be. /s
Also houses. No space, no kids.
all i can afford is a 2 room apartment. Not 2 bedroom. 2 room. Where am I supposed to put a kid?
Put it in the closet under the stairs like in Harry Potter. Oh wait, stairs are a luxury now too. Bathtub maybe? I only have a shower, but some people still have bathtubs right?
You know that passing wish for the future to come as a kid when you first saw a cyberpunk movie or show?
The cyberpunk future is here
The cyberpunk future is here
The term "boring dystopia" is a very apt description.
All of thr dystopia, none of the cool tech or aesthetics. Where's the bands of cyborg augmented jacked-in cyberpunks on hoverbikes? Where's the holograms and cyberdecks and the Net? Where's the robotic power armor and edgy neon and sleek titanium and carbon fiber? If we're gonna go full dystopia at least give us the aestherics for crying out loud!
Dude, think about it for a moment. Even if they come up with all that cool stuff, are you sure you wanna plug that shit into your body?
It's hilarious how I grew up loving cyberpunk like Ghost in the Shell. Thought I'd want to be a cool cyborg. Nope, I'm like Togusa, the dude with no cybernetics and refusing to get any.
B-but holograms though.
Nah I get it, I wouldn't plug corpo augs and decks into myself either. But you'll recall that in the stories, the punks also just made their own, 3d printed or cracked and rooted, running self-made FOSS they downloaded from the Net. We're kinda living that future with Linux, F-droid, 3d printers and all the rest, but still, none of the aesthetics. No holograms or hoverbikes makes me sad.
running self-made FOSS they downloaded from the Net.
That's just a different flavour of yolo. All fun and games until you break the firmware for your bowel functions.
"A small price to pay for
salvationcyborg augs" - the cyborg in the middle of disassembling their abdomen, maybeI still want my off the shelf holograms, EMP grenades and pulse rifles and hoverbike tho.
I love the aesthetics and all too, but I wouldn‘t do it. Imagine the ads and shit they would download into you, then you probably need a subscription for every little thing and all of it’s going to be focused at making people better work tools. I‘m good. Though I fear when everyone else has it, others might need to have it too to keep up in the labour market or be seen as Luddites, like how everyone has a smartphone now. I can only hope I‘m dead by then.
Fascists are gaining power because the left could not offer a viable response to the majority concerns. And it sounds like what's left of it is just giving up unfortunately.
Fascists are gaining power because they are put there by radicalizing conservatives and businesses in particular media businesses consolidating their power and happily pushing fascist propaganda to sow divide among poor people. Also it distracts from the perpetuators of problems, by giving scapegoats.
The left has plenty viable responses. It is just that they cannot lie about the world changing and requiring to adapt. Something fascists and their conservative enablers happily lie about and the worse it gets the more they brainwash people into blaming the left, the green, the immigrants, the jews, anybody but the businesses and politicians destroying the world for some more profit.
What you are saying is not wrong, but it can also be true that the left is quite divided and lacks a narrative which can be convincing to the same working class the left aims to empower. In fact, the left got quite disconnected from the working class on a number of issues. The lie may be easier to make convincing, but the truth has some advantages too. In fact, some talking points of the right, like the anti-elite sentiment, are straight out of the left playbook. Why did the left not manage to deliver this point better?