It’s not that complicated. It’s birth control.

Guys…it’s birth control. That’s it. People have fewer kids now because they can easily and reliably do that through hormonal birth control.

Posts on here act like the cause of the collapse is some kind of unsolvable riddle. It isn’t. It’s barely even a multiple choice question. Shifting your life from being self-centered to other-centered is hard. People prefer easy things to hard things.

People didn’t used to have eight kids because they carefully weighed the economic impacts of offspring and meticulously planned for their futures by optimizing their reproductive capacity to blah blah blah blah. They had eight kids because couples have sex and sex leads to pregnancy if you can’t reliably prevent it. They could not, and had a lot of kids. People today can. They have fewer kids.

People seem to be mystified by the apparent contradiction between things like self-reported desire for larger families and the reality of low birthrates. But that’s not rocket science, either. I’d bet the desired weight, dress size, and blood pressure are different than the actual ones are, too. It’s easy enough to want those things; it’s much harder to do them. So people don’t.

All of the other things people blame for the decline are just downstream. Women too focused on careers? They can only be that focused on careers because they can count on not getting pregnant for a decade or more. That’s birth control. Men are unreliable partners to risk starting families with? They are reluctant to commit because they have a lot of low-responsibility options for sexual relationships because most women around them are on birth control. Average age of first pregnancy too high? Birth control. Costs of raising kids too high? Material expectations have climbed alongside dual income, 1-2 child families (those are made possible by birth control).

Please note that nowhere in this anywhere did I say anyone should take birth control away, that women should be forced onto breeding farms, or anything goofy or weird like that. I’m not attacking your personal choices about life or belittling your unique personal situation that makes it a very noble and wise decision to remain childless forever. I’m just talking about an observation regarding the mismatch between the very simple causes of the problem we’re all here to discuss, and the complicated schemes people come up with the explain it.