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29 days agoThe counter to the cost of living explanation is that people were poorer a hundred years ago and still had kids. This does not factor in that those people 100 years ago were mostly doing slightly better than their parents. Having children while being downwardly mobile feels irresponsible, like you’re betraying those children by being unable to provide for them the advantages and experiences that you had.
Also, as others have pointed out, the current generation crop of young adults is objectively less hedonistic than the previous three. Less sex, less booze, less friends, less partying, less dancing, less music.
I don’t have any data to back this up, but I think social media addiction is a symptom, and the root cause is real estate prices. Younger adults have been priced out of cities, so they don’t go out as much for the same reason that previous generations stopped going out as much after they would move back to the suburbs to buy a house. Where are you gonna go to meet your partner or party with friends? The Applebee’s? Cant drink too much cause you gotta drive to get anywhere, cant take anyone home with you because there’s a good chance you live with your parent, cant even go have a kegger in the woods because even small wooded areas have been cleared for more investment housing. So the only private space available to these young adults is digital.
Social behaviour follows the path of least resistance and our societal infrastructure funnels young people into online spaces instead of real world spaces where they would meet someone they wanna have a kid with.