"You Don't Know What You're Missing": The Pronatalist Delusion

Added: 2026-05-18

[00:00:00]I'm on team let the birth rate plummet to hell and each spring the CDC puts out its numbers the birth rate numbers from the year before and inevitably there are going to be all kind of opeds speaking on what these numbers mean. So, now we have another oped. This man named Martin Gur says to the childless West, I say, "You don't know what you're missing."

[00:00:22]And then Martin shares a picture of his happy family. You see those smiles? He said, "You don't know what you're missing." Let's see what Martin is talking about. All right. The article, it says, "The capacity of Americans to produce babies crashed to a record low in 2025. It the capacity did not crash.

[00:00:41]The willingness to produce has crashed.

[00:00:44]I wish people would get it right with the words. All right. Just in time for Mother's Day, the CDC has published a report showing the total US fertility rate falling below 1.6 births per woman of reproductive age. That's a 1% decline from 2024 and a 23% drop since 2007 and far below the 2.1 births per woman needed just to keep our population stable. As with so many other aspects of contemporary life, we seem to have offshored the manufacturer of human beings. There should be nothing startling or unusual about this trend.

[00:01:20]It's in line with the expressed opinions of large swats of the great American public. According to a 2024 poll, the share of American adults under 50 who have sworn off the messy business of reproduction increased from 37% in 2018 to 47% in 2023.

[00:01:39]In an even more remarkable finding, only 48% of Americans between 18 and 29 think raising a family is a particularly important life goal. A majority of young people, it would appear, have discovered more important things to do than bring children into the world. Yet, the revolt against making babies isn't a uniquely American development. It's global and has had the most radical effect in the wealthiest countries. South Korea's fertility rate, for example, is8 children per woman. That's a statistic, a mere number, but the implications are large and troubling. Capitalist economies are predicated on continued growth driven by growing populations.

[00:02:23]Will the economy collapse along with the population? Ladies, are you unwilling to keep capitalism going? Are you allowing the whole economy to collapse simply because you're out here being selfish?

[00:02:39]Won't you all think of the retirement pensions? All right. Retirement pensions depend on a large number of young workers paying for a much smaller number of retirees. In South Korea, that demographic pyramid has now inverted. A war of the generations with the old always outnumbering the young may be fought over diminishing resources. The most unpredictable consequences of infertility, however, are human rather than economic. This part is a bit dramatic. Consider children born under the South Korean conditions will lack not just siblings but cousins, aunts, and uncles. Each child will feel like a thin thread of life groping through the spreading darkness of non-existence.

[00:03:25]Each child will learn that the world belongs to the old, the slow, and the rigidly entrenched. Such limited horizons aren't entirely unknown to history, but in the past they have been caused by devastating plagues or wars.

[00:03:39]This is the complete opposite. It's a silent extinction event, a massacre of innocents who are never to be born, brought out by vastly increased affluence, education, health, mobility, and political freedom. In 1955, when South Korea with a GDP per capita of $64 was one of the poorest countries on Earth and ruled by a military dictatorship to boot, the country's fertility rate stood at 6.1 children per woman. At the at the present rate, the needle is slipping toward zero. In 1955, could women choose? Could did women have choices? Did women have access to birth control? I wish they would stop using these numbers when women didn't have any choices in what they could do with their autonomy. This sentence is kind of ridiculous. I'm still going to read it.

[00:04:28]According to the AI platform Claude, the last South Korean will crawl unaided into his solitary grave sometime after the year 2400. The panic is ridiculous with this one. One doesn't have to buy into such a speculative disaster to perceive that Korean culture requires a critical mass of humanity endowed with a sense of purpose and a desire to project its way of life into the future. With those qualities now increasingly rare, Korea as a country may well vanish from history, swallowed by stillness and ruin long before 2400. If we accept evolutionary theory, then we must also accept that our species is wired for reproduction. There's a Darwinian imperative to replicate our selfish genes. And if that is true, something very unusual is happening to our to our human wiring.

[00:05:24]That something is probably the most significant existential question facing our kind today. But let's make this a subject for another conversation. Here I'm going to resist the temptation to preach or politicize. In the end, the decision whether or not to have children though civil civilizational at scale is always profoundly personal. So allow me good reader to reflect on the matter through the filter of my own personal experience as a husband, a father, a grandfather, an old man trying to make sense of things. I belong I belong to the first generation of fathers draoned into attending the birth of their kids.

[00:06:04]It's an awesome and untidy process. A physical struggle to detach from the flesh of the mother a separate life. A new story whose adventures and accomplishments remained at that moment a total mystery. Total potentiality.

[00:06:19]Nothing I have lived through can compare to that. I was told to act as a coach to my wife in her labors. Needless to say, I was useless. How could I, seated comfortably in the birthing room, presumed to coach someone wrestling with her own anatomy to launch an 8 lb protohuman into the light of day, or more accurately, the dark of night? I simply watched, held her hand, and applauded at the appropriate junctures.

[00:06:46]The fundamental question, um, why we wanted children is difficult to answer.

[00:06:51]I can offer all kinds of intellectual explanations that we wish to perpetuate our families, say, or share our bounty with the next generation. Those would be true enough but insufficient. I believe that the rightness of having children seemed to us self-evident and preceded any attempt to theorize or justify.

[00:07:11]Family was just one of the background assumptions of the good life. All I can say for certain in any case is that we wanted children pretty desperately and that desperate need made the arrival of each of our three kids a moment of triumph and self um celebration.

[00:07:29]I can tell you I cannot stand these pronatalist people. But let's continue.

[00:07:35]He says a body of research purports to prove that childless adults are as a whole happier than parents. Here is a typical claim. Statistics from Australia, the UK, and the US show that those without children are happier, more content with their lives and their lives, and experience less psychological stress than parents with children living at home. The author of that study actually labels children happiness thieves. See, that's the kind of weird person I used to warn my kids not to talk to in the streets. Parenting is massively timeconuming, but so long as everyone's healthy, not particularly stressful. You see how these proatalists do? They they really disregard how other people might feel and then they project how they felt about parenting onto everybody else. Stress is a factor of control. If you think creating the perfect environment for your children will turn them into idealistic geniuses, you'll end up stark raving mad. You can overprotect, many do, and wind up raising a pale and anxious species of human. But parental control is the flimsiest of illusions. You can't force-feed your kids into growing up to be Gandhi or Mozart. Stubbornly, despite all your efforts to improve them, they'll grow up to be themselves, which is infinitely better. My three kids turned out to be good-hearted, smart, among my favorite people to be with.

[00:09:03]That was luck. or I should say that was them, not me. As for happiness, try this experiment. Pretend to be Santa Claus and leave presents under the Christmas tree for yourself and nobody else. I don't think I'm alone in believing that happiness often entails family. And while that feeling can certainly be replicated with a spouse or old friends, children bring a magical freshness, a newness to the experience. Among the greatest joys of my life was transforming myself into a warrior dad and fighting the mob at Toys R Us to snatch that rare plastic Godzilla on my son's Christmas list. In the fullness of time, children become parents themselves, and the hidden purpose of the whole convoluted process is at last revealed. Grandkids. Between grandparents and grandkids, there exists as perfect a relationship as anything our flawed humanity allows. is based on a transcendent understanding of each other's place in the scheme of things.

[00:10:01]They think we're suckers and we're eager to prove them right. Ice cream have three scoops. Legos. Here's a pile the size of Mount Everest. Are we spoiling them? Well, that's their parents' problem. The people formerly known as our children. Grandkids are poetic justice. They offer all the wonderfulness of raising children with none of the work.

[00:10:25]The connection is deep beyond reckoning, impossible to capture in psychological jargon or fertility statistics. When I look into the eyes of my grandsons, I see somewhere behind the glitter and the smile, the long chain being of being harkening back to the remotest past and more proaically bits of my grandfather, my father, even myself, all arranged in distinct and unique creatures. But I also see the future. I will never live to witness.

[00:10:56]Long after I'm gone, they will be carrying on with their busy lives. Maybe pausing once in a while to recollect a memory of their grandpa, of the ice cream and the Legos. Like the song says, we all want to leave something behind.

[00:11:11]I was like, who is this Martin person?

[00:11:14]Let me look him up. This is Martin Gur.

[00:11:17]Definitely an old white man. the way he is talking like he just knows that his opinion is the authority on all of this.

[00:11:26]He is making it seem like his thoughts on family is just translated into an everything type of thing. So it says he is a former CIA analyst who writes about the relationship between politics and media. So that's who this person is.

[00:11:42]He's 77 years old. He, like I said before, obviously he is a white man and he does not seem attached to what is going on right now. These are the types of people that don't ask for other people's opinions. He he's not stressed about that kind of thing. But as a man of this generation, he probably did not have to do the nittygritty, the everyday functions of being a parent. And back in his time, back in his time, things were much cheaper than right now. Right now, people of my generation and younger are struggling to even like survive on their own. So, why would they be replicating this right now? It's not all Legos and ice cream and Toys R Us runs. It's absolutely not that. And so just listening to him talk about kids and you you know the process will be revealed with grandkids that to me sounds like an MLM scheme. It sounds like a pyramid scheme to me. It's like you have to keep on recruiting. You have to keep on replicating yourself in order to find fulfillment because then those grandkids have to have grandkids and those grandkids have to have it. Like I said, it's a pyramid scheme. So no, eventually these people will have to learn that each individual gets to figure out what their purpose is. It's not to replicate simply because this man, this obvious pro-atalist believes so. Let's go back to South Korea. A lot of this is predicated on what is going on in South Korean culture. They are so anti-feminist. They cannot stand women over in Korea and women are opting out of having babies. The men in Korea would rather go extinct than to change their ways and be better humans. And women have shut down their wombs because of it. He's talking about um Korean culture is going to disappear around 2400 and Korean culture requires a critical mass of humanity endowed with a sense of purpose. Okay, bet. is also going to require a shift, a paradigm shift in the thinking of men and how they treat women and children. And that is going to have to be replicated globally. This dude started off talking about to the childless west, you don't know what you're missing. Maybe they do. Maybe they grew up with parents who absolutely hated parenting. This man is talking about things as if parenting is is a fairy tale. like everybody's childhood was just marked with going off and hanging out with grandparents and just loving parents and the way I talk to people cuz I actually talk to people to get a um you know to gather evidence and anecdotes and all of this the things that he's talking about right now he could have very well lived it but what I know of parenting he probably wasn't doing the dayto-day he didn't he didn't have to live through you know the begging kids. He certainly isn't have having to live through what parents of right now are dealing with. Mass shooting, climate change, food insecurity, housing insecurity, war, all of that. He didn't have to deal with all of that. He just probably had to deal with going to work, dealing with managers, and then working his way up through the ranks. That's it. And that's all. His wife is the one that handled the three kids and all of that.

[00:15:20]It is disgusting to me when these people come in acting like there's some authority on something and you can tell that they are divorced from reality. He doesn't talk to people, but I do. So, y'all go ahead and weigh in on this oped. As you can see, I am honestly disgusted. I can't stand these people.

[00:15:45]I'm on team let the birth rate plummet to hell. Are you on team let the birth rate plummet to hell or do you think you know maybe you're on team have some babies and stuff?