something I think very important, but difficult to articulate:
most young-ish people with economic anxiety of one stripe or another are actually misidentifying a fundamental problem. It's actually almost solely one of being unable to find a truly committed mate
A simplistic example: There's plenty of cheap housing outside cities. But without a truly committed mate it is difficult to leave a city for a smaller town which has an immensely lower cost of housing. Difficult to find mate and possibly difficult to keep, in a sense.
I think that was less difficult decades ago and I think the difference in what I am talking about is so large that it cannot be overstated, even though it cannot easily be said.
I have relatives who got married at 19 and moved to a new city and could afford essentially *nothing* for a year, not a bit of furniture. They had to build a life from scratch together, and slowly. This did not bother them. They had each other.
I know scarcely any couples like that today, that are capable of inhabiting the particular mindset which I cannot easily explain here (I think I make it sound almost trite with my examples).
there is a power to truly being able to commit and divvy up the work of creating a life together, of being two people who subordinate themselves to something greater. There is less worry about bad outcomes if you know you are sticking together regardless.
Between us, by the peace of God, such truth can now be told;
Yea, there is strength in striking root and good in growing old.
We have found common things at last and marriage and a creed,
And I may safely write it now, and you may safely read.
I think there are a lot of people defecting who in their heart and hearts DO want to cooperate and are looking for the person that they can cooperate with. Now what would that person look like? That's what you have to be.
One reason I'd kind of like to design my own curriculum for my babies is that I think almost all topics can be made a lot more interesting by front-loading practical lessons. For example...
first are classes on architecture, that are about building with things like cement (eg making arches vs spans to learn about compressive vs tensile strength)
and gardening or botany or animal husbandry, to indirectly learn about fertilizer and other inputs to making things grow
Only after these, after a child has literally played with cement, would a class on chemistry be appropriate. Similar for geometry or biology of course.
some exec learned blender in a weekend, locked himself in his office for a week, and then passed the plans off to an architect, whispering "if you change a fucking pixel, I'll kill you"
In reality this was done by Gensler but even I, who hate everything about this style, have to admit it's extremely well executed. So much that the real life pics look better than the renders and people's random photos look better than the architect's.
I use social media to share what I think is interesting or lovely.
Babies are good, and good things should be celebrated and shared. I think the hiding of children from the visages of day to day life is something of a cumulative error.
Photography is a medium of great enchantment and storytelling, and I think if I can affect some heart-warming as you say, then that's worthwhile. If people want something like role models for the nicer parts of parenting or having children, then that's worthwhile too.
Generally if you want to make a cultural critique, you should try to make it implicit in the positive vision of what is good.
If pronatalist, you would achieve more by simply sharing and celebrating family life than by talking about policy all day long, or complaining.
it is kind of amazing how many people think work = jobs and jobs = manual labor. Hard to read the replies and not see a truly massive imagination deficient wrt children could be doing with their time. Or even reasoning about work in general.
while today home production is prob best, I was originally thinking about Andrew Carnegie, who did work outside the home. Getting to be a telegraph office boy at 12 and then becoming an operator early was a huge plus. But this is another can of worms...
Technology advances created office boys but then later ones also made them obsolete. It's very hard to "learn the ropes" in the way that Carnegie did today. Sometimes technology creates great jobs, sometimes it pulls up the ladder.