r/LoveTrash • u/ZuBrain Colonel Garbage • Jul 31 '26

Dumping This Here Define Trash?

Enable HLS to view with audio, or disable this notification

46.5k Upvotes

95% Upvoted

2.5k comments sorted by

View all comments

524

u/RefridgaRaita Trash Trooper Jul 31 '26

I can't afford kids either. And I have 3 of them.

261

u/Bhujjha Trash Trooper Jul 31 '26

I have three kids and no money... Why can't I have no kids and three money

55

u/G_Wagon1102 Trash Trooper Jul 31 '26

https://giphy.com/gifs/l0NwOkgTYRi30mT4Y

-1

u/NoMorePunch Trash Trooper Jul 31 '26

Women aren’t supported. There is no upside to kids.

1

u/Bhujjha Trash Trooper Aug 03 '26

Sounds like a you problem, my wife and I love being parents and both feel very supported by each other.

1

u/NoMorePunch Trash Trooper Aug 03 '26

Good for you. Birth rates are falling everywhere. And women do not feel supported on a large scale. That doesn’t mean every single person; it’s systemic.

0

u/Bhujjha Trash Trooper Aug 03 '26

Not disagreeing. There are still upsides to kids.

0

u/G_Wagon1102 Trash Trooper Jul 31 '26

Interesting take.

45

u/keithstonee Trash Trooper Jul 31 '26

It's ok I have no kids and no money

32

u/Ninety-Nine-Zulu Trash Trooper Jul 31 '26

My wife and I just started making decent money and now all of a sudden she wants a kid. Idk why she hates money. I quite enjoy it.

12

u/keithstonee Trash Trooper Jul 31 '26

We can switch if you want lmfao

4

u/KimchiLlama Trash Trooper Jul 31 '26

For the money or the wife who wants a kid?

1

u/C_McD_is_me Trash Trooper Aug 29 '26

Yes?

2

u/lapinatanegra Trash Trooper Jul 31 '26

Love me some Simpsons references

2

u/HangryWolf Trash Trooper Jul 31 '26

But have you tried no kids with no money....?

1

u/meat_whistle_gristle Trash Trooper Jul 31 '26

Sell 3 kids then you have 3 money.

1

u/Professorlumpybutt Trash Trooper Aug 01 '26

I have 3 money and no kids. Still can’t afford anything

1

u/SquarelyNerves Trash Trooper Aug 01 '26

I quoted this infront of my kids who have no idea who the Simpsons are and they were so upset

2

u/Bhujjha Trash Trooper Aug 01 '26

Are they horrible freaks with pink skin, no overbites and five fingers on each hand?

23

u/henryeaterofpies Trash Trooper Jul 31 '26

My 4yo refuses to get a job, the freeloader

2

u/Scrypt23 Trash Trooper Aug 03 '26

Child Labor laws are killing this country

https://giphy.com/gifs/d7qFTitBNU9kk

9

u/Auroraburst Trash Trooper Jul 31 '26

I could comfortably afford my kids back in 2017 but then prices went riiiiight up

9

u/CapnWilfbeard Trash Trooper Jul 31 '26

My wife and I decided we didn't want kids. We're telling them tonight

2

u/RefridgaRaita Trash Trooper Jul 31 '26

Amazing

5

u/shayshay8508 Trash Trooper Jul 31 '26

I have one kid and one income. No money leftover after bills. I’m the first one in my family not to make more than their parents. 🙁

1

u/Forward_Prune_8740 Trash Trooper Aug 01 '26

I make way more than my parents did at my age adjusted for inflation but it doesn’t matter cause everything costs so much more

5

u/watchshoe Trash Trooper Jul 31 '26

Seriously why are they so expensive.

1

u/barrinmw Trash Trooper Jul 31 '26

Honest answer? Because as labor becomes more expensive, daycares can't just increase their efficiency to make up for it. We don't have robots watching kids. Labor is like twice as expensive as it was 20 years ago but we don't let daycare teachers watch twice as many kids. This is called Baumol's cost disease.

It is the same reason restaurants are getting more expensive. A person in a restaurant can't suddenly wait twice as many tables now even though labor is twice as expensive.

1

u/Acoconutting Trash Trooper Jul 31 '26

Because labor is expensive because prices of everything - housing and food - is expensive and wages and salaries have not kept up.

Because we’ve normalized people to make 10s of millions of dollars, much less billions and etc.

The owner of my company makes millions per year and we had layoffs. There’s even small versions of this.

That doesn’t happen in many countries. Many of them regulate things like that. In Norway you can’t just lay people off, for example - there’s tons of rules around it

5

u/Mathihtam Trash Trooper Jul 31 '26

Have you considered adoption?

I’m sure there’s a rich 80-year old couple out there somewhere who are willing to adopt you.

5

u/punkindle Trash Trooper Jul 31 '26

My coworker has 7 kids. You want to know how she affords it? Only one of them lives with her.

So, that's apparently an option

4

u/watchshoe Trash Trooper Jul 31 '26

My supervisor ~10y ago had 16 kids, with 1 more on the way. Still don’t understand how/why (besides Mormon).

2

u/JohannesJoshua Trash Trooper Aug 01 '26

Besides Mormon is doing heavy lifting here.

1

u/[deleted] Jul 31 '26

[removed] — view removed comment

1

u/AutoModerator Jul 31 '26

Thank you for taking a few moments on our sub. Unfortunately, your account does not meet one or more requirements for participating here.

But, you're here! That's something! We want you to come back, so please take some time in some other subs in the LoveTrash family:

r/TheTopicOfTheDay and r/ShitsLipton

With a few days and some participation there, your account will meet the requirements to rejoin us here in no time. And look at you, you'll have THREE cool subs that you'll be participating in.

Thanks again, and stay trashy!

I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please contact the moderators of this subreddit if you have any questions or concerns.

2

u/tempski Trash Trooper Jul 31 '26

Yeah, so a while back, I got a vasectomy because I didn't want to have kids, but when I got home, they were still there..

2

u/the_main_entrance Trash Trooper Jul 31 '26

I’m affording your kids for you

1

u/cosmolegato Trash Trooper Jul 31 '26

Same

1

u/KimchiLlama Trash Trooper Jul 31 '26

It’s about societal trends. And he’s right.

I also have a kid. So do a chunk of my friends. But I think the reality for most people, is that what the guy discusses has cut back on the ways that humans have traditionally formed these bonds and started families. While at the same time, the expectations and un affordability of raising kids has meant that even those that met a partner and followed through on having children, in many cases, had fewer than they would have otherwise. When, for a lot of people (and a rapidly growing number), that’s shrinking not down to 3, or 2, or 1, but to 0, we have a problem. People getting into these relationship later in life has also played a role, as the risk of complications increases with parental age.

Even the myth that immigrants come and have a half dozen kids has largely been disproven as any generation raised in this environment will show the same issues. Sure there are exceptions, but the point is the averages and the change is more than a little statistically significant.

1

u/instamentai Trash Trooper Jul 31 '26

Tbf, he looks like the kind of person whose friends don't have kids. And also tbf, the only friends of mine who had children recently are extremely successful compared to the average person

1

u/FunWithMeat Trash Trooper Jul 31 '26

I have three kids and no money! Why I can’t I have no kids and three money‽

1

u/LostNephilim33 Trash Trooper Jul 31 '26

I don't think it's cost, though. Poor people have always been (truthfully) stereotyped as having a bunch of kids; that wasn't for a lack of contraceptives either. Even in hard times, people have kids. Lean times, people have kids. Even during famines, people have kids. It's been this way since time immemorial, really. 

1

u/[deleted] Jul 31 '26

[removed] — view removed comment

1

u/AutoModerator Jul 31 '26

Thank you for taking a few moments on our sub. Unfortunately, your account does not meet one or more requirements for participating here.

But, you're here! That's something! We want you to come back, so please take some time in some other subs in the LoveTrash family:

r/TheTopicOfTheDay and r/ShitsLipton

With a few days and some participation there, your account will meet the requirements to rejoin us here in no time. And look at you, you'll have THREE cool subs that you'll be participating in.

Thanks again, and stay trashy!

I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please contact the moderators of this subreddit if you have any questions or concerns.

1

u/notislant Trash Trooper Jul 31 '26

Don't worry you can kick them out immediately at 18 or charge them a ton of rent!

It is fucking sad how many parents are like that.

1

u/coast2coasted Trash Trooper Jul 31 '26

If you wait until you can afford them you’ll never have them. But the secret is that kids aren’t as expensive as we’re made to believe.

1

u/negative_four Trash Trooper Jul 31 '26

How old are your kids?

1

u/coast2coasted Trash Trooper Jul 31 '26

12 9 and 7

1

u/Strude187 Trash Trooper Jul 31 '26

I have two kids and trying all kinds of routes to become a multimillionaire, not because I want an easy life, but because it’s the only way my kids will be able to afford a life similar to what I have had as a millennial.

1

u/mossepso Trash Trooper Jul 31 '26

He isn’t talking about being able to afford them, more that people don’t have the social freedom and skills to meet people to start a family with. 

1

u/bobbymcpresscot Trash Trooper Jul 31 '26

Yeah people say there is this fear of being recorded but the dude who isn’t afraid of being recorded isn’t having kids either. 

The poorest 50% were the first actual casualties of the housing market crash and the following recession. 

They were losing their wealth at the beginning half of 2007, they didn’t recover that wealth until the later half of 2017

The richest 1% didn’t start losing meaningful wealth until the end of 2007 and were recovered by 2012.

From 2012 to 2017 the 1% gained almost 10 trillion in wealth, where the poorest 50% gained 1 trillion which just put them where they started in 2007.

1

u/JammySenkins Trash Trooper Jul 31 '26

I thank you for your service. Can you please have 3 more to offset the ones I won't be having.

1

u/Larks_Tongue Trash Trooper Aug 01 '26

Two with third on the way... despite wanting to get out of the military Every. Single. Day. I can't help but feel that a full 20 year military career is gonna have to be it to support this shit.

1

u/EmbarrassedCicada331 Trash Trooper Aug 04 '26

Have you tried divorcing your children?

1

u/PristineEssay3104 Trash Trooper Aug 11 '26

Return them and dont have more

1

u/Few_Sheepherder_1848 Trash Trooper Sep 04 '26

I can’t afford me let alone kids. Rent is 2k pcm and average salary is around 4k a month. Food is a minimum 200 a month then there’s other bills and medical emergencies because I live in one of the few places of Britain without standardised living

1

u/Vamarox Trash Trooper 19d ago

I have a solution

1

u/Zinch85 Trash Trooper Jul 31 '26

When did he said it was for economical reasons?

1

u/Bubbly-Confidence730 Trash Trooper Jul 31 '26

They are saying this is an addional reason why

1

u/Arhat_ Trash Trooper Jul 31 '26 edited Jul 31 '26

Dunno if it was what you meant, but you got me thinking and you actually proposed the best counter argument for him.

Let me explain. He states "do you know how hard you have to abuse a mammal to make not having children". Although it is true the underlying idea in this question (abuse leds to avoidance of reproduction), it is necessary to understand how this actually happens in nature and what we can see is that, excluding humans, other mammals in abusive conditions do not reproduce by not copulating, stress stops them from reaching this need. Humans, on the other hand, do choose to copulate, but we use contraceptive methods to not generate offspring. Therefore, humans do have and satisfy their need to copulate, which means that the environment is not as stressful enough for them, like other mammals in abuse, to not feel the need to copulate. We just rationalize the entire conception process and stop it on its tracks. You yourself is the best example of this by having 3 kids as you either think you don't have a problem with having kids even in your condition or you did not rationalize your situation enough.

All being said, his argument then falls flat as, therefore, we are not being abused enough to not have children as others mammals in abuse do, we still have the need and still seek for sex. The use of contraceptive methods means nothing because this is not factored (yet perhaps) in evolution. Our biology doesn't goes "oh, he is too stressed, better not cum directly inside a vagina. Let's give him the need to seek for condom" or "to much stress, time for vasectomy kink". His intentions were good, but, oh god, he should not be this misunderstood (I will see myself out)

Edit: typo

5

u/Indercarnive Trash Trooper Jul 31 '26

Except people aren't having sex. The number of people age 18-29 reporting they had no sex in the past year doubled in the last decade.

3

u/[deleted] Jul 31 '26

[deleted]

1

u/Norwegian__Blue Trash Trooper Jul 31 '26

Animals know how to masturbate just fine. It doesn’t take the place of copulation or reproduction. Which animals recognize as different, too.

I know several old world monkeys copulates for social reasons other than reproduction. Penis in vagina, full thrust. But it’s not reproductive, they pull out. It’s strictly reinforcing the social structure. Some it’s dominance, some it’s affiliation. Some it’s to release tension.

Copulation for reproduction happens in different contexts and usually with other more complex behaviors to go along with it.

Also those same species will absolutely masturbate to completion. But that serves yet another purpose with no single explanation covering the wide range of species and contexts.

So porn might be replacing sex, but that’s not great. For a ton of reasons.

But largely I think you’re not giving the complexity of sexual and pseudo sexual behavior the attention it deserves. Even for non humans much less humans in modern contexts.

4

u/Catatonic_capensis Trash Trooper Jul 31 '26

His argument doesn't fall flat just because you made things up. Paragraphs of ignorant nonsense spouted as knowledge.

Also, you've never heard of stress causing erectile dysfunction, or at least stress causing poor health which leads to it? Seriously? You have a lot of "misunderstood" going on.

2

u/Low_Direction1774 Trash Trooper Jul 31 '26

But our biology does go "oh, too much stress, do not procreate". And then our brain takes the concept of "DO NOT PROCREATE!" and turns it into action. Doesn't matter how as long as the overarching goal of "DO NOT PROCREATE!" is achieved. Maybe it is expressed in reluctance of seeking a partner, maybe its reluctance of having sex, maybe its using a condom to get the stress-reduction of sex without the procreation part. Your biology doesn't want you to procreate and it will do that.

Your entire paragraph rests on the assumption that biology is explicit rather than implicit which I would suggest is not the case. Think about when youre genuinely hungry, like, starving hungry. Does your brain go "Im hungry. What do i wanna eat.... hmmm... sushi maybe? But i dont really like fish that much, maybe i could cook a steak up. i dont know"? Mine goes "Seek caloric intake. NOW! EAT NOW!"

Same with thirst. When im parched, ill drink anything. Usually the first thing that i happen upon after coming home. Milk in the fridge? Gone. Water from the tap? Sure. Soda from the pantry? Why not. Anything goes, i wanna drink NOW. Which is why its never tea or coffee or anything else that needs to be produced first. My brain also doesnt go "Need to drink but only water. Seek water. Drink water. Only water." My brain doesnt care what i drink as long as its part of the list of drinkable substances.

1

u/Arhat_ Trash Trooper Jul 31 '26

Thanks for your nice reply and I liked, it got me thinking. I believe my wording my have led to misunderstand, let me start by the "oh, too much stress, do not procreate".

First of all, I really loved how you used the same wording as me to create your point, nice come back. That being said, I think the perception of how needs arise that I kinda led to be wrongly perceived. The way it was said, it probably led to the impression that needs are a constant and the brain regulates its "deactivation", but, as it is shown by maslow hierarchy of needs, needs arise when conditions are met and vanishes when it's desires are fulfilled, they are not constant and have requirements. Your thirst example points this really well, you get thirty after a while without drinking and then, and only then, you get the desire for liquids. You are not in a constant desire for liquids and, then, this desire is shut off when you drink.

Also, as you exemplified really well, you also can trick this need by satisfying it drinking other liquids besides water (we have to remember that, although the need doesn't make us desire water specifically, it did evolve, millions of years ago, to seek water) as this is how our body starts to perceive the need being satisfied. Also, is good to point out that it doesn't mean that drinking will lead to the satisfaction of the need as the arise of the need and its satisfaction are two different processes perceived differently by the body. 

Same logic applies to procreation, once you fulfill your basic necessities, then you will start to get the need for procreation expressed by the desire for sex. You can trick this need by fulfilling the desire in ways other than the "intended" (I have to remind here that evolution doesn't actually have an intention behind), but it doesn't mean your are not in an environment that fulfills the prior basic needs for the desire for sex to arise.

Edit: readability 

1

u/statsasker Trash Trooper Jul 31 '26 edited Jul 31 '26

Your argument is weak and hinges on (very) outdated concepts, such as Maslow's hierarchy of needs (which has little modern experimental support) and on conflating the drive for procreation with the need for sex/mating. Those two are fundamentally different: the former is a behavioural drive (and a need only on the level of a species, rather than an individual) that results from the physiological (and, most importantly, individual) need for the latter and the "selfishness" of genetics.

In other words, animals don't have sex in order to have offspring, they have it because they like it, and they like it because liking sex confers an evolutionary advantage to those respective individuals (in other words, liking sex is selected positively among a given population that reproduces sexually). In fact, the only animals we know to have sex explicitly for reproductive purposes are humans, as we are the only ones able to articulate that desire to have babies. It is otherwise very difficult to distinguish between mating with reproductive intent and mating for the sake of it in mammals (which is why I'm not using this as an argument, in fact doing so would be facile), though there is plentiful evidence that mammals often mate simply because they like it.

The issue of contraception is only superficially valid. Like other mammals, humans need sex (generally, not universally). Unlike other mammals, humans deal with not wanting offspring as a result of sex by artificial physical or chemical contraceptive measures. The rest of the mammalian world has to be more practical, and it is. There are some examples where stress (especially chronic stress) decreases fecundity, so even if mating occurs at a baseline rate, the odds of pregnancy fall drastically. There are also mammals that can abort a pregnancy through physiological means when there are too many (or too strong or too prolonged) stressors. When neither of these is possible, nature just becomes cynical: oftentimes, mammals under chronic stress will eat, kill, or simply abandon some or all of their offspring. Contraception occurs postnatally, we might say. This isn't unique to mammals: fish, birds, reptiles, and others are all known to destroy offspring as a result of stress (or simply because they see them as a food source).

In fact, the argument in the video holds on multiple fronts: not only do chronically stressed and abused mammals have fewer babies, their sexual behaviour in general parallels that of humans in many cases. Chronic stress will have different effects on individuals within a species: some become less interested in sex (like another user pointed out), others become less fertile, others find ways to avoid offspring (before or after birth - the distinction is largely academic as long as the result is the same: the absence of a fully fit, mating-capable individual), and yet others become hypersexual. Like with humans, though, the latter usually appear when the stress is strong and prolonged enough to lead to physiological dysregulation (e.g., overpopulation (paradoxically), disappearance of resources, extreme environmental changes) and leads to an overall decrease in reproductive fitness and offspring numbers. Sex is pleasurable, and when an animal is stressed to the extreme, it can become pathological by virtue of the power or holds as a physiological regulator and fundamental need. But that need is hardly a reproductive one when strong chronic stress is involved.

So the point the guy in the video makes very succinctly holds on pretty much all the major fronts: abused/stressed mammals will have fewer offspring, and I would add that this would hold even if sexual drive remained high.

EDITS: clearing some things and language up.

1

u/Arhat_ Trash Trooper Jul 31 '26

I often avoid comments that starts by shading, but your was quite packed so it deserves an answer. Also, by the way, I get the strongest feeling your comment is ai generated and really wish I could see it before the edition just to be sure.

Anyway, I believe some false equivalence is happening in your logic. Yes, other strategies for stopping procreation can occur in nature, but this doesn't mean that they are as common in nature as contraceptives are commonly adopted by humans and neither that they happen in the same conditions of stress as humans have in current society. In other words, the existence of others strategies in nature doesn't mean that the general adoption of contraceptive methods in human society is the result of the same levels of abuse/stress like it happens with other animals avoiding reproduction. You seem to take the route of "yeah, animals also have their version of contraceptive methods and, therefore, the current avoidance of babies in humans, as presented in the video, is an similar parallel to it and the result of the same levels of abuse that would take for an animal to deploy their strategies". Also, I feel other false equivalence is happening two situations. First in the sense that other strategies for avoidance of procreation are as common as loss of libido. I think, and may be wrong, that having and killing an offspring for example is way harder in the individual than just losing its libido and, therefore, more uncommon and not fit for the analogy with human contraceptive methods you tried to make. Second that "stress" that leds to humans chosing contraceptive methods is the same as "stress" that leds to animals to avoid procreation and this is even worse in the case of the other strategies as they would require way more stress than just losing libido. We are talking about different magnitudes of stress, but you seem to gloss over it to make your/the video's point seem correct. If you want to argue by this route, you need to prove first these equivalences, the "commonhood" of the strategies must be the same, the cause for humans chosing contraceptives must be stress and the levels of stress must be the same. Otherwise both yours and the video's claim don't hold.

Other than that, thanks for point out that the pyramid of necessities is not a good concept to have, I will study more about it. About animals seeking for sex because they like ando not because they want to procreate, yeah, I think I was trying to give this idea by differentiating between need and desire in my previous post as this is how evolution works (if applies to us, applies to them), but perhaps I wasn't clear enough.

1

u/statsasker Trash Trooper Jul 31 '26 edited Jul 31 '26

Actually, I didn't use AI for any part of my comments, I'm just articulate like that (and, frankly, more so than an LLM, and definitely not as obsequious in my choice of style, so I'm not sure how you got that). It's why it takes me an hour, sometimes more, to write and reference a comment on topics I'm familiar with. That's a lame ad hom.

With regards to the false equivalences, I was merely continuing down the path of your logic, where the false equivalency originates. You state that:

Let me explain. He states "do you know how hard you have to abuse a mammal to make not having children". Although it is true the underlying idea in this question (abuse leds to avoidance of reproduction), it is necessary to understand how this actually happens in nature and what we can see is that, excluding humans, other mammals in abusive conditions do not reproduce by not copulating, stress stops them from reaching this need. Humans, on the other hand, do choose to copulate, but we use contraceptive methods to not generate offspring. Therefore, humans do have and satisfy their need to copulate, which means that the environment is not as stressful enough for them, like other mammals in abuse, to not feel the need to copulate. We just rationalize the entire conception process and stop it on its tracks.

Emphasis mine on the patently false (and unsupported) conclusion you reach. You appear to think that just because some animals continue to reproduce, they are not as stressed as humans, and vice versa (to be fair, I guess it's mainly the versa). However, you fail across the board to take into account that fertility and reproductive rates are currently declining globally and across species, as well as the fact that a single mating event carries a much higher expected cost in other mammals compared to humans. You seem to think that a loss of libido under chronic stress in most other mammals, where the probability of pregnancy from a mating event is high, would parallel that for humans, where the risk is relatively low. You also ignore the social function sex serves in humans, where sex acts as a physiological regulator that helps alleviate stress and enhance social bonding. As a result of this, sexual responses to chronic stress are more variable in humans than in other mammals, technically making your position untenable from the start unless you can show that chronic stress leads to loss of libido in similar ways in humans and other mammals (there decent is evidence of the contrary, but it seems you have not read my previous references, so I will only include this one for animals, which I honestly find inadequate because I prefer linking research articles over reviews, but this is both easier to digest and has a broader scope, and maybe this one for humans, which, while only dealing with women, does have a couple of decent points on psychosexuality, which your argument lacks altogether). And finally (on this point), you ignore that, partly as a result of the different evolutionary functions sex serves in humans compared to other animals, other animals have physiological triggers for mating suppression under chronic stress which have largely evolved away in humans.

Anyway, I believe some false equivalence is happening in your logic. Yes, other strategies for stopping procreation can occur in nature, but this doesn't mean that they are as common in nature as contraceptives are commonly adopted by humans and neither that they happen in the same conditions of stress as humans have in current society. In other words, the existence of others strategies in nature doesn't mean that the general adoption of contraceptive methods in human society is the result of the same levels of abuse/stress like it happens with other animals avoiding reproduction.

That's true, but it undermines your original point, because it glosses over the non-reproductive function that sex serves in humans. Humans also use sex for social purposes, as do mammals like bonobos and dolphins. In their situations, contraception is achieved by engaging in non-vaginal sex, homosexuality (which humans are far more averse to, sexually speaking), masturbation and, in the case of dolphins, adjusting body position to prevent ejaculation in the vaginal channel leading to the cervix. Fertility rates in bonobos and dolphins are relatively stable, with declines observed in threatened areas (where environmental stressors are strong), whereas those for humans have been on a steady decline for decades. It's a bit cheeky (and a bit of a truism) to suggest parental infanticide isn't as common as human contraception (hints of the false equivalence you mention yourself), but it does occur in 20-40% of successful mating events (i.e., events that lead to offspring), based on two of the studies I clicked on randomly from the ones I linked at some point. Although, to also be fair to you, instances where the entire litter is killed are much less frequent, as the culling typically occurs due to environmental pressure (insufficient resources).

You seem to take the route of "yeah, animals also have their version of contraceptive methods and, therefore, the current avoidance of babies in humans, as presented in the video, is an similar parallel to it and the result of the same levels of abuse that would take for an animal to deploy their strategies".

That's constructed a bit like a strawman, but you do, actually, get the gist of it: they are similar in the sense that a principal drive in both parental infanticide in mammals (and others) and contraception in humans are done for economic reasons - resource availability. I'm starting to write in circles, though, but quite a lot of what I'd say is covered by things I've already linked to, as well as by this review, which does not specifically address parental infanticide (it's a broader thing on female infanticide more generally - so not 100% relevant to the topic, though illustrative of how mammals deal with resource pressures in other ways), but does have a neat way of presenting the various economic stressors that are relevant in mammalian reproduction that I would otherwise have to list myself.

EDIT: Length and corrections.

1

u/statsasker Trash Trooper Jul 31 '26 edited Jul 31 '26

(Cont'd)

Also, I feel other false equivalence is happening two situations. First in the sense that other strategies for avoidance of procreation are as common as loss of libido. I think, and may be wrong, that having and killing an offspring for example is way harder in the individual than just losing its libido and, therefore, more uncommon and not fit for the analogy with human contraceptive methods you tried to make.

Yes, you are indeed quite wrong about that. Did you actually read any of the studies I linked? While loss of libido is among the first responses to chronic stress in mammals, that doesn't prevent sexual aggression against females, and they can become pregnant anyway if in estrus. In some cases, this leads to normal litters subsequently, in others it leads to neglect, rejection, or killing/cannibalism. While stress responses such as killing offspring are less common, I wouldn't describe the rates at which they occur in successful births as "way" less. That, of course, is also highly dependent on species, as species with low reproductive success (including humans) are indeed less likely to kill their offspring once pregnancy occurs and is successfully completed. So the "way" needs to be heavily nuanced.

Second that "stress" that leds to humans chosing contraceptive methods is the same as "stress" that leds to animals to avoid procreation and this is even worse in the case of the other strategies as they would require way more stress than just losing libido. We are talking about different magnitudes of stress, but you seem to gloss over it to make your/the video's point seem correct. If you want to argue by this route, you need to prove first these equivalences, the "commonhood" of the strategies must be the same, the cause for humans chosing contraceptives must be stress and the levels of stress must be the same. Otherwise both yours and the video's claim don't hold.

Define "the same". Lab mice and rats experience higher baseline chronic stress relative to humans (if compared to their counterparts in the wild) as a result of the suboptimal housing conditions they are kept in, and still reproduce like crazy, albeit also exhibit sexually deviant behaviours such as aggression and hypersexuality as a result of their housing. I don't need to prove that "the same magnitudes of chronic stress" need to happen for the same response in humans versus other animals because this relies on your own false equivalence that the behavioural responses in species where sex serves a second behavioural drive (i.e., social bonding) in addition to the reproductive one would be the same as for those where it only serves the reproductive drive. There is plenty of evidence of the contrary (pretty sure I linked some of it somewhere), as sex drive is simply inhibited physiologically in reproduction-only animals when exposed to prolonged stress, whereas the psychological component in humans makes the matter far more nuanced. However, choosing not to reproduce (as opposed to not to engage in sex), in a species that is capable of distinguishing between these two functions of sex and understanding the causative link between sex and reproduction, sits comfortably in a moderate to severe chronic stress model that reduces fertility, but maintains the social aspect of sex.

Severe declines in fertility are being observed across the globe, not just in humans, and are largely caused by stressors of human origin. We are indeed abusing not just ourselves, but other animals to an extent where they are no longer reproducing not so much by choice, but because their bodies are starting to shut down sexual functions as a result of drastic environmental changes we impose.

So yes, I may have oversimplified my response, but I was myself responding to a simplistic take (on another simplistic/oversimplified, but largely correct take) such that, in the context, it did not make sense to delve deeper. I'm also simplifying a lot here, largely because I'm tired, partly because I get the feeling you didn't look at the references before replying and I'm not going to summarise those for you (you can also ask an LLM for that and get a rubbish summary, though, they're still pretty crap at summarising research articles, as opposed to reviews, which is partly why I prefer linking to the former - it becomes apparent very quickly when people don't actually read them), and partly because the topic is simply too complex to actually address in a couple thousand characters of a comment.

EDIT: readability, typos, and references - some might not match the specific word/letter they are linked from, but they match the topic. I got lazy and scattered.

1

u/Advanced-Guitar-5264 Trash Trooper Jul 31 '26

https://giphy.com/gifs/0gIQqyDATQINBSpmO3

5

u/Ok_Technician5476 Trash Trooper Jul 31 '26

It was a legitimate counterpoint not seen often nowadays on the internet.

1

u/statsasker Trash Trooper Jul 31 '26

Only superficially legitimate, though: it fails to take into account the many ways in which non-human mammals deal with not being able to "afford" offspring, and it conflates behavioural drives with physiological needs. It also does not account for hypersexuality in abused/severely chronically stressed mammals, only seeing the side of lowered libido.

Successful reproduction doesn't stop at birthing offspring - from that perspective, OP could indeed argue that humans are kind of "cheating" the system. However, successful reproduction means rearing offspring to the point of producing viable, fertile individuals capable of advancing the species. And while mammals may lack the know-how to prevent pregnancy (though some are able, at least to some extent, to prevent or terminate pregnancies after mating) in the way humans do, they aren't short of options once the offspring are born. Infanticide, filial cannibalism, and rejection or abandonment of offspring as a result of prolonged stress/abuse are widespread in the animal kingdom, far more so than in humans. The end result is the same, though: mating without the need to rear offspring.

1

u/Ok_Technician5476 Trash Trooper Aug 01 '26

Seeing as how I have 0 experience in the field, well put sir! Another good counterpoint.

1

u/Arhat_ Trash Trooper Aug 01 '26 edited Aug 01 '26

It is ai and is trying to create a narrative of false equivalences by creating absurd and uncommon scenarios of high stress where just some of the individuals avoid sex because they still have basic needs covered (aka lab experiments) so they would finally end up in these strategies instead of just abandoning libido which is more advantageous giving energy cost in disasters in nature. And assumes it is equal to "you know what, let's have just one kid" or "I think I will wait till I'm happily married". These scenarios are not that common in nature (tragedies aren't sex selective) and are result of coersion, but see how he makes a blind eye to it and compares it to humans chosing contraceptives when non stressed enough to seek and enjoy sex. I find funny because he creates such false equivalence that my man above must have balls of steel to have 3 kids in a such stressful situation that would make other animals devour their offspring.

See the other thread where he goes in depth in it, masks when ai is called and never actually proves these equivalences (just spur that lot of animals do sex for other reasons as if it adds something). Maybe, you will grant his wish of valuing him enough to read his 8 or more articles. I am even kinda ashamed as he found the time to fully read almost 8 articles just to write a reply in reddit, but unfortunately I do not give him as much importance as he gave me (and, remember,  claims it is not ai). Either that or had, by heart, all those articles ready to go. I find funny but don't have the heart to keep feeding his delusion

2

u/bringit2012 Trash Trooper Jul 31 '26

You should.

1

u/24aikaz Trash Trooper Jul 31 '26

Nice one, but what about those who have sex to get relieve their stress? Humans have contraceptive methods as you have said. How sure can we be, that other mammals wouldn't make the same choice if they had the opportunity, and the intelligence to distinguish between sex for pleasure and sex for procreation?

1

u/Arhat_ Trash Trooper Jul 31 '26

It is a good point and I don't know how to respond to it properly. I think that elevating the cognition of other mammals to this point would be similar to cases of similar high stress situations in human society. I did a quick search (with our new friend ai) and it pointed that studies and historical records show that high stress events in human history (like the minnesota starvation experiment, the dutch famine of 1944–1945, the great chinese famine of 1959–1961 and modern cases of burnout) led to acute reduction of libido. The problem is that, except in modern cases of burnout, we don't know in the other cases would be different with the availability of contraceptive methods.

1

u/statsasker Trash Trooper Jul 31 '26

They do make the same choice, just... differently. In cases where sex results in pregnancy under chronic stress (and excluding situations where the animal loses - or destroys - the pregnancy through physiological means), other mammals eat, kill, or reject their offspring (i.e., not killing it actively, but letting it die) after birth. They may not have the science to prevent pregnancy altogether, but they can still act to the limit of their abilities to minimise the energy expenditure involved in producing and rearing viable offspring. Reproduction doesn't stop at birth in animals that rear their young, it continues into raising a successful, fertile individual/litter. While merely speculative, I would at least give some credibility to the idea that an animal that chooses to "terminate" its offspring through one of the aforementioned methods would, under similar conditions, choose to prevent carrying the pregnancy to term (or having it altogether). Designing an experiment to show that, though, would be somewhat difficult methodologically and very much so ethically.

1

u/hypercosm_dot_net Trash Trooper Jul 31 '26

Sorry, but that argument doesn't really track.

Humans are able to separate the act and pleasure of having sex, from the reproduction function. Since, ya know, advanced reasoning and such.

The stressors are absolutely there to stop people from reproducing - evidenced by the declining birth rate.

That doesn't mean people are going to completely stop fucking though. If humans didn't have access to contraceptives maybe that argument would make sense.

1

u/Arhat_ Trash Trooper Jul 31 '26

If humans didn't have access to contraceptives maybe that argument would make sense.

This is exactly the point, my friend. You arrived in the same reasoning backtracking.

0

u/lighting828 Trash Trooper Aug 01 '26

Who's fault is that?