Yesterday I ran into my upstairs neighbor. He read from my tee-shirt, which says: "Six foot four, Handsome, And money too."
I said I thought it might be an idea to andvertize a little. He said maybe he should have one made saying "Five foot eight and skint" (Brit for broke).
I said "at least you're fit". (He's a good looking and fit black guy.) And I added: "and we're both looking young." We are both mid-forties.
He agreed. He said: "I have friends at thirty-eight who look fifty." I said "I know!"
He said: "of course they are married and have children. That can't be easy." I said "Yeah, you and I, we are living the easy life here." And then we laughed and we laughed. Oh, how we laughed!
But seriously, I wonder if having a family to support does wear down people much faster? I do know that being able to nap in the afternoon without any tykes tearing the place down is a good thing.
Of course family people often say that children is a big blessing. Good for them.
By the way, I recently read an interesting thought: that the reason caucasian birth rates are way down in Europe is because Christianity has lost its mainstream power. And that it takes a major religion to make populations "multiply and be fruitful". I don't really understand how that works, in both senses: I don't understand how anybody can let a religion rule their life to that degree, and I also don't understand exactly what it is that all the major religions do exactly to induce fruitiness (apart from banning condoms in the case of Catholicism).
5 comments:
Birth rates are way down in Europe because people are stressed. It has nothing to do with religion.
In a highly religious society, it is difficult for an individual not to embrace the church's positions. For example, if the priest says you have to make children, you rapidly will be singled out by your peers is you don't. That is the most powerful force behind religions, and it literally moved mountains throughout history.
Kids, blessing and curse.
Kids are great at making you laugh, they give you opportunities to see life in a different way, the number of times the question "Why is it called a any common noun?" is answered by a blank both from me and DW, and then a trip to a good dictionary.
I saw a lot and asked a lot growing up, my two are seeing different things in different ways. It really does spread your view.
I never really get this growth from my grown up adult friends. Least wise, not outside the engineering community.
Kids are a curse, bringing stress. Actually that's not true, we have an NT kid, and he is seldom stressing to us. The other one has such an interesting viewpoint on life, from such a different angle, that sometimes communication with him is very difficult. There have been times when we can get a week or two of horrible stress. There are times we feel like we are under house arrest.
As for reduced birth rate. In our case, we elected for small family (2 kids) and we elected to wait until we were ready. Don't think it was stress as much as maturity or wisdom. We were brought up to be people first, baby factories second. My parents generation were the ones who were scaling back on family size, but not necessarily starting later in life. Our peer group tended to favour later and smaller families.
I wonder if our middle class/educated status affected that? Some of my cousins are in the scrag end of Lancashire (Skelmersdale New Town). There the norm seems to be "have a couple of kids by a couple of blokes, then find a husband and have a couple by him". Securing a kid alone before you were 17 used to get you a council house (state paid accommodation).
Ah, peer pressure too, yes I can see that.
I grew up in Denmark, which already in the sixties was very liberal and didn't have much presence of religion, at least in the end of it I was at.
Prosperity seems to have an effect too. You don't see many rich families with eight children.
I think the health officials have awakened to the stress too. For they have creative ideas for family planning.
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