Why people aren’t having children anymore
And why dating is dead, and romance seems doomed…and a bit of good news
There's always been a great divide between young people and older people.
We called it the generation gap when I was growing up, but it exists today and even more so.
And today it has to do with sex.
In this article I’ll call young people young if they are from 18 to around 40, and older people are those over around 40, more like 50 on up.
In those old days, if you wanted to get your jollies, you would use magazines or videotapes. I have coached over 80,000 men, and so many got into their father’s “stash” and that’s how they got introduced to porn.
Older people grew up in an era before online pornography.
But from around 2000 on, high-speed video porn took over. When I got into coaching I noticed hundreds of young men 18 - 25 who were stuck in complete erectile dysfunction, and this grew into the “NoFap” movement and the “semen retention” movement that you can find on Reddit.
And this is when we started to see a lot of young people who had their sexual neuromachinery completely messed up before it was able to develop.
Sexual wiring
It seems that the brain develops its sexual wiring somewhere from around puberty to around age 25. This is where the core fantasy develops, the thing that gets you excited as an adult. That is, if you have normal sexual wiring.
I will call this period the “wiring period”. Where we develop into sexual beings.
But if all you have done during this crucial wiring period of is watching other people have sex on a computer or on a phone, you don't develop normal wiring. You develop wiring towards WATCHING people have sex, not HAVING sex.
And your wiring develops into aberrent directions as you frequently escalate into more and more taboo and extreme forms of pornography. This escalation is a very common feature of high speed video porn, and wasn’t so much of a feature in the old days with magazines and videotapes tapes.
What if you are raised with high speed porn accessible as young as 10 or 12?
We know the answer. We have a whole generation of young people who do not have normal sexual wiring.
They're completely sexually defective. Not just this way, but other ways too. I will seem very judgmental, but it’s just a problem when you have a young person who can’t make a telephone call, and can’t go out on a date. It’s a problem.
It's not their fault, but it's almost like a factory that produced widgets that were all broken.
Those broken widgets are out there in the world.
And so that's why we have the situation that we do today. They don't get together with anyone else. Or at least, not very often. Post “Pandemic” they have gotten much worse, either never developing the social skills, or just being more comfortable sitting at home.
They don't get together with other people for any purpose, really.
Sex? Fuggedaboutit. We have so many young people that are just interested in basically masturbation.
And if they do have sex, it's for hookups that have no actual emotional content. No Strings Attached, NSA.
And if they do have sex, it’s not “vanilla” sex, it’s always got angles to it from what they wired to when they began watching porn at age 10 or 12. Anal sex. Threesomes. How often did you used to hear about anal sex and threesomes if you are over 40?
I’m not saying there is anything morally wrong with any of this. I’m saying that it breeds unhappiness and that it has led to a decline in romantic partnerships that could prove fatal to the world as we know it.
Lately I've been doing a lot of podcast interviews and it's kind of weird but after each episode, the host told me that they had another third person in the bedroom on a regular basis.
One of them broke up their marriage from it.
And the other one is just thrilled with it. At least, so far.
I don't think anything is wrong with polyamory. My point is that today, high speed porn has molded people at the most crucial age of their neural wiring.
These hosts are men in their 30s, so they grew up with messed up sexual wiring, right? They grew up on high speed video porn as their brains were developing their sexual wiring.
So basically you have people under around age 40 who are sexually really messed up, unable to have a normal romantic relationship, and uninterested.
Now you might say, Matt, you're really showing your values here. How do you know they're messed up?
What makes them messed up?
Here's what I mean . We’re here because our fathers and mothers grandfathers and grandmothers, on and on, were successful in mating and raising children.
If they were not successful at any single point in the line, if the chain were broken anywhere, even 1000 years ago, one time, then we would not be here.
The chain of successful sex, procreation and raising kids is unbroken in our past, or we would not exist.
But now the children that we have are not going to be successful in producing children and raising children.
For two reasons.
First of all, they have no interest in normal romantic partnerships due to their messed up wiring.
Second, they have no interest in raising children.Again, through their messed up wiring.
The two (romantic partnerships and raising children) go hand in hand and is the primary purpose of our existence.
I go out and walk around and I see 10 dogs for every baby that I see. I count. Last weekend I saw 15 dogs for every baby. More often than not if you see a baby carriage it holds a dog, not a person.
I never used to see dogs in baby carriages but I see it all the time now.
The dog owners will speak of their dogs as if they are children, and put them in baby carriages.
You know the type.
And then you have so many young people who say, “I just want experiences. I don't want to be burdened with children, I don't want that.”
And that starts with not wanting a true romantic partnership.
To have children you have to have marriage
And one of the things that I have learned is that the Baby Boom originally started in the 1930s during the Great Depression.
It didn't start after World War II in this period of optimism after America won the war.
No, it started in the 1930s. And it started because there was a marriage boom. 1
Why?
Because during the Great Depression, men were making a very much higher income than women were…and when you have huge disparities in what men and women make you have a push toward marriage.
Women marry and raise children if they have poor financial prospects compared to men.
So in the Great Depression you had a huge disparity incomes between men and women, and the Marriage Boom resulted…and then the Baby Boom.
Today, marriage is a dying institution.2
Living together is the thing, for people who have a romantic partnership at all.
And people who just live together generally aren't as likely to have children.
And so many people are living alone.
“The largest single populations across men and women are Washington, D.C. (48.23%); St. Louis, MO (47.49%); Alexandria, VA (46.52%); Richmond, VA (46.23%); Cincinnati, OH (46.20%); and Cleveland, OH (46.20%).”3
And another thing that's happened is that women now are starting their careers and promoting their careers and building their careers first, before they think about a romantic partner.
Career first, romance second (or not at all)
And these women put off having children until they are in their thirties. At that point, they may or may not have children. If they do, it will probably be one child, maybe two but no more.
And since they aren’t dating, most of them will have no children at all.
By the time a person is in his or her thirties, they've got so set in their ways that children seem too much of a bother and a financial and energy drain.
And I can tell you from raising children (I have two) that it's much easier to do it when you're in your 20s and when you're in your 30s…
…it's much easier in your 30s than when you're in your 40s…
So you're not having marriages today — there's a huge crash in marriages. And children. And sex.
People are having sex much less often.4
So, with that, I will close this article out. And next article I write will be about the decline of sex, surprising reasons for it, what happens if you are in a relationship with little or no sex, and how to turn it around.
Meanwhile, I need your help. Please share this post and encourage your friends and family to subscribe.
https://worksinprogress.co/issue/understanding-the-baby-boom/
https://ifstudies.org/blog/1-in-3-a-record-share-of-young-adults-will-never-marry
https://smartasset.com/data-studies/household-changes-2023
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Brooke-Wells-3/publication/314273096_Declines_in_Sexual_Frequency_among_American_Adults_1989-2014/links/58c801c492851c2b9d3d3ead/Declines-in-Sexual-Frequency-among-American-Adults-1989-2014.pdf