A new genre of social media posts that The Algorithm has decided I need to see is female influencers bragging or boasting about having decided to remain single and childless. Quite commonly, this involves some sort of anti-natalist philosophy: "I could never bring children into this awful world", or "the world is already over-populated". It's also quite common that these posts are presented as a brave option, as if the woman having made this decision is a heroic trailblazer.
The reality is that people who subscribe to this point of view are merely the symptoms of an evolutionary and a cultural dead end. I suppose congratulations are in order to all of us: we've reached a point of peak privilege in our culture where maximum egotism can be openly celebrated, bragged about, and cheered. I was struck by the closing line in one of the recent videos I saw by a single and childless hedonista: “My ancestors sacrificed a lot for me to be where I am today. I choose to honour their legacy by putting myself first everyday”. I can’t imagine a sentence that more concisely captures self-indulgence and egotism with a total lack of self-awareness.
Recently, I met a guy who was about my age, and even though he had a very positive energy about him, something about him was rubbing me the wrong way. I soon realized what it was: he was a man in his 30s who didn't have any responsibilities and didn't want them. He was either single or in casual relationships. He had no stable jobs and only short term work that would pay the bills. He didn't have a place to live. Instead he moved from place to place, sometimes weekly.
He was completely unencumbered, and the only thing he worried about was maintaining this status quo. He was not a man. He was an incomplete human, who had chosen to live in a permanent state of infantility and narcissism.
Ties and connections to one another are the most defining factors in our lives. That we need them is what makes us human. That our culture glorifies their minimization or destruction is what makes it a dead end.
Along with the trend of childlessness, that of non-monogamy has been on the rise. In fact, there is a new term for those who are single, childless, and non-monogamous: Solo Poly. This is when you are single, but you want to date multiple people without any expectation of a relationship developing. As the great Melissa Chen quipped on X: why don't you just say you a ho?
Polyamory has been on the rise, with many books and podcasts being published about it. The ultimate motivation is, of course, the same as that of the single and childless woman: long term, committed relationships are a grind, and grinds run counter to the pursuit of one's own happiness. And since we as a society have decided individual happiness (or some perverse version of it) is the ultimate good, we cannot allow the grunt work of relationships to get in the way.
The anthropologist David Graeber, in an attempt to come up with a definition of slavery that encompasses all the forms in which it was practiced, defined it as an individual's inability to make promises to (and, therefore, to have social bonds with) other members of society. In the case of slaves, this inability stemmed from their obligation to obey their masters, with the threat of violence. But today, we take the same condition of existence, self-imposed, as a form of empowerment.
Truly, we live in twisted times.
God is dead. And in His absence, the worst impulses of humanity reign supreme. For the sake of our own continual existence, I hope for a speedy resurrection.