Spurius Larcius Celsus Germanicus

@Rothmus No one knows why.

The Only Real Existential Risk: the female problem x.com/i/status/20598… I saw this video the other day and I can’t stop thinking about it. A young woman celebrating that 52 percent of women aged 20 to 39 are now childless, that she is finally “part of the majority” and “the men are gonna crash out about this because they are so worried about the birth rate, and let me make this clear, I don't care". It is true that this is the best indicator of feminism’s success but the girl, as most women celebrating this, is not the enemy. The real problem is the mismatch between women and the modern world. Women evolved in environments where social exclusion meant death. You cannot hunt pregnant or fight nursing, so a single woman's survival depended on the tribe's acceptance, and a few hundred thousand years of that programmed her to see consensus as safety. It is the same trait that made women the thing that makes families work, what makes them a good mother and a good wife. It’s not that they are better or worse than men, they just evolved differently. Which is why women do not really know what they want. Not because they are stupid but because of how they evolved. What a woman says she wants is mostly what she thinks the group wants. For two hundred thousand years the group was right and disagreeing meant death. The problem is what the group is now. The group that decides what a woman wants is the average of millions of strangers an algorithm pulled together because they got a reaction out of them, tuned for outrage and sadness because that is what is engaging and sells ads. The wanting still feels like hers because the group wants it, but it’s the feed's. We built a global consensus engine, pointed it at the half of the species that sees consensus as survival, and hoped for the best. Add to the algorithms a world that never existed before 50 years ago, the new career ladder, the adversarial institution, the hyper-individualism, built by men for men and then imposed on women as liberation. Two transitions destroyed the family. The first was the decade between 1960 and 1973: the pill, no-fault divorce, Roe, and the beginning of adult daycare. IQ tests for hiring basically became illegal, college became the proxy, and college plus “career progression” became the norm eating away the entire fertile decade. In just 13 years, sex decoupled from reproduction, reproduction from commitment, commitment from permanence, and hiring from intelligence. The second transition was in 2012, when smartphones with social media and dating apps went into every teenager’s pocket. Family was first destroyed, and then women were told they never wanted one to begin with, and if they *really* wanted one they should have waited. They took her most fertile decade, the one stretch of biology that does not come back, and filled it with an extended adolescence. Eighteen to twenty-eight first in a classroom and then an office, children labeled burdens, the thing you get to later once you are established and it is responsible. Later arrives and the good men are gone (so are the eggs). She did not waste those years. They were taken from her by the people who were supposed to care for her. This is what feminism actually accomplished. The destruction of womanhood from the inside. Everything feminine, the relationships, the mothering, the holding-together of a community, labelled as low status, and the hole filled with a masculine dream she was told would set her free. Feminism is the spiritual and philosophical rape of what it means to be a woman. Women have been getting sadder for forty years while every objective measure of their lives improved, and the women who still report the most meaning are married mothers (shocked_pikachu_face.jpeg). Incredibly, the life they were told to run away from is the one that works. And that’s why elections are going how they are going. The same empathy that makes a woman a good mother is programmed to answer to the suffering it can see, the face in front of it, never the abstraction behind it. And that is what the whole political machine exploits. You take the most sympathetic case, give it a face, and let that face carry the entire policy without reason behind it. The raped woman becomes the proxy for every abortion, so the rare horror and the change of mind become the same thing, healthcare, and the child that is murdered never counts, because a fetus has no face and the woman in the ad does. She is not lying when she refuses to call it killing her own child. For women, an abstract victim never registers as a victim. The child in a war zone becomes the proxy for every migrant, so one photograph carries a policy about millions of grown men, and the country that has to hold them is too abstract to weigh against the kid. Every time, the visible sufferer now beats the invisible one later. Run that instinct at the scale of a whole country and the conclusions are fairly obvious, the more a society allows women to be politically involved, the lower the fertility rate goes (this is truer for single women than for married ones). The parallel problem is that men first allowed this, then were removed from the conversation, and now they ran. After allowing this to happen, a feminized society told them that masculinity was toxic, a lot of them obeyed and checked out into porn and games, built nothing worth joining, and the ones who refused got punished for it. Either way the supply of men worth marrying collapsed. "I can't find a good man" is true and self-inflicted at once. So this is the female problem of our generation. It was never that women were the problem. It is that female nature, the consensus-reading, the empathy, their radar for the room, the good stuff that built every family that ever held together, is the part most unfit for the modern world. You cannot fix a nature. You can only build a world that works with it instead of against it. We built the one that works against it. And this is the only existential risk that actually counts. If we can’t fix the female problem, fertility will remain below replacement, which means extinction, no matter what. AGI or automation or any other possible existential risk does not matter if there is no one left to use it. Abundance in an empty room is just an empty room. The woman in the video will get her wish, she will be the majority, she’ll cherish her childless life and realize her mistake when it’s too late. But the problem is that being the majority of a generation that does not continue is not a win. She cannot get out of this alone. Her nature is not the thing that can move first. Unless men start doing something and become worth choosing again and rebuild the thing worth joining, it only gets worse from here.