The typical causality assumption about having children is backwards I think. Having children doesn’t create stakes, it requires them. Like owning a lot of a company’s stock might encourage you to buy its products yourself if you’re in the market. Listening to trad and right-billionaire moral panic narratives about the “birth rate crisis” you’d think it was the other way round. Like people are “mysteriously” not having children the way it would be mysterious if someone refused free Nvidia stock today.

People who feel they have a stake in the present might choose to have children if they also want children for their own sake (there are other ways to express a sense of stake). But people who feel no sense of stakes in the present are likely to view children as additional debt to stakeholders even if they do want them. Just like taking out a second mortgage on a debt-financed house is not gaining “stakes.” It is trading what little stake you have for leverage.

Modernity extracts most psychologically real stakes from the environment and concentrates in a few hands, leaving behind at best thin fictions of small-holder equity and property for median citizens. With so many constraints attached it is indistinguishable from a pure renter existence. In a messed-up way, “you’ll own nothing, and you’ll be happy” is in fact the rational correct answer. But not in the way Davos bigwigs hoped it parsed. They were offering a neoliberal imaginary of carefree consumption utopia, while creating incentives for checked-out indifference, a different sort of carefree happiness. The lightness of having no skin in the game, and therefore no responsibility for outcomes.

This means not just children, but also most forms of fixed property, feel like debt burdens/bondage under modern conditions. It’s a kind of opt-in serfdom that only makes sense if you really really want kids or a house for their own sake. The apparent stakes in a brave new future being imagined by main characters aren’t really stakes. The best case outcome is capped. The worst case is a bondage spiral.

I think psychologically real stakes don’t come from property, equity, or any other legible capital type. They arise from feeling reasonably necessary in the live story of the world. At least locally for 15 minutes in a lifetime. This condition was pretty easy to satisfy before mass media, since the “live story” was purely local. The global story was already dead history by the time it got to you through newspapers. Now you’re constantly immersed in live history playing out but have no hope of a stake in it beyond ranting at strangers on social media.

Extending the Dictator’s Handbook frame of interchangeables/influentials/essentials, under modern conditions, most people are increasingly not-even-interchangeable. They’re entirely superfluous. If they disappeared nobody would notice or care, and it wouldn’t really matter.