Comment by Aurornis
8 hours ago
> People who want to be childless usually champion the importance of building strong community through friends and neighbors,
This describes all of the childless people age 50 and older than I know.
It does not describe the social media r/childfree mindset people I know at all. They have their bubble of friends they keep in touch with only when they feel like it but that's about it.
There's a big difference between childless and r/childfree style people, though.
> People wanting FIRE is a lot more to do with the current economy and wealth of useless or harmful jobs than kids
FIRE rose to popularity before this economy, though. It felt like peak FIRE was during ZIRP when it was easy to get a high paying tech job even if you barely had the skills for it. All the blogs and influencers made it sound so easy to just keep that going straight into early retirement as long as you continued living an austere lifestyle, which came with implied advice to avoid having kids.
I followed several of the FIRE blogs and forums in the early days but had to stop reading after they started filling up with people convinced they could retire at age 36 with $1.2 million in the bank because they they lived frugally last year and decided they could keep coasting that way for another 50 years without their lifestyle changing. I remember reading a few disaster stories from people who thought they were doing leanFIRE with their spouse until their spouse grew up and realized they actually wanted kids and to be married to someone who had a little more ambition in life. I know these stories aren't what FIRE is supposed to be about in the theoretical optimal sense, but there were so many stories like this that the forums just felt like a sad place to be.
>It does not describe the social media r/childfree mindset people I know at all. They have their bubble of friends they keep in touch with only when they feel like it but that's about it.
Do you actually know a lot of those people? I know a lot of people that don't have kids and they all are very normal, well adjusted people. None of them hate kids. Using the word "breeders" as derogatory is weird, bordering on mentally unwell behavior. I've never met anyone that doesn't have kids that's like that. Even for the few people I've met that don't particularly care for children, they just keep it to themselves.
Reddit I think is not representative of real life for the vast majority of people.
I've read and posted to r/childfree and similar subs in the past, but I quickly came to realize that the people there are not your typical child-free people.
They're mostly bitter anti-child people who rail against what they see as entitlements that parents get that non-parents don't. They derisively call parents petty and mean things like "breeders" and seem to be a very cynical bunch. I'm not saying their feelings are always ridiculous; certainly some of them have reasonable reasons for feeling the way they do. But they're a mostly-toxic, vocal minority.
It really annoys me when people assume all (or even a significant number) of childfree people are like those reddit folks (not accusing you of that, just saying in general.
And I don't get the automatic association between FIRE and childfree that some people are making here. Sure, FIRE is easier if you don't have kids, but IME the two groups are only loosely connected, at most.