We were optimistic about the future, we could do most anything, is why we had large families
What Actually Caused the Baby Boom?… It Wasn’t (really) WWII at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ts1ZFHA4cCw
I came from a large family and was born a few years after WW II. I would say that movies, advertising to “have the good life”, consumption, television had a lot to do with it. “Cheaper by the dozen” and washing machines, microwaves – indicated that technology makes taking care of the necessities of life easy. “Anything is possible”. The people going off to World War II came back with a much broader understanding of the size of the world and what was possible. My Dad and his older brother were 17 and 19 when they joined up. My Uncle was at D Day and would never talk about it. Both of them went to college and got advanced degrees where their parents barely got grade school.
So open education, resources like never before and TV, Movies, Radio all made “the possible” possible. I did not have kids until my mid 30’s and my own kids are taking longer. The world feels crowded. The Internet and non-stop 24/7 global media is wearisome. What sells on media is “disasters, death, horror, evil, s*x, violence” and that in mindless endless progression. God is dead uprooted most families and gave them nothing stable or reliable in return. My parents and their parents grew up in the great Depression. And almost everyone grew up going to church every Sunday. It was safe to leave children at home and in the neighborhood. I think one thing that crept into society was this notion there were perverts and evil people waiting everywhere and children were not safe. Some things happened, but the “evil is everywhere” I do not think was true, or is true. But it sold a lot of media.
I work 120 hours a week or more now. And have most of my life. I worked at home with chores and neighborhood jobs and started working at stores at 16 as soon as it was legal. At school I took double or triple classes. My high school was a few miles from Cape Canaveral and Kennedy got everyone working as hard as possible to go to the moon. The cold war was real and ominous, wars were constant all my life. If one was not going on, another president would start one. That “it is all sh*t and evil” is a media thing. The drugs and hippy things in the 70s gave a lot of “nothing matters”. Life for boomers is no different than any other times. But the pace of changes and input from electronic sources has been a lot to bear.
I studied demography and long range planning, and worked in that for many years. I, myself, made 50 year forecasts for all counties and industries in the world, and taught many to do it. I know that many countries were encouraged to reduce their birth rates – mostly because of infant, child and maternal mortality. But also because planning and managing cities and countries is still so primitive that close to 3 Billion of the 8.2 Billion humans are just scraping by. The simplistic ways of making money by selling things — mostly things that people do not need but the sellers want to sell – is not sustainable. I won’t write here decades of trying to figure out what the world ought to be, but did spend more than 50 years of long hours trying to figure it out.
There is more information in the world than humans can now process. Making more humans is not the only answer, but 25 or 50 Billion humans could be possible. So I have tried to find ways to get the real intelligent algorithms (IA not AI) to work for the good of all humans. Maybe if we all had time to think and feel, we would be more willing to have kids, kids would know they have a future. It takes a willingness to “just do it” and know that you can survive and prosper, no matter what.
Optimism, expecting that tomorrow will be better, can be better — without limit. I think that was the main reason our families had lots of kids. Being part of a large, close, loving, supportive, caring family is a wonderful thing.
Filed as (We were optimistic about the future, we could do most anything, is why we had large families)
Richard Collins, The Internet Foundation
Suppose it is a simple conspiracy of poor countries undermining rich ones by convincing them to stop reproducing? Why invade if you simply wait until they die off, then immigrate. A lot of the negative stuff on the Internet is externally generated. Much of movies now is by negative people. Maybe it is literal war between optimist and pessimists. I won the Optimist Club annual essay contest two years in a row in high school.
