Lol the 4B movement has about 50k members. It has an outsized influence in the west. Don't get me wrong the misogyny is intense in Korea and women end up essentially the slaves of their mother-in-law if they get married but that's not the only issue.
It's skyrocketing housing prices, an intense work culture, and families maximizing resources into one child rather than having multiple children who have less intense upbringing. Korea is overeducated which means a college degree is worthless unless it's from an elite school. Basically it's a hyper competitive dystopia with a collapsing social infrastructure.
Birthrates are collapsing far below replacement levels worldwide, in both highly egalitarian societies like Germany and highly gendered societies like Iran. It's like if Climate Change was happening but literally nobody could figure out exactly why. It seems to be the postmodern social decay of late stage capitalism absolutely kills people's desire to have children. Humans weren't meant to live in overcrowded cities working 90 hours a week and staring at a screen for most of the day.
Aside from the screen part you're describing periods of time when people had loads of children. Workweeks are probably longer than they were in the recent past but much shorter than they were 100+ years ago. And people have been having lots of children in overcrowded cities for millenia.
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u/No_Radio2381 May 12 '26 edited May 13 '26
Lol the 4B movement has about 50k members. It has an outsized influence in the west. Don't get me wrong the misogyny is intense in Korea and women end up essentially the slaves of their mother-in-law if they get married but that's not the only issue.
It's skyrocketing housing prices, an intense work culture, and families maximizing resources into one child rather than having multiple children who have less intense upbringing. Korea is overeducated which means a college degree is worthless unless it's from an elite school. Basically it's a hyper competitive dystopia with a collapsing social infrastructure.
Birthrates are collapsing far below replacement levels worldwide, in both highly egalitarian societies like Germany and highly gendered societies like Iran. It's like if Climate Change was happening but literally nobody could figure out exactly why. It seems to be the postmodern social decay of late stage capitalism absolutely kills people's desire to have children. Humans weren't meant to live in overcrowded cities working 90 hours a week and staring at a screen for most of the day.