Disaster: Gen Z Hates Babies, Likes Socialism 

The kids are not okay. 

We now have an enormous amount of poll data suggesting that Generation Z has some very serious problems, problems that they didn’t create for themselves.

These are problems created by generations of bad parenting in the United States of America.

A new NBC News poll shows young people are not fond of the idea of getting married or having babies — and they like socialism.

This is disastrous.

According to the NBC News poll, respondents aged 18 to 29 were asked about 13 different options for their top priorities. For women, the number one priority, the number one priority in life, was having a job or career they found fulfilling. Number two was having enough money to do the things that you want to do. Number three? Achieving financial independence. Number four? Having emotional stability.

And then, if you go all the way down the list, number ten was having children, and number 11 was being married.

This is a massive problem. If young women between the ages of 18 and 29 believe that it is a 10th priority to have kids and an 11th priority to get married, and their number one priority is having a job or a career, that is a gigantic mistake when it comes to the purpose of life.

How about for men?

Number one, having a job or career that you find fulfilling. Number two, having enough money to do the things you want to do. You have to go all the way down to number seven to get to “being married.” And number eight, “having children.”

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Any society that does not make its number one focus — not number two, not number three —  getting married and having kids, is a society doomed to failure because that is the priority of any society. You cannot pass your values on to the next generation if there is no next generation. And you can’t pass your values on to the next generation if you have no values.

The reality is that the central purpose in life comes from the book of Genesis: Leaving your father and mother, marrying a member of the opposite sex, and having kids. 

And that’s not just because it’s in the book of Genesis. The book of Genesis has lasted from time immemorial specifically because that happens to be true. Any society that believes yearning for individualistic pursuits — as shown here by the number two priority being having enough money to do the things you want to do — any society that is focused on hedonistic personal fulfillment is a society that is doomed to failure. 

People will stop having kids. People will stop getting married. People will not be happy. And when they are not happy, because it turns out that the fruits of economics are not enough to make you happy, they will turn on the economics themselves, because you cannot fill that family-shaped hole in the heart with cash. 

It is not possible to do it. You can’t. What gives fulfillment in life to human beings is getting married and having kids. 

I know in our radically individualistic society, we’re supposed to believe that all forms of familial formation, all forms of sexual behavior, are equally admirable and equally the target of aspiration for society. 

That is wrong and untrue. We should be teaching our kids that it is important to marry a member of the opposite sex, and have kids with those people. 

Will there be people for whom this doesn’t apply? Sure, because for every rule there are exceptions. But if that is not the societal aspiration, what you end up with is people who are inward-focused. 

That’s because what takes you out of your own emotional narcissism is getting married and having children. 

In my book “Lions and Scavengers,” I talk about this: The word in Hebrew for love is “ahava.” The root of the word “ahava” is “hov,” to give. Thus, giving is at the root of love. 

If you have no one to give yourself to, if you do not have, as it says in the Bible, an “ezer kenegdo,” which means a “helper against him,” it is not good. 

The point is that a woman completes a man and a man completes a woman. And yes, they do need each other, and that is a beautiful thing. And when they come together, they have children. And that is the most beautiful thing. 

Any society that vitiates that purpose and treats that purpose as not only secondary or tertiary, but 10th on the list of priorities, is a society that won’t have kids, and is doomed for unhappiness. 

And then when that unhappiness materializes, people blame the economic system. These two things are connected. There’s polling data showing that young people, in particular, are warming toward socialism. 

Why? 

The answer is that if you can’t get what you want in the form of economics, then you tend to blame the economic system. It used to be that so long as you were able to earn for your family, that was the purpose of earning: to be able to buy a house for your family. Not just for you. For your family, to provide a better life for your kids.

But if you separate family and kids from that purpose, no amount of money that you earn will ever be enough to do all the things you want to do, because there are always new things that you want to do. 

I don’t blame young people for this. I blame their parents. Parents did not hand down the values that they were taught by their parents to their kids.

We now have three generations in American life that have degraded the value of family and childbearing and child-rearing in favor of atomistic individualism that was supposed to provide a libertarian fulfillment.

It’s empty. People are unhappy.

The reality of the world is that it is women, traditionally speaking and biologically speaking, who long to have children. This pretend, nonsense, made-up world in which women are taught that they shouldn’t want to have children is unnatural.

There’s a reason why every study of rhesus monkeys shows that if you give female rhesus monkeys a truck, they will take the truck and start cradling the truck. The male rhesus monkeys will start hitting each other with it.

Men and women are different. When you tell women they don’t want the most natural thing for them to want, you get unhappy women. And when men can’t fulfill their highest purpose because many women don’t want to fulfill that purpose either, they get angry at women, and they become counterproductive and bad citizens of society.

When you alienate women from their magical superpower, having children, and you tell them that’s exactly what they shouldn’t want, that what they actually should want is to be more like men working 2200 billable hours at a law firm, what you’re going to end up with is an enormous amount of unhappiness.

And that unhappiness stems from women who have been alienated from the central purpose in life, and men who actively would like to form families with women and then fulfill their central purpose in life.