Zygmunt Bauman Celebrates Love

To celebrate the day of lovers, here is a great quote from Zygmunt Bauman:

‘Creating a family’ is like jumping headlong into uncharted waters of unfathomed depth. Having children means weighing the welfare of another, weaker and dependent, being against one’s own comfort. The autonomy of one’s own preferences is bound to be compromised, and ever anew: year by year; daily. One may become, horror of horrors, ‘dependent.’ Having children may mean the need to lower one’s professional ambitions, to ‘sacrifice a career’. . . Most painfully, having children means accepting such loyalty-dividing dependence for an indefinite time, entering an open-ended and irrevocable commitment with no ‘until further notice’ clause attached; the kind of obligation that goes against the grain of liquid modern life politics. Awakening to such a commitment may be a traumatic experience. Post-natal depression and post-childbirth marital crises look like specifically ‘liquid modern’ ailments, in the same way as anorexia, bulimia, and countless varieties of allergy.

Liquid Love

This is the origin of the Western fertility crisis right there. The idea that you can throw money at the problem and buy greater fertility is a neoliberal solution to a problem that neoliberalism creates. It won’t work.