Children are among the most expensive purchases
that average consumers are likely to make in the course of their entire lives.
In purely monetary terms, children cost more
than the most luxurious state-of-the-art car,
   a round-the-world cruise,
      even a mansion to be proud of.

Worse still, the total cost is likely to grow over the years,
and its volume cannot be fixed in advance
nor estimated with any degree of certainty.

In a world that no longer offers reliable career tracks and stable jobs,
for people moving from one project to another
and earning their livelihoods as the move,
signing a mortgage contract with undisclosed and indefinitely long repayments
means exposure to an uncharacteristically high level of risk
and a prolific source of anxiety and fear.

— Excerpt, Liquid Love: On the Frailty of Human Bonds by Zygmunt Bauman, p. 42

I press forward to finish a book by professor Richard Gilman-Opalsky, The Communism of Love.  Gilman-Opalsky teaches at the University of Illinois.  Since I signed up to participate in a seminar this Saturday to be facilitated by the professor, I am motivated to complete my reading of his book.

This quotation comes late in the book.  I’ve got only a few more pages to read.  I include lines from the Bauman source, because the words capture something that everyone “knows” but rarely if ever voices out loud in ordinary conversation.  Gilman-Opalsky concludes “most people cannot afford a family with children, and the anxiety and insecurity of the long term endeavor may be too much to bear.  …the double risk is that people are both afraid to build a family and afraid to be without one.”

The sobering observation is a “canary in the coal mine.”  Our society, indeed our world is in trouble, and it is very late.