“Why Would Someone Willingly Call Themselves a DINK?,” asks a befuddled Medium writer Sydel Brown. And indeed, it’s a proper question to make, considering that Green’s Dictionary of Slang defines “dink” as “the penis, esp. of a small boy or, if small, of an adult.”
However, in today’s context, DINK stands for something else, albeit not entirely different. Something celebrated by media, TikTok “influencers,” and most of the “woke” community. DINK, described best by the Daily Wire’s Matt Walsh, “is an acronym that stands for ‘dual income, no kids.’ These are the ‘childless by choice’ folks. Those who get married, and could have kids, but choose instead to have a barren, sterile relationship focused entirely on their own superficial wants and desires.”
To be clear, DINK does not refer to married couples that want to have children but, as fate would have it, are unfortunately unable to. No. DINKS are couples who can have children but proudly declare not wanting to have them. For the most self-centeredly banal of reasons.
Again, Walsh’s depiction is most accurate: “Most of them follow the same format: bragging about having all of the sleep, free time, and finances to… buy bulk snacks at Costco. Really. They are making videos providing unsolicited lists of the things that make their lives fulfilling and somehow Costco makes the cut. For what it’s worth. I like to buy cereal wholesale too, but I’m not going to make it my whole identity. Either way, pretty much everything revolves around their increased ability to buy stuff.”
But all this mindless prideful commercialism comes at a cost. As previously pointed out here (“Population collapse and the RH Law mistake,” March 2022; citing “Fertility, mortality, migration, and population scenarios for 195 countries and territories from 2017 to 2100,” The Lancet, July 2020), the world’s population is already shrinking to alarming levels.
Thus, “the global population was projected to peak in 2064 at 9.73 billion (8.84–10.9) people and decline to 8.79 billion (6.83–11.8) in 2100.” Total fertility rates (TFR) for several countries are expected to fall drastically: “By 2050, 151 countries were forecasted to have a TFR lower than the replacement level (TFR <2·1), and 183 were forecasted to have a TFR lower than replacement by 2100. Twenty-three countries in the reference scenario, including Japan, Thailand, and Spain, were forecasted to have population declines greater than 50% from 2017 to 2100.”
Even more disconcerting is the expected aging global population: “with 2.37 billion (1.91–2.87) individuals older than 65 years and 1.70 billion (1.11–2.81) individuals younger than 20 years, forecasted globally in 2100.”
China just experienced a 70% drop in its birthrate from 2017 and is expected to see its population halved by 48% by the end of this century, with India (expected 1.09 billion by 2100) and Nigeria (791 million) overtaking China’s predicted 732 million people. As The Lancet points out: “A sustained TFR lower than the replacement level in many countries, including China and India, would have economic, social, environmental, and geopolitical consequences.”
The Philippines itself has depreciating age demographics: in 2022, 58.1% or 844,909 of newborn Filipinos were born illegitimate. The Philippine Statistics Authority also reported that the Total Fertility Rate of Filipino women aged 15 to 49 years declined from 2.7 children per woman in 2017 to 1.9 children per woman in 2022, effectively placing the Philippines below the replacement fertility level of 2.1. The security, economic, and social problems that an aging population coupled with an improperly formed youth deprived of both biological parents can bring, if unaddressed, could be catastrophic.
And yet, the DINK mindset isn’t damaging only at the macro-societal level but also at the personal, individual level, harmful ironically even to DINKS themselves. Wendy Wang, Research Director for the Institute for Family Studies warns: “Don’t listen to proudly and deliberately childless couples: Children are good for marriage and for society.”
The message “that marriages are better without children and children are a big time drain and financial burden … is misleading. Among Americans ages 18 to 55 (the group who are most likely to have young children at home), married adults with children are the happiest. Nearly four in 10 married parents (37%) say they are very happy with their lives, compared with 27% of married, childless adults (the happiness level among unmarried adults is much lower), according to the 2022 General Social Survey. When it comes to marital quality, married parents also have an advantage over their childless peers: 63% of married parents are very happy about their marriage, compared with 57% of married and childless couples.
Even in the 18-to-34 age group, to which the featured TikTok couples appear to belong, married couples with children are far more likely than their childless peers to say they are very happy with their lives (43% vs. 30%).
It is true that children require a considerable amount of care, and married parents have less free time compared with their childless peers and single adults, but research shows that more free time doesn’t always translate to more happiness. Even though they have less free time, married parents tend to spend more of the free time they do have socializing with others and less time in front of screens, and these factors contribute to their higher levels of happiness” (“‘DINKs’ Should Rethink Their Anti-Child Views,” National Review, December 2023).
Even in that one particular aspect that DINKS love bragging about — their supposedly unbridled sex life (see, for example, “Why we’re putting off having children: We have sex four times a week and lie-ins every weekend — why ruin things?,” Daily Mail, March 2023) — they still get wrong. Married couples with kids apparently have more and enjoy more sex than their childless counterparts:
“There’s one group of adults who consistently have sex more often than any other, and it might come as a surprise to those who think having young children is all about sleep deprivation and mopping mashed food off the furniture. American couples in households with children under the age of six report having sex over 80 times per year, according to a new study led by the University of San Diego, more than those with no kids, and those with older kids.” (“The couples having the most sex in America all have this in common,” Medium, March 2017; citing “Declines in Sexual Frequency among American Adults,” 1989-2014,” Twenge, et.al., 2017).
DINK’s simply have no advantage over that of being married with kids, especially if one considers the concomitant damage and utterly vapid empty existence that such a lifestyle brings. Matt Walsh is precisely on point:
“I’m a SISK — single income, six kids — and I can do you one better. I buy whatever snacks I want for myself, whenever I want them, whether from Costco or anywhere else. My children do not prevent me from indulging in that way. The only difference is that, if anyone asked me to provide a list of the things I love most about my life, I wouldn’t cite the fact that I can buy snacks for myself. Not because I can’t buy snacks, but because that’s a rather banal detail that I wouldn’t think worth mentioning.
“And yet, for DINKs, snacks and Costco play, apparently, a central role in their lives. On their deathbeds, while they’re lying there alone with no one to mourn them or care that they’re dying, or remember them when they’re gone… when the hospice nurse asks them to pass along a final piece of wisdom, they will look up and with their final, dying breath, whisper: ‘Get a Costco membership. They have great deals on Cheez-Its’.”
Perhaps it’s no coincidence then that the American Heritage Dictionary defines a “dink” as a “stupid, annoying, or contemptible person.”
The views expressed here are his own and not necessarily those of the institutions to which he belongs.
Jemy Gatdula read international law at the University of Cambridge. He is the dean of the Institute of Law of the University of Asia and the Pacific, and is a Philippine Judicial Academy lecturer for constitutional philosophy and jurisprudence.
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