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Why The DINK Movement Is Destroying Society · The Family Teams Podcast

• 0:00
  there is no more destructive attitude that will make it hard for those of us who are having children and grandchildren than to have all of these people who are saying, I'm going to consume those things in my life and I'm not going to pay forward or contribute anything to the future. Because if I do that, I can consume more in my lifestyle. Again, don't celebrate it. Like this is not good. It's not a good thing to celebrate. It's not equal to somebody who's raising a family and doing the hard work to honor their ancestors, to do something that's actually good for the future and actually helps for their future flourishing.
• 0:32
  Hey everybody, welcome back to the podcast. I'm here with Robert Bortens. Robert, thanks for jumping on here with me today. Hey, excited to be here and excited to talk to your audience about some important stuff that we need to get out. Absolutely.
• 0:45
  Yeah, so Robert and I, we, so I was on Robert's podcast. Robert is the current CEO of Classical Conversations. His mom started that. About half of the homeschoolers I know are Classical Conversations students and tutors. And so our kids went through it. It's amazing, amazing. But we've got a much bigger, and one of the things I love, Robert, that you're stirring up is like we got to talk about,
• 1:07
  sort of the cultural state of the family. This is what Family Teams is all about. This is what we're always trying to understand. What is God's design blueprint for the family and how are we as a culture deviating from that? So Robert tweeted something, I think last week, maybe a week or two ago, that really caught fire on X and we posted on Family Teams and it got hundreds of thousands of views. So I just wanted to take a step back and just thought it'd be fun for Robert and I just to have a quick convo about this topic. Just zero in on this because
• 1:36
  I think this is something that really is worthwhile addressing. So I'm going to read what Robert wrote on X and then just kind of talk a little bit more about this. Okay. So you wrote, Dink sounds cool, but your lineage will end and the last years of life will be filled with regret. Silk is the new wealth, single income, lots of kids.
• 2:03
  Live that silk life and get lots of grandbabies for a joyful finish. Very simple, clear. But it is true that there's a lot of people who are actually advocating for the Dink lifestyle. Double income, no kids. They trumpet it very loudly. And so I think that this is a conversation that needs to happen. So, yeah, Robert, I would love just to start by asking, what was it that precipitated what you wrote here? Yeah.
• 2:28
  Yeah. So obviously, like the birth rate in the United States is now below replacement. It's below replacement all over Europe. And, you know, from a Christian biblical perspective, you know, God told us that wealth really was in our children and in our grandchildren and raising up them in the way they should go in this family unit idea. And I was just like,
• 2:53
  Everyone talks about Dink and how cool it is. You got all these celebrities, shout my abortion, and all these horrific things. And I was watching, my wife and I, I've watched some of the Stranger Things shows, and I saw this little clip on the Stranger Things girls that I wouldn't be here if my parents hadn't aborted my older sibling. And of course, that's just heartbreaking and disgusting at the same time. And I was like, look, this is not healthy for society. If we want to start...
• 3:23
  really restoring, rebuilding the Western values. It starts with rebuilding the family and it starts by honoring the family in the way it should go. And so, you know, dual income, no kids, you know, dink lifestyle. So we got to come up with an alternative. And I was just thinking, I was like,
• 3:39
  Silk, you know, single income, lots of kids. You know, it probably doesn't feel too good. I mean, it doesn't always feel like silk sheets when you're raising them, especially when they're younger. But all the research shows that the Dink lifestyle just leads to misery and that we are selling ourselves short of what God has for us when that's what we're promoting. And, of course, we're not talking about people who can't have kids
• 4:08
  for whatever reason, but just the intentionality of delaying children, not getting married till later, that this is not healthy for Christians, this isn't healthy for society in general, and so we've got to start having this conversation. Yeah, absolutely.
• 4:25
  Yeah, and you made a case right there that I think is really important to consider, which is that there are certain lifestyles that ought to be promoted and certain lifestyles that should not be promoted. And this sounds to a lot of people like a political conversation or a theological conversation or something that you have to be a Christian. But there's something about there's something just absolutely just natural.
• 4:49
  about saying, no, no, no, there's certain things that just lead to the promotion of the family. And because our culture says, no, no, no, there is no such thing as a lifestyle that needs to be uniquely promoted. What needs to be uniquely promoted is individualism, whatever an individual wants to do. And this is completely denied the fact there are certain lifestyles that actually make up the foundation of a stable lifestyle.
• 5:12
  Flourishing society. And what most societies have done throughout history is they have given special privilege to those lifestyles and say publicly, we all understand that these people bear more weight. They help the culture more. They are the bedrock of civilization. And so we're going to exclusively promote those lifestyles with an understanding of.
• 5:34
  that there are other lifestyles out there that people may choose. We're just not gonna promote those. We're not gonna say those are good. And the weird thing that seems to be happening is we are inverting the entire thing. Not only are we equally promoting alternative lifestyles that do not make up for that bedrock,
• 5:51
  But we are now in the process of actually demoting or doing the opposite of promoting the lifestyles that actually make up for the bedrock of civilization. I was just reading the New York Times just published an article. It's titled The Case for Ending a Long, Mostly Good Marriage.
• 6:11
  The New York Times is actually promoting, saying that, hey, if your individual freedom collides with your mostly good marriage, long marriage, that is absolutely the better. Let me give you the case for why you should get divorced. I'm so appalled. It's like, what happened, Robert? How do you think about this sort of collision we have, this allergy we have to promoting the very things that seem to be at the bedrock of what makes a flourishing society?
• 6:39
  Yeah, Jeremy, I actually have a new book coming out in January called Woken Weaponized, How Karl Marx Won the Battle for American Education and How We Can Win It Back. And this really started out with the ideas of Marx and the communists and a person that we highlight in the book, Robert Owen. He was an American, started a commune in Indiana, and it fell apart.
• 7:00
  And he said we have to just he created basically created the idea of public schools to condition our kids to fight the trinity of evil. And what he did determined to the trinity of evil was was family, religion and private property. And so today, more than half of children, even in well off families, are born out of wedlock.
• 7:23
  According to Barna, something like less than 6% of Americans have a biblical worldview. And I pay about 50% of my earnings in taxes. And so, I mean, if we don't see that the cause of this is just the destruction of family
• 7:40
  Really just it's been institutionalized over the last couple hundred years in the United States since about 1850 during the kind of during the second first and second world wars. And then it's now we're just seeing the fruit. So of that, and it's really borne out that this society is broken apart and.
• 7:59
  You know, that's really the root cause in my mind is that we have said, hey, state, educate my kids. And, you know, I'll see them, I'll feed them dinner and get them dressed in the morning and make sure they're on the school bus. And so...
• 8:15
  Churches have been complicit in this kind of ideology. They don't support, you know, many churches don't support this idea of single income, lots of kids, life's life. And, you know, I think there's a biblical basis in it. But I could, you know.
• 8:30
  I'm a Christian, so that's my worldview. But you can just look at lion prides or any sort of animal group that becomes very clear that family and offspring are very important to a flourishing lifestyle. And so, unfortunately, doing whatever you want doesn't necessarily lead to your best life. And so we need to look at the wisdom of the ages and see that there are certain...
• 8:57
  lifestyle decisions and views that have a healthier society a more flourishing society and those people who don't decide to take that path they actually are better off in those societies because of the good things that have been promoted and so we just see it all around us the destruction of this idea of dink and it's really just uh ending uh kind of
• 9:22
  comalternating worldview that Robert Owen said at the beginning that we need to end family, we need to end religion, and we need to end private property. Yeah. Man, what was the name of the book again? Yeah.
• 9:33
  Woken Weaponized is the primary title, and you can go to wokenweaponized.com, and you can preorder it on Amazon at the start of the year. Awesome. Thank you for writing. I can't wait to – yeah, we'll definitely want to have you on and go deeper and deeper into the philosophical underpinnings. I agree with the sentiment that we think the thoughts of dead philosophers, and a lot of times when people see a movement that's happening like this that is changing the way people think –
• 9:58
  It's really important to get into the actual first principles that gave rise to these aberrant ideas. But part of what's interesting, too, is if you are like just very practically, if you're talking to a friend or you're in a group and somebody starts to promote like the Dink lifestyle. Again, these are people that could have children, but they're saying, no, we're going to make a proactive decision.
• 10:24
  To combine our income and to not have children. And that this is a lifestyle choice. And we're going to go on social media and in groups and we're going to promote this. And then there is an assumption that it's going to be affirmed and celebrated. What's wrong with that? Like, what's wrong with just saying, hey, this is just another way. Some people want to go on this path. Let's just let's equally celebrate that lifestyle.
• 10:49
  Yeah, I mean, I've got cousins and uncles that have done this, and you can just see that it might work out pretty well in your 20s. That's what they're thinking about. But the older you get, the more you realize that there are things that you're not going to experience. You're not going to experience teaching your daughter to drive, you know.
• 11:11
  That first prom, high school graduation, grandbabies, the smile on kids' faces when they open their presents at Christmas. And so it's a really self-centered, short-term worldview that is promoted. You know, the idea of let's drink and be merry for tomorrow we die. You know, basically, it's a hopeless worldview that life isn't going to get better, that I have nothing to offer.
• 11:37
  Next generation, other than just, you know, a hedonistic lifestyle short term. And, you know, people say that a lot of people aren't like intentionally promoting it, but you'll hear him say like, oh, I could never homeschool my kids because I don't have the patience.
• 11:52
  Well, what are they saying? That they have a flaw that they've self-identified and they have no desire to become a better human, to work on that because they want to do what they want to do when they want to do it, and that doesn't include raising their own kids. And so, you know, for me, it's just sad because most of the time I don't necessarily have like, hey, have you thought about what it's going to be like 30 years from now? But the research, I mean, they've...
• 12:20
  this is a relatively new thing in that it's only like 50 or 60 years old. And it's really only become super popular over the last 10 years or so, 10, 20 years. But the research really clearly shows that, uh, on your deathbed, as you get older, like almost everyone wishes they had more kids and had spent more time with their family and had it spent so much time in their career. And so, uh,
• 12:46
  A Dink lifestyle is the exact opposite of, you know, what people have experienced life are reporting back to us what they wish they had done. They had wished they had, you know, had more kids. They wish they had, you know, maybe taken less evening phone calls at work and instead prioritized going to their kids' sports games.
• 13:05
  You know, if you're just trying to look at the science and follow what, you know, what we see that. Yeah. You know what? I have three kids. You know, sometimes it's inconvenient, especially when they're younger and you're changing diapers and all that thing. That's such a short season in the long scheme of things. And now that they've started to get older, you know, my oldest is 11. Now I'm like, oh, my gosh.
• 13:27
  there's so little time left. And so it's the idea that the culture just should be supporting larger families. You know, the parents, one parent staying home, you know, most of the time that should be the mom. Cause there's a lot of statistics that show if the female outperforms the male, that there's more likelihood of divorce. So,
• 13:47
  Obviously, men need to step up. That's not an accusation against women. That's saying, men, you got to step up. That's the big thing on the wage gap. People say, oh, men make more than women. Actually, if you take out singles, it's married men make more than everyone else. There's a father pay gap. Yes, absolutely.
• 14:06
  Yeah, so there's all these things that, all these societal problems are caused by the disenfranchisement of family and the destruction of the healthy family units out there. And so we've got to start promoting, with a lack of vision, the people perish. And I just don't know that we've cast a compelling vision yet for young people. And it's part of what they've grown up with. And so my goal with this kind of idea of this Silk Life
• 14:35
  is to just promote that single income, lots of kids, is actually the good life. And the accumulation of things actually just creates a bigger hole in your heart and makes it so that you're just continuing to want more and more and satisfied with life.
• 14:56
  less satisfied the more you accumulate. And so I want everyone to flourish. And so I think the silk life is going to make it. So, you know, 98% of society is going to live a much more flourishing life than they do today.
• 15:11
  Hey, it's Jeremy. When April and I started our family, we had love, but no framework. Everyone was pulling in different directions. Then we discovered God's design for the household, a multi-generational team on mission. That changed everything, our rhythms, our purpose,
• 15:26
  even how we worked and rested. That's why we wrote a free course called Five Days to Transform Your Family into a Team. It's five short emails with one simple step each day to help you realign your home to God's blueprint. You can sign up for free at familyteams.com slash transform.
• 15:45
  We need to have an actual vision for what causes people to flourish. And I think what you're saying is, look, this sort of silk lifestyle, this is what historically we've demonstrated helps humans flourish. We're experimenting with these other alternative ideas. And so we need to actually understand, like, how do we create a world in which this silk lifestyle makes sense to kind of put a bow on the dink, um,
• 16:07
  argument. Like what's wrong with that? So one of the things that you articulate is, look, you might think right now this makes sense because you're, you know, 25 and you're newly married or you're 30 and you're newly married and you think, oh, this would be a lot of fun. We keep traveling. You know, kids are annoying, whatever kind of reasons you're being given.
• 16:24
  So, and you've demonstrated, look, it doesn't take a lot of wisdom or connection with people in previous generations before you start to see that that's kind of a normal, kind of foolish, immature attitude that needs, instead of promoting that as a brilliant, beautiful, new individualistic lifestyle, that simply needs to be corrected because that's just a lack of wisdom. So that's one, just the individual is impacted by this dink lifestyle.
• 16:50
  I would say another argument that I'm always frustrated with when we promote a dink lifestyle is I think it's deeply disrespectful to our ancestors. I mean, if you tell a story where somebody, you know, like came to America, let's say that they had great sacrifice to themselves to give their children a better life. And then those parents did everything they could to give a better life to their kids. If you're a part of a family line in which...
• 17:12
  Things have been passed on to you. And then all of a sudden it gets to you, maybe after 10 generations, and you've got the best lifestyle and everything that you're being blessed with is really standing on what your ancestors, what your previous descendants did for you. And you said, okay, thank you guys.
• 17:27
  Thank you, you know, 10 generations of parents that have given me this incredible opportunity. You know what I'm gonna do with that opportunity? I'm gonna consume it and end it with my life. I have the best life that anybody has. I receive this from you, but I'm just gonna take it and I'm going to consume it in one generation. And for us to actually celebrate people,
• 17:47
  that are making that decision, incredibly disrespectful to people in the past. And as believers, we believe those people are, if they're believers, still alive, they're cheering us on. The Bible talks about a great cloud of witnesses. You have a responsibility to that great cloud of witnesses to actually live a lifestyle worthy of what they did for you. And to think that just by consuming this for yourself, that is disrespectful to them. So it's bad for you. It's disrespectful to your ancestors. And it's also...
• 18:14
  destructive to the future. I mean, there is no more destructive attitude that will make it hard for those of us who are having children and grandchildren than to have all of these people who are saying, I'm going to consume those things in my life and I'm not going to pay forward or contribute anything to the future. Because if I do that, I can consume more in my lifestyle. Again, what we're talking about isn't that these are things that we should...
• 18:35
  force people to do. We're just saying, don't celebrate it. This is not good. It's not a good thing to celebrate. It's not equal to somebody who's raising a family and doing the hard work to honor their ancestors, to do something that's actually good for the future and actually helps for their future flourishing. Those are the things that we need to celebrate. The idea that we need to celebrate aberrant, destructive, self-centered and immature lifestyles at an equal level as
• 19:02
  lead to flourishing, both in the present and in the future, that these are not equal. Absolutely. And there's a there was a study done with 401ks where they took people who are in their early 20s and said, how much do you want to put in your 401k? The company is going to match whatever percent. And, you know, they didn't hardly put any money in their 401k.
• 19:25
  Then they took another group of people in the same sample size and did a progression of them and showed them a picture of what they would look like when they're 70 and said, you know, how much do you want to put in? This is what you're going to look like when you're 70. And those people put in like two or three times the amount of the people who didn't see what their future would look like. And so, I mean, I could just see a simple, you know, picture.
• 19:52
  example of like, what if you did a study and you showed the one, the dink lifestyle, yep, you're having fun in your twenties, you know, in your thirties and then, you know, fifties, you know, it's just you and your wife, sixties, seventies, you're gone versus, Hey, you know, kids. Yeah. When you're younger, maybe it doesn't look so pleasant, but you know, now they're a teenager and you're having a, having fun with them and, and going out and doing things as a family. And now,
• 20:16
  They're in college and now they're having grandbabies and now you're at Christmas with the grandbabies and now you've got great grandbabies. And which of those lifestyles would you have? And so it's painting a compelling image of what is your future going to look like? And no one on their deathbed ever said, I wish I had less kids. I wish I had spent more time in the office. I wish I had accumulated more wealth.
• 20:42
  They realized that all those things were pointless, that they're going somewhere else. And, you know, whether you're a Christian or not, that your life is over. And so, you know, those individuals who've lived a good life said, you know, I wanted more kids. I wish I had worked less. I wish I had prioritized the right things. That's right.
• 21:05
  We know what those right things are to prioritize. It's hard enough to do it. I know working out is healthy for me. It doesn't mean I do it as much as I ought to. And so having society reinforcing these good behaviors isn't going to stop the bad behaviors or, like you said, the people who just physically can't or whatever reason they can't have kids. We're not talking about those people.
• 21:29
  We're just talking about a society that says it is better not to have kids than it is to have them. And that is a suicide mission for your culture. Yes. So that is a really, really important distinction to make, that we need to make a decision about what to celebrate because these things really matter. An example you gave earlier is that when you look at pay gaps,
• 21:54
  There was such a specific narrative that was put forward about the nature of these pay gaps. And the framing was always man versus women. And so women make 79 cents for every dollar a man makes.
• 22:10
  And so we hear that. We're appalled by that. I remember Obama came out and talked about that. And we have to close this pay gap. This pay gap is clearly a sign of deep misogyny that is rooted in our society. We've got to get rid of it. And when the researchers actually dove into the actual numbers, they discovered that
• 22:31
  This phenomenon, which was that fathers were the ones who were out making everyone single men, single women, single women often will will out earn single men. It wasn't misogyny at all. It was that oftentimes a woman would make decisions for her career that was in the best interest of her family. And then a man who is married with children would make.
• 22:51
  They would make decisions in the best interest of his family. And they made different decisions. The woman in much, much larger numbers would make decisions to actually put their their career on hold in many cases or to dial down to part time or to take fewer hours. Men would choose because they're having more children to begin to increase the amount they were working in order to do this silk lifestyle. In other words, if we actually cared about single income, lots of kids.
• 23:17
  We would love, we would want to see a gap like this emerge. A gap like this is actually evidence. If you just are looking at it from man, woman, you would want to see a gap emerge. It would be a positive sign that society was working. It's wouldn't be a sign at all of misogyny. It would be a sign that, that oftentimes men and women make different choices. If you've got men willing to work more and more hours, take more promotions that they're going to get a larger income.
• 23:42
  for the same kind of work than a woman who's making decisions in the best interest of her family. But because we framed all of this from the perspective of the individual, it didn't actually care about promoting and helping families that a lot of you guys listen to this, you're thinking, oh my gosh, we can't survive off of a single income.
• 23:59
  It is so important for you guys to understand that it's exactly these kinds of political battles that have taken place that have eroded your ability. And so you have to understand what's going on with these different, the nuance in what seems like, oh, wow, we've got to overcome misogyny. Let's pass all these laws, you know, and cause this to happen and re-engineer society so it's more equal without understanding that what you're doing is destroying the next generation's ability to live the single income, lots of kids lifestyle.
• 24:27
  Yeah, and as we talked, I'm going to get into a hard ending here in a minute. So one of the things we've got to understand is that these dads are taking responsibility and going above and beyond and maturing. And what is the one thing that we hear from young women today? They can't find men who will mature. That's right. Right? And why is that? Well, you don't need to mature in the deep lifestyle. It promotes. It celebrates.
• 24:52
  immaturity and of course those men aren't going to need to go you know make sacrifices go read extra books you know try to get higher you know credentials to get better jobs that might be a little bit more stressful but uh it's going to provide more for their family because they don't need to uh because they've opted out of having kids and so um you know it's just uh it's not healthy for society and single income let me just be clear my wife is
• 25:21
  She works like four jobs and we homeschool our kids because she's always helping someone or doing something. She coaches at my daughter's gymnastics. She makes earrings because she likes doing that. I mean, she tutors in our classical conversations community. I think about her mom, like she worked.
• 25:38
  during the school year, like waitressing and things like that. But so she could be free during the summer. So even though, you know, it wasn't a full single income, there are plenty of ways to modify your lifestyle and make decisions so that you can be there for your kids and promote the family, which is the bedrock of a healthy society. And until we do that, we shouldn't be surprised that our culture, you know,
• 26:05
  Hollywood undermining it. You know, unfortunately, it seems like both parties like to undermine it in Washington, D.C. And it's really up to us individually to get out of the rat race and to put our family first. And when that happens, good things happen. Amen.
• 26:22
  Yeah, so do not be afraid to privilege certain lifestyles that lead to human flourishing by design, and do not be afraid to resist certain lifestyles that are designed to erode human flourishing. We've got to be okay with this. We've got to stop looking at this just through the individual lens. So, Robert, thank you so much for jumping on here today. Anywhere else where you can point people that want to follow your work, remind us again about the book and anything else that would be helpful to tell people.
• 26:49
  Yeah, so go to WokenWeaponize.com to get the book. Pre-order it early in January, so you can be the first one on your block to have it. Follow me on X, The Robert B Show. And I've actually started a substack, and I haven't memorized it yet because I just started it. But talking more about this silk lifestyle. So go check that out. You can find it through my X account. Awesome. Thanks so much, Robert, for jumping on here today. Thank you.
• 27:12
  Thank you for listening to the Family Teams podcast. If you're enjoying this content or have learned something new, please make sure to leave a rating and review and share with a friend. To stay up to date with our events, new content, and products, you can follow us on Facebook and Instagram at Family Teams.