Stop buying stock in AI things. Buy stock in cat things instead. That’s my official advice. I read a good piece in the New Statesman that says this entire AI bubble is going to burst, but not before it takes out millions of jobs. This is lose-lose if you ask me.
Here is a better idea: if there is stock in cat related stuff – whiskers, sheba, and all those other pet foods and what not – I advise you to invest in it now. And that’s because we are going to need a lot more cats to keep the childless single ladies company in the years to come.
We all know that the marriage rate is falling and the fertility rate is falling. Therefore there will be many more childless cat ladies in the future. And don’t bother moaning to me that I am being rude about the single cat ladies and that single women actually aren’t big on the whole cat thing, when they are. Stereotypes are stereotypes for a reason; because they are true. Single childless women need company so they get themselves a mog. Childless couples seem to go for dogs.
Emer McLysaght of the Irish Times, childfree and loving it, has a cat. Surprise! The reason why the single lady acquires a cat is because the very strong maternal instinct to care for something vulnerable is in most women. Maybe not the narcissist but it is there and it doesn’t go away even if you are a raving feminist with purple hair. You can suppress this desire to care for years but slowly and surely as night follows day, it will emerge. The number of childless women is on the rise. What are they going to do after 50?
You can’t actually just go on a cruise for the rest of your life and make inane tik-tok videos about candles. You need to express that maternal feeling somehow. And in the next 20—30 years that maternal drive is going to go to cats.
Spinsters and childless women always existed but they were nearly always aunts. Sometimes they had cats and sometimes they did not. But, and this is a critical difference between today’s spinster and spinsters of yore, spinsters of yore still operated within a society that was pro-marriage and had lots of children in it. In fact, they were usually Aunts either literally or socially and they often took on the responsibility of guiding a niece in the marriage market or negotiating difficult situations between their nieces and their parents.
In the song, Baby it’s cold outside, the woman explains that she cannot stay for one more drink because of the gossip, especially ‘her maiden aunt’s mind is vicious.’ This was a form of social control that the maiden aunt enjoyed over her niece. In Downton Abbey the matriarch the Dowager Countess is sometimes aided and abetted by her childless daughter and widow Lady Rosamund Painswick (née Crawley) in the finishing off, of the Crawley sisters as they negotiate the marriage market. It is Lady Rosamund who is consulted when Lady Edith becomes pregnant out of wedlock.
(Lady Rosamund hatches her plan to help Lady Edith who is pregnant. Lady Grantham her mother is clueless but the grandmother Dowager Countess is no fool.)
Colm Tóibín has written of The Importance of Aunts in the 19th– century novel.
Those childless women, sometimes married and sometimes widowed, were still occupied with the raising of children, particularly the older children of their brothers and sisters. But today, in the Glorious 2100s, as the fertility rate collapses and there are fewer children around to guide, counsel, warn and socially censure, what are the childless ladies to do with their time?
They have already cut themselves off from the possibility of having a grandchild and now they don’t have their nieces or nephews to guide either. This is going to make for a very miserable group of women, and as misery loves company, you can expect this misery to spread. They will attempt to take us all down misery lane with them.
So you see, as the urge to care and nurture still glows within these women but there is no one upon which they can lavish such care, devotion or indeed tough love expect cats to tip-toe into the breach. I am telling you now the sale of cats, cat accessories, cat paraphernalia, those odd cat collars with bells, cat clothes, luxury cat foot, cat litter and all the rest of it will start climbing. Buy shares in the cat stuff now.
You are welcome.