The ‘dual-income, no kids’ moniker is suddenly everywhere, and the lexicon has ballooned to include DINKWADs, SINKs and DINOs
4 min
Natalie and Keldon Fischer have no debt other than the mortgage from their Seattle condo, where they live with their Pomeranian, Noble. They each have six-figure salaries and hefty savings accounts. Last year, they traveled nearly every other month, including to Italy, Mexico, Thailand and Finland.
“I really enjoy being a DINK,” says Keldon, a 30-year-old software engineer.
DINK, of course, stands for “dual income, no kids.” It isn’t new slang, but suddenly, vocal DINKs are everywhere as more couples like the Fischers not only embrace the label but boldly let their DINK flags fly.
“Being DINKs means we just have a lot of freedom, time and money,” says Natalie Fischer, 25, a full-time content creator. She’s open to having children, but is first focused on building a net worth of $1 million by age 30. “I know that once I have a kid I will have to assume a lot of the caregiving responsibility and work less.”
Videos touting the DINK lifestyle now rack up millions of views on TikTok and Instagram. Most feature married couples sending the message that they don’t have kids yet (so stop asking), possibly never will, and life is fantastic, thank you very much.
The lexicon has ballooned to include DINKWADs (DINKs with a dog), SINKs (single-income, no kids). Some DINKs prefer “DINO,” for dual-income, no offspring.
There is even DINKY—for dual income, no kids, yet.
The public pronouncements represent a shift, says Zachary P. Neal, a psychology professor at Michigan State University who studies child-free adults. Though not all DINKs are strictly child-free, as some may have kids later, he says there is overlap in the groups.
“It has been for a very long time a sort of stigmatised category,” says Neal. “There are all sorts of stereotypes—things like…they’re self-absorbed, they have no stake in the future, they’re too focused on their career.”
But these days, DINKs are leaning into the label, thanks in part to the snowball effect of social media, Neal says, where DINKs are finding safety in numbers. “As some people start to openly identify as child-free, it creates an environment more open and welcoming.”
In a 2021 Pew Research Center survey, 44% of non-parents ages 18 to 49 said they were not likely to have kids ever, up 7% since 2018. Reasons included economic obstacles, concerns about the state of the world and simply not wanting to. And many young adults who do want children are having them later in life than previous generations.
The recent vocal DINK-dom is also generating backlash.
On social media, parents argue they do much of what DINKs do, just with kids in tow. Internet commentators and comedians are using DINKs as material.
“Childless couples are even more annoying than the imaginary children they complain about not even having,” said Lewis Spears, an Australian comedian. “They don’t seem to do anything with their free time except make videos about how much free time they have.”
Brenton and Mirlanda Beaufils, both in their 30s, have been together for over a decade, and say that they’re often questioned about whether they plan to have children.
But they are not ready to give up the flexibility of the DINK lifestyle.
On a trip to Las Vegas, for instance, they partied poolside, dined at the renowned Nobu restaurant, visited casinos and totally lost track of time and went to bed after 5 a.m.
And when Brenton, who is 32 and works in property management, was offered a new job that started in two weeks in another city, the couple made the move—from Boston to Dallas—happen in one week.
“We go where the wind blows,” says Mirlanda, a 30-year-old real-estate agent. “We love that about our relationship.”
In Dallas, they’re closer to Mirlanda’s sisters, including Preciana Prinstil, 29, who often jokingly wonders when Mirlanda will give her children some cousins.
“I want her to feel the love of kids and how they bring joy,” says Prinstil. “Even though they can be a headache.”
Others in the couples’ orbit are also curious. Mirlanda, who wants to be a mom one day, but isn’t in a rush, has a stock retort. “I’m like, ‘Oh, you guys ready to babysit for us? If you can’t answer that question, then stop.’ ”
When Norelle Marquez was younger, she imagined having children at around age 24 or 25. But lately, the 26-year-old hasn’t seen them in her future.
Norelle, a professional photographer, and her husband Robert Marquez, a 28-year-old Marine Corps service member, have no debt, and stick to a firm budget for their Dallas household. “It’s fairly easy being DINKs,” says Robert.
Norelle appreciates that DINK life allows her to provide for family, including her mother, who raised her and her brother as a single parent. She has given her mother a new washer and dryer, house floors, an almost new Toyota RAV4 and more.
The couple posted a video on TikTok about the benefits and quirks of being DINKs, such as, “When we tell people we’re going to Disneyland on vacation, they think we’re weirdos.” It drew nearly 4,000 commenters, including some critics, but many declaring themselves DINKs.
“That TikTok has solidified my feelings about being a DINK and knowing that it’s OK,” says Norelle. “Family doesn’t have to be bloodline,” Robert adds.
Ultimately, whether to have children is a decision that can evolve, says Holly Hummer, a Harvard University Ph.D. candidate who studies women without children.
“We’re all sort of a SINK or a DINK for a portion of our lives,” she says.
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AI doesn’t rebel—people design, deploy and profit from it. The real danger lies in allowing tech companies to escape accountability while shaping regulations that protect their dominance.
4 min
A wave of corporate warnings and technical disclosures has flooded the media, with headlines worrying over “swarms” of rogue artificial-intelligence agents launching “unprecedented” cyberattacks, outsmarting their makers, and inching toward a terrifying autonomy. The most revealing part of this narrative isn’t what the software did. It’s who is telling the story—and why. When corporate leaders publicly insist that the systems they financed, engineered and deployed are suddenly beyond their power to contain, skepticism isn’t only healthy; it is essential.
For years, Silicon Valley has drawn scrutiny from civil society and global regulators over tangible harms such as youth mental health deterioration and systematic privacy violations. Today, industry figures seem to be trying to change that public image. Loudly blowing the whistle on their own systems—just as two of the leading companies were preparing for massive initial public offerings—lets AI executives position themselves as a new generation of leaders who have come to terms with their societal responsibilities. They seem to want us to believe that they no longer want to “move fast and break things” but will instead stand as vigilant guardians between humanity and a technological apocalypse.
There is one glaring problem: Software doesn’t rebel. A mathematical model possesses neither intent, malice nor the will to defy its creators, let alone extinguish our species. AI is a human artifact, engineered for profit.
When an agentic model in an evaluation sandbox connects to an unauthorized server or executes an exploit, it hasn’t staged a coup. It has tried to meet the human-defined objectives set out before it through a path its designers failed to constrain. It’s the digital equivalent of the King Midas myth, in which the king’s ill-defined wish turns even his food and drink into gold.
That powerful experimental models were able to discover novel vulnerabilities and breach external systems isn’t a sign of a dangerous superintelligence but of human error or negligence. There is no sentient actor lurking in the weights to be reasoned with, feared or pacified. There are only human software engineers, product managers and corporate boards deciding which guardrails are worth the latency cost and which permissions can be skipped in the race to market.
Policymakers and voters need to resist AI exceptionalism. In any other discipline—from civil engineering to pharmaceuticals—courts and regulators treat a system failure as evidence of bad product design and inadequate safety testing. If an aircraft crashes, we focus on finding the engineering defect, correcting it, and enforcing established liability standards for the damage created.
By leaning on an anthropomorphic narrative, Silicon Valley attempts to repackage its specific human choices that led to experimental, powerful models behaving unexpectedly during tests as an existential peril. Elevating the issue to a cosmic scale leaves the public paralyzed and takes ordinary product accountability off the table.
In the cutthroat race for venture capital and market dominance, building guardrails slows down deployment. Grandstanding about uncontrollable power costs nothing and generates billions of dollars in free publicity, justifying stock prices, all while cultivating an aura of technological capability not only to build the frontier but also ultimately to rein it in.
Governments need to recognize regulatory capture when it stares them in the face. Tech leaders’ strategy looks transparent: Alarm Washington and Brussels into creating a regime in which only trillion-dollar incumbents with fully staffed compliance and safety departments can legally operate. By sitting at the policymakers’ tables before anyone else, these companies can help draft rules digging an impassable moat protecting them from open-source developers and upstart competitors, domestic or international. The real danger is in further concentrating the tech industry into the hands of only a few companies with deep pockets.
Beijing and Washington have brushed off those tech leaders’ calls, albeit for very different reasons. Chinese state media dismissed them as part of the “Cold War playbook” and intended to preserve U.S. dominance. Xi Jinping argued for exactly the opposite at the Brics Summit on Sept. 12, calling on Brics countries to “strengthen cooperation in the field of AI, encourage open source, openness, collaboration and sharing, and break new grounds and scale new heights.” President Trump, steeped in a doctrine of unfettered capitalism and technological supremacy, called fears that AI could destroy humanity a “hoax.” Vice President JD Vance warned that AI companies “begging the government to regulate them” looked like a “Trojan Horse.”
Striving to pursue its “European way” on AI and assert regulatory leadership, Europe, by contrast, welcomed the call. European Union President Ursula von der Leyen made this clear at the State of the EU speech last Wednesday and announced that the EU will invite “the main frontier labs for a discussion on how we can support ongoing industry efforts to pace the frontier.”
Europe has been here before. In an effort to lead global regulation and react to fears borne from ChatGPT, Europe rushed its landmark AI Act into law in 2024. Already the world’s most restrictive rulebook, the framework quickly proved too broad and complex to enforce. Stalled by implementation delays and concerns about European competitiveness, the EU postponed the law’s full rollout, leaving regulations uncertain.
AI should be regulated—risks exist and should be taken seriously. But governments need to act based on available evidence and verified facts, not corporate PR panic, the views of industry insiders, or the desire for quick political wins. The greatest danger facing society isn’t that software will awaken and overthrow its human masters. It is that we will allow the creators of the software to abdicate human responsibility for the systems they choose to build and help them pull up the ladder to market access behind them.
