I personally cringe when I hear a friend js having a kid. All I can think of is how bad theyre going to have it. Hell id definitely have been better off being born 20 years earlier, but these new kids are REALLY screwed unless they have super rich parents.
“Nothing new under the sun” I suppose!
Very much so. I honestly think it’s at least a little cruel and selfish to have a child in a dying world.
That said, I remain supportive of the parents in my life and I try to keep that feeling to myself–unless the parent brings it up (my cousin has two very young children whom he adores, but he also worries for their futures due to climate change and political instability, and he’ll talk pretty openly with me about it).
Climate change is the number one thing. The past had fascism, tools, slavery - but it didn’t have an Extinction level event looming just cresting over the horizon. I’m not having any kids until there is actual meaningful progress towards fixing that… So it looks like I’m not having kids.
Not to mention that one of the easiest ways to combat climate change is to simply not bring more humans into the world.
Of course it did.
If not for the courage and conviction of Vasily Arkhipov, civilization, and potentially humanity, may have ended in 1964. People had kids for 30 years under the very real threat of nuclear extermination. In the end it turned out pretty well.
People had kids during the black plague.
While a climate crisis is more than just a threat, we don’t know what’s going to happen. We have ideas, and models, and educated guesses… But not knowledge.
I wouldn’t tell anyone to have kids if they don’t want to. But no one should plan their life around sparing a hypothetical person from the hypothetical struggles of a slow moving crisis we don’t fully understand.
How about sparing them from a life of working constantly to have job insecurity, no social safety net, and a bullet for a retirement plan? Birth is cruelty.
I think you may just need to talk to somebody this comment is out of my depth.
We’re all talking now. I don’t find that perspective to be one that equates uniquely to a depressed person. That perspective is relatively prevalent within this thread, but also somewhat prevalent within social circles that I find myself in.
“my life is so miserable that I would rather see the continuation of the species voluntarily end that risk someone else suffers like me” is depression. Maybe it’s not suicidal depression, but it probably requires intervention.
Maybe it’s just immature edgelord BS, but if not that’s a serious problem.
I really think you’re missing the target entirely.
There’s not a biological imperative for humans to reproduce. It’s pretty egotistical to assume that your species “deserves” to exist. Can you tell me what about our species is so special?
Calling something “a problem,” and failing to articulate on what specifically makes it a problem is MAGA level thinking.
I didn’t say anything about deserve, I don’t really understand why you have it in quotes.
I thought it was pretty clearly implied the problem was a mental health issue. I’m not a psychiatrist so I’m not qualified to say what the particular mental health issue is any more than I would be able to qualify or runny nose as a cold or allergies or a flu. I just know a symptom when I see it.
A person that wants to determine what species do and do not “deserve” to exist is outside of my pay grade, but clearly unwell.