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!
My children are still very young, but oh are they happy!
They are enjoying their life and no future suffering will ever take that away from them.
I wouldn’t want to deny those awesome humans their right to play as merrily as they do. To create, to enjoy life. They exist right now as well, in 2025 and 2026.
The end of life is always painful. Life is still worth it.
It’s a very personal decision and I’m glad about every human that’s not born on this crowded planet. But collectively not having children feels pretty bleak to me. Are we as a species already giving up, rolling on our backs and wait to go extinct? Come on! There is so much beauty and so much to do in this world.
My children are having a great time, they bring joy, purpose and chaos to my life. I love having them around, even though their future scares me. That has always been part of becoming a parent.
I feel like some doomer lemmings need to go outside a little more, instead of telling themselves and their screens how awful everything is. Life was brutal a century ago.
I think that, no matter when you were born in history, there were trials and tribulations.
Absolutely I do. And I don’t understand what makes a person think that bringing a new life into this disaster is a good idea.
Well, hopefully you at least feel thankful that so many of your ancestors brought children into a world much more filled with pain and suffering and death than today.
I’m not, lmao. My life sucks. Wtf is with all the breeders here trying to justify their contributions to climate change!? There is immensely more pain and suffering in our immediate future than there was at any point in human history. We are literally looking at the end of humanity here.
Oh, and are you not contributing to climate change? Ok for you tho, just not kids?
Breeders, oy… So wtf you still doing here if so miserable and zero hope?
It’s the main reason I’m not having children. While there are other reasons the main one is a combination of global warming made worse by late stage capitalism and the resulting political instability that comes with that.
While I refuse to make the choice to bring someone new into this world myself I do see it as my duty to help as many of the kids around me who were brought into this world regardless. The world they were bron into is not their fault and I appreciate being able to use my resources to help them and their parents.
I was born in the 90s and I feel sad about being born to this day, can’t imagine the poor kids who are gonna grow up now
I think the next generation is going to start feeling it hard. Current generation will slip by but barely. I’m not pressuring my kids to have their own. Just do you fam.
If you were born 20 years earlier you’d get to destroy the planet and die before there was any consequences?
The kids will be fine, they are smarter and more capable than those that came before them, every time. The real problem is people living so long they aren’t making room for the young people. Think turnover at a restaurant, and all the diners finished eating and paid but won’t leave.
I mean, I made a conscious decision not to have children, so…
I feel like most people today have kids just because they feel that’s what they should be doing or because they just want a kid. I feel having kids is almost, incredibly selfish? If that makes sense.
What an odd take. Reproducing is arguably the #1 motivation, and purpose, of all life on this planet. Biologically anyway. You’re taking issue with a fundamental trait of life that’s baked into our DNA.
May as well deem people selfish for wanting food and shelter too.
Yeah, I don’t get how people can think like this but not want nukes to take out everything. Like you’re living this shit, too, if you are willing to keep living this shit, why do you assume it’s a bad thing for anyone to bring someone else into it? Anti-natalism is pro-extinction from my pov.
Not that I have an issue with people taking themselves out of the gene pool or anything, I just find the position wildly inconsistent with anyone who wants to continue living themselves.
And to be clear, I mean specifically the “if you choose to have a kid, you are bad” position, I can understand “having kids is not for me, I don’t want to do parenting”.
Hey there, I’ll try to clear things up a bit. At this point in time, here’s a list of things going on in the world:
1.) Collapse of world democracies- the US is fascist now with several countries on their way. It’s a reasonable assumption that a child born today will experience less freedom than you ever have.
2.) Collapse of the environment. - The planet is becoming uninhabitable. 60% of insect species are gone. Temperatures are rising. There’s more than a few inferences that can be made from this…
3.) Collapse of the middle class - it kinda ties into #1, and a lot of people have seen this coming for a while too. We’re being split into an ownership class and a working class. If that divide continues growing (like graphs would indicate) we’re heading towards a neo-feudalist state. That’s not a pleasant experience for anyone other than those at the top. I’m not at the top, you probably aren’t either.
4.) Idiocracy Effect - the beginning part of idiocracy, where it’s explained that dumb people are popping out 10 kids while intelligent people are spending years planning their first. If you are one of the smart people, you’d be forcing a new version of yourself to live in a world with exponentially more dumb people than the world you live in today. If you’re one of the dumb people, well….
The last one doesn’t get a #, but I also have questions surrounding consent for existence. I won’t get into that because I don’t have a fully formulated opinion on that specific area yet. I’m still working it out for myself.
Might want to add resource depletion to your list.
Global freshwater demand will exceed supply 40% by 2030, experts warn and 90 per cent of Earth’s topsoil at risk by 2050
Fresh water is already low in many places and with no water or arable land to grow food in, that’s not a future that anyone is surviving.
Since the industrial revolution, fossil fuels were the only affordable energy sources that could meet the demand of industrialized countries. Until 5-10 years ago.
We’re now in a situation where most people can still pretend that climate change isn’t serious, and the fossil fuel lobby is stronger than ever. And yet over 90% of new electricity generation is already renewable, because it has simply become cheaper than coal and gas power in the last years.
As climate impacts worsen, the pressure to decarbonize will only get larger. The lobbies have been fighting tooth and nail against the energy transition for over 40 years, but they are rapidly loosing ground now in most countries.
It’s right to be alarmed about climate change, there will be serious long-term impacts, but it seems irrational to be completely fatalistic. Just comparing the battery prices and solar panel prices and ev market with 10 years ago reveals a truly massive shift. And this is just the beginning of the energy transition.
Yes
No. I felt sorry for people born yesterday, but I think today’s kids will be OK.
Not sure about tomorrow, though. :P
Not really. Time flies fast, they are newborn today, but in 60 years, they’ll be the elderly every yougster wished do be (if there’s no war) and we, will be the misunderstood great grandfathers who lived an unknown time.
Whatever the world would become, they would live an interesting but very harsh time of population shrinking, due to demographic transition (except african children), and even if we fear about their early ipad brainrotting process, they’ll figure out how to make their way in life, because it’ll be chaos if they don’t.
They’ll be the beta generation who were born with the ol’ AI generative tools, knew a bit about life without mass surveillance, lived the VR revolution, and worked to make nuclear fusion possible. (some guesses about future, let’s be optimists)
Fusion is just 50 years away, every year!
People are bad at estimating how long it will take to develop something, but everything I’ve seen indicates that we are getting closer to it being a real thing.
Though I’m skeptical about the safety, as it does sound like it could get pretty explody if the containment fields fail. Or if they fail in just one direction, I wonder if they’d shoot out a plasma jet that fucks up everything in its path.
Even the sun shoots shit at us from time to time, which our own magnetic field generally protects us from.
Not that I’m against fusion power, just not holding my breath that it’s going to be all sunshine and no flares.
With a broken containment field, the reaction will simply stop. Fusion is hard because at small scales everything has to be perfect.
nope
Life will be harder but your kids might make it better for the others
