this post was submitted on 08 Oct 2024
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My wife really wanted a kid. I love my wife.
I gave her no illusions though. This world is fucked. This is either the beginning of another dark(enforced ignorance) age or the end of human civilization entirely. The kid is beyond fucked.
I have more of a "welcome to the shit show, kid" mindset. I can't protect him from this exploitative hellscape, any more than I could protect myself. Oh and please spare me the cliche "well you need to man up and find a way to give them an awesome life," as reality isn't a Disney movie.
I can show him the stuff I like and ways to protect himself a little, but man his generation's future is bleak.
My husband wants kids, I'm okay without for the same reasons as you and a big disgust of pregnancy. I have a lot of experience with kids in my career and we love kids, but it just seems the kindest thing to do for them is to not bring them into this world. We're planning on fostering once we're in a better financial position and hopefully adopting from there. I'd rather grow our family with a kid or toddler that already got the shit luck of being here.
Holy shit the negativity between these two posts is disgusting. This world is far from perfect but it's not a dystopian hell scape and it's far from a lost cause.
Hop offline, touch grass, talk to your neighbors. Be the change you want to see in the world and all that instead of being the world's biggest wet blankets.
People on the Internet, and specifically reddit/Lemmy, sit and read all this negative shit all day, every day, and then come and regurgitate it for others to do the same. Life has literally never been easy, except for a very select few. I personally think some of the best things in life come from the fact that there are difficulties weighing in opposition (winter and summer, as the most general example). If you don't want to have kids, that is great, but to say it's because the world is difficult is just such a copout, because the world has always been and will always be difficult. You need to live for good times, weather the bad times.
So why do you think a child deserves to be brought into a world where they're going to suffer?
Other than perhaps what else I addressed that you didn't quote, are you asking me what the meaning of life is? I'm not sure I'm qualified to answer.
Can we send his wife flowers?
I'm with you calling it out. "His generation’s future is bleak" lol thanks, dad. Half the content on here is screeching about how prior generations failed to save the world, and this guy is leaning full in on "not my choice, not my problem" to a cheering crowd encouraging him to spike his son into the ground.
I promise I'm not a doomsday prepper or anything, just a person in my 30s who grew up in poverty and has only recently gotten to a point of being slightly above water. We are aware that having a child would immediately bring us back to scraping by, which means that we may not be able to afford any extras for said child. No dance classes, no preschool, no crayons with the sharpener on the back. Just stressed out parents who won't be able to give as much attention and care due to burnout and survival mode. That doesn't sound nice for anyone involved... The kinder thing for me to do is either wait till we're in a better financial state(where aging and inflation works against us) or just accept we won't have them. Our plan, as I said, is to eventually foster and hopefully adopt from there, because by the time we feel financially stable enough to support another human in our world, I'll probably be too old for a safe pregnancy.(Which I'm disgusted by as well, but that's a whole different issue)
This isn't a situation where I'm worried about the world blowing up, it's accepting that we'll either be trapping ourselves and a child in poverty and continuing that cycle we both came from or dealing with a high risk geriatric pregnancy and a baby in our 40s.
Yeah I'm shocked they literally said the best thing we could do for kids is not allow them a chance at life.
How closed minded they must be, to think everyone shares the exact same despair they do, as well as the inability or lack of creativity needed to envision a better future and a path that takes us there.
If thats the perspective they will teach their children, I really hope they prove their parents wrong.
While I believe the end of the world is still a few generations away, judging someone for their decision to not have kids makes you seem like a pro-natalist conservative.
The world sucks for more than half of the entirety of its population. Only privileged Westerners believe there aren't any existential problems on the horizon.
For what it's worth I'm not judging them for their decision to not have kids. I don't care if they have kids or not. That's their choice. I'm just commenting on their incredibly fatalistic world view. When in reality, in the west at least, we have so many positive things going for us like tech advancements, healthcare/medical advancements, and the education opportunities.
It's the safest it's been in a while and even with what's happening in the middle east and Ukraine, it's one of the most peaceful times in history.
There are plenty of people in the West, especially in America, that are desperately impoverished. There are millions of people without access to any healthcare, let alone the fabulous new advancements in medicine. Education is also being torn down at the foundations by the GOP fucking with schools, and higher education is extremely expensive. You can only get a college degree with generational wealth or crushing, inescapable student loans.
I don't blame people who are not financially comfortable for being fatalistic.
There are plenty of people in the West, especially in America, that are desperately impoverished. There are millions of people without access to any healthcare, let alone the fabulous new advancements in medicine. Education is also being torn down at the foundations by the GOP fucking with schools, and higher education is extremely expensive. You can only get a college degree with generational wealth or crushing, inescapable student loans.
I don't blame people who are not financially comfortable for being fatalistic.
Why do you think the world sucks for half the population? You must be making an awful lot of assumptions. I mean, I barely know if my neighbor is having a hard time let alone 4 billion people who I never see.
Lets do a test. Could you imagine supporting:
Most people can't because they have been programmed to see these as "holy touchstones" of their true religion, capitalism. And that means only economic power may rule, and there are no paths to the future except the profitable ones. They rather de-federate call socialists tankies and than to deal with the angry dirtbag left. They prefer to exist in a calm apolitical space with a total war on good vs evil.
So please don't insult people who can imagine many paths but also have the wisdom why all these paths are shut. It's just like a physics problem, you can't overcome the political energy worth trillions of dollars with a few measly millions of dollars of political energy we could muster.
I can imagine lots of great future possibilities without doing any of those 4 things too. Mankind has the technology to do innumerable amazing things now.
Yes but the issue is that any technology will be used to maximize profit, which results in almost always the worst case outcome. We already have the technology for a global post-scarcity civilization with a circular economy.
Those 4 things are just random ideas but anything that is unprofitable or decreases power or destroys massive wealth of capitalists is basically censored in mainstream political discourse. And today effective countermeasures have been developed to make protests useless and reform or revolutions impossible.
But I do agree that this doesn't justify radical anti-natalism. Just teach your children profitable skills, multiple languages, subsistence farming, electronics and how to build electric motors and windmills, how to build a cozy tiny house or a boat. I also hope for technological advancements (like 3D printers, genetic engineering) that allow for a more democratic industrial base.
PS: Kurzgesagt has a new video on this: Is Our World Broken?. TLDW: We need to tell ourselves a new story (but that requires we stop believing in the old ones)
Aside from global warming the world as a whole has been steadily improving. I think you are confusing the USA with the rest of the world. Empires collapse, it happens, that doesn't mean the whole world is on fire.
I wonder what romans would have done to the barbarians if they had nukes.
I'm sure that type of language helps.
The Romans would have nuked themselves first with how many times they overthrew themselves.
The barbarians weren't any different than the romans. Same thing as Americans calling groups terrorists so we can kill them.
You would be surprised how other countries (including your favorite role model European ones) are fucking themselves up right now.
I live in Europe, in a country that still has its problems. The truth is though it's not just us. There are less deaths from war and less poverty throughout the world in general if you actually look at the statistics. This is despite all the bad things you see in the news. The modern news and internet make people more aware of the bad in the world, when the truth is things are actually getting better overall.
I get what you are saying. But that improvement has been possible only because of global warming. Today we have more energy (=workforce) at our hands than ever before. This has imported things, but it's living on bored time Global warming will start to deteriate our world in multiple ways, I fact it is doing so right now.
A collapse of this system build on sand is a very real possibility. And it is a very real possibility that it will take less than a generation to happen.
You're not wrong, but that's just growing pains that every technologically capable species goes through. Like every other kind of alien, we have less than 1,000 years to figure out how to move our industry and other energy use and generation off-world before we cook ourselves.
The only thing collapsing is nations that value money more than anything. They don't fit into the current world, and certainly not in the future.
If you are so tied to the notion that your worth is based on your wealth, I'm sure you would feel despair.