I get to travel, spend time on hobbies, and have a social life.
I have kids, travel, hobby, and have a social life. Introducing kids to new places, ideas, and people has given me a new perspective on them and made these activities more fun.
Also, I think letting our population decline a bit is probably better for our species and our planet.
The biggest waste producers on our planet aren’t the areas with the most people. They’re the areas with the access to the most money and the least political consequence.
The OpenAI project is a great example of this. Phenomenal consumption of domestic resources - land, minerals, energy, water - at the hands of a few thousand people. If everyone in Brazil stopped existing tomorrow, Sam Altman would still be pumping out huge plumes of CO2 and sucking up hectares of water to cool his data centers.
Similarly, the assorted wars in Europe and the Middle East - Russia/Ukraine, Israel’s genocide in Palestine, the US/Afghanistan and US/Iraq missions - have been resource hogs that vastly outstripped anything a comparable number of civilians would have consumed.
Idk what the “correct” number of humans is, but the notion that we can end the ecological degradation if the population gets cut in half really underweight the biggest drivers of the harm.
I have kids, travel, hobby, and have a social life. Introducing kids to new places, ideas, and people has given me a new perspective on them and made these activities more fun.
The biggest waste producers on our planet aren’t the areas with the most people. They’re the areas with the access to the most money and the least political consequence.
The OpenAI project is a great example of this. Phenomenal consumption of domestic resources - land, minerals, energy, water - at the hands of a few thousand people. If everyone in Brazil stopped existing tomorrow, Sam Altman would still be pumping out huge plumes of CO2 and sucking up hectares of water to cool his data centers.
Similarly, the assorted wars in Europe and the Middle East - Russia/Ukraine, Israel’s genocide in Palestine, the US/Afghanistan and US/Iraq missions - have been resource hogs that vastly outstripped anything a comparable number of civilians would have consumed.
Idk what the “correct” number of humans is, but the notion that we can end the ecological degradation if the population gets cut in half really underweight the biggest drivers of the harm.