We didn’t start the fire. It was always burning since the world’s been turning.
garbage health care
mass shootings
violent racism
Look at this guy who thinks the USA invented racism and holds a monopoly on it.
I mean, the UK has 2 out of 3 of those. And most countries have the violent racism.
RIP Alaska, Hawaii, and Michigan’s Upper Peninsula
When we go down we are taking all of you with us.
Don’t worry we know
DO NOT HAVE CHILDREN REPEAT DO NOT HAVE CHILDREN
THIS MESSAGE IS FOR ALL RESIDENTS OF PLANET EARTH
NO ONE NEEDS YOU TO BIRTH THEM
ABORT. ABORT. ABORT.
WE HAVE ENOUGH PEOPLE, THE PLANET IS BURNING, THEY WILL NOT LEAD GOOD LIVES. IT’S NOT WORTH IT. PULL OUT BEFORE YOU NUT HOLY CHRIST PLEASE DO NOT HAVE KIDS
This is mostly copied over from my recent comments elsewhere, but it is very relevant here too.
By 2030 we are going to be 40% over capacity on fresh water resources globally. and 40% of arable land has already been depleted, and 95% will be by 2050.
And that’s just water and food.
Once arctic ice sheet coverage gets below 1,000,000 square kilometres, the planet will be absorbing more heat than it reflects and this is called a Blue Ocean Event.
The BOE will trigger the Clathrate Gun which will cause seabeds to rapidly realease fuck tons of methane, cooking the earth in it’s own atmosphere.
2024 Arctic sea ice likely reached its annual minimum extent of 4.28 million square kilometers.
Greenhouse gas emissions are still increasing and fuelled by climate change, the world’s oceans have broken temperature records every single day over the past year.
So it’s basically a race between whether the drought and famine kill us all first, or the BOE setting off the Clathrate Gun will.
Either way, it is unlikely the human race survives the century. Creating more people to suffer in this dying world, is stupid and cruel and is only going to speed up our demise.
Well. Fuck.
Just get a vasectomy honestly. You can keep nutting inside afterwards. Deal?
Vasectomies are not 100%. Abstinence or anal.
Please consider adoption as an alternative if you are in a stable situation and want children.
My SO and I have both decided that we definitely don’t want kids but would discuss the subject if any one of us seriously considered it for one reason or another. What we agreed on, though, is to look for adoption rather than biological children. We both have stuff we’d rather not pass along, firstly, and secondly, there’s so many children that don’t have any family. It’s sorta like “adopt don’t shop”, if you will.
Thats one of the reasons i’m not having kids. I have a decent life by any metric but I had to work my ass off and face a tonne of resistance in my career. It always feels like I’m playing catch up with the cost of everything going up and up to the point where I’m just exhausted and depressed. Like, what is the point of living?! it honestly feels like theres just nothing left to enjoy anymore, everything has been monetized to hell and back. They told us as kids that you can be anything you want when you grow up, the future is bright and if you work hard you will be rewarded and its just not true. I can’t do that to another person, these problems are only getting worse with no end in sight.
That’s the point? The left get demoralized and the right can’t be because they have no morals. Its part of the reason right wingers tend to have a dozen children, it’s quite literally biblical drown them in numbers bullshit.
Idiocracy is a documentary
It absolutely isnt
President Comacho has a problem, finds the most qualified person to fix it, does so (reluctantly) and then dosen’t take credit. This so divorced from reality that it should be concidred high fantasy.
That’s the only thing preventing it from being categorized as a documentary.
I’m Gen X, but cusp with Millennial. I said at 15 or 16 I’d never have kids & stuck with it. I’m more resolute than ever & feel like I would have massive guilt if I had caved. I felt the world was too fucked up back in the 90s. I wonder how my younger self would deal with the world today.
I’m on the other side of the generational gap (nearly gen x, but millennial), and I was terrified during my late teens/early 20s of becoming a parent. I could not imagine raising a child the way I was living paycheque to paycheque, if I had a paycheque at all…
That feeling never went away, and I still wouldn’t know how I could possibly afford that. I decided in my mid 20s that children would be a decision I would leave up to my wife (wherever I had a wife to make the decision). I was/am instinctually driven to want them (a feeling I mostly disregard), but given the state of the world and my own financial situation, I can’t say that I want to force any intelligent being, especially one that is my offspring, to suffer through a lifetime of this shit like I have been forced to so far.
I didn’t ask to be here. If someone had given me a choice, I would have probably opted out of gestures all of this.
I’m currently in a long term relationship, and we’re planning on signing the papers next year, so soon I’ll have someone I can legitimately call my wife. She is very much on the side of “never have kids”. So that’s my decision as well.
Instinctual drive isn’t enough to cause me to overlook how things are going. I love my (non-existent) children too much, than to force them into living a life in these circumstances. Fuck no.
What is the acceptable level of tragedy to impart upon a non-consenting progeny? I vote for zero
You’d have to be immortal, first. Most kids are gonna live to see their own parents pass.
Tragedy is a part of life.
It’s easily avoidable tragedy, unaddressed by those who could do something about it, that’s the problem.
Even worse, there’s potentially extinction level tragedy happening right now, going unaddressed by those who can do something about it.
Most kids though? I’m not going to go looking for stats but let’s just say 95% of children are outliving their parents right now. Awkward sentence there. I mean parents who are dying today, 95% of them didn’t outlive their children. I hope that makes sense. Yes that’s not how statistics work, I’m trying to make a point.
What’s an acceptable level to drop to before we say fuck this we’re done having kids? I knew I didn’t want kids when I was a kid, but I’m an outlier.
Let’s say 85% is the number for kids born today. I believe that’s already unacceptable. It’s so unnatural.
I think the number is worse than that. The mass climate migration/water wars are going to really get moving in the 2040s if not earlier. I don’t want to live through that. I definitely don’t want a child to live through that.
Historically we’ve tolerated MUCH higher rates of infant and child mortality than we do today. People will keep having kids even if most of them will die.
People will keep having kids even if most of them will die
“even if”? Biologically, knowing that most of your offspring are going to die is a reason to have as many kids as possible.
Agreed. It’s just now we have more options. At least we did before the Christian Nationalist Supreme Court made abortion illegal in half of the US. Even with this there are still more options and more education than in the distant past.
When in human history was ever a good time to have children?
Is there an objective “this was the best year/decade/century”?
That’s the neat part, there isn’t!
But being more serious: I think I can express the feeling of things being particularly worse now in a way that isn’t just recency bias.
Sure, over time technology has improved and that’s generally speaking allowed for better standards of living, at least for the people at the right end of that technology. (Not so great if you’re being conquered because someone shows up with guns for example.) So you could look at the past and say it was worse because materially things like food availability and medicine have become better over time.
But key to this was that all of this was a struggle of humans over nature. To the extent things were bad, there were tangible things we could do to improve.
These days, so many of our problems are self-inflicted and technology and economic development mostly makes them worse. Climate change is the obvious big one, but then there’s stuff like:
-
Weapons have become increasingly destructive and centrally usable. A small number of people can cause a lot more damage than they ever could in the past.
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Surveillance technology invades our privacy in a way that’s unprecedented in human history.
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Automation, communications, and transportation technology have made workers less and less powerful and therefore more subject to abuse and artificial poverty. This is one of the more messed up things about capitalism. Technology gets better and rather than getting the benefits of that progress, it actually hurts a lot of people.
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Advances in science and technology, particularly data science, allow the powerful to hyper-optimize the bad things they were always doing or enables them to do things they’ve wanted to do.
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A financialized economy creates economic catastrophes where people go homeless or starve without any actual changes to material conditions. The numbers got screwed up or the investors panicked and now everything sucks for no reason?
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More generally, we can produce enough of the necessities of life for everyone, but capitalism ensures that those necessities won’t make it to people. Capitalism depends on scarcity. If you had a house you wouldn’t need to pay a landlord. If you had food you wouldn’t need to pay food companies. If you had both you wouldn’t need to go work and put up with awful conditions. We’ve solved our most fundamental problems and yet because of the interests of the system and those in power, that progress gets held back.
In the past, even if things were rough now, you could maybe look forward to them improving. Now it feels like the walls are closing in. Unless we actively do something about it, things are going to get worse for most people as more and more wealth accumulates in private hands, as we become subject to increasingly powerful forms of control, and as the powerful destroy the environment we need to live.
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Always whatever year you never lived
Ten years BEFORE you lived. Being a white male adult through the 80s must be peak?
Yeah that’s how I feel. People still had kids during wars, famines, imprisonment, potential nuclear war. Every problem humans have ever faced really. This is the best time to be alive ever. There are tonne of problems we are going to face in the near future but that has always been the case.
The biggest reasons people are having kids is we’re all overweight and feel bad about ourselves and are constantly comparing to people/couples online. We have phone/shopping/gaming addictions to deal with all this mental stress. Online dating is shit. 3rd places don’t exist anymore. We are all lonely and meeting someone and figuring everything out to the point where children are an viable option seems impossible. Easier to just say fuck it and just post memes and complain about the world is bad now so I’m not having kids. And to be fair all of that has a lot of truth in it.
Incorrect. The biggest reason people aren’t having kids is that the planet is dying and no one can afford them anyway. Life is nothing to do to a person at this point.
Why do you think the politicians that are accelerating inequality are the same politicians that are trying to outlaw abortion?
They want babies because they need more workers to distribute inequality and produce more wealth for the shareholders. Foster kids are less likely to go to college, so they’re perfect fuel for the machine.
Don’t forget soldiers. As George Carlin said, “Live babies make dead soldiers.”
The catch-22 is that if the people with environmental values don’t have kids, those values aren’t passed on to the next generation (unless they become teachers or media personalities).
You don’t need to have kids to pass on values. The basic premise of your statement doesn’t hold up.
Well, like I mentioned you still need some sort of interaction with kids. Or maybe influence their parents enough to have them indirectly pass on those values you imparted on them. But I still think that if the smartest, kindest, most compassionate people among us stop having kids… well then that’s not great for that next generation. I’ve just always felt that giving up one of the primary factors of life, reproduction, seems very defeatist. But on the other hand, if someone genuinely doesn’t want children then by all means don’t.
I know at least one friend that wants to adopt/foster once they’re ready, instead of having biological children.
The justification was similar to what you said, where they want to pass on their values / legacy, but don’t care about the genetic side
This is the answer. The problem is the huge expense to adopt at least in the US. Money that could make a better life for the child being adopted is taken by the state.
We need to streamline adoption while still vetting the potential parents as unlikely to be abusive.
Yeah this has always pissed me off with my non-parent friends. You really think you have that much influence on random kids you have fleeting interactions with? Unless you’re a teacher or in some other position where it’s your job to interact with kids, your opinions aren’t getting passed down to anyone.
They could always get more involved with their community. They don’t have to be a parent or have some specialized education to be a coach or volunteer at a youth center.
My scoutmaster did more to instill honesty, leadership ability, and respect for community in me than my mom or absent father ever did.
Now in my career I take mentoring new hires more seriously than anything other than general safety. My company hires a lot of young men with no direction and shitty childhoods. It’s not as good as getting to them when they’re young, but when I’m their only friend 200 or 800 miles from home I get the privilege to impart some important ideas and philosophies.
Scoutmaster is a job that works with kids, so I agree with you there. And mentoring is important too. But these things are less important than the impact you make as a parent. For most people the family is the anchor.
lol fucking obliterated
Any society that doesn’t impart those values across the board to its citizens will devolve into shit regardless.
It’s basically just math.
People with zero values are going to fuck like rabbits and people with values aren’t.
If trash family has 5 kids they can’t take care of and a dad that leaves, that’s at least 4 really mad poor kids that are going to blame a lot on somesuch minority for their problems in 18 years.
For all those values, even in yourself. There’s no better motivator to make an effort for the future, than having a kid you want the best for. If you don’t have a kid, you’re not passing your environmental values, or you educational values, or all the other values you may have for what makes a better society. Nor do you have any reason to hold to them yourself.
I don’t mean to try to push anyone toward having kids, but if you do want to have kids but give up thinking the world is getting worse, that decision is part of the world getting worse. If you do want kids, there’s all sorts of opportunity to make this a better world for both yourself and them, and longer, and plenty of opportunity to make an actual difference
Just passing along the value of the bidet may be worth it, according to the comic
By that rote though everyone that has had children in the past has cared for their future and the future of the social and actual environment they will inherit. We wouldn’t be having this discussion if any semblance of that was true.
There are plenty of reasons to think this true, and plenty of reasons the world is getting better over time. Maybe not the next four years, and maybe not for everyone, but there are so many stays at global and national levels that have trended up for decades and continue to do so.
And before someone single-minded chimes in about Gaza. War and atrocity has always been an ugly part of our history and also has trended downward over the last several decades. Just the fact that we can get so worked up about ending atrocities somewhere else in the world that doesn’t affect us, is a great sign for the future
If you don’t have a kid, you’re not passing your environmental values, or you educational values, or all the other values you may have for what makes a better society. Nor do you have any reason to hold to them yourself.
…
Why does it have to be my kid for me to care?
Like actually. Are you seriously saying being a parent somehow intrinsically makes someone a better, more caring, and impactful, person? Or that parenthood is the only way to achieve true conviction? That’s literally not how any of this works.
Not bringing children into the world in no way prevents you from caring about making the world a better place, and acting to make it so. And doing the things that make the world better doesn’t functionally require having a kid. All it takes is some basic fucking decency.
Which is something people already have, but get taken away by the grind of survival or material success. That is maybe why you have this fucked up idea that people get it by having a kid, but in reality that’s just a huge life event that wakes some people up enough to take a look around and start caring again.
And passing good things on doesn’t require having descendants. If you’ve ever changed someones mind on something for the better, you’ve successfully passed on “values you may have for what makes a better society”. The person whose mind you changed doesn’t even need to be younger than you, thought doesn’t procreate through fucking genetics.
Plenty of parents are made no more profound than they were before by the act of procreating, and will conently continue to do nothing to improve the world. There are parents who will protect their own to the detriment of everyone else.
Kids though, if raised by caring parents, care from the start, but then have that heart crushed by society until they too have a kid of their own.
But in there is way for everyone to care, all the time.
The whole idea that it’s ok not to care about and deal with bad stuff unless you personally are somehow impacted is the whole reason we’re in this mess, and it’s perpetuated by people being forced to live in a constant scramble of stress and consumerism.
Not by people not having children.
I would add that the sentiment is also wrong in the other direction. I’ve personally encountered multiple parents and grandparents who hit me with the “well it won’t affect me, I’ll be long gone” reasoning regarding climate change.
So yeah. What a stupid and offensively self centered thing to say. If you personally didn’t give a shit about other people before, that’s actually a character flaw, not a rite of passage you complete by roping children into this mess
I don’t need to have a child to care about passing down a habitable planet to the next generation.
No, noone is under any obligation to do so.
Remember what they say on airplanes. Secure your own mask before helping others.
Give me a break. How about the people having kids in:
- -900,000: Whatever happened to kill off almost all humans
- -1177: Bronze Age collapse
- 535: Volcanic winter of 536
- 1347-1351: Black Death
- 1914-1918: WWI and Spanish Flu
- 1929-1939: Great Depression and Dust Bowl
- 1962: Great Leap Forward
- 1943-1945: Worst killings and bombings of WWII
- 2020: For our lifetimes. COVID and 100 other disasters. So bad most have forgotten it started with Australia burning to the ground, 1 billion animals killed.
As to racism, we watched Mississippi Burning last night. My wife isn’t from America and was horrified. “Honey, that was happening when our parents were kids.”
You’re right we should have stopped having children millennia ago. I wish my parents never met.
2024+: Climate change, water wars, resultant mass migration, worldwide rise of fascism.
This entire thread sums up the utter misery of Lemmy.
Exactly. I love it. These people are basically self pruning their evolutionary branches all by themselves!
There should be a Darwin awards category for this
Intelligence pruning itself out of a malicious environment isn’t really a great showcase of evolution.
It’s not technically incorrect - we are changing, but a species actively taking steps backwards by inflating itself with idiots doesn’t quite hit that stronger/faster/smarter progression that the concept of evolution implies.
These are darwinism’s death throes.
So…have kids in a dying world so you have mating success? That’s an asinine reason to procreate.
Evolution determined by mating is basically over for humans. In the time it takes a species to meaningfully change, humans will be genetically engineered.
I’m all up for that
Im amazed at how much X has had kids. Seems nuts. Then I realize I might have done it if I had went 4 years to college and started working right after and if within a few years made a family raising type of wage. That double major and one year in a PhD may have saved me.
I’m not.
Well you can have them, then just say “screw them” cause you got your own problems to deal with as western society would prefer you act.
Their only purpose is to support you when you get old anyways. Everyone knows that.
Honestly if I have a kid it would only to raise them to be a post apocalyptic war lord and hopefully give them a tragic enough backstory to survive the wasteland on.
hopefully give them a tragic enough backstory
What the fuck? Like abuse the shit out of them to toughen them up?
I know you’re not being serious but damn what do you mean by this?
Maybe I will hold back a wave of marauders and while they see the door buckling I tell them I love them and they need to fix the world to be a better place where kids don’t have to lose their parents then throw them down the escape slide as I turn around to start going with a chainsaw through the enemies.
Maybe I will just name them Chadderick…
I dunno, guess will see what works best in the moment.
"and the winner, by a landslide vote, for Warmaster of the Golden Fleet, is Chadderick the LargeHuge.
Sorry, Leslie."
"and the winner, by a landslide vote, for Warmaster of the Golden Fleet, is Chadderick the LargeHuge.
Sorry, Leslie."
