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.
Tragedy is a part of life
Yes. And tragedy is categorically bad, and tragedies cannot be experienced by that which is not alive (i.e. non-sentient). Thusly, a total absence of (sentient) life would be a total absence of tragedies and vice versa; in other words, sentient life and tragedy are virtually biconditional. The continuation of sentient life and tragedy is wholly avoidable if the relevant capable parties were willing, and it can often be abated on a small scale on an individual basis.
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.
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.
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.
tolerated
I don’t think many women had a choice in the matter.
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).
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
I don’t need to have a child to care about passing down a habitable planet to the next generation.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
It seems like vanishingly few people in the US care about the good of broader humanity anymore. Destroying the environment is fine as long as it creates jobs. Poisoning the water tables forever with fracking is fine as long as it makes cheap gas. Genocide was supported by both parties in the last election. Both parties are waving guns around even as school kids die in ever more frequent mass shootings. Its a race to the bottom and no one cares to change course.
Ironically, if temperature gets to a high degree enough, so much water vapor, methane and carbon dioxide will be on the atmosphere capturing heat (which will eventually escape), but more importantly, reflecting it on the upper atmosphere layers, that we will freeze to death before even feeling the burn LMAO 🤣
I fucking wish
Water vapour is quite good at absorbing heat, and it insulates the atmosphere too(it’s often warmer at night if its cloudy), would it reflect enough heat for that sort of cooling to happen? Sounds like something that would take a lot longer to happen than the time it will take to get too hot for us to survive without living underground or something.
Cringe
2020 called, they want their self-pity memes back
Our parents and grandparents had kids - depending on your age - when there was a world war and tens of thousands of people were dying daily in their country, or in the 50 years where the world was always on the brink of getting destroyed in a nuclear apocalypse if one of the two world powers made the wrong move. Were they dumb?
Not to downplay on the current emergencies which are existential and terrifying, especially seeing how little as a species we are doing to address them - but they are a bit of a silly reason not to have kids.
If you don’t want kids don’t have them, you do you :) far too many people have children out of peer or societal pressure or just carelessness, and we could really use much fewer of those, considering the societal damage of absent or careless parenting. But just be honest with yourself, no need to blame viruses and “no toilet paper”.
How many of those kids were intentional though? Birth control and abortion were restricted or just not available. I’m sure most of the people who had kids in the past did not regret it but I’m not going to pretend they meant to get pregnant.
And the toilet paper thing is obviously a joke. A bit of levity in the horror.
Sure, those were separate arguments. The intentionality part was about contemporary, potential parents.
Lol having a planet that won’t sustain us because we’re actively murdering it is absolutely the silliest reason ever not to have kids. Go on, progeny! Enjoy your water wars and starvation! It would’ve been incredibly silly not to create you just so you could endure it.
Were they dumb?
Yes.
Woah handle all that edge with care!
I hate that it’s apparently the edgelord opinion to think bringing a child into a world where they will suffer is a bad thing. Anyone having a child is either a victim, an idiot, or a sociopath.
Being self centered and tribal is more the norm than ever before in my lifetime. Its going to be a very bumpy next 50 years for people who come into the world now.
It might’ve been more clear if you just said “I don’t think they were dumb. Therefore…”
A shitty life situation has never stopped anybody from having kids. Quite the opposite, the less educated a society and the lower the prospect of comfort, the more kids people have. Poor and miserable people fuck for fun and don’t care about proper contraceptives, resulting in more kids. Further more, people believe that the more kids you’ll have, the more likely it is that one of them is going to end up rich and successfull.
Kudos to those not having kids. I’ve had two recently fully knowing it’s going to be tough on them, but I’m going to do the responsible thing and teach them self defense and how to disrespect authority.
Plus as a bonus, I’m going to get those additional family members when we’re protecting the homestead from raiders.
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:
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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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In the past, children were your labor force, health care and pension plan. People had many children so at least some survived into adulthood. There wasn’t much alternative back in the day.
Now children are a net cost. They can’t even take care of you in old age if government pensions or retirement plans don’t pan out because many can barely feed themselves.
So, the best time to have children was roughly before 1900. That’s when things started to change.
Always whatever year you never lived
Ten years BEFORE you lived. Being a white male adult through the 80s must be peak?
Everyone was a little white in the '80s, if you smell what I mean.
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.
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
So…have kids in a dying world so you have mating success? That’s an asinine reason to procreate.
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.
It wouldn’t be intelligence pruned. Plenty of smart people are committed to fighting for humanity, are prospering, and won’t succumb to doomer echo chambers.
Big time Homer energy in this thread.
I wish their children and grandchildren etc the best of luck in finding comfort in the hellscape we’re building for them. I have a feeling they won’t find it in the knowledge that their grandpappy owned a boat or some shit, but I’m sure they’ll be able to science-miracle their way out of all the problems the generations before them allowed to bottle up to a breaking point.
My own children will be happily non-existing, cuz I love them far too much to cast them into this dumpsterfire, especially as pawns against a horde of morons doing their damnedest to strip everyone’s rights.
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
It’s a fuckin doomer tumor.
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 trouble with this graphic is that millennials are part of the problem now. The oldest are over forty. We’ve all seen the footage of Jan 6th. There were very few boomers in their 60 and 70s.
And we just saw the first corrupt Millennials enter office this election.
It will be 20 more years before the Millennials are the geritocracy and hold any real power
By then our country will be over
Matt Gaetz is an elder millennial like me, and he is a fucking dipshit… and he’s going to be attorney general of the United States despite being a proven pedophile and having committed statutory rape AND has mininal legal experience.
There’s a whole fucking generation between Boomers and Millennials. Yes, Gen X does get overlooked often, that’s the running joke. But they’re far more likely to have soaked up Boomerisms and benefited from better economic ROI than Millennials who hit college just at the cusp of the 2000s, and for whom everything thereafter has been a shit toboggan.
Dr. Toboggan! Dr. Shit Toboggan!
Don’t forget the Millennials who graduated high school/college during the 08 housing crisis.
Imagine that one guy shoveling fuel on the fire “IF IT GETS A LITTLE BIT WORSE THEN WE CAN RISE UP!”
Sammy Hager? Sheesh.
garbage health care
mass shootings
violent racism
Look at this guy who thinks the USA invented racism and holds a monopoly on it.
I was going to say… I don’t see the UK anywhere on this map
Not the same level of problems with mass shootings in the UK. And whilst I take the point about healthcare it’s a very different kind of issue, and if you get triaged conveniently it can work out for you… Really just depends what you need and how old you are, but at least having a baby and keeping it alive is fairly well covered
In Europe it’s just sparkling “let them down in the Mediterranean and/or make sure they stay in their own neighborhoods.”
I bet they would hold a monopoly on it if they could. Damn I wish they did
The comic is very America-centric if you look at the problems mentioned in totality.
When we go down we are taking all of you with us.
Don’t worry we know
I mean, the UK has 2 out of 3 of those. And most countries have the violent racism.
Most countries have racism, some have violent racism… and there are some in which terrorist organizations like KKK are freely roaming the streets and are ok for some reason.
Anyway, it feels wierd to speak shit of the USA when there currently are countries actively working on ethnic cleansing.
Yep. You dumbfucks want to talk about “muh racism”? Be Uyghur or Palestinian or STFU. That’s REAL shit.
the UK has 2 out of 3 of those
Change “shooting” to “knifing” and its 3 for 3. The UK has a huge hooliganism problem. The country is rife with domestic violence. But no (non-police) guns!
Most countries have less violent racism now than at any other point in history.
That bar you’re bragging about stepping over is subterranean.
r/iam14andthisisdeep
RIP Alaska, Hawaii, and Michigan’s Upper Peninsula
The US is far from the only country with violent racism. In terms of healthcare, the privatization. The Canadian healthcare system is being increasingly enshittified by conservatives up here, too.
The Canadian healthcare system is being increasingly enshittified
by conservativesup here, tooFTFY
lol, yes Millennials and Gen Z are trying so much harder to fix the situation by voting for change… ohhh wait
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/yes-trump-improved-young-men-drew-young-women-rcna179019
Yeah I’m afraid that the lesson is that Gen Z is not actually the future, they are going to repeat the past. What makes me sad is that they should have been the future but social media made sure that didn’t happen.
Did social media make sure that didn’t happen, or did the fact that virtually every generation ultimately repeats the mistakes of the one before it ensure that didn’t happen?
That they could have been so much better without Zuckerberg, Savage, Peterson, etc.
but the system is rigged or my vote doesn’t count or genocide joe or some stupid shit
Look at this guy thinking that we can vote our way out of this when we only have two, corporate sponsored, candidates.
