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.
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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.
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
…
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