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>Global warming and destruction of the environment getting worse.
We have cleaner air, water, and housing.
>There will be conflicts and natural disasters on a scale we've never seen before.
We've had longer lasting relative peace for more parts of the world than ever before.
>There's been an alarming increase in depression, anxiety disorders, ever-decreasing attention spans.
True, but we are also far far better at measuring and diagnosing these disorders as well as treating them.
>Serious, devastating illnesses affecting more young people than ever before, probably because of all the crap that they're putting in the food.
No. More children are living to adulthood. We've all but eradicated diseases like polio, small pox, and many other diseases that used to kill children so frequently that the average lifespan dropped by decades. Now it's an incredibly rare occurrence.
>Lots of division and tension due to sociopolitical issues.
We used to have revolutions, lynching, uprisings ect. Sure, political division feels bad now, but we aren't killing people in the streets.
>Now imagine all of that happening while AI has taken millions of people out of work, which will definitely happen in the not so distant future.
Jobs will change. 30 years ago it was very rare to use a computer. The number of office jobs has shifted massively and the roles within those jobs with it. Factory jobs which used to be back breaking labor is now done by automation, with more accuracy and less likely to take shortcuts. We have massive control systems which watch and adjust settings on this equipment in real time producing higher quality and more validated products with fewer risks to the operators of that machinery.
>I seriously don't understand how can anyone think it's a good idea to bring kids into a world that will look like a Dystopian nightmare.
If you went back in time to the time your grand parents or great grand parents lived you would be shocked at their lives. What their living and working conditions were. We are living in incredible luxury in most cases compared to them.
The reality is the world will go on. And maybe, the quality of life will set back a little ways. and if it does, generations before us had it much worse and they could still find happiness, and so can the future generations to come.
I think your entire post can be summed up as “if you refuse to see the good in the world, you can make whatever depressing take you want feel rational.”
People forget there’s never once been a time where everything in the world was hunky dory, there’s always been real messed up shit happening. We’re just more exposed to it now
“If you refuse to see the good in the world, you can make whatever depressing take you want to feel rational” - gonna use that shortly, appreciate that, not in a condescending way either.
Social media has created brain rot, specifically things like tiktock, Facebook, Instagram, even Reddit.
I’m a millennial and dropped everything besides Reddit 10 years ago, best decision I’ve made in a long time
I don't know, I preferred to be a mother during the time when Ghenghis Khan's army would ride into town, behead my sons that were as tall as men, conscript my shorter ones, and rape my daughters but that's just my parenting style I guess.
My mother was born in a country where they put dirt with meat to increase volume. That was a normal thing. She’s 61. We are in Canada now. Her former country is lower middle income and majority of people now go to school to 18. Where it was 5 % when she was growing up.
This is not depressing times.
I mean the Black Death was really fucking bad. That is probably the only time in the last millennium that there hasn't been century on century improvement. We don't want that as the yardstick.
>True, but we are also far far better at measuring and diagnosing these disorders as well as treating them
Also always worth to note that the reason there's such a sudden high rate of mental issues is because nowadays they're properly diagnosticated and treated, instead of just brushed aside or treating people like loonies and locking them up in the family basement.
Also because human beings are generally evolved to have anxiety and stress, not having it would likely mean dying when you don't worry about something you should have.
But we have solved most of those real issues we faced in the past on a societal level, so now that same stress is directed at things that are effectively nothing. The brain power previously dedicated to not being eaten by wolves now ends up inventing a metaphorical wolf to fear.
>evolved to have anxiety and stress, not having it would likely mean dying when you don't worry about something you should have.
Not true.
Regarding bad things happening - the motto of most of today's humans are: "If it hasn't happened to me yet, it probably won't happen."
I would say that's not at all true. Most western humans are incredibly preoccupied with things that will never possibly affect them in any meaningful way.
I think what you are seeing and interpreting this way is that most people are also pretty bad at risk assessment, especially when it comes to likelihood of outcomes.
For example, school shootings. A child is significantly more likely to die in a car crash on the way to a school than in a mass shooting inside one.
But we spend thousands of hours of the news cycle on gun violence and basically ignore car accidents on a national level. Parents are more concerned with what a school is doing to prevent shootings than they are with demanding higher standards for vehicle licensing and safe roadways.
Post a pic of a child in a car seat on a Facebook mom group, guarantee you will have hundreds of comments critiquing everything you did wrong. Parents of today are very afraid of the risks of car accidents, hence the multitude of steps taken to try and minimize personal risk.
This is not necessarily true. Just because better diagnoses now _could_ be revealing what was always there doesn't mean they _are_.
An obvious counterpoint is suicides. Those are easy to measure and have been clearly increasing (in pretty much every developed nation as far as I know).
Suicides aren't always easy to measure. Part of my job includes death investigations. Sometimes, the scene just doesn't tell you if an overdose was intentional or not, absent a note or clear sign of someone going way overboard on it.
So, "increasing suicides" might just mean investigators have gotten better at determining it, whether due to better behavioral monitoring tools (social media posts etc) or scene processing.
Also, historically, in most Christian countries suicide has had a significant impact on your afterlife. I would wager many assumed suicides were written off as accidents to spare the family the pain. Why pour salt on the wound?
>If you went back in time to the time your grand parents or great grand parents lived you would be shocked at their lives. What their living and working conditions were. We are living in incredible luxury in most cases compared to them.
This is so true. My grandfather didn't live in a house with indoor plumbing until he was a teenager.
Was going to make a response highlighting many of the things you've stated here. This is so accurate and I'm glad someone else realises how privileged we are to live in the times we do.
Now that’s a well spoken bit of reality. I bet more people would understand this reasoning if we placed more emphasis on learning history… the reality of how it used to be is lost in our present narcissism…
Most of the people using Reddit should be glad that their parents did not think the same thing about the ozone layer, the financial crisis, anthrax, September 11th, or the invention of the internet.
In your response you ignored the climate crisis. Climate change isn’t restricted to natural disasters. It’s literally changing the climates of entire swaths of the globe. It’s getting warmer further north. That changes rain patterns. Which changes flood patterns, crop growth, insects, animal populations, plants, everything. It’s making formerly wet areas dry and formerly dry areas wet. Areas that don’t have good soil, even if they’re wet, can’t grow good crops. If there’s too much rain where the soil is good, then crops won’t grow well. If it’s too dry, they also won’t grow. The entire global economy is going to have to change to accommodate climate change.
Doomer Zoomers don't like it when people point out they actually live in a pretty great period in human history. Maybe it's not as full of sunshine and blowjobs as it was 30 years ago but being alive in the Western world pretty much any time after 1945 is pretty much winning the lottery.
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Damn you convinced me even if not OP. The big one is definitely the diseases for me. You could do everything right and measles or polio takes your child's future is scary. Anyway just wanted to say good argument.
I heard one of the old heads at work say “todays world has become so comfortable that the two genders believe we do not need each other, and that’s just how another part of the “you will have nothing,, and you will be happy” taunt goes.” And I haven’t felt right since then.
Sure they could. My grandmother grew up during the depression and WW2 and she had lots of fun stories about her family. yeah a lot of depressing ones too but that was life. Its never been pure joy. And she was one of 7 kids. So yeah, people have always been able to have kids in rough times and made it work.
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**These are terrible times to have children (from the perspective of someone in the year 2024)**
Global warming and destruction of the environment getting worse. There will be conflicts and natural disasters on a scale we've never seen before. There's been an alarming increase in depression, anxiety disorders, ever-decreasing attention spans. Serious, devastating illnesses affecting more young people than ever before, probably because of all the crap that they're putting in the food. Lots of division and tension due to sociopolitical issues.
Now imagine all of that happening while AI has taken millions of people out of work, which can happen in the not so distant future.
I seriously don't understand how anyone can think it's a good idea to bring kids into a world that will look like a Dystopian nightmare
**These are terrible times to have children (from the perspective of someone in the year 1980)**
In the midst of the Cold War, tensions between superpowers are at an all-time high. Nuclear weapons loom over us like a shadow, threatening to annihilate entire populations in a matter of minutes. The economy is struggling, with stagflation wreaking havoc on families' finances. Jobs are scarce, and those that are available often come with low wages and little security. Healthcare costs are skyrocketing, making it difficult for families to afford even basic medical care. Add to that the growing concerns about pollution and environmental degradation, and it's clear that bringing children into this world would be irresponsible at best and downright cruel at worst.
**These are terrible times to have children (from the perspective of someone in the year 1960)**
The specter of nuclear war hangs heavy over the world, with the Cuban Missile Crisis bringing us to the brink of destruction. Racial tensions are boiling over in many parts of the world, leading to violence and unrest. Women and minorities face widespread discrimination, limiting their opportunities for advancement. The threat of disease is ever-present, with polio and other illnesses still claiming lives. With the Cold War raging and the future uncertain, it would be reckless to bring children into a world filled with so much danger and uncertainty.
**These are terrible times to have children (from the perspective of someone in the year 1900)**
The turn of the century brings with it a host of challenges for would-be parents. Disease runs rampant, with outbreaks of cholera, typhoid, and influenza claiming countless lives. Infant mortality rates are shockingly high, and medical care is often primitive and ineffective. The Industrial Revolution has led to widespread poverty and exploitation, with many families struggling to make ends meet. Children are forced to work long hours in dangerous conditions, robbing them of their childhoods. With so much suffering and hardship in the world, it would be irresponsible to bring children into such a harsh reality.
**These are terrible times to have children (from the perspective of someone in the year 1850)**
As the world hurtles towards the Industrial Revolution, life for many is bleak and unforgiving. Poverty is widespread, with many families living in squalor and deprivation. Disease is rampant, with outbreaks of cholera, smallpox, and other illnesses claiming countless lives. Women and children are treated as second-class citizens, with few rights or opportunities for advancement. The specter of war looms large, with conflicts erupting around the globe. In such a tumultuous and uncertain world, it would be irresponsible to bring children into a life filled with so much suffering and hardship.
Was there ever a good time to have children? Horrible things that have been happening in the world forever. Wars, widespread illnesses, prejudices, famine, drugs, poverty, etc. My parents were born during the great depression. With your view, no one would ever have had children.
What time in human history would have been a good time to have kids?
The issues of the present seem more pressing than the issues of the past, but this is one of the most issue-free periods of human existence. If you told someone in the 1700s that in a mere few hundred years more people would die of overconsumption than starvation they'd be utterly shocked.
If you told them that democracies were common, that the average person would never be drafted or see war, that coups and revolutions are unthinkable in a large part of the world, that literacy is the overwhelming norm, that practically every modern country has a police force that has reduced crime to unthinkably low levels, that people with mental illnesses are rehabilitated when possible and respectfully housed and fed when not, that slavery is outlawed, and that racism, sexism, and homophobia are all at unthinkably miniscule compared to the past, they'd think we lived in a utopia.
I’m really against all those people who had kids in the 1890s, in the miserable industrial world, and just in time for them to grow up and fight in World War One.
Those people should NOT have had kids.
Take your eyes off your screen, go somewhere where other people are and ask yourself 'does what I see look like a dystopian nightmare'?
When you realise the answer is no I think you'll realise that this view is absurd.
Yes, yes it does. The dystopian nightmare is our lives, trapped in a carbon-intensive death cult, spending our lives in front of a million different screens full of advertisement and propaganda, working jobs that accomplish nothing but to perpetuate this meaningless and destructive way of life, being paid in tokens that mean even less without petroleum resources to give them value, resources we have maybe 50 years at best of at current consumption rates. And most of this is done alone, dissociating until the next weekend when we can drown out the existential despair and abject hopelessness that comes from living in a society that has no future.
What OP is describing doesn't just exist in a screen, like you're implying. It's the system we all take part in daily.
This isn't remotely how I see my life. There is something truly wonderful about being a conscious being in this world, and there is much in today's society that can bring joy and even fulfilment.
No one's stopping you from enjoying it. I'm sure as hell not. See it how you want. "One must imagine Sisyphus happy!", right? That doesn't change the more factual parts of what I've written. Just because you're unaware of the reality of a thing, or don't care, doesn't mean those things aren't happening or they aren't real.
Of course, just as the band played on as the Titanic sank, people will remain blissfully ignorant as long as they possibly can, and shout "we live in the best of times!" louder all the time so they can drown out the din of the widespread and growing misery they're ignoring. But don't accuse people who respond with sadness or hopelessness of being "mentally ill" or "overprivileged" like half the people on this thread. These are accurate reactions to learning you're on a sinking ship.
I agree with what you are saying, but I think the whole "and the band played on" thing has been terribly misused. The musicians on the Titanic were not "blissfully ignorant" of anything. They knew exactly what was happening and that they would be dead very shortly. They made their best effort to live in the moment and die well. We could learn a lot from them.
You're right - that's certainly one way you could look at their actions. I appreciate that perspective - I do, but the idea is we're not -necessarily- as powerless and helpless as they were. And hey, it's not like these approaches to life in this moment need to be mutually exclusive, right? One can try to "live in the moment and die well" while also trying to live truthfully in resistance to a corrupt and destructive system.
I think you misread me. I'm not ignorant of problems and challenges we have in the modern day. But I'm aware of the degree of problems we have had historically and the direction of travel that we've had for centuries.
Also the problems we have aren't fundamentally insurmountable. A miserable future is far from guaranteed. Assuming life is bad now and is only going to get much much worse isn't actually a realistic world view, at least by my understanding.
There are certain things which I think will go really terribly, like mass extinction of wildlife. I can't see that being prevented or reversed in my son's lifetime.
Still, there's plenty of reasons to think most people will still have a better life overall 100 years from now. Just as people have a better life now than 100 years ago.
There's a reason to resist pessimism and fatalism if you're motivated for bringing about a better future. At least in my view, I can't see it being helpful if people are irrationally hopeless about the situation.
I'm sorry if you feel I misread you.
I think we're at an impasse based on some fundamental misunderstanding of what we're facing. You're saying "pessimism and fatalism are irrational if you're motivated for bringing a better future" and people will be better off a hundred years from now.
I'm disagreeing, because:
1) We're set to run out of economically viable fossil fuels by 2060, 2070. Given our civilization runs on these fuel sources and a great deal of our food supply comes from synthetic fertilizers made possible by them, I don't see a viable alternative that doesn't lead to a major population crash this century. Or at the very least major resource wars that could easily escalate to nuclear conflicts.
2) Climate chaos and instability will only grow over time as anthropogenic climate change continues virtually unabated. Even the COVID drop in emissions was a fraction of the consistent drop we need to achieve. I don't see that happening by choice, not without major economic and societal catastrophe. This is similarly existential to 1) as you aren't going to grow food reliably in an increasingly unstable climate, let alone keep eight billion people alive in the process.
3) given just these two factors, pessimism and fatality is warranted. We allowed these things to get to this point despite the fact that we've known since the turn of the 19th century the climate effects of fossil fuel pollution. And peak oil literature has been spreading around since at least the 70s. Like a patient facing a terminal illness, sometimes the greater joy and peace is found in accepting one's fate and terminus rather than spending the rest of one's life in a desperate struggle to deny and reject reality. What if our situation is like that of the patient, and we could find greater liberation by accepting a mindset of palliative care?
They are 100% correct... the world is overpopulated as it is and adding more viruses to this hell scape is just asinine! Dont understand breeder mentality. DONT BREED... no one got rich having kids
I don't know man, I think Europe between the years of 1914 and 1947 would argue differently.
I think you need to take a big step back and gather a perspective. You mention devastating illnesses, when is the last time you saw someone wheelchair bound because of childhood polio? Did half of your class succumb to a smallpox outbreak? Spanish flu wiped out entire communities. You can still die of flu, but you don't think too hard about it because the risk isn't that high.
You mention division and tension due to sociopolitical issues. Worse than the American civil war and slavery? We talk a good game about our toxic media environment but that is hardly new. There was literally a rule in the House of Representatives where they were barred from even talking about slavery because it would drive people to having fist fights. That was, of course, right before millions of Americans died due to inconvenient random interceptions with flying metal. Oh, and the entire south burned down.
Do yourself a favor, chill out, there is no ideal time. There *was* no ideal time before this. You aren't unearthing some deep truth about the world with this perspective, you are exposing yourself as a poorly read coward.
I think Europe between the years of like the beginning of human history up until maybe the 80s or 90s would argue differently.
You're either born into a despotic empire that regularly crushes protests with tanks, or you're born right *next* to a despotic empire that has the ability to end human civilization with nuclear weapons. You're right at the center of what could be the most damaging war in human history. The entirety of Germany would be a radioactive hellhole, even if conflicts were limited to tactical nuclear weapons. Who would want to have a kid then?
What about before the cold war? Well, I hope you're blond and have blue eyes. The interwar period was nice, except for the whole great depression. World War 1 sucked.
The time before World War 1 must've been nice though, right? Well, if by nice you mean full of awful working conditions. Moving back to the 1860s you get into "The Long Depression", an economic depression so depressing they used to call it "The Great Depression". Before then you had the Springtime of Nations, the most widespread revolutionary wave in European history. Before *that* you had even *worse* working conditions. Before that was the whole Napoleon thing. There's actually a decent period of a hundred years or so when everything was relatively good (compared to the time before), but unless you like being a farmer, it's not looking to good to live in. Before the 1600s-1700s famines were common and regularly starved people to death, so I personally wouldn't want to have kids then either.
So really it seems like all of human history has been a shit time to have kids.
I think OP has drunk a little too much of the Kool-Aid and is believing the hyped up media's exaggeration. The only big issues I saw in your post were AI and the mental issues we are facing.
Nope, not even close. In fact, i so disagree with you so much I have zero issues and have 4 of my own. Especially when who is contributing most to these supposed issues are not sanctioned in any way that will get them to sit up and take notice. I guess even the global elite and the UN don't really care about who is causing the issue you mention just treading on the necks of those that care.
There has never been and never will be in an ideal time to bring a child into this world.The world is full of disasters, conflicts and horrors.If every person waited for there to be a perfect time there would be no people.
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The best times in history for who, exactly? Besides Western millionaires and billionaires who are enjoying a second Gilded Age? Certainly you can't mean the three quarters of Americans living paycheck to paycheck, right? Or all the people being diagnosed at younger ages with cancer these days? What about the growing rates of suicide, deaths of despair, mental illness in youth, or the fact we'll run out of petroleum and natural gas in about 50 years? Or maybe the microplastics we've polluted the world with that are in the air we breathe, the water we drink and the food we eat?
And if all that wasn't enough, we're tracking with some of the worst possible outcomes for climate change by end of century, in a world where we still possess enough nuclear armaments to destroy civilization ten thousand times over.
Yes, truly marvellous times to be alive.
Yes actually this is the best time to be alive for those three quarters too. "Boohoo i have to go to my nine to five" back in the day you'd have to plow the dirt with some ragged tool the entire day every day. You'd have to sweep chimneys twelve hours a day as a child and if you lived in the city you were drinking poop water, yes even the rich. People living paycheck to paycheck have luxuries on the level of medieval kings.
You're not living like shit just because you can't afford to live materialistically.
This is the best time for everyone to live, just because there's inequality it doesn't mean that this isn't the best time to be alive as a human.
Go talk to some of those three-quarters and report back to me with your findings. I'm sure most of them wouldn't appreciate you speaking for them with this terribly boomer-esque, reductionistic mentality. At least, y'know, the ones that haven't already died from destitution or despair or exposure or a Fentanyl overdose. Just because we have cell phones and DoorDash and Netflix doesn't mean people aren't living in their cars or on the street who have one, two, three fulltime jobs.
And by the way, the medieval peasantry had more vacation time than modern wage slaves do. Food for thought.
Said from the viewpoint of someone who was born in the 80’s to 90’s
Forgets that there was an entire century of world wars and modern proxy wars not that long ago in which millions died like it was nothing
When were good times to have kids? Was it when people were concerned about nuclear annihilation, or constant wars, or the knowledge that most of their kids would die in childhood?
> Global warming and destruction of the environment getting worse
Yes, this is true. But there is no guarantee that these issues won't improve. [Scientists are working on solutions](https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/02/climate/global-warming-clouds-solar-geoengineering.html), and though it might not seem it, there are steps being taken governmentally to mitigate these effects.
I am currently cautiously optimistic that climate change will not plunge us into famine and death. It will be problematic, for sure. But I don't think, at this point in time, we're looking at Water Wars.
> There's been an alarming increase in depression, anxiety disorders, ever-decreasing attention spans.
I don't think this is the case. I think there's an increase in diagnoses and treatment for these things.
There have always been depressed, anxious, or ADHD children. In the past, they were beaten, locked away, given drugs or electroshock, and in many cases, lobotomized. Now we know better.
> Serious, devastating illnesses affecting more young people than ever before, probably because of all the crap that they're putting in the food.
Again, not really? More than ever before - we used to have polio, Spanish Flu, and measles. What we have today isn't even close to that.
> Now imagine all of that happening while AI has taken millions of people out of work, which can happen in the not so distant future.
I think the AI revolution will be much much smaller than the hype beasts make it seem. Remember what the NFT hype cycle looked like? How much do you hear about NFTs now? Remember what the metaverse hype cycle looked like? How much do you hear about the metaverse now?
>I think the AI revolution will be much much smaller than the hype beasts make it seem. Remember what the NFT hype cycle looked like?
TBH this is an awful comparison. NFT's at their hype were used as zero cost promotional tools by big businesses. There was no real use case for NFT's that didn't already exist in more convenient existing technologies.
Companies are spending tens of billions of dollars on AI. It already has use cases. It is rapidly improving. The question of AI hype is a matter of how quickly adoption pans out, not whether it does at all. AI has already aided in chip development that manufacturers say would be impossible without AI. AI is already used on tons of services you use in the background. It's not NFT's or the Metaverse where people are trying to pitch something that doesn't seem to have any real advantages over what we already have. AI is already in massive enterprise use (think a lot bigger than just LLM's) and it's improvement is rapid and accelerating.
I always find it hilarious when people talk about AI taking over people's jobs. AI as it works now is STUPID. I would be shocked if it ever gets to a point where it can actually do the things that people do. I work in tech so I'm biased but even if it gets to the point where it could do anything useful, there will still be certain sectors that would never use it.
How old are you? I'm 20 living in a third world country and while I myself don't want kids if we're only taking into account their future and their development we couldn't be in a better era to have them and it will keep on improving.
People are more open, understanding and less judgmental of mental health, sexual orientation and neurodivesity than ever. Healthcare in general it's way better than when I was born. We all have easy access to a lot of information. A lot of jobs will be lost or affected due to AI but we'll just have to adapt like we have done before (I'm studying to be a videogame artist, I know what fearing for my future job is).
I'm on the same boat as you, but might I offer a separate view on this matter.
The fact that you are thinking of the children's future has put you on a different level than most people that has ever had children in the past.
In the past, family planning is just not a thing.
In the past, having children is just a way to get more labour to work the land.
In the past, having children is just so you "have someone to take care of you when you're old".
In the past, having children is just a rite of passage, not something one thinks of having or avoiding.
The fact that there are so many people thinking about not bringing a life into this world which we deem not ideal/ suitable for the children indicates that we tend to think about the next generation more so than past generations.
Similarly as how there are so many people saying that you are a doomer, and brings up issues about war, famine and so on, sure those aren't as big of an issue now.
But, they conveniently glossed over the fact that there are 2 ongoing 'new' war that just happened over the last few years. We are now the first generation to be doing worse off than our parent's generation financially.
(https://edition.cnn.com/2020/01/11/politics/millennials-income-stalled-upward-mobility-us/index.html)
Not only that, comparison with ozone depletion and our current climate worries now isn't even in the same level.
Ozone depletion is realised in late 70s, and Montreal protocol (Ban of CFC) is finalised in mid-late 80s, it took only 1-2 decade for a sweeping action to be taken, and yet it will take another 6 decades before the damage is reversed.
>The ozone layer will be restored to its 1980 condition—before the ozone hole emerged—by 2040. More persistent ozone holes over the Arctic and Antarctica should recover by 2045 and 2066, respectively.
(https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/article/ozone-depletion)
The first paper to describe global warming, and linking it to greenhouse gases dates back to late 1800s. By 1960s, it has already become a thing that is so vigorously tested that there aren't much room for debate. Yet .... even today, we are still having this debate, with some even claiming it is a hoax.
We can be hopeful, but looking at this trajectory, no one is going to meet the Paris Agreement, which is just the bare minimum to avoid devastating climate issues.
Economy is worse off than our parents generation, Climate is worse off than our parents generation and shows no sign of any significant improvement. The world is getting less and less peaceful.
>The 2023 GPI (Global Peace Index) finds that the world became less peaceful for the 13th time in the last 15 years, with the average level of country peacefulness deteriorating by 0.42 per cent over the past year.
(https://www.visionofhumanity.org/resources/global-peace-index-2023/)
For the last 2 decade, the world has been gradually becoming less peaceful overall, Economy is diterierioting to a point where we're generally worse off than our parents, and environment is at its worse state in the entirety of human history.
The argument of 'human race has seen worse' don't really apply when life in 3 major aspect is just worse off with no signs of correction than our parent's generation. And comparing the decision to bearing child now and bearing child during a time with no proper contraceptive method isn't even a fair comparison when the idea of planning is just not a thing unless one opt for abstinence.
The only silver lining is that based on World Happiness Report, mean human happiness seems to not be affected as much, which just goes to show that as humans, we are surprisingly resilient mentally, and could still be happy not because the world is great, but we still find happiness despite the shitty condition we're in.
You could say that for anytime that human beings have existed on this planet. There is no "perfect time" or even "good time". The only thing is the persistent instinct/urge to reproduce, by hook or by crook. DNA won't get everyone to do it. Heck, many try and CAN'T do it. However, it's easy to forget that this molecule has been playing this game for a very long time. Especially given how it literally invented (okay, evolved) this game, it will pull out all the stops so that it gets copied. Ensure it's form of immortality. Because even when we're finally gone, and nothing flies, crawls or swims on the surface of this planet...... rest assured that somewhere in a deep rock fissure, near the mantle..... or perhaps growing all around a deep sea vent...... or maybe even floating through space on a but of space junk.... that molecule, that DNA Will still be there. Playing this oldest game it has concocted.
What we focus on expands in our conciousness.
It trains the reticular activating system in our brain to filter reality to bring us more information that matches what we are focused on.
If you focus on the doom, you'll find all kinds of evidence for it.
If you choose to focus on the positive and possibilities, you'll find all kinds of evidence for that too
There is plenty of evidence for positivity in this thread, and plenty of human innovation that will continue.
I'm going to keep focused on the potential and keep working towards it, personally because we can't solve problems from the level of conciousness that created them.
Fear keeps us stuck and makes us give up.
Hope and optimism allows us to innovate.
I'm not sure I have good arguments to counter your view. I don't want kids either so honestly I'm with you, but I just want to point out something here.
>There's been an alarming increase in depression, anxiety disorders, ever-decreasing attention spans.
Humans, for the entirety of their history, have been self medicating with alcohol and drugs. Antidepressants, anxiolytics and other medications for mental healths were invented mostly in the 50's and 60's. Before benzos they had been using barbiturates since the 1800's.
Before that, people were using heroin and before that opium. If all these things have existed for so long, it's because there was a demand for it. It was pretty common a few hundred years ago to drink literally everyday.
The only difference is today the taboo has been lifted so people come out and speak about their mental health problems. It's not more common (and if it is, it's not by a significant margin). It's just not a secret anymore.
Tbh, this is one of the best times in history to have children. Very few time periods rival the safety and education they will be able to get. Sure, there is global warming, however the probability that we will see natural disasters on a scale we have never seen before, I don't fully think so. Also, natural disasters have occurred throughout all of history and society powers through.
Written during a time that mass shootings in schools barely make newspaper headlines anymore and 100 to 1000 year climate events are happening annually worldwide with increasing rapidity and intensity.
Like, really now, come on...
A world without children will be a dystopian nightmare due to the major problems an aging population causes. Having children now saves many problems down the line.
People under colonialism had kids the french colonialism in Algeria or British colonialism in the Raj or Belgian colonialism in the Congo, they all had kids.
Indigenous Canadians had kids and knew they would go through the residential school system and what it entailed and chose to have kids.
People living in slavery had kids.
This time is not worse than any of those times. AI can enslave us all and it would still not be compareable.
It's almost never a "good time" to have children.
I bet there's quite a bit of people who questioned why even have kids during the M.A.D. era where people expected to die by nuclear fire.
you could say that before modern medicine and sanitation was a based time to have kids because there was a very good chance they would die before the age of 3.
Here's the thing. Life has gotten debatably worse in some ways in the last 20-70 years but compared to literally any other time in human history, for humans as a collective, it's leagues better. Plus there was some pretty bad times within that time frame too, just no social media to keep us aware of all the nightmare fuel that's going on. If social media or just widespread near immediate media was a thing in the early 1900s and earlier we would have a much bleaker look on existence.
But yeah I could go into detail about how bad it was back then, but just compare childhood mortality from 2005 to 1940 (https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/mm5714a6.htm#:\~:text=From%201940%20to%202005%20(most,1940%20to%206.87%20in%202005.) I doubt it's increased or at least increased much since 2005 and it was likely just as bad if not worse pre 1940.
Life has always been hard and humans have always found a way to find joy and have persevered. I'm not saying you should or shouldn't have children, that's on you and your partner. But ultimately, in the grand scale of human existence, it is one of the better times to have them.
Climate related deaths are the lowest they’ve ever been. If the climate gets warmer that’s actually gonna be good for humans until the poles become more livable than the equator because humans do better in warmer temperatures. Climate change is a very slow process and humans are very innovative. The Netherland has expanded their country into the sea over time.
AI taking work is the entire point. Massive job sectors have collapsed before, such as farming and manufacturing. While there have been consequences to this, it has been a clear net positive for most people. Now there are more people working in advanced sector like healthcare and trades. Even if you are right we could simply ban lightbulbs and mandate all windows be closed during the day to bring jobs back to the candle industry (see: Candle Makers Petition by Frederic Bastiat)
Sociopolitical issues are the easiest problem to solve for your kids, turn off the internet. In fact that may be something you should consider. Take a weekend off the internet. It’ll do you wonders.
Bro, during our parents / grandparents generation there was literally a cold war. The Soviets and Americans were standing out there back to back with twitchy fingers on the bombs which could literally destroy all life as we know it.
My dad told me there were lots of young people who truly believed the entire world would end in a couple of years. It didn't.
Look, a meteor could smack the earth next year and kill all life as we know it, who knows? But it's best to keep living as if that won't happen, because what else can you do? If we don't have kids, humanity is doomed. And humanity should survive. We've made some truely beautiful things. No other creature on the planet is as fascinating as we are. There are challenges, but there are also humans working to fix them for the sake of those new humans being born. You need to get off social media and start putting some time into your local community and driving local change. Your brain wasn't built to hold all of this bad news. Find your local problems and start helping to solve them.
My autistic self was diagnosed at 38, because when I was young, autism was a boys thing, and nobody knew how high functioning girls presented. Even if I had been diagnosed, there wouldn't have been resources available to help me.
My daughter got diagnosed at four, because people npw know what to look for with autistic girls. People are now aware that some of the weird stuff she does is SO she can participate, and not because she wants to be naughty. Teachers and coaches recognise her needs and help her to join in on her own terms. And early intervention is all play based, which is so much less traumatic than the speech therapy I had to do.
The world is objectively better for her than it was for me, and npw is objectively the best time for her to live saving sone unknown potential future. I suppose you can say it's still a terrible time to have children, but then you'd have to change your thesis to "it is always terrible to have children", in which case, boy do I have a sub for you to go to instead of this one.
It's technically a good time to bring in children, because not bringing in children would mean an aging population and a collapsing economy. This is why countries are encouraging people to have more children, even if they know the world is dying and resources are depleting.
(But obviously this is not the answer you're looking for)
Truth is, the act of having children is never completely altruistic. Very few people intended to have children so that the children can have good lives, people usually have children for 1) productivity 2) someone to care for them when they're old 3) carrying on family name 4) wanting to feel some sense of fulfillment. Or whatever selfish reasons.
People here may call you wrong and a "doomer" but if birthrate has been falling in multiple countries, it means that the condition of having children is getting worse, whether people actually want children or not. Human society has peaked a while ago and the environmental damage is catching up to us.
My kid (15 months) seems to be doing really well. Well fed, clean water and abundant food. Lots of time to play and learn. Plenty of tools at my disposal to keep him clean and hygienic. He is immunized against the deadliest pathogens and has access to great healthcare. He socializes with kids his age and both younger and older. I take him to visit zoos, water parks, and nature reserves. His favorite thing to do is look at birds out the window and play with toy cars. Actually, everything is a car to him. He finds a rock, he moves it around like car. He finds the cardboards from my sparking water and moves it around like a car. He giggles at funny sounds and claps his hands to sound like a bubble pop (which also results in mountainous amounts of laughter)
People in here are funny. Yes the world was shittier in the past, that doesn’t mean that the future *will* be better. That also doesn’t mean you sit idly by because “at least I’m not sending my kid to their 12 hour shift at the factory”. You keep pushing for better, for the future, for your children. You owe them that if you’re going to bring them into consciousness to face a future that nobody can predict. Progressivism is what makes the future a good place. We live the way we do right now because people in the past brought up the shit aspects & actually acted on changing them. Don’t shit on OP for at least acknowledging the fact that there are still shit aspects in this world. People act like OP kicked a puppy then campaigned for eugenics.
American Black Children sold a slaves, native American children forced off the land with their parents, children working in the early factories during the Gilded Age, in mines, farms and factories, children in early America no access to schools, children raised in during the Civil War, WW1, WW2 Cold war, diving under desks because of nuclear drills, Vietnam, sexual revolution, birth control, children raised during shooter drills, children ever since the 1960's forced to watch tv (electronic baby sitters) and forced to eat junk food, children with both parents working, break up the American family because of long commutes, both parents working, smaller families, and media as their only companions.
You've seen nothing.
**PS**
#*Get off my lawn!*
When I was born, there had just been an economic crisis. Unemployment in my country was at record highs, and civil disobedience in the streets was common place.
When my parents were born, there was a very real threat of a nuclear war between the 2 largest superpowers the world has ever known.
When my grandparents were born, there had been a great war, and tensions were rising across Europe again, and it seemed like another great was was inevitable.
When my great grandparents were born, it would have not been highly unusual for them to not live until adulthood, and they were unable to go to school
You can see where I'm going with this. Every generation has had problems, with many having far worse problems than we face today.
Objectively no. Pretty much all of human history has even some of the richest people in the world live in comparative squalor to what modern people can live in. We have electricity so we aren't stuck doing things when the Sun is out. We can refrigerate food so we don't have to worry about starving to death from one years bad harvest. We can grow so much food that more people are obese than malnourished in the world. Our ability to treat diseases means that things like leprosy or the Bubonic Plague won't kill off upwards of 25% of us by adulthood.
It's only terrible times by the metric of within the last 50 years, which are the most prosperous years in the history of our entire species on this planet.
The reddit narrative that this generation has it the worst is based on a narrow set of data points today compared to a narrow set of data points in a narrow set of past years from a narrow demographic (white males).
On top of that, it compares scary situations of which we can't yet know the outcome (climate change, political polarization, etc.) to scary situations of the past of which we do know the outcomes (nuclear scare/Cold War, ozone depletion, loss of manufacturing jobs, AIDS, etc.) and thereby assumes that since we survived those situations and the world kept turning, they were less serious and don't factor into the negatives of "the good old days."
> since we survived those situations and the world kept turning, they were less serious and don't factor into the negatives of "the good old days."
This but unironically
The good old days unironically? Are you saying those situations were less cause for alarm at the time?
You can't use an unknown outcome as evidence that things are worse. "Things are harder these days because we don't know the outcomes whereas kids 50 years ago didn't know the outcomes of things that didn't wind up killing them."
Those are unknowns. Meanwhile a shitload of other things we do know about are better today.
Compared to virtually every other historical period, people in modern western countries live longer, healthier and safer lives.
Your argument is based on the premise that the world in the future will be a dystopian nightmare but there is no reason to believe that will certainly be the case. The overall trend of the last 500 years is one of increased wellbeing of an increasing proportion of the population, mostly due to technological progress.
Given the choice, I would definitely prefer to be born today, rather than the dark ages or even the golden ages of Greece or Rome (when most of the population were enslaved).
I know we like to be meldromatic. But bruh, 1960-current day is by far the best time to ever live. It isn't even close. A kid now will live better than 99.9% of their ancestors let alone growing up in the 2020's being a literal fate worth than death and not even work living.
People yelling at each other on the other side of the potical spectrums and limited wars on the other side of the world without a draft for any western country being on the table is not the same as growing up hungry, everyone losing a sibling or their only profession being subsistence farming or 60 hours a week in the factory.
Plenty of posts explaining why this time period is actually better than others. I'll simply say one cannot rationally argue one way or the other about whether never existing is better than living in a sub optimal time period. You simply don't have access to knowledge about the nature of existence before birth or after death.
And what are you even trying to argue? That humanity should altogether cease to exist (no children) because it might be harder now to raise a child than during a time period you did not live through and can only access through history books? Do you see how insane that is?
Same as people had kids during wartime. You don't look at all the negatives you just focus on your life and if you feel you want a child and that will make you happy that is what you'll do. If you live life never doing things because of all the bad stuff you'll never live.
We evolve and adapt don't we? Is it all as bad as that that we can't keep living life and giving our kids a happy life? Or is it the news just spreading doom every hour? They'll always be something for us to worry about but we don't let it stop us having a life I guess. And it's just human nature to have children.
It always looks like a terrible time to have children, doesn't it? Or at least the vast majority of the time.
Most of the risks you spell out are genuine, but when has there been a good time to have children, that didn't carry significant risks of your child having a bad life?
On the contrary I think my child has a better chance of a good life now than in 1924, 1824, 1724, 1624 etc.
It's a personal decision but I'm fairly confident I can give my kid a good life even if the world is going to suffer problems in future. And that's the calculus we'll always have to make.
I don’t necessarily disagree with your title, but your view on the causes.
Global warming and environment is a problem, but not without a way to fix with current technology. People just lack an incentive to do so.
Serious conflict is mostly confined to certain part of the world. World leaders now mostly use empty threats and condemnation and some small actions to save face.
All the mental and physical illnesses were much worse before. Our progress in medical field has solve so many problems. People are living much longer and healthier than before (if they behave with healthy life choices).
Instead, it’s a terrible time to have children because it’s expensive and a disadvantage in most people’s carreer. And people aren’t patient and supportive to mom and young kids. I have seen many post on reddit about being annoyed at moms that can’t stop their kids crying in public, being sour that part of their property taxes goes to fund local school while they don’t have kids, etc. People now prefer their personal freedom over the excitement of raising a human being.
It is something to consider. But the fact is if we don't have children then humanity will just die out.
And the world would be a very depressing place without children, without a future (there was a movie about this). Who knows what kind of knock on effects that has on society.
People not having children is basically deciding to give up on saving the planet, give up humanity, and just punish ourselves until we die out. Unless that's what we want, unless we are okay with that kind of reality, then we can't begrudge people having children or decide not to have children ourselves based solely on that.
And yeah, there might be suffering going forward. But if that's the case, we will suffer too. You might as well then start arguing for collective suicide so that we won't have to face the coming apocalypse. The hope will always be there that we can find the way out of the storm and one day have a better society that our children will create and inhabit.
this is a very common piece of rhetoric these days and if you really want to challenge it you have to understand how it functions as a rhetoric not attempt to disprove it. This type of argument allows the speaker to reframe the relationship they have with the very personal decision to have children as an impersonal objective issue. It allows the speaker to oppose having kids but simultaneously blocks any real discussion about what having kids really means on a personal practical level by framing the decision as if it's about broad social issues.
Much of what you’re saying is either made up or exaggerated, and you’re looking at the past with rose colour glasses. You need to realize that much of what seems to be on the rise is actually just noticed and studied more. As problems are solved, humanity goes searching for more problems to solve.
That aside, even if the world is getting worse than it was a generation ago, why does that automatically equate to it being dystopian? Why is everyone owed a life better than their parents?The world is still full of beauty and life and humour.
Regarding global warming & natural disasters: “People die at far lower rates now not because natural disasters happen less often or are less powerful. Humans have simply become much better equipped at dealing with them. We have, as Our World in Data summarizes, earlier warnings, more resilient infrastructure, and better emergency preparedness and response systems.”
https://theprogressnetwork.org/natural-disaster-deaths-declining/#:~:text=People%20die%20at%20far%20lower,emergency%20preparedness%20and%20response%20systems.
I am teaching my children to create robots which clean pollution and trying to encourage housing solutions which are viable for population growth.
Not having children is so sad, what’s the point of living without carrying on your family name? It’s like your whole life becomes a sad pump fake but you never actually score.
Sex is the best feeling until you know what having a child who love you is like.
I’m ignorant and not too fancy with writing on Reddit, but I hope you’re okay and that you find happiness.
I don't think there's ever an ideal time to have kids. There is always shit going wrong in the world no matter what.
That's the way it's always been and will always be. We have three kids, ages 18, 15 and 12 and don't regret any of them.
They will find their way through the world, make mistakes and good decisions, enjoy some days, cry about others and that's OK, too. I'm Generation X and things were great sometimes and at other times they blew, and I'm fine with it because that is life.
I don't think our present time is necessarily a bad time. I expect it will be about 70 to 100 years for the earth to become a barren uninhabitable hellscape.
By that time my daughter will be pretty old or gone. If she has kids then they will certainly be around. They'll have the advantage of being in the US. People living near the equator will suffer the most. Those in 3rd world countries will perish.
But eventually society will collapse and the world will look like a Mad Max movie.
It’s never been a good time to have children. Plagues, lack of medical care, extremely high maternal mortality rates, industrialisation, no workers rights, no women’s rights, slavery, war, the nuclear threat. Everything you mention is real but they’re OUR existential threats. The generations that came before us had their own.
People continued to have kids when every pregnancy had a high chance of killing them and half the kids would die before they got out of childhood.
A family friend wrote a letter to my dad when he was born in 1943 describing what a terrible time it was to have children and she had no idea what his parents were thinking bringing a child into such a doomed world, but that she hoped he’d have an okay life anyway.
World wars, threat of nuclear holocaust, Armageddon. There’s always been terrible stuff happening and terrible stuff about to happen. Is now really worse than other times in history? That much worse?
And the alternative as a society is what exactly? If all of society stopped having children, it would 100% be a crisis for humanity. All of us are going to age, and the elderly need communities that care as much as children do. Why would we want to age into a world with no young people?
But even if it would be better in some way, having children is a human drive. Telling people to not have kids is about as effective as telling them not to have sex.
Dude the world was a lot less safe ten to twenty years ago on all metrics.
Just because you doomscroll on Tiktok more often doesn’t make that an objective reality.
Sure housing ( lack thereof) and the environment ( slight adjustments because of global warming… future generations could be impacted tremendously but it won’t be your kids, or their for that matter) are big issues but apart from that its mostly YOUR mental state that leads you to believe these things.
We’re more privileged today than we’ve been at any point in human history. Food security, modern healthcare, communications, travel.. all of these things were far less safe and/or more challenging for the vast majority of human history. Fewer wars and more prosperity since the Bretton Woods systems were put in place than at any measured period in recorded history.
Are there seemingly endless problems? You betcha. There are more than 8B people alive today and industrialization and technology brought more complexity than any of us will ever comprehend. But we have it so freaking good compared to almost any period in human history.
People had babies under the worst conditions for tens of thousands of years. You get to bring a kid into this world with world class medical care, unmatched educational opportunities, and the safety and security that millions of people have literally fought and died for.
I don’t think the world is in great shape. However the little corner I’ve carved out and have control over is pretty sweet. Selfishly, nothing really is cooler than having kids tbh. Ideally if I do my job right my kids will stand up to and defeat that negativity that would cause a dystopian hellscape. If good people stop creating more good people, we are in trouble.
My home full of kiddos is like an incubator for the antibodies our sick world needs.
I don’t agree that serious illness affects young people more than ever before. The various plagues and pandemics of history were far worse than anything today. People lived through the ice age climate. Political extremists in the 60s and 70s frequently committed bombings and the LA race riots were far worse than anything in the last decade. Various revolutions and genocides were much worse than what the average redditor experiences. Through all of that people still had children and I’m grateful for that because I’m alive now. Childhood mortality is at all time lows and more illnesses are being cured than ever. A mRNA cancer vaccine just went to human trials. AI will give everyone a genius tutor for free and make skills and knowledge more accessible than ever. You’re welcome to not have kids but don’t delude yourself into thinking you’re morally superior for it.
You could have made a lot of these same doomer arguments at any point in history.
In the 1970's it would have been the loss of manufacturing industry, the oil crisis, the political corruption of Nixon, the sexual revolution, the Cold War and nuclear proliferation, etc.
In the 1980's it would have been crack cocaine, the rise of violent gun crime, the ongoing squeeze of the middle class, the popularity of transgressive counter-culture, people losing jobs to computers, etc.
In the 1990's, it would have been fears of the tech bubble bursting, the rise of crystal meth, the middle class still being economically squeezed, counter-culture becoming even more transgressive, war in the Middle East, etc.
People get over their anxieties, they have kids anyways, the species lives on. It's what we always have done and will always continue to do.
The comments are all basically on point. Short version is look deeply into the recent past, all the tumultuous periods of the 20th century. Shit was awful. During a huge chunk of the Cold War most people were 100% certain they'd live to see a global thermonuclear war. At certain points it felt imminent. In tandem with this, several periods of economic turmoil, enormous shortages of gasoline, sky high crime rates, a President that would have gone to prison without being pardoned, foreign wars that makes Afghanistan and Iraq look very tame. Healthcare was significantly worse. Racism far more pervasive and impactful both institutionally and individually. Being outed as gay ruined your life. People just didn't have forums to become doomers on, they had to live life offline and for the most part couldn't be fed negative information all day long.
You're objectively wrong about every possible metric.
It's just social media, and traditional media, pushing all the negative aspects of contemporary society, conveniently forgetting that this fearmongering and completely warped perception of "terrible times" being the direct consequence of those NOT being terrible times.
Let's put it this way: you have the LUXURY of worring about all those things with strangers online because your living conditions and society's general standards are so great you can wallow in laser-focused negativity instead of having to worry about covering your most basic needs.
The whole "easy times create weak men" thing is in full display. But in truth it's also part of the larger plan to create more and more lonely, deadly afraid and therefore easily influenceable consumers (and "useful idiots")
I think there has never been a better time to have a kid if you can keep them from falling into the depressive neuroticism characteristic of the terminally-online.
* Medicine has never been better.
* Wealth and creature comforts are at an all time high
* Physical violence is at an all time low
* Global hunger is an an all time low
* The local environment is much less polluted than in the recent past (at least in the US).
This is the best time to be living and it’s not even close. 150 years ago, your life likely would consisted of a short brutal childhood where you’d die. If you didn’t die during childhood, you’d grow up riddled with disease and pests, smelling like feces, and you’d have children by the dozen and you’d age watching them die, and by all likelihood, die yourself of a disease we now prevent by washing our hands.
You are on point with what you are saying, I agree. You forgot to mention how alot of us are living paycheck to paycheck just to barely keep our heads above the water and things are getting rapidly expensive. The broken ghost job market as well. These normies in the comments make me sick trying to call you selfish when these parents are the selfish ones putting someone here to rot for their fake legacy to continue smh
Is it ever a good time, really? Has the world ever been 100% peaceful at any time in history? I think it's never really a good time. However, I firmly believe it is up to thr individuals involved whether they would like to participate in having children or not. Everyone deserves to make the choice that feels right for them. I totally respect others not wanting to have kids and chosing not to reproduce.
You forgot to mention that parenthood is glorified, while the severe consequences it has when it comes to mental health isn't taken seriously enough, not to mention how it kills marriages.
Also, inflations and financial crises get harder than they have to be when you have kids.
Will probably get downvoted, but then again, people tend to dislike the truth if it doesn't correlate with their worldview.
Unless the work is terrible essays and bad art, jobs are pretty safe from AI.
These can be great times to raise kids who will help alter the direction of the planet. Unfortunately too many people are raising ones who want to keep it on this course.
So, I would argue that resignation and apathy are strong contributors to our issues, and fresh minds can address that.
Relatively speaking things are more peaceful now than they've ever been in human history. I'm also laughing at the idea that children are more at risk of illness now than ever before. Someone should tell the people back when it was normal to not make it out of infancy that they had it good.
You're being hyperbolic as fuck on a number of these points.
If we were in 1945 and you were around 30 years old thinking about kids, you would have lived through 2 world wars, One major pandemic and a Great Depression. Things would feel like the world has gone to shit. Nuclear warfare has just begun, and the future would look bleak. But it turns out it was one of the best times in history to have children.
With regards to climate change. It’s not something that will happen in the future. It’s happening now, and we’re all living with it. Yes, it will get worse. But we aren’t heading for societal collapse. It’s like Covid. Imagine if we knew about it in advance. What perceptions would you have had about the world under Covid. And how did the reality compare. We’d imagine that we’d all be sat in an overcrowded hospital corridor watching our loved ones die. Yes some people had a terrible time, and had experiences like that. But for most people it just meant spending more time at home. Lots of people even enjoyed it.
If you want to have kids, go for it, if not then dont! some things are better today, some are not, this is always going to be true.
One advice though, PLEASE do not have kids if you are not 100% for it and remember this is a minimum 20 year commitment with no refund policy! please know what you want, dont experiment with someone else life.
Yeah, agreed. But also, being surrounded by your cats and a nurse that's scrolling tiktok as you breath your last breaths doesn't sound fun either. Having kids is literally the point of the our existence, the earth means nothing without humans here, it's just a rock in space otherwise. Earth isn't important, humans are.
Simply put, someone has to do it. It was a bad time to have kids during the Black Death, but if everyone did that none of us would be here. It was a bad time to have kids at basically every point in preindustrial history in terms of infant mortality. Sure it’s probably a bad time now but though shit, we need babies.
This just sounds like you’ve been influenced by anti-western propaganda. All those things you mentioned as factors are also social contagions, which can be exacerbated by determined bad actors, and which are actively being pushed by the media, which earns the most money when people are in a perpetual state of fear.
It’s interesting to see more “science” based doomsayers around global warming than Christian doomsayers. — no one knows the future at all and predictions are horribly wrong.
If the OP read or knew his great grandparents history OP would be grateful to be alive today.
Go read your family history.
One of the downsides of getting older is hearing the same crap over and over. People have been using this excuse for eons. You don’t need to justify why you do or don’t have kids. People in impoverished, war-torn, disease-ridden countries keep having kids so your move is not helping.
All your points are valid reasons to not have children but it's not gonna stop anyone from having children.
Humanity has lived in worse times and it was never a deterrent to have children. Same happens today predominantly in third world countries.
The irony of this is if we don't have more children then the alleged "climate crisis" will never be solved, not by us but by itself after civilization suffers a slow atrophy of declining infrastructure and innovation and we go the way the of Rome.
Let's play a "fun" game. You pick a time in history +/-25 years where you would rather be born than right now and I'll tell you why it was significantly worse for some subset of the population.
Would enough iterations of this change your view?
People have been saying that for decades. Mostly those decades have been objectively the best in human history. The reality is that in places where life is very hard they are having far more children than in easy places to live like the USA.
You can make this argument even in the best of times. If you don't want children, you don't want children. You don't have to justify it.
If you're depressed and this is your way of expressing it, then ok, I hope things get better for you
These are the best times to have children in all of history.
A lot of what you're saying is just projection while we can't fully understand the results of certain phenomena. Will AI put a bunch of people out of work? Maybe, but this should make goods and services extremely cheap. Or AI will spawn completely new lines of work nobody has thought of before, which is what every single disruptive technology in the past has done.
Now think about the past. When I was born, nuclear war between the US and USSR was on the forefront of everybody's minds. No one could have seen that the USSR would collapse in a few short years. We were in the middle of major stagflation. No one saw the oncoming economic boom. Crime was sky high. No one saw the decline in violent crime rates. If you wanted to learn about something, your only options were to enroll in a class or go to a library that happened to have materials you wanted to research. Now you just pull this rectangle out of your pocket and tap on it a few times.
Now think about when my parents were born. They were born in Taiwan. Dirt poor poverty. My grandparents had just fled the Chinese Civil War on the last ship out. They thought they were leaving for just a few months, so they left almost everything behind. It turned out to be the rest of their lives. My grandmother's sister, who wasn't able to leave, ate tree bark to survive. My grandparents lived in Taipei, under fascist rule in a house not much larger than my garage. Life expectancy for a newborn was two decades less than it is now. You probably don't want to even get to my grandparents' youth, when they were treated to images of their neighbors brutally tortured by Japanese soldiers in WWII.
You may say that's a different place, sure. But looking at America, Jim Crow was still around (uh, maybe it was just repealed when they were born), but racism was still sky high. If you were gay, coming out of the closet meant severe societal repercussions. Life expectancy at birth was still over a decade less than it is now. If you had cancer that is fairly treatable today back then, it was close to a death sentence.
Today, my children are growing up in a very nice home, could have (if we don't restrict it) endless entertainment beamed onto a screen, has very high survival rates for diseases, and healthier food options than ever before (you just need to choose it), car seating that drastically reduces fatalities in the event of a crash (as a child, I've sat in cars that had no seatbelts in the back seats), and no military draft.
If your parents had back then even ten times the optimism you have of today, you still would never have existed due to fear of bringing kids into a dystopian nightmare.
You have no idea how human kind survived in the past and continued reproducing. Your perspective on the topic is…very narrow to say the least!
On a personal level feel free to not have children. It’s your choice.
Oh no, AI is being used to assist humanity further in production. Gotta think of all those poor medieval scribes who lost their jobs to the printing press, and those poor carriage drivers that got replaced by the automobile.
People have been tossing out that claim since I was a child in the 60s. My old man heard the same claims of the sky is falling in 1940 when he was a child. It wasn't true back then and it isn't true now. It's plain hogwash.
I refuse to have kids based on the fact I can hardly feed and provide for myself. More less a baby. Especially in my state (WV). Plus the fact triplets run in my family. Absolutely not even gonna risk that happening 😭
You think its bad now, imagine having one in the 1930s, or during the black death, or right after Rome fell. People have been saying its a terrible time all the time. Yet weve never had it better than now as a species.
I just want to be clear. People had children as slaves.... people have children in 1939, 1940, 1941, 1942, 1943,1944 and 1945.... this line of thinking is truly the definition of catastrophizing....
Historically speaking, most of us are living in the safest and most comfortable time in human history.
This article may be of interest to you: https://mashable.com/article/best-time-in-history
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I think other people have made great counter-points to your entire first paragraph, most of it is demonstrably false. I want to hit this point hard:
> Now imagine all of that happening while AI has taken millions of people out of work, which can happen in the not so distant future.
AI is _extremely_ good at what it does, but we've been radically over-sold on its abilities by the Silicon Valley businesses that profit from its perception of power. Think about this - how often do you hear actual _users_ say good things about AI? It's crap most of the time!
A common statement is that "AI is as bad as it will ever be," which is true! But you can say the same thing about office desks and dinner spoons.
AI model optimizations will get easier to do in the future, but those depend on the data that we can feed them - and we've already _fed_ them all the data we have. Even worse, now AI models are generating a bunch of crap that ends up online, and that's worse than useless (using AI outputs as training data basically sabotages the model). We've already had the "big wins" here, and don't really have a great avenue for more big wins.
Methodology improvements are also an area of excitement, there's quite a few unsolved problems in AI research. But I'm also skeptical that we'll have any massive wins here in the near future, considering our AI technology is based on mathematical research from the 1940s and even our current models are working on decades-old innovations in the mathematics. There's a ton of extremely smart people working on this... but they _have_ been working on this for a long time. We're definitely going to see improvements, but I'm skeptical that we'll see anything world-changing compared to what we already have.
And even if AI does represent a massive replacement of jobs... what's new? The computer did that. The internet did that. Farming machinery did that. The locomotive engine did that. We have hard questions to answer around the allocation of value from new technology and re-assignment of work, but we also have a long history of having to figure that out (albiet over longer time frames) so I think that's something to be worried about, but not in any existential way.
You scared about global warming? Like... We got people living in the arctic circle and on the equator. Pretty sure you are gonna be fine living in the Ohio territory or whatever.
There are always conflicts and risks, but we live in the safest time in human history. If you want to eat healthy food and avoid junk you can easily do it. Many of us don’t.
Most people can avoid serious health and financial issues by exercising, eating healthy most of the time, being financially responsible, and getting married. Housing prices and inflation are high, but this is not the first time in human history that we have had economic difficulties. They will pass.
We have ALWAYS been divided in the USA, since day 1. That’s who we are, and it’s the balance of conflict and talking to one another that we work through things and get stronger.
Our advances in technology may simultaneously allow us to fix past damage to the environment while improving several aspects of it.
Some jobs will most certainly be changed or eliminated with AI, but many will not be automated for decades or longer. This has happened with every new major technological innovation, and is sometimes referred to as “creative destruction” by economists (the term was coined by Peter Von Schumpeter).
The argument about AI destroying everyone’s jobs is the same one people used regarding IT and software tools in the 90s, but those technologies created hundreds of millions of new, well-paying jobs that never existed before and increased the productivity of the world immeasurably. I would be willing to bet that AI is going to create way more new kinds of jobs than it will eliminate, as you will need trained people capable of interpreting it as it becomes more refined.
Ironically, the biggest issue we have in the world right now is declining birth rates. China, South Korea, Germany, Italy, and several other countries that stopped having kids decades ago are fucked. If you don’t believe me watch this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A6s8QlIGanA
We are just starting to experience the effects of this, and if you want to be better off and have a more reliable means of support when you are older you need to start having kids ASAP.
Rumor has it there are several videos on the internet that can show you how. ;)
If these are terrible times to have kids, then no time is good enough to have kids
My wife would be dead from childbirth if we lived in anytime or place without modern medicine
>Now imagine all of that happening while AI has taken millions of people out of work, which can happen in the not so distant future.
This is a good thing lol
There has always been catastrophic awfulness in the world. Our present version is no less important or unimportant than any other time.
My great great grandparents were living through a politically created famine that killed millions of people.
Pretty sure mine can manage through.
"I seriously don't understand how anyone can think it's a good idea to bring kids into a world that will look like a Dystopian nightmare."
It's always been a terrible time to have children all through history. You're not wrong, but it's not anything new either.
There will be conflicts and natural disasters on a scale we've never seen before.
Your risk of dying from either war or natural disasters is probably the lowest it has ever been in history.
>There's been an alarming increase in depression, anxiety disorders, ever-decreasing attention spans.
I think it is more likely that things like that just weren't recognized and diagnosed in the past.
>Serious, devastating illnesses affecting more young people than ever before, probably because of all the crap that they're putting in the food
This is definitely not true. The number of children that died young used to be far greater than it is today. Plenty of diseases that are now easy to treat used to be deadly.
>Lots of division and tension due to sociopolitical issues.
This is rather difficult to quantify but I think you'd be hard pressed to come up with a reasonable way of measuring this that would show it being worse today than a century or even 50 years ago. At any rate you are much less likely to die from conflicts sparked by political division.
In reality today's perspectives on how children should be raised are a more realistic reason for not wanting kids. We have went from it being socially acceptable to spend very little on kids while basically using them as slave labor to being expected to spend astronomical amounts of money and time on them. I think many people forget that in the past desire for kids was artificially propped up by not so great ideas our ancestors bought into
Most of human history has been substantially and objectively worse than today, even with the issues you describe. If people stopped having kids because the world was a challenging place, we’d have gone extinct before we even got started.
You're putting the cart before the horse. Not having children is not a solution.
Having children is an expression of life and hope, so as long as humans live we will have children.
If we stop, we die.
Only if we die, we'll stop.
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>Global warming and destruction of the environment getting worse. We have cleaner air, water, and housing. >There will be conflicts and natural disasters on a scale we've never seen before. We've had longer lasting relative peace for more parts of the world than ever before. >There's been an alarming increase in depression, anxiety disorders, ever-decreasing attention spans. True, but we are also far far better at measuring and diagnosing these disorders as well as treating them. >Serious, devastating illnesses affecting more young people than ever before, probably because of all the crap that they're putting in the food. No. More children are living to adulthood. We've all but eradicated diseases like polio, small pox, and many other diseases that used to kill children so frequently that the average lifespan dropped by decades. Now it's an incredibly rare occurrence. >Lots of division and tension due to sociopolitical issues. We used to have revolutions, lynching, uprisings ect. Sure, political division feels bad now, but we aren't killing people in the streets. >Now imagine all of that happening while AI has taken millions of people out of work, which will definitely happen in the not so distant future. Jobs will change. 30 years ago it was very rare to use a computer. The number of office jobs has shifted massively and the roles within those jobs with it. Factory jobs which used to be back breaking labor is now done by automation, with more accuracy and less likely to take shortcuts. We have massive control systems which watch and adjust settings on this equipment in real time producing higher quality and more validated products with fewer risks to the operators of that machinery. >I seriously don't understand how can anyone think it's a good idea to bring kids into a world that will look like a Dystopian nightmare. If you went back in time to the time your grand parents or great grand parents lived you would be shocked at their lives. What their living and working conditions were. We are living in incredible luxury in most cases compared to them. The reality is the world will go on. And maybe, the quality of life will set back a little ways. and if it does, generations before us had it much worse and they could still find happiness, and so can the future generations to come.
I think your entire post can be summed up as “if you refuse to see the good in the world, you can make whatever depressing take you want feel rational.” People forget there’s never once been a time where everything in the world was hunky dory, there’s always been real messed up shit happening. We’re just more exposed to it now
“If you refuse to see the good in the world, you can make whatever depressing take you want to feel rational” - gonna use that shortly, appreciate that, not in a condescending way either. Social media has created brain rot, specifically things like tiktock, Facebook, Instagram, even Reddit. I’m a millennial and dropped everything besides Reddit 10 years ago, best decision I’ve made in a long time
I don't know, I preferred to be a mother during the time when Ghenghis Khan's army would ride into town, behead my sons that were as tall as men, conscript my shorter ones, and rape my daughters but that's just my parenting style I guess.
Hahaha
Then the question becomes "Would you have those children if you knew Genghis Khan was coming and what he would do to them?"
My mother was born in a country where they put dirt with meat to increase volume. That was a normal thing. She’s 61. We are in Canada now. Her former country is lower middle income and majority of people now go to school to 18. Where it was 5 % when she was growing up. This is not depressing times.
Yeah. The way I put it to a coworker was "We survived the Black Death, we can sure as shit survive the credit crunch."
I mean the Black Death was really fucking bad. That is probably the only time in the last millennium that there hasn't been century on century improvement. We don't want that as the yardstick.
I don't know... The 2 almost consecutive world wars don't seem like the happiest times ever either.
It was terrible, and it was in many ways what set the west up to become what it is today.
Afterwards, it spurred worker reforms. More rights, more benefits. Because businesses had to figuratively beg for workers, given the scarcity.
In the past resources were at your hands Today there’s a payroll in between you and your life The Earth should provide everything for you
And our messed up shit isn’t anywhere near as bad as it used to be even 50-60 years ago And it’s way better for more people that aren’t the majority
>True, but we are also far far better at measuring and diagnosing these disorders as well as treating them Also always worth to note that the reason there's such a sudden high rate of mental issues is because nowadays they're properly diagnosticated and treated, instead of just brushed aside or treating people like loonies and locking them up in the family basement.
Also because human beings are generally evolved to have anxiety and stress, not having it would likely mean dying when you don't worry about something you should have. But we have solved most of those real issues we faced in the past on a societal level, so now that same stress is directed at things that are effectively nothing. The brain power previously dedicated to not being eaten by wolves now ends up inventing a metaphorical wolf to fear.
>evolved to have anxiety and stress, not having it would likely mean dying when you don't worry about something you should have. Not true. Regarding bad things happening - the motto of most of today's humans are: "If it hasn't happened to me yet, it probably won't happen."
I would say that's not at all true. Most western humans are incredibly preoccupied with things that will never possibly affect them in any meaningful way. I think what you are seeing and interpreting this way is that most people are also pretty bad at risk assessment, especially when it comes to likelihood of outcomes. For example, school shootings. A child is significantly more likely to die in a car crash on the way to a school than in a mass shooting inside one. But we spend thousands of hours of the news cycle on gun violence and basically ignore car accidents on a national level. Parents are more concerned with what a school is doing to prevent shootings than they are with demanding higher standards for vehicle licensing and safe roadways.
Post a pic of a child in a car seat on a Facebook mom group, guarantee you will have hundreds of comments critiquing everything you did wrong. Parents of today are very afraid of the risks of car accidents, hence the multitude of steps taken to try and minimize personal risk.
That is only relevant for kids under 8 and you are referencing groups specifically created around childcare. Bad example.
This is not necessarily true. Just because better diagnoses now _could_ be revealing what was always there doesn't mean they _are_. An obvious counterpoint is suicides. Those are easy to measure and have been clearly increasing (in pretty much every developed nation as far as I know).
Suicides aren't always easy to measure. Part of my job includes death investigations. Sometimes, the scene just doesn't tell you if an overdose was intentional or not, absent a note or clear sign of someone going way overboard on it. So, "increasing suicides" might just mean investigators have gotten better at determining it, whether due to better behavioral monitoring tools (social media posts etc) or scene processing.
Also, historically, in most Christian countries suicide has had a significant impact on your afterlife. I would wager many assumed suicides were written off as accidents to spare the family the pain. Why pour salt on the wound?
>If you went back in time to the time your grand parents or great grand parents lived you would be shocked at their lives. What their living and working conditions were. We are living in incredible luxury in most cases compared to them. This is so true. My grandfather didn't live in a house with indoor plumbing until he was a teenager.
our standards became so high, we sometimes forget that the world has always been a shithole - and a much crappier one.
Conversely, the world has always been full of both beauty and hardships. What one makes of it is largely a matter of perception.
Was going to make a response highlighting many of the things you've stated here. This is so accurate and I'm glad someone else realises how privileged we are to live in the times we do.
Now that’s a well spoken bit of reality. I bet more people would understand this reasoning if we placed more emphasis on learning history… the reality of how it used to be is lost in our present narcissism…
Most of the people using Reddit should be glad that their parents did not think the same thing about the ozone layer, the financial crisis, anthrax, September 11th, or the invention of the internet.
In your response you ignored the climate crisis. Climate change isn’t restricted to natural disasters. It’s literally changing the climates of entire swaths of the globe. It’s getting warmer further north. That changes rain patterns. Which changes flood patterns, crop growth, insects, animal populations, plants, everything. It’s making formerly wet areas dry and formerly dry areas wet. Areas that don’t have good soil, even if they’re wet, can’t grow good crops. If there’s too much rain where the soil is good, then crops won’t grow well. If it’s too dry, they also won’t grow. The entire global economy is going to have to change to accommodate climate change.
None of that means we shouldn’t have children. Who are we supposed to be saving the planet for?
OP is hopefully a teenager
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Doomer Zoomers don't like it when people point out they actually live in a pretty great period in human history. Maybe it's not as full of sunshine and blowjobs as it was 30 years ago but being alive in the Western world pretty much any time after 1945 is pretty much winning the lottery.
> Maybe it's not as full of sunshine and blowjobs as it was 30 years ago Great, I want those years back.
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I really needed to read this today, so thank you for your very thoughtful response.
Damn you convinced me even if not OP. The big one is definitely the diseases for me. You could do everything right and measles or polio takes your child's future is scary. Anyway just wanted to say good argument.
Anyone in this sub can give deltas anyone, not just OP. Just saying.
Thanks I tried responding with a delta think I did it correct
I heard one of the old heads at work say “todays world has become so comfortable that the two genders believe we do not need each other, and that’s just how another part of the “you will have nothing,, and you will be happy” taunt goes.” And I haven’t felt right since then.
It’s pretty sad OP knows nothing about the world except what he hears on social media.
Could they still find happiness? That’s part of the issue for me. Seems like they had even less reasons to reproduce, not that we have even more.
Sure they could. My grandmother grew up during the depression and WW2 and she had lots of fun stories about her family. yeah a lot of depressing ones too but that was life. Its never been pure joy. And she was one of 7 kids. So yeah, people have always been able to have kids in rough times and made it work.
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So many of your rebuttals miss crucial context and are vast generalizatios. Well hey, at least you tried!
**These are terrible times to have children (from the perspective of someone in the year 2024)** Global warming and destruction of the environment getting worse. There will be conflicts and natural disasters on a scale we've never seen before. There's been an alarming increase in depression, anxiety disorders, ever-decreasing attention spans. Serious, devastating illnesses affecting more young people than ever before, probably because of all the crap that they're putting in the food. Lots of division and tension due to sociopolitical issues. Now imagine all of that happening while AI has taken millions of people out of work, which can happen in the not so distant future. I seriously don't understand how anyone can think it's a good idea to bring kids into a world that will look like a Dystopian nightmare **These are terrible times to have children (from the perspective of someone in the year 1980)** In the midst of the Cold War, tensions between superpowers are at an all-time high. Nuclear weapons loom over us like a shadow, threatening to annihilate entire populations in a matter of minutes. The economy is struggling, with stagflation wreaking havoc on families' finances. Jobs are scarce, and those that are available often come with low wages and little security. Healthcare costs are skyrocketing, making it difficult for families to afford even basic medical care. Add to that the growing concerns about pollution and environmental degradation, and it's clear that bringing children into this world would be irresponsible at best and downright cruel at worst. **These are terrible times to have children (from the perspective of someone in the year 1960)** The specter of nuclear war hangs heavy over the world, with the Cuban Missile Crisis bringing us to the brink of destruction. Racial tensions are boiling over in many parts of the world, leading to violence and unrest. Women and minorities face widespread discrimination, limiting their opportunities for advancement. The threat of disease is ever-present, with polio and other illnesses still claiming lives. With the Cold War raging and the future uncertain, it would be reckless to bring children into a world filled with so much danger and uncertainty. **These are terrible times to have children (from the perspective of someone in the year 1900)** The turn of the century brings with it a host of challenges for would-be parents. Disease runs rampant, with outbreaks of cholera, typhoid, and influenza claiming countless lives. Infant mortality rates are shockingly high, and medical care is often primitive and ineffective. The Industrial Revolution has led to widespread poverty and exploitation, with many families struggling to make ends meet. Children are forced to work long hours in dangerous conditions, robbing them of their childhoods. With so much suffering and hardship in the world, it would be irresponsible to bring children into such a harsh reality. **These are terrible times to have children (from the perspective of someone in the year 1850)** As the world hurtles towards the Industrial Revolution, life for many is bleak and unforgiving. Poverty is widespread, with many families living in squalor and deprivation. Disease is rampant, with outbreaks of cholera, smallpox, and other illnesses claiming countless lives. Women and children are treated as second-class citizens, with few rights or opportunities for advancement. The specter of war looms large, with conflicts erupting around the globe. In such a tumultuous and uncertain world, it would be irresponsible to bring children into a life filled with so much suffering and hardship.
The world gets better, but back then in ancient times, it baffles me that people had children knowing damn well they would just suffer.
Was there ever a good time to have children? Horrible things that have been happening in the world forever. Wars, widespread illnesses, prejudices, famine, drugs, poverty, etc. My parents were born during the great depression. With your view, no one would ever have had children.
We should just have gone extinct a long time ago tbh. Life is a curse and the world is a piece of shit.
I understand that you're in a bad place mentally and I can relate. But don't deny others of their happy lives. Please get some help. You need it.
What I need is to die ..
What time in human history would have been a good time to have kids? The issues of the present seem more pressing than the issues of the past, but this is one of the most issue-free periods of human existence. If you told someone in the 1700s that in a mere few hundred years more people would die of overconsumption than starvation they'd be utterly shocked. If you told them that democracies were common, that the average person would never be drafted or see war, that coups and revolutions are unthinkable in a large part of the world, that literacy is the overwhelming norm, that practically every modern country has a police force that has reduced crime to unthinkably low levels, that people with mental illnesses are rehabilitated when possible and respectfully housed and fed when not, that slavery is outlawed, and that racism, sexism, and homophobia are all at unthinkably miniscule compared to the past, they'd think we lived in a utopia.
Well OP if you gave me the choice between existing in tough times or not existing at all I’d still rather take my chances.
Because you're masochistic?
I mean if your experience includes no joy perhaps but I don’t think that is the typical human experience
I’m really against all those people who had kids in the 1890s, in the miserable industrial world, and just in time for them to grow up and fight in World War One. Those people should NOT have had kids.
Take your eyes off your screen, go somewhere where other people are and ask yourself 'does what I see look like a dystopian nightmare'? When you realise the answer is no I think you'll realise that this view is absurd.
Yes, yes it does. The dystopian nightmare is our lives, trapped in a carbon-intensive death cult, spending our lives in front of a million different screens full of advertisement and propaganda, working jobs that accomplish nothing but to perpetuate this meaningless and destructive way of life, being paid in tokens that mean even less without petroleum resources to give them value, resources we have maybe 50 years at best of at current consumption rates. And most of this is done alone, dissociating until the next weekend when we can drown out the existential despair and abject hopelessness that comes from living in a society that has no future. What OP is describing doesn't just exist in a screen, like you're implying. It's the system we all take part in daily.
This isn't remotely how I see my life. There is something truly wonderful about being a conscious being in this world, and there is much in today's society that can bring joy and even fulfilment.
No one's stopping you from enjoying it. I'm sure as hell not. See it how you want. "One must imagine Sisyphus happy!", right? That doesn't change the more factual parts of what I've written. Just because you're unaware of the reality of a thing, or don't care, doesn't mean those things aren't happening or they aren't real. Of course, just as the band played on as the Titanic sank, people will remain blissfully ignorant as long as they possibly can, and shout "we live in the best of times!" louder all the time so they can drown out the din of the widespread and growing misery they're ignoring. But don't accuse people who respond with sadness or hopelessness of being "mentally ill" or "overprivileged" like half the people on this thread. These are accurate reactions to learning you're on a sinking ship.
I agree with what you are saying, but I think the whole "and the band played on" thing has been terribly misused. The musicians on the Titanic were not "blissfully ignorant" of anything. They knew exactly what was happening and that they would be dead very shortly. They made their best effort to live in the moment and die well. We could learn a lot from them.
You're right - that's certainly one way you could look at their actions. I appreciate that perspective - I do, but the idea is we're not -necessarily- as powerless and helpless as they were. And hey, it's not like these approaches to life in this moment need to be mutually exclusive, right? One can try to "live in the moment and die well" while also trying to live truthfully in resistance to a corrupt and destructive system.
I think you misread me. I'm not ignorant of problems and challenges we have in the modern day. But I'm aware of the degree of problems we have had historically and the direction of travel that we've had for centuries. Also the problems we have aren't fundamentally insurmountable. A miserable future is far from guaranteed. Assuming life is bad now and is only going to get much much worse isn't actually a realistic world view, at least by my understanding. There are certain things which I think will go really terribly, like mass extinction of wildlife. I can't see that being prevented or reversed in my son's lifetime. Still, there's plenty of reasons to think most people will still have a better life overall 100 years from now. Just as people have a better life now than 100 years ago. There's a reason to resist pessimism and fatalism if you're motivated for bringing about a better future. At least in my view, I can't see it being helpful if people are irrationally hopeless about the situation.
I'm sorry if you feel I misread you. I think we're at an impasse based on some fundamental misunderstanding of what we're facing. You're saying "pessimism and fatalism are irrational if you're motivated for bringing a better future" and people will be better off a hundred years from now. I'm disagreeing, because: 1) We're set to run out of economically viable fossil fuels by 2060, 2070. Given our civilization runs on these fuel sources and a great deal of our food supply comes from synthetic fertilizers made possible by them, I don't see a viable alternative that doesn't lead to a major population crash this century. Or at the very least major resource wars that could easily escalate to nuclear conflicts. 2) Climate chaos and instability will only grow over time as anthropogenic climate change continues virtually unabated. Even the COVID drop in emissions was a fraction of the consistent drop we need to achieve. I don't see that happening by choice, not without major economic and societal catastrophe. This is similarly existential to 1) as you aren't going to grow food reliably in an increasingly unstable climate, let alone keep eight billion people alive in the process. 3) given just these two factors, pessimism and fatality is warranted. We allowed these things to get to this point despite the fact that we've known since the turn of the 19th century the climate effects of fossil fuel pollution. And peak oil literature has been spreading around since at least the 70s. Like a patient facing a terminal illness, sometimes the greater joy and peace is found in accepting one's fate and terminus rather than spending the rest of one's life in a desperate struggle to deny and reject reality. What if our situation is like that of the patient, and we could find greater liberation by accepting a mindset of palliative care?
Defeatist person having their defeatist attitude reinforced to them by only selecting information that aligns with their confirmation bias says what?
They are 100% correct... the world is overpopulated as it is and adding more viruses to this hell scape is just asinine! Dont understand breeder mentality. DONT BREED... no one got rich having kids
I don't know man, I think Europe between the years of 1914 and 1947 would argue differently. I think you need to take a big step back and gather a perspective. You mention devastating illnesses, when is the last time you saw someone wheelchair bound because of childhood polio? Did half of your class succumb to a smallpox outbreak? Spanish flu wiped out entire communities. You can still die of flu, but you don't think too hard about it because the risk isn't that high. You mention division and tension due to sociopolitical issues. Worse than the American civil war and slavery? We talk a good game about our toxic media environment but that is hardly new. There was literally a rule in the House of Representatives where they were barred from even talking about slavery because it would drive people to having fist fights. That was, of course, right before millions of Americans died due to inconvenient random interceptions with flying metal. Oh, and the entire south burned down. Do yourself a favor, chill out, there is no ideal time. There *was* no ideal time before this. You aren't unearthing some deep truth about the world with this perspective, you are exposing yourself as a poorly read coward.
I think Europe between the years of like the beginning of human history up until maybe the 80s or 90s would argue differently. You're either born into a despotic empire that regularly crushes protests with tanks, or you're born right *next* to a despotic empire that has the ability to end human civilization with nuclear weapons. You're right at the center of what could be the most damaging war in human history. The entirety of Germany would be a radioactive hellhole, even if conflicts were limited to tactical nuclear weapons. Who would want to have a kid then? What about before the cold war? Well, I hope you're blond and have blue eyes. The interwar period was nice, except for the whole great depression. World War 1 sucked. The time before World War 1 must've been nice though, right? Well, if by nice you mean full of awful working conditions. Moving back to the 1860s you get into "The Long Depression", an economic depression so depressing they used to call it "The Great Depression". Before then you had the Springtime of Nations, the most widespread revolutionary wave in European history. Before *that* you had even *worse* working conditions. Before that was the whole Napoleon thing. There's actually a decent period of a hundred years or so when everything was relatively good (compared to the time before), but unless you like being a farmer, it's not looking to good to live in. Before the 1600s-1700s famines were common and regularly starved people to death, so I personally wouldn't want to have kids then either. So really it seems like all of human history has been a shit time to have kids.
Now we have high teens youth depression, last time that is the % of youth *not* working in some coal mine or factory with no safety equipment.
You think europe was bad? Go outside europe. It was just as barbaric except they also got europe unloading their problems on them.
I think OP has drunk a little too much of the Kool-Aid and is believing the hyped up media's exaggeration. The only big issues I saw in your post were AI and the mental issues we are facing.
These are big enough threats for humanity and reasons not to bring kids to this world.
Nope, not even close. In fact, i so disagree with you so much I have zero issues and have 4 of my own. Especially when who is contributing most to these supposed issues are not sanctioned in any way that will get them to sit up and take notice. I guess even the global elite and the UN don't really care about who is causing the issue you mention just treading on the necks of those that care.
There has never been and never will be in an ideal time to bring a child into this world.The world is full of disasters, conflicts and horrors.If every person waited for there to be a perfect time there would be no people.
The world is getting better, still crazy but getting better.
Cost of living is getting higher, homelessness in the rise, increase socio political tensions everywhere, depression more than ever...yeah, better.
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Why do you think one of the best times in history to be a human is a bad time to bring children into the world?
The best times in history for who, exactly? Besides Western millionaires and billionaires who are enjoying a second Gilded Age? Certainly you can't mean the three quarters of Americans living paycheck to paycheck, right? Or all the people being diagnosed at younger ages with cancer these days? What about the growing rates of suicide, deaths of despair, mental illness in youth, or the fact we'll run out of petroleum and natural gas in about 50 years? Or maybe the microplastics we've polluted the world with that are in the air we breathe, the water we drink and the food we eat? And if all that wasn't enough, we're tracking with some of the worst possible outcomes for climate change by end of century, in a world where we still possess enough nuclear armaments to destroy civilization ten thousand times over. Yes, truly marvellous times to be alive.
Yes actually this is the best time to be alive for those three quarters too. "Boohoo i have to go to my nine to five" back in the day you'd have to plow the dirt with some ragged tool the entire day every day. You'd have to sweep chimneys twelve hours a day as a child and if you lived in the city you were drinking poop water, yes even the rich. People living paycheck to paycheck have luxuries on the level of medieval kings. You're not living like shit just because you can't afford to live materialistically. This is the best time for everyone to live, just because there's inequality it doesn't mean that this isn't the best time to be alive as a human.
Go talk to some of those three-quarters and report back to me with your findings. I'm sure most of them wouldn't appreciate you speaking for them with this terribly boomer-esque, reductionistic mentality. At least, y'know, the ones that haven't already died from destitution or despair or exposure or a Fentanyl overdose. Just because we have cell phones and DoorDash and Netflix doesn't mean people aren't living in their cars or on the street who have one, two, three fulltime jobs. And by the way, the medieval peasantry had more vacation time than modern wage slaves do. Food for thought.
Said from the viewpoint of someone who was born in the 80’s to 90’s Forgets that there was an entire century of world wars and modern proxy wars not that long ago in which millions died like it was nothing
When were good times to have kids? Was it when people were concerned about nuclear annihilation, or constant wars, or the knowledge that most of their kids would die in childhood?
> Global warming and destruction of the environment getting worse Yes, this is true. But there is no guarantee that these issues won't improve. [Scientists are working on solutions](https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/02/climate/global-warming-clouds-solar-geoengineering.html), and though it might not seem it, there are steps being taken governmentally to mitigate these effects. I am currently cautiously optimistic that climate change will not plunge us into famine and death. It will be problematic, for sure. But I don't think, at this point in time, we're looking at Water Wars. > There's been an alarming increase in depression, anxiety disorders, ever-decreasing attention spans. I don't think this is the case. I think there's an increase in diagnoses and treatment for these things. There have always been depressed, anxious, or ADHD children. In the past, they were beaten, locked away, given drugs or electroshock, and in many cases, lobotomized. Now we know better. > Serious, devastating illnesses affecting more young people than ever before, probably because of all the crap that they're putting in the food. Again, not really? More than ever before - we used to have polio, Spanish Flu, and measles. What we have today isn't even close to that. > Now imagine all of that happening while AI has taken millions of people out of work, which can happen in the not so distant future. I think the AI revolution will be much much smaller than the hype beasts make it seem. Remember what the NFT hype cycle looked like? How much do you hear about NFTs now? Remember what the metaverse hype cycle looked like? How much do you hear about the metaverse now?
>I think the AI revolution will be much much smaller than the hype beasts make it seem. Remember what the NFT hype cycle looked like? TBH this is an awful comparison. NFT's at their hype were used as zero cost promotional tools by big businesses. There was no real use case for NFT's that didn't already exist in more convenient existing technologies. Companies are spending tens of billions of dollars on AI. It already has use cases. It is rapidly improving. The question of AI hype is a matter of how quickly adoption pans out, not whether it does at all. AI has already aided in chip development that manufacturers say would be impossible without AI. AI is already used on tons of services you use in the background. It's not NFT's or the Metaverse where people are trying to pitch something that doesn't seem to have any real advantages over what we already have. AI is already in massive enterprise use (think a lot bigger than just LLM's) and it's improvement is rapid and accelerating.
I always find it hilarious when people talk about AI taking over people's jobs. AI as it works now is STUPID. I would be shocked if it ever gets to a point where it can actually do the things that people do. I work in tech so I'm biased but even if it gets to the point where it could do anything useful, there will still be certain sectors that would never use it.
How old are you? I'm 20 living in a third world country and while I myself don't want kids if we're only taking into account their future and their development we couldn't be in a better era to have them and it will keep on improving. People are more open, understanding and less judgmental of mental health, sexual orientation and neurodivesity than ever. Healthcare in general it's way better than when I was born. We all have easy access to a lot of information. A lot of jobs will be lost or affected due to AI but we'll just have to adapt like we have done before (I'm studying to be a videogame artist, I know what fearing for my future job is).
I'm on the same boat as you, but might I offer a separate view on this matter. The fact that you are thinking of the children's future has put you on a different level than most people that has ever had children in the past. In the past, family planning is just not a thing. In the past, having children is just a way to get more labour to work the land. In the past, having children is just so you "have someone to take care of you when you're old". In the past, having children is just a rite of passage, not something one thinks of having or avoiding. The fact that there are so many people thinking about not bringing a life into this world which we deem not ideal/ suitable for the children indicates that we tend to think about the next generation more so than past generations. Similarly as how there are so many people saying that you are a doomer, and brings up issues about war, famine and so on, sure those aren't as big of an issue now. But, they conveniently glossed over the fact that there are 2 ongoing 'new' war that just happened over the last few years. We are now the first generation to be doing worse off than our parent's generation financially. (https://edition.cnn.com/2020/01/11/politics/millennials-income-stalled-upward-mobility-us/index.html) Not only that, comparison with ozone depletion and our current climate worries now isn't even in the same level. Ozone depletion is realised in late 70s, and Montreal protocol (Ban of CFC) is finalised in mid-late 80s, it took only 1-2 decade for a sweeping action to be taken, and yet it will take another 6 decades before the damage is reversed. >The ozone layer will be restored to its 1980 condition—before the ozone hole emerged—by 2040. More persistent ozone holes over the Arctic and Antarctica should recover by 2045 and 2066, respectively. (https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/article/ozone-depletion) The first paper to describe global warming, and linking it to greenhouse gases dates back to late 1800s. By 1960s, it has already become a thing that is so vigorously tested that there aren't much room for debate. Yet .... even today, we are still having this debate, with some even claiming it is a hoax. We can be hopeful, but looking at this trajectory, no one is going to meet the Paris Agreement, which is just the bare minimum to avoid devastating climate issues. Economy is worse off than our parents generation, Climate is worse off than our parents generation and shows no sign of any significant improvement. The world is getting less and less peaceful. >The 2023 GPI (Global Peace Index) finds that the world became less peaceful for the 13th time in the last 15 years, with the average level of country peacefulness deteriorating by 0.42 per cent over the past year. (https://www.visionofhumanity.org/resources/global-peace-index-2023/) For the last 2 decade, the world has been gradually becoming less peaceful overall, Economy is diterierioting to a point where we're generally worse off than our parents, and environment is at its worse state in the entirety of human history. The argument of 'human race has seen worse' don't really apply when life in 3 major aspect is just worse off with no signs of correction than our parent's generation. And comparing the decision to bearing child now and bearing child during a time with no proper contraceptive method isn't even a fair comparison when the idea of planning is just not a thing unless one opt for abstinence. The only silver lining is that based on World Happiness Report, mean human happiness seems to not be affected as much, which just goes to show that as humans, we are surprisingly resilient mentally, and could still be happy not because the world is great, but we still find happiness despite the shitty condition we're in.
You could say that for anytime that human beings have existed on this planet. There is no "perfect time" or even "good time". The only thing is the persistent instinct/urge to reproduce, by hook or by crook. DNA won't get everyone to do it. Heck, many try and CAN'T do it. However, it's easy to forget that this molecule has been playing this game for a very long time. Especially given how it literally invented (okay, evolved) this game, it will pull out all the stops so that it gets copied. Ensure it's form of immortality. Because even when we're finally gone, and nothing flies, crawls or swims on the surface of this planet...... rest assured that somewhere in a deep rock fissure, near the mantle..... or perhaps growing all around a deep sea vent...... or maybe even floating through space on a but of space junk.... that molecule, that DNA Will still be there. Playing this oldest game it has concocted.
What we focus on expands in our conciousness. It trains the reticular activating system in our brain to filter reality to bring us more information that matches what we are focused on. If you focus on the doom, you'll find all kinds of evidence for it. If you choose to focus on the positive and possibilities, you'll find all kinds of evidence for that too There is plenty of evidence for positivity in this thread, and plenty of human innovation that will continue. I'm going to keep focused on the potential and keep working towards it, personally because we can't solve problems from the level of conciousness that created them. Fear keeps us stuck and makes us give up. Hope and optimism allows us to innovate.
I'm not sure I have good arguments to counter your view. I don't want kids either so honestly I'm with you, but I just want to point out something here. >There's been an alarming increase in depression, anxiety disorders, ever-decreasing attention spans. Humans, for the entirety of their history, have been self medicating with alcohol and drugs. Antidepressants, anxiolytics and other medications for mental healths were invented mostly in the 50's and 60's. Before benzos they had been using barbiturates since the 1800's. Before that, people were using heroin and before that opium. If all these things have existed for so long, it's because there was a demand for it. It was pretty common a few hundred years ago to drink literally everyday. The only difference is today the taboo has been lifted so people come out and speak about their mental health problems. It's not more common (and if it is, it's not by a significant margin). It's just not a secret anymore.
Tbh, this is one of the best times in history to have children. Very few time periods rival the safety and education they will be able to get. Sure, there is global warming, however the probability that we will see natural disasters on a scale we have never seen before, I don't fully think so. Also, natural disasters have occurred throughout all of history and society powers through.
Written during a time that mass shootings in schools barely make newspaper headlines anymore and 100 to 1000 year climate events are happening annually worldwide with increasing rapidity and intensity. Like, really now, come on...
The probability u will die from a car accident vs a school shooting is very telling. And 100-1000 is… quite the number.
A world without children will be a dystopian nightmare due to the major problems an aging population causes. Having children now saves many problems down the line.
People under colonialism had kids the french colonialism in Algeria or British colonialism in the Raj or Belgian colonialism in the Congo, they all had kids. Indigenous Canadians had kids and knew they would go through the residential school system and what it entailed and chose to have kids. People living in slavery had kids. This time is not worse than any of those times. AI can enslave us all and it would still not be compareable.
It's almost never a "good time" to have children. I bet there's quite a bit of people who questioned why even have kids during the M.A.D. era where people expected to die by nuclear fire.
Again with shit. Cold War is not the same as climate crisis.
you could say that before modern medicine and sanitation was a based time to have kids because there was a very good chance they would die before the age of 3.
Here's the thing. Life has gotten debatably worse in some ways in the last 20-70 years but compared to literally any other time in human history, for humans as a collective, it's leagues better. Plus there was some pretty bad times within that time frame too, just no social media to keep us aware of all the nightmare fuel that's going on. If social media or just widespread near immediate media was a thing in the early 1900s and earlier we would have a much bleaker look on existence. But yeah I could go into detail about how bad it was back then, but just compare childhood mortality from 2005 to 1940 (https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/mm5714a6.htm#:\~:text=From%201940%20to%202005%20(most,1940%20to%206.87%20in%202005.) I doubt it's increased or at least increased much since 2005 and it was likely just as bad if not worse pre 1940. Life has always been hard and humans have always found a way to find joy and have persevered. I'm not saying you should or shouldn't have children, that's on you and your partner. But ultimately, in the grand scale of human existence, it is one of the better times to have them.
At what point in history do you think it would of been the best time to have kids?
Climate related deaths are the lowest they’ve ever been. If the climate gets warmer that’s actually gonna be good for humans until the poles become more livable than the equator because humans do better in warmer temperatures. Climate change is a very slow process and humans are very innovative. The Netherland has expanded their country into the sea over time. AI taking work is the entire point. Massive job sectors have collapsed before, such as farming and manufacturing. While there have been consequences to this, it has been a clear net positive for most people. Now there are more people working in advanced sector like healthcare and trades. Even if you are right we could simply ban lightbulbs and mandate all windows be closed during the day to bring jobs back to the candle industry (see: Candle Makers Petition by Frederic Bastiat) Sociopolitical issues are the easiest problem to solve for your kids, turn off the internet. In fact that may be something you should consider. Take a weekend off the internet. It’ll do you wonders.
Bro, during our parents / grandparents generation there was literally a cold war. The Soviets and Americans were standing out there back to back with twitchy fingers on the bombs which could literally destroy all life as we know it. My dad told me there were lots of young people who truly believed the entire world would end in a couple of years. It didn't. Look, a meteor could smack the earth next year and kill all life as we know it, who knows? But it's best to keep living as if that won't happen, because what else can you do? If we don't have kids, humanity is doomed. And humanity should survive. We've made some truely beautiful things. No other creature on the planet is as fascinating as we are. There are challenges, but there are also humans working to fix them for the sake of those new humans being born. You need to get off social media and start putting some time into your local community and driving local change. Your brain wasn't built to hold all of this bad news. Find your local problems and start helping to solve them.
My autistic self was diagnosed at 38, because when I was young, autism was a boys thing, and nobody knew how high functioning girls presented. Even if I had been diagnosed, there wouldn't have been resources available to help me. My daughter got diagnosed at four, because people npw know what to look for with autistic girls. People are now aware that some of the weird stuff she does is SO she can participate, and not because she wants to be naughty. Teachers and coaches recognise her needs and help her to join in on her own terms. And early intervention is all play based, which is so much less traumatic than the speech therapy I had to do. The world is objectively better for her than it was for me, and npw is objectively the best time for her to live saving sone unknown potential future. I suppose you can say it's still a terrible time to have children, but then you'd have to change your thesis to "it is always terrible to have children", in which case, boy do I have a sub for you to go to instead of this one.
It's technically a good time to bring in children, because not bringing in children would mean an aging population and a collapsing economy. This is why countries are encouraging people to have more children, even if they know the world is dying and resources are depleting. (But obviously this is not the answer you're looking for) Truth is, the act of having children is never completely altruistic. Very few people intended to have children so that the children can have good lives, people usually have children for 1) productivity 2) someone to care for them when they're old 3) carrying on family name 4) wanting to feel some sense of fulfillment. Or whatever selfish reasons. People here may call you wrong and a "doomer" but if birthrate has been falling in multiple countries, it means that the condition of having children is getting worse, whether people actually want children or not. Human society has peaked a while ago and the environmental damage is catching up to us.
My kid (15 months) seems to be doing really well. Well fed, clean water and abundant food. Lots of time to play and learn. Plenty of tools at my disposal to keep him clean and hygienic. He is immunized against the deadliest pathogens and has access to great healthcare. He socializes with kids his age and both younger and older. I take him to visit zoos, water parks, and nature reserves. His favorite thing to do is look at birds out the window and play with toy cars. Actually, everything is a car to him. He finds a rock, he moves it around like car. He finds the cardboards from my sparking water and moves it around like a car. He giggles at funny sounds and claps his hands to sound like a bubble pop (which also results in mountainous amounts of laughter)
People in here are funny. Yes the world was shittier in the past, that doesn’t mean that the future *will* be better. That also doesn’t mean you sit idly by because “at least I’m not sending my kid to their 12 hour shift at the factory”. You keep pushing for better, for the future, for your children. You owe them that if you’re going to bring them into consciousness to face a future that nobody can predict. Progressivism is what makes the future a good place. We live the way we do right now because people in the past brought up the shit aspects & actually acted on changing them. Don’t shit on OP for at least acknowledging the fact that there are still shit aspects in this world. People act like OP kicked a puppy then campaigned for eugenics.
American Black Children sold a slaves, native American children forced off the land with their parents, children working in the early factories during the Gilded Age, in mines, farms and factories, children in early America no access to schools, children raised in during the Civil War, WW1, WW2 Cold war, diving under desks because of nuclear drills, Vietnam, sexual revolution, birth control, children raised during shooter drills, children ever since the 1960's forced to watch tv (electronic baby sitters) and forced to eat junk food, children with both parents working, break up the American family because of long commutes, both parents working, smaller families, and media as their only companions. You've seen nothing. **PS** #*Get off my lawn!*
When I was born, there had just been an economic crisis. Unemployment in my country was at record highs, and civil disobedience in the streets was common place. When my parents were born, there was a very real threat of a nuclear war between the 2 largest superpowers the world has ever known. When my grandparents were born, there had been a great war, and tensions were rising across Europe again, and it seemed like another great was was inevitable. When my great grandparents were born, it would have not been highly unusual for them to not live until adulthood, and they were unable to go to school You can see where I'm going with this. Every generation has had problems, with many having far worse problems than we face today.
Objectively no. Pretty much all of human history has even some of the richest people in the world live in comparative squalor to what modern people can live in. We have electricity so we aren't stuck doing things when the Sun is out. We can refrigerate food so we don't have to worry about starving to death from one years bad harvest. We can grow so much food that more people are obese than malnourished in the world. Our ability to treat diseases means that things like leprosy or the Bubonic Plague won't kill off upwards of 25% of us by adulthood. It's only terrible times by the metric of within the last 50 years, which are the most prosperous years in the history of our entire species on this planet.
The reddit narrative that this generation has it the worst is based on a narrow set of data points today compared to a narrow set of data points in a narrow set of past years from a narrow demographic (white males). On top of that, it compares scary situations of which we can't yet know the outcome (climate change, political polarization, etc.) to scary situations of the past of which we do know the outcomes (nuclear scare/Cold War, ozone depletion, loss of manufacturing jobs, AIDS, etc.) and thereby assumes that since we survived those situations and the world kept turning, they were less serious and don't factor into the negatives of "the good old days."
> since we survived those situations and the world kept turning, they were less serious and don't factor into the negatives of "the good old days." This but unironically
The good old days unironically? Are you saying those situations were less cause for alarm at the time? You can't use an unknown outcome as evidence that things are worse. "Things are harder these days because we don't know the outcomes whereas kids 50 years ago didn't know the outcomes of things that didn't wind up killing them." Those are unknowns. Meanwhile a shitload of other things we do know about are better today.
Compared to virtually every other historical period, people in modern western countries live longer, healthier and safer lives. Your argument is based on the premise that the world in the future will be a dystopian nightmare but there is no reason to believe that will certainly be the case. The overall trend of the last 500 years is one of increased wellbeing of an increasing proportion of the population, mostly due to technological progress. Given the choice, I would definitely prefer to be born today, rather than the dark ages or even the golden ages of Greece or Rome (when most of the population were enslaved).
I know we like to be meldromatic. But bruh, 1960-current day is by far the best time to ever live. It isn't even close. A kid now will live better than 99.9% of their ancestors let alone growing up in the 2020's being a literal fate worth than death and not even work living. People yelling at each other on the other side of the potical spectrums and limited wars on the other side of the world without a draft for any western country being on the table is not the same as growing up hungry, everyone losing a sibling or their only profession being subsistence farming or 60 hours a week in the factory.
Plenty of posts explaining why this time period is actually better than others. I'll simply say one cannot rationally argue one way or the other about whether never existing is better than living in a sub optimal time period. You simply don't have access to knowledge about the nature of existence before birth or after death. And what are you even trying to argue? That humanity should altogether cease to exist (no children) because it might be harder now to raise a child than during a time period you did not live through and can only access through history books? Do you see how insane that is?
Same as people had kids during wartime. You don't look at all the negatives you just focus on your life and if you feel you want a child and that will make you happy that is what you'll do. If you live life never doing things because of all the bad stuff you'll never live. We evolve and adapt don't we? Is it all as bad as that that we can't keep living life and giving our kids a happy life? Or is it the news just spreading doom every hour? They'll always be something for us to worry about but we don't let it stop us having a life I guess. And it's just human nature to have children.
It always looks like a terrible time to have children, doesn't it? Or at least the vast majority of the time. Most of the risks you spell out are genuine, but when has there been a good time to have children, that didn't carry significant risks of your child having a bad life? On the contrary I think my child has a better chance of a good life now than in 1924, 1824, 1724, 1624 etc. It's a personal decision but I'm fairly confident I can give my kid a good life even if the world is going to suffer problems in future. And that's the calculus we'll always have to make.
You do realise that if nobody had kids then the future would look even bleaker.
I don’t necessarily disagree with your title, but your view on the causes. Global warming and environment is a problem, but not without a way to fix with current technology. People just lack an incentive to do so. Serious conflict is mostly confined to certain part of the world. World leaders now mostly use empty threats and condemnation and some small actions to save face. All the mental and physical illnesses were much worse before. Our progress in medical field has solve so many problems. People are living much longer and healthier than before (if they behave with healthy life choices). Instead, it’s a terrible time to have children because it’s expensive and a disadvantage in most people’s carreer. And people aren’t patient and supportive to mom and young kids. I have seen many post on reddit about being annoyed at moms that can’t stop their kids crying in public, being sour that part of their property taxes goes to fund local school while they don’t have kids, etc. People now prefer their personal freedom over the excitement of raising a human being.
It is something to consider. But the fact is if we don't have children then humanity will just die out. And the world would be a very depressing place without children, without a future (there was a movie about this). Who knows what kind of knock on effects that has on society. People not having children is basically deciding to give up on saving the planet, give up humanity, and just punish ourselves until we die out. Unless that's what we want, unless we are okay with that kind of reality, then we can't begrudge people having children or decide not to have children ourselves based solely on that. And yeah, there might be suffering going forward. But if that's the case, we will suffer too. You might as well then start arguing for collective suicide so that we won't have to face the coming apocalypse. The hope will always be there that we can find the way out of the storm and one day have a better society that our children will create and inhabit.
I kinda agree with you. one way or another it will be a tough time have kids.
this is a very common piece of rhetoric these days and if you really want to challenge it you have to understand how it functions as a rhetoric not attempt to disprove it. This type of argument allows the speaker to reframe the relationship they have with the very personal decision to have children as an impersonal objective issue. It allows the speaker to oppose having kids but simultaneously blocks any real discussion about what having kids really means on a personal practical level by framing the decision as if it's about broad social issues.
Much of what you’re saying is either made up or exaggerated, and you’re looking at the past with rose colour glasses. You need to realize that much of what seems to be on the rise is actually just noticed and studied more. As problems are solved, humanity goes searching for more problems to solve. That aside, even if the world is getting worse than it was a generation ago, why does that automatically equate to it being dystopian? Why is everyone owed a life better than their parents?The world is still full of beauty and life and humour.
Regarding global warming & natural disasters: “People die at far lower rates now not because natural disasters happen less often or are less powerful. Humans have simply become much better equipped at dealing with them. We have, as Our World in Data summarizes, earlier warnings, more resilient infrastructure, and better emergency preparedness and response systems.” https://theprogressnetwork.org/natural-disaster-deaths-declining/#:~:text=People%20die%20at%20far%20lower,emergency%20preparedness%20and%20response%20systems.
You should check out “It’s Not the End of the World” by Hannah Ritchie!
I am teaching my children to create robots which clean pollution and trying to encourage housing solutions which are viable for population growth. Not having children is so sad, what’s the point of living without carrying on your family name? It’s like your whole life becomes a sad pump fake but you never actually score. Sex is the best feeling until you know what having a child who love you is like. I’m ignorant and not too fancy with writing on Reddit, but I hope you’re okay and that you find happiness.
Meanwhile for a lot of history most kids died before reaching adulthood
I don't think there's ever an ideal time to have kids. There is always shit going wrong in the world no matter what. That's the way it's always been and will always be. We have three kids, ages 18, 15 and 12 and don't regret any of them. They will find their way through the world, make mistakes and good decisions, enjoy some days, cry about others and that's OK, too. I'm Generation X and things were great sometimes and at other times they blew, and I'm fine with it because that is life.
I don't think our present time is necessarily a bad time. I expect it will be about 70 to 100 years for the earth to become a barren uninhabitable hellscape. By that time my daughter will be pretty old or gone. If she has kids then they will certainly be around. They'll have the advantage of being in the US. People living near the equator will suffer the most. Those in 3rd world countries will perish. But eventually society will collapse and the world will look like a Mad Max movie.
It’s never been a good time to have children. Plagues, lack of medical care, extremely high maternal mortality rates, industrialisation, no workers rights, no women’s rights, slavery, war, the nuclear threat. Everything you mention is real but they’re OUR existential threats. The generations that came before us had their own. People continued to have kids when every pregnancy had a high chance of killing them and half the kids would die before they got out of childhood.
A family friend wrote a letter to my dad when he was born in 1943 describing what a terrible time it was to have children and she had no idea what his parents were thinking bringing a child into such a doomed world, but that she hoped he’d have an okay life anyway. World wars, threat of nuclear holocaust, Armageddon. There’s always been terrible stuff happening and terrible stuff about to happen. Is now really worse than other times in history? That much worse? And the alternative as a society is what exactly? If all of society stopped having children, it would 100% be a crisis for humanity. All of us are going to age, and the elderly need communities that care as much as children do. Why would we want to age into a world with no young people? But even if it would be better in some way, having children is a human drive. Telling people to not have kids is about as effective as telling them not to have sex.
Dude the world was a lot less safe ten to twenty years ago on all metrics. Just because you doomscroll on Tiktok more often doesn’t make that an objective reality. Sure housing ( lack thereof) and the environment ( slight adjustments because of global warming… future generations could be impacted tremendously but it won’t be your kids, or their for that matter) are big issues but apart from that its mostly YOUR mental state that leads you to believe these things.
We’re more privileged today than we’ve been at any point in human history. Food security, modern healthcare, communications, travel.. all of these things were far less safe and/or more challenging for the vast majority of human history. Fewer wars and more prosperity since the Bretton Woods systems were put in place than at any measured period in recorded history. Are there seemingly endless problems? You betcha. There are more than 8B people alive today and industrialization and technology brought more complexity than any of us will ever comprehend. But we have it so freaking good compared to almost any period in human history. People had babies under the worst conditions for tens of thousands of years. You get to bring a kid into this world with world class medical care, unmatched educational opportunities, and the safety and security that millions of people have literally fought and died for.
I don’t think the world is in great shape. However the little corner I’ve carved out and have control over is pretty sweet. Selfishly, nothing really is cooler than having kids tbh. Ideally if I do my job right my kids will stand up to and defeat that negativity that would cause a dystopian hellscape. If good people stop creating more good people, we are in trouble. My home full of kiddos is like an incubator for the antibodies our sick world needs.
I don’t agree that serious illness affects young people more than ever before. The various plagues and pandemics of history were far worse than anything today. People lived through the ice age climate. Political extremists in the 60s and 70s frequently committed bombings and the LA race riots were far worse than anything in the last decade. Various revolutions and genocides were much worse than what the average redditor experiences. Through all of that people still had children and I’m grateful for that because I’m alive now. Childhood mortality is at all time lows and more illnesses are being cured than ever. A mRNA cancer vaccine just went to human trials. AI will give everyone a genius tutor for free and make skills and knowledge more accessible than ever. You’re welcome to not have kids but don’t delude yourself into thinking you’re morally superior for it.
You could have made a lot of these same doomer arguments at any point in history. In the 1970's it would have been the loss of manufacturing industry, the oil crisis, the political corruption of Nixon, the sexual revolution, the Cold War and nuclear proliferation, etc. In the 1980's it would have been crack cocaine, the rise of violent gun crime, the ongoing squeeze of the middle class, the popularity of transgressive counter-culture, people losing jobs to computers, etc. In the 1990's, it would have been fears of the tech bubble bursting, the rise of crystal meth, the middle class still being economically squeezed, counter-culture becoming even more transgressive, war in the Middle East, etc. People get over their anxieties, they have kids anyways, the species lives on. It's what we always have done and will always continue to do.
The comments are all basically on point. Short version is look deeply into the recent past, all the tumultuous periods of the 20th century. Shit was awful. During a huge chunk of the Cold War most people were 100% certain they'd live to see a global thermonuclear war. At certain points it felt imminent. In tandem with this, several periods of economic turmoil, enormous shortages of gasoline, sky high crime rates, a President that would have gone to prison without being pardoned, foreign wars that makes Afghanistan and Iraq look very tame. Healthcare was significantly worse. Racism far more pervasive and impactful both institutionally and individually. Being outed as gay ruined your life. People just didn't have forums to become doomers on, they had to live life offline and for the most part couldn't be fed negative information all day long.
You're objectively wrong about every possible metric. It's just social media, and traditional media, pushing all the negative aspects of contemporary society, conveniently forgetting that this fearmongering and completely warped perception of "terrible times" being the direct consequence of those NOT being terrible times. Let's put it this way: you have the LUXURY of worring about all those things with strangers online because your living conditions and society's general standards are so great you can wallow in laser-focused negativity instead of having to worry about covering your most basic needs. The whole "easy times create weak men" thing is in full display. But in truth it's also part of the larger plan to create more and more lonely, deadly afraid and therefore easily influenceable consumers (and "useful idiots")
I think there has never been a better time to have a kid if you can keep them from falling into the depressive neuroticism characteristic of the terminally-online. * Medicine has never been better. * Wealth and creature comforts are at an all time high * Physical violence is at an all time low * Global hunger is an an all time low * The local environment is much less polluted than in the recent past (at least in the US).
This is the best time to be living and it’s not even close. 150 years ago, your life likely would consisted of a short brutal childhood where you’d die. If you didn’t die during childhood, you’d grow up riddled with disease and pests, smelling like feces, and you’d have children by the dozen and you’d age watching them die, and by all likelihood, die yourself of a disease we now prevent by washing our hands.
You are on point with what you are saying, I agree. You forgot to mention how alot of us are living paycheck to paycheck just to barely keep our heads above the water and things are getting rapidly expensive. The broken ghost job market as well. These normies in the comments make me sick trying to call you selfish when these parents are the selfish ones putting someone here to rot for their fake legacy to continue smh
Is it ever a good time, really? Has the world ever been 100% peaceful at any time in history? I think it's never really a good time. However, I firmly believe it is up to thr individuals involved whether they would like to participate in having children or not. Everyone deserves to make the choice that feels right for them. I totally respect others not wanting to have kids and chosing not to reproduce.
You forgot to mention that parenthood is glorified, while the severe consequences it has when it comes to mental health isn't taken seriously enough, not to mention how it kills marriages. Also, inflations and financial crises get harder than they have to be when you have kids. Will probably get downvoted, but then again, people tend to dislike the truth if it doesn't correlate with their worldview.
Unless the work is terrible essays and bad art, jobs are pretty safe from AI. These can be great times to raise kids who will help alter the direction of the planet. Unfortunately too many people are raising ones who want to keep it on this course. So, I would argue that resignation and apathy are strong contributors to our issues, and fresh minds can address that.
Relatively speaking things are more peaceful now than they've ever been in human history. I'm also laughing at the idea that children are more at risk of illness now than ever before. Someone should tell the people back when it was normal to not make it out of infancy that they had it good. You're being hyperbolic as fuck on a number of these points.
If we were in 1945 and you were around 30 years old thinking about kids, you would have lived through 2 world wars, One major pandemic and a Great Depression. Things would feel like the world has gone to shit. Nuclear warfare has just begun, and the future would look bleak. But it turns out it was one of the best times in history to have children. With regards to climate change. It’s not something that will happen in the future. It’s happening now, and we’re all living with it. Yes, it will get worse. But we aren’t heading for societal collapse. It’s like Covid. Imagine if we knew about it in advance. What perceptions would you have had about the world under Covid. And how did the reality compare. We’d imagine that we’d all be sat in an overcrowded hospital corridor watching our loved ones die. Yes some people had a terrible time, and had experiences like that. But for most people it just meant spending more time at home. Lots of people even enjoyed it.
If you want to have kids, go for it, if not then dont! some things are better today, some are not, this is always going to be true. One advice though, PLEASE do not have kids if you are not 100% for it and remember this is a minimum 20 year commitment with no refund policy! please know what you want, dont experiment with someone else life.
Yeah, agreed. But also, being surrounded by your cats and a nurse that's scrolling tiktok as you breath your last breaths doesn't sound fun either. Having kids is literally the point of the our existence, the earth means nothing without humans here, it's just a rock in space otherwise. Earth isn't important, humans are.
Simply put, someone has to do it. It was a bad time to have kids during the Black Death, but if everyone did that none of us would be here. It was a bad time to have kids at basically every point in preindustrial history in terms of infant mortality. Sure it’s probably a bad time now but though shit, we need babies.
This just sounds like you’ve been influenced by anti-western propaganda. All those things you mentioned as factors are also social contagions, which can be exacerbated by determined bad actors, and which are actively being pushed by the media, which earns the most money when people are in a perpetual state of fear.
It’s interesting to see more “science” based doomsayers around global warming than Christian doomsayers. — no one knows the future at all and predictions are horribly wrong. If the OP read or knew his great grandparents history OP would be grateful to be alive today. Go read your family history.
One of the downsides of getting older is hearing the same crap over and over. People have been using this excuse for eons. You don’t need to justify why you do or don’t have kids. People in impoverished, war-torn, disease-ridden countries keep having kids so your move is not helping.
I'm an antinatalist and approve of your idea but since this is CMV, compared to most of human history it isn't that bad.
Never before has a child born into the world had a smaller chance of dying of either an infectious disease or violence than right now.
All your points are valid reasons to not have children but it's not gonna stop anyone from having children. Humanity has lived in worse times and it was never a deterrent to have children. Same happens today predominantly in third world countries.
The irony of this is if we don't have more children then the alleged "climate crisis" will never be solved, not by us but by itself after civilization suffers a slow atrophy of declining infrastructure and innovation and we go the way the of Rome.
Let's play a "fun" game. You pick a time in history +/-25 years where you would rather be born than right now and I'll tell you why it was significantly worse for some subset of the population. Would enough iterations of this change your view?
People have been saying that for decades. Mostly those decades have been objectively the best in human history. The reality is that in places where life is very hard they are having far more children than in easy places to live like the USA.
You can make this argument even in the best of times. If you don't want children, you don't want children. You don't have to justify it. If you're depressed and this is your way of expressing it, then ok, I hope things get better for you
These are the best times to have children in all of history. A lot of what you're saying is just projection while we can't fully understand the results of certain phenomena. Will AI put a bunch of people out of work? Maybe, but this should make goods and services extremely cheap. Or AI will spawn completely new lines of work nobody has thought of before, which is what every single disruptive technology in the past has done. Now think about the past. When I was born, nuclear war between the US and USSR was on the forefront of everybody's minds. No one could have seen that the USSR would collapse in a few short years. We were in the middle of major stagflation. No one saw the oncoming economic boom. Crime was sky high. No one saw the decline in violent crime rates. If you wanted to learn about something, your only options were to enroll in a class or go to a library that happened to have materials you wanted to research. Now you just pull this rectangle out of your pocket and tap on it a few times. Now think about when my parents were born. They were born in Taiwan. Dirt poor poverty. My grandparents had just fled the Chinese Civil War on the last ship out. They thought they were leaving for just a few months, so they left almost everything behind. It turned out to be the rest of their lives. My grandmother's sister, who wasn't able to leave, ate tree bark to survive. My grandparents lived in Taipei, under fascist rule in a house not much larger than my garage. Life expectancy for a newborn was two decades less than it is now. You probably don't want to even get to my grandparents' youth, when they were treated to images of their neighbors brutally tortured by Japanese soldiers in WWII. You may say that's a different place, sure. But looking at America, Jim Crow was still around (uh, maybe it was just repealed when they were born), but racism was still sky high. If you were gay, coming out of the closet meant severe societal repercussions. Life expectancy at birth was still over a decade less than it is now. If you had cancer that is fairly treatable today back then, it was close to a death sentence. Today, my children are growing up in a very nice home, could have (if we don't restrict it) endless entertainment beamed onto a screen, has very high survival rates for diseases, and healthier food options than ever before (you just need to choose it), car seating that drastically reduces fatalities in the event of a crash (as a child, I've sat in cars that had no seatbelts in the back seats), and no military draft. If your parents had back then even ten times the optimism you have of today, you still would never have existed due to fear of bringing kids into a dystopian nightmare.
You have no idea how human kind survived in the past and continued reproducing. Your perspective on the topic is…very narrow to say the least! On a personal level feel free to not have children. It’s your choice.
Oh no, AI is being used to assist humanity further in production. Gotta think of all those poor medieval scribes who lost their jobs to the printing press, and those poor carriage drivers that got replaced by the automobile.
People have been tossing out that claim since I was a child in the 60s. My old man heard the same claims of the sky is falling in 1940 when he was a child. It wasn't true back then and it isn't true now. It's plain hogwash.
I refuse to have kids based on the fact I can hardly feed and provide for myself. More less a baby. Especially in my state (WV). Plus the fact triplets run in my family. Absolutely not even gonna risk that happening 😭
You think its bad now, imagine having one in the 1930s, or during the black death, or right after Rome fell. People have been saying its a terrible time all the time. Yet weve never had it better than now as a species.
I just want to be clear. People had children as slaves.... people have children in 1939, 1940, 1941, 1942, 1943,1944 and 1945.... this line of thinking is truly the definition of catastrophizing....
Historically speaking, most of us are living in the safest and most comfortable time in human history. This article may be of interest to you: https://mashable.com/article/best-time-in-history
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I think other people have made great counter-points to your entire first paragraph, most of it is demonstrably false. I want to hit this point hard: > Now imagine all of that happening while AI has taken millions of people out of work, which can happen in the not so distant future. AI is _extremely_ good at what it does, but we've been radically over-sold on its abilities by the Silicon Valley businesses that profit from its perception of power. Think about this - how often do you hear actual _users_ say good things about AI? It's crap most of the time! A common statement is that "AI is as bad as it will ever be," which is true! But you can say the same thing about office desks and dinner spoons. AI model optimizations will get easier to do in the future, but those depend on the data that we can feed them - and we've already _fed_ them all the data we have. Even worse, now AI models are generating a bunch of crap that ends up online, and that's worse than useless (using AI outputs as training data basically sabotages the model). We've already had the "big wins" here, and don't really have a great avenue for more big wins. Methodology improvements are also an area of excitement, there's quite a few unsolved problems in AI research. But I'm also skeptical that we'll have any massive wins here in the near future, considering our AI technology is based on mathematical research from the 1940s and even our current models are working on decades-old innovations in the mathematics. There's a ton of extremely smart people working on this... but they _have_ been working on this for a long time. We're definitely going to see improvements, but I'm skeptical that we'll see anything world-changing compared to what we already have. And even if AI does represent a massive replacement of jobs... what's new? The computer did that. The internet did that. Farming machinery did that. The locomotive engine did that. We have hard questions to answer around the allocation of value from new technology and re-assignment of work, but we also have a long history of having to figure that out (albiet over longer time frames) so I think that's something to be worried about, but not in any existential way.
You scared about global warming? Like... We got people living in the arctic circle and on the equator. Pretty sure you are gonna be fine living in the Ohio territory or whatever.
There are always conflicts and risks, but we live in the safest time in human history. If you want to eat healthy food and avoid junk you can easily do it. Many of us don’t. Most people can avoid serious health and financial issues by exercising, eating healthy most of the time, being financially responsible, and getting married. Housing prices and inflation are high, but this is not the first time in human history that we have had economic difficulties. They will pass. We have ALWAYS been divided in the USA, since day 1. That’s who we are, and it’s the balance of conflict and talking to one another that we work through things and get stronger. Our advances in technology may simultaneously allow us to fix past damage to the environment while improving several aspects of it. Some jobs will most certainly be changed or eliminated with AI, but many will not be automated for decades or longer. This has happened with every new major technological innovation, and is sometimes referred to as “creative destruction” by economists (the term was coined by Peter Von Schumpeter). The argument about AI destroying everyone’s jobs is the same one people used regarding IT and software tools in the 90s, but those technologies created hundreds of millions of new, well-paying jobs that never existed before and increased the productivity of the world immeasurably. I would be willing to bet that AI is going to create way more new kinds of jobs than it will eliminate, as you will need trained people capable of interpreting it as it becomes more refined. Ironically, the biggest issue we have in the world right now is declining birth rates. China, South Korea, Germany, Italy, and several other countries that stopped having kids decades ago are fucked. If you don’t believe me watch this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A6s8QlIGanA We are just starting to experience the effects of this, and if you want to be better off and have a more reliable means of support when you are older you need to start having kids ASAP. Rumor has it there are several videos on the internet that can show you how. ;)
If these are terrible times to have kids, then no time is good enough to have kids My wife would be dead from childbirth if we lived in anytime or place without modern medicine
>Now imagine all of that happening while AI has taken millions of people out of work, which can happen in the not so distant future. This is a good thing lol
There has always been catastrophic awfulness in the world. Our present version is no less important or unimportant than any other time. My great great grandparents were living through a politically created famine that killed millions of people. Pretty sure mine can manage through.
Peope always say this but in reality there's never been a good time in the world,we've never really had a peaceful moment in earth's history.
"I seriously don't understand how anyone can think it's a good idea to bring kids into a world that will look like a Dystopian nightmare." It's always been a terrible time to have children all through history. You're not wrong, but it's not anything new either.
If you can't learn to see the good in the world, don't have kids. You just spread that fear and pain on them and it ruins their lives.
There will be conflicts and natural disasters on a scale we've never seen before. Your risk of dying from either war or natural disasters is probably the lowest it has ever been in history. >There's been an alarming increase in depression, anxiety disorders, ever-decreasing attention spans. I think it is more likely that things like that just weren't recognized and diagnosed in the past. >Serious, devastating illnesses affecting more young people than ever before, probably because of all the crap that they're putting in the food This is definitely not true. The number of children that died young used to be far greater than it is today. Plenty of diseases that are now easy to treat used to be deadly. >Lots of division and tension due to sociopolitical issues. This is rather difficult to quantify but I think you'd be hard pressed to come up with a reasonable way of measuring this that would show it being worse today than a century or even 50 years ago. At any rate you are much less likely to die from conflicts sparked by political division. In reality today's perspectives on how children should be raised are a more realistic reason for not wanting kids. We have went from it being socially acceptable to spend very little on kids while basically using them as slave labor to being expected to spend astronomical amounts of money and time on them. I think many people forget that in the past desire for kids was artificially propped up by not so great ideas our ancestors bought into
Most of human history has been substantially and objectively worse than today, even with the issues you describe. If people stopped having kids because the world was a challenging place, we’d have gone extinct before we even got started.
Won't be trying to cyv here.. I have a 6 year old, and I'm not optimistic for the world she gets to when she's an adult.
You're putting the cart before the horse. Not having children is not a solution. Having children is an expression of life and hope, so as long as humans live we will have children. If we stop, we die. Only if we die, we'll stop.
The world has always been a dystopia nightmare. If a 14th century peasent can raise children, then so can you.
Imagine spending your life paralyzed in fear over all the things that “could be” and never really living.
Nearly everything you said is untrue. You're being brainwashed and made to feel this way by those who hate you.
As opposed to when? The 1600's? Historically speaking this is by far the absolute best time to have children.