Thats one of the reasons i'm not having kids. I have a decent life by any metric but I had to work my ass off and face a tonne of resistance in my career. It always feels like I'm playing catch up with the cost of everything going up and up to the point where I'm just exhausted and depressed. Like, what is the point of living?! it honestly feels like theres just nothing left to enjoy anymore, everything has been monetized to hell and back. They told us as kids that you can be anything you want when you grow up, the future is bright and if you work hard you will be rewarded and its just not true. I can't do that to another person, these problems are only getting worse with no end in sight.
That's the point? The left get demoralized and the right can't be because they have no morals. Its part of the reason right wingers tend to have a dozen children, it's quite literally biblical drown them in numbers bullshit.
President Comacho has a problem, finds the most qualified person to fix it, does so (reluctantly) and then dosen't take credit. This so divorced from reality that it should be concidred high fantasy.
Yeah, Idiocracy has this basic assumption that people are generally acting in good faith, even the ones with more selfish tendencies. It's been a while since I've seen it, but didn't someone else get frozen along with the MC and started out with a "fuck you, I'll take care of myself however I need to" before later pivoting to a "we need to work together to save the world!"
Just like that Batman scene where the boat full of civilians and the boat full of criminals have the trigger for each others' bombs. In the real world, I'd bet the guard that was handed the trigger on the prisoner boat would have pressed it almost immediately. And if he didn't, there would have been a riot on the civilian boat to push it rather than a calm vote that decides against it, followed closely by the same thing on the prisoner boat. And many from both boats would have just bailed into the water rather than trust the other boat to not kill them. Joker would have been completely right in his prediction of how things would go. Especially in a city like Gotham. The catch should have been that the boats had their own trigger instead of each others'.
Well I'd assume Joker was lying and that each boat actually controlled their own bomb to fuck with the ones who didn't press the button,
because who would believe they didn't press it? It would cause so much more chaos that way (actually max chaos might be to rig both buttons to blow up the prisoners, though I could also see reasons for him to rig up both to blow up the civilians).
I'm not even sure I'd be on the boat in the first place, though it's easy to say that in hindsight, knowing how things turn out. I'd probably have made every effort to gtfo of Gotham earlier than that if I could.
But for an answer that doesn't completely sidestep the question, I don't know. It's a prisoner's dilemma and I know the optimal solution is if both sides trust each other, but I'd also have a hard time trusting both the other prisoner as well as the "guards" (in this case Joker) setting up the whole situation, knowing there's no reason they need to be honest about the outcomes of each choice. Like even in the movie, Joker was going to just blow up at least one of the boats anyways when neither of them pressed the button.
I'd like to think that I wouldn't, but I guess you never really know until you're in the situation. Family would make the equation harder as well, I think I'd be much more willing to trust a stranger with my life rather than the lives of my nieces and nephews.
Not the same level of problems with mass shootings in the UK. And whilst I take the point about healthcare it's a very different kind of issue, and if you get triaged conveniently it can work out for you... Really just depends what you need and how old you are, but at least having a baby and keeping it alive is fairly well covered
Change "shooting" to "knifing" and its 3 for 3. The UK has a huge hooliganism problem. The country is rife with domestic violence. But no (non-police) guns!
Most countries have racism, some have violent racism... and there are some in which terrorist organizations like KKK are freely roaming the streets and are ok for some reason.
Anyway, it feels wierd to speak shit of the USA when there currently are countries actively working on ethnic cleansing.
The US is far from the only country with violent racism. In terms of healthcare, the privatization. The Canadian healthcare system is being increasingly enshittified by conservatives up here, too.
The conservatives are the main ones behind it, and as usual everyone believes it is failing on its own due to 'free means shit' and not realizing just how deep conservative shit is being encrusted into it.
Nah bro, trump try will nuke the superbowl for his false flag and accidentally have his ketchup covered fingers slip and push to many buttons and nuke the rest of the USA leaving the rest of the world and native American reservations in tact
Not foster kids. Foster parents/adoptions are always needing people, even babies. Sometimes the babies have to sleep in the DHR office, because there's nowhere for them to go.
Talked to a social worker - kids in DHS care sleep in homeless shelters, hospitals, DHS offices. Teen group homes are inherently damaging to them; I’ve never seen a good one.
Foster teens. Short term commitment. They will have severe trauma and can be hard to deal with, but you would be amazed at how they respond if you can genuinely provide love. Love and Logic is fucking magic.
If you can’t foster, you can be a child advocate. Many states have CASA programs. Visit the kid once a month, let them know someone cares, and tell the court what you think is best for them. Even just something like a phone call “hey, kid left something behind at the group home - any way we could get that moved?”
Or even just someone to protect them from the group home. A dozen seriously traumatized kids, with staff paid less than $15/hr on a week of training. A place that provides opportunities for people to be around children, who are already isolated and have limited access to supportive adults… and financial incentives to cover anything up.
I don’t think there’s much hope for the future, but we can focus on the now and helping the children who are already here.
The big idea is about giving children choice. “Do you want to get out of the bath and brush your teeth now, or do you want to brush your teeth in the bathtub?” “Should we work on math homework or our essay first?” “Would you like to do your homework at the table with me, or would you like to sit in the living room and listen to music while you do it?”
Both choices should be choices you are happy with.
Many traumatized foster kids will react very poorly to just being told to do things. They struggle with a lot of feelings of powerlessness - being moved from place to place with little consideration of what they want, having to follow new rules from strange adults. You have to work around some “pathological demand avoidance” - you have to avoid tripping them into that flight or fight mode. You empower them by providing them with two acceptable options, instead of reminding them that they have no power over their own lives.
They won’t always go along with those two choices, but then the focus is going to be on natural consequences - “you didn’t clean up your room, so I don’t think we have room for a new squishmallow.”
The name of the book is perfect. You start from a place of love - you want this child to grow into a healthy and happy adult, you want to provide them opportunities because you care deeply for them and that informs your actions. You give them rational rules to their behavior - it’s not about control, it’s about teaching them how to function.
Yeah I don't really get comics like these, or any other form of "[my generation] has it the worst, the world had been destroyed, why should I have kids" that more or less ignores all of history.
For context, I'm gen Z/millennial with a child and planning another with my wife. We're not rich or living in nice city of whatever, just living in a smaller city in Europe.
The catch-22 is that if the people with environmental values don't have kids, those values aren't passed on to the next generation (unless they become teachers or media personalities).
Well, like I mentioned you still need some sort of interaction with kids. Or maybe influence their parents enough to have them indirectly pass on those values you imparted on them. But I still think that if the smartest, kindest, most compassionate people among us stop having kids... well then that's not great for that next generation. I've just always felt that giving up one of the primary factors of life, reproduction, seems very defeatist. But on the other hand, if someone genuinely doesn't want children then by all means don't.
This is the answer. The problem is the huge expense to adopt at least in the US. Money that could make a better life for the child being adopted is taken by the state.
We need to streamline adoption while still vetting the potential parents as unlikely to be abusive.
Yeah this has always pissed me off with my non-parent friends. You really think you have that much influence on random kids you have fleeting interactions with? Unless you’re a teacher or in some other position where it’s your job to interact with kids, your opinions aren’t getting passed down to anyone.
They could always get more involved with their community. They don't have to be a parent or have some specialized education to be a coach or volunteer at a youth center.
My scoutmaster did more to instill honesty, leadership ability, and respect for community in me than my mom or absent father ever did.
Now in my career I take mentoring new hires more seriously than anything other than general safety. My company hires a lot of young men with no direction and shitty childhoods. It's not as good as getting to them when they're young, but when I'm their only friend 200 or 800 miles from home I get the privilege to impart some important ideas and philosophies.
Scoutmaster is a job that works with kids, so I agree with you there. And mentoring is important too. But these things are less important than the impact you make as a parent. For most people the family is the anchor.
Your opinions get passed on whenever you open your mouth, like the dumbass opinion you gave just now. What's the big fucking deal with influencing kids, anyway? If you aren't hanging out with any kids, you can influence other adults.
Or is it appealing because you believe that kids are so easy to influence that they'll just believe any dumb shit that plops out of your mouth? If you give your opinions to adults, then they might disagree and even push back on you. Oh, shit! That isn't as much fun as brainwash---er, I mean, passing on your enlightened opinions to easily-molded young people!
Any society that doesn't impart those values across the board to its citizens will devolve into shit regardless.
It's basically just math.
People with zero values are going to fuck like rabbits and people with values aren't.
If trash family has 5 kids they can't take care of and a dad that leaves, that's at least 4 really mad poor kids that are going to blame a lot on somesuch minority for their problems in 18 years.
It seems like vanishingly few people in the US care about the good of broader humanity anymore. Destroying the environment is fine as long as it creates jobs. Poisoning the water tables forever with fracking is fine as long as it makes cheap gas. Genocide was supported by both parties in the last election. Both parties are waving guns around even as school kids die in ever more frequent mass shootings. Its a race to the bottom and no one cares to change course.
For all those values, even in yourself. There’s no better motivator to make an effort for the future, than having a kid you want the best for. If you don’t have a kid, you’re not passing your environmental values, or you educational values, or all the other values you may have for what makes a better society. Nor do you have any reason to hold to them yourself.
I don’t mean to try to push anyone toward having kids, but if you do want to have kids but give up thinking the world is getting worse, that decision is part of the world getting worse. If you do want kids, there’s all sorts of opportunity to make this a better world for both yourself and them, and longer, and plenty of opportunity to make an actual difference
Just passing along the value of the bidet may be worth it, according to the comic
By that rote though everyone that has had children in the past has cared for their future and the future of the social and actual environment they will inherit. We wouldn’t be having this discussion if any semblance of that was true.
There are plenty of reasons to think this true, and plenty of reasons the world is getting better over time. Maybe not the next four years, and maybe not for everyone, but there are so many stays at global and national levels that have trended up for decades and continue to do so.
And before someone single-minded chimes in about Gaza. War and atrocity has always been an ugly part of our history and also has trended downward over the last several decades. Just the fact that we can get so worked up about ending atrocities somewhere else in the world that doesn’t affect us, is a great sign for the future
If you don’t have a kid, you’re not passing your environmental values, or you educational values, or all the other values you may have for what makes a better society. Nor do you have any reason to hold to them yourself.
...
Why does it have to be my kid for me to care?
Like actually. Are you seriously saying being a parent somehow intrinsically makes someone a better, more caring, and impactful, person? Or that parenthood is the only way to achieve true conviction? That's literally not how any of this works.
Not bringing children into the world in no way prevents you from caring about making the world a better place, and acting to make it so. And doing the things that make the world better doesn't functionally require having a kid. All it takes is some basic fucking decency.
Which is something people already have, but get taken away by the grind of survival or material success. That is maybe why you have this fucked up idea that people get it by having a kid, but in reality that's just a huge life event that wakes some people up enough to take a look around and start caring again.
And passing good things on doesn't require having descendants. If you've ever changed someones mind on something for the better, you've successfully passed on "values you may have for what makes a better society". The person whose mind you changed doesn't even need to be younger than you, thought doesn't procreate through fucking genetics.
Plenty of parents are made no more profound than they were before by the act of procreating, and will conently continue to do nothing to improve the world. There are parents who will protect their own to the detriment of everyone else.
Kids though, if raised by caring parents, care from the start, but then have that heart crushed by society until they too have a kid of their own.
But in there is way for everyone to care, all the time.
The whole idea that it's ok not to care about and deal with bad stuff unless you personally are somehow impacted is the whole reason we're in this mess, and it's perpetuated by people being forced to live in a constant scramble of stress and consumerism.
I would add that the sentiment is also wrong in the other direction. I’ve personally encountered multiple parents and grandparents who hit me with the “well it won’t affect me, I’ll be long gone” reasoning regarding climate change.
So yeah. What a stupid and offensively self centered thing to say. If you personally didn’t give a shit about other people before, that’s actually a character flaw, not a rite of passage you complete by roping children into this mess
Think about it... If Gen alpha agrees not to have kids, there will still be a generation after them, raised by Gen Z. A lot of families have a generation gap between parents and their children.
generation (noun): "the living things which share a common ancestry and are alive at (or about) the same time."
The word does not refer solely to humans. It existed before the habit of neatly labeling people born within an arbitrary range of years. For example, medical researchers will record changes in microbes from generation to generation (without making up names for each generation).
So, if our generation (the people alive today, or any time in the next ~9 months) agreed to not have children then humanity's climate crisis would be solved. In fact, every human problem would be solved. Think about it.
I'm not defining terms; I'm repeating how the terms are defined. You can look it up in any dictionary. After that, if you still feel like arguing about it I'm not your opponent. You can contact Mrs. Mirriam-Webster, or Mr. Oxford, etc. Please post the exchange! Maybe the argument, "That's not how it works," will convince them.
Since you mentioned Webster... See definition "1.b" for the most common meaning of the term when people are talking about human generations (Millennials, boomers, anything that starts with "Gen"). Context matters.
Yes. And tragedy is categorically bad, and tragedies cannot be experienced by that which is not alive (i.e. non-sentient). Thusly, a total absence of (sentient) life would be a total absence of tragedies and vice versa; in other words, sentient life and tragedy are virtually biconditional. The continuation of sentient life and tragedy is wholly avoidable if the relevant capable parties were willing, and it can often be abated on a small scale on an individual basis.
Most kids though? I'm not going to go looking for stats but let's just say 95% of children are outliving their parents right now. Awkward sentence there. I mean parents who are dying today, 95% of them didn't outlive their children. I hope that makes sense. Yes that's not how statistics work, I'm trying to make a point.
What's an acceptable level to drop to before we say fuck this we're done having kids? I knew I didn't want kids when I was a kid, but I'm an outlier.
Let's say 85% is the number for kids born today. I believe that's already unacceptable. It's so unnatural.
I think the number is worse than that. The mass climate migration/water wars are going to really get moving in the 2040s if not earlier. I don't want to live through that. I definitely don't want a child to live through that.
Historically we've tolerated MUCH higher rates of infant and child mortality than we do today. People will keep having kids even if most of them will die.
Agreed. It's just now we have more options. At least we did before the Christian Nationalist Supreme Court made abortion illegal in half of the US. Even with this there are still more options and more education than in the distant past.
WE HAVE ENOUGH PEOPLE, THE PLANET IS BURNING, THEY WILL NOT LEAD GOOD LIVES. IT'S NOT WORTH IT. PULL OUT BEFORE YOU NUT HOLY CHRIST PLEASE DO NOT HAVE KIDS
Once arctic ice sheet coverage gets below 1,000,000 square kilometres, the planet will be absorbing more heat than it reflects and this is called a Blue Ocean Event.
The BOE will trigger the Clathrate Gun which will cause seabeds to rapidly realease fuck tons of methane, cooking the earth in it's own atmosphere.
So it's basically a race between whether the drought and famine kill us all first, or the BOE setting off the Clathrate Gun will.
Either way, it is unlikely the human race survives the century. Creating more people to suffer in this dying world, is stupid and cruel and is only going to speed up our demise.
Yeah this is what frustrates me when people complain about illegal immigration. Those places are now experiencing food shortages and will just get worse. Where do you think people will go when there is no food in their own country. Do you think they will just let their children starve? Do you really think a physical wall will stop them from trying to feed their children?
Would you put your child through all that, plus force them to wage slave their whole life to pay their landed lord? All for a hit of dopamine and serotonin?
Consider loading up a crack pipe instead and save some needless suffering.
Is that directed at me, or at other people reading this comment chain?
And why are you telling people to smoke crack? You are promoting suffering by doing this, and that is illogical and mean spirited when the rest of your comment is talking about reducing suffering by not procreating.
Are you arguing in bad faith here, or have you just not thought this through properly?
putting aside the innumerable issues with the stance "it is fundamentally immoral to have children", sweet mother of mercy the solution is not life-ruining addictive substances
My SO and I have both decided that we definitely don't want kids but would discuss the subject if any one of us seriously considered it for one reason or another. What we agreed on, though, is to look for adoption rather than biological children. We both have stuff we'd rather not pass along, firstly, and secondly, there's so many children that don't have any family. It's sorta like "adopt don't shop", if you will.
You don’t even have to be in a stable situation to be a Big Brother/Sister at your local Boys and Girls club or a court advocate/CASA for a child. Volunteer at a school district. Children recognize how fucked everything is, and on the whole they are suffering. We need kind and loving adults to show up for them - to teach them art and read them stories to show them the parts of living that can hopefully make it worth it.
At this point I think the GOP are just taunting people who won't bring kids into this. Jokes on them though, if theyre having kids from some sort obligation and not to love and properly nurture them it's just bad news for everyone involved. Have fun with all that trauma.
And religious indoctrination programming children to blindly follow strongman authority figures and not require any proof when forming their wolrdview.
Conservatives are often very insecure people who have never overcome their own childhood trauma or understood why they want children. That trauma and insecurity just gets passed down.
I know, I'm the child of two. For the last 20 years I've been completely isolated from all my family by no doing of my own. I often wonder what the fuck all that was about. You know, the whole, bringing 4 kids into the world then putting fasicists into power. Like I got problems, true, but I'd of prefered keeping myself and not being a plague to those around me.
Yeah sounds like my childhood. My parents made my life a living hell then suddenly grew up and realized that everyone around them was broken. We have a better relationship but the damage was done long ago to me siblings and we still have problems.
This plus observing and learning from others convinced me that most people should not have children prior to the age of 30. This is time to grow up, party some, get established, and become yourself. Then you’re ready to parent.
Thanks for the nice words. I’ll keep an eye out for you in the future. Need to figure out Joe to do tags.
Yeah because deadly viruses aren't still a thing, and aren't becoming a much more massive problem and we're DEFINITELY not on the cusp of an additional pandemic
But being more serious: I think I can express the feeling of things being particularly worse now in a way that isn’t just recency bias.
Sure, over time technology has improved and that’s generally speaking allowed for better standards of living, at least for the people at the right end of that technology. (Not so great if you’re being conquered because someone shows up with guns for example.) So you could look at the past and say it was worse because materially things like food availability and medicine have become better over time.
But key to this was that all of this was a struggle of humans over nature. To the extent things were bad, there were tangible things we could do to improve.
These days, so many of our problems are self-inflicted and technology and economic development mostly makes them worse. Climate change is the obvious big one, but then there’s stuff like:
Weapons have become increasingly destructive and centrally usable. A small number of people can cause a lot more damage than they ever could in the past.
Surveillance technology invades our privacy in a way that’s unprecedented in human history.
Automation, communications, and transportation technology have made workers less and less powerful and therefore more subject to abuse and artificial poverty. This is one of the more messed up things about capitalism. Technology gets better and rather than getting the benefits of that progress, it actually hurts a lot of people.
Advances in science and technology, particularly data science, allow the powerful to hyper-optimize the bad things they were always doing or enables them to do things they’ve wanted to do.
A financialized economy creates economic catastrophes where people go homeless or starve without any actual changes to material conditions. The numbers got screwed up or the investors panicked and now everything sucks for no reason?
More generally, we can produce enough of the necessities of life for everyone, but capitalism ensures that those necessities won’t make it to people. Capitalism depends on scarcity. If you had a house you wouldn’t need to pay a landlord. If you had food you wouldn’t need to pay food companies. If you had both you wouldn’t need to go work and put up with awful conditions. We’ve solved our most fundamental problems and yet because of the interests of the system and those in power, that progress gets held back.
In the past, even if things were rough now, you could maybe look forward to them improving. Now it feels like the walls are closing in. Unless we actively do something about it, things are going to get worse for most people as more and more wealth accumulates in private hands, as we become subject to increasingly powerful forms of control, and as the powerful destroy the environment we need to live.
In the past, children were your labor force, health care and pension plan. People had many children so at least some survived into adulthood. There wasn't much alternative back in the day.
Now children are a net cost. They can't even take care of you in old age if government pensions or retirement plans don't pan out because many can barely feed themselves.
So, the best time to have children was roughly before 1900. That's when things started to change.
Yeah that's how I feel. People still had kids during wars, famines, imprisonment, potential nuclear war. Every problem humans have ever faced really. This is the best time to be alive ever. There are tonne of problems we are going to face in the near future but that has always been the case.
The biggest reasons people are having kids is we're all overweight and feel bad about ourselves and are constantly comparing to people/couples online. We have phone/shopping/gaming addictions to deal with all this mental stress. Online dating is shit. 3rd places don't exist anymore. We are all lonely and meeting someone and figuring everything out to the point where children are an viable option seems impossible. Easier to just say fuck it and just post memes and complain about the world is bad now so I'm not having kids. And to be fair all of that has a lot of truth in it.
Incorrect. The biggest reason people aren't having kids is that the planet is dying and no one can afford them anyway. Life is nothing to do to a person at this point.
Why do you think the politicians that are accelerating inequality are the same politicians that are trying to outlaw abortion?
They want babies because they need more workers to distribute inequality and produce more wealth for the shareholders. Foster kids are less likely to go to college, so they’re perfect fuel for the machine.
I'm Gen X, but cusp with Millennial. I said at 15 or 16 I'd never have kids & stuck with it. I'm more resolute than ever & feel like I would have massive guilt if I had caved. I felt the world was too fucked up back in the 90s. I wonder how my younger self would deal with the world today.
I'm on the other side of the generational gap (nearly gen x, but millennial), and I was terrified during my late teens/early 20s of becoming a parent. I could not imagine raising a child the way I was living paycheque to paycheque, if I had a paycheque at all....
That feeling never went away, and I still wouldn't know how I could possibly afford that. I decided in my mid 20s that children would be a decision I would leave up to my wife (wherever I had a wife to make the decision). I was/am instinctually driven to want them (a feeling I mostly disregard), but given the state of the world and my own financial situation, I can't say that I want to force any intelligent being, especially one that is my offspring, to suffer through a lifetime of this shit like I have been forced to so far.
I didn't ask to be here. If someone had given me a choice, I would have probably opted out of gestures all of this.
I'm currently in a long term relationship, and we're planning on signing the papers next year, so soon I'll have someone I can legitimately call my wife. She is very much on the side of "never have kids". So that's my decision as well.
Instinctual drive isn't enough to cause me to overlook how things are going. I love my (non-existent) children too much, than to force them into living a life in these circumstances. Fuck no.
I was/am instinctually driven to want them (a feeling I mostly disregard), but given the state of the world and my own financial situation, I can’t say that I want to force any intelligent being, especially one that is my offspring, to suffer through a lifetime of this shit like I have been forced to so far.
This is interesting to me, as I've never had the biological urge to have kids. I love them and enjoy hanging out with them, joking, playing, etc., but never my own. In any case, I commend you on being resolute.
I’m currently in a long term relationship, and we’re planning on signing the papers next year, so soon I’ll have someone I can legitimately call my wife. She is very much on the side of “never have kids”. So that’s my decision as well.
My girlfriend doesn't want them either. She's a good deal younger than me - 31 years old - but she says something similar to me: raising kids in this world would be a tragedy.
Frankly, I've always felt there are too many humans. I never understood the push for more. Just maintain or reduce the population naturally.
Good luck staving off that biological imperative. I feel lucky not to have it myself.
It's not difficult for me, to say the feeling isn't felt very strongly, would probably be an understatement.
The other comment I want to make is that I agree that there's too many humans, however, the economy survives by constant growth, so that's a thing. It has to do with how money works and is valuated.
The video "money as debt" is a good resource for more info on that.
Bluntly, I don't care since I'll be long dead when the economy collapses under it's own weight.
I considered that and it was part of my early stands: IF i had a kid, I would adopt since there are so many without parents.
Just like Millenials and Gen Zs, my life is hard enough to pay for financially. I don't know that I could provide something positive for a child. I need to be honest with myself about this shit.
I got a vasectomy as soon as I could which was at 26. I would have done it sooner but I had insurance problems and was broke before that. It was the best decision I've ever made for myself.
Yeah I’m afraid that the lesson is that Gen Z is not actually the future, they are going to repeat the past. What makes me sad is that they should have been the future but social media made sure that didn’t happen.
Did social media make sure that didn't happen, or did the fact that virtually every generation ultimately repeats the mistakes of the one before it ensure that didn't happen?
I mean genocide joe is calling any democrat who wants to stop sending weapons to israel a hamas supporter. I can understand why they didn't believe the dems would fix the situation.
Credibility that a politician will do what the people they're asking to vote for them want isn't stupid shit, that's the absolute most basic aspect of representative democracy.
Do you think the republicans would have voted for Trump if his messaging was mostly about how the democrats are correct and he's going to do what the democratic voters want more competently, and called his constituents antisemitic terrorist supporters?
Then surely you understand why the dems trotting out Liz Cheney to represent them and talking about the importance of building the wall, being tough on crime, tax-cuts for businesses, increasing military spending, etc all lowers democratic turnout?
That's just how representative democracy works. You can go "Damn I wish people tended to vote for a party they don't believe will do what they want because the other side is worse", but that's just not how it works in reality.
The democrats failed the people, the people did not fail the democrats.
The democrats should have been able to run a goddamn cardboard cutout and people should have turned out in droves to vote against that shitstain. This isn't 2000. This wasn't the kind of election where any of the things you mentioned should have been a factor. It's insane.
Yes, I absolutely can blame the people for being too lazy or stupid to do the minimum possible to protect themselves and their neighbors. These excuses are just goddamn braindead, and it will never not astound me that when comparing a functioning adult to a giant corrupt sack of shit, that anyone anywhere had to have a conversation about why they should bother to show uo to vote for the functioning adult.
You're/they're/we're now going to pay for having a complete lack of perspective. Buckle up, it is not going to be fun for anyone. Except the oligarchs I guess.
So says the headline, but the entire article focuses on males and how much they love that he did shit like Rogan. I'm not saying young women can't also be idiots or angry at the present state of things, but they didn't completely forget that the right sees them as procreation slaves.
Well yeah, young men bought into all the incelfluencer crap they were being fed. Probably a good thing since young women by and large are flocking the opposite way and absolutely don't want to fuck conservatives.
The deeper tragedy is in the meme as a whole. There has been so much power, control, and hope sucked away from us... and they try to replace it with panic (usually to buy a product or lie). I would like to believe that the situation is not hopeless, and that we are not powerless...
Not really. Most of Europe is just fine. We in the UK have elected a labor government for the first time in several elections as the conservatives severely fucked up multiple times. Far right wing sentiment is on the rise in several countries, but that doesn't make them the majority, so they aren't winning elections anywhere but locally. Mostly the far right are just taking votes from the moderate right.
In the same breath, we now have climate scientists saying that remaining below 1.5° this century is all but a pipedream, right wing leaders surging in Italy, Germany, France, Hungary, and other EU countries stoking socially regressive rhetoric, and the AMOC could fail as soon as 2026, plunging Europe temperatures by 10° and causing a new annual storm front akin to Florida right above France and Germany. I am less than optimistic for Europe's future as a whole, as crises drive further nationalism and right wing populism. In future, with european crops struggling under these worse conditions and with the UK currently reliant on imports for 60% its food, the worst is likely yet to come for us.
So nothing has really happened yet then? While that all sounds alarming it's all theoretical at best. We as a species have already made large inroads on pollution and climate change. Even China is building huge wind and solar farms. It's now more profitable to invest in renewables than fossil fuels. It seems to me the main people holding us back are the USA who for some reason seem to be going backwards.
You tend to find that as people struggle more it's far left wing politics that appeals to the working class just as much as the far right. Hence things like the recent labor victory. Last I heard in France the far right party was beaten by a coalition on the left. I don't really know what's happening in Germany, but I imagine it's much the same. Both extremes of politics get amplified in times of struggle. It's probably why the Democrats failed in America, because they are too moderate and too centrist.
Evolution determined by mating is basically over for humans. In the time it takes a species to meaningfully change, humans will be genetically engineered.
It wouldn't be intelligence pruned. Plenty of smart people are committed to fighting for humanity, are prospering, and won't succumb to doomer echo chambers.
A shitty life situation has never stopped anybody from having kids. Quite the opposite, the less educated a society and the lower the prospect of comfort, the more kids people have. Poor and miserable people fuck for fun and don't care about proper contraceptives, resulting in more kids. Further more, people believe that the more kids you'll have, the more likely it is that one of them is going to end up rich and successfull.
That's because people are actually more educated than ever at least in part thanks to the internet. In most places the standard of living has actually gone up, in some cases quite drastically. So people are more comfortable. A lot of the doomerism stuff doesn't take into account any of the awful stuff that happened in the past, and most are only focused on the USA which is having weird problems at the moment. In most of the world the material wealth of the average person has gone up, not down.
Give me a break. How about the people having kids in:
-900,000: Whatever happened to kill off almost all humans
-1177: Bronze Age collapse
535: Volcanic winter of 536
1347-1351: Black Death
1914-1918: WWI and Spanish Flu
1929-1939: Great Depression and Dust Bowl
1962: Great Leap Forward
1943-1945: Worst killings and bombings of WWII
2020: For our lifetimes. COVID and 100 other disasters. So bad most have forgotten it started with Australia burning to the ground, 1 billion animals killed.
As to racism, we watched Mississippi Burning last night. My wife isn't from America and was horrified. "Honey, that was happening when our parents were kids."
The trouble with this graphic is that millennials are part of the problem now. The oldest are over forty. We've all seen the footage of Jan 6th. There were very few boomers in their 60 and 70s.
There's a whole fucking generation between Boomers and Millennials. Yes, Gen X does get overlooked often, that's the running joke. But they're far more likely to have soaked up Boomerisms and benefited from better economic ROI than Millennials who hit college just at the cusp of the 2000s, and for whom everything thereafter has been a shit toboggan.
Matt Gaetz is an elder millennial like me, and he is a fucking dipshit... and he's going to be attorney general of the United States despite being a proven pedophile and having committed statutory rape AND has minimal legal experience.
Im amazed at how much X has had kids. Seems nuts. Then I realize I might have done it if I had went 4 years to college and started working right after and if within a few years made a family raising type of wage. That double major and one year in a PhD may have saved me.
Kudos to those not having kids. I've had two recently fully knowing it's going to be tough on them, but I'm going to do the responsible thing and teach them self defense and how to disrespect authority.
Plus as a bonus, I'm going to get those additional family members when we're protecting the homestead from raiders.
It doesn't matter where you live. Even if you're in the perfect geography and latitude to make climate change no big deal locally; the mass migration, wars, and production disruption will certainly affect you and especially your children.
Ironically, if temperature gets to a high degree enough, so much water vapor, methane and carbon dioxide will be on the atmosphere capturing heat (which will eventually escape), but more importantly, reflecting it on the upper atmosphere layers, that we will freeze to death before even feeling the burn LMAO 🤣
Water vapour is quite good at absorbing heat, and it insulates the atmosphere too(it's often warmer at night if its cloudy), would it reflect enough heat for that sort of cooling to happen? Sounds like something that would take a lot longer to happen than the time it will take to get too hot for us to survive without living underground or something.
Its bad, I get it. But lets go back to 1968 when baby boomers who would give birth to the millennial generation was born. Vietnam, political assassinations , race riots, anarchist bombings. Throw in watergate and stagflation. The world has always been burning.
Well you can have them, then just say "screw them" cause you got your own problems to deal with as western society would prefer you act.
Their only purpose is to support you when you get old anyways. Everyone knows that.
Honestly if I have a kid it would only to raise them to be a post apocalyptic war lord and hopefully give them a tragic enough backstory to survive the wasteland on.
Maybe I will hold back a wave of marauders and while they see the door buckling I tell them I love them and they need to fix the world to be a better place where kids don't have to lose their parents then throw them down the escape slide as I turn around to start going with a chainsaw through the enemies.
Maybe I will just name them Chadderick...
I dunno, guess will see what works best in the moment.
Look... Um... Don't take this the wrong way because global warming is serious shit... and the fascism trend is super scary... But don't think you're the only generation that has a scary world outlook. You got to live your life. You've got to get the most out of this world that you can. As hard as it is to believe, things are better now than they ever have been in the history of time. Unarguably.
There are many things to be unhappy about, there are many things that we should fight to change, but it's self-defeating to only see the negative and to be this cynical. You have to see life as it is and enjoy the positives, savior the positives, Go out where the weather is good, find a special person and bask in their company, And yes, start a family with them. Create a pocket of goodness in your little slice of the world... Keep the rest of the shit out. Create memories and love and laughter and joy where you can. This is the way it's been done since forever.
Our parents and grandparents had kids - depending on your age - when there was a world war and tens of thousands of people were dying daily in their country, or in the 50 years where the world was always on the brink of getting destroyed in a nuclear apocalypse if one of the two world powers made the wrong move. Were they dumb?
Not to downplay on the current emergencies which are existential and terrifying, especially seeing how little as a species we are doing to address them - but they are a bit of a silly reason not to have kids.
If you don’t want kids don’t have them, you do you :) far too many people have children out of peer or societal pressure or just carelessness, and we could really use much fewer of those, considering the societal damage of absent or careless parenting. But just be honest with yourself, no need to blame viruses and “no toilet paper”.
Being self centered and tribal is more the norm than ever before in my lifetime. Its going to be a very bumpy next 50 years for people who come into the world now.
How many of those kids were intentional though? Birth control and abortion were restricted or just not available. I'm sure most of the people who had kids in the past did not regret it but I'm not going to pretend they meant to get pregnant.
And the toilet paper thing is obviously a joke. A bit of levity in the horror.
Lol having a planet that won't sustain us because we're actively murdering it is absolutely the silliest reason ever not to have kids. Go on, progeny! Enjoy your water wars and starvation! It would've been incredibly silly not to create you just so you could endure it.
I get it, the world is overwhelming, and one person can't possibly neither bear nor solve it all.
What helps is limiting your scope: lower your media diet, focus on real people and relationships, focus on the things you can do something about, and do those well.
That's not the same as doing your thing at the expense of others', but that it's fine to learn and correct and simplify as best you can. If you learn that your car is made from endangered child labor and methane leeching radioactive rain forest - you don't have to burn it at once, but be mindful not to get that type of car the next time.
Find one goal and task and keep your head down until you reach it, it's the only way any of us can get any real work done.
Believing this tripe is what causes some people to not bother trying to improve the only actual life we have here on this planet. Comforting lies do not help.
I love the part were they kind of observe it in a detached, third person point of view, as if it didn't affect them at all, and taking care of the issue in any way was beyond even their wildest dreams, just because they consider themselves above the issue.
Oh, but by all means, keep self pruning your evolutionary tree branch.
But do try to use those extra resources to last a bit. You don't want to miss the global chaos the lack of social security is gonna create in about 20 to 30 years, it's gonna be sick
The detachment is more of a defeatism issue. When you have zero power to affect change, what the hell else can you do but work through the day and try to not have a breakdown?
Mind you, I vote when that comes around, I just don't have the mental fortitude anymore to not be detached. Don't have the time or space to do more than that, which is rather by design I expect.
The fact that you believe that you have zero power and then participate in this thread, not realizing one of the leading causes on the why the situation or problem got to this point.
You people can do so much more than you think and you squander it on petty online squabbles
So clarify what I can do. I vote, so that's out of the way.
Donate? With what money?
Help/run campaigns? With what time and/or money?
Be informed? I generally am and a fat lot of good it did.
Inform others? Not an influencer, so no reach. The few crazies I am adjacent to I either can't discuss things with because it'd be unprofessional and I don't want to lose my job or they drank deep of the Kool aid. And the non crazies are usually on my side even when I do have info they don't already know.
Take people to the polls? Everyone for whom I could offer such a service early voted.
So what power am I overlooking? I participate to the best of my ability and within my limited resources so what am I missing?
Both obviously. I did my part and sanity lost in the US. I continue to have no meaningful power.
Our lives are also on the list to lose. The health and well-being of those that depend on us as well. Losing our chains is great if that's really all you have to lose.
I love the fact that you ignore the parents who put them on the planet saying "they can solve it" then going on to destroy be dicks to people and the environment. I love it that you completely forget about the Fridays for Future, Last Generation, the people glueing themselves to the streets in protest, lots of other movements, and the ensuing reaction "oh, you're children, STFU". Funny how selective memory works.
Oh, but by all means, keep self pruning your evolutionary tree branch.
Yes, by all means, keep pumping out units and teaching them to condescend against others online. They'll surely change the world in a positive way. Don't forget to tell your children how nobody did nothing, but you, oh so brave and valiant Shardikprime, forced them into the world to bestow a wonderful life in the climate wars. They'll be so grateful for your thoughtfulness.
Like asking billionaires to pretty please stop destroying and start saving the planet while I recycle my recyclables? Yep, pretty sure I've done everything in my power. And they don't care.
Thats one of the reasons i'm not having kids. I have a decent life by any metric but I had to work my ass off and face a tonne of resistance in my career. It always feels like I'm playing catch up with the cost of everything going up and up to the point where I'm just exhausted and depressed. Like, what is the point of living?! it honestly feels like theres just nothing left to enjoy anymore, everything has been monetized to hell and back. They told us as kids that you can be anything you want when you grow up, the future is bright and if you work hard you will be rewarded and its just not true. I can't do that to another person, these problems are only getting worse with no end in sight.
That's the point? The left get demoralized and the right can't be because they have no morals. Its part of the reason right wingers tend to have a dozen children, it's quite literally biblical drown them in numbers bullshit.
Idiocracy is a documentary
It absolutely isnt
President Comacho has a problem, finds the most qualified person to fix it, does so (reluctantly) and then dosen't take credit. This so divorced from reality that it should be concidred high fantasy.
Yeah, Idiocracy has this basic assumption that people are generally acting in good faith, even the ones with more selfish tendencies. It's been a while since I've seen it, but didn't someone else get frozen along with the MC and started out with a "fuck you, I'll take care of myself however I need to" before later pivoting to a "we need to work together to save the world!"
Just like that Batman scene where the boat full of civilians and the boat full of criminals have the trigger for each others' bombs. In the real world, I'd bet the guard that was handed the trigger on the prisoner boat would have pressed it almost immediately. And if he didn't, there would have been a riot on the civilian boat to push it rather than a calm vote that decides against it, followed closely by the same thing on the prisoner boat. And many from both boats would have just bailed into the water rather than trust the other boat to not kill them. Joker would have been completely right in his prediction of how things would go. Especially in a city like Gotham. The catch should have been that the boats had their own trigger instead of each others'.
Would you press the button?
Well I'd assume Joker was lying and that each boat actually controlled their own bomb to fuck with the ones who didn't press the button, because who would believe they didn't press it? It would cause so much more chaos that way (actually max chaos might be to rig both buttons to blow up the prisoners, though I could also see reasons for him to rig up both to blow up the civilians).
I'm not even sure I'd be on the boat in the first place, though it's easy to say that in hindsight, knowing how things turn out. I'd probably have made every effort to gtfo of Gotham earlier than that if I could.
But for an answer that doesn't completely sidestep the question, I don't know. It's a prisoner's dilemma and I know the optimal solution is if both sides trust each other, but I'd also have a hard time trusting both the other prisoner as well as the "guards" (in this case Joker) setting up the whole situation, knowing there's no reason they need to be honest about the outcomes of each choice. Like even in the movie, Joker was going to just blow up at least one of the boats anyways when neither of them pressed the button.
Best bet would probably be to go for a swim.
What about you?
I'd like to think that I wouldn't, but I guess you never really know until you're in the situation. Family would make the equation harder as well, I think I'd be much more willing to trust a stranger with my life rather than the lives of my nieces and nephews.
That’s the only thing preventing it from being categorized as a documentary.
I thought about it and it’s just unfortunate kimbo slice died before he could eventually be president. He could have been the one.
Now that'd a name I havent heard in a while
Yes, it's called (disgustingly) the "Quiverfull Movement"
Look at this guy who thinks the USA invented racism and holds a monopoly on it.
The comic is very America-centric if you look at the problems mentioned in totality.
In Europe it's just sparkling "let them down in the Mediterranean and/or make sure they stay in their own neighborhoods."
I was going to say... I don't see the UK anywhere on this map
Not the same level of problems with mass shootings in the UK. And whilst I take the point about healthcare it's a very different kind of issue, and if you get triaged conveniently it can work out for you... Really just depends what you need and how old you are, but at least having a baby and keeping it alive is fairly well covered
I bet they would hold a monopoly on it if they could. Damn I wish they did
I mean, the UK has 2 out of 3 of those. And most countries have the violent racism.
Change "shooting" to "knifing" and its 3 for 3. The UK has a huge hooliganism problem. The country is rife with domestic violence. But no (non-police) guns!
Most countries have racism, some have violent racism... and there are some in which terrorist organizations like KKK are freely roaming the streets and are ok for some reason.
Anyway, it feels wierd to speak shit of the USA when there currently are countries actively working on ethnic cleansing.
Yep. You dumbfucks want to talk about "muh racism"? Be Uyghur or Palestinian or STFU. That's REAL shit.
Just because a problem is worse somewhere else, doesn't make the problem trivial here.
That bar you're bragging about stepping over is subterranean.
RIP Alaska, Hawaii, and Michigan's Upper Peninsula
But wait there's more!
The US is far from the only country with violent racism. In terms of healthcare, the privatization. The Canadian healthcare system is being increasingly enshittified by conservatives up here, too.
The Canadian healthcare system is being increasingly enshittified
by conservativesup here, tooFTFY
The conservatives are the main ones behind it, and as usual everyone believes it is failing on its own due to 'free means shit' and not realizing just how deep conservative shit is being encrusted into it.
When we go down we are taking all of you with us.
Don’t worry we know
Nah bro, trump try will nuke the superbowl for his false flag and accidentally have his ketchup covered fingers slip and push to many buttons and nuke the rest of the USA leaving the rest of the world and native American reservations in tact
Now tell us what you think needs to be done about g*psies.
r/iam14andthisisdeep
If I ever decide to have kids then I'm adopting because I can't in good conscience bring a life into this shitty world
Given the glut of unwanted children from our abortion prohibition, we'll be needing a lot of new adoptive parents in the near future.
Babies get adopted quickly. It's the older children who need homes.
Not foster kids. Foster parents/adoptions are always needing people, even babies. Sometimes the babies have to sleep in the DHR office, because there's nowhere for them to go.
Talked to a social worker - kids in DHS care sleep in homeless shelters, hospitals, DHS offices. Teen group homes are inherently damaging to them; I’ve never seen a good one.
Foster teens. Short term commitment. They will have severe trauma and can be hard to deal with, but you would be amazed at how they respond if you can genuinely provide love. Love and Logic is fucking magic.
If you can’t foster, you can be a child advocate. Many states have CASA programs. Visit the kid once a month, let them know someone cares, and tell the court what you think is best for them. Even just something like a phone call “hey, kid left something behind at the group home - any way we could get that moved?”
Or even just someone to protect them from the group home. A dozen seriously traumatized kids, with staff paid less than $15/hr on a week of training. A place that provides opportunities for people to be around children, who are already isolated and have limited access to supportive adults… and financial incentives to cover anything up.
I don’t think there’s much hope for the future, but we can focus on the now and helping the children who are already here.
Please elaborate about the magic of love and logic
The big idea is about giving children choice. “Do you want to get out of the bath and brush your teeth now, or do you want to brush your teeth in the bathtub?” “Should we work on math homework or our essay first?” “Would you like to do your homework at the table with me, or would you like to sit in the living room and listen to music while you do it?”
Both choices should be choices you are happy with.
Many traumatized foster kids will react very poorly to just being told to do things. They struggle with a lot of feelings of powerlessness - being moved from place to place with little consideration of what they want, having to follow new rules from strange adults. You have to work around some “pathological demand avoidance” - you have to avoid tripping them into that flight or fight mode. You empower them by providing them with two acceptable options, instead of reminding them that they have no power over their own lives.
They won’t always go along with those two choices, but then the focus is going to be on natural consequences - “you didn’t clean up your room, so I don’t think we have room for a new squishmallow.”
The name of the book is perfect. You start from a place of love - you want this child to grow into a healthy and happy adult, you want to provide them opportunities because you care deeply for them and that informs your actions. You give them rational rules to their behavior - it’s not about control, it’s about teaching them how to function.
Good to know. Thank you for sharing.
Healthy, white babies do. It's a lot harder for minority kids, preemies, and anyone with congenital health issues (even relatively minor ones)
Ceaușescu's Romania
Adopt, don't shop lmao
We didn't start the fire. It was always burning since the world's been turning.
Yeah I don't really get comics like these, or any other form of "[my generation] has it the worst, the world had been destroyed, why should I have kids" that more or less ignores all of history.
For context, I'm gen Z/millennial with a child and planning another with my wife. We're not rich or living in nice city of whatever, just living in a smaller city in Europe.
Oh thank god one person on this threat who is not opposed to children or straight out antinatalist
The catch-22 is that if the people with environmental values don't have kids, those values aren't passed on to the next generation (unless they become teachers or media personalities).
You don’t need to have kids to pass on values. The basic premise of your statement doesn’t hold up.
Well, like I mentioned you still need some sort of interaction with kids. Or maybe influence their parents enough to have them indirectly pass on those values you imparted on them. But I still think that if the smartest, kindest, most compassionate people among us stop having kids... well then that's not great for that next generation. I've just always felt that giving up one of the primary factors of life, reproduction, seems very defeatist. But on the other hand, if someone genuinely doesn't want children then by all means don't.
I know at least one friend that wants to adopt/foster once they're ready, instead of having biological children.
The justification was similar to what you said, where they want to pass on their values / legacy, but don't care about the genetic side
This is the answer. The problem is the huge expense to adopt at least in the US. Money that could make a better life for the child being adopted is taken by the state.
We need to streamline adoption while still vetting the potential parents as unlikely to be abusive.
We don't need more people. We already have too many.
Yeah this has always pissed me off with my non-parent friends. You really think you have that much influence on random kids you have fleeting interactions with? Unless you’re a teacher or in some other position where it’s your job to interact with kids, your opinions aren’t getting passed down to anyone.
They could always get more involved with their community. They don't have to be a parent or have some specialized education to be a coach or volunteer at a youth center.
My scoutmaster did more to instill honesty, leadership ability, and respect for community in me than my mom or absent father ever did.
Now in my career I take mentoring new hires more seriously than anything other than general safety. My company hires a lot of young men with no direction and shitty childhoods. It's not as good as getting to them when they're young, but when I'm their only friend 200 or 800 miles from home I get the privilege to impart some important ideas and philosophies.
Scoutmaster is a job that works with kids, so I agree with you there. And mentoring is important too. But these things are less important than the impact you make as a parent. For most people the family is the anchor.
Your opinions get passed on whenever you open your mouth, like the dumbass opinion you gave just now. What's the big fucking deal with influencing kids, anyway? If you aren't hanging out with any kids, you can influence other adults.
Or is it appealing because you believe that kids are so easy to influence that they'll just believe any dumb shit that plops out of your mouth? If you give your opinions to adults, then they might disagree and even push back on you. Oh, shit! That isn't as much fun as brainwash---er, I mean, passing on your enlightened opinions to easily-molded young people!
You’re sure influencing me right now, lemme tell ya.
lol fucking obliterated
Any society that doesn't impart those values across the board to its citizens will devolve into shit regardless.
It's basically just math.
People with zero values are going to fuck like rabbits and people with values aren't.
If trash family has 5 kids they can't take care of and a dad that leaves, that's at least 4 really mad poor kids that are going to blame a lot on somesuch minority for their problems in 18 years.
How often do children adopt their parents' values?
It seems like vanishingly few people in the US care about the good of broader humanity anymore. Destroying the environment is fine as long as it creates jobs. Poisoning the water tables forever with fracking is fine as long as it makes cheap gas. Genocide was supported by both parties in the last election. Both parties are waving guns around even as school kids die in ever more frequent mass shootings. Its a race to the bottom and no one cares to change course.
For all those values, even in yourself. There’s no better motivator to make an effort for the future, than having a kid you want the best for. If you don’t have a kid, you’re not passing your environmental values, or you educational values, or all the other values you may have for what makes a better society. Nor do you have any reason to hold to them yourself.
I don’t mean to try to push anyone toward having kids, but if you do want to have kids but give up thinking the world is getting worse, that decision is part of the world getting worse. If you do want kids, there’s all sorts of opportunity to make this a better world for both yourself and them, and longer, and plenty of opportunity to make an actual difference
Just passing along the value of the bidet may be worth it, according to the comic
By that rote though everyone that has had children in the past has cared for their future and the future of the social and actual environment they will inherit. We wouldn’t be having this discussion if any semblance of that was true.
There are plenty of reasons to think this true, and plenty of reasons the world is getting better over time. Maybe not the next four years, and maybe not for everyone, but there are so many stays at global and national levels that have trended up for decades and continue to do so.
And before someone single-minded chimes in about Gaza. War and atrocity has always been an ugly part of our history and also has trended downward over the last several decades. Just the fact that we can get so worked up about ending atrocities somewhere else in the world that doesn’t affect us, is a great sign for the future
...
Why does it have to be my kid for me to care?
Like actually. Are you seriously saying being a parent somehow intrinsically makes someone a better, more caring, and impactful, person? Or that parenthood is the only way to achieve true conviction? That's literally not how any of this works.
Not bringing children into the world in no way prevents you from caring about making the world a better place, and acting to make it so. And doing the things that make the world better doesn't functionally require having a kid. All it takes is some basic fucking decency.
Which is something people already have, but get taken away by the grind of survival or material success. That is maybe why you have this fucked up idea that people get it by having a kid, but in reality that's just a huge life event that wakes some people up enough to take a look around and start caring again.
And passing good things on doesn't require having descendants. If you've ever changed someones mind on something for the better, you've successfully passed on "values you may have for what makes a better society". The person whose mind you changed doesn't even need to be younger than you, thought doesn't procreate through fucking genetics.
Plenty of parents are made no more profound than they were before by the act of procreating, and will conently continue to do nothing to improve the world. There are parents who will protect their own to the detriment of everyone else.
Kids though, if raised by caring parents, care from the start, but then have that heart crushed by society until they too have a kid of their own.
But in there is way for everyone to care, all the time.
The whole idea that it's ok not to care about and deal with bad stuff unless you personally are somehow impacted is the whole reason we're in this mess, and it's perpetuated by people being forced to live in a constant scramble of stress and consumerism.
Not by people not having children.
I would add that the sentiment is also wrong in the other direction. I’ve personally encountered multiple parents and grandparents who hit me with the “well it won’t affect me, I’ll be long gone” reasoning regarding climate change.
So yeah. What a stupid and offensively self centered thing to say. If you personally didn’t give a shit about other people before, that’s actually a character flaw, not a rite of passage you complete by roping children into this mess
I don't need to have a child to care about passing down a habitable planet to the next generation.
100% of scientists agree that not-having-kids will solve our climate change crisis in one generation.
It'll take more than one...
Well since we can't count on our leaders to be responsible
You only need the one lol
Think about it... If Gen alpha agrees not to have kids, there will still be a generation after them, raised by Gen Z. A lot of families have a generation gap between parents and their children.
generation (noun): "the living things which share a common ancestry and are alive at (or about) the same time."
The word does not refer solely to humans. It existed before the habit of neatly labeling people born within an arbitrary range of years. For example, medical researchers will record changes in microbes from generation to generation (without making up names for each generation).
So, if our generation (the people alive today, or any time in the next ~9 months) agreed to not have children then humanity's climate crisis would be solved. In fact, every human problem would be solved. Think about it.
Are you saying every human alive today belongs to the same generation? That's not how it works.
I'm not defining terms; I'm repeating how the terms are defined. You can look it up in any dictionary. After that, if you still feel like arguing about it I'm not your opponent. You can contact Mrs. Mirriam-Webster, or Mr. Oxford, etc. Please post the exchange! Maybe the argument, "That's not how it works," will convince them.
Since you mentioned Webster... See definition "1.b" for the most common meaning of the term when people are talking about human generations (Millennials, boomers, anything that starts with "Gen"). Context matters.
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/generation
Fucking lol
What is the acceptable level of tragedy to impart upon a non-consenting progeny? I vote for zero
You'd have to be immortal, first. Most kids are gonna live to see their own parents pass.
Tragedy is a part of life.
It's easily avoidable tragedy, unaddressed by those who could do something about it, that's the problem.
Even worse, there's potentially extinction level tragedy happening right now, going unaddressed by those who can do something about it.
Yes. And tragedy is categorically bad, and tragedies cannot be experienced by that which is not alive (i.e. non-sentient). Thusly, a total absence of (sentient) life would be a total absence of tragedies and vice versa; in other words, sentient life and tragedy are virtually biconditional. The continuation of sentient life and tragedy is wholly avoidable if the relevant capable parties were willing, and it can often be abated on a small scale on an individual basis.
Most kids though? I'm not going to go looking for stats but let's just say 95% of children are outliving their parents right now. Awkward sentence there. I mean parents who are dying today, 95% of them didn't outlive their children. I hope that makes sense. Yes that's not how statistics work, I'm trying to make a point.
What's an acceptable level to drop to before we say fuck this we're done having kids? I knew I didn't want kids when I was a kid, but I'm an outlier.
Let's say 85% is the number for kids born today. I believe that's already unacceptable. It's so unnatural.
I think the number is worse than that. The mass climate migration/water wars are going to really get moving in the 2040s if not earlier. I don't want to live through that. I definitely don't want a child to live through that.
Historically we've tolerated MUCH higher rates of infant and child mortality than we do today. People will keep having kids even if most of them will die.
Agreed. It's just now we have more options. At least we did before the Christian Nationalist Supreme Court made abortion illegal in half of the US. Even with this there are still more options and more education than in the distant past.
"even if"? Biologically, knowing that most of your offspring are going to die is a reason to have as many kids as possible.
Operation human shield
All of their children will die; it is only a matter of when.
Put another way: every time a parent gives birth, they are bestowing the irrevocable gift of one day experiencing dying to their child.
I don't think many women had a choice in the matter.
"It's hell getting old" - my parents who had me knowing it's hell getting old.
DO NOT HAVE CHILDREN REPEAT DO NOT HAVE CHILDREN
THIS MESSAGE IS FOR ALL RESIDENTS OF PLANET EARTH
NO ONE NEEDS YOU TO BIRTH THEM
ABORT. ABORT. ABORT.
WE HAVE ENOUGH PEOPLE, THE PLANET IS BURNING, THEY WILL NOT LEAD GOOD LIVES. IT'S NOT WORTH IT. PULL OUT BEFORE YOU NUT HOLY CHRIST PLEASE DO NOT HAVE KIDS
This is mostly copied over from my recent comments elsewhere, but it is very relevant here too.
By 2030 we are going to be 40% over capacity on fresh water resources globally. and 40% of arable land has already been depleted, and 95% will be by 2050.
And that's just water and food.
Once arctic ice sheet coverage gets below 1,000,000 square kilometres, the planet will be absorbing more heat than it reflects and this is called a Blue Ocean Event.
The BOE will trigger the Clathrate Gun which will cause seabeds to rapidly realease fuck tons of methane, cooking the earth in it's own atmosphere.
2024 Arctic sea ice likely reached its annual minimum extent of 4.28 million square kilometers.
Greenhouse gas emissions are still increasing and fuelled by climate change, the world's oceans have broken temperature records every single day over the past year.
So it's basically a race between whether the drought and famine kill us all first, or the BOE setting off the Clathrate Gun will.
Either way, it is unlikely the human race survives the century. Creating more people to suffer in this dying world, is stupid and cruel and is only going to speed up our demise.
Well. Fuck.
Yeah this is what frustrates me when people complain about illegal immigration. Those places are now experiencing food shortages and will just get worse. Where do you think people will go when there is no food in their own country. Do you think they will just let their children starve? Do you really think a physical wall will stop them from trying to feed their children?
Would you put your child through all that, plus force them to wage slave their whole life to pay their landed lord? All for a hit of dopamine and serotonin?
Consider loading up a crack pipe instead and save some needless suffering.
Is that directed at me, or at other people reading this comment chain?
And why are you telling people to smoke crack? You are promoting suffering by doing this, and that is illogical and mean spirited when the rest of your comment is talking about reducing suffering by not procreating.
Are you arguing in bad faith here, or have you just not thought this through properly?
putting aside the innumerable issues with the stance "it is fundamentally immoral to have children", sweet mother of mercy the solution is not life-ruining addictive substances
Please consider adoption as an alternative if you are in a stable situation and want children.
My SO and I have both decided that we definitely don't want kids but would discuss the subject if any one of us seriously considered it for one reason or another. What we agreed on, though, is to look for adoption rather than biological children. We both have stuff we'd rather not pass along, firstly, and secondly, there's so many children that don't have any family. It's sorta like "adopt don't shop", if you will.
You don’t even have to be in a stable situation to be a Big Brother/Sister at your local Boys and Girls club or a court advocate/CASA for a child. Volunteer at a school district. Children recognize how fucked everything is, and on the whole they are suffering. We need kind and loving adults to show up for them - to teach them art and read them stories to show them the parts of living that can hopefully make it worth it.
or wood chipper
Just get a vasectomy honestly. You can keep nutting inside afterwards. Deal?
i'll take two
Oral is gonna make a kid?
Speak for yourself I've got a vasectomy
Can i have it
At this point I think the GOP are just taunting people who won't bring kids into this. Jokes on them though, if theyre having kids from some sort obligation and not to love and properly nurture them it's just bad news for everyone involved. Have fun with all that trauma.
Where do you think we get new Republicans from?
Generational trauma. It's all just generational trauma.
And religious indoctrination programming children to blindly follow strongman authority figures and not require any proof when forming their wolrdview.
New Democrats too.
BOtH sIDeS
I really wish that you had someone to add to the conversation.
Conservatives are often very insecure people who have never overcome their own childhood trauma or understood why they want children. That trauma and insecurity just gets passed down.
I know, I'm the child of two. For the last 20 years I've been completely isolated from all my family by no doing of my own. I often wonder what the fuck all that was about. You know, the whole, bringing 4 kids into the world then putting fasicists into power. Like I got problems, true, but I'd of prefered keeping myself and not being a plague to those around me.
Yeah sounds like my childhood. My parents made my life a living hell then suddenly grew up and realized that everyone around them was broken. We have a better relationship but the damage was done long ago to me siblings and we still have problems.
Glad you're ok, and seem pretty cool from the little I know of you. We got a raw deal in all this, you know. I think it's OK to feel that way.
This plus observing and learning from others convinced me that most people should not have children prior to the age of 30. This is time to grow up, party some, get established, and become yourself. Then you’re ready to parent.
Thanks for the nice words. I’ll keep an eye out for you in the future. Need to figure out Joe to do tags.
Figured out tags. You got my first!
What country are you from and what exact "fascists" are you speaking of? That word doesn't mean what you think it means.
Republicans saying they hate Communism, then doing a Nicolae Ceaușescu speed run.
Craziest thing about this graphic is that it leaves so many major issues off while also covering so much horseshit.
I mean it's clearly a pandemic era comic. The whole no toilet paper thing and deadly viruses.
Yeah because deadly viruses aren't still a thing, and aren't becoming a much more massive problem and we're DEFINITELY not on the cusp of an additional pandemic
Where did I say any of that? I replied to OPs confusion about the lack of current events in this ancient meme.
Was gonna say, wheres the fascism going retro?
no board is big enough to put all the problems
Confused the US with the entire world again, honest mistake.
Eh, Canada's about the same too.
When the US had their boot on the neck of the world we are taking you all with us
Yeah, but that doesn't mean we have the same problems as you.
*Yet
When in human history was ever a good time to have children?
Is there an objective "this was the best year/decade/century"?
That’s the neat part, there isn’t!
But being more serious: I think I can express the feeling of things being particularly worse now in a way that isn’t just recency bias.
Sure, over time technology has improved and that’s generally speaking allowed for better standards of living, at least for the people at the right end of that technology. (Not so great if you’re being conquered because someone shows up with guns for example.) So you could look at the past and say it was worse because materially things like food availability and medicine have become better over time.
But key to this was that all of this was a struggle of humans over nature. To the extent things were bad, there were tangible things we could do to improve.
These days, so many of our problems are self-inflicted and technology and economic development mostly makes them worse. Climate change is the obvious big one, but then there’s stuff like:
Weapons have become increasingly destructive and centrally usable. A small number of people can cause a lot more damage than they ever could in the past.
Surveillance technology invades our privacy in a way that’s unprecedented in human history.
Automation, communications, and transportation technology have made workers less and less powerful and therefore more subject to abuse and artificial poverty. This is one of the more messed up things about capitalism. Technology gets better and rather than getting the benefits of that progress, it actually hurts a lot of people.
Advances in science and technology, particularly data science, allow the powerful to hyper-optimize the bad things they were always doing or enables them to do things they’ve wanted to do.
A financialized economy creates economic catastrophes where people go homeless or starve without any actual changes to material conditions. The numbers got screwed up or the investors panicked and now everything sucks for no reason?
More generally, we can produce enough of the necessities of life for everyone, but capitalism ensures that those necessities won’t make it to people. Capitalism depends on scarcity. If you had a house you wouldn’t need to pay a landlord. If you had food you wouldn’t need to pay food companies. If you had both you wouldn’t need to go work and put up with awful conditions. We’ve solved our most fundamental problems and yet because of the interests of the system and those in power, that progress gets held back.
In the past, even if things were rough now, you could maybe look forward to them improving. Now it feels like the walls are closing in. Unless we actively do something about it, things are going to get worse for most people as more and more wealth accumulates in private hands, as we become subject to increasingly powerful forms of control, and as the powerful destroy the environment we need to live.
loads automatedselfsufficientdronearmy.exe
selects 'working class extinction'
opens options, selects filter
opens Facebook and uploads the profiles of desired sex slaves
presses execute button
Always whatever year you never lived
Ten years BEFORE you lived. Being a white male adult through the 80s must be peak?
It's the 1% vs the working class, not race vs race or gender vs gender.
Can't say no to that, but I was thinking a relatively large portion of average people.
Everyone was a little white in the '80s, if you smell what I mean.
In the past, children were your labor force, health care and pension plan. People had many children so at least some survived into adulthood. There wasn't much alternative back in the day.
Now children are a net cost. They can't even take care of you in old age if government pensions or retirement plans don't pan out because many can barely feed themselves.
So, the best time to have children was roughly before 1900. That's when things started to change.
Yeah that's how I feel. People still had kids during wars, famines, imprisonment, potential nuclear war. Every problem humans have ever faced really. This is the best time to be alive ever. There are tonne of problems we are going to face in the near future but that has always been the case.
The biggest reasons people are having kids is we're all overweight and feel bad about ourselves and are constantly comparing to people/couples online. We have phone/shopping/gaming addictions to deal with all this mental stress. Online dating is shit. 3rd places don't exist anymore. We are all lonely and meeting someone and figuring everything out to the point where children are an viable option seems impossible. Easier to just say fuck it and just post memes and complain about the world is bad now so I'm not having kids. And to be fair all of that has a lot of truth in it.
Incorrect. The biggest reason people aren't having kids is that the planet is dying and no one can afford them anyway. Life is nothing to do to a person at this point.
Why do you think the politicians that are accelerating inequality are the same politicians that are trying to outlaw abortion?
They want babies because they need more workers to distribute inequality and produce more wealth for the shareholders. Foster kids are less likely to go to college, so they’re perfect fuel for the machine.
Don't forget soldiers. As George Carlin said, "Live babies make dead soldiers."
I'm Gen X, but cusp with Millennial. I said at 15 or 16 I'd never have kids & stuck with it. I'm more resolute than ever & feel like I would have massive guilt if I had caved. I felt the world was too fucked up back in the 90s. I wonder how my younger self would deal with the world today.
I'm on the other side of the generational gap (nearly gen x, but millennial), and I was terrified during my late teens/early 20s of becoming a parent. I could not imagine raising a child the way I was living paycheque to paycheque, if I had a paycheque at all....
That feeling never went away, and I still wouldn't know how I could possibly afford that. I decided in my mid 20s that children would be a decision I would leave up to my wife (wherever I had a wife to make the decision). I was/am instinctually driven to want them (a feeling I mostly disregard), but given the state of the world and my own financial situation, I can't say that I want to force any intelligent being, especially one that is my offspring, to suffer through a lifetime of this shit like I have been forced to so far.
I didn't ask to be here. If someone had given me a choice, I would have probably opted out of gestures all of this.
I'm currently in a long term relationship, and we're planning on signing the papers next year, so soon I'll have someone I can legitimately call my wife. She is very much on the side of "never have kids". So that's my decision as well.
Instinctual drive isn't enough to cause me to overlook how things are going. I love my (non-existent) children too much, than to force them into living a life in these circumstances. Fuck no.
This is interesting to me, as I've never had the biological urge to have kids. I love them and enjoy hanging out with them, joking, playing, etc., but never my own. In any case, I commend you on being resolute.
My girlfriend doesn't want them either. She's a good deal younger than me - 31 years old - but she says something similar to me: raising kids in this world would be a tragedy.
Frankly, I've always felt there are too many humans. I never understood the push for more. Just maintain or reduce the population naturally.
Good luck staving off that biological imperative. I feel lucky not to have it myself.
It's not difficult for me, to say the feeling isn't felt very strongly, would probably be an understatement.
The other comment I want to make is that I agree that there's too many humans, however, the economy survives by constant growth, so that's a thing. It has to do with how money works and is valuated.
The video "money as debt" is a good resource for more info on that.
Bluntly, I don't care since I'll be long dead when the economy collapses under it's own weight.
You could adopt a kid. And give them a home. That is 1 option.
I considered that and it was part of my early stands: IF i had a kid, I would adopt since there are so many without parents.
Just like Millenials and Gen Zs, my life is hard enough to pay for financially. I don't know that I could provide something positive for a child. I need to be honest with myself about this shit.
I got a vasectomy as soon as I could which was at 26. I would have done it sooner but I had insurance problems and was broke before that. It was the best decision I've ever made for myself.
lol, yes Millennials and Gen Z are trying so much harder to fix the situation by voting for change… ohhh wait
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/yes-trump-improved-young-men-drew-young-women-rcna179019
Yeah I’m afraid that the lesson is that Gen Z is not actually the future, they are going to repeat the past. What makes me sad is that they should have been the future but social media made sure that didn’t happen.
Did social media make sure that didn't happen, or did the fact that virtually every generation ultimately repeats the mistakes of the one before it ensure that didn't happen?
That they could have been so much better without Zuckerberg, Savage, Peterson, etc.
Exactly. They're turning young men into the generation that will force American women into burqas. Or at least support / help with the move.
but the system is rigged or my vote doesn't count or genocide joe or some stupid shit
I mean genocide joe is calling any democrat who wants to stop sending weapons to israel a hamas supporter. I can understand why they didn't believe the dems would fix the situation.
Yeah that's the stupid shit
Credibility that a politician will do what the people they're asking to vote for them want isn't stupid shit, that's the absolute most basic aspect of representative democracy.
Do you think the republicans would have voted for Trump if his messaging was mostly about how the democrats are correct and he's going to do what the democratic voters want more competently, and called his constituents antisemitic terrorist supporters?
Then surely you understand why the dems trotting out Liz Cheney to represent them and talking about the importance of building the wall, being tough on crime, tax-cuts for businesses, increasing military spending, etc all lowers democratic turnout?
Shitty reasons to let the ultra-fascists win
That's just how representative democracy works. You can go "Damn I wish people tended to vote for a party they don't believe will do what they want because the other side is worse", but that's just not how it works in reality.
The democrats failed the people, the people did not fail the democrats.
The democrats should have been able to run a goddamn cardboard cutout and people should have turned out in droves to vote against that shitstain. This isn't 2000. This wasn't the kind of election where any of the things you mentioned should have been a factor. It's insane.
Yes, I absolutely can blame the people for being too lazy or stupid to do the minimum possible to protect themselves and their neighbors. These excuses are just goddamn braindead, and it will never not astound me that when comparing a functioning adult to a giant corrupt sack of shit, that anyone anywhere had to have a conversation about why they should bother to show uo to vote for the functioning adult.
You're/they're/we're now going to pay for having a complete lack of perspective. Buckle up, it is not going to be fun for anyone. Except the oligarchs I guess.
Look at this guy thinking that we can vote our way out of this when we only have two, corporate sponsored, candidates.
So says the headline, but the entire article focuses on males and how much they love that he did shit like Rogan. I'm not saying young women can't also be idiots or angry at the present state of things, but they didn't completely forget that the right sees them as procreation slaves.
https://thehill.com/opinion/campaign/4986243-trump-gen-z-voters-shift/amp/#amp_ct=1732198304481&_tf=From%20%251%24s&aoh=17321982963326&referrer=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.google.com
I mean, they did vote for change... just not the change we were hoping for, I guess. Things will most likely change for the worse now.
That said, real good change wasn't really on the ballot either.
Well yeah, young men bought into all the incelfluencer crap they were being fed. Probably a good thing since young women by and large are flocking the opposite way and absolutely don't want to fuck conservatives.
If you read the linked article in my post Trump made inroads with young women too.
You can be damned sure the crazy fundamentalists are gonna have a shit ton of kids. And some of those will vote.
Yeah, and they'll die in the water wars too.
No, noone is under any obligation to do so.
Remember what they say on airplanes. Secure your own mask before helping others.
The deeper tragedy is in the meme as a whole. There has been so much power, control, and hope sucked away from us... and they try to replace it with panic (usually to buy a product or lie). I would like to believe that the situation is not hopeless, and that we are not powerless...
Why is the whole world on fire? These are all mostly American problems.
A) keep electing far-right leaders and they won't be B) global warming
Concise and accurate. Bravo
I know Australia is American lite sometimes, but we also have most of these issues. Shit is going bad in a lot of places is my understanding.
Not really. Most of Europe is just fine. We in the UK have elected a labor government for the first time in several elections as the conservatives severely fucked up multiple times. Far right wing sentiment is on the rise in several countries, but that doesn't make them the majority, so they aren't winning elections anywhere but locally. Mostly the far right are just taking votes from the moderate right.
In the same breath, we now have climate scientists saying that remaining below 1.5° this century is all but a pipedream, right wing leaders surging in Italy, Germany, France, Hungary, and other EU countries stoking socially regressive rhetoric, and the AMOC could fail as soon as 2026, plunging Europe temperatures by 10° and causing a new annual storm front akin to Florida right above France and Germany. I am less than optimistic for Europe's future as a whole, as crises drive further nationalism and right wing populism. In future, with european crops struggling under these worse conditions and with the UK currently reliant on imports for 60% its food, the worst is likely yet to come for us.
So nothing has really happened yet then? While that all sounds alarming it's all theoretical at best. We as a species have already made large inroads on pollution and climate change. Even China is building huge wind and solar farms. It's now more profitable to invest in renewables than fossil fuels. It seems to me the main people holding us back are the USA who for some reason seem to be going backwards.
You tend to find that as people struggle more it's far left wing politics that appeals to the working class just as much as the far right. Hence things like the recent labor victory. Last I heard in France the far right party was beaten by a coalition on the left. I don't really know what's happening in Germany, but I imagine it's much the same. Both extremes of politics get amplified in times of struggle. It's probably why the Democrats failed in America, because they are too moderate and too centrist.
Yeah feeling this, I'm a little tired of one country projecting it issues on the entire world.
That sentence can be interpreted in a number of ways and all are correct sadly.
And you're not even calling out the war in Europe.
No no. Wars are destined to be over. This? I don't know how it would end.
wut
Ancient ass meme
This entire thread sums up the utter misery of Lemmy.
It's a fuckin doomer tumor.
Goodbye
Exactly. I love it. These people are basically self pruning their evolutionary branches all by themselves!
There should be a Darwin awards category for this
Evolution determined by mating is basically over for humans. In the time it takes a species to meaningfully change, humans will be genetically engineered.
I'm all up for that
So...have kids in a dying world so you have mating success? That's an asinine reason to procreate.
It wouldn't be intelligence pruned. Plenty of smart people are committed to fighting for humanity, are prospering, and won't succumb to doomer echo chambers.
Big time Homer energy in this thread.
And scene.
A shitty life situation has never stopped anybody from having kids. Quite the opposite, the less educated a society and the lower the prospect of comfort, the more kids people have. Poor and miserable people fuck for fun and don't care about proper contraceptives, resulting in more kids. Further more, people believe that the more kids you'll have, the more likely it is that one of them is going to end up rich and successfull.
Generational-wise, we are having less children then the previous. That's the point of the comic.
That's because people are actually more educated than ever at least in part thanks to the internet. In most places the standard of living has actually gone up, in some cases quite drastically. So people are more comfortable. A lot of the doomerism stuff doesn't take into account any of the awful stuff that happened in the past, and most are only focused on the USA which is having weird problems at the moment. In most of the world the material wealth of the average person has gone up, not down.
Yes, by instinct. And the more educated they are, the more they can make informed decisions.
In that sense, keeping children uneducated is rape by extension.
Give me a break. How about the people having kids in:
As to racism, we watched Mississippi Burning last night. My wife isn't from America and was horrified. "Honey, that was happening when our parents were kids."
2024+: Climate change, water wars, resultant mass migration, worldwide rise of fascism.
You're right we should have stopped having children millennia ago. I wish my parents never met.
I don't think you understand why people stop having kids, do you? video
Humans didn't evolve until about 300,000 years ago. Humans didn't exist 900,000 years ago.
If we did, it would make us even dumber, since we already spent about 280k years in the dirt before we considered growing food ourselves in one place.
no toilet paper?
During covid and maybe bird flu if it takes off. Also if vaccines stop being a thing In murica.
The trouble with this graphic is that millennials are part of the problem now. The oldest are over forty. We've all seen the footage of Jan 6th. There were very few boomers in their 60 and 70s.
There's a whole fucking generation between Boomers and Millennials. Yes, Gen X does get overlooked often, that's the running joke. But they're far more likely to have soaked up Boomerisms and benefited from better economic ROI than Millennials who hit college just at the cusp of the 2000s, and for whom everything thereafter has been a shit toboggan.
Dr. Toboggan! Dr. Shit Toboggan!
Don't forget the Millennials who graduated high school/college during the 08 housing crisis.
Matt Gaetz is an elder millennial like me, and he is a fucking dipshit... and he's going to be attorney general of the United States despite being a proven pedophile and having committed statutory rape AND has minimal legal experience.
And we just saw the first corrupt Millennials enter office this election.
It will be 20 more years before the Millennials are the geritocracy and hold any real power
By then our country will be over
I’m not.
Im amazed at how much X has had kids. Seems nuts. Then I realize I might have done it if I had went 4 years to college and started working right after and if within a few years made a family raising type of wage. That double major and one year in a PhD may have saved me.
Kudos to those not having kids. I've had two recently fully knowing it's going to be tough on them, but I'm going to do the responsible thing and teach them self defense and how to disrespect authority.
Plus as a bonus, I'm going to get those additional family members when we're protecting the homestead from raiders.
Imagine that one guy shoveling fuel on the fire "IF IT GETS A LITTLE BIT WORSE THEN WE CAN RISE UP!"
These keywords are not prevalent in my country (not the us) but this or a couple of nukes doesn't really make much difference
It doesn't matter where you live. Even if you're in the perfect geography and latitude to make climate change no big deal locally; the mass migration, wars, and production disruption will certainly affect you and especially your children.
Wait, there's a toilet paper shortage? No idea, haven't been to Costco in a while.
The 1% can make their own wage slaves.
Ironically, if temperature gets to a high degree enough, so much water vapor, methane and carbon dioxide will be on the atmosphere capturing heat (which will eventually escape), but more importantly, reflecting it on the upper atmosphere layers, that we will freeze to death before even feeling the burn LMAO 🤣
I fucking wish
Water vapour is quite good at absorbing heat, and it insulates the atmosphere too(it's often warmer at night if its cloudy), would it reflect enough heat for that sort of cooling to happen? Sounds like something that would take a lot longer to happen than the time it will take to get too hot for us to survive without living underground or something.
It's end times folks, only going to get worse before the end.
Its bad, I get it. But lets go back to 1968 when baby boomers who would give birth to the millennial generation was born. Vietnam, political assassinations , race riots, anarchist bombings. Throw in watergate and stagflation. The world has always been burning.
The difference is climate change. The better you understand it, the less likely you are to want to have children.
No, climate change was not a concern for them back then.
Climate change was known and covered up by oil companies since the 1930s.
Cool, super irrelevant to the greater point though. It was not known to the people, so the people had hope.
Well you can have them, then just say "screw them" cause you got your own problems to deal with as western society would prefer you act.
Their only purpose is to support you when you get old anyways. Everyone knows that.
Honestly if I have a kid it would only to raise them to be a post apocalyptic war lord and hopefully give them a tragic enough backstory to survive the wasteland on.
What the fuck? Like abuse the shit out of them to toughen them up?
I know you're not being serious but damn what do you mean by this?
Maybe I will hold back a wave of marauders and while they see the door buckling I tell them I love them and they need to fix the world to be a better place where kids don't have to lose their parents then throw them down the escape slide as I turn around to start going with a chainsaw through the enemies.
Maybe I will just name them Chadderick...
I dunno, guess will see what works best in the moment.
"and the winner, by a landslide vote, for Warmaster of the Golden Fleet, is Chadderick the LargeHuge.
Sorry, Leslie."
Look... Um... Don't take this the wrong way because global warming is serious shit... and the fascism trend is super scary... But don't think you're the only generation that has a scary world outlook. You got to live your life. You've got to get the most out of this world that you can. As hard as it is to believe, things are better now than they ever have been in the history of time. Unarguably.
There are many things to be unhappy about, there are many things that we should fight to change, but it's self-defeating to only see the negative and to be this cynical. You have to see life as it is and enjoy the positives, savior the positives, Go out where the weather is good, find a special person and bask in their company, And yes, start a family with them. Create a pocket of goodness in your little slice of the world... Keep the rest of the shit out. Create memories and love and laughter and joy where you can. This is the way it's been done since forever.
Sammy Hager? Sheesh.
Yes
However without experiencing the previous version of bad there isn't a frame of reference, so whatever bad experience is now is the bad experience
Every movie has a bad guy and a good guy. Simple stories for simple people.
Our parents and grandparents had kids - depending on your age - when there was a world war and tens of thousands of people were dying daily in their country, or in the 50 years where the world was always on the brink of getting destroyed in a nuclear apocalypse if one of the two world powers made the wrong move. Were they dumb?
Not to downplay on the current emergencies which are existential and terrifying, especially seeing how little as a species we are doing to address them - but they are a bit of a silly reason not to have kids.
If you don’t want kids don’t have them, you do you :) far too many people have children out of peer or societal pressure or just carelessness, and we could really use much fewer of those, considering the societal damage of absent or careless parenting. But just be honest with yourself, no need to blame viruses and “no toilet paper”.
Woah handle all that edge with care!
It might've been more clear if you just said "I don't think they were dumb. Therefore..."
Being self centered and tribal is more the norm than ever before in my lifetime. Its going to be a very bumpy next 50 years for people who come into the world now.
How many of those kids were intentional though? Birth control and abortion were restricted or just not available. I'm sure most of the people who had kids in the past did not regret it but I'm not going to pretend they meant to get pregnant.
And the toilet paper thing is obviously a joke. A bit of levity in the horror.
Sure, those were separate arguments. The intentionality part was about contemporary, potential parents.
Lol having a planet that won't sustain us because we're actively murdering it is absolutely the silliest reason ever not to have kids. Go on, progeny! Enjoy your water wars and starvation! It would've been incredibly silly not to create you just so you could endure it.
[Citation needed]
The sad part about believing in an afterlife is that it's so easy to give up on the world we have to leave for the next generation.
Even if there would be a blissful afterlife, the people who survive you will suffer more for your complacency.
I've done all I can, I just wanna go home man. I'm tired of fighting.... espeically when I win nothing
I get it, the world is overwhelming, and one person can't possibly neither bear nor solve it all.
What helps is limiting your scope: lower your media diet, focus on real people and relationships, focus on the things you can do something about, and do those well.
That's not the same as doing your thing at the expense of others', but that it's fine to learn and correct and simplify as best you can. If you learn that your car is made from endangered child labor and methane leeching radioactive rain forest - you don't have to burn it at once, but be mindful not to get that type of car the next time.
Find one goal and task and keep your head down until you reach it, it's the only way any of us can get any real work done.
I'm half expecting the assholes that ruined this life to ruin the next one as well.
"You wasted a life, why wouldn't you waste the afterlife?"
Now playing Modest Mouse - Ocean Breathes Salty
Believing this tripe is what causes some people to not bother trying to improve the only actual life we have here on this planet. Comforting lies do not help.
Guys....
Take a deep breath
Be thankful for what you have
Be compassionate for others sharing the same experiences
You will feel better.
It is that simple.
Oh shit, my asthmas acting up from all the pollution.
I just used my last inhaler, and I won't get another one for a month.
They died.
It didn't work.
I don't feel better.
I love the part were they kind of observe it in a detached, third person point of view, as if it didn't affect them at all, and taking care of the issue in any way was beyond even their wildest dreams, just because they consider themselves above the issue.
Oh, but by all means, keep self pruning your evolutionary tree branch.
But do try to use those extra resources to last a bit. You don't want to miss the global chaos the lack of social security is gonna create in about 20 to 30 years, it's gonna be sick
The detachment is more of a defeatism issue. When you have zero power to affect change, what the hell else can you do but work through the day and try to not have a breakdown?
Mind you, I vote when that comes around, I just don't have the mental fortitude anymore to not be detached. Don't have the time or space to do more than that, which is rather by design I expect.
The fact that you believe that you have zero power and then participate in this thread, not realizing one of the leading causes on the why the situation or problem got to this point.
You people can do so much more than you think and you squander it on petty online squabbles
So clarify what I can do. I vote, so that's out of the way.
Donate? With what money?
Help/run campaigns? With what time and/or money?
Be informed? I generally am and a fat lot of good it did.
Inform others? Not an influencer, so no reach. The few crazies I am adjacent to I either can't discuss things with because it'd be unprofessional and I don't want to lose my job or they drank deep of the Kool aid. And the non crazies are usually on my side even when I do have info they don't already know.
Take people to the polls? Everyone for whom I could offer such a service early voted.
So what power am I overlooking? I participate to the best of my ability and within my limited resources so what am I missing?
Edit: How shocking, no response, just a downvote.
So which is it? If we've got nothing to lose but our chains, then maybe we should "break down" together at strategic times.
Both obviously. I did my part and sanity lost in the US. I continue to have no meaningful power.
Our lives are also on the list to lose. The health and well-being of those that depend on us as well. Losing our chains is great if that's really all you have to lose.
yeah I got a good chuckle out of that.
I love the fact that you ignore the parents who put them on the planet saying "they can solve it" then going on to destroy be dicks to people and the environment. I love it that you completely forget about the Fridays for Future, Last Generation, the people glueing themselves to the streets in protest, lots of other movements, and the ensuing reaction "oh, you're children, STFU". Funny how selective memory works.
Yes, by all means, keep pumping out units and teaching them to condescend against others online. They'll surely change the world in a positive way. Don't forget to tell your children how nobody did nothing, but you, oh so brave and valiant Shardikprime, forced them into the world to bestow a wonderful life in the climate wars. They'll be so grateful for your thoughtfulness.
The problem is still there. It doesn't care about who started it
Are you sure you have done your absolute best to solve this problem?
Oh man. You've totally convinced me to have kids. 🙄
Not the idea but are you ABSOLUTELY convinced you have done everything in your power to solve the issue?
Like asking billionaires to pretty please stop destroying and start saving the planet while I recycle my recyclables? Yep, pretty sure I've done everything in my power. And they don't care.
Your problem is a perspective one. You can do much more than ask. Only social boundaries stop you from going further
Cringe
2020 called, they want their self-pity memes back