I’m not.
No, noone is under any obligation to do so.
Remember what they say on airplanes. Secure your own mask before helping others.
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!
Matt Gaetz is an elder millennial like me, and he is a fucking dipshit… and he’s going to be attorney general of the United States despite being a proven pedophile and having committed statutory rape AND has mininal legal experience.
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.
Republicans saying they hate Communism, then doing a Nicolae Ceaușescu speed run.
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.
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.
Figured out tags. You got my first!
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.
What country are you from and what exact “fascists” are you speaking of? That word doesn’t mean what you think it means.
Where do you think we get new Republicans from?
New Democrats too.
BOtH sIDeS
I really wish that you had someone to add to the conversation.
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.
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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
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Why is the whole world on fire? These are all mostly American problems.
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.
A) keep electing far-right leaders and they won’t be B) global warming
Concise and accurate. Bravo
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.
100% of scientists agree that not-having-kids will solve our climate change crisis in one generation.
Fucking lol
It’ll take more than one…
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.
Well since we can’t count on our leaders to be responsible
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.
it’s quite literally biblical drown them in numbers bullshit.
Yes, it’s called (disgustingly) the “Quiverfull Movement”
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.
I thought about it and it’s just unfortunate kimbo slice died before he could eventually be president. He could have been the one.
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.
What is the acceptable level of tragedy to impart upon a noncensenting progeny? I vote for zero
You’d have to be immortal, first. Most kids are gonna live to see their own parents pass.
Tragedy is a part of life.
It’s easily avoidable tragedy, unaddressed by those who could do something about it, that’s the problem.
Even worse, there’s potentially extinction level tragedy happening right now, going unaddressed by those who can do something about it.
Most kids though? I’m not going to go looking for stats but let’s just say 95% of children are outliving their parents right now. Awkward sentence there. I mean parents who are dying today, 95% of them didn’t outlive their children. I hope that makes sense. Yes that’s not how statistics work, I’m trying to make a point.
What’s an acceptable level to drop to before we say fuck this we’re done having kids? I knew I didn’t want kids when I was a kid, but I’m an outlier.
Let’s say 85% is the number for kids born today. I believe that’s already unacceptable. It’s so unnatural.
I think the number is worse than that. The mass climate migration/water wars are going to really get moving in the 2040s if not earlier. I don’t want to live through that. I definitely don’t want a child to live through that.
Historically we’ve tolerated MUCH higher rates of infant and child mortality than we do today. People will keep having kids even if most of them will die.
Agreed. It’s just now we have more options. At least we did before the Christian Nationalist Supreme Court made abortion illegal in half of the US. Even with this there are still more options and more education than in the distant past.
People will keep having kids even if most of them will die
“even if”? Biologically, knowing that most of your offspring are going to die is a reason to have as many kids as possible.
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.
tolerated
I don’t think many women had a choice in the matter.
Tragedy is a part of life
Yes. And tragedy is categorically bad, and tragedies cannot be experienced by that which is not alive (i.e. non-sentient). Thusly, a total absence of (sentient) life would be a total absence of tragedies and vice versa; in other words, sentient life and tragedy are virtually biconditional. The continuation of sentient life and tragedy is wholly avoidable if the relevant capable parties were willing, and it can often be abated on a small scale on an individual basis.
“It’s hell getting old” - my parents who had me knowing it’s hell getting old.
When in human history was ever a good time to have children?
Is there an objective “this was the best year/decade/century”?
That’s the neat part, there isn’t!
But being more serious: I think I can express the feeling of things being particularly worse now in a way that isn’t just recency bias.
Sure, over time technology has improved and that’s generally speaking allowed for better standards of living, at least for the people at the right end of that technology. (Not so great if you’re being conquered because someone shows up with guns for example.) So you could look at the past and say it was worse because materially things like food availability and medicine have become better over time.
But key to this was that all of this was a struggle of humans over nature. To the extent things were bad, there were tangible things we could do to improve.
These days, so many of our problems are self-inflicted and technology and economic development mostly makes them worse. Climate change is the obvious big one, but then there’s stuff like:
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Weapons have become increasingly destructive and centrally usable. A small number of people can cause a lot more damage than they ever could in the past.
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Surveillance technology invades our privacy in a way that’s unprecedented in human history.
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Automation, communications, and transportation technology have made workers less and less powerful and therefore more subject to abuse and artificial poverty. This is one of the more messed up things about capitalism. Technology gets better and rather than getting the benefits of that progress, it actually hurts a lot of people.
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Advances in science and technology, particularly data science, allow the powerful to hyper-optimize the bad things they were always doing or enables them to do things they’ve wanted to do.
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A financialized economy creates economic catastrophes where people go homeless or starve without any actual changes to material conditions. The numbers got screwed up or the investors panicked and now everything sucks for no reason?
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More generally, we can produce enough of the necessities of life for everyone, but capitalism ensures that those necessities won’t make it to people. Capitalism depends on scarcity. If you had a house you wouldn’t need to pay a landlord. If you had food you wouldn’t need to pay food companies. If you had both you wouldn’t need to go work and put up with awful conditions. We’ve solved our most fundamental problems and yet because of the interests of the system and those in power, that progress gets held back.
In the past, even if things were rough now, you could maybe look forward to them improving. Now it feels like the walls are closing in. Unless we actively do something about it, things are going to get worse for most people as more and more wealth accumulates in private hands, as we become subject to increasingly powerful forms of control, and as the powerful destroy the environment we need to live.
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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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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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 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.
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.
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.
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.
