This entire thread sums up the utter misery of Lemmy.
Exactly. I love it. These people are basically self pruning their evolutionary branches all by themselves!
There should be a Darwin awards category for this
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.
Intelligence pruning itself out of a malicious environment isn’t really a great showcase of evolution.
It’s not technically incorrect - we are changing, but a species actively taking steps backwards by inflating itself with idiots doesn’t quite hit that stronger/faster/smarter progression that the concept of evolution implies.
These are darwinism’s death throes.
It wouldn’t be intelligence pruned. Plenty of smart people are committed to fighting for humanity, are prospering, and won’t succumb to doomer echo chambers.
Big time Homer energy in this thread.
I wish their children and grandchildren etc the best of luck in finding comfort in the hellscape we’re building for them. I have a feeling they won’t find it in the knowledge that their grandpappy owned a boat or some shit, but I’m sure they’ll be able to science-miracle their way out of all the problems the generations before them allowed to bottle up to a breaking point.
My own children will be happily non-existing, cuz I love them far too much to cast them into this dumpsterfire, especially as pawns against a horde of morons doing their damnedest to strip everyone’s rights.
And scene.
It’s a fuckin doomer tumor.
Our parents and grandparents had kids - depending on your age - when there was a world war and tens of thousands of people were dying daily in their country, or in the 50 years where the world was always on the brink of getting destroyed in a nuclear apocalypse if one of the two world powers made the wrong move. Were they dumb?
Not to downplay on the current emergencies which are existential and terrifying, especially seeing how little as a species we are doing to address them - but they are a bit of a silly reason not to have kids.
If you don’t want kids don’t have them, you do you :) far too many people have children out of peer or societal pressure or just carelessness, and we could really use much fewer of those, considering the societal damage of absent or careless parenting. But just be honest with yourself, no need to blame viruses and “no toilet paper”.
How many of those kids were intentional though? Birth control and abortion were restricted or just not available. I’m sure most of the people who had kids in the past did not regret it but I’m not going to pretend they meant to get pregnant.
And the toilet paper thing is obviously a joke. A bit of levity in the horror.
Sure, those were separate arguments. The intentionality part was about contemporary, potential parents.
Were they dumb?
Yes.
Woah handle all that edge with care!
I hate that it’s apparently the edgelord opinion to think bringing a child into a world where they will suffer is a bad thing. Anyone having a child is either a victim, an idiot, or a sociopath.
Being self centered and tribal is more the norm than ever before in my lifetime. Its going to be a very bumpy next 50 years for people who come into the world now.
It might’ve been more clear if you just said “I don’t think they were dumb. Therefore…”
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.
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.
hopefully give them a tragic enough backstory
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."
Sammy Hager? Sheesh.
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…
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
Look at this guy thinking that we can vote our way out of this when we only have two, corporate sponsored, candidates.
Yeah I’m afraid that the lesson is that Gen Z is not actually the future, they are going to repeat the past.
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.
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.
I thought about it and it’s just unfortunate kimbo slice died before he could eventually be president. He could have been the one.
That’s the only thing preventing it from being categorized as a documentary.
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.
it’s quite literally biblical drown them in numbers bullshit.
Yes, it’s called (disgustingly) the “Quiverfull Movement”
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.
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.
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.
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.
When in human history was ever a good time to have children?
Is there an objective “this was the best year/decade/century”?
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.
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.
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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.
No, noone is under any obligation to do so.
Remember what they say on airplanes. Secure your own mask before helping others.
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.
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
Just get a vasectomy honestly. You can keep nutting inside afterwards. Deal?
i’ll take two
Vasectomies are not 100%. Abstinence or anal.
Speak for yourself I’ve got a vasectomy
Can i have it
Please consider adoption as an alternative if you are in a stable situation and want children.
or wood chipper
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.
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.”
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.
2024+: Climate change, water wars, resultant mass migration, worldwide rise of fascism.
You’re right we should have stopped having millennia ago. I wish my parents never met.
