Maybe they should have left us a better world if they wanted their genetic line to continue lol
I asked my wife if she wanted kids and she just waved around and said "look at this shit, do you really want to put a someone through this?" Yep, the world is screwed. But I believe people have to make their own, conscious choice. No sense in forcing them to either have kids or not.
My wife and I were planning to have kids in 2020. We had already started the process in 2019. Then covid happened. Then people hoarded toilet paper during a respiratory pandemic that doesn't even affect your bowels. Then supply lines shut down. Then forest fires raged out of control across the country, turning the skies into red ash. Then protests and riots broke out across the country. All the while trump was happening about eleventy billion times. Ultimately we got a master class on how fucking ridiculous this world has become. We decided never to have kids. We're already middle aged, so that's it for us. It's too late now. We occasionally consider adopting, but that's a whole other bag of cats.
If you ever decide you do want kids, I'd endorse adopting. That way you're not bringing a new life into this shitty world, you're hopefully improving one that's already gotten dealt a bad hand in life.
People weren't hoarding toilet paper because they thought it affected their bowels -- they were hoarding it because who knew what might happen where we'd have to stay at home or be isolated for a long time.
What's strange is, why toilet paper and not much else lol. At least where I lived. I wasn't hoarding, I was just trying to get some at the store because we were running out completely, and the shelves were empty. 💀 Had to buy some non-bulk expensive and fragile af paper.
The why TP is because it was big and noticeable in store. There was a chunk missing and then word got that "you need to get some before they run out" and that causes a run and the stores run out.
If you remember during the gas pipeline cyber attack. It only effected a specific area of the country SE area, but areas outside of the actual problem ran out of fuel because people heard about other stations running out and having problems. We are not good at handling stressful situations together. We turn into a "fuck you, I got mine and I might need to stockpile more for later" type of people.
Where I live grocery stores were picked clean. Honestly we started buying and stocking up as well or we'd end up with nothing.
We bought bidets and have never looked back. My husband actually prefers it because it cleans a hairy ass better lol
Same, same. Well just in Germany. We haven't been hit as bad as the U.S. but your country stretches over three climate zones. However, we live in a small town on the Baltic coast and last year was nuts with the weather. And yes, some people are unfortunately very egoistical and make it even harder for the rest who just want to have a halfway decent life.
We had a long talk about it and the above statement is just the gist of it. If we lived in better times, sure. But not in this timeline. We both came to that conclusion and it is perfectly fine.
Not to butt in your business, but if that's your only reason to not have children, and you're otherwise financially capable and willing to raise kids, have you two considered adoption? Instead of bringing someone extra into this shit as you put it, you'd just be helping one of the people who're unfortunately already in it.
Sorry for the late reply, was night here. Yes, we actually thought about that. But while it is easy to just have a kid, adoption (at least here in Germany where you only have around 4000 adoptions per year) comes with quite the list of requirements. We are both working full time and just recently found a very nice apartment, but without a seperate room for a kid. Then again my wife is a kindergarten teacher, so she already has like 20 kids ;)
As the parent of a current Kindergartener (and also a former one myself), give your wife a big hug for us. Her job is so important, a especially if we want this world’s society to turn around and fix the problems it’s made for itself.
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Fuck yes. Thank you for doing your part to not make this place worse for your woulda-been kids and for me.
The sad part of this is the people here with the critial thinking and reasoning skills to make that descision are the ones not passing on those attributes, but its the low income & education people are the ones who cant even think far enough ahead to wear a fucking condom.
You say that as if it's necessary for human kind to improve. We don't have control over what happens to our species and we will go extinct which is absolutely fine. Not sure what is up with this whole obsession with continuing the species. Stop worrying about something that will naturally work itself out instead of complaining that the 'wrong' pe ople are breeding. Maybe thats just the natural way of things. I mean, greed, violence, hatred and discrimination are all ingrained parts of the human animal meant to aide in the whole survival aspect of things. It wasn't meant to catapult earth species into space. Unless you are ok with genetic engineering and removing those traits from the gene pool you will never not have power hungry assholes ruining it for the rest of us. And that's fine. That's just what life on earth is like.
you wont catch me raising children both because im a mess, and i refuse to raise children in a dysfunctional society that hasn't got its shit together.
Not sorry at all. These genetics are just a dead end. I’m making the human race better. Addition by subtraction.
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I know!
Considering my ridiculously high-magnification contact lenses, my ancestors have no idea what I’m up to. They couldn’t even see across the room.
Yep, my partner and I have way too many medical issues so we don't feel bad at all for not bringing kids into this already fucked up world.
Absolutely nothing wrong with eugenics when applied properly. Like nuclear power, AI, the internet, eugenics would fix a lot that's wrong with humanity. If I could generically engineer myself into someone with no anxiety disorder or adhd or no postural tachycardia or naturally muscular body maybe even different color eyes and a different voice, I would. My genes aren't unique and my traits don't need to be passed on. I'm not a chinchilla.
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What you are describing is gene therapy, not eugenics. When eugenics was a thing, it was mostly voluntary in liberal countries. Propaganda was used to convince "inferior" people to sterilize themselves, including black people. How is that different than reinforcing the idea that "dysgenic" people are doing the right thing by not having kids?
My genes aren’t unique and my traits don’t need to be passed on
I never said they did. Some people will never have kids and that's fine. That's not the issue at hand with eugenics. Eugenics is treating people like chinchillas actually, animals that must be bred and selected for the best traits.
If I could generically engineer myself into someone with no anxiety disorder...
That's the thing, you can't. Not synthetically at least. The current gene framework is a house of cards and it will be replaced by a better system of understanding. Look into Denis Noble's work. Also look into epigenetics. The genes you pass on to your children are not the genes you inherit from your parents, they change, and they are changed by your body in response to your environment for the better. No organism is doomed to the fate of inferior genes, they are naturally mutable. But perhaps your environment and lifestyle is not serving you well, and that may be your real problem.
Not one of them cares tbh. Besides, not having kids, is the best environmental friendly option of them all.
I'd guess that having children, in the long run is more environmentally harmful than you eating meat the rest of your life.
Pretty much.
"Oh ... But I want kids", adopt why bringing another being to this fuckshow when u could improve the life of one currently in the bottom of the barrel.
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“You never know. I mean, what if my baby cures cancer?” —Someone I’m paraphrasing but not by much ffs
Most do care imo. This Christmas with relatives it was asked many times like no one cares about any other part of my life
Most of your ancestors are dead. And even among the living ones I'd argue that the majority don't really care. Never the less, who cares if they do.
I'd guess that having children, in the long run is more environmentally harmful than you eating meat the rest of your life.
This just strikes me as silly. What is the "environment" but children of various species? Obviously an environmentally harmonious life is best, but life isn't just what the environment is for, it's what the environment is. This is the same mindset as people who have a couch that no one's allowed to sit on.
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When one species growing prevents others from doing the same there is a problem in that ecosystem. For example too many wolves in an area can cause a reduction in prey which is also bad for the wolves. We're just smart enough to see what we're doing is harmful to the world around us and we can do things to limit our damage.
And not enough wolves causes an unchecked increase in prey which is bad for the rest of the environment. As I said, harmonious coexistence is best. We have the knowledge and tools to live harmoniously. My problem is with the trend of un-nuanced universal anti-natalism.
That's not really a salient argument. Can you think of even one place where it would be appropriate to say there aren't enough humans? Besides that, humans and wolves have completely different impact on the environment.
Additionally, after the advent of agriculture and industrialization, I think there is a fair argument to be made that humans are no longer capable of living an environmentally harmonious life. Think of all the resource depletion and fossil fuel consumption required just for you to post that argument on the internet.
Until we regain the ability for, not just individuals, but entire societies to live in harmony with the environment, I believe there is a strong argument for reducing your impact by not having children.
All I'm saying is that there's a logical breakdown at play. Any argument in favor of "the environment" had to be based on the value of individual life. I'm not even saying that we shouldn't be moderating our population growth, we should. I'm just saying the environmentally friendly angle is a logically strange argument, from first principles.
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And what do we do with the prey when there are too many? Let them keep living or sell more hunting licenses?
Humans have not only sat on that couch; we've slept on it, puked on it, taken a dump on it, taken it outside and set fire to it.
As does every other life form, given the chance. We are the only one, that we know of, which even has a concept of conservation. We have the power to consciously regulate our behavior.
In the end, my point is that either life is valuable for its own sake, including humans, or it isn't, including the rest of the ecosystem. Any philosophy which posits that the existence of other life forms is more valid than that of humans is foundationally inconsistent. I'm certainly not saying that human life is more valid than others, but either life is valid or out isn't. Humans aren't special one way or the other.
That's just garbage talk. Sure we can enjoy life now and not consider the future of the planet but is your life more worth than the future of our own species? I find it deeply concerning that we as humans know what to do to not go extinct, buy don't do it.
is your life more worth than the future of our own species?
Where exactly does the future of the species come from if no one has kids?
It's not black or white. Or on and off
I don't expect all human reproduction to just stop. But cutting down on the human population by either having no children or only one, would substantially reduce the load humans place on the planet and mayne even increase quality of life. Not to mention that it would improve the chances of other species to thrive.
Sure. But your framing of not having children as "environmentally friendly", if embraced, results in only the unconscientious people having kids. That's literally the premise of Idiocracy.
There is absolutely no scenario in which everyone stops having children. If everyone who could be convinced not to have children is convinced, there will still be plenty of human beings.
As I've said, if you convince everyone who considers their environmental impact to not have children, who does that leave having children? What becomes of the environment when it's only the environmentally negligent raising future generations?
I find a lot of people can kind of fall down from this path, into anti-natalism, and then malthusianism, and then ultimately eco-fascism and eugenics, through what I like to call the "idiocracy deduction". Name pending. The sort of idea that, if stupid people are the only one having kids, only stupid people will promulgate, and then we'll all be stupid. Substitute stupid, for whatever political ideological group you don't really like (or even minority group), bam, shit's wacked. So, logically, stupid people, or, my political opposition, or, people I don't like/who can't be trusted to have kids, shouldn't be allowed to have them. After all, you know, it's more ecologically conscientious to not have kids, so we should just kind of force everyone to not have kids. A lot of this is also going to come down to like, third world countries tending to have higher birth rates because of higher infant mortality, and also tending to have higher emissions, and those two are connected because ???. It's sort of the inverse of christian conservatives who want to force every white anglo saxon protestant into having 70 billion kids, and then do things like ban abortion on those grounds.
I think there's also this like, really stupid idea that if we have more people, somehow those people will not have any jobs, based on some naturalistic concern. This is stupid. It's less that we've surpassed the planet's carrying capacity, and more that we all are just fucking morons who live in an 18th century economic hellsystem. That's the core of why mathusianism doesn't work, because there is no "hard" carrying capacity to the planet. People in ancient times had to occupy much larger portions of land in order to support themselves, because their crops were not selectively bred to maximize their calories, and because of diseases and shit, which is part of why agriculture sucked back in the day compared to hunter-gathering, (even though in practice the two aren't really that different, hunter-gatherers just move around more and thus have access to that larger space which they need to "grow their crops"). In any case, you'd have to build some argument that we've entered a period of natural technological stagnation, which is pretty fucking hard to do because you have to thoroughly discount any conceivable future technologies that might help, and you have to discredit the amount of blame resting on the current economic system.
So, yeah, I dunno. I find the whole dealio kind of dumb and stupid. Seems like an overcorrection, kind of like those hardcore atheists that were everywhere in the 2000's and 2010's, and you could tell they'd all grown up being raised by radical fundamentalist christian parents or whatever, or just that christians are fucking annoying (big if true), and then have kind of a limited perspective, even just on all religions, because of that, on top of not really being politically different enough from those christians, if you actually boiled it all down. Everyone's a neoliberal, at the end of the day, everyone's buying in to the same premises and arguments, even when they disagree on some issue, and then they all fail to see the bigger picture and just kind of end up splintering themselves into more and more radical extremist positions.
Actually you can stop reading here (if you even read all of that, good luck), but I kind of wonder if that's just like, an inevitable facet of late stage capitalism. It sort of seems to me like the ideological version of spam, which I tend to think of a lot as an analogy for capitalism "maximizing efficiency". Spam is nonsense, nobody wants to read it, and yet, it will inevitably eat up all the bandwidth if left unchecked, because those with the most economic resources want to cut out all other avenues of communication, and, "make efficient use of the bandwidth". The fact that everyone eventually becomes kind of radicalized and pushed into these nonsensical extremist positions, totally lacking nuance, the fact that, you know, people slip into fascism, it seems kind of along the same lines. People get pushed to what the maximum extent of their political ideology will allow, through some mechanism, despite liberalism kind of inherently being a modest and compromising ideology at heart, one that becomes incoherent if you actually push it to any logical extremes. I dunno if there's anything there, about how people's conceptions of things gets shaped by like, the larger economic system at work.
Upvote for partial agreement, but why the attack on atheism? It's not extreme to not believe, in fact, it sounds utterly ridiculous that you want moderate or liberal people to believe a little bit in fairy tales, but not too much. There simply is no middle ground with regard to religion, either you delude yourself or you accept the obvious implausibility, lack of evidence and irrationality inherent to them.
Theyre talking about atheists in 00s10s that were ex-Christians who were still closed minded and hateful, and essentially using the same flawed evangelism tactics as Christians (not great). They don't recognize that not all religions are the same, that different ones have different goals, and never considered why someone would choose to practice any form of spirituality, labelling it as a form of religion.
Its a grueling slog in a good state and a fucking nightmare in a bad one. My experience with the Texas adoption system has me convinced that the entire agency is run by a collection of sadists. Feels like it exists just to traumatize people further.
Worth it to try and get at least one kid out of that nightmare system. If it's that bad to adopt, imagine how bad it is to be completely at its mercy.
The bigger problem is that it can be prohibitively expensive, which is why the 'people will just adopt unwanted children' line that anti-abortion advocates take is bullshit. They make as many barriers to adoption as possible, the biggest one being cost.
And worse, they can deny you outright. For things like having the wrong religion. State-funded adoption agencies.
All legitimate concerns. It's definitely not the best option, or even feasible, for everyone. But it deserves more consideration than it tends to receive whenever the subject of having kids comes up.
I think along with that consideration is a necessary discussion about easing the difficulty of going through the process.
Perhaps they should have set up a world where its possible to have kids without ruining yourself financially.
fuck around and find out economics were NOT fucking around, and i am NOT finding out
Or set up a world where it is not cruel bringing a kid into because you know their life will be even more fucked in the future
Also, I said this before as a parent and I will say it again- please do not have children unless you really want children. No child deserves to go through their childhood neglected and unloved. Which is going to be a major result of the end of Roe v. Wade in the U.S. and why abortion rights are vital.
No one should have to be a parent unless they absolutely want to be a parent.
In an abortion, the unborn child. In a partial birth abortion in an unbelievably brutal way, involving a drill to the base of the skull as the baby is writhing in pain. But even with earlier methods, it's still murder. I know, you'll say you're fine with it, like to call it something else, pretend since it hasn't breathed on its own it's not a child. Deep down though, you know.
Do I know deep down? Or do I not give a shit whether or not it's considered murder by you because no one should be forced to give up their bodily autonomy for someone else and if you consider it murder, then it is a person using someone else's body for their own personal gain against that person's will. Which is slavery. And you're fine for that.
Either it is not a person, so it isn't murder, or if it is a person, a slaver killing the person enslaving them is also not murder. Not in my world.
That anger comes from knowing deep down you're on the wrong side of this, it's the inner conflict. I'm very sorry you're too entrenched politically to listen to your conscience. I'll leave you alone with your enemy, yourself.
What anger? I'm not angry that you are fine with slavery. But I am amused at your silly attempts at armchair psychology.
Adolf Hitler had a sister who emigrated to England before the war and had two kids. Both kids actually fought in the war against their uncle with no one aware of who they were. They both agreed to never have children.
And that's why there are no more Hitlers.
There are few things sweeter than sleeping in on a Saturday and waking up to a clean, quiet house.
You couldn't pay me to trade that for some whiny, entitled little brat.
Can’t quantify the feeling of having kids until you have one, but it’s very easy to articulate the perceived drawbacks of said unknown. They bring a life buff like nothing else, speaking a someone who regularly chases altered states of consciousness.
They provide a large opportunity for some enormous maturation, removal of bitterness/edgelord-iness and to not be so self-centred.
Your description of kids sounds like me beforehand. Have 2 happy accidents now.
Lie-ins are still possible if you are actually in a decent relationship by the way. To anybody reading, don’t have kids if you are in a bad one. No kid deserves to grow up around that.
I grew up in a family with eighteen kids. If having such a huge family is good for anything, it's that I don't have the romantic veneer that most people do when it comes to childrearing.
I know exactly how expensive and hard it is, and just how much it sucks.
Your life experience is actually so extreme that you don't know exactly how hard it is or how much it sucks. Your experience is not going to be representative of 99.9% of the populace.
You should basically never use your family life experiences growing as a reference point because of how extremely unusual it is. This is the equivalent of complaining about how hard it is to drive around town in the truckasaurus.
Unless you are intentionally misrepresenting a foster home, which is again different than having your own child or 2.
Eh idk. I think most people who are alive were children at some point. Don't think it is a huge leap to extrapolate what it would be like to have kids now that we are adults.
Most people who are alive didn't get raised with as many children as the post I was responding to. Your point stands but is irrelevant to the post you are responding to.
Also, that argument ignores the fact that everyone with children at one point did not. This means we already know what it's like to assume what having children was like. We then also have the experience of actually having one. So when someone tells you it's different, they've already got the "no kid" experience under their belt and can tell you how successfully they extrapolated what it meant to be a parent in that life atage.
I don't think that's a great analogy.
Driving a monster truck on a tiny road will give you a lot of life experience about driving safely. It's the same when you have to do a lot of parenting and have no other choice. I have more practical experience rearing children than most people on this thread, guaranteed.
It actually won't, but if you own it, you'll find lots of excuses to use it anyway and rationalize it to others.
There are few things sweeter than sleeping in on a Saturday and waking up to a clean, quiet house.
Waking up early, making pancakes for a couple of gleeful little munchkins, and then going out to the park to run around and have fun is one of those things you forget you used to love doing when you were younger.
True, until one of them screams about something that doesn't matter and you have to will yourself not to strangle them.
one of them screams about something that doesn’t matter
I mean, one of the challenges of child care is having empathy for kids who are still struggling to regulate their emotions. If you're openly dismissive and adversarial to kids, their behavior tends to get worse over time.
There are plenty of people who simply aren't mature enough, themselves, to know how to interact with children. That's one big reason why its helpful to have large extended family homes. Grandparents - particularly those who are retired, experienced, and nostalgic for parenthood - can be way better at dealing with little kids than adults who are themselves too emotionally congested and socially anxious to know how to respond.
But people routinely overstate how difficult child care can be, in large part because they fixate on the grumpy and frustrated children while suffering total blindness towards the happy, well-adjusted, and well-behaved kids.
You cannot rationally explain why it's fulfilling to have kids. The payoff is largely emotional.
Sleeping in got old for me at some point.
You cannot rationally explain why it's fulfilling to have kids.
That's certainly true.
As a father and a very rational person, I can fully understand you.
Especially if you don't have any kids around you and/or problems inside your family anyways.
I'd lie if I said I wouldn't sometimes love to have some alone time. But I would never go back to sleeping in every Saturday and missing out on my child.
Vasectomy is up there in the top 5 best things to happen in my life.
Highly recommend if you are sure you want to go child-free. There is nothing quite so worry free as shooting blanks instead of using condoms and birth control.
When I was a teenager I wanted kids. I fully bought into 'the American dream' being sold. I'd get me a wife, kids, house, and a career. Helped that I actually like kids. Made it my life's goal to try to be the best provider, best dad, best husband I could be.
Put myself through college, I have a good career, bought a house when I was 24, and still love kids. But I gave up on dating when I was like 28(?). It just became not worth it for so many reasons.
This last fall marked 20 years since I left my hometown to start my life... And I felt like a failure (still do). I exist to work and pay bills.
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“That son of a bitch lars finally put a kink in our crazyhose. Blessed be.” —my dead peeps probs
This is kind of my family. My brother and I have not fathered any children, he's a step dad, with no intention to have any of his own, I'm happily in a childfree relationship.
The only (sort of) exception is that my eldest brother (of three), had four kids.... All girls.
So our biological lineage will continue, but our family name ends here, since once my niece's get married, our family name will be dead.
The closest continuance of our family name is through my one male cousin on my dad's side. I don't keep in touch with him enough to know if he has kids or he's planning to have kids, or to even be informed as to whether or not those children would be boys or girls, etc.
After that, you would have to go back about 3 generations to find someone of the same lineage that's actually continuing the family name. Second or third cousins... I believe. I'm unaware if my grandfather had any siblings, or cousins... So that part of my family tree is a complete unknown.
For my brother, he wasn't in a stable relationship long enough to get married and have kids (though, he's on his second marriage, the first did not last very long.... It's a long story as to why)... And since his second wife (his current wife) already had children from a previous marriage, he has no interest. For me, I never cared either way, and stuck to the philosophy of "I'll let my wife decide". My current, and longest, relationship, under which we've been together for nearly a decade now, is with a beautiful woman who has been very childfree for a long time, and I support her in that. I also wouldn't be able to financially support children, which is why I kept waiting for marriage before kids. I at least wanted the illusion that someone was going to stick around before making that commitment.
My oldest brother got married pretty young and to his credit, they're still together. I'm mostly estranged from him, but I'm aware of some of the details of his life. His children are at the age where they can start having kids of their own now (which should give some indication of how old I am... I'm "great uncle" age). I don't have any pressure to have kids at this point because my SO doesn't want them, my breeder brother is estranged, my father is dead, and I'm estranged from my mom. The only time I even hear about kids is either from my sister-in-law taking about her (now post-teen) children, and from my SO's family, who we see online only a few times a year at most.
I don't feel like I'm missing out.
I mean real talk, how many generations back are you actually disappointing? Like I'm only going to disappoint my dad, as once you go up to grandparent level I have plenty of cousins who can and have already passed "our line" down.