Lemmy sometimes annoys me with all this doomeristic boomer firstworlders.
Yeah it’s not just lemmy but it’s certainly prevalent here. I think the allure is that it can feel ‘sophisticated’ and ‘aware’ to be cynical, but it is annoying.
Especially the anti-natalists OMFG. ‘Having children is like totally selfish and inmoral’ oh jeez shut your trap. Like I get the anti-hyper-natalists because having like 5 children is also completely nutso these days, but. Well anyway.
Tl;Dr: totally, dude
“Sooo. . . . Are we supposed to have kids?”
No, just sit around and watch this shit keep happening or better yet, just go on your phone and pretend nothing is happening. You could also just blame everything on everyone else and still keep contributing to the things you are complaining about . . .
Or fucking go and do something , like maybe even something as simple as casting a vote. So many of the younger people are complaining and then when the bare minimum can be done by voting for someone who has the same values . . .nope.
And half the voting population just stays home because, “Both sides are the same!” Whelp, that’s an easy way out and just adds to the bullshit.
How about: look for some nuance in the candidates? Or maybe just vote against the more evil fuck. Or maybe get involved, run for some leadership role, help out people in your neighborhood, advocate for spending more on education, protest. . . Do something . It’s your turn! Get off the internet and do something.
Most of these points only apply to the US
Don’t you know USA is one of the 4 country in the world? The other 3 is China, Russia, and Europe.
Yeah, the US! That’s the big ball in the picture!
Sort of crazy to look at the birth rates in, like, the DRC or Afghanistan and conclude they must have done everything right.
America can have birth rates on par with Pakistan and Somalia if they just obliterate access to birth control and end all public education. Concentrate large numbers of American teenagers into ghettos and refuge camps where there’s nothing better to do than fuck. Guaranteed you’ll get another baby boom inside ten months.
Have a kid.
18 years from now: “Good luck in the water wars, son”
I’m too nice to do that to someone.
Are ya winning, son?
My siblings’ kids are all angry at the hubris their parents had to birth them. I love them and get it, but it’s a hell of a lot more complicated than that and nihilism is so 2005. I think. I was pretty dissociated that year but I had a professor who talked about it a lot according to dissociated me’s notes.
My wife and I had ours in 2024. I’ve always felt that it was my purpose to be an amazing dad to someone, because I didn’t really have one.
So I went ahead and became an amazing dad. I’m righting so many wrongs, healing, learning from and teaching myself, my wife and those around me, blah blah blah. There is just that much more love in the world and I feel so much more capable than I did before.
Will my little one start asking the hard questions in 10-15 yrs?
Probably. But they won’t be alone.
I am willing to bet that they won’t be too far off from the ones I was asking at that age. Not only does little one have 2 committed, full-time, safe parents – I also feel 100x more prepared to follow those inquiries than any adult figure that was in my life was when I was doing the asking. Yes, we are lucky. IMO it behooves the lucky ones to put in this work.
“Nihilism” is the perfect descriptor for this flavor of antinatalism. I do get where it’s coming from (because, believe me, we have struggles). And yeah, don’t have a kid who you know won’t be supported – it’s irresponsible. But don’t pretend you’re better off because of a choice we made for ourselves.
I don’t feel like we’re even close to a stage where it’s ok to just throw up our hands, turn away, and let the light die out. We need a turning towards and inwards to make a better place, even if the struggles are uncomfortable.
My siblings’ kids are all angry at the hubris their parents had to birth them.
It’s a weird thing to be angry about. They now have agency over the world they live in. If they hate it, they can change it. That’s an opportunity given to vanishingly few life forms on the planet.
Not conservative Millenials/Z. Apparently.
Judging by slices I see on Reddit/Facebook/Twitter, they are in alternate reality where all this is hysteria. The plan is to settle down with a tradwife and smile into their Rumble podcasts, I guess?
Judging by slices I see on Reddit/Facebook/Twitter, they are in alternate reality where all this is hysteria.
It is hysteria. The outcry is fully unreflective of social conditions, at least within the United States. Go back to the 1980s, when all the millennials were being born, and describe the modern era - historic low crime, a superabundance of cheap consumer goods, massive housing surpluses, cheap and inexhaustible energy, no nuclear wars. We’re not living with acid rain or radioactive wastelands or Soylent Green levels of food shortages. The scariest thing about AI is that it sucks.
Imagine how many people wouldn’t have had kids 40 years ago knowing the modern state of America.
So much of this shit really is just terminally online doomerism. It’s not material.
Keep ignoring all the road signs that there is a curve ahead. No need to slow down. In fact, speed up.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/We_Didn't_Start_the_Fire
“We Didn’t Start the Fire” is a song written by American musician Billy Joel.
Joel conceived the idea for the song when he had just turned 40. He was in a recording studio and met a 21-year-old friend of Sean Lennon who said “It’s a terrible time to be 21!”. Joel replied: “Yeah, I remember when I was 21 – I thought it was an awful time and we had Vietnam, and y’know, drug problems, and civil rights problems and everything seemed to be awful”. The friend replied: “Yeah, yeah, yeah, but it’s different for you. You were a kid in the fifties and everybody knows that nothing happened in the fifties”. Joel retorted: “Wait a minute, didn’t you hear of the Korean War or the Suez Canal Crisis?” Joel later said those headlines formed the basic framework for the song.[4]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eFTLKWw542g
🎵 We didn’t start the fire 🎵
🎵 It was always burning since the world’s been turning 🎵
🎵 We didn’t start the fire 🎵
🎵 No, we didn’t light it, but we tried to fight it 🎵We did start the fire, about 400k years ago, some Homo created magic; a prodigy, a firestarter.
That mother fucker. It’s all his fault. Or her fault. I’m equal opportunity.
A twisted firestarter?
Punkin instigator.
Alchemy and arsonry, live together in perfect harmony.
They’ve got the poison, they’ve got the remedy.
And then some downvote those trying to fight it. Boggles the mind.
I’d say adopt/care for the many unwanted kids.
This is what my wife and I did. I think it is a good thing to do, but if you look at my comment history just one comment down from this, you’ll see good reason for what I’m about to say:
Not everyone should do this. It is extremely challenging, and its not something I think most people can take on successfully. Unfortunately, the fact that a kid is in a situation to be adopted means they have been severely impacted by trauma, which means that they will be considerably harder to parent than a kid you have biologically.
It is not for the faint of heart. Hell, its not even for those of a strong constitution. I have been nearly broken many times, and I’ve only been parenting my kids for 5 years. I have wanted to quit countless times.
I was adopted - abandoned at the hospital after birth. Not every adoptee has a deeply traumatic past that makes it hard to raise them.
Likewise many bio children are just as capable of being stressful and challenging to raise.
Most definitely, but I think in general people underestimate the challenges they can find in adoption. Those kids deserve loving families, it’s just something I know people I personally know who have expressed interest in adopting would not be able to handle.
Wish you both the best of luck and send a hug. I hope the tide turns and you get to enjoy it more with time. We need more people like you in this world.
Nah, people are way to stupid.
Just look at all the comments already saying that “we need to have kids because are have smart genes and we need to fight against the evil stupid genes of the shit people”
Isn’t that what you’ve just done?
Was that an intentional joke?
I’d rather look to egalitarian emancipatory remedies, than dwell on defeatism and succumbing to ploys of "pitchforks vs torches, or opposaming in service of the polluting oligarchs and kakistarchs.
Avail the suppressed clean emancipatory techologies, abundance is restored, people no longer feel the economic duress, “it’s easy to be an angel in heaven”, and we’ll see “it takes a village”, and can all eagerly help care for the ever dwindling “unwanted kids”.
no. you’re supposed to be more racist. didn’t get the memo?
Every generation has had its own set of crises that could “never be overcome”. Being a doomer is letting them win. A better future only happens if we make it happen.
Climate change is nothing like previous crises. How are we supposed to reverse physics to make better future happen?
Even if we all adopted neolithic lifestyle and stopped putting more greenhouse gases in the atmosphere today, the amount of harmful elements that are already in the atmosphere means temperatures will keep rising for the next couple of decades.
Tell me with a straight face this is same as WW2 or cold war.
The same way people fixed the ozone layer, by working together, is totally doable, and we have emerging technologies that would allow us to actively reverse harm, while we have other ones to adapt to the new climate.
Which technology is there to remove greenhouse gases from the atmosphere? That’s the main driver of climate change.
Climate change is nothing like previous crises. How are we supposed to reverse physics to make better future happen?
No “reverse physics” required.
One idea among many:
Restore cannabis.
It cleans air 7 times more than pine forests.
It’s not just the carbon dioxide that comes into contact with the chlorophyll in the leaves. It’s all the terpenes (and other aromatics and pollen) it pumps out too. Meaning it cleans the air high in the sky.
And atop that, it can replace many polluting technologies. Oil and deforestation (like for farming), for a couple hot examples.
Even making limecrete housing, instead of offgassing carbon dioxide and causing loads of carbon dioxide during production like concrete does, it’s actually carbon negative, in production and throughout its lifetime, sucking up carbon, further hardening over time.
Similar gains with bioplastics, graphene, paper, fabric, rope, medicine, food, etc.
It can grow in a greater range of climates than any other useful plant. We could re-green e.g. the entire sahara, the australian outback and the southern half of north america. And it’d increase the soil quality readied for other vegetation within a year or two.
And that’s just one idea.
Our problem is not physics, it’s psycho-socio-economic.
If the new solid state battery from donutlabs is legit, that could indicate the trickle of cleaner technologies coming, perhaps even towards availing of the emancipatory technologies that have been suppressed for the past century or two. Many an untapped potential. Even just the more mundane better known, like thorium reactors. We have so much headroom without the crooks keeping us down and dirty.
You had me at cannabis, fuck yeah lol
At this point it’s already happening one way or another so either you resign yourself to the fact that the world you knew is over and do everything in your power to make something better or you cede the future to those who certainly won’t. I’m not delusional, I know things suck. The planet is irreparably damaged. Wallowing in that fact does nothing, it’s a bridge to nowhere.
Whatever. I’m still not going to have kids. The future is fucked and I don’t want to inflict it upon them.
What if we’re in a “fall of the Roman empire” type scenario? Shit does not feel like business as usual.
Agreed. I would say yeah we likely are at one of those historical inflection points. But I think what we do in the interstitial period matters a lot. It’s now apparent that these systems that we were told were immovable can be dismantled rather quickly.
The hinge point we sit on is whether or not we allow the existing ruling class to consolidate power and create the new world or if working class people take back the power that belongs to them. I think the doomer attitude favors the prior.
And having kids is the best way to not get a better future.
I used to think this. Then I remembered everyone will get old and no one will be around to run the economy.
But … our current economic system is a big part of how things got so bad. Being able to fuck it up is kinda a motivator for not having kids-
We just need to like… skip a generation, then breed just enough to stay level.
I don’t think anyone means no one should have children, but man… there’s too many fucking people. And it doesn’t mean killing people, just letting people die naturally while not adding more.
Yeah funny thing is this is basically what we’re already doing. China’s one child policy and neoliberal austerity everywhere else ensured the current generation of children is smaller than ever. We’re running the experiment now, and overall we’d be fine if the countries that have negative growth rates weren’t so xenophobic and let immigrants in to replace their ageing workforce.
Twenty years ago I would have agreed, there’s too many people, but now the pendulum is swinging the other way.
And let them win?
This is the line of thinking that leads to Idiocracy
Nah, the line of thinking is unnecessary under capitalism. Capitalism will ensure the greediest piece of shit wins. Modern healthcare means idiots survive. It’s a known near constant that intelligent people have fewer kids.
It’s all but guaranteed when the norm is to not pay attention to quality. and if the constant push for shitty low quality “AI” slop in everything as of recent is any indication… yeaaaa we’re fucked.
Then give up and don’t have kids and ensure that their similarly thinking offspring have a better chance of continuing the cycle.
There is no better chance than 100%.
Why is everyone so fond of this movie that is based on eugenics undertones?
The premise is bad, but the portrayal of the nonsensical aspects of modern society are spot on and in many ways prescient. It just missed that what would make us dimmer would not be mating, but technology.
In some ways, sure. But it just depicts it as “People dumb, LOL” and not how that dumbness arises or persists. It doesn’t happen in a vacuum, it happens because specific groups of people (mostly conservative politicians and their leash-holders) discourage education and encourage reactionism. None of that is shown in Idiocracy. Without them, at least some critical thinking would persist or arise.
People praising that movie as prescient want to believe that all their problems are just that everyone but them are idiots, because it absolves them of trying to help fix things. It means the problem is inevitable and unfixable. It also means those people are help creating the future they are critiquing as they abandon critical thinking for reactionism.
But it just depicts it as “People dumb, LOL” and not how that dumbness arises or persists.
Well, it’s a comedy, not an education piece. It was never intended to have any sort of accuracy. People just relate to it because it seems like far too many people in charge make awful decisions because of ignorance, willful or otherwise.
The problem being that everyone uses it to say “dumb people reproduce more and that’s the problem with humanity”, which I’m sure the nazis would like but that I struggle seeing as an acceptable opinion.
I wouldn’t mind having 50 kids, I’m just too broke to even afford to date :D
I don’t think it’s fair to show the entire world burning because of several issues that are very unique to the US. This is highly US-centric.
I don’t think it’s unfair to include the whole world when the biggest ones are basically everywhere (climate change, viral swords of Damocles, rampant racism, sexism and other discrimination, corrupt leaders and the rise of the global far-right, etc.)
And others, like affordable housing, are similarly out-of-reach throughout most of the world.
Us defaultism
US defeatism
The statistics clearly show that poorer people have more children than richer people, so does having material comfort cause despair or are many people confused about their own motivations?
This is not your boomer’s “poor”.
I think that people with access to higher education who also have constant access to world news is bound to lead to people not wanting to put their kids through it. If you compare that to someone who barely has access to the internet and whose main focus is trying to feed their family and it’s a whole different situation. Humans need meaning in their lives and in western societies this has been waning for a while now.
I’d say both are involved, but of the two, far more the latter than the former.
My observation is that generally speaking, poor countries tend to be conservative politically; and where the country is richer than the statistically poorer countries, the conservative group within tend to be poorer per capita.
My guess (and that’s all it really is), is that procreation factors very heavily into the conservative religious ethos, and in that it appears that religion will be heavily rooted in poorer nations/socioeconmic areas, having(or making) (as many) children (as possible) is a god-given mandate.
Doesn’t matter the conditions into which children are born because they will follow the will of god and live in eternal happiness after death. The misery they endure here on earth will be forever forgotten in the joys of their afterlives.
This is, at least, how it seems to me, and is just my opinion.
According to this data: https://www.neilsberg.com/insights/united-states-population-by-age/ the most populous age (in five-year increments) in the US is 30-34, followed closely by 25-29 then 35-39.
Ignoring the under 20 population, older Gen-Z + Millennials (age 20-45) make up about 45% of the voting age population. So enjoy blaming everyone else for the world’s problems for about 5 more years.
Now do the candidates we can vote for.
If people showed up for primaries and supported candidates worth voting for, there’d be a hell of a lot more of them. Instead most of that demographic would rather stay home, post memes, and complain that the world is doomed.
Maybe try doing something about those problems instead of just standing there?
Okay, done. I’ve switched my house over to electric, I drive an ev, I fight the good fight against racists, I push everything I can as an individual, but we’re still careening towards a bleak future. What else, oh wise one, should I do? How do I personally solve these issues to appease you?
It takes collective action, aka government.
What do you mean do something, can’t you see we’re posting about it? Jokes aside, choosing to not have kids is doing something about it.
Like electing people who say they’re going to do something about them?
Sure… could take that impression. Or… consider:
Patent Office whistle blower Tom Valone revealed at energy conferences in the early 00’s that by the year 2000 there had already been over 3000 free energy device patents secreted. (… That’s abundant energy without pollution.)
- “We should do away with the absolutely specious notion that everybody has to earn a living. It is a fact today that one in ten thousand of us can make a technological breakthrough capable of supporting all the rest. The youth of today are absolutely right in recognizing this nonsense of earning a living. We keep inventing jobs because of this false idea that everybody has to be employed at some kind of drudgery because, according to Malthusian Darwinian theory he must justify his right to exist. So we have inspectors of inspectors and people making instruments for inspectors to inspect inspectors. The true business of people should be to go back to school and think about whatever it was they were thinking about before somebody came along and told them they had to earn a living.” ― Buckminster Fuller
Follow the tech arc from Michael Faraday through to Nikola Tesla (passing by the Sonora Aero Club and Charles Dellschau’s drawings of what they had in 1850 (the early state of the art of what would become zero-inertia propulsion (like the foo-fighters and “the bell” (“die glocke”) in (and before) WW2))), you may find many more examples of technologies we’ve been denied.
Consider even the lies they {Ed Bernays (who inspired Hitler), Harry J Anslinger and Randolf William Hearst} spread to convince us our most useful resource, Cannabis, was instead a demon called “Marijuana”, depriving us of the most nutritionally complete and balanced food source for humans and livestock, that can be even eaten without processing and cooking, can last for many years, can be grown in the same soil for 20 years without rotation before depleting nutrients, cleans the air over 7 times more than a pine forest, makes 7 times as much paper as trees and the paper is stronger and lasts for hundreds and even thousands of years, makes fabrics more versatile than cotton with none of the pollution and easier and without slaves, and it even can produce oil fuels like diesel, alcohol fuels like petrol, and even cheap abundant easy graphene to help make solid state capacitors and photovoltaics etc, as well as making super strong limecrete and bioplastics and on and on it goes. And I haven’t even mentioned medicine and spirituality and fun yet, which it’s the best at and non-lethal. All unsurprising since humanity have been in co-evolution with it, cultivating it the longest. The first writing we still have on paper, was on hemp paper, about cannabis, as a medicine. It’s the main ingredient in the holy anointing oil. Salvation’s return is the restoration of cannabis/hemp. No wonder competing industries sought to eliminate the competition, keeping us dependent on their inferior products, and wage slavery.
Consider these two quotes together, and who said them:
- “We already have the means to travel among the stars, but these technologies are locked up in black projects and it would take an act of God to ever get them out to benefit humanity… anything you can imagine we already know how to do.” — Ben Rich, former Head of the Lockheed Skunk Works
- “It is easier for us to pay a private contractor to re-invent something so it will come out at a lower classification level, than to try to declassify it.” – Bennett Hart, then Deputy Director of the National Reconnaissance Organization
If we release all the emancipatory technologies the corporations have been sitting on to keep us hog-tied to their polluting and inferior technology for impoverishing rents, we’ll have dispelled the circular argument that we need a cull of the human population (like the top line of the Georgia Guidestones or some interpretations of Bill Gates’ reductive equation suggests).
It’d even avail all space to us (space, that’s expanding, faster than we could fill it). And to populate Mars, Callisto, Ceres, etc. And to create vast spinning tube orbitals for 1G almost wherever we want. And it would let us build interconnected forest-arcologies, creating a vast forest arcology-scapes, allowing over 300 trillion humans to live here on earth, in abundant nature.
Not saying we should.
Just saying we have so much more headroom with proper resource management, without the crooks holding us down just so they have more than us. Egalitarian proliferation of the (currently suppressed) emancipatory technologies would have even the richest be better off.
Or we could just keep sabotaging ourselves, sabotaging the survival of the species, held under duress to be complicitly committing ecocide, pretending things are harder than they are, just to help maintain the billionaires’ rigged game. :/
It’s just a ride. And we can change it any time we want:
