Do you feel sad for people born today?
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That’s our fight—not our unborn childrens’.
Having a child for any purpose other than the flourishing and well-being of that child has always struck me as a deeply flawed decision. If your child doesn’t want to fight for a world they never knew, all you’ve birthed is misery.
wrote last edited by [email protected]Mate, we have to create the environment to flourish. I never said it was fair. I never said it was right. But look at the world around you. Someone has to pick up the banner, and we won't be here forever. You still have to kindle hope.
Also, some people fuck and kids get made, and thats just life.
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I personally cringe when I hear a friend js having a kid. All I can think of is how bad theyre going to have it. Hell id definitely have been better off being born 20 years earlier, but these new kids are REALLY screwed unless they have super rich parents.
"Nothing new under the sun" I suppose!
Everyone here knows the solution; Eat the rich.
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I personally cringe when I hear a friend js having a kid. All I can think of is how bad theyre going to have it. Hell id definitely have been better off being born 20 years earlier, but these new kids are REALLY screwed unless they have super rich parents.
"Nothing new under the sun" I suppose!
Climate change is the only true existential reason to feel that way.
Everything else is just over focusing on a short term dip. On average things are getting better over the long term. The British Empire collapsed, and so will the American one, and the world will keep on turning and progressing.
Hell kids born these days may have legitimate cures for most forms of cancer by the time they're old. We won't.
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I personally cringe when I hear a friend js having a kid. All I can think of is how bad theyre going to have it. Hell id definitely have been better off being born 20 years earlier, but these new kids are REALLY screwed unless they have super rich parents.
"Nothing new under the sun" I suppose!
"I miss the good ol' days" is basically how a certain country's fascist got elected. There's nothing to miss about the past, what's to miss? Casual "gay humor" (homophobia), racial stereotyping, misogyny and toxic masculinity, ableism, refusal to ackowlege other's mental health stuggles, or conversely, locking people up for neurodivergence, the fact that "lobotomy" is a legal thing to do, fuck that world.
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I personally cringe when I hear a friend js having a kid. All I can think of is how bad theyre going to have it. Hell id definitely have been better off being born 20 years earlier, but these new kids are REALLY screwed unless they have super rich parents.
"Nothing new under the sun" I suppose!
Having a child in 2025 is just plain selfish.
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I personally cringe when I hear a friend js having a kid. All I can think of is how bad theyre going to have it. Hell id definitely have been better off being born 20 years earlier, but these new kids are REALLY screwed unless they have super rich parents.
"Nothing new under the sun" I suppose!
I think every time period has its up sides and down sides. I fear that human civilization will soon end thanks to climate change but I don't think it's an inevitability, a part of me still has hope things will get better. You just can't know for sure what things will be like for the next generation
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I personally cringe when I hear a friend js having a kid. All I can think of is how bad theyre going to have it. Hell id definitely have been better off being born 20 years earlier, but these new kids are REALLY screwed unless they have super rich parents.
"Nothing new under the sun" I suppose!
wrote last edited by [email protected]All ye who enter abandon all hope
Seriously, you people are a bunch of cake eaters. "The future is scary and things are getting worse." It's always been scary, you've just been privileged enough for it not to be.
All I can think of is how bad theyre going to have it.
Bro, people have it bad NOW. Life is and has always been suffering and struggle. Get out of your online bubble and go see some shit. Anyone here who says their life outlook looks bleak would have said the exact same shit 30 years ago or even 100 years ago.
Life is suffering no matter when.
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Having a child in 2025 is just plain selfish.
Username checks out.
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Very. I already dont see a bright future. People born today dont know anything but a broken world. Me being born 2003 atleast saw a slight bit of it
I'm sorry, but you are wildly naive. You've seen 22 years of this planet. You have no idea how good you and your potential offspring actually have it.
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I can't wrap my head around this. I'm choosing not to have kids because I can't imagine explaining to them some day why I chose to bring them into the world.
Not every child is planned
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Hell id definitely have been better off being born 20 years earlier
You personally, maybe. But a lot of other people no. I'm thinking about disease we found and will find cures for, acceptation of differences (gender, neurodiversity etc...), advancement in prosthetic technologies and all the other things.
As history advances some people will be better of, some less and the tides always turn.
How does OP know he'd be better off? He could have died of AIDS in 1995. That shit happened all the time.
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I personally cringe when I hear a friend js having a kid. All I can think of is how bad theyre going to have it. Hell id definitely have been better off being born 20 years earlier, but these new kids are REALLY screwed unless they have super rich parents.
"Nothing new under the sun" I suppose!
I definitely would not want a child now. I believe the uncertainty of the speed of climate change and the global suffering that comes with it all would be a terrible burden for everyone.
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As a parent in the US, yes. The future looks very dim among climate change, water overuse, corruption of civic institutions by the capital class, etc.
Even people born 20 years ago have it rough - they’re just now graduating college into a crummy job market and massively inflated housing market, with MAGA policies and AI destroying the economy for both blue and white collar folks as quickly as possible.
It seems cruel to create new life in this environment. Are you going to tell the kids that it’s their job to fix the world that the previous generations abused and degraded for short term gains, because it’s somehow our duty as sane humans to produce more sane humans to continue the fight? Many people today already live a worsening paycheck to paycheck existence, with too little free time to focus on systemic change. How will adding to that help?
Nearly every generation has felt pessimism at one time or another that the world is the worst it’s ever been. But it sure seems different this time.
The folk heroes of tomorrow will be people like Greta Thunberg and Mario’s brother, and that’s not a great existence to root for.
But it sure seems different this time.
They said that last time too. And the time before that? They said that then too.
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Not every child is planned
Right, and that's all well and good, but not what I was talking about.
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People be fucking.
There were kids conceived and born during the Holocaust.
"Hey, baby. Wanna fight eugenics?"
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I personally cringe when I hear a friend js having a kid. All I can think of is how bad theyre going to have it. Hell id definitely have been better off being born 20 years earlier, but these new kids are REALLY screwed unless they have super rich parents.
"Nothing new under the sun" I suppose!
I used to.
Kids have never been something I never saw myself having. I have nephews and nieces and I used to worry about them.
They’ve grown up a bit and the kids are actually doing alright. In my family they are all loved and they’re well behaved kids.
They’re getting proper diagnoses and treatment for their adhd that my brothers and I probably should have gotten as kids. Instead we all got countless detentions and suspensions in school.
School these days is kind of a mess, but my nieces and nephews all have parents who step in and help. The biggest thing for one who was getting bullied was switching schools, it was a total 180 in his life after leaving that environment.
The omnipresent tech and AI stuff is a mess too. I think having involved and caring parents helps a lot with that. It’s harder to fall into the traps when you have good examples in life. Hopefully that keeps up.
As for money/job prospects that was a huge concern when I was coming of age too. 2008 fucked everything up. This too shall pass the youth job market has always been tough for the last 25 years. They’ll figure it out with a bit of help. They’re not doomed here. As long as there are people there will be needs to fill.
I do worry about the climate. I don’t know how to help with that. I try to do good but it’s beyond my control to stop. All we can do is try to mitigate and adapt.
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I personally cringe when I hear a friend js having a kid. All I can think of is how bad theyre going to have it. Hell id definitely have been better off being born 20 years earlier, but these new kids are REALLY screwed unless they have super rich parents.
"Nothing new under the sun" I suppose!
You are born in the very very very best stretch the human race has ever known.
We have solutions for almost every problem which exists today.
Wars are at an historical low point.
Chances are good you've never been even experienced war first hand.
Housing is expensive, yes. But chances are you're reading this on a couch or bed in a home, heated (or cooled), with a working stove, light at night and a fridge with edibles in it. And lets not talk about your immediate almost unrestricted access to all of human knowledge.
That would be unbelievable, impossible even during 99.9% of human history. (Or somewhere near this figure)
You should stop doomscrolling and start reading the real human history.
All of human knowledge at your fingertips. And this is what you chose to distill from it.
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I personally cringe when I hear a friend js having a kid. All I can think of is how bad theyre going to have it. Hell id definitely have been better off being born 20 years earlier, but these new kids are REALLY screwed unless they have super rich parents.
"Nothing new under the sun" I suppose!
Without knowing your friends social economic conditions it is hard to asses...
But this OP is cringe AF though.
Mind your own business lol
If you don't want children, good for you. Trying to act like it is a moral imperative is a maturity issue.
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Mate, we have to create the environment to flourish. I never said it was fair. I never said it was right. But look at the world around you. Someone has to pick up the banner, and we won't be here forever. You still have to kindle hope.
Also, some people fuck and kids get made, and thats just life.
Amen.
If we try and leave the world better than we found it then we can make space for kids to flourish. Thats our obligation to them.
But we have to actually try, even when it’s hard or inconvenient or unfair.
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But it sure seems different this time.
They said that last time too. And the time before that? They said that then too.
wrote last edited by [email protected]Yep, they did. But they weren’t on the brink of tipping-point climate change negative feedback cycles. Exponential growth is great for the economy until it overruns the carrying capacity of the underlying fundamentals.
I expect to live to see worldwide famine and an unimaginably large worldwide refugee crisis as the equatorial band becomes uninhabitable. The groundwater we’ve been pumping out of aquifers took geologic timescales to accumulate, and as it runs out the effect on agriculture will be severe. The Colorado river is enormously oversubscribed, and almost none of the problems that Marc Reisner wrote about over 30 years ago in Cadillac Desert have improved.
I could go on, but it’s all depressing. Yes, this time is much worse. We might claw our way back out of fascism in a reasonable timescale, sure. But the underlying physical realities of the earth’s systems
will starthave already started to come crashing down and will only intensify within my lifetime, and definitely within the average lifespans of children born today.
