Do you feel sad for people born today?
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Today, people have the money to buy a new microwave every time the old one breaks. Things were a lot more expensive then, and electronic repair was a viable industry because of it.
I can't remember ever actually buying a microwave in the first place.
Then again, I'm not normal, I know how to diagnose, repair, overhaul and even Frankenstein microwave ovens, so if one ever goes out, I'll just keep an eye out by nearby dumpsters for scrap parts microwaves and rebuild whichever of the two is in better condition...
I hate living in such a wasteful society, I'm all about the right to repair!
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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!
Not specifically today, just generally born. Some things are worse, some better.
It's just that it's impossible for anyone to consent to being born. And not many people can say that they're living happily. -
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!
Yup. I smile and give lip service while thinking how I would never want to do that to a child. Im really lucky because if I did a fifth year of college to pick up a second major and did a year in a PhD program and worked in my industry that did not make enough for two or three years. This set me back just enough that by the time the kid question came up it was in the mid aughts and it was a no not now and looking around not ever. Did not take many more years to become no way, no how, not in this reality. If I had done a more lucrative major and started working right out of college there is a massive chance I might have kids who I would not have been able to help pay for college and desperately trying to make sure I did not turn into a burden on them.
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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.
wrote last edited by [email protected]reading real history is work though. just like working out and eating well.
doomscrolling is like the equivalent of sitting you your ass and eating junk food/delivery and satiating that lizard brain to the exclusion of their higher functions and potentials.
majority of people are going to choose the latter as much as they can.
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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.
wrote last edited by [email protected]Seriously. I regularly meet people who make top 5% incomes, like 250K+. They living in luxury condos, have had their entire life paved out for them by welathy parents, and will never have any real problems or struggles in their lives.
What do they talk about every time? How poor they are. How everything is so hard. How they struggle so much with daily tasks. How their job is so awful. Why can't they just go be on a yacht somewhere forever? How their friend/boss/parent is mean and not giving them more stuff, etc. etc. Why isn't their life perfect and wonderful life they were promised? Why aren't they famous and rich like some other person they met once? Oh, and how the govt is evil because it taxes them too much and it's not fair that their multi-million dollar inheritance might be taxed too so they might only inherent $20 million, not $28 million, the horror and unfairness of it all!
And the millionaires/billionaires... all feel this same way too. Hence why they are all building apocalypse estates in New Zealand and bunkers in old missile silos and whining about how the mean government taxing them is so unfair.
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30 years ago, if your microwave went out, half the time it might have just been the fuse, which you could buy a pack of really cheap at the local Radio Shack.
Today, what the fuck is a fuse? They want you to chuck that old microwave and buy a new one that connects to the internet...
wrote last edited by [email protected]a new microwave is like $20-50 dude. And no, it has no internet.
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Asbestos and lead paint everywhere, yummers
That's just complaining at a high level. Think about the gens before and after
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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.
wrote last edited by [email protected]I think you're missing the point.
Dying of disease because there simply isn't a cure is a tragedy, but dying of disease because the cure is too expensive, not because of material and resource limitations but because some shithead just wants to be rich, when in reality we could produce enough for everyone - is a farce beyond comprehension.
We escaped the wolves and I sure am glad for it, but we have senselessly created new wolves just to throw people to them.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not making an appeal to nature, or using the noble savage fallacy, nor am I reactionary moron who thinks everyone went to Galas or that in the past I'd be admiring the decorative architecture rather than be the slave making it, I'm a huge simp for science and technology, but I also can see that the world is headed in a very dark direction compared to the 2010s.
As a minority in both legislation and in practice my rights and safety have been actively eroded since the 90s and things were quite literally just better back then for basically everyone.
I struggle to think what exactly would be worse for your average Westerner being born earlier in actual human scales of time, like e.g. the 1990s.
The boomers around me don't even understand that you don't just "get" a job for existing, and my parents can't imagine having a degree and worrying about making rent or skipping on heating or meals in a "first world country" like the UK, and they grew up in the fucking soviet union and not exactly during it's heyday.
Living in wartime is awful. Living while wishing for things to be fixed, or even for any kind of hope, even if it means death in war, isn't that much better.
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a new microwave is like $20-50 dude. And no, it has no internet.
I've never bought one, I always repair them. Spare parts are pretty easy to find near dumpsters, given how often people just throw them away..
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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.
So how old must one be to not have you pull an ad-hominem instead of addressing the points being made?
Have you maybe considered that it's precisely the fact that you are older and have seen more of the world actually somewhat functioning that gives you this impression that on the whole things are fine, not to mention material advantages, and it is in fact - your credibility, that should be in question?
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Asbestos and lead paint everywhere, yummers
wrote last edited by [email protected]We don't know what our asbestos and lead paint will be, and so we don't worry about it. Neither did they, and it wasn't a problem for them. They're a problem for us, though.
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If we dont pass the torch only the rich will. Is that a world we want to fortify? I'd rather not. Someone has to oppose them. Thats our and our children's fight as the world begins to wane.
wrote last edited by [email protected]And we're fighting this fight by breeding more wageslaves for the capitalists?
I don't mean to be as dramatic as this comes off, but I don't understand this logic. You don't work extra hard when you want to stick it to the rich, you don't work at all, i.e. go on strike. People not having kids would make sense as a strike of sorts.
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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!
Honestly, I don't. I came up in the '80s, wasn't diagnosed with autism until 2022. My life would have been so different if I had known about it when I was a child, and if autism was as well-understood as it is today so that I had the support I needed. Kids today who have issue like that are identified much earlier and helped more. The steady march of knowledge and science is almost always a good thing. So, the present and the future are always the place to be for most people most of the time. Of course a Gazan isn't feeling the giddy excitement of scientific discovery at this moment, but for the human species as a whole, things have never been better. There is always someone suffering immense, unimaginable hardship. The human project is overwhelmingly not that.
Every generation has existential concerns, too. Climate change and the rise of fascism is on the cards right now. When I was a kid and adolescent in the '80s and '90s, I was in the middle of the N. Irish 'Troubles'. Before that, people had the Cold War to worry about. Before that, WWII and WWI. But things are always better than they were 'yesterday' if you take stock of everyone as a whole and not just those suffering the worst in any given moment.
If you took the average kid born today in an average society, and transplanted them into the 1970s with the same socioeconomic starting point, it would be tantamount to gross child abuse given the vast ocean of stuff they could have had, but now will never have (in their childhood, at least). And I'm not even talking about technology and the internet; just the treatment of children by the state and schools alone would be night-and-day different. Kids are individuals today, in the '70s you were your parents' property and didn't develop a sense-of-self worth respecting until you were old enough to get drunk.
I still wouldn't bring a kid into existence, but for those that are here already, 2025 is the best time to be born. Like if I were my parents, I would not have had me while the country was tearing itself apart with bombings and shootings every day. But I'm glad I was born when I was and not when my parents were kids.
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Remember the hole in the ozone layer? Or the nuclear threat, some people were sure that the world was going to end before 1984. Then the aids epidemic. And 9/11, my god, nobody was safe anymore! And then the Yellostone caldera, that thing is going to erupt any time now!
The hole in the ozone layer is a great case study in effective amelioration of an anthropogenic climate problem. People got whipped up into a frenzy and politicians listened both to them and to the scientists. We switched refrigerants and have continued research and development to the point that heat pumps are now good enough to work in the winter in most places, using refrigerant blends. The ozone layer is well on its way to recovery. The overall response was excellent, and the Montreal Protocol was likely the most successful international agreement ever. That’s a stark contrast to our modern climate denialism and the vilification of science.
The nuclear threat is still real, but mutually assured destruction turns out to have been a pretty effective deterrent. But hey, maybe nuclear winter is the answer to global warming.
I don’t think anyone saw AIDS or 9/11 as an existential threat. I agree that there have always been things to dread, but you’re just building a strawman.
Dread about uncontrollable geologic forces is natural, but it’s not what I’m talking about. Yellowstone could erupt, sure. Many other geologic disasters could also occur, and humans would be along for a short ride of doom. That’s just life, and that’s okay.
But it’s especially depressing to watch the slow-motion failure of our social species to be able to communicate and organize effectively enough to stop a climate problem of our own making. It’s technologically preventable, but not socially. And at this point, I argue that it’s morally wrong to create children without realistic hope for a better future.
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Yup. I smile and give lip service while thinking how I would never want to do that to a child. Im really lucky because if I did a fifth year of college to pick up a second major and did a year in a PhD program and worked in my industry that did not make enough for two or three years. This set me back just enough that by the time the kid question came up it was in the mid aughts and it was a no not now and looking around not ever. Did not take many more years to become no way, no how, not in this reality. If I had done a more lucrative major and started working right out of college there is a massive chance I might have kids who I would not have been able to help pay for college and desperately trying to make sure I did not turn into a burden on them.
And the fact that these economic conditions are imposed on the working majority is the real crime.
Owner class are parasites and get your ivermectin out.
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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.
Wars are at an historical low point.
Factually incorrect statement.
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Honestly, I don't. I came up in the '80s, wasn't diagnosed with autism until 2022. My life would have been so different if I had known about it when I was a child, and if autism was as well-understood as it is today so that I had the support I needed. Kids today who have issue like that are identified much earlier and helped more. The steady march of knowledge and science is almost always a good thing. So, the present and the future are always the place to be for most people most of the time. Of course a Gazan isn't feeling the giddy excitement of scientific discovery at this moment, but for the human species as a whole, things have never been better. There is always someone suffering immense, unimaginable hardship. The human project is overwhelmingly not that.
Every generation has existential concerns, too. Climate change and the rise of fascism is on the cards right now. When I was a kid and adolescent in the '80s and '90s, I was in the middle of the N. Irish 'Troubles'. Before that, people had the Cold War to worry about. Before that, WWII and WWI. But things are always better than they were 'yesterday' if you take stock of everyone as a whole and not just those suffering the worst in any given moment.
If you took the average kid born today in an average society, and transplanted them into the 1970s with the same socioeconomic starting point, it would be tantamount to gross child abuse given the vast ocean of stuff they could have had, but now will never have (in their childhood, at least). And I'm not even talking about technology and the internet; just the treatment of children by the state and schools alone would be night-and-day different. Kids are individuals today, in the '70s you were your parents' property and didn't develop a sense-of-self worth respecting until you were old enough to get drunk.
I still wouldn't bring a kid into existence, but for those that are here already, 2025 is the best time to be born. Like if I were my parents, I would not have had me while the country was tearing itself apart with bombings and shootings every day. But I'm glad I was born when I was and not when my parents were kids.
IMO climate change is kind of a different beast than hardships from the past.
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Even a cursory search shows the statement to be factual. Pick one
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wrote last edited by [email protected]
The difference (sans 9/11 which isn't really comparable) is that all of those were actively worked on and ultimately solved.
We banned CFCs and fixed the Ozone layer.
We have done nuclear reduction treaties with USSR/US and later Russia/US, even under Putin.
We had prevention, medical and otherwise for HIV, and then effective treatment where having HIV is honestly not even that big a deal anymore.
We've created and improved upon much better seismic measurement methodology and equipment.People likewise thought the world would end in 2012 but through science and reason we have evolved past such superstitions.
Now let's compare to now:
What has been done about climate change? In the grand scheme - nothing. Renewables are all well and good, but most of the emissions are offset with carbon credits that mean absolutely nothing. Recycling is literally just a lie 99% of the time.
The risk of nuclear confrontation has actually increased, not decreased, since ~2012, between NK, collapsing USA, collapsing fascist Russia, increased standoffs between India and Pakistan, China's increasing militancy, increase in war just generally whether it's Palestine/Israel escalating (yes I'm aware it's been going on forever) or Ethiopia/Eritrea.
At least in my opinion, the bitter rivalry of the Cold war was actually significantly safer than the geopolitical farce we live, which i'd pinpoint as sometime around when Henry Kissinger got the Nobel Peace Prize.
We have the US as world police but the best they could do is give the Taliban some of their gear and get a lot of their own and others killed for it when they weren't busy crashing the world economy and electing fascists with global ambitions for shits and giggles.
Wow what a Belle Époque, Metternich himself would be proud. (/s of course)
We have widespread vaccine mistrust/hesitancy, which puts vulnerable people at risk, not to mention broadly reactionary, outright fascist/nationalist and anti-science, anti-reason and/or anti-intellectual currents among both the elite and powerful strata in society who pretty openly seek to undo the very solutions and improvements we have had over the last 40 odd years and the general population who not only not opposed them, but seem to find these ideas appealing, whether it's intersectional tolerance or workers' rights or people's general freedoms.
On top of all that, we are currently on course for a dictatorship of the rich, and while our conditions in terms of technology and science are nowhere near, our social attitudes seem downright feudal, if not worse when you consider the absurdity of the fact that most of the problems could literally be solved tomorrow (e.g. more empty houses in the UK than homeless people) but simply aren't for no actual legitimate reason whatsoever, and the world not only seems to not have any corrections lined up for this trajectory, but seems to be actively accelerating towards it.
So many times I've tried to ignore the world and tell myself in the grand scheme of things this must just be the darkest moment before the sunset, but it keeps getting darker and darker, and only faster and faster.
And to get ahead of the usual thought terminating cliches of "doomscrolling" and "go outside" in comments in threads like this - My life personally, world notwithstanding, is actually pretty great, I've been enormously lucky compared to many I know IRL, I'm happy on the whole, but it doesn't make the world around me any less hopeless and depressing or change the facts on which I base that opinion.
If anything, the use of those same cliches just proves this point further - because effectively it's no different than the "if I don't look, maybe it'll go away" from that Twilight Zone episode, and all other excuses like "we weren't meant to process this much information" that people use to kill the curiousity they have about the world within their very soul to protect their fragile selves from the absurdity of the hell we seem to inhabit at the moment, only reinforce further that the observation of the world today as bleak definitely has merit.
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So how old must one be to not have you pull an ad-hominem instead of addressing the points being made?
Have you maybe considered that it's precisely the fact that you are older and have seen more of the world actually somewhat functioning that gives you this impression that on the whole things are fine, not to mention material advantages, and it is in fact - your credibility, that should be in question?
I'm old enough and have seen enough to know that I've got it better than a lot of people from the present and past. I can't know for certain what this person has undergone in their 22 years, but because they use Lemmy I can assume they are a relatively stable, middle class person. I may be wrong about that. This person is privileged enough to even be able to type said comment here. To claim they know what a "broken world" looks like is naive in my opinion.
