Do you feel sad for people born today?
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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.
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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!
Children born today will have to kill other human beings to obtain clean water within their lifetime.
It really comes down to if you think that's an acceptable world to have kids in.
I weep for the youth personally.
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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]Yes, climate change, microplatics in brains and balls and mountain fresh water and pollution all around.
Oh and forget about ever owning your house except you inherit.
And all of it is man-made.
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Right, and that's all well and good, but not what I was talking about.
Okay? I fail to see the relevance of your comment then. Its about how we feel of the children born today. Not how you feel about having children. The children dont have to be your's. They're going to be born whether you approve or not. Giving them a reason to have hope is still a choice you can make.
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VERY specific people would have been better off born 20 years ago.
The vast majority of people would be better off today.
You can imagine in another 20 years that would be different, but almost everyone is better off today than they were 20 years ago, and they will be even better 20 years from now than today.
Specific groups may have a harder time in one time period or another, but society at large is getting better at the world scale over the long term. Hope still exists.
Climate change related disasters will only get worse over the long term, though.
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Maybe when it comes to social issues but when I read OP’s post I think of climate change and how it seems to be worsening at an increasing pace.
I’m in my mid thirties and I’ve had a tough time the last few summers. I’m too hot to eat, causing nausea and reducing the amount of water I can drink without vomiting. I’m sure it puts a strain on my vital organs. I wonder how much it’s taking off of my life expectancy already and how much worse it will get over the next decades.
I don't even live in a (historically) warm place.
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Even a cursory search shows the statement to be factual. Pick one
wrote last edited by [email protected]Are you living under a rock?
You don't need to google this shit...
There is a large land war in Europe with combined casualties likeling going to hit 2 million within a year. north Korea entered the war on Russian side.
Israel is exterminating Arabs in Gaza.
There is a big war in sudan
RWANDA invaded DRC.
Europe is re arming. China has been re arming and rattling saber for Taiwan.
India and Pakistan always doing their thing. Yemen is in chronic proxy war.
There is a proxy war in burma
Thailand is testing Cambonia
You repeating propaganda from 15 years ago.
Get educated.
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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!
No I find that line of thinking cringe and a terminally online position
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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..
wrote last edited by [email protected]Cool I'd rather go to the store and buy one than dumpster dive and spend hours of my time repairing something I can buy in 15m for $50. Hours of my time is far more valuable than the $50 I'd save dumpster diving. Must be nice to have a lot of free time to go dumpster diving to save a few bucks. I might have done that when I was broke in my 20s.
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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.
wrote last edited by [email protected]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 agree. But I also am old enough and have also seen enough to know I have it a lot worse than a lot of people from the present and past. I have known this at 27, at 22, and at 20. These are actually not contradictory statements.
but because they use Lemmy I can assume they are a relatively stable, middle class person
This is a pretty odd assumption. A middle class person to me would be someone who doesn't struggle to pay rent/bills, and is saving up for a property or is already paying a mortgage without extreme sacrifices. They own property, or in (nowadays) rare circumstances a productive business and at least some of their income thus isn't generated from wage labour.
This is of course a very conservative definition, but let's go with that:
An extremely lavish internet connection of half a gigabit down with no caps or limits here in the UK costs about £30 or less a month and a phone or basic PC costs less than £100 even for both, easily.
The council tax alone, before things like electricity, water exceeds that. My rent is 11 times that and is extremely cheap compared to living in the city, which I can only do because I WFH - a rarity.
A median downpayment on a house costs £75,000 for a 30 years long mortgage, this is approximately twice the median, pre-tax income for full-time employees in the UK of £37,430.
Housing price rises, and even rent/bill/cost of living rises have also outpaced both wage growth and even in many cases inflation. Purchasing power is on the whole - down.
Focusing on the only things that have gotten enormously cheap very much contrary to the general trend - like access to social media, internet and electronics is like looking at a really nice tree when the forest is on fire.
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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.
Word. Just because America is on a downward slide everyone acting like these are the worst times ever. LOL. The people need some history classes.
When I was a kid, cancer was basically a death sentence. AIDS certainly was! Some of the tech I've experienced blows my mind. Wondering if my wife and I had finally caught COVID (we did 🤬), so I busted out the free laboratory kit I got in the mail. That was work for a hospital lab, and you were going to wait a few days. Sliced the side of my finger off, and they grew it back. I could go on forever.
In the movie Armageddon (1998), talking about the age of the space station being 10-years old, "Most of us don't drive cars that old." A 10-yo car was trash, common knowledge. My truck is a 2004 and my wife's car is a 2014. Both run great. And I could go on for ages as to how much safer vehicles are. None of the things we take for granted like ABS, air bags, crumple zones, none of that existed when I was a kid. Hell, some cars didn't have safety glass!
People will next tell me that global warming is a new threat that will kill us all. Friends and neighbors, we already survived an ice age.
