841–850 of 881 posts
Give it a few generations. In the past, having a family was status quo and basically required. Now, it’s a choice. Natural selection will heavily favor those with the “I want kids!” gene.
That assumes there is such a thing as a "I want kids" gene, which I personally have never heard of.
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I'd like to see an accounting of the real resources (not money) that elderly require vs children and young to middle aged adults. I'm suspicious because it sounds much like the undue burden tripe you hear about disabled people.
At least in the US, expenses in later life seem not too bad, until the last 3-5 years--at which point healthcare cost absolutely blows everything out of the water. Like, more healthcare cost in one week at 85 than an entire year at 50. Especially once a person is unable to safely walk to the bathroom or prepare a simple meal without falling. Meds, ambulance transport, non-emergency wheelchair transport, rental of var…
The source of the panic is the 'exponential growth forever' dingbats being confronted by a reality they don't like.
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Those issues can be solved by immigration and by immigration, respectively.
Immigration from the same countries that are rapidly improving their own standard of living, and at the same time experiencing their own demographic crashes?
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To add to that, even if we can technically support a lot more people with the sustainable resources we have, which I personally doubt, getting close to our max capacity means we will have zero wiggle room when things go wrong. With climate change accelerating and guaranteed to cause drastic changes to our environment, a lot of things will go wrong at the same time. The analogy I like is your income/spending ratio. Ye…
> Anyway, if you're choosing to have kids, one is enough. The real winners adopt. Not from an evolutionary standpoint, lol
I also consider the memes > genes in terms of leaving a legacy. Shaping a kid's mindset doesn't require them to share half of your genes.
Millennials can’t afford to move out of Mom & Dad’s basement, get married, and have kids. Our society is profoundly sick, both figuratively and now literally.
It seems to me that some parents have kids to help them deal with their existential angst and fulfill a need for meaning they couldn't find elsewhere, let's say providing and caring for people who are already alive and in dire need of help, lets say orphans in developing countries, homeless ppl etc. Or something entirely different. Having children have a very strong narrative for meaning associated with it, which might cause some who are lost in their life have children which will be equally lost.
I happen to hear things like "spread my genes" as example, probably not accounting for the 99.9% similarity with the next random guy and we all share the same ancestors. Even the homeless dude would help us spread our (common) dna if we could help him get his act together.
There are lots of good reasons for having children already mentioned and I agree with many of them, however, difficulty making friends and feelings of meaninglessness should probably be resolved before having children.
Focusing on having something meaningful to give is a lot better. My takeaway from the article is that people deal with more complexities today and might not reach a point where they feel enough "on top of things". Having children if already stressed out might not leave much left to give.
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> whether to start trying to have a family is a BIG-ASS decision, with life-long consequences It especially has life-long consequences for the children! I wouldn't want to put children in this world. I don't think the future world is a nice place to grow up in, even the current world isn't. IMO it's selfish to make kids just to feel fulfilled and not be lonely.
> IMO it's selfish to make kids just to feel fulfilled and not be lonely. You can paint pretty much any action as selfish by using this "just to make yourself feel good" angle. It's a meaningless non-argument.
It would be better to use some other kind of metric, like overall happiness vs suffering, perhaps like antinatalism attempts to do. For example, someone who enjoys working all the time, might see that as a boon for their children, and so decide that overall, it's better to have kids. While someone who doesn't like work might decide to empathize with their unborn children and decide it would be a blessing not to have them. Very subjective, but more well grounded arguments for each persons' decision.
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How would you suggest they broach the point that not every family turns out well? That some end up with kids watching from the car while their mom fights dad's drunken mistress in the Safeway parking lot while dad himself watches on, smoking a cigarette and having a beer?
It doesn't need to be broached. It's obvious.
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They exist as potential, the same way the rock at the top of hill has a certain amount of potential energy. You choose whether to push the rock down the hill or not, and declaring that the rock will absolutely be harmed to an unacceptable degree, when it's foggy and you can't see even 10 feet down the hill, is irrational. Especially given that billions of other rocks have been pushed down much steeper hills with extr…
>I don't want to succeed at the basic function of life Treating having children as a success and a reward in of itself is part of the problem. If someone doesn't want to have children because they feel like they'll have a bad life, that's their decision to make. Not yours to try and apply some strange value judgment where completely unborn children somehow have a say in the equation. You're making the argument rather…
If for example you read about, say Global Warming and say that's the deciding reason you don't want to have kids, and it isn't just a self-serving lie/excuse and you actually understand the issue, then you are an extremely weak person and you should work on that. If everyone acknowledged global warming, or saw insert negative news story and decided not to have kids on that basis the species would end in a generation. That sounds like a pretty weak species to me, literally scared to death.
As for untrustworthy, in my experience weak people are inherently untrustworthy. Even if their motives are good they are unable to endure or contribute under stress. Someone who folds on the issue of having kids because of what they see on the news is someone who's likely to fold on other things under extremely mild pressure, and I don't want to have to depend on such people in a crisis; and everyone's life will have crises unless you're extremely lucky. This is hardly just my opinion.
As for the helicopter parent line, the poster argued that while hypothetical kids can't be harmed if they aren't born, having them does potentially cause them harm. Thus they are arguing that "harm" to the hypothetical kids is the deciding factor, and said "harm" should be avoided by shielding said kids from the world. That is the exact thought process of many helicopter parents, only taken to an extreme level of over-protection and perhaps with less overt narcissism.
And yes this gets a little personal, it's a philosophical argument and I'm calling out perceived weaknesses in another person's life philosophy, just as you are calling out weaknesses you perceive in me. I don't see a problem with any of that.
Millennials can’t afford to move out of Mom & Dad’s basement, get married, and have kids. Our society is profoundly sick, both figuratively and now literally.
That’s not the only reason. Overweight women have a harder time conceiving. More alarmingly, men’s sperm counts have been dropping for decades, and not by small amounts. I think it’s a greater threat to humanity than global warming, yet most people aren’t even aware of it.