Thats one of the reasons i'm not having kids. I have a decent life by any metric but I had to work my ass off and face a tonne of resistance in my career. It always feels like I'm playing catch up with the cost of everything going up and up to the point where I'm just exhausted and depressed. Like, what is the point of living?! it honestly feels like theres just nothing left to enjoy anymore, everything has been monetized to hell and back. They told us as kids that you can be anything you want when you grow up, the future is bright and if you work hard you will be rewarded and its just not true. I can't do that to another person, these problems are only getting worse with no end in sight.
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That's the point? The left get demoralized and the right can't be because they have no morals. Its part of the reason right wingers tend to have a dozen children, it's quite literally biblical drown them in numbers bullshit.
Idiocracy is a documentary
It absolutely isnt
President Comacho has a problem, finds the most qualified person to fix it, does so (reluctantly) and then dosen't take credit. This so divorced from reality that it should be concidred high fantasy.
garbage health care
mass shootings
violent racism
Look at this guy who thinks the USA invented racism and holds a monopoly on it.
The comic is very America-centric if you look at the problems mentioned in totality.
In Europe it's just sparkling "let them down in the Mediterranean and/or make sure they stay in their own neighborhoods."
I mean, the UK has 2 out of 3 of those. And most countries have the violent racism.
The US is far from the only country with violent racism. In terms of healthcare, the privatization. The Canadian healthcare system is being increasingly enshittified by conservatives up here, too.
If I ever decide to have kids then I'm adopting because I can't in good conscience bring a life into this shitty world
Given the glut of unwanted children from our abortion prohibition, we'll be needing a lot of new adoptive parents in the near future.
We didn't start the fire. It was always burning since the world's been turning.
The catch-22 is that if the people with environmental values don't have kids, those values aren't passed on to the next generation (unless they become teachers or media personalities).
You don’t need to have kids to pass on values. The basic premise of your statement doesn’t hold up.
Well, like I mentioned you still need some sort of interaction with kids. Or maybe influence their parents enough to have them indirectly pass on those values you imparted on them. But I still think that if the smartest, kindest, most compassionate people among us stop having kids... well then that's not great for that next generation. I've just always felt that giving up one of the primary factors of life, reproduction, seems very defeatist. But on the other hand, if someone genuinely doesn't want children then by all means don't.
I know at least one friend that wants to adopt/foster once they're ready, instead of having biological children.
The justification was similar to what you said, where they want to pass on their values / legacy, but don't care about the genetic side
Any society that doesn't impart those values across the board to its citizens will devolve into shit regardless.
It's basically just math.
People with zero values are going to fuck like rabbits and people with values aren't.
If trash family has 5 kids they can't take care of and a dad that leaves, that's at least 4 really mad poor kids that are going to blame a lot on somesuch minority for their problems in 18 years.
What is the acceptable level of tragedy to impart upon a non-consenting progeny? I vote for zero
You'd have to be immortal, first. Most kids are gonna live to see their own parents pass.
Tragedy is a part of life.
It's easily avoidable tragedy, unaddressed by those who could do something about it, that's the problem.
Even worse, there's potentially extinction level tragedy happening right now, going unaddressed by those who can do something about it.
100% of scientists agree that not-having-kids will solve our climate change crisis in one generation.
DO NOT HAVE CHILDREN REPEAT DO NOT HAVE CHILDREN
THIS MESSAGE IS FOR ALL RESIDENTS OF PLANET EARTH
NO ONE NEEDS YOU TO BIRTH THEM
ABORT. ABORT. ABORT.
WE HAVE ENOUGH PEOPLE, THE PLANET IS BURNING, THEY WILL NOT LEAD GOOD LIVES. IT'S NOT WORTH IT. PULL OUT BEFORE YOU NUT HOLY CHRIST PLEASE DO NOT HAVE KIDS
This is mostly copied over from my recent comments elsewhere, but it is very relevant here too.
By 2030 we are going to be 40% over capacity on fresh water resources globally. and 40% of arable land has already been depleted, and 95% will be by 2050.
And that's just water and food.
Once arctic ice sheet coverage gets below 1,000,000 square kilometres, the planet will be absorbing more heat than it reflects and this is called a Blue Ocean Event.
The BOE will trigger the Clathrate Gun which will cause seabeds to rapidly realease fuck tons of methane, cooking the earth in it's own atmosphere.
2024 Arctic sea ice likely reached its annual minimum extent of 4.28 million square kilometers.
Greenhouse gas emissions are still increasing and fuelled by climate change, the world's oceans have broken temperature records every single day over the past year.
So it's basically a race between whether the drought and famine kill us all first, or the BOE setting off the Clathrate Gun will.
Either way, it is unlikely the human race survives the century. Creating more people to suffer in this dying world, is stupid and cruel and is only going to speed up our demise.
Well. Fuck.
Please consider adoption as an alternative if you are in a stable situation and want children.
At this point I think the GOP are just taunting people who won't bring kids into this. Jokes on them though, if theyre having kids from some sort obligation and not to love and properly nurture them it's just bad news for everyone involved. Have fun with all that trauma.
Craziest thing about this graphic is that it leaves so many major issues off while also covering so much horseshit.
I mean it's clearly a pandemic era comic. The whole no toilet paper thing and deadly viruses.
Why do you think the politicians that are accelerating inequality are the same politicians that are trying to outlaw abortion?
They want babies because they need more workers to distribute inequality and produce more wealth for the shareholders. Foster kids are less likely to go to college, so they’re perfect fuel for the machine.
When in human history was ever a good time to have children?
Is there an objective "this was the best year/decade/century"?
That’s the neat part, there isn’t!
But being more serious: I think I can express the feeling of things being particularly worse now in a way that isn’t just recency bias.
Sure, over time technology has improved and that’s generally speaking allowed for better standards of living, at least for the people at the right end of that technology. (Not so great if you’re being conquered because someone shows up with guns for example.) So you could look at the past and say it was worse because materially things like food availability and medicine have become better over time.
But key to this was that all of this was a struggle of humans over nature. To the extent things were bad, there were tangible things we could do to improve.
These days, so many of our problems are self-inflicted and technology and economic development mostly makes them worse. Climate change is the obvious big one, but then there’s stuff like:
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Weapons have become increasingly destructive and centrally usable. A small number of people can cause a lot more damage than they ever could in the past.
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Surveillance technology invades our privacy in a way that’s unprecedented in human history.
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Automation, communications, and transportation technology have made workers less and less powerful and therefore more subject to abuse and artificial poverty. This is one of the more messed up things about capitalism. Technology gets better and rather than getting the benefits of that progress, it actually hurts a lot of people.
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Advances in science and technology, particularly data science, allow the powerful to hyper-optimize the bad things they were always doing or enables them to do things they’ve wanted to do.
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A financialized economy creates economic catastrophes where people go homeless or starve without any actual changes to material conditions. The numbers got screwed up or the investors panicked and now everything sucks for no reason?
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More generally, we can produce enough of the necessities of life for everyone, but capitalism ensures that those necessities won’t make it to people. Capitalism depends on scarcity. If you had a house you wouldn’t need to pay a landlord. If you had food you wouldn’t need to pay food companies. If you had both you wouldn’t need to go work and put up with awful conditions. We’ve solved our most fundamental problems and yet because of the interests of the system and those in power, that progress gets held back.
In the past, even if things were rough now, you could maybe look forward to them improving. Now it feels like the walls are closing in. Unless we actively do something about it, things are going to get worse for most people as more and more wealth accumulates in private hands, as we become subject to increasingly powerful forms of control, and as the powerful destroy the environment we need to live.
I'm Gen X, but cusp with Millennial. I said at 15 or 16 I'd never have kids & stuck with it. I'm more resolute than ever & feel like I would have massive guilt if I had caved. I felt the world was too fucked up back in the 90s. I wonder how my younger self would deal with the world today.
lol, yes Millennials and Gen Z are trying so much harder to fix the situation by voting for change… ohhh wait
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/yes-trump-improved-young-men-drew-young-women-rcna179019
Yeah I’m afraid that the lesson is that Gen Z is not actually the future, they are going to repeat the past. What makes me sad is that they should have been the future but social media made sure that didn’t happen.
Did social media make sure that didn't happen, or did the fact that virtually every generation ultimately repeats the mistakes of the one before it ensure that didn't happen?
You can be damned sure the crazy fundamentalists are gonna have a shit ton of kids. And some of those will vote.
No, noone is under any obligation to do so.
Remember what they say on airplanes. Secure your own mask before helping others.