Honestly, while it’s very much an unpopular opinion, at this point I think it’s unconscionable to add to that next generation and I definitely secretly judge my peers who do so as making an incredibly selfish decision likely dooming that child to a quite depressing future by the time they reach adulthood themselves.
Also, one of the worst things you can do for the environment in a developed nation is have a child.
Yeah, I’ve had a hobby over the past few years looking into the history of a particular apocrypha text, and its antinatalism is one of the more interesting features, with a great line like this:
A woman in the crowd said to him, “Lucky are the womb that bore you and the breasts that fed you.”
He said to [her], “Lucky are those who have heard the word of the Father and have truly kept it. For there will be days when you will say, ‘Lucky are the womb that has not conceived and the breasts that have not given milk.’”
This line is broken up into two different parts in the gospel of Luke (11:27 and 23:29) but the inherent parallelism makes me think it was originally a call and response as it then appears in the Gospel of Thomas above.
You also have the antinatalism in one of the surviving lines from the lost Gospel of the Egyptians where Salome asked “how long will death continue?” And the response was “as long as women bear children.” Followed by her asking if she’d done well in not having any.
It’s interesting how across history it’s inherently a position that dooms itself to obsolescence when it appears due to adherents dying out without passing it on, even if the inherent merit of it remains true from one age to another.
So we socially have a collective anchoring bias towards seeing procreation and “be fruitful and multiply” as such a good thing, even though this is simply a platform with an inherent survivorship bias and not necessarily actually a good thing at all.
I could not have worded it better myself. It is absolutely a survivorship bias. Those who believe it is good to have children will have children and pass on those beliefs, while those of us who recognize the inherent ills of procreation do not.
And then due to the relatively small number of us, we are written off as psychopaths or pessimists for acknowledging the realities of the situation.
It’s sad, and it’s extremely annoying. But at the end of the day, I’m at least doing my part by not throwing another person unwillingly into this mess to be both a perpetrator and victim
It’s pretty arrogant to assume that your pessimistic outlook on the future is the only valid or reasonable one. Human quality of life, on average, has pretty consistently improved since the industrial revolution.
I’m hopeful that as a greater proportion of people aren’t scrambling to survive day to day more of us can turn to the issues of environmental protection and remediation.
Me choosing to hope for a Star Trek future is no less valid than your belief in the inevitability of the Mad Max future.
Broadly, human quality of life has pretty consistently improved for as long as there’s been humans actually.
It’s happened faster than before in the past 100 years.
It’s happened quite a lot over just the past 20 on many measures.
It’s accelerating rapidly.
But alongside that acceleration and improvement has been knowingly playing a dangerous game in maximizing short term gains in exchange for long term consequences on which we developed technologies to increase the potential debt we were taking on for short term rewards.
Perhaps there will be a deus ex machina that averts disaster and delivers us from paying those debts we’ve brought on ourselves.
I too hope that’s the case.
But to me it’s irresponsible and presumptuous to gamble somebody else’s future on that hope.
“The world is going to end” has been a line for as long as there’s been lines to be written down.
And yes, it’s consistently a false prophecy.
But “not one stone will be left of these buildings around you” tends to be correct given a long enough time scale and in places in the world today it becomes true for neighborhoods or cities literally overnight.
The world may or may not end. But what we really need to worry about is the survival of civilizations under significantly increasing pressures. Because “the end of civilization” is potentially much, much worse to go through than the end of the world. The sun explodes? It’ll be over quick. There’s famine so bad people start eating their neighbors? Nuclear fallout poisoned the land around you? The oceans die?
Maybe not the best environments to raise a child, even if humanity overall will ultimately survive.
A baby born today will have microplastics inside their body when born and we’ve seen the most rapid change in global environment in millions of years, seeing changes that previously took tens of thousands change in decades. And they’d be born into a world with a so called “Doomsday clock” at a second away by scientists symbolically showing how close we could come to an end for an entirely different reason from why many other scientists today think we have less than a century of civilization.
The past performance may no longer be the best predictor of future returns.
I think we agree on the state of the world, and even that civilisation is worthy of continuation. So the question is, which is more likely to end civilisation, an entirely preventable apocalypse that we already have all the tools needed to perfect against without even materially losing quality of life?
Or no children ever being born again? Because I was responding to people suggesting that this was the only reasonable option.
Individual choices not to have children seem extremely unlikely to suddenly reflect a universal avoidance of having children, and given the world was working pretty fine with populations of only a billion people in the past, especially given automation is coming along which can replace a large number of people within the workforce, even a global drop in population to 50% or 20% of what it is today would likely be more than fine. Sure, a drop to 0% for a prolonged time would spell the end of humanity, but that assumes conditions and forecasts don’t improve such that people resume having kids.
As for “we already have all the tools needed to protect against without any material loss of quality of life” - not sure what hopium you rely on, but that’s patently not the case for most of the existential threats we face.
In theory we have had the technology to end all wars and have peace on earth since at least the invention of the drum circle and singing Kumbaya. Weirdly that hasn’t happened yet.
The existence of theoretical solutions is very different from the probable solutions given the various complex competing interests and short-sighted myopia dominating the majority of decision makers.
You said it was unconscionable to have children, so by your metric no-one should have children. If you’d like to walk that back and concede you were being hyperbolic feel free to so!
Again, I agree with you, I agree that a smaller population would be a Good Thing.
But the shock to society/civilisation of even a 50% reduction in birthrate could be just as savage as the impacts of climate change. We’d be back to encouraging elders to commit suicide rather than being a burden on society.
I also think that there’s not a lot of point to civilisation if we aren’t aiming for people to be happy and fulfilled, and for a lot of people raising a family is the biggest contributor to their happiness and fulfillment. You dismissing that of hand and judging those people for wanting what makes them happy seems pretty mean and uncaring.
The existence of theoretical solutions is very different from the probable solutions given the various complex competing interests and short-sighted myopia dominating the majority of decision makers.
Again, I agree! But I do think that the existing technical solutions should be proof against the despair that you are peddling.
Yes, I agree, right now no one should have children. If in a decade we have benevolent AIs doing work for everyone and universal basic income and peace on Earth, this should probably be reassessed. But as of this moment right now, everyone should not have children. What I’m saying is that your argument this would have higher odds of disaster than other things is baseless as we both know that not everyone will stop having children even if they should.
We’d be back to encouraging elders to commit suicide rather than being a burden on society.
We literally already are back at that with some of what’s going on with the euthanasia program in Canada in practice, even if that wasn’t in the intended design.
for a lot of people raising a family is the biggest contributor to their happiness and fulfillment
Sure about that?
Most people think of their children as making their lives better. Yet many studies have found that those without children value their lives more than those with children.
Well I’ll keep in mind that cures for cancer in mice should be proof against despair should anyone I know or love come down with it.
Yes, if your loved one comes down with a cancer that can be cured by applying existing technologies, not ones that have been tested in mice, but ones that are currently being used successfully to treat patients you should not despair!
Worry? Stress? Generally be concerned? Fucking riot if the government starts limiting/preventing access to that treatment? Yeah sure, that would be a healthy response.
But despair? No way!
Oh, so there are scalable technologies to bring climate change back to decades earlier levels in existence already and not just in theory in research? Is that what you’re claiming?
Nonsense! The IPCC reports include perfectly reasonable science based action plans to address climate change and prevent the Mad Max future.
It’s politics that supports the current plan of emitting as much as possible as fast as possible. It’s people like you who have given up and embraced doomer pessimism that make it so hard to build the political captial needed for change.
You understand the problem. You should know that it’s solvable. Don’t give up before the fight is over!
Honestly, while it’s very much an unpopular opinion, at this point I think it’s unconscionable to add to that next generation and I definitely secretly judge my peers who do so as making an incredibly selfish decision likely dooming that child to a quite depressing future by the time they reach adulthood themselves.
Also, one of the worst things you can do for the environment in a developed nation is have a child.
Antinatalism is a dirty word, and you will probably get dog piled for it in almost any community
Despite the fact that it’s the most moral position…
People are just too selfish to acknowledge that birthing is a horrible decision
Edit: Human extinction is the best thing we can do for our planet and all other species. If you can’t see that, you’re just willfully ignorant.
Yeah, I’ve had a hobby over the past few years looking into the history of a particular apocrypha text, and its antinatalism is one of the more interesting features, with a great line like this:
This line is broken up into two different parts in the gospel of Luke (11:27 and 23:29) but the inherent parallelism makes me think it was originally a call and response as it then appears in the Gospel of Thomas above.
You also have the antinatalism in one of the surviving lines from the lost Gospel of the Egyptians where Salome asked “how long will death continue?” And the response was “as long as women bear children.” Followed by her asking if she’d done well in not having any.
It’s interesting how across history it’s inherently a position that dooms itself to obsolescence when it appears due to adherents dying out without passing it on, even if the inherent merit of it remains true from one age to another.
So we socially have a collective anchoring bias towards seeing procreation and “be fruitful and multiply” as such a good thing, even though this is simply a platform with an inherent survivorship bias and not necessarily actually a good thing at all.
I could not have worded it better myself. It is absolutely a survivorship bias. Those who believe it is good to have children will have children and pass on those beliefs, while those of us who recognize the inherent ills of procreation do not.
And then due to the relatively small number of us, we are written off as psychopaths or pessimists for acknowledging the realities of the situation.
It’s sad, and it’s extremely annoying. But at the end of the day, I’m at least doing my part by not throwing another person unwillingly into this mess to be both a perpetrator and victim
No need for human extinction, but 90% population reduction would be helpful. Environmentally speaking.
It’s pretty arrogant to assume that your pessimistic outlook on the future is the only valid or reasonable one. Human quality of life, on average, has pretty consistently improved since the industrial revolution.
I’m hopeful that as a greater proportion of people aren’t scrambling to survive day to day more of us can turn to the issues of environmental protection and remediation.
Me choosing to hope for a Star Trek future is no less valid than your belief in the inevitability of the Mad Max future.
Broadly, human quality of life has pretty consistently improved for as long as there’s been humans actually.
It’s happened faster than before in the past 100 years.
It’s happened quite a lot over just the past 20 on many measures.
It’s accelerating rapidly.
But alongside that acceleration and improvement has been knowingly playing a dangerous game in maximizing short term gains in exchange for long term consequences on which we developed technologies to increase the potential debt we were taking on for short term rewards.
Perhaps there will be a deus ex machina that averts disaster and delivers us from paying those debts we’ve brought on ourselves.
I too hope that’s the case.
But to me it’s irresponsible and presumptuous to gamble somebody else’s future on that hope.
“The world is going to end” has been a line for as long as there’s been lines to be written down.
And yes, it’s consistently a false prophecy.
But “not one stone will be left of these buildings around you” tends to be correct given a long enough time scale and in places in the world today it becomes true for neighborhoods or cities literally overnight.
The world may or may not end. But what we really need to worry about is the survival of civilizations under significantly increasing pressures. Because “the end of civilization” is potentially much, much worse to go through than the end of the world. The sun explodes? It’ll be over quick. There’s famine so bad people start eating their neighbors? Nuclear fallout poisoned the land around you? The oceans die?
Maybe not the best environments to raise a child, even if humanity overall will ultimately survive.
A baby born today will have microplastics inside their body when born and we’ve seen the most rapid change in global environment in millions of years, seeing changes that previously took tens of thousands change in decades. And they’d be born into a world with a so called “Doomsday clock” at a second away by scientists symbolically showing how close we could come to an end for an entirely different reason from why many other scientists today think we have less than a century of civilization.
The past performance may no longer be the best predictor of future returns.
Well said.
I think we agree on the state of the world, and even that civilisation is worthy of continuation. So the question is, which is more likely to end civilisation, an entirely preventable apocalypse that we already have all the tools needed to perfect against without even materially losing quality of life?
Or no children ever being born again? Because I was responding to people suggesting that this was the only reasonable option.
Individual choices not to have children seem extremely unlikely to suddenly reflect a universal avoidance of having children, and given the world was working pretty fine with populations of only a billion people in the past, especially given automation is coming along which can replace a large number of people within the workforce, even a global drop in population to 50% or 20% of what it is today would likely be more than fine. Sure, a drop to 0% for a prolonged time would spell the end of humanity, but that assumes conditions and forecasts don’t improve such that people resume having kids.
As for “we already have all the tools needed to protect against without any material loss of quality of life” - not sure what hopium you rely on, but that’s patently not the case for most of the existential threats we face.
In theory we have had the technology to end all wars and have peace on earth since at least the invention of the drum circle and singing Kumbaya. Weirdly that hasn’t happened yet.
The existence of theoretical solutions is very different from the probable solutions given the various complex competing interests and short-sighted myopia dominating the majority of decision makers.
You said it was unconscionable to have children, so by your metric no-one should have children. If you’d like to walk that back and concede you were being hyperbolic feel free to so!
Again, I agree with you, I agree that a smaller population would be a Good Thing. But the shock to society/civilisation of even a 50% reduction in birthrate could be just as savage as the impacts of climate change. We’d be back to encouraging elders to commit suicide rather than being a burden on society.
I also think that there’s not a lot of point to civilisation if we aren’t aiming for people to be happy and fulfilled, and for a lot of people raising a family is the biggest contributor to their happiness and fulfillment. You dismissing that of hand and judging those people for wanting what makes them happy seems pretty mean and uncaring.
Again, I agree! But I do think that the existing technical solutions should be proof against the despair that you are peddling.
Yes, I agree, right now no one should have children. If in a decade we have benevolent AIs doing work for everyone and universal basic income and peace on Earth, this should probably be reassessed. But as of this moment right now, everyone should not have children. What I’m saying is that your argument this would have higher odds of disaster than other things is baseless as we both know that not everyone will stop having children even if they should.
We literally already are back at that with some of what’s going on with the euthanasia program in Canada in practice, even if that wasn’t in the intended design.
Sure about that?
Well I’ll keep in mind that cures for cancer in mice should be proof against despair should anyone I know or love come down with it.
Yes, if your loved one comes down with a cancer that can be cured by applying existing technologies, not ones that have been tested in mice, but ones that are currently being used successfully to treat patients you should not despair!
Worry? Stress? Generally be concerned? Fucking riot if the government starts limiting/preventing access to that treatment? Yeah sure, that would be a healthy response. But despair? No way!
Oh, so there are scalable technologies to bring climate change back to decades earlier levels in existence already and not just in theory in research? Is that what you’re claiming?
Science supports the pessimistic Mad Max future, not the Star Trek one. So it’s not arrogant at all. It’s foolish to think otherwise.
Nonsense! The IPCC reports include perfectly reasonable science based action plans to address climate change and prevent the Mad Max future.
It’s politics that supports the current plan of emitting as much as possible as fast as possible. It’s people like you who have given up and embraced doomer pessimism that make it so hard to build the political captial needed for change.
You understand the problem. You should know that it’s solvable. Don’t give up before the fight is over!
I worry that this news just makes people apathetic, which is counterproductive.
Ah yes, lets end life to save life
Choosing not to unnecessarily create more life isn’t ending life.
It’s being responsible.