I asked my wife if she wanted kids and she just waved around and said "look at this shit, do you really want to put a someone through this?" Yep, the world is screwed. But I believe people have to make their own, conscious choice. No sense in forcing them to either have kids or not.
My wife and I were planning to have kids in 2020. We had already started the process in 2019. Then covid happened. Then people hoarded toilet paper during a respiratory pandemic that doesn't even affect your bowels. Then supply lines shut down. Then forest fires raged out of control across the country, turning the skies into red ash. Then protests and riots broke out across the country. All the while trump was happening about eleventy billion times. Ultimately we got a master class on how fucking ridiculous this world has become. We decided never to have kids. We're already middle aged, so that's it for us. It's too late now. We occasionally consider adopting, but that's a whole other bag of cats.
If you ever decide you do want kids, I'd endorse adopting. That way you're not bringing a new life into this shitty world, you're hopefully improving one that's already gotten dealt a bad hand in life.
People weren't hoarding toilet paper because they thought it affected their bowels -- they were hoarding it because who knew what might happen where we'd have to stay at home or be isolated for a long time.
What's strange is, why toilet paper and not much else lol. At least where I lived. I wasn't hoarding, I was just trying to get some at the store because we were running out completely, and the shelves were empty. 💀 Had to buy some non-bulk expensive and fragile af paper.
Same, same. Well just in Germany. We haven't been hit as bad as the U.S. but your country stretches over three climate zones. However, we live in a small town on the Baltic coast and last year was nuts with the weather. And yes, some people are unfortunately very egoistical and make it even harder for the rest who just want to have a halfway decent life.
Just FYI it does affect bowels. My mom had straight diarrhea for weeks while she had covid. I may have had it and my bf we both had the hits for over a week.
We had a long talk about it and the above statement is just the gist of it. If we lived in better times, sure. But not in this timeline. We both came to that conclusion and it is perfectly fine.
you wont catch me raising children both because im a mess, and i refuse to raise children in a dysfunctional society that hasn't got its shit together.
Absolutely nothing wrong with eugenics when applied properly. Like nuclear power, AI, the internet, eugenics would fix a lot that's wrong with humanity. If I could generically engineer myself into someone with no anxiety disorder or adhd or no postural tachycardia or naturally muscular body maybe even different color eyes and a different voice, I would.
My genes aren't unique and my traits don't need to be passed on. I'm not a chinchilla.
"Oh ... But I want kids", adopt why bringing another being to this fuckshow when u could improve the life of one currently in the bottom of the barrel.
I'd guess that having children, in the long run is more environmentally harmful than you eating meat the rest of your life.
This just strikes me as silly. What is the "environment" but children of various species? Obviously an environmentally harmonious life is best, but life isn't just what the environment is for, it's what the environment is. This is the same mindset as people who have a couch that no one's allowed to sit on.
When one species growing prevents others from doing the same there is a problem in that ecosystem. For example too many wolves in an area can cause a reduction in prey which is also bad for the wolves. We're just smart enough to see what we're doing is harmful to the world around us and we can do things to limit our damage.
I find a lot of people can kind of fall down from this path, into anti-natalism, and then malthusianism, and then ultimately eco-fascism and eugenics, through what I like to call the "idiocracy deduction". Name pending. The sort of idea that, if stupid people are the only one having kids, only stupid people will promulgate, and then we'll all be stupid. Substitute stupid, for whatever political ideological group you don't really like (or even minority group), bam, shit's wacked. So, logically, stupid people, or, my political opposition, or, people I don't like/who can't be trusted to have kids, shouldn't be allowed to have them. After all, you know, it's more ecologically conscientious to not have kids, so we should just kind of force everyone to not have kids. A lot of this is also going to come down to like, third world countries tending to have higher birth rates because of higher infant mortality, and also tending to have higher emissions, and those two are connected because ???. It's sort of the inverse of christian conservatives who want to force every white anglo saxon protestant into having 70 billion kids, and then do things like ban abortion on those grounds.
I think there's also this like, really stupid idea that if we have more people, somehow those people will not have any jobs, based on some naturalistic concern. This is stupid. It's less that we've surpassed the planet's carrying capacity, and more that we all are just fucking morons who live in an 18th century economic hellsystem. That's the core of why mathusianism doesn't work, because there is no "hard" carrying capacity to the planet. People in ancient times had to occupy much larger portions of land in order to support themselves, because their crops were not selectively bred to maximize their calories, and because of diseases and shit, which is part of why agriculture sucked back in the day compared to hunter-gathering, (even though in practice the two aren't really that different, hunter-gatherers just move around more and thus have access to that larger space which they need to "grow their crops"). In any case, you'd have to build some argument that we've entered a period of natural technological stagnation, which is pretty fucking hard to do because you have to thoroughly discount any conceivable future technologies that might help, and you have to discredit the amount of blame resting on the current economic system.
So, yeah, I dunno. I find the whole dealio kind of dumb and stupid. Seems like an overcorrection, kind of like those hardcore atheists that were everywhere in the 2000's and 2010's, and you could tell they'd all grown up being raised by radical fundamentalist christian parents or whatever, or just that christians are fucking annoying (big if true), and then have kind of a limited perspective, even just on all religions, because of that, on top of not really being politically different enough from those christians, if you actually boiled it all down. Everyone's a neoliberal, at the end of the day, everyone's buying in to the same premises and arguments, even when they disagree on some issue, and then they all fail to see the bigger picture and just kind of end up splintering themselves into more and more radical extremist positions.
Actually you can stop reading here (if you even read all of that, good luck), but I kind of wonder if that's just like, an inevitable facet of late stage capitalism. It sort of seems to me like the ideological version of spam, which I tend to think of a lot as an analogy for capitalism "maximizing efficiency". Spam is nonsense, nobody wants to read it, and yet, it will inevitably eat up all the bandwidth if left unchecked, because those with the most economic resources want to cut out all other avenues of communication, and, "make efficient use of the bandwidth". The fact that everyone eventually becomes kind of radicalized and pushed into these nonsensical extremist positions, totally lacking nuance, the fact that, you know, people slip into fascism, it seems kind of along the same lines. People get pushed to what the maximum extent of their political ideology will allow, through some mechanism, despite liberalism kind of inherently being a modest and compromising ideology at heart, one that becomes incoherent if you actually push it to any logical extremes. I dunno if there's anything there, about how people's conceptions of things gets shaped by like, the larger economic system at work.
Its a grueling slog in a good state and a fucking nightmare in a bad one. My experience with the Texas adoption system has me convinced that the entire agency is run by a collection of sadists. Feels like it exists just to traumatize people further.
Also, I said this before as a parent and I will say it again- please do not have children unless you really want children. No child deserves to go through their childhood neglected and unloved. Which is going to be a major result of the end of Roe v. Wade in the U.S. and why abortion rights are vital.
No one should have to be a parent unless they absolutely want to be a parent.
There are few things sweeter than sleeping in on a Saturday and waking up to a clean, quiet house.
Waking up early, making pancakes for a couple of gleeful little munchkins, and then going out to the park to run around and have fun is one of those things you forget you used to love doing when you were younger.
Can’t quantify the feeling of having kids until you have one, but it’s very easy to articulate the perceived drawbacks of said unknown. They bring a life buff like nothing else, speaking a someone who regularly chases altered states of consciousness.
They provide a large opportunity for some enormous maturation, removal of bitterness/edgelord-iness and to not be so self-centred.
Your description of kids sounds like me beforehand. Have 2 happy accidents now.
Lie-ins are still possible if you are actually in a decent relationship by the way.
To anybody reading, don’t have kids if you are in a bad one. No kid deserves to grow up around that.
I grew up in a family with eighteen kids. If having such a huge family is good for anything, it's that I don't have the romantic veneer that most people do when it comes to childrearing.
I know exactly how expensive and hard it is, and just how much it sucks.
Adolf Hitler had a sister who emigrated to England before the war and had two kids. Both kids actually fought in the war against their uncle with no one aware of who they were. They both agreed to never have children.
Vasectomy is up there in the top 5 best things to happen in my life.
Highly recommend if you are sure you want to go child-free. There is nothing quite so worry free as shooting blanks instead of using condoms and birth control.
When I was a teenager I wanted kids. I fully bought into 'the American dream' being sold. I'd get me a wife, kids, house, and a career. Helped that I actually like kids. Made it my life's goal to try to be the best provider, best dad, best husband I could be.
Put myself through college, I have a good career, bought a house when I was 24, and still love kids. But I gave up on dating when I was like 28(?). It just became not worth it for so many reasons.
This last fall marked 20 years since I left my hometown to start my life... And I felt like a failure (still do). I exist to work and pay bills.
This is kind of my family. My brother and I have not fathered any children, he's a step dad, with no intention to have any of his own, I'm happily in a childfree relationship.
The only (sort of) exception is that my eldest brother (of three), had four kids.... All girls.
So our biological lineage will continue, but our family name ends here, since once my niece's get married, our family name will be dead.
The closest continuance of our family name is through my one male cousin on my dad's side. I don't keep in touch with him enough to know if he has kids or he's planning to have kids, or to even be informed as to whether or not those children would be boys or girls, etc.
After that, you would have to go back about 3 generations to find someone of the same lineage that's actually continuing the family name. Second or third cousins... I believe. I'm unaware if my grandfather had any siblings, or cousins... So that part of my family tree is a complete unknown.
For my brother, he wasn't in a stable relationship long enough to get married and have kids (though, he's on his second marriage, the first did not last very long.... It's a long story as to why)... And since his second wife (his current wife) already had children from a previous marriage, he has no interest. For me, I never cared either way, and stuck to the philosophy of "I'll let my wife decide". My current, and longest, relationship, under which we've been together for nearly a decade now, is with a beautiful woman who has been very childfree for a long time, and I support her in that. I also wouldn't be able to financially support children, which is why I kept waiting for marriage before kids. I at least wanted the illusion that someone was going to stick around before making that commitment.
My oldest brother got married pretty young and to his credit, they're still together. I'm mostly estranged from him, but I'm aware of some of the details of his life. His children are at the age where they can start having kids of their own now (which should give some indication of how old I am... I'm "great uncle" age). I don't have any pressure to have kids at this point because my SO doesn't want them, my breeder brother is estranged, my father is dead, and I'm estranged from my mom. The only time I even hear about kids is either from my sister-in-law taking about her (now post-teen) children, and from my SO's family, who we see online only a few times a year at most.
I mean real talk, how many generations back are you actually disappointing? Like I'm only going to disappoint my dad, as once you go up to grandparent level I have plenty of cousins who can and have already passed "our line" down.