The deeper tragedy is in the meme as a whole. There has been so much power, control, and hope sucked away from us... and they try to replace it with panic (usually to buy a product or lie). I would like to believe that the situation is not hopeless, and that we are not powerless...
Change "shooting" to "knifing" and its 3 for 3. The UK has a huge hooliganism problem. The country is rife with domestic violence. But no (non-police) guns!
Most countries have racism, some have violent racism... and there are some in which terrorist organizations like KKK are freely roaming the streets and are ok for some reason.
Anyway, it feels wierd to speak shit of the USA when there currently are countries actively working on ethnic cleansing.
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.
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.
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.
Yeah I don't really get comics like these, or any other form of "[my generation] has it the worst, the world had been destroyed, why should I have kids" that more or less ignores all of history.
For context, I'm gen Z/millennial with a child and planning another with my wife. We're not rich or living in nice city of whatever, just living in a smaller city in Europe.
Not really. Most of Europe is just fine. We in the UK have elected a labor government for the first time in several elections as the conservatives severely fucked up multiple times. Far right wing sentiment is on the rise in several countries, but that doesn't make them the majority, so they aren't winning elections anywhere but locally. Mostly the far right are just taking votes from the moderate right.
A shitty life situation has never stopped anybody from having kids. Quite the opposite, the less educated a society and the lower the prospect of comfort, the more kids people have. Poor and miserable people fuck for fun and don't care about proper contraceptives, resulting in more kids. Further more, people believe that the more kids you'll have, the more likely it is that one of them is going to end up rich and successfull.
That's because people are actually more educated than ever at least in part thanks to the internet. In most places the standard of living has actually gone up, in some cases quite drastically. So people are more comfortable. A lot of the doomerism stuff doesn't take into account any of the awful stuff that happened in the past, and most are only focused on the USA which is having weird problems at the moment. In most of the world the material wealth of the average person has gone up, not down.
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).
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.
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.
For all those values, even in yourself. There’s no better motivator to make an effort for the future, than having a kid you want the best for. If you don’t have a kid, you’re not passing your environmental values, or you educational values, or all the other values you may have for what makes a better society. Nor do you have any reason to hold to them yourself.
I don’t mean to try to push anyone toward having kids, but if you do want to have kids but give up thinking the world is getting worse, that decision is part of the world getting worse. If you do want kids, there’s all sorts of opportunity to make this a better world for both yourself and them, and longer, and plenty of opportunity to make an actual difference
Just passing along the value of the bidet may be worth it, according to the comic
By that rote though everyone that has had children in the past has cared for their future and the future of the social and actual environment they will inherit. We wouldn’t be having this discussion if any semblance of that was true.
If you don’t have a kid, you’re not passing your environmental values, or you educational values, or all the other values you may have for what makes a better society. Nor do you have any reason to hold to them yourself.
...
Why does it have to be my kid for me to care?
Like actually. Are you seriously saying being a parent somehow intrinsically makes someone a better, more caring, and impactful, person? Or that parenthood is the only way to achieve true conviction? That's literally not how any of this works.
Not bringing children into the world in no way prevents you from caring about making the world a better place, and acting to make it so. And doing the things that make the world better doesn't functionally require having a kid. All it takes is some basic fucking decency.
Which is something people already have, but get taken away by the grind of survival or material success. That is maybe why you have this fucked up idea that people get it by having a kid, but in reality that's just a huge life event that wakes some people up enough to take a look around and start caring again.
And passing good things on doesn't require having descendants. If you've ever changed someones mind on something for the better, you've successfully passed on "values you may have for what makes a better society". The person whose mind you changed doesn't even need to be younger than you, thought doesn't procreate through fucking genetics.
Plenty of parents are made no more profound than they were before by the act of procreating, and will conently continue to do nothing to improve the world. There are parents who will protect their own to the detriment of everyone else.
Kids though, if raised by caring parents, care from the start, but then have that heart crushed by society until they too have a kid of their own.
But in there is way for everyone to care, all the time.
The whole idea that it's ok not to care about and deal with bad stuff unless you personally are somehow impacted is the whole reason we're in this mess, and it's perpetuated by people being forced to live in a constant scramble of stress and consumerism.
It seems like vanishingly few people in the US care about the good of broader humanity anymore. Destroying the environment is fine as long as it creates jobs. Poisoning the water tables forever with fracking is fine as long as it makes cheap gas. Genocide was supported by both parties in the last election. Both parties are waving guns around even as school kids die in ever more frequent mass shootings. Its a race to the bottom and no one cares to change course.
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?
So says the headline, but the entire article focuses on males and how much they love that he did shit like Rogan. I'm not saying young women can't also be idiots or angry at the present state of things, but they didn't completely forget that the right sees them as procreation slaves.
Well yeah, young men bought into all the incelfluencer crap they were being fed. Probably a good thing since young women by and large are flocking the opposite way and absolutely don't want to fuck conservatives.
Yeah because deadly viruses aren't still a thing, and aren't becoming a much more massive problem and we're DEFINITELY not on the cusp of an additional pandemic
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.
Conservatives are often very insecure people who have never overcome their own childhood trauma or understood why they want children. That trauma and insecurity just gets passed down.
I know, I'm the child of two. For the last 20 years I've been completely isolated from all my family by no doing of my own. I often wonder what the fuck all that was about. You know, the whole, bringing 4 kids into the world then putting fasicists into power. Like I got problems, true, but I'd of prefered keeping myself and not being a plague to those around me.
Yes. And tragedy is categorically bad, and tragedies cannot be experienced by that which is not alive (i.e. non-sentient). Thusly, a total absence of (sentient) life would be a total absence of tragedies and vice versa; in other words, sentient life and tragedy are virtually biconditional. The continuation of sentient life and tragedy is wholly avoidable if the relevant capable parties were willing, and it can often be abated on a small scale on an individual basis.
Most kids though? I'm not going to go looking for stats but let's just say 95% of children are outliving their parents right now. Awkward sentence there. I mean parents who are dying today, 95% of them didn't outlive their children. I hope that makes sense. Yes that's not how statistics work, I'm trying to make a point.
What's an acceptable level to drop to before we say fuck this we're done having kids? I knew I didn't want kids when I was a kid, but I'm an outlier.
Let's say 85% is the number for kids born today. I believe that's already unacceptable. It's so unnatural.
I think the number is worse than that. The mass climate migration/water wars are going to really get moving in the 2040s if not earlier. I don't want to live through that. I definitely don't want a child to live through that.
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
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.
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.
Yeah this is what frustrates me when people complain about illegal immigration. Those places are now experiencing food shortages and will just get worse. Where do you think people will go when there is no food in their own country. Do you think they will just let their children starve? Do you really think a physical wall will stop them from trying to feed their children?
Would you put your child through all that, plus force them to wage slave their whole life to pay their landed lord? All for a hit of dopamine and serotonin?
Consider loading up a crack pipe instead and save some needless suffering.
My SO and I have both decided that we definitely don't want kids but would discuss the subject if any one of us seriously considered it for one reason or another. What we agreed on, though, is to look for adoption rather than biological children. We both have stuff we'd rather not pass along, firstly, and secondly, there's so many children that don't have any family. It's sorta like "adopt don't shop", if you will.
You don’t even have to be in a stable situation to be a Big Brother/Sister at your local Boys and Girls club or a court advocate/CASA for a child. Volunteer at a school district. Children recognize how fucked everything is, and on the whole they are suffering. We need kind and loving adults to show up for them - to teach them art and read them stories to show them the parts of living that can hopefully make it worth it.
Look... Um... Don't take this the wrong way because global warming is serious shit... and the fascism trend is super scary... But don't think you're the only generation that has a scary world outlook. You got to live your life. You've got to get the most out of this world that you can. As hard as it is to believe, things are better now than they ever have been in the history of time. Unarguably.
There are many things to be unhappy about, there are many things that we should fight to change, but it's self-defeating to only see the negative and to be this cynical. You have to see life as it is and enjoy the positives, savior the positives, Go out where the weather is good, find a special person and bask in their company, And yes, start a family with them. Create a pocket of goodness in your little slice of the world... Keep the rest of the shit out. Create memories and love and laughter and joy where you can. This is the way it's been done since forever.
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:
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.
Surveillance technology invades our privacy in a way that’s unprecedented in human history.
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.
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.
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?
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.
In the past, children were your labor force, health care and pension plan. People had many children so at least some survived into adulthood. There wasn't much alternative back in the day.
Now children are a net cost. They can't even take care of you in old age if government pensions or retirement plans don't pan out because many can barely feed themselves.
So, the best time to have children was roughly before 1900. That's when things started to change.
Yeah that's how I feel. People still had kids during wars, famines, imprisonment, potential nuclear war. Every problem humans have ever faced really. This is the best time to be alive ever. There are tonne of problems we are going to face in the near future but that has always been the case.
The biggest reasons people are having kids is we're all overweight and feel bad about ourselves and are constantly comparing to people/couples online. We have phone/shopping/gaming addictions to deal with all this mental stress. Online dating is shit. 3rd places don't exist anymore. We are all lonely and meeting someone and figuring everything out to the point where children are an viable option seems impossible. Easier to just say fuck it and just post memes and complain about the world is bad now so I'm not having kids. And to be fair all of that has a lot of truth in it.
Incorrect. The biggest reason people aren't having kids is that the planet is dying and no one can afford them anyway. Life is nothing to do to a person at this point.
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.
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.
I'm on the other side of the generational gap (nearly gen x, but millennial), and I was terrified during my late teens/early 20s of becoming a parent. I could not imagine raising a child the way I was living paycheque to paycheque, if I had a paycheque at all....
That feeling never went away, and I still wouldn't know how I could possibly afford that. I decided in my mid 20s that children would be a decision I would leave up to my wife (wherever I had a wife to make the decision). I was/am instinctually driven to want them (a feeling I mostly disregard), but given the state of the world and my own financial situation, I can't say that I want to force any intelligent being, especially one that is my offspring, to suffer through a lifetime of this shit like I have been forced to so far.
I didn't ask to be here. If someone had given me a choice, I would have probably opted out of gestures all of this.
I'm currently in a long term relationship, and we're planning on signing the papers next year, so soon I'll have someone I can legitimately call my wife. She is very much on the side of "never have kids". So that's my decision as well.
Instinctual drive isn't enough to cause me to overlook how things are going. I love my (non-existent) children too much, than to force them into living a life in these circumstances. Fuck no.
I was/am instinctually driven to want them (a feeling I mostly disregard), but given the state of the world and my own financial situation, I can’t say that I want to force any intelligent being, especially one that is my offspring, to suffer through a lifetime of this shit like I have been forced to so far.
This is interesting to me, as I've never had the biological urge to have kids. I love them and enjoy hanging out with them, joking, playing, etc., but never my own. In any case, I commend you on being resolute.
I’m currently in a long term relationship, and we’re planning on signing the papers next year, so soon I’ll have someone I can legitimately call my wife. She is very much on the side of “never have kids”. So that’s my decision as well.
My girlfriend doesn't want them either. She's a good deal younger than me - 31 years old - but she says something similar to me: raising kids in this world would be a tragedy.
Frankly, I've always felt there are too many humans. I never understood the push for more. Just maintain or reduce the population naturally.
Good luck staving off that biological imperative. I feel lucky not to have it myself.
Evolution determined by mating is basically over for humans. In the time it takes a species to meaningfully change, humans will be genetically engineered.
Intelligence pruning itself out of a malicious environment isn't really a great showcase of evolution.
It's not technically incorrect - we are changing, but a species actively taking steps backwards by inflating itself with idiots doesn't quite hit that stronger/faster/smarter progression that the concept of evolution implies.
Give me a break. How about the people having kids in:
-900,000: Whatever happened to kill off almost all humans
-1177: Bronze Age collapse
535: Volcanic winter of 536
1347-1351: Black Death
1914-1918: WWI and Spanish Flu
1929-1939: Great Depression and Dust Bowl
1962: Great Leap Forward
1943-1945: Worst killings and bombings of WWII
2020: For our lifetimes. COVID and 100 other disasters. So bad most have forgotten it started with Australia burning to the ground, 1 billion animals killed.
As to racism, we watched Mississippi Burning last night. My wife isn't from America and was horrified. "Honey, that was happening when our parents were kids."
The trouble with this graphic is that millennials are part of the problem now. The oldest are over forty. We've all seen the footage of Jan 6th. There were very few boomers in their 60 and 70s.
There's a whole fucking generation between Boomers and Millennials. Yes, Gen X does get overlooked often, that's the running joke. But they're far more likely to have soaked up Boomerisms and benefited from better economic ROI than Millennials who hit college just at the cusp of the 2000s, and for whom everything thereafter has been a shit toboggan.
Matt Gaetz is an elder millennial like me, and he is a fucking dipshit... and he's going to be attorney general of the United States despite being a proven pedophile and having committed statutory rape AND has minimal legal experience.
Kudos to those not having kids. I've had two recently fully knowing it's going to be tough on them, but I'm going to do the responsible thing and teach them self defense and how to disrespect authority.
Plus as a bonus, I'm going to get those additional family members when we're protecting the homestead from raiders.
Im amazed at how much X has had kids. Seems nuts. Then I realize I might have done it if I had went 4 years to college and started working right after and if within a few years made a family raising type of wage. That double major and one year in a PhD may have saved me.
Ironically, if temperature gets to a high degree enough, so much water vapor, methane and carbon dioxide will be on the atmosphere capturing heat (which will eventually escape), but more importantly, reflecting it on the upper atmosphere layers, that we will freeze to death before even feeling the burn LMAO 🤣
Water vapour is quite good at absorbing heat, and it insulates the atmosphere too(it's often warmer at night if its cloudy), would it reflect enough heat for that sort of cooling to happen? Sounds like something that would take a lot longer to happen than the time it will take to get too hot for us to survive without living underground or something.
My point is that bad things shouldn't prevent someone from having kids. Nobody would be alive today if other people didn't have kids because bad things happen.
There was a time your dumb deseased mother pushed you out on a savana, maybe died in the process, and nobody on the earth gave a shit about you, and everything wanted to eat you from the ants, mosquitos, and flies, the larger predators. Everything was hostile and if you could manage not to die you still had to find a way to eat, drink, and shelter yourself from weather.
Millions of years of that, was just the beginning of how bad things could be.
Now we sit here, almost permanently sheltered, on the internet, where most peoples biggest problem is like, heart disease or rectal cancer.
It doesn't matter where you live. Even if you're in the perfect geography and latitude to make climate change no big deal locally; the mass migration, wars, and production disruption will certainly affect you and especially your children.
Its bad, I get it. But lets go back to 1968 when baby boomers who would give birth to the millennial generation was born. Vietnam, political assassinations , race riots, anarchist bombings. Throw in watergate and stagflation. The world has always been burning.
I love the part were they kind of observe it in a detached, third person point of view, as if it didn't affect them at all, and taking care of the issue in any way was beyond even their wildest dreams, just because they consider themselves above the issue.
Oh, but by all means, keep self pruning your evolutionary tree branch.
But do try to use those extra resources to last a bit. You don't want to miss the global chaos the lack of social security is gonna create in about 20 to 30 years, it's gonna be sick
The detachment is more of a defeatism issue. When you have zero power to affect change, what the hell else can you do but work through the day and try to not have a breakdown?
Mind you, I vote when that comes around, I just don't have the mental fortitude anymore to not be detached. Don't have the time or space to do more than that, which is rather by design I expect.
The fact that you believe that you have zero power and then participate in this thread, not realizing one of the leading causes on the why the situation or problem got to this point.
You people can do so much more than you think and you squander it on petty online squabbles
I love the fact that you ignore the parents who put them on the planet saying "they can solve it" then going on to destroy be dicks to people and the environment. I love it that you completely forget about the Fridays for Future, Last Generation, the people glueing themselves to the streets in protest, lots of other movements, and the ensuing reaction "oh, you're children, STFU". Funny how selective memory works.
Oh, but by all means, keep self pruning your evolutionary tree branch.
Yes, by all means, keep pumping out units and teaching them to condescend against others online. They'll surely change the world in a positive way. Don't forget to tell your children how nobody did nothing, but you, oh so brave and valiant Shardikprime, forced them into the world to bestow a wonderful life in the climate wars. They'll be so grateful for your thoughtfulness.
Well you can have them, then just say "screw them" cause you got your own problems to deal with as western society would prefer you act.
Their only purpose is to support you when you get old anyways. Everyone knows that.
Honestly if I have a kid it would only to raise them to be a post apocalyptic war lord and hopefully give them a tragic enough backstory to survive the wasteland on.
Maybe I will hold back a wave of marauders and while they see the door buckling I tell them I love them and they need to fix the world to be a better place where kids don't have to lose their parents then throw them down the escape slide as I turn around to start going with a chainsaw through the enemies.
Maybe I will just name them Chadderick...
I dunno, guess will see what works best in the moment.
Our parents and grandparents had kids - depending on your age - when there was a world war and tens of thousands of people were dying daily in their country, or in the 50 years where the world was always on the brink of getting destroyed in a nuclear apocalypse if one of the two world powers made the wrong move. Were they dumb?
Not to downplay on the current emergencies which are existential and terrifying, especially seeing how little as a species we are doing to address them - but they are a bit of a silly reason not to have kids.
If you don’t want kids don’t have them, you do you :) far too many people have children out of peer or societal pressure or just carelessness, and we could really use much fewer of those, considering the societal damage of absent or careless parenting. But just be honest with yourself, no need to blame viruses and “no toilet paper”.
How many of those kids were intentional though? Birth control and abortion were restricted or just not available. I'm sure most of the people who had kids in the past did not regret it but I'm not going to pretend they meant to get pregnant.
And the toilet paper thing is obviously a joke. A bit of levity in the horror.
Lol having a planet that won't sustain us because we're actively murdering it is absolutely the silliest reason ever not to have kids. Go on, progeny! Enjoy your water wars and starvation! It would've been incredibly silly not to create you just so you could endure it.