I personally cringe when I hear a friend js having a kid. All I can think of is how bad theyre going to have it. Hell id definitely have been better off being born 20 years earlier, but these new kids are REALLY screwed unless they have super rich parents.
“Nothing new under the sun” I suppose!
Abortions should be legal at any term
Unclear. Maybe things are going to get better; it’s happened before right?
It hasn’t been all bad news lately, too. If you’re not straight, cis, or from the the West, being a boomer wasn’t such a great deal.
it’s happened before right?
not what we’ve done to the ecosystem. we’re in entirely uncharted territory.
Politics, economics and war are all hard to predict for long term, but just on the count of climate change kids born today are screwed.
No. I think that things have pretty steadily gotten better over time, and that a great deal of people being upset about now for any given now comes from a tendency to focus on negatives. Could be social media or news media tending to bring negatives to the surface because it drives engagement, political activists aiming to drive or leverage upset, or so forth.
Very much so. I honestly think it’s at least a little cruel and selfish to have a child in a dying world.
That said, I remain supportive of the parents in my life and I try to keep that feeling to myself–unless the parent brings it up (my cousin has two very young children whom he adores, but he also worries for their futures due to climate change and political instability, and he’ll talk pretty openly with me about it).
Climate change is the number one thing. The past had fascism, tools, slavery - but it didn’t have an Extinction level event looming just cresting over the horizon. I’m not having any kids until there is actual meaningful progress towards fixing that… So it looks like I’m not having kids.
Not to mention that one of the easiest ways to combat climate change is to simply not bring more humans into the world.
Of course it did.
If not for the courage and conviction of Vasily Arkhipov, civilization, and potentially humanity, may have ended in 1964. People had kids for 30 years under the very real threat of nuclear extermination. In the end it turned out pretty well.
People had kids during the black plague.
While a climate crisis is more than just a threat, we don’t know what’s going to happen. We have ideas, and models, and educated guesses… But not knowledge.
I wouldn’t tell anyone to have kids if they don’t want to. But no one should plan their life around sparing a hypothetical person from the hypothetical struggles of a slow moving crisis we don’t fully understand.
Not in the least.
You should look at people born in the past.
Fuck parents.
Specifically, MILFs
I think the whole “wrong generation” thing is a bit of a misconception, at least in terms of culture. Say you really love 60s culture, you can dress like you are in the 60s and listen to all the music from that time - including obscure stuff your local record store wouldn’t have had then but likely do now. Then additionally you can also listen to the odd song for the 70s and 80s if they take your fancy. The 60s are a part of pop culture and you can swim in that stream for as long as you want.
Socially as well, I think people underestimate how much latitude we are given to be individuals in modern society vs even like 30 years ago where social pressures to conform were stronger.
Economically I think there could be some cause for concern for the future but there were really tough economic times in the past too. Stagflation in the late 70s for example is worse than what we are experiencing at the moment. Having a kid could be something people treat like buying a property and waiting for the ideal time to do it; however, property prices are unpredictable and trying to judge it perfectly is like trying to catch a falling knife. The best advice is just to buy a property when you can afford it, and that probably holds true for having a kid too (assuming you want one… that’s another benefit of living in contemporary times!)
Climate change is the only true existential reason to feel that way.
Everything else is just over focusing on a short term dip. On average things are getting better over the long term. The British Empire collapsed, and so will the American one, and the world will keep on turning and progressing.
Hell kids born these days may have legitimate cures for most forms of cancer by the time they’re old. We won’t.
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My grandma was born pre world war 2, she was literally born during the rise of fascism, then lived through her family getting conscripted and some killed, having to flee to the country side during the bombing raids, then through years of post war rationing.
She then travelled around the world during the 50s, raised a family during the 60s and 70s, and enjoyed a long, happy, fruitful, and fulling retirement / art career from the 80s, through the 90s, and 00s, and just passed away this year.
And there was zero chance she regretted being born.
It’ll be over within the next century or so
Partly yes.
If I could choose, I would take 10 years earlier than I was actually born.
At least I could have experienced the early internet for longer.Honestly, I don’t. I came up in the '80s, wasn’t diagnosed with autism until 2022. My life would have been so different if I had known about it when I was a child, and if autism was as well-understood as it is today so that I had the support I needed. Kids today who have issue like that are identified much earlier and helped more. The steady march of knowledge and science is almost always a good thing. So, the present and the future are always the place to be for most people most of the time. Of course a Gazan isn’t feeling the giddy excitement of scientific discovery at this moment, but for the human species as a whole, things have never been better. There is always someone suffering immense, unimaginable hardship. The human project is overwhelmingly not that.
Every generation has existential concerns, too. Climate change and the rise of fascism is on the cards right now. When I was a kid and adolescent in the '80s and '90s, I was in the middle of the N. Irish ‘Troubles’. Before that, people had the Cold War to worry about. Before that, WWII and WWI. But things are always better than they were ‘yesterday’ if you take stock of everyone as a whole and not just those suffering the worst in any given moment.
If you took the average kid born today in an average society, and transplanted them into the 1970s with the same socioeconomic starting point, it would be tantamount to gross child abuse given the vast ocean of stuff they could have had, but now will never have (in their childhood, at least). And I’m not even talking about technology and the internet; just the treatment of children by the state and schools alone would be night-and-day different. Kids are individuals today, in the ‘70s you were your parents’ property and didn’t develop a sense-of-self worth respecting until you were old enough to get drunk.
I still wouldn’t bring a kid into existence, but for those that are here already, 2025 is the best time to be born. Like if I were my parents, I would not have had me while the country was tearing itself apart with bombings and shootings every day. But I’m glad I was born when I was and not when my parents were kids.
IMO climate change is kind of a different beast than hardships from the past.
Tell it to the young American men who were drafted into the Vietnam War, and were dead 3 months after receiving their notices to report.
I am quite certain they would be happy to hear that their friends and family back home continued to live on past them.
Climate change is the sort of existential threat that will literally kill every single person you’ve ever met. It is not the same. If I could volunteer to give my own life to reverse catastrophic climate change it wouldn’t even be a question. But no matter how many of us go and die about it we are now past the point where we can make a difference. The ice caps are in runaway melt loops. This is now a self perpetuating problem that cannot be solved without some new major scientific breakthrough. Habitable portions of the earth are going to shrink to single digit percentages of what we have right now, over the next couple hundred years. We can no longer stop this from happening, and it all happened because some of the very worst parts of humanity decided they needed a few extra thousand dollars every year.
Your point? Climate change has the potential to affect every living thing on the planet. Even the horrors of world war 2 didn’t have that kind of reach. Additionally, humans eventually have to stop fighting when enough of them are dead. Climate change is a threat that humanity can unleash but be potentially unable to stop. Like I said, a different kind of beast.
Slow and steady boil vs a quick(er) release.
Not the best way to die of course, but I’d choose the quick path if given the choice.But the path to the end is littered with grief on both ways just spread more and in a different way.
This mostly but also a lot of that support that’s available today is being stripped away.
Yes, climate change, microplatics in brains and balls and mountain fresh water and pollution all around.
Oh and forget about ever owning your house except you inherit.
And all of it is man-made.
There’s enough land in the world for every single adult human to have 2 acres. Pretty crazy. Then we have people living in actual closets that cost 2k a month. Crazy.
Maybe the area but how is living in the Sahara desert?
You are born in the very very very best stretch the human race has ever known.
We have solutions for almost every problem which exists today.
Wars are at an historical low point.
Chances are good you’ve never been even experienced war first hand.
Housing is expensive, yes. But chances are you’re reading this on a couch or bed in a home, heated (or cooled), with a working stove, light at night and a fridge with edibles in it. And lets not talk about your immediate almost unrestricted access to all of human knowledge.
That would be unbelievable, impossible even during 99.9% of human history. (Or somewhere near this figure)
You should stop doomscrolling and start reading the real human history.
All of human knowledge at your fingertips. And this is what you chose to distill from it.
I get what you are saying but everyone is ignoring the human condition. We feel things based on how they are around us in a relative sense.
It doesn’t matter if it is statistically better. Modern times are getting worse for people. Health, privacy, freedom are all declining in America. That is what people see and feel. I’m tired of people acting like we have life horizons that can see centuries.
Chronic health is a real current issue and it absolutely destroys quality of life too.
So yeah, great, best time to be alive. But since I was a kid many things have gotten worse. From health (cost, accessibility) and education to privacy. Maybe we will be much farther ahead in 20 years, but the next 10 are looking grim.
I think you’re missing the point.
Dying of disease because there simply isn’t a cure is a tragedy, but dying of disease because the cure is too expensive, not because of material and resource limitations but because some shithead just wants to be rich, when in reality we could produce enough for everyone - is a farce beyond comprehension.
We escaped the wolves and I sure am glad for it, but we have senselessly created new wolves just to throw people to them.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not making an appeal to nature, or using the noble savage fallacy, nor am I reactionary moron who thinks everyone went to Galas or that in the past I’d be admiring the decorative architecture rather than be the slave making it, I’m a huge simp for science and technology, but I also can see that the world is headed in a very dark direction compared to the 2010s.
As a minority in both legislation and in practice my rights and safety have been actively eroded since the 90s and things were quite literally just better back then for basically everyone.
I struggle to think what exactly would be worse for your average Westerner being born earlier in actual human scales of time, like e.g. the 1990s.
The boomers around me don’t even understand that you don’t just “get” a job for existing, and my parents can’t imagine having a degree and worrying about making rent or skipping on heating or meals in a “first world country” like the UK, and they grew up in the fucking soviet union and not exactly during it’s heyday.
Living in wartime is awful. Living while wishing for things to be fixed, or even for any kind of hope, even if it means death in war, isn’t that much better.
What? Are you stupid? Realism with a tinge of optimism in this thread clearly designed to be a crying, woe-is-me circle-jerk? Get with it man! /s
Wars are at an historical low point.
Factually incorrect statement.
Even a cursory search shows the statement to be factual. Pick one
Are you living under a rock?
You don’t need to google this shit…
There is a large land war in Europe with combined casualties likeling going to hit 2 million within a year. north Korea entered the war on Russian side.
Israel is exterminating Arabs in Gaza.
There is a big war in sudan
RWANDA invaded DRC.
Europe is re arming. China has been re arming and rattling saber for Taiwan.
India and Pakistan always doing their thing. Yemen is in chronic proxy war.
There is a proxy war in burma
Thailand is testing Cambonia
You repeating propaganda from 15 years ago.
Get educated.
Still an historical low point. Did you not check a single link I posted?
You don’t need to google this shit…
NM, you admitted it.
ALL of that has been going on since WWII, and slowly dialing down. The Ukraine war is such a shock because it’s so damned unusual.
I didn’t say the world was at peace, but war and death is at an all-time low. Look at the casualties reported in the news today. We’re stunned if 100 people get killed in a single attack. There were WWI and WWII battles you’ve never even heard of where 4,000 men were killed at once.
As to my education: I have 2 years of Advanced European History under my belt and 4 college credits to show for it. Not to pull the age card, but at 54 I’ve lived a fair bit of modern history. I’m guessing you weren’t around when global thermonuclear war was hanging over our head as a day-to-day fact of life?
Ukraine war alone reserved the trend.
The only thing that comapres is korean war.
You larping old regime propaganda in earnest jfc
Quit being a boomer and look at the numbers.
This is such an odd conversation. I provided many charts, many numbers to look at, and you’re still arguing, what exactly?
BTW, Boomers were my parents, and I still have no idea what propaganda you’re referring to. If anything, American propaganda has always been about how violent the world is and how we need more defense spending.
Can you name any propaganda where the government has espoused how peaceful the world is?!
Word. Just because America is on a downward slide everyone acting like these are the worst times ever. LOL. The people need some history classes.
When I was a kid, cancer was basically a death sentence. AIDS certainly was! Some of the tech I’ve experienced blows my mind. Wondering if my wife and I had finally caught COVID (we did 🤬), so I busted out the free laboratory kit I got in the mail. That was work for a hospital lab, and you were going to wait a few days. Sliced the side of my finger off, and they grew it back. I could go on forever.
In the movie Armageddon (1998), talking about the age of the space station being 10-years old, “Most of us don’t drive cars that old.” A 10-yo car was trash, common knowledge. My truck is a 2004 and my wife’s car is a 2014. Both run great. And I could go on for ages as to how much safer vehicles are. None of the things we take for granted like ABS, air bags, crumple zones, none of that existed when I was a kid. Hell, some cars didn’t have safety glass!
People will next tell me that global warming is a new threat that will kill us all. Friends and neighbors, we already survived an ice age.
reading real history is work though. just like working out and eating well.
doomscrolling is like the equivalent of sitting you your ass and eating junk food/delivery and satiating that lizard brain to the exclusion of their higher functions and potentials.
majority of people are going to choose the latter as much as they can.
VERY specific people would have been better off born 20 years ago.
The vast majority of people would be better off today.
You can imagine in another 20 years that would be different, but almost everyone is better off today than they were 20 years ago, and they will be even better 20 years from now than today.
Specific groups may have a harder time in one time period or another, but society at large is getting better at the world scale over the long term. Hope still exists.
Maybe when it comes to social issues but when I read OP’s post I think of climate change and how it seems to be worsening at an increasing pace.
That and personal privacy and freedom from despotic and fascist government
I’m in my mid thirties and I’ve had a tough time the last few summers. I’m too hot to eat, causing nausea and reducing the amount of water I can drink without vomiting. I’m sure it puts a strain on my vital organs. I wonder how much it’s taking off of my life expectancy already and how much worse it will get over the next decades.
I don’t even live in a (historically) warm place.
Climate change related disasters will only get worse over the long term, though.
I agree with almost all of this, but I think factoring in the imminent catastrophes we know are coming (and actively doing nothing about) will make a sizeable balance of this ‘better off vast majority’ of today.
The heaps of plastic tell a different story and define ‘getting better’ in a daunting light for those just now being born
VERY specific people would have been better off born 20 years ago.
The people pining to repeat the mistakes of the past.
Yeah. It is like a kid being born in the 1930’s.
