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!
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.