I have had depression for many years and never understood why anyone would want to set children into this terrible world. In hindsight it’s kinda funny, I have since changed my mind.
How is it any more terrible than it’s ever been these last few million years ago? I don’t have to worry about my kids being eaten by some predator anymore, the smilodon problem’s taken care of. Horrible diseases still about, but many that would have crippled or killed them just 100 years ago are now bad cultural memories. They have the comfort kings wouldn’t have known in centuries past.
Only the neurotic would whine about how they can’t bring children into a terrible world. I’m glad you’ve gotten over yours. As you have time, do what you can to dissect that old worldview and figure out how it works so that maybe you can help other people someday.
Insulting people for having a different opinion to yours is not a good look. No matter how much humanity has evolved when compared to previous generations, there are still big enough problems in the world that someone can rationally make that decision.
I’m not aware of having insulted anyone. I’ve come to learn in my life that some people are insulted by reality… that’s sad. Reality doesn’t change just because you feel insulted, it never apologizes, and it definitely doesn’t make amends.
that someone can rationally make that decision.
No. They can only irrationally make that decision. And it’s not difficult to discern that truth… just open your eyes. Trauma, gluttony, there’s always something right there at the surface pressuring that choice.
I’m not aware of having insulted anyone. I’ve come to learn in my life that some people are insulted by reality… that’s sad.
Really? Please say that line to anyone you know and after they’re finished chuckling, as them what they think is so funny and perhaps they’ll explain it better than I can.
You just sound like some guy who watched the "you’re not wrong, Walter-- you’re just an asshole" scene in The Big Lebowski and thought to yourself "Yeah, I’m Walter! He tells it like it is!"
i.e. saying "people who don’t want kids are mentally ill" and then wondering why people would consider that to be an insulting statement.
I feel like you’re probably more in love with yourself than your partner. Reply if you want but I’ll just be blocking you anyway-- people like you creep me out.
i.e. saying “people who don’t want kids are mentally ill” and then wondering why people would consider that to be an insulting statement.
It’s like saying “people who want to force themselves to vomit after every meal are mentally ill” and then wondering why the bulimics consider that to be insulting?
They’re bulimic. It’s a mental illness. They probably do find it insulting, at least when they can work up the nerve to do it… it wasn’t always that way. But wasn’t it Oprah who had a bunch of the crackpots on her show where they were starting to claim eating disorders were a lifestyle choice?
Same thing here. If you get enough mentally ill people together in one place, they can convince themselves that their perceived numbers alone make them not mentally ill.
I can’t tell if you’re playing devil’s advocate or one of the mentally ill, and I don’t care nearly enough to read your comment carefully to try to figure it out.
Reality doesn’t change just because you feel insulted, it never apologizes, and it definitely doesn’t make amends.
In the words of Thanos, “reality can be whatever we want”. I am joking a bit of course, but really, although the laws of physics and the physical world don’t change, society can adapt around them in any way it sees fit. If society chooses, it can embark on a more positive path, with less suffering. In many ways, it has been doing that the past century. The conservative idea that “reality never changes” and that individual people should change because society as a whole won’t is a fallacy and can be proven empirically.
They can only irrationally make that decision.
Who can make that judgement, you? Do you have the qualifications required to produce a judgement on mental health like that?
Trauma, gluttony, there’s always something right there at the surface pressuring that choice.
Trauma seems like a damn good argument for not having kids. It’s not irrational. If I suffered, it’d be immoral on my part to want to subject another human being, who had no say in being born, to potentially suffer the same (especially when some of that suffering may be caused by genetics, which will be passed down to said human being).
society can adapt around them in any way it sees fit
It can’t adapt to this. Society ceases to exist if there are no people, so saying “it can adapt to no one performing the process by which people create their replacements in the world” is dumb.
Fertility is weird in that young children grow up in the same society that is doing these things… they internalize what they see around them as “normal”. So if you teach children that having one or zero children is normal, they’ll grow up to want the same. They can always go lower than 1, but never higher. This means fertility trends in one direction only, it never goes up.
And once it drops below replacement levels, it won’t ever go back up to them (let alone above) ever again.
Your society is dying. It doesn’t realize it yet, and by the time it does nothing will be possible to do about it.
Who can make that judgement, you?
Yes. I do not claim to be the only one capable of making that judgement. Though it seems those like me are rare.
Judgement is nothing more than the measurement of a thing or an event. We are not talking about a legal process… I sentence no one, I convict no one, I condemn no one.
But I’ve measured, and accurately.
Trauma seems like a damn good argument for not having kids.
It may seem that way, but it isn’t. At most, it’s an argument to delay having them.
If you wanted or needed to do something in your life, and you were in a car wreck and broke both your legs… would you think it sane for someone to say “now you should never do that thing again, you’ve experienced trauma!” ?
Why is it any more sane if the injury is psychological? You take the time you need to recover, you work hard to get back to where you should be, and you do that thing. And you do it whether it’s having children or climbing some mountain or whatever. And you’d even agree with me if we hadn’t prefaced the achievement as “having children”, but some other trivial thing.
to subject another human being, who had no say in being born
This is a nonsense statement. Until the person exists, by definition they can have no say in anything because they do not exist. Therefor it is not necessary, and even irrational, to speak or think about whether someone has a say in “being born”.
You’re morally permitted to subject a non-existent non-person to “being born”. Unless you’ve invented some sort of time travel, nothing else makes any sense.
especially when some of that suffering may be caused by genetics, which will be passed down to said human being
This is the first intelligent thing you’ve said. Those who have incurable genetic diseases that cause true misery are rational to not reproduce.
None of the people in this thread, and few of those (1 in 10,000 or even fewer) who are childfree are childless because of that reason. You don’t have the Tay Sachs gene, and your receding hairline’s not comparable.
It can’t adapt to this. Society ceases to exist if there are no people, so saying “it can adapt to no one performing the process by which people create their replacements in the world” is dumb.
And why does society have to exist? Society and humanity have no inherent value. The value they have is the value we, as rational beings, give them. If we collectively determined that they should exist no more, they would cease to exist.
Your society is dying. It doesn’t realize it yet, and by the time it does nothing will be possible to do about it.
I don’t mind it. That alarmism doesn’t scare me. Remember I follow VHEMT, hence that is my end goal (at least, I’m doing my part towards that).
But I’ve measured, and accurately.
That is precisely what my question was targeting. You’ve measured (and you have every right to your measurement as the expression of an opinion), but who’s to say you’ve measured accurately? What qualifications do you have to make such a statement of fact?
If you wanted or needed to do something in your life, and you were in a car wreck and broke both your legs… would you think it sane for someone to say “now you should never do that thing again, you’ve experienced trauma!” ?
I would. That is how I try to act in my daily life: avoiding things that have caused me suffering in the past, as much as possible. That is how I try to achieve a comfortable and happy life, by avoiding what has broken that comfort and happiness in the past.
This is a nonsense statement. Until the person exists, by definition they can have no say in anything because they do not exist. Therefor it is not necessary, and even irrational, to speak or think about whether someone has a say in “being born”.
It may be from a pragmatic point of view, but abstractly/philosophically speaking, it isn’t. When we make a moral choice, we have to think of the future consequences of that choice. From that point of view, we have to consider that the person being born will have no concept of the meaning behind their future suffering and will try to attribute such meaning to the ones who decided for them. People desire, naturally, to be in control and being born is the one action you have zero control over. That is also a reason why people seek religion: to justify and give meaning to their existence.
None of the people in this thread, and few of those (1 in 10,000 or even fewer) who are childfree are childless because of that reason. You don’t have the Tay Sachs gene, and your receding hairline’s not comparable.
How can you make such a blanket statement when you don’t know any of us personally?
And why does society have to exist? Society and humanity have no inherent value.
If this is your opinion, then it is only reasonable for those of us who do find value in society and humanity to ignore your opinions on how those things should work. Your statement is, in essence, a resignation from those groups.
avoiding things that have caused me suffering
I spend about 10 hours a week at the gym pursuing activities that (best that I can tell what you mean by “suffering”) cause me suffering. I am better for it.
When we make a moral choice, we have to think of the future consequences of that choice.
Yes. And since the consequences of having children is good, at least net good, there’s not much of a choice to make.
At most, I simply have to avoid the sorts of abuse that would cause them to turn out like yourself and believe absurdities such as “human extinction is a goal one should pursue”.
How can you make such a blanket statement when you don’t know any of us personally?
Because these sorts of genetic issues are exceedingly rare, and the people who have them and know they have them would have a very different attitude which you do not present.
Moreso, I’ve spoken to such people as yourself in person before, and the “conditions” they specify would be jokeworthy except that they’re typically friends or at least acquaintances I wouldn’t want to be blunt with. “My grandparents have diabetes!” and such. WTF.
I live in an absurd world populated by absurd people hellbent on making certain it won’t be populated at all anymore.
If this is your opinion, then it is only reasonable for those of us who do find value in society and humanity to ignore your opinions on how those things should work. Your statement is, in essence, a resignation from those groups.
I agree.
I spend about 10 hours a week at the gym pursuing activities that (best that I can tell what you mean by “suffering”) cause me suffering. I am better for it.
Well, that is your choice. If you genuinely enjoy those activities and believe they improve your quality of life, then I can’t say that they consist suffering for you. Suffering can only be broadly specified in general terms, but to be specified in more granular terms, it varies between people and one person’s definition of suffering may be wildly different from the next. Some people actually enjoy being professional soldiers and getting involved in violent conflicts. Others practice violent and radical sports and enjoy it. For those people, those activities do not classify as suffering. For others, they would.
And since the consequences of having children is good, at least net good, there’s not much of a choice to make.
In your opinion. Since for me they aren’t, my choice is different from yours.
At most, I simply have to avoid the sorts of abuse that would cause them to turn out like yourself and believe absurdities such as “human extinction is a goal one should pursue”.
Except, as a parent, you can’t really prevent that 100%. Perhaps not even 50%. The world takes twisted turns and your child might end up suffering such abuse at the hands of events or people you have no control over.
Because these sorts of genetic issues are exceedingly rare, and the people who have them and know they have them would have a very different attitude which you do not present.
The attitudes people have differ between people, because people’s mindsets, experiences and personalities are all different. I don’t think I’m making a radical statement here.
Moreso, I’ve spoken to such people as yourself in person before, and the “conditions” they specify would be jokeworthy except that they’re typically friends or at least acquaintances I wouldn’t want to be blunt with. “My grandparents have diabetes!” and such. WTF.
What one person sees as a joke, another might see as something quite serious. It all depends on their own viewpoints and past experiences.
For example, although I should not be giving personal examples and opening myself to comments on my own character, due to some trauma I have with having been medically abused by hospital staff as a child, I have paralyzing, crippling phobia of needles. Getting the COVID vaccine, for instance, was a major psychological ordeal for me and I only ended up getting it because of the duty to society and public health (if it was something that affected just myself, I wouldn’t have). Having diabetes would mean getting regular, if not daily, insulin shots or blood sugar tests (depending on the type of diabetes), so that would quickly devolve into a miserable, fear-driven life. Fortunately it isn’t something I have to deal with at the moment and I take as good care as I can to ensure it won’t become an issue in the future, but there are worse things, which are unavoidable, that can happen.
I live in an absurd world populated by absurd people hellbent on making certain it won’t be populated at all anymore.
I fail to see why that is absurd at all. It’s as valid a viewpoint as ever in my opinion.
I have had depression for many years and never understood why anyone would want to set children into this terrible world. In hindsight it’s kinda funny, I have since changed my mind.
How is it any more terrible than it’s ever been these last few million years ago? I don’t have to worry about my kids being eaten by some predator anymore, the smilodon problem’s taken care of. Horrible diseases still about, but many that would have crippled or killed them just 100 years ago are now bad cultural memories. They have the comfort kings wouldn’t have known in centuries past.
Only the neurotic would whine about how they can’t bring children into a terrible world. I’m glad you’ve gotten over yours. As you have time, do what you can to dissect that old worldview and figure out how it works so that maybe you can help other people someday.
Insulting people for having a different opinion to yours is not a good look. No matter how much humanity has evolved when compared to previous generations, there are still big enough problems in the world that someone can rationally make that decision.
I’m not aware of having insulted anyone. I’ve come to learn in my life that some people are insulted by reality… that’s sad. Reality doesn’t change just because you feel insulted, it never apologizes, and it definitely doesn’t make amends.
No. They can only irrationally make that decision. And it’s not difficult to discern that truth… just open your eyes. Trauma, gluttony, there’s always something right there at the surface pressuring that choice.
Really? Please say that line to anyone you know and after they’re finished chuckling, as them what they think is so funny and perhaps they’ll explain it better than I can.
You just sound like some guy who watched the "you’re not wrong, Walter-- you’re just an asshole" scene in The Big Lebowski and thought to yourself "Yeah, I’m Walter! He tells it like it is!"
i.e. saying "people who don’t want kids are mentally ill" and then wondering why people would consider that to be an insulting statement.
I feel like you’re probably more in love with yourself than your partner. Reply if you want but I’ll just be blocking you anyway-- people like you creep me out.
It’s like saying “people who want to force themselves to vomit after every meal are mentally ill” and then wondering why the bulimics consider that to be insulting?
They’re bulimic. It’s a mental illness. They probably do find it insulting, at least when they can work up the nerve to do it… it wasn’t always that way. But wasn’t it Oprah who had a bunch of the crackpots on her show where they were starting to claim eating disorders were a lifestyle choice?
Same thing here. If you get enough mentally ill people together in one place, they can convince themselves that their perceived numbers alone make them not mentally ill.
I can’t tell if you’re playing devil’s advocate or one of the mentally ill, and I don’t care nearly enough to read your comment carefully to try to figure it out.
In the words of Thanos, “reality can be whatever we want”. I am joking a bit of course, but really, although the laws of physics and the physical world don’t change, society can adapt around them in any way it sees fit. If society chooses, it can embark on a more positive path, with less suffering. In many ways, it has been doing that the past century. The conservative idea that “reality never changes” and that individual people should change because society as a whole won’t is a fallacy and can be proven empirically.
Who can make that judgement, you? Do you have the qualifications required to produce a judgement on mental health like that?
Trauma seems like a damn good argument for not having kids. It’s not irrational. If I suffered, it’d be immoral on my part to want to subject another human being, who had no say in being born, to potentially suffer the same (especially when some of that suffering may be caused by genetics, which will be passed down to said human being).
It can’t adapt to this. Society ceases to exist if there are no people, so saying “it can adapt to no one performing the process by which people create their replacements in the world” is dumb.
Fertility is weird in that young children grow up in the same society that is doing these things… they internalize what they see around them as “normal”. So if you teach children that having one or zero children is normal, they’ll grow up to want the same. They can always go lower than 1, but never higher. This means fertility trends in one direction only, it never goes up.
And once it drops below replacement levels, it won’t ever go back up to them (let alone above) ever again.
Your society is dying. It doesn’t realize it yet, and by the time it does nothing will be possible to do about it.
Yes. I do not claim to be the only one capable of making that judgement. Though it seems those like me are rare.
Judgement is nothing more than the measurement of a thing or an event. We are not talking about a legal process… I sentence no one, I convict no one, I condemn no one.
But I’ve measured, and accurately.
It may seem that way, but it isn’t. At most, it’s an argument to delay having them.
If you wanted or needed to do something in your life, and you were in a car wreck and broke both your legs… would you think it sane for someone to say “now you should never do that thing again, you’ve experienced trauma!” ?
Why is it any more sane if the injury is psychological? You take the time you need to recover, you work hard to get back to where you should be, and you do that thing. And you do it whether it’s having children or climbing some mountain or whatever. And you’d even agree with me if we hadn’t prefaced the achievement as “having children”, but some other trivial thing.
This is a nonsense statement. Until the person exists, by definition they can have no say in anything because they do not exist. Therefor it is not necessary, and even irrational, to speak or think about whether someone has a say in “being born”.
You’re morally permitted to subject a non-existent non-person to “being born”. Unless you’ve invented some sort of time travel, nothing else makes any sense.
This is the first intelligent thing you’ve said. Those who have incurable genetic diseases that cause true misery are rational to not reproduce.
None of the people in this thread, and few of those (1 in 10,000 or even fewer) who are childfree are childless because of that reason. You don’t have the Tay Sachs gene, and your receding hairline’s not comparable.
And why does society have to exist? Society and humanity have no inherent value. The value they have is the value we, as rational beings, give them. If we collectively determined that they should exist no more, they would cease to exist.
I don’t mind it. That alarmism doesn’t scare me. Remember I follow VHEMT, hence that is my end goal (at least, I’m doing my part towards that).
That is precisely what my question was targeting. You’ve measured (and you have every right to your measurement as the expression of an opinion), but who’s to say you’ve measured accurately? What qualifications do you have to make such a statement of fact?
I would. That is how I try to act in my daily life: avoiding things that have caused me suffering in the past, as much as possible. That is how I try to achieve a comfortable and happy life, by avoiding what has broken that comfort and happiness in the past.
It may be from a pragmatic point of view, but abstractly/philosophically speaking, it isn’t. When we make a moral choice, we have to think of the future consequences of that choice. From that point of view, we have to consider that the person being born will have no concept of the meaning behind their future suffering and will try to attribute such meaning to the ones who decided for them. People desire, naturally, to be in control and being born is the one action you have zero control over. That is also a reason why people seek religion: to justify and give meaning to their existence.
How can you make such a blanket statement when you don’t know any of us personally?
If this is your opinion, then it is only reasonable for those of us who do find value in society and humanity to ignore your opinions on how those things should work. Your statement is, in essence, a resignation from those groups.
I spend about 10 hours a week at the gym pursuing activities that (best that I can tell what you mean by “suffering”) cause me suffering. I am better for it.
Yes. And since the consequences of having children is good, at least net good, there’s not much of a choice to make.
At most, I simply have to avoid the sorts of abuse that would cause them to turn out like yourself and believe absurdities such as “human extinction is a goal one should pursue”.
Because these sorts of genetic issues are exceedingly rare, and the people who have them and know they have them would have a very different attitude which you do not present.
Moreso, I’ve spoken to such people as yourself in person before, and the “conditions” they specify would be jokeworthy except that they’re typically friends or at least acquaintances I wouldn’t want to be blunt with. “My grandparents have diabetes!” and such. WTF.
I live in an absurd world populated by absurd people hellbent on making certain it won’t be populated at all anymore.
I agree.
Well, that is your choice. If you genuinely enjoy those activities and believe they improve your quality of life, then I can’t say that they consist suffering for you. Suffering can only be broadly specified in general terms, but to be specified in more granular terms, it varies between people and one person’s definition of suffering may be wildly different from the next. Some people actually enjoy being professional soldiers and getting involved in violent conflicts. Others practice violent and radical sports and enjoy it. For those people, those activities do not classify as suffering. For others, they would.
In your opinion. Since for me they aren’t, my choice is different from yours.
Except, as a parent, you can’t really prevent that 100%. Perhaps not even 50%. The world takes twisted turns and your child might end up suffering such abuse at the hands of events or people you have no control over.
The attitudes people have differ between people, because people’s mindsets, experiences and personalities are all different. I don’t think I’m making a radical statement here.
What one person sees as a joke, another might see as something quite serious. It all depends on their own viewpoints and past experiences.
For example, although I should not be giving personal examples and opening myself to comments on my own character, due to some trauma I have with having been medically abused by hospital staff as a child, I have paralyzing, crippling phobia of needles. Getting the COVID vaccine, for instance, was a major psychological ordeal for me and I only ended up getting it because of the duty to society and public health (if it was something that affected just myself, I wouldn’t have). Having diabetes would mean getting regular, if not daily, insulin shots or blood sugar tests (depending on the type of diabetes), so that would quickly devolve into a miserable, fear-driven life. Fortunately it isn’t something I have to deal with at the moment and I take as good care as I can to ensure it won’t become an issue in the future, but there are worse things, which are unavoidable, that can happen.
I fail to see why that is absurd at all. It’s as valid a viewpoint as ever in my opinion.