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!
All ye who enter abandon all hope
Seriously, you people are a bunch of cake eaters. “The future is scary and things are getting worse.” It’s always been scary, you’ve just been privileged enough for it not to be.
All I can think of is how bad theyre going to have it.
Bro, people have it bad NOW. Life is and has always been suffering and struggle. Get out of your online bubble and go see some shit. Anyone here who says their life outlook looks bleak would have said the exact same shit 30 years ago or even 100 years ago.
Life is suffering no matter when.
Just read all of Vonnegut’s works again. It’s weird hearing him outline, from the 1940s onward, the same exact issues we have today. There are easily 300 passages I could quote here and claim as my own commentary on modern life. No one would blink.
“The good Earth - we could have saved it, but we were too damn cheap and lazy.”
“America is the wealthiest nation on Earth, but its people are mainly poor, and poor Americans are urged to hate themselves. To quote the American humorist Kin Hubbard, ‘It ain’t no disgrace to be poor, but it might as well be.’ It is in fact a crime for an American to be poor, even though America is a nation of poor.”
Suffering is not new. It’s universal. To exist is to suffer. Even if we were to find an infinite source of energy and food, we would find a way to suffer.
Seriously. I regularly meet people who make top 5% incomes, like 250K+. They living in luxury condos, have had their entire life paved out for them by welathy parents, and will never have any real problems or struggles in their lives.
What do they talk about every time? How poor they are. How everything is so hard. How they struggle so much with daily tasks. How their job is so awful. Why can’t they just go be on a yacht somewhere forever? How their friend/boss/parent is mean and not giving them more stuff, etc. etc. Why isn’t their life perfect and wonderful life they were promised? Why aren’t they famous and rich like some other person they met once? Oh, and how the govt is evil because it taxes them too much and it’s not fair that their multi-million dollar inheritance might be taxed too so they might only inherent $20 million, not $28 million, the horror and unfairness of it all!
And the millionaires/billionaires… all feel this same way too. Hence why they are all building apocalypse estates in New Zealand and bunkers in old missile silos and whining about how the mean government taxing them is so unfair.
No, I try to keep in mind that most situations are transient and I don’t really know what people born today are going to be dealing with.
Climate change looks pretty bad for people going into the future, don’t want to discount or downplay that. But other things, from the terrible political trends and hatred to wars to failed or booming economies will ebb and flow over lifetimes, and it’s hard to say in many ways if the future holds better or worse for today’s children.
Economically speaking the more abrupt the population shrinkage the worse the few young people will have it because of the extreme imbalance of retired vs working population
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.
VERY specific people would have been better off born 20 years ago.
The people pining to repeat the mistakes of the past.
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
But the point is it is not about the situation today, it is about the situation in 20 years, heck just 10 years, of which these people will live into and experience very soon.
but society at large is getting better at the world scale over the long term.
That used to be true, it is no longer true. And it is not a natural law that this will happen, it is just something a lot of people who have lived in the golden period of the 1950s to early 2000s inferred, without actually considering a larger swath of history than that.
Year of the Linux desktop will be worth it
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.
I was born over 40 years ago. I feel like there was a general consensus in the 80’s that kids being born then absolutely would be “better off” than their parents.
Reality is sinking in and we’re seeing that wasn’t the case for a lot of people.
The fact that questionability surrounding “if kids born today will be better off than their parents” even exists today seems to suggest that they will not.
Climate change related disasters will only get worse over the long term, though.
I am envious of people being born today. Barring advances in medicine that are uncertain to come in time, they’re going to see a lot more of the future than I am.
Sure, there might be rough patches in the timeline ahead. There have been rough patches in the timeline behind us, too. I don’t feel sad for people born right before World War I, for example.
Yup.
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!)
You seem to have forgotten climate change, the main problem which we are facing, and which will cause tougher economic times than we have ever experienced before.
Personally I’d lump that in with the economic problems category. I don’t personally want kids but it wouldn’t deter me if I did.
Did I miss the news that we just had the last harvest of okra ever?
When I was a kid, there was a hole in the ozone layer and we were just going to be blown up by a nuclear war, or get AIDS.
It’s always been the end times.
So no, I don’t worry that much about kids. I do wish that embodiment was not a forced choice, you can’t ask a baby if they would like to be born. I’m sure there are planets where the ‘people’ have a much harder time than we do here. Sure I am incredibly angry that we are squandering this glorious advantage we have so soon. But no I am not sorry for the kids of the future and also the past really sucked for most people, you can’t compare a hard life of the near future to some idealized imaginary easy life of the past.
Nonsense. We have never had the manmade cilmate change situation which we are experiencing now. It is a unique situation in the history of mankind. We know it is going to get drastically worse in the near future, and it is something that is going to affect us all.
The fear of nuclear war was fear of the possibility of it, not the absolute knowledge it was going to happen.
Nah fuck them kids
Ok, Drumpf
I think the next generation is going to start feeling it hard. Current generation will slip by but barely. I’m not pressuring my kids to have their own. Just do you fam.
I used to.
Kids have never been something I never saw myself having. I have nephews and nieces and I used to worry about them.
They’ve grown up a bit and the kids are actually doing alright. In my family they are all loved and they’re well behaved kids.
They’re getting proper diagnoses and treatment for their adhd that my brothers and I probably should have gotten as kids. Instead we all got countless detentions and suspensions in school.
School these days is kind of a mess, but my nieces and nephews all have parents who step in and help. The biggest thing for one who was getting bullied was switching schools, it was a total 180 in his life after leaving that environment.
The omnipresent tech and AI stuff is a mess too. I think having involved and caring parents helps a lot with that. It’s harder to fall into the traps when you have good examples in life. Hopefully that keeps up.
As for money/job prospects that was a huge concern when I was coming of age too. 2008 fucked everything up. This too shall pass the youth job market has always been tough for the last 25 years. They’ll figure it out with a bit of help. They’re not doomed here. As long as there are people there will be needs to fill.
I do worry about the climate. I don’t know how to help with that. I try to do good but it’s beyond my control to stop. All we can do is try to mitigate and adapt.
Yup. Between climate collapse, wealth shift to the ultra wealthy, and the global surge in popularity of right wing extremist authoritarianism, I don’t see things improving any time soon.
Things are rapidly degrading, and intentionally dropping a child into the dumpster fire we’re turning our planet into is an act of cruelty and selfishness that few others measure up to.
Having a vasectomy was probably the best decision I’ve made - not for my sake, but the kid’s and any even less fortunate grandkids and so on.
My own parents have finally fucked off a bit about when their grandchildren are coming, and lecturing me on how I’m cheating myself out of life’s greatest joy or some shit… I think current events have finally become so glaringly bad that even they can’t ignore it, but reminding them constantly about how unfair that would be for the kid was so fucking tiring.
wealth shift to the ultra wealthy
What in the world do you think the Great Depression was?!
extremist authoritarianism
WWII and the Soviet Union?
Climate change isn’t even a unique issue. Humans already survived an ice age, with nothing more than stone age tools.
And I’ll remind you, people were making babies all along.
I do, but I also acknowledge that I may be wrong, and that the parents are free to make their own choices.
Yes
