this post was submitted on 02 Jun 2024
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Well perhaps the microplastics will reduce the overall fertility rate of the human population at large. Perhaps life itself will get so difficult for the average person, they'll be discouraged from having babies, and perhaps only then will the worst effects of climate change will be narrowly averted...maybe.
One of the worst things you can do to the environment folks. Don't bear children. Don't invite another being into this madness and suffering.
As is continuing to live so why don't you follow through on that line of thought here
Because I hold out hope that the living can change things. But only us, this generation, right now has that opportunity. Having children forces you to focus on raising them rather than fighting the good fight against climate change and the forces that keep it in place. Instead, I'd say your energy is better spent protesting loudly and relentlessly against the forces that enforce the status quo.
But hey, good luck trying to stay optimistic about that next generation not hating your guts as you raise them in an ever darkening world, if that's the gamble you'd like to take.
Idk about you but I watched the sopranos senior year of high school, and the premise of that show is literally “the party’s over”. I still love my parents.
No one hates their parents for having them.
The idea that energy spent protesting or engaging with work to change our global system is premised on two plainly false underlying ideas, that more time spent will result in faster or broader change (or any change at all) and that people can’t do two things.
My parents had hobbies, one of my childhood friends parents was always out at some protest or other.
Theres obviously room to work towards a better society while also raising children.
Didn't watch that show, but I'm assuming you mean "the party's over" as in the world is already fucked. Fuck that noise, even if it were, then the question only is "how hard did you fight to leave this world better than you found it anyway?"
Good for you.
Hard disagree from my own experience. I've met plenty of people across different backgrounds who hate or resent their parents for bringing them into this world, and then gave some half hearted "Your generation will figure out climate change" schtick when confronted with the naive question, "Why aren't we all doing something about it?" The hate and resentment comes when you realize they were selfish and weak. If they really wanted kids, why not adopt? Oh but MY genes. MY heritage is what matters. Why?
Why not fight the good fight and protest instead? Meh, it's just easier to live a comfortable life today than fight for a better tomorrow I'll never live to see. I'm still a good person! I raised a beautiful family of people who will likely make the same selfish decisions, but because I cared and looked after them and them alone, I swear, there's no way you can question my goodness!
Again, fuck that, hell yes I can and should question that bullshit, and break the fucking cycle of selfish idiocy. Not having more kids is the absolute least I can do.
You live a privileged life for being able to fantasize that that is he case for the majority of people. Most people make little to no money, and had they not had children, might look at their shitty circumstances and had enough time and willpower to take a chance and upend the systems that oppress them. Instead, out of fear for their children's wellbeing, they bow their heads and accept increasingly shitty conditions, all the while praying that somehow life will magically be better for their children. No, you can't exert the kind of political pressure necessary when there are many more sociological pressures to simply feed your kids. The kind of pressure needed to actually change things requires your undivided attention and an exorbitant amount of your time.
The first like five minutes or something of the shows first episode has the main character explaining how he feels like he got into the mob after the good days, that it’s all downhill.
I brought it up to establish that the kind of thinking you’re doing isn’t new. The way it does that is not just by simply being 25 years old, but the context of that monologue: he’s going into therapy to address his feelings. Because therapy and the ideas that everything’s going to shit and you’re late to the party we’re already well established concepts by the 1990s.
So a 25 year old show can traffic in those ideas not as cutting edge thought, but as old well trod ground so much so that the very ways society addresses those ideas are ripe for satire.
That’s not to say that there wasn’t a winnowing down of the opportunities presented to Americans that coincided with the dot com boom and bust, just that the idea that things are going downhill isn’t anything new. The world has been ever darkening for decades now and as I said before, people don’t hate their parents for bringing them into the world.
Now you had a long response to this and I’m not going to argue that your experiences are wrong. We have different experiences though, and we have different conclusions about them.
It’s not easy to adopt. The poorer you are, the harder it is. When you look into the process of adoption closer than “I want a kid”, there are some serious systemic issues that crop up. I’m not arguing that it’s not worth adopting, just that an ethical person considering adoption might end up working within the foster system instead. If that gives you an idea of how fucked the adoption industry is, that’s kinda what I was going for.
I would also question the tactical usefulness of antinatalism when it’s a strategy embraced by the bourgeoisie to extract more out of the downhill trend. There’s no need to pay people enough to support a family when it’s a completely legitimate choice not to reproduce (never mind that people who don’t have enough money to support a family never get to exercise that choice).
If the group destroying the future is making short term money on people not having kids, who’s really being helped by not having kids?
If our goal is the emancipation of the working class, how does embracing the destruction specifically of that class by giving up on reproducing that class move us toward that emancipation?
The amount of labor involved in social reproduction is significant, but has literally never stopped people from participating in collective action in the past. I can’t help but look at your argument that people can’t work to change society if they have to do family labor as absurd and ahistorical.
I mean, look at the panthers, their most significant program was feeding children.
I gotta take a moment and respond directly to your personal attack that I lead a very privileged life. I’m not gonna get into the poverty Olympics or dox myself, but you don’t know me or anything about my life.
Fair enough. I will say that the novelty or whether things haven't always been in decline doesn't denote that therefore, having children doesn't inherently contribute to worsening the climate crisis. It does. Faith that things will somehow be resolved by future generations and not by the present one is a lazy, kick the can down the road approach that I am obviously very critical of.
This is a very fair argument in which I am in general agreement with. I would also point out that the decision to therefore "have my own genetic kids" is not the right approach because, again, having children inevitably contributes to worsening the climate crisis.
There's no incentive to pay people enough whether they have kids or not. There are no laws incentivizing nor disincentivizing employers to pay their employees more based off of them having children.
The people in power are incentivized to encourage the general populous to have children for many reasons, but one of them is simply that, like your job and other obligations, having children forces you to divide your concerns away from protests and other forms of activism, as I mentioned earlier. You've criticized that my argument that the assumption that change can only happen with more immediate action ("faster"), more time spent, and with undivided attention (ie "can't do two things") is plainly false.
I'd argue that while beneficial societal change does happen slowly over time due to long uphill battles by protesters, that this change would have been more dramatic and rapid had people had had less obligations to keeping the bourgeoisie wealthy and with a fresh supply of future workers, and therefore had more time to devote to protests and activism. But I'll concede this is a hypothetical.
Well, to be fair, the original argument I was making was that the point of not having children was to leave the Earth itself better off than when we came to be on it regardless of whether we go extinct or not.
The decision to not have children in this context is an act of defiance, a breaking of a malicious cycle of contributing to a global society that has over generations come to the conclusion that modern comforts, societal hierarchy, and inherited cultures, are more important than ensuring the longevity of the human race and the majority of life on Earth as we currently know it.
The only ones who ultimately benefit from this endless cycle are those who have figured out how to exploit the majority of people and resources around them to their whim. The decision to not have children isn't a decision to somehow deprive the powerful of anything, other than future participants in their game.
My argument is that the change a person can make is proportional to the time they can devote to it. Protests that are most effective are literally the ones that occur where people have nothing but time. They walk out of their jobs, they refuse to work, and yeah, they take time away from their families to do so. All I'm saying is that if you have no children you're obliged to take care of, you have more time and energy to devote to the cause, and can thereby make for a more effective societal movement.
Good example, and I won't argue it. As mentioned previously, my take that these movements would have been more effective had they had more time had they not had children is a hypothetical that I strongly believe to be true, but has no historical basis because the majority of people end up having children.
That said, I'll concede that having children of your own often inspires those who would otherwise not have participated in social activism to do so. I would contest that you can achieve more by fighting for the children of others than by dividing your attention between raising your children and fighting for their future.
Fair enough. You're right and it was mean spirited and wrong of me to do so. I'll not make excuses and simply apologize for doing so. I got overly heated up in making my argument, and should have never made it about you personally. I apologize.
so if the whole argument youre making is that people shouldn't have children because then they have more time to devote to fulfilling the campsite rule is anyone actually doing that?
Is there any indication that the time and energy people spend on families wouldn't just be spent doing anything else in the world?
if you want some good examples of incentives for the bourgeois classes to encourage antinatalism, look at wages by sector in any country that has a low replacement rate. businesses benefit in the long term from hiring immigrant workers and temporary workers because there are fewer native workers who tend to demand higher pay and benefits.
the word in biology for reproductive strategies where many individuals work to ensure the success of others offspring with no intention of reproducing themselves is "eusociality". it's what bees and ants have.
I saw it articulated as "the greenest thing anyone can do is not have kids." Pretty cynical, but also true. Unfortunately, there tends to be a lot of overlap between truth and cynicism.
“Bad for the environment” means “Bad for us humans”, nature will take care of itself, just not in a human scale lifespan. So not populating because of the environment doesn’t make sense. Why have a better environment for humans if there are no humans? I’m not saying we don’t need to look after the environment, on the contrary, we need to better ourselves and the environment because otherwise we go extinct anyway.
You think only humans are affected by microplastics? You think it got into our blood streams and no other animals?
Oh no, I’m saying on a scale big enough micro plastics don’t matter. But you are missing my point, we DO need to take care of microplastics, because we want to repopulate… the poster I’m replying to is trying to convince us not to bear children. Edgy, but also quite stupid.
Your statement is exhibiting a narrow anthropocentric point of view. Obviously, human beings aren't meant to be here forever. Just like any individual life form, we live for a moment and then die.
The question is not "how can we survive for the longest amount of time possible?", it's not even "how can I get the most out of my time living?", it's "what do I leave behind for those that remain?"
In the case of human beings as a species, our best selves are those that leave a positive impact on our environment, stewards of the Earth. But we obviously aren't exhibiting our best selves.
"The Earth will be fine." is a pointless statement akin to "The next generation will figure out this mess." Both statements hand wave away the complicated problem that needs to be solved right the fuck now.
A better statement to ponder is the difficult question of "how do we leave this place better than we found it even if we do go extinct?" And on a more individual level, "what decisions and actions can we take to make sure the world is better off for those that will come after me?" Which then begs the follow up question, "What does a better world look like?", and also "How can we get there?"
Whining about what you can't do, or isn't feasible in the paradigm that is modern civilization is pointless. You can't have modern capitalism and leave the Earth a better place than it was before.
Very soon, something major will have to change sociopolitically and economically if we're going to simply go extinct with dignity. Let alone preserve the climate for our children.
So first you say: Don’t bear children. And now you’re trying to counteract my point by saying: think of the children… I’m positive you didn’t even read beyond my first sentence. Cause I’m literally saying we need to get our shit together.
Then let's go over your post, line by line.
That's incorrect. Nature is an ambivalent unfeeling aspect of our reality. This is the hand waving comment I was referencing earlier. It amounts to "The Earth will be fine. Humans should only focus on the environment as much as it relates to humans." I heavily disagree. Humans should focus on the environment to ensure that it remains in a state that sustains as much biodiversity and life for its own sake.
I believe I addressed this as well. This is anthropocentric thinking. "Human beings should only care about human beings" sort of thinking. My argument is that the fight for a "better environment", as you put it, is not for the sake of preserving human beings, but rather for the sake of leaving the Earth in a state that is better for biodiversity as a whole, that is a better world period, whether human beings go extinct or not.
Ultimately I hold human beings to a higher standard than the average person. I believe we are beings capable of great compassion for other living beings on this Earth, but most seem to think we are little more than a thinking animal. I am less concerned with preserving human survival, and more concerned with the legacy humans leave once we are gone, even if there is not a soul to appreciate it, it is still worth doing in my opinion because I believe that is the pinnacle of what humans are capable of, i.e. Compassionate Selflessness.
Now let's address your latest comment:
Not having children is thinking of the children. Just think about it. If I tell you that having children will make the environment worse, and encourage you to not have children. Ultimately those children that do end up being born in that world with less people in it will inherit a world with an environment under less strain from less human beings.
Well I did read your post, and I stand by my initial response.
On that we are in agreement. The point on which we differ is on whether advocating for not having children is reasonable. I've made my case on this point, and unless you have anything to elaborate on, I don't see how you've made a reasonable argument to the contrary. But of course, feel free to respond.
And also, in response to your separate name calling:
Another hard disagree. The human population is far beyond what it can sustain without oil. Oil goes into our fertilizers, our medications, our daily used plastic packaged products, etc. Without oil, we would not be able to feed and sustain the population we have now, the majority of which live in relative squalor. And we WILL need to vastly cut back on our oil consumption to stabilize the climate. Depopulation will either be forced through mass starvation due to lack of oil and degradation of our environment, or will be chosen by those who opt out of having children.
Repopulation is something touted by the rich to ensure a continuous supply of wage/literal slaves and armies for future nation states to hold dominance. Depopulation will be necessary in order to ensure the survival not only of the human race but also the majority of the currently existing life on this planet, as well as ensuring that the quality of life for those that do live in such a world can be expected to be better than what we have today.
Edgy? Meh, your perspective. Stupid? Debate me.
You need a lot of words to correct yourself, you may sound smart, to me you sound like a hypocrite. let me go ahead and try to summarize, what you actually try to say is: we should bear less children, instead of your first statement no children at all. On that we can agree.
Correct myself? Nope. Just reinforced my arguments.
And I'll stand by my original statement. Don't bear children. Leave the earth better off than when you found it, not having children is one of the easiest way to do that.
The only way I'm a hypocrite is if I'm a parent, which I guess you'll just have to take my word on it when I say I'm not. Thank goodness I'm not. But hey, you and I aren't ever gonna get along anyway, right? So you think whatever you want of me.
Lastly, can we all just take a moment and appreciate that we got into this because of a question about the effect on fertility rates due to microplastics in our testicles?
Leave the earth for whom then? No one? Everything else but humanity? It’s such a destructive and pessimistic take. And no, we are not gonna get along then. I have a bit more faith in humanity and our intuitive ability to adapt.