- cross-posted to:
- ComicsStrips@sh.itjust.works
- comics@sh.itjust.works
- cross-posted to:
- ComicsStrips@sh.itjust.works
- comics@sh.itjust.works
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We had a population explosion during the last 200 years that’s only just starting to taper off. I was taught about it in school 30 years ago, except back then it was called a “demographic transition” and it was hailed as a sign of a country becoming economically prosperous. The “fertility crisis” is a moral panic manufactured by neoliberal capitalists.
That population explosion was enabled by a vast cheap energy bonanza called fossil fuels. Now that they are running out and getting more expensive and lower quality, everything is getting more expensive because fossil fuels are the basis of everything.
Things are expensive. That’s all there is to it.
Oh, and it’s a permanent situation. Renewables can’t replace fossil fuels, if they could, why didn’t we have 8 billion people a thousand years ago when we had all the solar, wind, and renewable energy we have now?
Space won’t save us either. It’s going to get uglier.
why didn’t we have 8 billion people a thousand years ago when we had all the solar, wind, and renewable energy we have now?
Because…power delivery and storage is also a thing? Like, electricity, and batteries? Which make renewable energy way more accessible. Ever heard of electric cars?
While cheap energy certainly played a huge role, medicine and other technology play an equal part.
They also kinda had fossil fuels back then, oil could be found on the surface. Why didn’t have the Romans a billion population, when they could find oil on the surface?
Ah yes, 1000 year old civilizations, famous for having modern high efficiency photovoltaics.
Things are expensive. That’s all there is to it.
We are currently experiencing the biggest wealth inequality in history and you think things are expensive just because they are expensive? Or because of fossil fuels being replaced by renewables?
There’s a new billionaire made every 30 hours.
Go find one and say thank you for being my overlord.
It makes zero sense to say we had “all the solar, wind and renewable energy we have now”. Electricity wasn’t discovered until 500 years ago and made useful much more recently, in the early 1800s.
Sure we had windmills and watermills, but surely anyone can see that harnessing the power of the wind or water for a dedicated task is a very different proposition to generating energy that can be directed to nearly anything.
Renewables can’t replace fossil fuels everywhere they are used, but they can directly in an awful lot of cases and more cases can be adapted to use electricity rather than fossil fuel (trains going from diesel to electric, etc.)
So more to the point, what are you on about?
Solar is better than its ever been and will get more efficient as tech improves. Fossil fuels are also massively subsidized by entrenched interests
I mean, I decided to not have kids because I don’t want to subject anyone to the existential horror that is life, and I feel no obligation to crank out miniature replicas of me.
My logic is along the same line.
I didn’t ask to be here, nobody asked if I wanted to be here. Being here, I kinda wish I was given that choice so I could say no.
Why would I force someone, who I supposedly love, to suffer through gestures at everything this? I love my potential children more than to condemn them to dealing with the children of those wealthy enough to have them.
There are some who believe that choosing to come here is like the show Severance.
You in the beforelife chose to come here for reasons unknown. You in the present life forgot all about that. And when you die, you will resume being the you of the beforelife, meaning the present you won’t get any justice.
Which is why some believe we’re on a prison planet.
I default to mindless math bubble does a chemistry. So long as there is no evidence of anything else, we’re just obliterated when we die and there’s no before or after.
But this place sure does suspiciously resemble some form of Hell.
We let the worst of us decide how life should be, it was not some natural order, cosmic inevitability, or resource scarcity, someone actively decided they can’t be happy, unless everyone else is miderable, and we believed their lies.
We’re all just playing the Roy simulation at Blips and Chitz
I’m definitely of the mind that “if hell exists, we’re already there”.
I also believe that reincarnation is possible, and if you combine those two things, and “heaven” is being able to leave this place and not come back.
I don’t know what’s actually out there. I know what I believe to be out there and I obligate nobody to agree with me on that. I also think that athiesm is a more likely factual belief versus any religion that uses a text book to dictate their thoughts; but like with many things, I believe the truth is somewhere in-between, in the unknown chasm that science is trying to fill.
My beliefs will always be that science is fact, any “faith” I have beyond that is just an educated guess at best, and when science proves something I used to believe was different than what was proven, then I am wrong and my beliefs must change accordingly.
It’s a wild world, and I’m tired of suffering it, but someone put me here and unless I take “the easy way out”, I’m stuck here for another few decades at least, barring any unforeseen circumstances.
The big breakthrough science needs is figuring out how to shut down the POV we have without making us unconscious/dead. Basically, how can one be converted into a P-zombie, and back, without causing unconsciousness or death in the process?
Or put in another way: What is the minimum amount of brain required to transfer my consciousness, and ONLY my consciousness (not including memory, language, knowing how to walk, etc), into your body?
Figure that thing out, and a lot of before and after questions become easier to solve.
Economy is probably the most commonly cited reason, but the world being a shithole has to be up there somewhere.
“I can’t even take care of myself, but I’m going to bring a bunch of children into the world to suffer my consequences anyway.”
No, THAT shit is selfish.
Meanwhile these boomers have multiple houses, affordable insurance, savings…
Very few help their kids.
Meanwhile, Ukrainians are still having kids.
Westerners: “This world is too horrific!”
Uhhh… Having a baby is one of the most selfish things a person can do. They’re choosing not to foster or adopt. They’re doing the exact worst thing they can do for the environment.
And why are they doing it? Because they like kids, or because they want a family, or because they want someone to take care of them when they’re old. All selfish reasons.
My favorite reason, they want someone that looks like them. Heard that when I said I’d consider adopting, the other person was like “but don’t you want someone who looks like you?!”
Uh, no, my cat looks nothing like me but I still somehow mustered empathy for it. I don’t understand why people feel like they would love an adopted kid less, and it makes them horrible people.
Its fundamental to the urge to reproduce. Its literally the driving force of evolution.
And it shows that they haven’t evolved at all past it.
There is quite literally exactly zero evolutionary pressure to “evolve past it”, since any gene that makes its carrier more likely to care for others children than to have their own will quite quickly be removed from the gene pool.
Correct. There’s no evolutionary reason to. That’s why I chose the wording, that people should evolve emotionally past their basic instincts and learn empathy for others. I’m literally saying that falling back to basic human instincts and saying “why should I care for others” makes them horrible people.
Too many people are no different than animals. They reproduce just to reproduce. There is no regard for their situation, their competence or the impact on greater society. But these primitive people are more into “muh lineage”.
Savages, obeying their primal instincts like that. Next they’ll be trying to eat food and avoid predators.
Nothing wrong with sex but having kids is not a necessity like eating and safety. You would think people would be able to rationalize this day and age that having kids is a drawback for most of us and the planet.
^This 100%
Where I live, it’s a thousand dollars a month to rent A ROOM. The not particularly nice one bedroom apartments closest to where I live are 1700 a month. Food has never been more expensive. How people supposed to afford kids which are notoriously expensive to have?
its not because I’m selfish, its because I hate people
Housing crisis, affordability crisis, corporate exploitation, job precarity, climate crisis, biodiversity crisis, water crisis, PFAS laden rain and microplastics in our bodies. AI drones and nuclear annihilation in an era of ecological overshoot and collapse.
So many great reasons not to have kids.
And yet these anthrocidal threats to our species are also reasons to have kids. :/
… it’s mostly because I know I’d be a shitty parent. I don’t want to damage them.
What do you mean you don’t want to raise the next generation of wage slaves? How will my children buy their second yachts?
Also more intelligent; back then people just had kids whether they were broke or not.
Stupidity == Altruism ???
You got it the wrong way round. 100 years ago, people were having kids precisely because they were broke.
100 years ago, if you had kids you had to feed them for 5-7 years and then they’d be adding to the family income. They’d be working the fields or the mines or in factories or any other job like that.
And when you got old, the only thing standing between you and dieing from being worked to death in the poor house was having kids that would take you in and support you.
Today the math is flipped on its head: You have to support your kids until at least 18, more likely 25 or 30 until they make it through education. Then they don’t contribute to your household income at all because they have their own household. And when you are old you get retirement benefits and live off the work of everyone else’s children too.
So 100 years ago, if you didn’t care about children and were broke, math told you to have kids.
Today, if you don’t care about children (no matter if you are broke), math tells you to not have kids.
Simple as that.
And since these changes happened gradually and society adapts its standards slowly, it’s been a gradual shift.
“But all my friends are having kids and I feel like I am missing out while they chat.”
Yes, FOMO is old.
Technically correct. It’s selfish not to have anything because we’re broke. The alternative is going to debt and not paying it: it’s selfless in the sense you’re putting yourself in a worse position
Based on news articles i see about younger generations this would also apply to:
Why arent gen _ going out to clubs/pubs anymore ?
Why are gen _ drinking less alcohol ?
Why arent gen _ going to restaurants ?
Why arent gen _ going travelling ?Ngl people that care about the number of babies being born are just weird
If they are like 30, they know the babies today will fund their retirement, and a lack of babies means they will be screwed. At least those people I can see a concern from a rational perspective.
However it’s broadly either due to some religious fervor or tech bro narcissism (two two major pro nataliat voices, both super creepy in different ways that actually also hate each other)
It’s bad for the economy in the long term. Fewer and fewer young people supporting more and more elderly people. We’re about to see the effects of this “inverted pyramid” in several Asian countries.
Yeah people do have this religious devotion of maintaining the economy even after they’re dead
