This is greatly exaggerated by news media and social media, especially with everyone stuck at home. The contrast between what I read online and what I see in the real world has never felt larger.
Austerity refers to reduced government spending, which is the opposite of what we’re experiencing right now. We’re spending so much that my CPA friends are working overtime to help businesses figure out what to do with their stimulus money. Prices for goods like lumber are through the roof because construction demand is off the charts. My local construction companies don’t have any availability until Q4, if they’re taking bids at all.
Obviously we have problems that need to be addressed, but the combination of 24/7 news media and politicians competing for our attention has exaggerated these issues to the point that we’re losing our ability to put things in perspective or judge the absolute scale of social issues.
Your world might be nice, but not everyone else's is.
I can't speak to your personal situation, but from what I've seen this is usually driven by the exact trends the person you're responding to is pointing out. Exaggerated media and politics.
It's a weakness in our psychology, we're entertained by drama and it sells well.
All I see is "we can't afford to do this" while the military wastes trillions of dollars on pet projects.
When I look at how other countries treat their citizens, I can't help but think of the guy who calls us, "human capital stock."
That, IMHO, is how the U.S. views its citizens.
So really what you and @lanai are talking about seem to identify you both are in completely different strata.
As the US experiences more and more social/economic stratification, these separate realities become more divergent (canonical YMMV).
It's peak ignorance to pretend everyone has the same conditions as you. Stats show many people are suffering.
Those at the very top made out like a bandit, and there are a cohort of the PMC that will to be fine. For this group to be so out of touch with reality to downplay or outright ignore these issues is a direct path to a very angry segment on society.
Looking back, I am not sure this justification makes any sense, but it was how I thought at the time.
In any case it's moot now because it turns out kids are great fun to have around and generally make life better. Except the car seats, car seats are a pain in the ass.
That said, I do fear my kid will live to see something we’ve made apocalyptic movies about. Hell, we all might.
I also think OPs reasoning has more to do with the considerations of inflicting the potentially post-apocalyptic future on those future generations: there is an arguable moral duty to ensure that whatever offspring you have will have a (generally) good life, and that if you aren't reasonably sure of that it's A Bad Thing to have said offspring.
He said the guys kids would be better off if he didn’t have them. And basically said he had them for selfish reasons (kids make your life better)
Seems like you’re the one making leaps, I read what was written
Basically, life is suffering, and from the view of reducing the amount of suffering in the world, it is a good to abstain from bringing more beings into this world to suffer.
The world has huge issues, sure, but it's still far better to be alive now than any time in human history. The only way the future could be worse is if this idea becomes mainstream and the prophecy self-fulfilling.
Saying "the only way" the world gets worse is if we don't have children is to ignore the potential for all of those effects to grow worse. It's certainly possible that we may overcome them and human life will continue on its merry way, but it's very unreasonable to ignore all these difficulties and the psychological effects they can have on new parents.... And on new children.
What would your response be to a 9 year old having an existential crisis about the polar bears starving to death because of climate change, and the implications for human civilization, and civilization's apparent apathy towards that? "Don't worry kid, just make sure you have children of your own and everything will work out"?
Speaking as a new parent who did in fact have an existential crisis about this as a child, very very disappointed in both myself and the rest of us.
Should we worry about these things? Absolutely! But the incessant hysteria is counter productive. Us ceasing having children in a form of civilizational suicide is not a solution.
I absolutely agree! I'm not an anti-natalist, nor do I think not having children is necessarily the correct choice, either morally or for these hypothetical childrens' well-being: my point was merely that the issue is more complex than "just have kids and sort the problems out" or "don't have any kids because these problems are impossible to sort out." I apologize if I failed in this, but I was just seeking to highlight the empathy needed to understand the reluctance many (myself included) have around the idea of having kids.
Too often I think those who have reservations about having children are told "Oh just get over it," or "You're being dramatic," which does nothing to address the underlying concerns these would-be parents have, and in fact can just make those concerns worse because they feel like nobody is truly paying attention to those concerns. Which just exacerbates them.
What if automation and outsourcing to cheaper countries leads to a widening income/wealth gap such that you're always scraping by and any hiccup along the way will cause you to have to start depending on very unreliable social safety nets?
I think people earning $20 an hour commuting 2 hours each day to work are capable of doing the calculations of figuring out they will probably never build wealth such that they don't have to worry about sacrificing a vacation if their kid breaks their arm or losing their job because their kid became sick and having no family around to help shoulder the burden.
People's wages didn't stagnate because the idea of a worse future became mainstream, wages stagnated because the supply and demand equation for labor shifted negatively for wage earners. People then started thinking about a worse future once they saw friends and family de railed by unexpected medical expenses, or laid off and never rehired at a comparable wage, etc.
Specifically with the biological imperative argument... I've always felt the opposite effect: being aware that my biology so wants me to have children makes me doubt whatever impulses I may have towards having children as being motivated by what I want, and instead being motivated by an evolutionary adaptation that doesn't take my psychology into account.
[1] https://www.ted.com/talks/dan_gilbert_the_surprising_science...
It's probably not so wise to make decisions based on anthropomorphizing genes. They don't want anything other than to replicate, given that they're replicators and if they didn't they wouldn't continue to exist, that's all there is to it, it's a pretty meaningless affair.
I feel paying more attention to one's cultural legacy probably makes more sense than passing one's hair colour on.
That's not to say that having kids can't be fulfilling because many people get a lot of joy out of raising kids, but having attachment to a bunch of nucleotides seems kinda degrading to be honest
I'm personally mostly indifferent and sometimes want my own, but it's my wife's choice more than mine and she has medical issues that would make pregnancy extremely unpleasant and dangerous.
The vast majority of humans had very very stable futures. Like tens of thousands of years stable.
Civilization as we know it is very very recent and unstable.
Prior to that, you had WW2, the Depression, WW1, slums and brutal industrial factory jobs and before that mostly subsistence farming. The idea that life today is so precarious and difficult is absurd. We just aren’t used to difficulty.
We are still at risk of nuclear destruction. Not only are the old weapons still around but we are making new ones for some crazy reason. (Check the Doomsday Clock, I'm not the only person who has noticed that atomic war is still threatening this planet.)
You have to take the long view: For approximately a million years we lived in very stable societies (as judged by the artifacts and art left behind.) In fact the people of Sentinel Island and some other places still live this way.
Very recently, since roughly 10k to 15k ago, we started doing agriculture and cities. Since then things have been rough: wars, famines, societies collapsing, etc.
Despite that, in the last 400-500 years, we have developed science and technology, which has increased and accelerated civilization but not stabilized it.
Now of course some people have had it pretty good for, say, the last century or so (I date it from the ready availability of hot and cold running water in the tub. If you can take a hot bath you're ahead of the game, IMO.)
And that's great! And more and more people are getting in on that, which is also great!
But if you want to say, as you did, that "Pretty much every single generation other than your parents (assuming you’re 25-40) had a tougher time and lived in a world with a more uncertain future. Every generation, going back millions of years." that's wrong. It's only going back a few thousands of years, at most, and then only for a small fraction of the people on Earth.
That's before the problem that luxury the few are enjoying is bought at the cost of the life or our whole planet! Is it really so great after all if some people get to live well for a generation or two but then everybody (that survives) has to live in post-apocalyptic hell?
Sentinel Island will be destroyed by the rising ocean in a few decades or so. The folks that have lived there for some 40,000 years will die or be forced to migrate. That's on us, not them.
See: "According to Sahlins, ethnographic data indicated that hunter-gatherers worked far fewer hours and enjoyed more leisure than typical members of industrial society, and they still ate well."
Citation: "Notes on the Original Affluent Society", Man the Hunter. R.B. Lee and I. DeVore (New York: Aldine Publishing Company) pp. 85–89. Published in 1966.
The average life expectancy in Africa today, the poorest continent, is over 60.
The average life expectancy of hunter gatherers was about 30, give or take 5 years.
For instance, my understanding is that life expectancy at age 5 in both Africa and the UK are approximately equal.
Right, because of basic modern medical care, which hunter gatherers don't have, often dying of problems with their teeth in their 20s, untreated infections, etc.
And that's only one of a deluge of reasons as to why hunter gatherer life was much more difficult than modern life, even modern life in relatively poor countries.
We can have a debate about whether life is easier in current South Sudan versus prehistory hunter gatherer tribes. Beyond that there's no debate to be had.
I'm just pointing out that the metric you used is pretty deceptive, like the average life expectancy for Romans was mid-30's, but that definitely wasn't the modal age of death (that would have been 0).
I think it's clear though that the ordering of QoL goes roughly:
Wealthy City/Farm > Hunter-Gatherer > Poor City/Farm
So for about a million years most people had it pretty good, then for about ten thousand years most people had it pretty bad, and then the last hundred years or so many people have gone from bad to good conditions, but many still endure pretty bad conditions.
If we could somehow compare the subjective quality of life of the people of Sentinel Island and the people of Manhattan Island I suspect that the least happy Sentinelese folks would be happier than the least happy New Yorkers.
The other comments here are all making absolutist claims - "I can name a circumstance in all human history that was worse therefore your claim is wrong." But that's of course not how humans make decisions - they make decisions based off of what they know and have experienced. The situation in the US today does not lead people to have children in the same rates as the baby boom generation - and that's the difference between positive and negative growth.
Yes, the cold war never ended. Yes, people have largely forgotten about it. Yes, any minute misunderstanding could really blossom into WWIII or worse, still. The fall of the USSR helped US society forget the anxieties of cold war. The cold war also existed in a universe of possibilities allowing for growth the US is unlikely to see again. There were big governmental projects in the recent past (to the cold war) that made whole industries and even cities (see: Las Vegas) possible and flourish where they weren't before those big governmental projects.
The voracity with which they attacked my idea and the exact nature of their attacks shows the cynicism I mentioned in my original comment above. Granted, HN is only a website. But I certainly don't expect every post to be just some bot looking to spread cynicism. People have actually internalized and decided to spread and act upon cynicism.
AFAIK in recent years it's only moving forward because of other man-made calamities (eg. climate change), not because of atomic war.
This is it absolutely. We can’t even fully understand how easy our lives are. I’m an adult with mouths to feed, yet both my wife and I barely know how to cook. And that’s only our biggest problem assuming we have access to food. We certainly have no clue how to procure food outside of retail.
This is part of what worries me for my kids. It’s been so easy, the equilibrium is more difficult. As we know from covid, weather events, etc our whole way of life is a fragile house of cards.
Not to mention early death from famine and disease and other forms of homicide.
The notion that we've got it harder now is wrong on all counts.
There's a case to be made that we've got new existential risks due to technological progress (climate change, nukes, AI), and that's accurate, but tech/civilization will also help us to offset other existential risks (asteroid impact, pathogen). So that's up for debate.
I beg to differ - when's the last time you heard of a famine or major war in the 1st world? (same cannot be said of elsewhere, it is true)
Does what we're doing (I'm Team USA) in the Middle East count?
In re: expectations of a stable future and the pros and cons of modern civilization, in the USA more people have died in car accidents than in all the wars we've fought.
Thanks to readily available and affordable birth control individuals have much more freedom to make reproductive choices that benefit themselves.
What those individual freedoms do to society as a whole is another issue but it is entirely within the ability of western governments to increase birthrates through policy. The fact that they don't is most interesting.
Two other factors are religion, and the fact that children are now expenses into their mid-twenties rather than income-generating/household-contributing in their teens.
I’d boil it down to selfishness.
In the past, kids were productive assets as you mentioned. They were also your elder care and retirement plan. So having kids was a selfish act.
Now, kids are liabilities and things like elder care and retirement is a financial consideration and people don’t want their kids burdened by it (US culture). Also, you can freely live your life without kids (travel, career, etc). So, in that sense, not having kids is a selfish act.
I personally feel like many of the people who say they’re not having kids because overpopulation/fearsome of future/etc are just looking for a pat on the back while really their motivation is selfish.
Also with larger extended families and closer knit societies many people would "gift" their kids to others who were barren.
5 out of my mother's 15 cousins were adopted (without their parents dying).
The Doomsday Clock is still set to 100 seconds before midnight.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doomsday_Clock
> Aside from Covid ...
Covid isn't the last virus. And the tools we use to fight it are also the tools we could use to make worse ones. (Every tool is also a weapon. As long as people are willing to hurt each other technology is fraught with danger.)
Here's a brand new failure mode to worry about: "A puzzling lack of thiamine is disrupting some marine ecosystems." https://www.hakaimagazine.com/features/the-oceans-mysterious...
We don't yet know how bad it is nor what's causing it.
And where the hell are all the bugs!? It's warming up now and there's nobody out there. That should scare the fuck out of you. It does me.
How many habitable planets are there? One. There is one habitable planet.
>https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doomsday_Clock
The same article points out it's not exactly objective, and I'm inclined to agree. It's more of a political (ie. subjective) statement that the world is fucked rather than an objective measure.
>Cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker harshly criticized the Doomsday Clock as a political stunt, pointing to the words of its founder that its purpose was "to preserve civilization by scaring men into rationality." He stated that it is inconsistent and not based on any objective indicators of security, using as an example its being farther from midnight in 1962 during the Cuban Missile Crisis than in the "far calmer 2007". He argued it was another example of humanity's tendency toward historical pessimism, and compared it to other predictions of self-destruction that went unfulfilled.[24]
The point is that serious thinkers (not just talking heads or twitterers) see cause for concern, so it's not all hysteria and click bait.
I contend there's a lot of potentially existential threats out there, but to use it as a crutch for not having children is weak, especially when people still procreated through much worse times.
And the Doomsday Clock was "just made up" by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists not a bunch of yahoos.
> In addition to Rabinowitch and Goldsmith, contributors have included: Morton Grodzins, Hans Bethe, Anatoli Blagonravov, Max Born, Harrison Brown, Stuart Chase, Brock Chisholm, E.U. Condon, Albert Einstein, E.K. Fedorov, Bernard T. Feld, James Franck, Ralph E. Lapp, Richard S. Leghorn, J. Robert Oppenheimer, Lord Boyd Orr, Michael Polanyi, Louis Ridenour, Bertrand Russell, Nikolay Semyonov, Leó Szilárd, Edward Teller, A.V. Topchiev, Harold C. Urey, Paul Weiss, James L. Tuck, among many others.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bulletin_of_the_Atomic_Scienti...
Recognize?
I really don't see how you could possibly come to that conclusion. I think your outlook may be affected by Mean World Syndrome: