> I'm terrified of growing old in this country.
Have kids, raise them right, and you’ll be fine. It’s worked out pretty well for a couple thousand years.
Have kids, raise them right, and you’ll be fine. It’s worked out pretty well for a couple thousand years.
Others consider bearing children a gift of life.
That's right - it cannot be given.
I’m bullish on that strategy, even if there is no contractual guarantee that those kids will return the favor.
If you’re not abusive children tend to remember the 18 years you gave them fondly and provide assistance for your last few years.
It's kind of funny, my wife's mom abused her horribly and is now upset my wife and I won't take care of her. Treat your investments better lady.
If your kids aren’t suicidally depressive but also don’t love you enough to take care of you in your old age, there’s probably something else they resent you for other than being born in the first place. Which isn’t necessarily your fault—some people are just irrationally resentful. But that is probably the bigger risk to worry about. It’s just that, compared to trusting nursing homes not to become abusive, it’s still a better bet.
It’s also not necessarily about obligation, at least not in the negative sense of the term. I took care of my father during the last year of his life, not out of obligation but out of love. (One might define love as the act of willingly accepting the obligation to care for another, but a willingly accepted obligation is not really the same kind of obligation.)
In any case, the goal is to go into old age having people in your life who are capable of taking care of you and who will choose to do so out of love. Having kids and maintaining a strong relationship with them gives you a good chance of reaching that goal. Institutions, on the other hand, will never love you and will instead just fuck you up with psychoactive drugs for their own convenience.
This is a common misconception, and completely incorrect. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antinatalism . This is a possible valid philosophical judgment that implies nothing about depression.
Life expectancy is a bit of a misleading metric in that regard, since life expectancies are just averages. If a population has a life expectancy of 50, that doesn’t necessarily mean that 50-year-olds are dying of old age and no one makes it to age 80. It could mean that there are a lot more children and young adults dying and bringing down the average. So if you’re living in a society with a life expectancy of 50 years and you turn 50, your personal life expectancy is probably going to be closer to 70-80 because you’ve already managed to survive the causes of death that affect younger people.
And you may very well develop things like dementia. The concept of people becoming elderly enough to lose their mental faculties isn’t some unprecedented 20th century discovery. It is becoming more common, but that’s just because deaths from childhood illness, infectious disease, violence, and occupational accidents are becoming less common.