Hacker News Reader

Comment by samatman | Hacker News Reader

[flagged]

What do you mean? Would I want my children to be at risk of school shootings? Would I want my children to have to deal with the fact that I can't afford to pay for health care in the only country where it's not free? Would I want my children to have to deal with the current state of the internet, with TikTok and other predatory social media running rampant? When they get older do I want them to have to deal with how hard it is to get a job and make a living? The housing crisis?

No I don't want to bring children into this world. These are not everyday struggles to be overcome. Today's world is extremely ugly, extremely unfair and I would not under any circumstances want to make a child suffer through it all...

Would I want to bring children into the world if it weren't this terrible? Maybe. I don't know. I'm not a potential mother, so I obviously don't get to make the decision of whether to give birth or not, but right now there are just too many obvious, overwhelming reasons not to.

Try to actually do the math on school shootings, and compare it to car crashes when you were conceived. If you were objective and considered risks equally, for school shootings to even come into your calculations (instead of immediately dismissing it as not worth your time) the world would have to be almost utopian. Try to calculate how many times more likely it is for you to have a miscarriage than any of your potential children to even be anywhere near a school shooting.

I don't think that's a good way of looking at it. The increase in school shootings is independent of car crash rates.

While it's still unlikely that any given person's kid will be killed in a school shooting, the idea of it is heartbreaking enough that I can understand why it's a part of someone's calculus.

> Would I want my children to be at risk of school shootings?

Everyone is at risk of everything. Since the beginning of time.

> Would I want my children to have to deal with the fact that I can’t afford to pay health care in the only country where it’s not free?

I agree the healthcare situation in the US (where I’m guessing you’re based) is not ideal but it’s far from the worst. Medicaid exists. CHIP exists. Obamacare exists. A competent enough parent would be capable of efficiently using their resources if their childs health was at stake.

> Would I want my children to have to deal with the current state of the internet…

The internet is a double edged sword where it can both be a blessing and a curse. It’s 100% possible to raise a kid to have a healthy relationship with the internet. Just don’t give them an iPad at 5.

> Housing crisis…

Yeah housing crisis is hard too. But markets fluctuate and who knows what it’s going to look like by the time a kid grows up to be of home-purchasing age.

I’m sad you have such a negatively skewed view of the world. I don’t think today’s world is “extremely ugly” and “extremely unfair.” Compared to life 100 years ago, I think we’ll be ok.

I'm pretty sure the world was at least as terrible at any given point in the past, we were just much less informed/aware of it thanks to the lack of Internet like mass-communication.

It was far worse. Imagine having kids when they could get polio. Or taken from you and sold as slaves. Or conscripted and sent to war.

These things are all becoming more likely again

I don’t disagree with you that life can seem bleak in the present, but people have brought children into the world under much harder conditions. There is something particular about post-industrialization that has caused this attitude shift.

> These are not everyday struggles to be overcome.

Neither were the slavery, tyrannical empires, war, plagues, etc of the past.

But fortunately humans continued to persevere and reproduce and make progress, as hopefully our children and future generations will.

Depression isn't always treatable, although it's worth a shot.

But it's a serious mistake to think it's a fact about the world. It isn't. It's a fact about you.