I noticed a strong tendency of people stating that it would be a bad idea to have children in this age.
I've never met anyone for whom this was the primary reason. I have, however, met people who resort to it when dealing with the ****** babyists who just never ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever drop the ****** smug lecturing on & on & on & on & on & on & on & on & on about how we can't really actually just
not want kids. The argument that's more efficient at getting them to just shut the **** up is the best one to give them, regardless of whether it's really our main motivator or not.
this trend of improved day to day life does not seem to stop any time soon.
Quite the opposite. And it's not just global warming. Our soils are getting eroded and depleted of nutrients. Our wells are drying up. Wild ecosystems continue to get deleted for human uses. With populations growing and land getting less productive (which most projections of population trends aren't accounting for), even land that was set aside in some countries for wild habitat preservation is already getting encroached on, chopped/burned down, and exploited by desperate neighboring human populations, too numerous and desperate to be policed. Chemical pollution other than greenhouse gases has been reduced in some countries but increased in others. We have better responses to diseases now, at least in some countries, but they also arise more frequently and spread more easily now, and some of them don't respond to once-standard treatments anymore. Weapons of mass destruction are getting easier for maniacs to acquire. Automation is reducing the work load without reducing the people's need to work to sustain themselves. Fakability of digital data is doing away with confidence that any information we're given is real anymore. People say the solution to the population-related problems is to just make the whole world as prosperous as some parts of it already are, but that doesn't look possible (certainly at least nobody has come up with a realistic way to do it) when population densities are already as high as they are (which they weren't yet when the currently prosperous countries got prosperous). And there's already not enough of some metals left in the ground for that anyway, or sand for concrete, or certain elements that are needed for certain niches in technology like indium or even helium. And the various projected "point of disaster" dates for most of these things, while they are still in the future, are mostly within the next century (and the rest are pretty soon after it).
And although some of the problems to come from all of this are local in origin, they're sure to end up being global in burden. My country, for example, is currently a net exporter of food, and might be able to keep that up for up to another century if things go well, based on our remaining amounts of soil and well-water. But the coming global superfamines from similar causes will probably strike many other countries first, and then what will the hundreds of millions to low billions of refugees want to do? Go to the last remaining places that can, temporarily, still feed themselves and even export food, such as here. The only way for my country to protect itself when that starts crashing down on us will be to keep the outsiders out and stop depleting ourselves by trying to export enough save everybody else, but it doesn't currently look like we will be willing to, and even if a zero-immigration policy were passed, the overwhelming numbers would make it pretty dire to try to enforce. And even with any of that miraculously not playing itself out as it's currently on course for, even this relatively productive & secure country is still on pace to run out of its own soil & water within a few generations anyway... and there aren't many other places for
our refugees to flee to then.
The world might be better off now than ever before, for a while, but the near future is an unavoidable crash from that back to a hunter-gatherer-like population level, mostly by starvation & thirst & disease, only this time without nearly as much of the world being as fertile & productive as it was the last time we were all hunter-gatherers, or with the resources left to help us try to recover from it.
This isn't stuff the kid-free came up with to justify our evil failure to want kids; it's what the kid-afflicted are forced to pretend isn't true to justify their
contribution to it.
2. Population trends always go down as quality of life gets better. We don't need to have 400 kids so enough of them will survive smallpox to work the farm come harvest season.
3. WE'RE ALL BROKE. People in their prime, physical child bearing age are currently in the worst economic place in history.
#3 is interesting for its apparent contradiction to #2, and also to the original post. It's hard to explain how we can be both so prosperous & safe & secure that we don't want kids anymore, and so poor & precarious that we don't want kids anymore. The resolution is probably at least twofold:
A. Whether to have kids or not wasn't even really a question until the last half-century; having kids was just a side-effect of horniness for most of human existence, so most of human history before almost-reliable contraception isn't really the relevant comparison for people who now have an actual choice to make. Only the limited span of our predecessors who had a similar choice at all are comparable. And our quality of life hasn't really gotten significantly better in that half-century; the big improvements were mostly in the century or two before that, which aren't a valid comparison because of the lack of almost-reliable contraception back then.
B. We also seem to have higher standards for the standard of living of our offspring than we had in the past. And again, these two points seem tied together on that: the lower predictable standard of living back then might have affected our choices more, if we'd had a practical choice at the time, but we didn't, so the terrible standard of living was just seen as unavoidable. Now it's avoidable.
Somehow I'm now reminded of the Vorlons, a fictional species in Babylon 5 so much older than us that their technology is not merely more advanced, but advanced to the point of humans just having no clue what in the world we're even looking at and no way to even try to make any sense of it, even worse than Earth's cargo cults facing radios and airplanes. If their home planet ever had the kind of calamity I described above, it was eons ago and they recovered eons ago. Their ambassador to Babylon 5 died and it was seriously jarring to their whole society, culture, & government...
because it was so rare for any Vorlon to die. If that kind of future is ahead of us, it's rather distant.
Does nobody here appreciate that world population is approaching a peak some time around 2050? Many nations (including my own and much of Europe) are below replacement birth rates.
Mine is said to be so as well, or close to it, but our population has still managed to increase by around 50% since I was a kid. (Then again, several years ago, I ran into a few claims that our immigration rate had suddenly plummeted, but our population growth doesn't seem to have been interrupted, so there's something missing in there somewhere.)
Yes, the world can be a ****** place. But the alternative of just giving up on it????
For those who can't do anything about it, which is nearly everybody, giving up isn't really giving up. It's just not living in denial.
