136
'Should I even be having children?' Eco-anxiety fueled by summer of adverse weather
(montreal.ctvnews.ca)
The "greenest" thing anyone can do is not have children.
this post was submitted on 23 Jul 2023
136 points (95.9% liked)
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Actually, eating the rich would be significantly greener.
Yeah, once. But if we had to keep producing rich people just to eat, we'd quickly destroy everything.
Between those two would be suicide.
Only works if you don't have kids first. Suicide isn't enough, you have to Darwin yourself.
I've always leaned towards the side of not having children, but there's no way in hell I could justify bringing a child into this world at this point. What future is there for them?
I hope like hell that I'm wrong and we get our shit together, but being proactive and fixing mistakes before they're catastrophic just isn't in the human nature.
I always wanted children, but I'm not going to force someone into a dying world. Either we work through all this and technology will give me all the time in the world to be a parent, or we don't and I've avoided pulling a new person down with the rest of us
I've been thinking about this whole eco-depression and have been wondering whether it could end up saving us.
Like, it's awful that folks don't want to be parents, especially those who are environmentally conscious, but to be blunt about it, a higher ratio of plants vs. humans, isn't the worst thing to happen to the climate.
Much more importantly, though, I'm hoping, it makes all those capitalists realize that their limitless growth is fucking pointless. If it culminates in an apocalypse, all their excess money and property is not worth anything.
I'm hoping for the best but we might get the worst of idiocracy in a climate catastrophe.
Yeah, thunk of who would not be having kids and think of who it is making room for...
I haven't looked at the data, but I'm guessing the most eco-anxious demographics are also probably the ones that already have the lowest birth rate.
What i dont understand is all my single/childless friends are biking to work and doing all the "environmentally friendly" things we're supposed to do (whether it's effective or just stoking our own egos is up for debate)
And then you have my friends who are parents of 2-4 kids and they're doubling down on the mass consumption, SUV at costco lifestyle...
Like... Your kids are headed for the hunger games... Why are ya'll trying to accelerate the timeline?
Yeah, I have been wondering about that, too. I've found these potential reasons:
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Self-selection bias. If you're optimistic enough to have kids, you're probably more optimistic about the climate in general.
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Genuinely needing things. Not an SUV, but e.g. grocery shopping without a car, when you've got a family, is quite a challenge.
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Other things to worry about. Parents are often just trying to survive the every-day-chaos. Worrying how to save the world has a lower priority to them.
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Someone to be selfish for. As an individual, I'm free to be altruistic, because it only affects me. But with a partner and/or kids, you can always buy nice things for them instead.
As long as there are going to be religious conservative people in this world, regardless of religion, there will always be children born. Religion forces people to have them. And the more they make kids, the more these companies will influence the government to increase immigration from these regions.
Fuck, no.
You know what people regret far, far more often than getting sterilized? Having children.
Especially in this context where every gouvernement on every level just isn't helping one bit. And being under constant pressure from employers. And financial pressure from the housing crisis and incredible inflation with stagnant wages.
Oh, the government will help. Just they'll do it in some miniscule or pointless way that makes you wonder if you're doing something wrong because you barely see the benefits. There's various tax refunds and whatnot, but they don't come close to how expensive it is to have kids. Ontario claimed there'd be some kinda affordable childcare, but that never really happened (at least not in a way accessible to most). Wage stagnation is perhaps the biggest issue as it's the root cause of why we can't afford to have kids like older generations could. No government seems to give a shit about that.
Have your 100$ relief cheque. I'm sure this will go a long way, sir/madam!
-the government
What i dont understand is all my single/childless friends are biking to work and doing all the "environmentally friendly" things we're supposed to do (whether it's effective or just stoking our own egos is up for debate)
And then you have my friends who are parents of 2-4 kids and they're doubling down on the mass consumption, SUV at costco lifestyle...
Like... Your kids are headed for the hungee games... Why are ya'll trying to accelerate the timeline?
I try to reserve judgement, mainly because I never wanted kids, so not having them was an easy choice for me. I canβt pretend to understand the biological drive to procreate, since I donβt feel it.
But yeahβ¦I suspect a LOT of people who have kids (especially young kids) are very much burying their heads in the sand to avoid the reality. Especially as climate-related disasters start happening with increasing frequency. The horror of seeing collapse coming for their children will be devastating mentally - most people will lean hard into the cognitive dissonance to avoid facing it.
From a societal standpoint, the lack of children is harmful on quite a few levels. The obvious is the lack of population growth, and an aging society. But the issues that stem from that are pretty serious. On the top level, most of millennials won't be able to experience retirement like how the boomers are, as there isn't enough young people to support the aging population, and few millennials will 20mil in the bank when they reach 65.
On the other side, the GenZ and future generations are inheriting a world that's been ravaged by rampant consumption, and they themselves don't have the numbers to do much about it. Entire towns are being abandoned with the environments around them being left as messed up as ever because nobody is around to even notice that abandoned factory from 30 years ago had tons of toxic chemicals left over when the company left the town and never got cleaned up. And even if it is noticed, the potential to clean any of that up is evaporating as there's just less people to do something about it.
And that doesn't even get into how there's fewer people doing essential jobs. And I'm not just talking about the blue collar void. Do you remember how much the farmers were complaining that they didn't have enough hands to harvest their crops during the worst of COVID?
Hell, I've seen entire neighbourhoods that's had help wanted signs posted for more than a year straight. We're already starting to see the early onset of labour shortage, and Canada's one of the few top tier countries that has managed decent population growth thanks to our immigrants. Imagine how bad it is in Europe and East Asia?
That said, from an individual level, the governments, on every level, are really failing to create an environment where people can decently have children in the first place. When you work full time and constantly worry about making your bills, you have significantly less leeway to think about something that'll add massively to your payments.
Even dating is difficult under those circumstances, not to mention hookup culture that basically treat long term relationship as a thing of the past.
Marriage, and then having a child instead of a pet? Forgettaboutit. Not when a significant percentage of the population is already living paycheck to paycheck. One wrong move, and they're heading right into bankruptcy. Not the sort of environment to have children.
Honestly, there's too many people on earth and we need to curb the population growth.
Also this constant growth from companies isn't realistic. Our resources are not infinite. We had to hit a wall at some point and start to decrease.
Native population growth is ALREADY curbed in nearly all Indusrialized Nations and places like the US are only growing due to immigration.
The global population keeps climbing because of under and still developing countries...and even in those places their rate of growth is slowing.
Globally the population will hit max around the year 2100 but many rich nations already heat peak population and are now declining.
This doesn't even take into consideration that we're doing a terrible job utilizing our resources as things stand as well.
I think it was something like 70%+ of all food crops grown go to feeding livestock, with something like 70% of that being to growing beef. And of the 30% or so that goes to non-livestock (which includes pets), about half of it is wasted. I mean, it's not just kitchen waste, but farmers frequently throw away entire hectares of their crop just because they couldn't sell it. Not to mention how much is thrown out along the way to a person's home because they're not pretty enough.
And if people argue that even if we fix that, that'll only give us a bit more leeway, there's a bunch of alternative farming that are capable of getting yields massively greater than traditional farming. Not only growing crops 24/7, but in environments that growing isn't normally possible. And then there's vertical farming that basically allows to stack fields ontop of each other.
And if energy is the problem, the issue there is that nobody wants to invest in better forms of power generation because of disinformation. Nuclear is insanely clean and safe. Fewer people have died from nuclear compared to any other form of energy generation, even measuring by watt. Yes, even wind has killed more people than nuclear due to accidents during installation and maintenance.
I used to live in a country that had a program to get social groups to step in when friends get to child number five. If you're poor and disadvantaged the next child is just idiocy.
The bulk of the overpopulation comes from communities with no way to stop a population boom.
But, the environmental footprint from rich Western country parents is equally nuts.
As long as you are neither problem, you're probably going to have a child that is part of the solution.
I think it's more a worry that you're bringing someone into a pretty terrible world.
"Should I even be having children in this state? I would like to be a mother one day, but it's difficult to look at the world around me and think, 'I'd like to bring kids into this world,' when I can see that I don't know how long the world is going to last at this point."
And I totally understand; we've totally fucked things for our kids and especially their kids.
Yep this is the point. This is why Iβve never planned to have kids and never will. The world is beyond fucked and is only getting worse with absolutely no sign of getting better. Why would I ever want to doom someone to live in these conditions?
Because you'll raise them to want to make things better? If everyone who sees the climate crisis as a problem doesn't want children, what does that mean for the next generation?
The comments section: Doomers, unite!
Yes, things are tough now. Climate change is a very serious challenge ahead. I vote Green, ride a bike, etc.
All that being said, I'm probably older than most of you. I grew up during the cold war, when we sincerely believed we were at the brink of nuclear annihilation.
It didn't happen.
I will spare you the countless doomsday headlines I've read in the news over the years. The hole in the ozone layer, the wars, the genocides, the natural disasters, the political churn.
The details don't matter. We were truly terrified of the future, just like you are. Yet, the immense majority of the fears we had did not materialize, either because we took action to prevent them or because they had been overblown. We also faced some challenges that the news didn't warn us about.
We prevail, like we have always done. People are much more resilient than they imagine. You can handle it and so can your children, and your children's children. Living in fear doesn't solve the problem, so why do it?
Equating nuclear apocalypse to the climate emergency is so strange. One requires a whole chain of command to decide that their friends, family and everything they've ever believed should be destroyed, the other is the default scenario.
Details really do matter. War, nuclear war and political turmoil are all very different scenarios. Climate change will likely have more severe consequences for humanity than every war ever fought.
To counter the "doomer" (scientific) point of view you'd have to point to some feasible solutions like banning CFCs to fix the hole in the ozone. We have one, stop or severley reduce all greenhouse gas emissions, and it's not being acted upon.
Instead we've decided to keep pumping an ever increasing amount into the atmosphere each day and as a result are currently on course for 8-10Β°C of warming. For context the largest extinction event in Earth's history which resulted in so much death it stained the geological records happened during a temperature rise of about 8Β°C.
The difference between the cold war and climate change is that the former could be stopped simply by not being a warmongering idiot. The latter, even if we stop being a nature-raping idiot species, is still going to fuck. us. up.
Also, a lot of people have died in wars, genocides, natural disasters, and political churn. As a survivor for whatever reason, I'm not really sure how valuable your insight is. There are a lot of dead children out there.
Why not both? We have an unstoppable climate crisis on our hands AND a nuclear threat, again, from Russia with the conflict in Ukraine.
Thank you for the perspective. I honestly never thought about things that way before. There's not much we can do, so we do what we can.
I see where the world is headed and I don't want to bring children here. I don't have much faith in our future as a species.
I had a thought the other day.
Does it change something that a lot of people don't have a family these days ? I mean, why are we building this community, what for ? For immi
Most people don't have a family these days. Does that change something in policies ?
Are we losing the focus of why we are living in a community? Why we do the thing that we do? I mean, are we doing all of this work, the 9 to 5 shift, just to have more immigrant in our city ?
It feels a lot like we are working to create wealth just for the sake of creating wealth. What if our population growth was from babies, would that make a change in our policies? Would we think more about the future instead of thinking more about making money?
Just food for thought, looking for someone with good insight.
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