Post a controversial opinion

one of my envirofascist college professors actually did change their mind on having kids because of climate change/resource constraints. he and his wife limited themselves to one kid (don't know if they adopted more or not)

but yeah, not too common

I can kind of see someone having the feeling of "not wanting to bring a child into this world to suffer" assuming climate change is going to massively fuck up the planet, but the results seem so indeterminate and unknowable, and so much human suffering has occurred in so many eras that it sees presumptuous to think you can guess whether your own offspring will suffer particularly badly in the coming decades.

my wife and i have thought about environmental concerns when talking about having a kid but def more in terms of "hey the world is going to be screwed when our hypothetical kid grows up" rather than "hey our hypothetical kid is going to contribute to screwing up the world".

here's a controversial opinion. or not a controversial opinion but like a serious consideration i've been having recently which is that despite my fervent wish for more gun control that could successfully bring down the murder rate in the US i keep thinking about asking a gun-rights promoting friend to initiate me into the horrors of gun ownership. i can totally get how these things reinforce themselves - ppl are afraid and they want to defend themselves and naturally if just you own a gun it's not a problem. like it's a categorical imperative issue. obv a society full of guns doesn't work but it's easy to think that you are not contributing to that problem. or like why ppl don't vote. so i guess i will continue to vote + to not own a gun bc kant.

xp the world is going to be screwed up for the next couple generations i assume unless humanity miraculously pulls itself out of this nose dive like a hero in an adventure pulp but tbh most eras of history seem pretty bleak and humanity has survived and i assume there was even happiness and great satisfaction in the most horrific of times and those people continued to have kids knowing how shitty their lives would be

I know plenty of people who are still upset by the curly lightbulbs

CFLs have already been overtaken by LEDs fyi

xp oh, it's just one of a myriad of different considerations and counter-considerations in an interminable debate that we have with varying degrees of seriousness, I agree that it's not a deeply compelling reason not to procreate.

xp Always find it interesting to read what the coherent end of gun owners have to say, though in my mind, they tend to get bracketed off with miniature carpenters with respectable workshops (10+ kinds of saw and a selection of stock wood) and people who take drugs responsibly and people who are very good at painting 15mm Greek hoplites and other professional hobbyists, with just one telling distinction which is that this a gun

is artisanal gun craftsmanship/ownership a thing, like fellas reclaiming gun ownership just as they reclaim the wood they use on the gun handle?

I haven't seen that, no doubt it's out there? But gun ownership def matches up with 'non-tradesman's interest in tools and hardware'

People who make it a summer project to build their own house extension or replace their own joists and boards, through a feeling of being a Renaissance man or a Henry David Thoreau

Muscular Christianity

I'll cop to having had a certain curiosity about gun ownership at times, although the risks of one of my children using it have always outweighed any perceived security benefits, which I think are probably marginal anyway.

; if only we could all concede contra-causal free will is a delusion.

if we don't concede this, presumably it's because we have no free will to choose to do so

you know when you submerge a straw in water and put your finger on one end and then take the straw out of the water, and the water stays in the straw instead of falling out? i don't get how that works

that was my controversial opinion

i know a guy who deals in historical guns and let me fire a civil-war-era pistol once, from which i surmise that not many civil-war-era people were killed by pistols

anyway

Hate to belabor the obvious, but no children = no future grownups

so what? i'll be dead soon enough; why should i care?

we have reached such a pinnacle of evolution that i neither need to play these darwinian games nor appreciate enormous strollers on the subway at rush hour

i am optimistic about the future of human civilization.

"I agree that it's not a deeply compelling reason not to procreate."

Idk - it's one that I seriously think of often. I worry about bringing a new kid into such a fucked up future. Somehow it just doesn't seem fair. It's one of the things that's made me start thinking about maybe fostering one day instead of bio parenting. Which is not to say I have decided not to ever have a kid. I haven't decided anything yet but it's something I think about a ton.

the future is going to be the best time ever

http://pixel.nymag.com/imgs/daily/vulture/2015/07/15/15-future-rapper.w529.h352.jpg

ok even if you don't feel as optimistic about me, there's still good reason to be suspicious of your own forecast of an apocalyptic future

for example, people born in the 1970s: many people of your parents' generation were extremely pessimistic about the future. however, people born in the 1970s (in america or wherever) live super sweet lives

*optimistic about IT as me

people who decided NOT to have kids in the 70s for that reason are now old, and see other people's children living wonderful lives as they die alone. you wanna risk being that person?

we all die alone

Worth noting I get a sweet pension

lol having kids so that you don't die alone seems insanely selfish and is also ridiculous considering how many people have kids and die alone anyway

however, people born in the 1970s (in america or wherever) live super sweet lives

― flopson, Thursday, December 3, 2015 2:38 AM (8 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

no they fucking don't. what?

I was born in 1971, and my life's pretty sweet. But then, I don't have kids.

yeah you want to meet my cousins? idk maybe they are upbeat but their lives seem more than a little dire, and they are 70s kids

my cousins born in the seventies lead amazing lives, at least by external measures.

Even struggling people today have material comforts that couldn't be dreamed of 100 years ago, so direness of life is relative.

yeah but for the wider polis the world's been pretty much straight downhill since the 70s. dismantling of the liberal consensus, capitalism retrenches the lines of global exploitation that were meant to be vanishing with the colonial program, bowie stops making good records

xpost but whatever

in the scheme of human existence, americans born in the 70s (of which i am one) are #blessed. that doesn't mean they're happy tho, nor does it explain why i should care what y'all get up to when i'm outie

thomp: i agree there are some things that have been not so sweet since the 1970s, but you gotta put it in perspective, and something like the stagnation in US real median wages is nothing relative to the apocalyptic predictions of people in the 70's

otm signed someone also born in the 70s who is largely #blessed and leads a pretty amazing life by external measures

also like, yeah wages were flat for a while in one big country, but like, we also have the internet now. we didn't even have VHS in the 70's. or like, just barely.

i realise bringing up the internet on a board of self-loathing internet addicts is not the best argument and anticipate your pithy remarks. it's still rocked our standard of living

idk mane i thought the metric here 'is life worth living by some absolute metric, and does it have the prospect of becoming more so'. i agree that post-millenial enforced leisure is better than trying to work out what parts of an irradiated cockroach are safe to eat or whatever would have been

yes the metric is about a metric. metrics 4 lyfe

that doesn't mean they're happy tho

serious question: do you guys really have the impression everyone is unhappy? i really don't feel that way, about like just about anyone i know with very few exceptions

the best reason not to have kids are selfish reasons. i feel bad for anyone dumb enough to convince themselves not to have kids for perceived altruistic reasons

idk the typical ilxor is also like a caricature of leftist intellectual who moan about life under late capitalism. most people don't think about that shit, and depending on what your kid majors in neither will they. u know?

Even struggling people today have material comforts that couldn't be dreamed of 100 years ago, so direness of life is relative.

― on entre O.K. on sort K.O. (man alive), Wednesday, December 2, 2015 8:53 PM (4 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

life's anxieties and pain really expand to meet their demand -- there are so many ways we've expanded in ways of reaching out to others and creating community and support, but until you meet a certain threshold of comfort, your personal stresses will echo those of the aggrieved people of the past -- even if they didn't have indoor plumbing

it sucks to think that human misery is relative, but it is. ppl born whenever might have it sweet as far as economics and social attitudes but we're on a continuum where we inherit attitudes and fears from those around us.

idk growing up in the 70s might be nice until your dad who was a vietnam vet was erratic and mostly absent made for a weird home experience

a bunch of recent weird activity in my area made me realize again how many people around my age are either veterans or peers of veterans who fell into some really heavy drug shit

'is life worth living by some absolute metric, and does it have the prospect of becoming more so'

Life is meaningless and death is inevitable. But there's fun to be had in the meantime.

Re external/material comforts: I am a diabetic. So was my father. When I think about what he went through as a diabetic child in the 1940s and 1950s, there is no way I wouldn't want to be the age I am, with the drugs and technology available to me.

i feel bad for anyone dumb enough to convince themselves not to have kids for perceived altruistic reasons

idk I have a few coworkers who adopted because of their genetic conditions that were highly inheritable. kids? pretty good. not wanting to have their kids deal with shit that makes their life difficult? fair.

wait what how did you misconstrue that to make me against adoption, my sisters are adopted i love adoption someone adopt me

feel like that still counts as 'having kids'!! haha xp

many x-posts - Everyone? No, of course not. That said, I do think that I know a lot more unhappy people than I do happy people, yeah.