Yes. I’d rather be the “eccentric uncle QuentinCallaghan” to my siblings’ kids than a father to any kid in a world like this. I’m so used to having my own independence and freedom, and I’m a hedonist to some extent. Also having kids would require a relationship, and the Yellowstone volcano erupting is more likely than that.
I would have liked to, but my husband was a hard no. We’re gay and the risks and difficulty involved with adoption are pretty high. He just didn’t feel like either of us were up for that, and honestly it may be true. If he’s a no and I’m a soft yes, the default goes to no. It looks like my brother is headed the same direction.
Still, I always will feel a little sad that I won’t be able to raise a kid or two. In terms of a stable marriage with decent income, we could offer that. I think I could be a decent parent, so it makes me a little sad that I will have little legacy to pass down to the next generation.
I don’t have kids nor do I want kids, but I try not to judge others, particularly people who aren’t super privileged, for having kids.
Privileged (rich) people who have kids though? They kinda irk me because it’s so obvious that they know the world is fucked but they clearly have the money and privilege to keep their kids in a little bubble.
God no. I can’t imagine a more horrific punishment than to be childless.
I wish we had more than the two we have, but my wife and I started late. My daughter (12) sometimes asks how many children she could realistically have… a good sign that she hasn’t been tainted by whatever mental illness it is that the “childfree” people have.
My daughter (12) sometimes asks how many children she could realistically have… a good sign that she hasn’t been tainted by whatever mental illness it is that the “childfree” people have.
Nice way to call many people’s choices a mentally ill condition.
What a progressive take on psychiatry! That guy babbling about demons whispering in his ear as he uses feces to fingerpaint on the hospital walls isn’t mentally ill… he’s just making a choice.
A choice you or I might not make, but it’s no less valid and no less healthy.
I have had depression for many years and never understood why anyone would want to set children into this terrible world. In hindsight it’s kinda funny, I have since changed my mind.
How is it any more terrible than it’s ever been these last few million years ago? I don’t have to worry about my kids being eaten by some predator anymore, the smilodon problem’s taken care of. Horrible diseases still about, but many that would have crippled or killed them just 100 years ago are now bad cultural memories. They have the comfort kings wouldn’t have known in centuries past.
Only the neurotic would whine about how they can’t bring children into a terrible world. I’m glad you’ve gotten over yours. As you have time, do what you can to dissect that old worldview and figure out how it works so that maybe you can help other people someday.
Insulting people for having a different opinion to yours is not a good look. No matter how much humanity has evolved when compared to previous generations, there are still big enough problems in the world that someone can rationally make that decision.
I’m not aware of having insulted anyone. I’ve come to learn in my life that some people are insulted by reality… that’s sad. Reality doesn’t change just because you feel insulted, it never apologizes, and it definitely doesn’t make amends.
that someone can rationally make that decision.
No. They can only irrationally make that decision. And it’s not difficult to discern that truth… just open your eyes. Trauma, gluttony, there’s always something right there at the surface pressuring that choice.
Reality doesn’t change just because you feel insulted, it never apologizes, and it definitely doesn’t make amends.
In the words of Thanos, “reality can be whatever we want”. I am joking a bit of course, but really, although the laws of physics and the physical world don’t change, society can adapt around them in any way it sees fit. If society chooses, it can embark on a more positive path, with less suffering. In many ways, it has been doing that the past century. The conservative idea that “reality never changes” and that individual people should change because society as a whole won’t is a fallacy and can be proven empirically.
They can only irrationally make that decision.
Who can make that judgement, you? Do you have the qualifications required to produce a judgement on mental health like that?
Trauma, gluttony, there’s always something right there at the surface pressuring that choice.
Trauma seems like a damn good argument for not having kids. It’s not irrational. If I suffered, it’d be immoral on my part to want to subject another human being, who had no say in being born, to potentially suffer the same (especially when some of that suffering may be caused by genetics, which will be passed down to said human being).
society can adapt around them in any way it sees fit
It can’t adapt to this. Society ceases to exist if there are no people, so saying “it can adapt to no one performing the process by which people create their replacements in the world” is dumb.
Fertility is weird in that young children grow up in the same society that is doing these things… they internalize what they see around them as “normal”. So if you teach children that having one or zero children is normal, they’ll grow up to want the same. They can always go lower than 1, but never higher. This means fertility trends in one direction only, it never goes up.
And once it drops below replacement levels, it won’t ever go back up to them (let alone above) ever again.
Your society is dying. It doesn’t realize it yet, and by the time it does nothing will be possible to do about it.
Who can make that judgement, you?
Yes. I do not claim to be the only one capable of making that judgement. Though it seems those like me are rare.
Judgement is nothing more than the measurement of a thing or an event. We are not talking about a legal process… I sentence no one, I convict no one, I condemn no one.
But I’ve measured, and accurately.
Trauma seems like a damn good argument for not having kids.
It may seem that way, but it isn’t. At most, it’s an argument to delay having them.
If you wanted or needed to do something in your life, and you were in a car wreck and broke both your legs… would you think it sane for someone to say “now you should never do that thing again, you’ve experienced trauma!” ?
Why is it any more sane if the injury is psychological? You take the time you need to recover, you work hard to get back to where you should be, and you do that thing. And you do it whether it’s having children or climbing some mountain or whatever. And you’d even agree with me if we hadn’t prefaced the achievement as “having children”, but some other trivial thing.
to subject another human being, who had no say in being born
This is a nonsense statement. Until the person exists, by definition they can have no say in anything because they do not exist. Therefor it is not necessary, and even irrational, to speak or think about whether someone has a say in “being born”.
You’re morally permitted to subject a non-existent non-person to “being born”. Unless you’ve invented some sort of time travel, nothing else makes any sense.
especially when some of that suffering may be caused by genetics, which will be passed down to said human being
This is the first intelligent thing you’ve said. Those who have incurable genetic diseases that cause true misery are rational to not reproduce.
None of the people in this thread, and few of those (1 in 10,000 or even fewer) who are childfree are childless because of that reason. You don’t have the Tay Sachs gene, and your receding hairline’s not comparable.
It can’t adapt to this. Society ceases to exist if there are no people, so saying “it can adapt to no one performing the process by which people create their replacements in the world” is dumb.
And why does society have to exist? Society and humanity have no inherent value. The value they have is the value we, as rational beings, give them. If we collectively determined that they should exist no more, they would cease to exist.
Your society is dying. It doesn’t realize it yet, and by the time it does nothing will be possible to do about it.
I don’t mind it. That alarmism doesn’t scare me. Remember I follow VHEMT, hence that is my end goal (at least, I’m doing my part towards that).
But I’ve measured, and accurately.
That is precisely what my question was targeting. You’ve measured (and you have every right to your measurement as the expression of an opinion), but who’s to say you’ve measured accurately? What qualifications do you have to make such a statement of fact?
If you wanted or needed to do something in your life, and you were in a car wreck and broke both your legs… would you think it sane for someone to say “now you should never do that thing again, you’ve experienced trauma!” ?
I would. That is how I try to act in my daily life: avoiding things that have caused me suffering in the past, as much as possible. That is how I try to achieve a comfortable and happy life, by avoiding what has broken that comfort and happiness in the past.
This is a nonsense statement. Until the person exists, by definition they can have no say in anything because they do not exist. Therefor it is not necessary, and even irrational, to speak or think about whether someone has a say in “being born”.
It may be from a pragmatic point of view, but abstractly/philosophically speaking, it isn’t. When we make a moral choice, we have to think of the future consequences of that choice. From that point of view, we have to consider that the person being born will have no concept of the meaning behind their future suffering and will try to attribute such meaning to the ones who decided for them. People desire, naturally, to be in control and being born is the one action you have zero control over. That is also a reason why people seek religion: to justify and give meaning to their existence.
None of the people in this thread, and few of those (1 in 10,000 or even fewer) who are childfree are childless because of that reason. You don’t have the Tay Sachs gene, and your receding hairline’s not comparable.
How can you make such a blanket statement when you don’t know any of us personally?
I’m not aware of having insulted anyone. I’ve come to learn in my life that some people are insulted by reality… that’s sad.
Really? Please say that line to anyone you know and after they’re finished chuckling, as them what they think is so funny and perhaps they’ll explain it better than I can.
You just sound like some guy who watched the "you’re not wrong, Walter-- you’re just an asshole" scene in The Big Lebowski and thought to yourself "Yeah, I’m Walter! He tells it like it is!"
i.e. saying "people who don’t want kids are mentally ill" and then wondering why people would consider that to be an insulting statement.
I feel like you’re probably more in love with yourself than your partner. Reply if you want but I’ll just be blocking you anyway-- people like you creep me out.
i.e. saying “people who don’t want kids are mentally ill” and then wondering why people would consider that to be an insulting statement.
It’s like saying “people who want to force themselves to vomit after every meal are mentally ill” and then wondering why the bulimics consider that to be insulting?
They’re bulimic. It’s a mental illness. They probably do find it insulting, at least when they can work up the nerve to do it… it wasn’t always that way. But wasn’t it Oprah who had a bunch of the crackpots on her show where they were starting to claim eating disorders were a lifestyle choice?
Same thing here. If you get enough mentally ill people together in one place, they can convince themselves that their perceived numbers alone make them not mentally ill.
I can’t tell if you’re playing devil’s advocate or one of the mentally ill, and I don’t care nearly enough to read your comment carefully to try to figure it out.
No plans to create my own children. I’ve always felt that it’s far more important to adopt a child that’s been abandoned by an uncaring society then to make another. I don’t have any genes important enough to try to reproduce (and few people do).
If you can’t find it in your heart to love a child that doesn’t contain the same genetic material as you, I think you should reconsider being a parent
Haha. “Adoption”. There haven’t been any recent world wars. No plagues (close miss on that though). There are no children to adopt. So few, in fact, that those who want to adopt often find themselves on waiting lists…
So much so, that many give up on that course of action, and instead choose to fly halfway around the world to buy children from warlords and conmen in Africa.
Or, you could become a “foster parent”, which is like adoption except that the kid’s even less yours… they might come along and yank them away from you for a variety of reasons. The most heartbreaking of which, I’m told, is that the real parents have convinced some bureaucrat that they won’t abuse or neglect them like they had been doing, when experience suggests that it will just happen again.
Though, don’t be too sympathetic to the foster parents, they’re helping the government prosecute the war on drugs and ruin families, just by supplying the demand for child abduction technicians. And all so they can scratch their itch of (fake) parenthood and feel self-righteous about it.
Your pessimism and ignorance is truly astounding. There need not be wars for children to be abandoned, and it should be common knowledge at this point that foster parents have a high chance of being nothing but another loveless cage for orphans to suffer in.
Full fledged adoption is hardly done right, but that’s all the more reason why good and caring people should step in and try.
I grew up around orphans, and I know how hard and lonely it is to be foisted from foster family to foster family, surrounded by siblings and adults who resent and use you until you’re once again abandoned to some other equally cruel house. Maybe you don’t think adoption does any good (god knows why), but I know for certain that there are a lot of children who grow up alone without any support that would be so much better off if they had someone in their life who truly cared for them. Is it really better to just not care at all than to try and help even one person?
If you think so, you’re a terribly sad person.
Also if you want to adopt you need a very square life where I live. You need proper jobs, a lot of money to show them, be married etc. Not saying this is bad, it’s probably best for the adopted children, but I don’t have many of these things.
I get what he’s trying to say here; he’s being ironic about it, as some people gullibly adopt from immoral sources such as african warlords. It is child trafficking but, since it is being “whitewashed” and not labeled as such, it becomes somehow acceptable in the public eye.
He is not being sarcastic, as you already seem to have experienced. He said in one comment now removed:
My daughter (12) sometimes asks how many children she could realistically have… a good sign that she hasn’t been tainted by whatever mental illness it is that the “childfree” people have.
He claims to have a wife and 2 kids, and preach all this load of right wing purist nutjob levels of crap to people.
Yeah, I’ve read that comment. I don’t agree with what he said in general but it’s undeniable that there are plenty of scams to lure rich people, typically americans, to poor countries under the guise of adopting children from underfunded orphanages when in fact there are far grimmer ulterior motives behind them.
There are no moral sources. Those who would adopt morally would be compelled to adopt children from their own family first… who better to not let an orphan forget their parents than someone who also loved and knew those parents?
And if there were no family, then friends of those parents for the same reason.
And if no friends, then that community… except today, there aren’t really any communities left. Just people who live near each other as accidents of geography.
And if none in the community, then at least someone from that culture. So that the child might grow up knowing his or her own language and songs and whatnot. But western culture isn’t a culture so much as the absence of one, a void, and so it can’t imagine that anything like that’s important.
But none of these rules allow hipsters who live in California but are too eco-conscious of their carbon footprint to want to “bring another child into this world” but want to raise a child to do so. So these rules are bad. And that’s why adopting African children is good and moral. Because they want to, they have the money to do it, and that warlord uses a cutout so that the adoption has the appearance of being above-board.
Those who would adopt morally would be compelled to adopt children from their own family first… who better to not let an orphan forget their parents than someone who also loved and knew those parents?
And if there were no family, then friends of those parents for the same reason.
I… agree with you? You’re making a strawman out of me in this argument. I never said I advocated for adopting from Africa before adopting from your own family or circle of friends. Heck, if I do decide to adopt in the future, that’s the route I’d try to take first. Not that it’s a big desire of mine, but that’s what I’d choose to do.
The current era is better to raise children than many other eras where human rights didn’t existed. Although it depends on which society too. Many of those worries are very subjective. Having or not having children ultimately is a personal choice* (except when is not e.g. Rape) and neither is wrong. Whichever you chose you will miss the benefits of the other. Both have pros and cons.
“I try to be.” Uhm is there a middle ground here between do or do not? It seems like rather a binary choice lol. Anyway ya, life is shit and this is hell, no way am I bringing more sapient life to this shithole.
I’ve raised four kids but reared none of my own. Of the four step kids, three girls and one boy, only one of the girls has hatched their own. The other three have zero interest in having kids…unless you count cats.
i don’t want to have kids because i believe it’s unethical for some average joe, or in fact anyone that isn’t an expert in child psychology and child development, to subject a human being to potential lifelong trauma because “babies be cute doe”. also i think the hype is overblown. society feeds you the lie that you need to have kids to feel fulfilled and happy, but in reality there are many other ways to do that and they don’t involve a very high risk of ruining someone’s entire life. surround yourself with people you like, create a daily lifestyle that energizes and refreshes you, and spend time on your passions. one or all three of those things could involve children, but for most people they will not.
i think refraining from raising children because “humanity’s future is gloom” isn’t entirely logical. even absolute climate catastrophe would be better than most of human history because of the technology available to us, and at worst it would be just as bad. humans have been born and lived in the worst possible conditions, they can do it in these ones too. definitely adopt though, creating children is still dumb for other reasons.
i don’t want to have kids because i believe it’s unethical for some average joe, or in fact anyone that isn’t an expert in child psychology and child development, to subject a human being to potential lifelong trauma
Only PhDs in child psychology should reproduce? So, you want humanity to be extinct, that’s a more ethically sound position than “sometimes bad things happen to some people”?
society feeds you the lie that you need to have kids to feel fulfilled and happy,
You’ve got 4 billion years of genetic coding that insists, even demands that this is true. The last few tens of millions of years hardcodes it directly into your meat brain.
Society? If society ever did that, it ceased doing it almost a hundred years ago. Now, you can’t turn your head or hear a dozen words from some random stranger proclaiming the opposite is true and that anyone who says otherwise is a misogynist, masochist, or biblethumper.
There of course are many reasons for that. If you believe transexuals are healthy, important individuals… how could they participate in parenting if they’re mutilating their reproductive organs? So, parenting and reproduction now have to be bad or at least discouraged, to push the other message more fully. Not just them, of course, it’s not fair to single them out when there are so many other degenerate lifestyles that, if you embrace them, you also can’t embrace the idea that parenting is important without being hypocritical.
The end result will be, of course, that these lifestyles die out. The question is, will they take everything else with them.
Only those with some qualification in child psychology should raise children.
“sometimes bad things happen to some people”
most times small things happen to most children that have a huge psychological impact on them. these things can be avoided by child psychology experts because they actually know what they’re doing.
You’ve got 4 billion years of genetic coding that insists, even demands that this is true.
There are primal instincts that push us towards wanting children, but pleasing the more complex parts of your brain is much more fulfilling, enough that you don’t need to appease those primal instincts. I’m not arguing that having children wouldn’t provide some happiness at certain points for everyone, just that there are other things that will make you much more happy and don’t risk the lifelong wellbeing of another human being. and again, for some people the more complex part of their brain will want children, because of genuine interest in the process of raising a child, not because of a temporary high that will fade as soon as they need to pay attention to their actions around the child or make tough decisions about discipline.
Society? If society ever did that, it ceased doing it almost a hundred years ago.
That’s great to hear, my observations must be anomalous then.
So, you want humanity to be extinct, that’s a more ethically sound position than “sometimes bad things happen to some people”?
Yes. Suffering should be eradicated at all costs. Humanity doesn’t have an inherent right to exist, it simply does as long as it is perpetuated by both humans themselves and while external conditions allow it.
degenerate lifestyles
I see your beliefs now. Well, no wonder you also disagree with this viewpoint then.
What is suffering? I’ve lumped that word in with all the other religious claptrap like “soul” and “afterlife” and whatnot.
Are you talking about pain (the sensation)? It doesn’t seem that you mean that, but if you did it would be absurd. “Pain should be eradicated” makes no sense. It can’t even be said that pain should be avoided, since discomfort is often associated with worthwhile, and ultimately pleasant, activities.
Define suffering so we can be on the same page.
Humanity doesn’t have an inherent right to exist,
True, as far as it goes. But it’s like “turnips have no inherent right to exist”. Pretty meaningless, and in the context where people actually want to exist (and for others to exist), somewhat misleading.
I see your beliefs now.
Please, read my palm. Tell everyone what my beliefs are.
That is merely a component of suffering. That should be avoided imo, but it isn’t the only thing that should.
It can’t even be said that pain should be avoided, since discomfort is often associated with worthwhile, and ultimately pleasant, activities.
I struggle to find such activities. I’m not stating there are none, just that I can’t remember any off the top of my head.
Define suffering so we can be on the same page.
A negative experience which causes physical or psychological distress to a person or group of people, often for extended periods of time or with lasting effects after the experience itself has stopped (ie. trauma).
Pretty meaningless, and in the context where people actually want to exist (and for others to exist), somewhat misleading.
Saying this statement is meaningless is the same as saying philosophy itself is meaningless, but it can be a valuable tool to help us define our values and offer a base from which every other aspect of life can be evaluated more precisely. I don’t see how it’s misleading at all.
Please, read my palm. Tell everyone what my beliefs are.
That statement was more hostile than I intended it to, in hindsight, and I see how it might be hypocritical to complain that you are lumping all “young liberals” (as it seems) in the same strawman when I ended up doing the same to you. I was quite offended by the transphobic comment so I reacted in an emotional way. Sorry.
I believe you follow some conservative beliefs (from an american standpoint) pretty strictly and that might be the bias shown in your arguments towards traditional values and against modern, sort of more “extreme” or what you perceive as catering to emotions rather than rationality (which I think they really aren’t, but even if they were, emotions are a part of life, if you value life, surely you’d value emotions too?). My critique to that is that conservatives often fail to see that their own positions and points of view are similarly coming from an emotional, and not rational, place, as they react to change by clinging to traditional views “because that’s what has been done until now”, without any actual rational reasoning for them. Like you yourself said, just because a lot of people follow a given ideology doesn’t make it right, the majority might be wrong, it’s just the majority. The same could be applied in this situation.
For instance, you might see having children as the rational choice because that’s what humanity has done since it began existing and due to it being a necessity for the continuation of the species, but is that not your natural, biological impulses speaking for you? Is it truly rational, logical thought? Why does humanity have to keep existing? You might have arguments and answers to those questions and that would make them rationally valid, but “just because” is not a rational answer.
I’d recommend considering adopting, if you don’t mind me saying so. More paperwork sure, but way less pain for you or your partner, and they’re really usually perfectly good kids. My neice, nephew, and cousin are all adopted, and they’re no less a part of the family than anyone else.
It makes a world of difference to a child that already exists, and you spare the unborn the existential crises our world is facing- huge win-win.
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Yes. I’d rather be the “eccentric uncle QuentinCallaghan” to my siblings’ kids than a father to any kid in a world like this. I’m so used to having my own independence and freedom, and I’m a hedonist to some extent. Also having kids would require a relationship, and the Yellowstone volcano erupting is more likely than that.
I am not, got a 10 month old boy. Its a lot of work, but definitely worth everything. Its incredible how happy he is all the time.
I would have liked to, but my husband was a hard no. We’re gay and the risks and difficulty involved with adoption are pretty high. He just didn’t feel like either of us were up for that, and honestly it may be true. If he’s a no and I’m a soft yes, the default goes to no. It looks like my brother is headed the same direction.
Still, I always will feel a little sad that I won’t be able to raise a kid or two. In terms of a stable marriage with decent income, we could offer that. I think I could be a decent parent, so it makes me a little sad that I will have little legacy to pass down to the next generation.
I don’t have kids nor do I want kids, but I try not to judge others, particularly people who aren’t super privileged, for having kids.
Privileged (rich) people who have kids though? They kinda irk me because it’s so obvious that they know the world is fucked but they clearly have the money and privilege to keep their kids in a little bubble.
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God no. I can’t imagine a more horrific punishment than to be childless.
I wish we had more than the two we have, but my wife and I started late. My daughter (12) sometimes asks how many children she could realistically have… a good sign that she hasn’t been tainted by whatever mental illness it is that the “childfree” people have.
Nice way to call many people’s choices a mentally ill condition.
What a progressive take on psychiatry! That guy babbling about demons whispering in his ear as he uses feces to fingerpaint on the hospital walls isn’t mentally ill… he’s just making a choice.
A choice you or I might not make, but it’s no less valid and no less healthy.
Thanks for changing my mind.
I have had depression for many years and never understood why anyone would want to set children into this terrible world. In hindsight it’s kinda funny, I have since changed my mind.
How is it any more terrible than it’s ever been these last few million years ago? I don’t have to worry about my kids being eaten by some predator anymore, the smilodon problem’s taken care of. Horrible diseases still about, but many that would have crippled or killed them just 100 years ago are now bad cultural memories. They have the comfort kings wouldn’t have known in centuries past.
Only the neurotic would whine about how they can’t bring children into a terrible world. I’m glad you’ve gotten over yours. As you have time, do what you can to dissect that old worldview and figure out how it works so that maybe you can help other people someday.
Insulting people for having a different opinion to yours is not a good look. No matter how much humanity has evolved when compared to previous generations, there are still big enough problems in the world that someone can rationally make that decision.
I’m not aware of having insulted anyone. I’ve come to learn in my life that some people are insulted by reality… that’s sad. Reality doesn’t change just because you feel insulted, it never apologizes, and it definitely doesn’t make amends.
No. They can only irrationally make that decision. And it’s not difficult to discern that truth… just open your eyes. Trauma, gluttony, there’s always something right there at the surface pressuring that choice.
In the words of Thanos, “reality can be whatever we want”. I am joking a bit of course, but really, although the laws of physics and the physical world don’t change, society can adapt around them in any way it sees fit. If society chooses, it can embark on a more positive path, with less suffering. In many ways, it has been doing that the past century. The conservative idea that “reality never changes” and that individual people should change because society as a whole won’t is a fallacy and can be proven empirically.
Who can make that judgement, you? Do you have the qualifications required to produce a judgement on mental health like that?
Trauma seems like a damn good argument for not having kids. It’s not irrational. If I suffered, it’d be immoral on my part to want to subject another human being, who had no say in being born, to potentially suffer the same (especially when some of that suffering may be caused by genetics, which will be passed down to said human being).
It can’t adapt to this. Society ceases to exist if there are no people, so saying “it can adapt to no one performing the process by which people create their replacements in the world” is dumb.
Fertility is weird in that young children grow up in the same society that is doing these things… they internalize what they see around them as “normal”. So if you teach children that having one or zero children is normal, they’ll grow up to want the same. They can always go lower than 1, but never higher. This means fertility trends in one direction only, it never goes up.
And once it drops below replacement levels, it won’t ever go back up to them (let alone above) ever again.
Your society is dying. It doesn’t realize it yet, and by the time it does nothing will be possible to do about it.
Yes. I do not claim to be the only one capable of making that judgement. Though it seems those like me are rare.
Judgement is nothing more than the measurement of a thing or an event. We are not talking about a legal process… I sentence no one, I convict no one, I condemn no one.
But I’ve measured, and accurately.
It may seem that way, but it isn’t. At most, it’s an argument to delay having them.
If you wanted or needed to do something in your life, and you were in a car wreck and broke both your legs… would you think it sane for someone to say “now you should never do that thing again, you’ve experienced trauma!” ?
Why is it any more sane if the injury is psychological? You take the time you need to recover, you work hard to get back to where you should be, and you do that thing. And you do it whether it’s having children or climbing some mountain or whatever. And you’d even agree with me if we hadn’t prefaced the achievement as “having children”, but some other trivial thing.
This is a nonsense statement. Until the person exists, by definition they can have no say in anything because they do not exist. Therefor it is not necessary, and even irrational, to speak or think about whether someone has a say in “being born”.
You’re morally permitted to subject a non-existent non-person to “being born”. Unless you’ve invented some sort of time travel, nothing else makes any sense.
This is the first intelligent thing you’ve said. Those who have incurable genetic diseases that cause true misery are rational to not reproduce.
None of the people in this thread, and few of those (1 in 10,000 or even fewer) who are childfree are childless because of that reason. You don’t have the Tay Sachs gene, and your receding hairline’s not comparable.
And why does society have to exist? Society and humanity have no inherent value. The value they have is the value we, as rational beings, give them. If we collectively determined that they should exist no more, they would cease to exist.
I don’t mind it. That alarmism doesn’t scare me. Remember I follow VHEMT, hence that is my end goal (at least, I’m doing my part towards that).
That is precisely what my question was targeting. You’ve measured (and you have every right to your measurement as the expression of an opinion), but who’s to say you’ve measured accurately? What qualifications do you have to make such a statement of fact?
I would. That is how I try to act in my daily life: avoiding things that have caused me suffering in the past, as much as possible. That is how I try to achieve a comfortable and happy life, by avoiding what has broken that comfort and happiness in the past.
It may be from a pragmatic point of view, but abstractly/philosophically speaking, it isn’t. When we make a moral choice, we have to think of the future consequences of that choice. From that point of view, we have to consider that the person being born will have no concept of the meaning behind their future suffering and will try to attribute such meaning to the ones who decided for them. People desire, naturally, to be in control and being born is the one action you have zero control over. That is also a reason why people seek religion: to justify and give meaning to their existence.
How can you make such a blanket statement when you don’t know any of us personally?
Really? Please say that line to anyone you know and after they’re finished chuckling, as them what they think is so funny and perhaps they’ll explain it better than I can.
You just sound like some guy who watched the "you’re not wrong, Walter-- you’re just an asshole" scene in The Big Lebowski and thought to yourself "Yeah, I’m Walter! He tells it like it is!"
i.e. saying "people who don’t want kids are mentally ill" and then wondering why people would consider that to be an insulting statement.
I feel like you’re probably more in love with yourself than your partner. Reply if you want but I’ll just be blocking you anyway-- people like you creep me out.
It’s like saying “people who want to force themselves to vomit after every meal are mentally ill” and then wondering why the bulimics consider that to be insulting?
They’re bulimic. It’s a mental illness. They probably do find it insulting, at least when they can work up the nerve to do it… it wasn’t always that way. But wasn’t it Oprah who had a bunch of the crackpots on her show where they were starting to claim eating disorders were a lifestyle choice?
Same thing here. If you get enough mentally ill people together in one place, they can convince themselves that their perceived numbers alone make them not mentally ill.
I can’t tell if you’re playing devil’s advocate or one of the mentally ill, and I don’t care nearly enough to read your comment carefully to try to figure it out.
No plans to create my own children. I’ve always felt that it’s far more important to adopt a child that’s been abandoned by an uncaring society then to make another. I don’t have any genes important enough to try to reproduce (and few people do). If you can’t find it in your heart to love a child that doesn’t contain the same genetic material as you, I think you should reconsider being a parent
Haha. “Adoption”. There haven’t been any recent world wars. No plagues (close miss on that though). There are no children to adopt. So few, in fact, that those who want to adopt often find themselves on waiting lists…
So much so, that many give up on that course of action, and instead choose to fly halfway around the world to buy children from warlords and conmen in Africa.
Or, you could become a “foster parent”, which is like adoption except that the kid’s even less yours… they might come along and yank them away from you for a variety of reasons. The most heartbreaking of which, I’m told, is that the real parents have convinced some bureaucrat that they won’t abuse or neglect them like they had been doing, when experience suggests that it will just happen again.
Though, don’t be too sympathetic to the foster parents, they’re helping the government prosecute the war on drugs and ruin families, just by supplying the demand for child abduction technicians. And all so they can scratch their itch of (fake) parenthood and feel self-righteous about it.
Your pessimism and ignorance is truly astounding. There need not be wars for children to be abandoned, and it should be common knowledge at this point that foster parents have a high chance of being nothing but another loveless cage for orphans to suffer in. Full fledged adoption is hardly done right, but that’s all the more reason why good and caring people should step in and try.
I grew up around orphans, and I know how hard and lonely it is to be foisted from foster family to foster family, surrounded by siblings and adults who resent and use you until you’re once again abandoned to some other equally cruel house. Maybe you don’t think adoption does any good (god knows why), but I know for certain that there are a lot of children who grow up alone without any support that would be so much better off if they had someone in their life who truly cared for them. Is it really better to just not care at all than to try and help even one person? If you think so, you’re a terribly sad person.
Also if you want to adopt you need a very square life where I live. You need proper jobs, a lot of money to show them, be married etc. Not saying this is bad, it’s probably best for the adopted children, but I don’t have many of these things.
Nah, for $50,000 you can buy an African child. Takes about a year or so. It’s not human trafficking because it’s good and wholesome.
I did not know human trafficking is wholesome. You are scoring some big wins in this thread, DPUGT2, especially as a married male with 2 kids.
extend DPUGT2 ban to like a week imo
I get what he’s trying to say here; he’s being ironic about it, as some people gullibly adopt from immoral sources such as african warlords. It is child trafficking but, since it is being “whitewashed” and not labeled as such, it becomes somehow acceptable in the public eye.
He is not being sarcastic, as you already seem to have experienced. He said in one comment now removed:
He claims to have a wife and 2 kids, and preach all this load of right wing purist nutjob levels of crap to people.
Yeah, I’ve read that comment. I don’t agree with what he said in general but it’s undeniable that there are plenty of scams to lure rich people, typically americans, to poor countries under the guise of adopting children from underfunded orphanages when in fact there are far grimmer ulterior motives behind them.
There are no moral sources. Those who would adopt morally would be compelled to adopt children from their own family first… who better to not let an orphan forget their parents than someone who also loved and knew those parents?
And if there were no family, then friends of those parents for the same reason.
And if no friends, then that community… except today, there aren’t really any communities left. Just people who live near each other as accidents of geography.
And if none in the community, then at least someone from that culture. So that the child might grow up knowing his or her own language and songs and whatnot. But western culture isn’t a culture so much as the absence of one, a void, and so it can’t imagine that anything like that’s important.
But none of these rules allow hipsters who live in California but are too eco-conscious of their carbon footprint to want to “bring another child into this world” but want to raise a child to do so. So these rules are bad. And that’s why adopting African children is good and moral. Because they want to, they have the money to do it, and that warlord uses a cutout so that the adoption has the appearance of being above-board.
I… agree with you? You’re making a strawman out of me in this argument. I never said I advocated for adopting from Africa before adopting from your own family or circle of friends. Heck, if I do decide to adopt in the future, that’s the route I’d try to take first. Not that it’s a big desire of mine, but that’s what I’d choose to do.
It can be. You just have to label it correctly. Call it “international adoption” and the money “adoption fees”, and it’s all good.
…WTF? Labelling something in a sugarcoating manner does not justify it.
Nazis call atrocities like Holocaust a form of justice, DOES NOT mean it will ever be acceptable.
Hasn’t been the message for the last 2000 years?
The current era is better to raise children than many other eras where human rights didn’t existed. Although it depends on which society too. Many of those worries are very subjective. Having or not having children ultimately is a personal choice* (except when is not e.g. Rape) and neither is wrong. Whichever you chose you will miss the benefits of the other. Both have pros and cons.
yeah this is what I agree with.
“I try to be.” Uhm is there a middle ground here between do or do not? It seems like rather a binary choice lol. Anyway ya, life is shit and this is hell, no way am I bringing more sapient life to this shithole.
I’ve raised four kids but reared none of my own. Of the four step kids, three girls and one boy, only one of the girls has hatched their own. The other three have zero interest in having kids…unless you count cats.
Well there is adoption or babysitting; but I’m trying to stay committed to my decision to be childfree.
i don’t want to have kids because i believe it’s unethical for some average joe, or in fact anyone that isn’t an expert in child psychology and child development, to subject a human being to potential lifelong trauma because “babies be cute doe”. also i think the hype is overblown. society feeds you the lie that you need to have kids to feel fulfilled and happy, but in reality there are many other ways to do that and they don’t involve a very high risk of ruining someone’s entire life. surround yourself with people you like, create a daily lifestyle that energizes and refreshes you, and spend time on your passions. one or all three of those things could involve children, but for most people they will not.
i think refraining from raising children because “humanity’s future is gloom” isn’t entirely logical. even absolute climate catastrophe would be better than most of human history because of the technology available to us, and at worst it would be just as bad. humans have been born and lived in the worst possible conditions, they can do it in these ones too. definitely adopt though, creating children is still dumb for other reasons.
Only PhDs in child psychology should reproduce? So, you want humanity to be extinct, that’s a more ethically sound position than “sometimes bad things happen to some people”?
You’ve got 4 billion years of genetic coding that insists, even demands that this is true. The last few tens of millions of years hardcodes it directly into your meat brain.
Society? If society ever did that, it ceased doing it almost a hundred years ago. Now, you can’t turn your head or hear a dozen words from some random stranger proclaiming the opposite is true and that anyone who says otherwise is a misogynist, masochist, or biblethumper.
There of course are many reasons for that. If you believe transexuals are healthy, important individuals… how could they participate in parenting if they’re mutilating their reproductive organs? So, parenting and reproduction now have to be bad or at least discouraged, to push the other message more fully. Not just them, of course, it’s not fair to single them out when there are so many other degenerate lifestyles that, if you embrace them, you also can’t embrace the idea that parenting is important without being hypocritical.
The end result will be, of course, that these lifestyles die out. The question is, will they take everything else with them.
Only those with some qualification in child psychology should raise children.
most times small things happen to most children that have a huge psychological impact on them. these things can be avoided by child psychology experts because they actually know what they’re doing.
There are primal instincts that push us towards wanting children, but pleasing the more complex parts of your brain is much more fulfilling, enough that you don’t need to appease those primal instincts. I’m not arguing that having children wouldn’t provide some happiness at certain points for everyone, just that there are other things that will make you much more happy and don’t risk the lifelong wellbeing of another human being. and again, for some people the more complex part of their brain will want children, because of genuine interest in the process of raising a child, not because of a temporary high that will fade as soon as they need to pay attention to their actions around the child or make tough decisions about discipline.
That’s great to hear, my observations must be anomalous then.
Yes. Suffering should be eradicated at all costs. Humanity doesn’t have an inherent right to exist, it simply does as long as it is perpetuated by both humans themselves and while external conditions allow it.
I see your beliefs now. Well, no wonder you also disagree with this viewpoint then.
What is suffering? I’ve lumped that word in with all the other religious claptrap like “soul” and “afterlife” and whatnot.
Are you talking about pain (the sensation)? It doesn’t seem that you mean that, but if you did it would be absurd. “Pain should be eradicated” makes no sense. It can’t even be said that pain should be avoided, since discomfort is often associated with worthwhile, and ultimately pleasant, activities.
Define suffering so we can be on the same page.
True, as far as it goes. But it’s like “turnips have no inherent right to exist”. Pretty meaningless, and in the context where people actually want to exist (and for others to exist), somewhat misleading.
Please, read my palm. Tell everyone what my beliefs are.
That is merely a component of suffering. That should be avoided imo, but it isn’t the only thing that should.
I struggle to find such activities. I’m not stating there are none, just that I can’t remember any off the top of my head.
A negative experience which causes physical or psychological distress to a person or group of people, often for extended periods of time or with lasting effects after the experience itself has stopped (ie. trauma).
Saying this statement is meaningless is the same as saying philosophy itself is meaningless, but it can be a valuable tool to help us define our values and offer a base from which every other aspect of life can be evaluated more precisely. I don’t see how it’s misleading at all.
That statement was more hostile than I intended it to, in hindsight, and I see how it might be hypocritical to complain that you are lumping all “young liberals” (as it seems) in the same strawman when I ended up doing the same to you. I was quite offended by the transphobic comment so I reacted in an emotional way. Sorry.
I believe you follow some conservative beliefs (from an american standpoint) pretty strictly and that might be the bias shown in your arguments towards traditional values and against modern, sort of more “extreme” or what you perceive as catering to emotions rather than rationality (which I think they really aren’t, but even if they were, emotions are a part of life, if you value life, surely you’d value emotions too?). My critique to that is that conservatives often fail to see that their own positions and points of view are similarly coming from an emotional, and not rational, place, as they react to change by clinging to traditional views “because that’s what has been done until now”, without any actual rational reasoning for them. Like you yourself said, just because a lot of people follow a given ideology doesn’t make it right, the majority might be wrong, it’s just the majority. The same could be applied in this situation.
For instance, you might see having children as the rational choice because that’s what humanity has done since it began existing and due to it being a necessity for the continuation of the species, but is that not your natural, biological impulses speaking for you? Is it truly rational, logical thought? Why does humanity have to keep existing? You might have arguments and answers to those questions and that would make them rationally valid, but “just because” is not a rational answer.
Never had any interest in having children, and the more I’ve learned about the state of the world the happier I am with my choices.
Same.
Yes, unless you count my dog.
Do cats count? Otherwise, I’m childless.
I don’t have any but want 2 I think. A few years ago I didn’t want any but I guess I got older
Two’s a good number. Not sure I’d say it out loud, it’s like daring fate to give you triplets.
I’d recommend considering adopting, if you don’t mind me saying so. More paperwork sure, but way less pain for you or your partner, and they’re really usually perfectly good kids. My neice, nephew, and cousin are all adopted, and they’re no less a part of the family than anyone else.
It makes a world of difference to a child that already exists, and you spare the unborn the existential crises our world is facing- huge win-win.
as far as i know
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It’s a cult that hates you so much that it implores you to go out and make half-clones of yourself.