I have two teenagers and they are wonderful. But the world is NOT the same anymore. In the current moment, I would really think twice before bringing any more kids into this world. I feel sorry for everyone coming of age at this time. The world got very bad very quickly. There's no jobs, no one can afford a house, healthcare, or retirement, and the climate is toast.
Of the 110 billion people to have ever been born, maybe 2 billion have been born into more comfortable circumstances than the median child born in the United States today.
Were those children born to brave parents who made a choice to selflessly sacrifice to do their societal duty, or could it be that having sex is fun and only relatively recently have we managed to figure out how to do it without risking pregnancy? Given individual choice, would we have such a large population to begin with?
In my experience it’s 100% effective over a couple longterm(ish) relationships that total to about 4 years in my early 30s. Average around 3 to 4 times a week after accounting for time apart. I guess I could be sterile in my older age?
I have five kids all five were conceived during a single act. Pulling out is the only form of birth control my partners and I have ever practised. in my opinion even for a very fertile person if you ( and I’m not sure how someone could fuck this up ) actually pull out there will be no conception.
What a ridiculous attitude. The world will always have problems you cannot control. People have been having babies in all sorts of adversity for all of history.
Why is this ridiculous? If the topic is about the baby boom, surely "optimism" at the end of WWII plays a big role. (Unsurprisingly, birth rates during the Great Depression had plummeted)
It may be hard to believe, that is considered a major reason for the baby boom. People were happy the war was over, happy to be back with their families, The GI Bill made people optimistic about the future.
There was PTSD of course, a lot of grief and life altering injuries, but back then you didn't talk about it and just drank and beat up your wife and kids instead.
> People have been having babies in all sorts of adversity for all of history.
Anatomically modern humans exist for ~100,000-200,000 years. Reliable contraception widely available is something that didn't exist until ~60 years ago. So we can't just use past performance to predict the future.
Weird, I think having the right to bodily autonomy and freedom to control your own life is - by default - right and moral. And any attempt to mandate what others must or cannot do, outside of what harms those around them, is - by default - wrong and immoral.
Shockingly, declarations as if we are gods laying down "the one true morality" are not actually definitions of "the one true morality".
You made that up. It’s very easy to think of circumstances where it would be very immoral because of all the suffering the children will have to endure.
Moral norms evolve to ensure survival of it's bearers.
Basically under no circumstances it will be immoral for the population at large to have kids because such moral norms will quickly cease to exist. Eather because it's bearers cease to exist or more likely because they move on to more suitable moral norms.
I say "more likely" because humans obviously didn't get extinct despite bringing kids into the world of suffering for about a million years.
I was literally told as a kid that we were heading to overpopulation and that having kids would be immoral. The Chinese committed a genocide against girl infants with that as a justification.
I'm not saying that's something that can't happen, I'm saying it can't last for long.
The "immoral to have kids" crowd still exists e.g in Europe but their options are to either change their mind or to be gradually overrun by people who think otherwise.
yeah but compared to the entirity of human history, its still pretty good. Like, I prefer the era I grew up in but so does my dad probably, so its hard to work out if its just a "when I were young and could run a mile without wheezing thing". i.e. We could paint similar tales of woe during the cold war about the uncertainty of the future.
But that aside, I can live out my life in considerable security in the western world, earn enough to never go hungry and if I'm smart enough I can learn a skill or forge out some opportunity that gets me enough dollar to join the asset class. That's some real post 1950s opportunity for most people. Bear in mind that post-war rationing meant many people in Europe rarely ate meat. You could eat a burger for every meal today, even on a relatively low budget.
I think many of us underestimate the opulence of our society. Take anyone from the pre-1950s to a supermarket and watch them lose it at how incredibly bourgeois that shit is. Show any non-elite from the 2nd or 3rd world in the late 20th century that you have your OWN ROOM or maybe even OWN BATHROOM! That's proper living. My gramma would always whine about how they were like 8 to a bed or whatever during the war. Single paned windows, cold af. My eastern european grandparents didn't even have running hot water (which was an alien experience to me) and heated their place by going to the forest and chopping wood.
Even 80s or 90s kids would be exceptionally envious at the incredible access to entertainment and software of this era. Figure how spoiled a society is when it buys dreams of a violent world (fortnite, game of thrones, gta) because its own world is so secure that is doesn't have a grasp of how harrowing that shit is. My western euro grand parents who survived the war only wanted a sunny day, a patch of grass to sit on and some peace and quiet, and we have ample supply of that, even today.
I used to be really angry at parents, thinking it was incredible cruelty to throw children into a world without teaching them just how hard capitalism is going to try and wreck them. But i guess it didn't "used" to be this bad, you used to be able to afford rent i guess.
But still, we need to be teaching above all the other dumb shit thats happening in school: how capitalism hates them. How you need to eliminate middle men, having a regular wage means you are going to be an oppressed slave for life. You need to come up with your own thing, that you own and control and get to do some kind of negotiating for its value. You need to invest in things that can be used to make money in the future, little side hustles always. And maybe even deep dives on how crime really does pay, and if not figure one out yourself at least know the huge majority of people that are going to try and scam you. It is pure evil not to teach reality in high school
But the idiopathic depression of the modern era is certainly interesting. Doubtful it can be studied before natural selection exacts its ruthless revenge
