2019-04-06

In other news, birth rates are inexplicably plummeting across the globe. Governments remain baffled.

"I bet it's because there's not enough spying in their homes."
- clearly the government just needs to provide pizza parties
If I saw any real positive progress being made I'd reverse my decision to not have kids, but they all seem to want to do what's worst for the planet, so why actively bring someone into that?
- 🤝
- In the US at least, I think it’s possible at the local and state levels, but land and money have most of the power. To me, it feels like many leaders pushed the goals back because we were relatively close to being able to implement the progressive changes federally, but it’s become clear that’s still a ways away.
  Those progressive changes can still happen in blue states, and I feel the will is there to elect progressives. States just need to be willing to go into debt to bring forward those progressive programs now.
  Idk, even still after all these years, I find there are still moments that make me happy to be alive and think that it’s awesome to be alive, to have experienced things that were dear to me. Living in a place with others that still care about positive progress gives me a reason to do a little better each day.
  I do think about how much greater life could be if love was what guided policy rather than the accumulation of wealth that’s worth nothing to us when we die.
- Why can't YOU be my dad? Or, rather not my dad as it were.....I mean you're ALREADY not my dad, but.....
  Ugh. This is getting confusing. What I'm trying to say is, I don't want to exist if earth is my only option.
  There! Simple enough now?
China reversed its one-child policy and people there are having even fewer kids.
Latin America isn't at the replacement rate of 2 children per couple any more. You know, the continent with all those Catholics? They aren't having kids.
Only Africa now is above the replacement rate. Likely not for long.
Human population will peak way sooner than expected.
What will Western billionaires do when the flow of poor brown people stops? They're dependent on them for cheap labour and to deflect blame onto.
- What will Western billionaires do when the flow of poor brown people stops? They're dependent on them for cheap labour and to deflect blame onto.
  They will bring back the slave trade. This time using latinos.
  Edit: I'm not even remotely joking or being facetious.
"Well, of course it's the white genocide. It has to be!"
And strangely, people aren't spending as much money at the same time... Better jack up prices on everything to compensate!
Could it be that housing prices are rising, people are living paycheck-to-paycheck with no job security, and fascism and the threat of a(nother) world war are on the rise?
Naaah, can't be that.
Education and rising from poverty does that. No matter how your government works, you can't get away from that simple fact.
- it's not only developing countries
- Just gotta stack up some savings. And get a biger place.
Those damn video games!
The cause is obviously biological. Not societal. Listen to my anecdotal or correlational evidence.

One of those comics that only get more depressing as it ages

There are lots of children already here with even less support. I know it's not easy in a lot of places, but adoption is a compassionate alternative.

no.. I only want little baby that looks like my beautiful face and carries my superior flawless unmatches genes. /s

Literally my number one reason not to have kids

Cyanide and happiness is your number one reason not to have kids?
That's weird

Most people aren't these YT commenters or Twitter megaphones like Donald Trump.

It's an attention amplification mirage. But we've fed the trolls and given them power.

IMO if folks were largely aware of that, they'd be burning down the headquarters of Big Tech, Big Media, stuff like that. Instead, it makes them depressed because it looks like all other humans are mad, and I find that really sad.

You definitely have a point. They're not a majority of people. They're just so loud and noisy the real majority can't have a decent conversation anymore.
Not in social media, at least. Social media is totally rigged and scored to fascism.
The reason assholes like Trump can win elections is because there are SO many other assholes who support them.
Trump won because more people valued hurting others than helping others.
- Trump won because of algorithmic propaganda and people following idols instead of history.
  This includes the 'assholes' who have been indocrinated for decades.
- Not necessarily. This is a very simplified, decolorized version of events.
  Most voters in the US can't even name and shallowly describe any given policy of their chosen candidate. Americans voted for Trump, because they liked one or two things they heard him say. Or simply because they only knew one of the names on the form.

2019? Oh... oh dear.

My daughter is born in 2019. I think to myself im so sorry when I look at her.
- Give her knowledge, patience, and love. We don't know the mettle of the new generations yet. Have heart. The world wants to correct itself; we just haven't figured out how to do it yet.
- And my son. I know how you feel.
- At least by virtue of being so young, she was HOPEFULLY exempt from the insane worldwide mask mandate of 2020-21.
The real depressing message is always... 🤢... in the comments.
There, I made myself say it. I apologize if I gave anybody flashbacks to any older, worse social link aggregator platforms.

My son was born in December 2019. Not a day goes by where I don't feel this in my soul. I hate knowing the suffering he is likely to witness or experience so a few can have it all. It equally depresses and infuriates me.

There are also great opportunities. You care, he will care. That's a good foundation.
- Thank you for saying so!

Fuck that's a depressing comic

And its from 6 years ago...

2019... The good old times. And then things went bad.

It's been bad for much longer than that but I'd argue that 2015/2016 is when it really started to go absolutely terrible.

This here is straight up one of the biggest reasons I do not want a kid. Right now it sure seems like the best thing I could do for my children is not force existence upon them.

I once had a girlfriend tell me she aborted a baby I'd fathered. At the time I was surprised (I learned there was a baby), puzzled, saddened, depressed, and I went to have a drink (ok, several).
But of course she was right.
What kind of lunatic would raise children nowadays?
However The problem is that only lunatics would raise children nowadays. So we'll end up with people raised by lunatics. Our species will drift towards lunacy. (Ok, we're already looneys) Is it realistic to throw kids into the boiling pot to counter the crazy ones? Or should we just let the crazies fight amongst themselves?
I'm for the lmatter (also I won't be there, so it's not like I care, unless I can haunt them, in which case theyre going to fucking suffer), what's your POV?
- As much as I'd like humanity to improve, it feels off to task my not-yet-existent child with trying to fix humanity. It still simply doesn't feel right to bring a child into this existence, and it still doesn't feel right to task them with fixing it all.
  If I had more hope that very serious improvements are guaranteed, I might be more keen on it. As it currently sits, it's not my unborn child's job to fix what I failed to fix.
I struggle with this line of reasoning as almost every generation before has had similar struggles. World wars, great depressions, authoritarian regimes/dictators, and nuclear wars, just to name a few of the most recent. Add in historical contexts like plagues, invasions, witch hunts, etc. If people had the same thoughts as this then none of us would be here today, I dont fault my parents for the state of the world even if I wish it was better but I'm glad I get to experience the mystery we call consciousness and help better the world for all those in the future that come after me. If those with common sense stop having kids and teaching all we are guaranteed to do is make the world even worse off for those living today and let stupidity continue to rise in those who will be born in the future. The hateful and idiotic people aren't questioning whether they should have kids, so if we can counter that by having and raising well-adjusted kids its imperative we try. Otherwise, humanity will be doomed to be full of hateful bigots that will destroy ourselves.
- That is if climate change doesn't turn into a catastrophe
If I look at world news for the decade I was born (and more importantly, contemporary sources for what was actually happening in that decade), I can tell you two things. 1: That decade was objectively worse than the current one for a large fraction of earth's population, and 2: I don't resent my parents for birthing me into that decade. I'd rather be alive than not, and that's mostly history now anyway.
The best part of my above comment, is you can't tell what decade I was born from the content. They were all f'n bad.

Get a vasectomy, you save on having kids and buying condoms. The only disadvantage is her having to clean up all the creampies.

or gay sex
- The ass doesn't clench the same. 😔
I don't think any woman or man I've ever been with would consider that a disadvantage lol
- In the moment it's not a problem, but sit up a minute later and it's dripping down your leg and you gotta do the sheets again.
Well I just recently learned, that you may have complications and partially or completely lose your erections, so yes there is downside
- Minimal risks.
  You can leave your house and get hit by a car and that doesn't keep you from leaving, does it?
- Friend of mine constantly has a shooting pain from his shaft to his butt hole that never goes away. He's had it for more than a year now and they've tried to do multiple surgeries etc to fix it. Can't.

Littering is seen as more common than it really is in the public perception thanks to all kinds of cynical messaging from industry groups, like, for example, Big Tobacco and the infamous “Crying Indian Ad”.

This messaging has the effect of shifting the blame of environmental devastation away from industry and onto individuals, much like how the fossil fuel industry popularized the term ‘carbon footprint’ and shifted the onus of fossil fuel emissions away from the fossil fuel industry and onto individuals.

As for the disgusting types of comments depicted in the next panel of the comic, a great deal of that is generated by bots to divide us. It also doesn’t help things in this particular case that only 1 of the 2 main parties/sides in the world’s most “important” country (important and dominant culturally, economically, etc.) is willing to consider any changes to approaches to widespread availability of guns. Creating division is as easy as having bots go around blaming anything (even victims!) except the relative ease of access to guns in the US.

This comic sadly plays into exactly the kind of thinking that leads to defeatism and broad mistrust. The common person is not, in fact, bad.

In fact, it is instead a relatively small number of psychopaths that perpetuate many of the kinds of problems depicted in this comic. The CEOs of any given Big Oil or Big Tobacco company are almost inevitably psychopaths. And we almost cannot help but continue to give power to these kinds of people. They are, after all, often the only ones who think so highly of themselves and their abilities to even offer to take on a leadership role. Sometimes they crave little more than the power itself. And they are the ones with the most power to steer the directions of messaging towards individual blame and individual misdeeds, rather than towards faith in the common person and blame on the corporations they lead.

In other words, the comic’s author is falling right into the trap of being led to see the world misanthropically. When you think “the problem is people,” instead of “the problem is a few people,” there is very little to do except become depressed and inactive.

To solve many of the world’s biggest problems, we literally just need more of the people who first doubt that they themselves could be a good leader to instead raise their hands, instead of letting only the psychopaths and narcissists raise their hands and rise to power.

Naw, fuck that. Even if we weren't in climate crisis, littering is for tools. Fuck people who litter. It's like walking into someones home and spitting on the floor.
- Of course, I’m just saying this problem that does indeed exist is blown out of proportion by the messaging we’re bombarded with.
  A bit of a case of this, basically:
The common person is not, in fact, bad.
Then riddle me this: why are there many successful political parties based on harming others as their core principle?
- Because charismatic bad people are very adept at convincing ignorant people that those "others" are, in fact, bad and we all need protection from them. In fact, I think nearly everyone is willing to sign up to harm people in some way - it's just defining who is bad that those political parties f' with.
  A minority of really bad people have an out-sized harm on society, and we haven't really figured out a way of preventing that.
- Because the average person is stupid and has fears that can be changed and directed at the "other"

This is why, as a father, you go on a search for the amulet.

Every generation has had to deal with some version of this, either they could see it coming or they got blindsided by something. Not saying that makes it ok, it just happens.

Has there been a time in history where they expected their offspring to live a harder life then themselves though?
- Throughout history, generation to generation changes were mostly negligible and whether the kids or parents had it easier came down to luck. People still had kids when communities raided their neighbours, when they started conquering instead of just raping and pillaging, when kings demanded soldiers fight their wars and labourers farm their fields, when they were literally denied any freedom and beaten severely or killed if they tried to push back, when large men in boats would just show up randomly at communities anywhere along the coast, when people with swords or guns went around the world saying "worship our god or die". Or when the black plague was wiping out anywhere from 20 to 80% of a region's population and doing it with some regularity.
  There might not have been an expectation that their kids might have to suffer more than they did but suffering has been one of the most constant components of the human existence. I think the biggest difference is a relative lack of resilience (or at least the inability to imagine the resilience that will be necessary to continue on, since I also believe that we're better at handling change than we think we are going into it).
  The generations that do handle this and the ones that follow will probably look back at this "it's cruel to bring a kid into this world" mindset with contempt. People often think about babies and children when considering future generations, but these ones will probably grow up into tougher adults than most of us are.
The difference is we all own tiny devices that give us live updates on the horrors of the world. The other generations were blissfully ignorant.
- That’s true. We’ve seen this coming for decades and still can’t manage to stop it.

OP: My desire to reproduce outweighed my capacity for foresight!

I'll throw my lot in with OP. I'm not leaving the planet to the fucking nazis.
- It almost used to be a truism that the youth were more progressive than the older generations, but nowadays... Not sure if it's borne out of rebelliousness edginess or what. Agreed at how disappointing and gross it is.

Governments when theres no parental leave, unaffordable childcare, skyrocketing cost of living, no social spaces, and they actively sell out the future yet for some strange reason nobody is having children:

Having a child is on average one of the worst decisions you can make for the climate. Raising your child vegan and carfree can mitigate some, but not all of the climate damage. Raising your child to be a socialist and teaching them how to use a gun can reverse the effect.

Raising my child to remove billionares from the world by whatever means are legal will do more than being car free and vegan can ever do. Yea, let me make my kid walk to school 4km daily (no proper public transport here) while billionaires fly to their coffee machine and back to their bed every morning and have literally every single one of their goods delivered at their doorstep with a car or van, then presented to them in so much plastic packaging that turtles can die before it even gets in the waters. We're not the problem, wasteful rich cunts and lack of regulation are the problem.
- by whatever means ~~are legal~~ will do more
  Considering they lobby the law into what they want... there, FTFY.
- Oh, raising a child to be an armed socialist without being vegan or carfree? It's an interesting idea, but I'd worry it's rather difficult to teach a child ideals you don't live by. If I lived in a place with no public transit or vegan food, I wouldn't reproduce. I wouldn't want to inflict that kind of environment on my child.

they do what brings them joy (murder brings joy to some)