"So the decision to avoid having children may amount to a kind of performance anxiety in the face of intense expectations and weak governmental and social support".
"So the decision to avoid having children may amount to a kind of performance anxiety in the face of intense expectations and weak governmental and social support".
https://twitter.com/juutsid/status/1720518455458214044
tl;dr: millennials are afraid of failure.
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I want to have kids in the future and have confidence that my partner and I will be able to figure it out and that the joy of having children will outweigh whatever hardships it may put upon us.
I respect that others may not want the same for themselves, but I don't buy this anti-natalist doom and gloom shit at all. People in dire economic and environmental conditions have been having children for all of human history.
If my kids really don't want to live through what's to come, they can kill themselves, just like I can and don't even though things are only looking to be shittier in my future. But I'm not going to make that decision for them.
Holy shit, they can just kill themselves?? Do what you want, but if you really view the world as only getting worse, why not just spare them from having to off themselves?
I'm saying that I don't see it that way. I am a communist because I am an optimist - if I was a nihilist, I wouldn't bother investing myself in the notion of progress and improvement. My point is that, even if the malthusianists are right, I still do not recognize malthusianism as a valid reason against having children - they will have free will, they can do as they please. My guess, and my bet, is that, like me, they will appreciate being alive, in spite of its associated pains, and will feel empowered to rise to the challenges of whatever times they face.
Life is full of joys, and we are going to have to deal with large-scale economic and environmental changes in the next 100 years. Neither of those statements precludes the other. I am not going to deny the future generation the opportunity to exist because of my prisoner-of-the-moment paranoias about the future. If the malthusianists are correct, they can have the last laugh. I understand that people can also make valid individual decisions not to have children and I respect that 100%, but I find the wallowing in fear of the future exhausting, dispiriting, and counterproductive to the leftist cause, and I reject anti-natalism as a point of leftist philosophy.
That's fair.