'Should I even be having children?' Eco-anxiety fueled by summer of adverse weather
'Should I even be having children?' Eco-anxiety fueled by summer of adverse weather
By Lauren Fernandez / CTV News
I've always leaned towards the side of not having children, but there's no way in hell I could justify bringing a child into this world at this point. What future is there for them?
I hope like hell that I'm wrong and we get our shit together, but being proactive and fixing mistakes before they're catastrophic just isn't in the human nature.
I always wanted children, but I'm not going to force someone into a dying world. Either we work through all this and technology will give me all the time in the world to be a parent, or we don't and I've avoided pulling a new person down with the rest of us
I've been thinking about this whole eco-depression and have been wondering whether it could end up saving us.
Like, it's awful that folks don't want to be parents, especially those who are environmentally conscious, but to be blunt about it, a higher ratio of plants vs. humans, isn't the worst thing to happen to the climate.
Much more importantly, though, I'm hoping, it makes all those capitalists realize that their limitless growth is fucking pointless. If it culminates in an apocalypse, all their excess money and property is not worth anything.
I'm hoping for the best but we might get the worst of idiocracy in a climate catastrophe.
Yeah, thunk of who would not be having kids and think of who it is making room for...
I haven't looked at the data, but I'm guessing the most eco-anxious demographics are also probably the ones that already have the lowest birth rate.
What i dont understand is all my single/childless friends are biking to work and doing all the "environmentally friendly" things we're supposed to do (whether it's effective or just stoking our own egos is up for debate)
And then you have my friends who are parents of 2-4 kids and they're doubling down on the mass consumption, SUV at costco lifestyle...
Like... Your kids are headed for the hunger games... Why are ya'll trying to accelerate the timeline?
Yeah, I have been wondering about that, too. I've found these potential reasons:
As long as there are going to be religious conservative people in this world, regardless of religion, there will always be children born. Religion forces people to have them. And the more they make kids, the more these companies will influence the government to increase immigration from these regions.
Fuck, no.
You know what people regret far, far more often than getting sterilized? Having children.
Especially in this context where every gouvernement on every level just isn't helping one bit. And being under constant pressure from employers. And financial pressure from the housing crisis and incredible inflation with stagnant wages.
Oh, the government will help. Just they'll do it in some miniscule or pointless way that makes you wonder if you're doing something wrong because you barely see the benefits. There's various tax refunds and whatnot, but they don't come close to how expensive it is to have kids. Ontario claimed there'd be some kinda affordable childcare, but that never really happened (at least not in a way accessible to most). Wage stagnation is perhaps the biggest issue as it's the root cause of why we can't afford to have kids like older generations could. No government seems to give a shit about that.
From a societal standpoint, the lack of children is harmful on quite a few levels. The obvious is the lack of population growth, and an aging society. But the issues that stem from that are pretty serious. On the top level, most of millennials won't be able to experience retirement like how the boomers are, as there isn't enough young people to support the aging population, and few millennials will 20mil in the bank when they reach 65.
On the other side, the GenZ and future generations are inheriting a world that's been ravaged by rampant consumption, and they themselves don't have the numbers to do much about it. Entire towns are being abandoned with the environments around them being left as messed up as ever because nobody is around to even notice that abandoned factory from 30 years ago had tons of toxic chemicals left over when the company left the town and never got cleaned up. And even if it is noticed, the potential to clean any of that up is evaporating as there's just less people to do something about it.
And that doesn't even get into how there's fewer people doing essential jobs. And I'm not just talking about the blue collar void. Do you remember how much the farmers were complaining that they didn't have enough hands to harvest their crops during the worst of COVID?
Hell, I've seen entire neighbourhoods that's had help wanted signs posted for more than a year straight. We're already starting to see the early onset of labour shortage, and Canada's one of the few top tier countries that has managed decent population growth thanks to our immigrants. Imagine how bad it is in Europe and East Asia?
That said, from an individual level, the governments, on every level, are really failing to create an environment where people can decently have children in the first place. When you work full time and constantly worry about making your bills, you have significantly less leeway to think about something that'll add massively to your payments.
Even dating is difficult under those circumstances, not to mention hookup culture that basically treat long term relationship as a thing of the past.
Marriage, and then having a child instead of a pet? Forgettaboutit. Not when a significant percentage of the population is already living paycheck to paycheck. One wrong move, and they're heading right into bankruptcy. Not the sort of environment to have children.
Honestly, there's too many people on earth and we need to curb the population growth.
Also this constant growth from companies isn't realistic. Our resources are not infinite. We had to hit a wall at some point and start to decrease.
Native population growth is ALREADY curbed in nearly all Indusrialized Nations and places like the US are only growing due to immigration.
The global population keeps climbing because of under and still developing countries...and even in those places their rate of growth is slowing.
Globally the population will hit max around the year 2100 but many rich nations already heat peak population and are now declining.
What i dont understand is all my single/childless friends are biking to work and doing all the "environmentally friendly" things we're supposed to do (whether it's effective or just stoking our own egos is up for debate)
And then you have my friends who are parents of 2-4 kids and they're doubling down on the mass consumption, SUV at costco lifestyle...
Like... Your kids are headed for the hungee games... Why are ya'll trying to accelerate the timeline?
I try to reserve judgement, mainly because I never wanted kids, so not having them was an easy choice for me. I can’t pretend to understand the biological drive to procreate, since I don’t feel it.
But yeah…I suspect a LOT of people who have kids (especially young kids) are very much burying their heads in the sand to avoid the reality. Especially as climate-related disasters start happening with increasing frequency. The horror of seeing collapse coming for their children will be devastating mentally - most people will lean hard into the cognitive dissonance to avoid facing it.
The world is already a godforsaken hellscape, and it's going to get a whole lot worse any minute now, so no, you shouldn't. You really, really, really shouldn't.
Exactly .. relatively speaking, the world looks good here in Canada or even the US .... but you'd be shocked to see what the world looks like in Southeast Asia, African cities, South American cities, most of eastern Europe and the Middle East.
We literally have blinders on ... we're only looking at the bit of pollution we have here in Canada while never seeing the ocean of liquids and mountains of crap that's accumulating everywhere else in the world.
We are in a climate catastrophe ...... we're inside a burning house except we're sitting in a room that hasn't been affected by the smoke and fire yet, so we just sit back and turn the TV on and thank our lucky stars that we can't see that our house is on fire.
We can totally see it from here. Ridiculously hot summers, gigantic wildfires, house insurance companies pulling out of entire states, and the knowledge that this is only the beginning.
This world is doomed. We never had a chance. With cargo ships burning bunker fuel, everything made overseas, and everybody too broke to buy local products even if they did exist, there's nothing the little people can hope to do to prevent the end of the world.
Only the rich can turn this around, and their brilliant plan is to build themselves opulent underground shelters where they'll hang out while the rest of humanity dies, then emerge to rule unchallenged over the ashes. They fully intend to see the human race go virtually extinct. Little do they realize that they'll be killed and eaten by their own security guards once the collapse of civilization renders their wealth meaningless.
There isn't even any point in changing my lifestyle. Nothing I do will so much as delay the end of the world, let alone prevent it. I may as well live it up, hope I check out before it gets really ugly, and pray that there's no mandatory reincarnation.
I used to live in a country that had a program to get social groups to step in when friends get to child number five. If you're poor and disadvantaged the next child is just idiocy.
The bulk of the overpopulation comes from communities with no way to stop a population boom.
But, the environmental footprint from rich Western country parents is equally nuts.
As long as you are neither problem, you're probably going to have a child that is part of the solution.
I think it's more a worry that you're bringing someone into a pretty terrible world.
"Should I even be having children in this state? I would like to be a mother one day, but it's difficult to look at the world around me and think, 'I'd like to bring kids into this world,' when I can see that I don't know how long the world is going to last at this point."
And I totally understand; we've totally fucked things for our kids and especially their kids.
The comments section: Doomers, unite!
Yes, things are tough now. Climate change is a very serious challenge ahead. I vote Green, ride a bike, etc.
All that being said, I'm probably older than most of you. I grew up during the cold war, when we sincerely believed we were at the brink of nuclear annihilation.
It didn't happen.
I will spare you the countless doomsday headlines I've read in the news over the years. The hole in the ozone layer, the wars, the genocides, the natural disasters, the political churn.
The details don't matter. We were truly terrified of the future, just like you are. Yet, the immense majority of the fears we had did not materialize, either because we took action to prevent them or because they had been overblown. We also faced some challenges that the news didn't warn us about.
We prevail, like we have always done. People are much more resilient than they imagine. You can handle it and so can your children, and your children's children. Living in fear doesn't solve the problem, so why do it?
Equating nuclear apocalypse to the climate emergency is so strange. One requires a whole chain of command to decide that their friends, family and everything they've ever believed should be destroyed, the other is the default scenario.
Details really do matter. War, nuclear war and political turmoil are all very different scenarios. Climate change will likely have more severe consequences for humanity than every war ever fought.
To counter the "doomer" (scientific) point of view you'd have to point to some feasible solutions like banning CFCs to fix the hole in the ozone. We have one, stop or severley reduce all greenhouse gas emissions, and it's not being acted upon.
Instead we've decided to keep pumping an ever increasing amount into the atmosphere each day and as a result are currently on course for 8-10°C of warming. For context the largest extinction event in Earth's history which resulted in so much death it stained the geological records happened during a temperature rise of about 8°C.
The difference between the cold war and climate change is that the former could be stopped simply by not being a warmongering idiot. The latter, even if we stop being a nature-raping idiot species, is still going to fuck. us. up.
Also, a lot of people have died in wars, genocides, natural disasters, and political churn. As a survivor for whatever reason, I'm not really sure how valuable your insight is. There are a lot of dead children out there.
Why not both? We have an unstoppable climate crisis on our hands AND a nuclear threat, again, from Russia with the conflict in Ukraine.
Thank you for the perspective. I honestly never thought about things that way before. There's not much we can do, so we do what we can.
I see where the world is headed and I don't want to bring children here. I don't have much faith in our future as a species.
I had a thought the other day.
Does it change something that a lot of people don't have a family these days ? I mean, why are we building this community, what for ? For immi
Most people don't have a family these days. Does that change something in policies ?
Are we losing the focus of why we are living in a community? Why we do the thing that we do? I mean, are we doing all of this work, the 9 to 5 shift, just to have more immigrant in our city ?
It feels a lot like we are working to create wealth just for the sake of creating wealth. What if our population growth was from babies, would that make a change in our policies? Would we think more about the future instead of thinking more about making money?
Just food for thought, looking for someone with good insight.
The "greenest" thing anyone can do is not have children.
Actually, eating the rich would be significantly greener.
Yeah, once. But if we had to keep producing rich people just to eat, we'd quickly destroy everything.
Between those two would be suicide.
So dumb. Go look at how the top corps make up 70% of the worlds emissions and stop being brainwashed like it's us small potatoes people doing shit. That one water bottle a week you put in recycling ain't doing much.
I know this is trotted out a ton, but those corps make those emissions by selling their product to consumers. We have a personal responsibility in this. We support those companies with our money.
You're kinda right, but at the same time we need to stop purchasing stuff that they sell that create population.
One example I can think of are those god damn coffee pods. Or disposable razors. I buy my coffee from a bulk store with my own reusable containers, grind it and use a French press to make my coffee. My razor is an old fashioned metal safety razor and I buy the individual blades alone. No plastics. This is so much better to fight pollution.