I personally cringe when I hear a friend js having a kid. All I can think of is how bad theyre going to have it. Hell id definitely have been better off being born 20 years earlier, but these new kids are REALLY screwed unless they have super rich parents.
“Nothing new under the sun” I suppose!
Climate change is the only true existential reason to feel that way.
Everything else is just over focusing on a short term dip. On average things are getting better over the long term. The British Empire collapsed, and so will the American one, and the world will keep on turning and progressing.
Hell kids born these days may have legitimate cures for most forms of cancer by the time they’re old. We won’t.
deleted by creator
Yes.
deleted by creator
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h1jOqyjcO4g https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vUA1kFSJnYQ
I was going to say more, but basically, watch those videos (or read their references).
Good news sells bad, solar energy is being deployed really quickly and accelerating exponentially, solar has a higher return on investment than gas, coal or oil (about 8x as much in developed markets, according to the IEA), nowadays, green energy is the better one for the economy, and the billionaires just want money, so if it is the green energy that has higher returns, they will invest in that.
Green energy has had 2x as much investment as fossil fuels, and about 80% of that investment is private.
In september 2024 the UK shut down its last coal powerplant.
And I forgot the most important! There have been days where energy has a NEGATIVE COST in some places in the world because of renewables, doesn’t that sound like a financial incentive to use renewables?
you could go on for days, there is a lot being done, we just don’t know about most of it.
I’d argue that technology also, because it is consolidating wealth and power in the hands of fewer and fewer. This creates a positive feedback loop to further entrench their power. They have widened the divide and pulled up the ladder.
Oh, only climate change. Well that’s alright then. /s
Climate change is going to influence everything in our society for the worse: politics, economics, living standards, everything, including the amount of resources available to use for research.
and the world will keep on turning and progressing.
The world will keep on turning, but there is absolutely no factual basis for claiming it will keep on progressing. If anything that is one thing we can learn from history.
Climate change is going to influence everything in our society for the worse: politics, economics, living standards, everything, including the amount of resources available to use for research.
Cite the numbers that make you pessimistic.
If you don’t have numbers, then keep your crystal astrology bad vibes to yourself until you have something to back them.
I’m fucking sick of leftists acting like being moody and pessimistic is a valid political stan stance that does anything.
What kind of numbers are you going after?
I mean, probably you want numbers to prove that climate change is changing politics and economics, etc. for the worse, or maybe just numbers for proving that climate change is real.
But both of these seem like such trivial information that I’m probably just guessing wrong. But because of that, I’d be curious to know: what kind of numbers did you mean?
I can probably help digging up some for you, but not if you just meant “prove that climate change exists”. But, numbers proving that economy will suffer from climate change should be easy to find. (And I think you could just search for them yourself…)
The goal posts are just going to be moved if you produce anything with numbers on it.
VERY specific people would have been better off born 20 years ago.
The vast majority of people would be better off today.
You can imagine in another 20 years that would be different, but almost everyone is better off today than they were 20 years ago, and they will be even better 20 years from now than today.
Specific groups may have a harder time in one time period or another, but society at large is getting better at the world scale over the long term. Hope still exists.
I agree with almost all of this, but I think factoring in the imminent catastrophes we know are coming (and actively doing nothing about) will make a sizeable balance of this ‘better off vast majority’ of today.
The heaps of plastic tell a different story and define ‘getting better’ in a daunting light for those just now being born
Climate change related disasters will only get worse over the long term, though.
VERY specific people would have been better off born 20 years ago.
The people pining to repeat the mistakes of the past.
I was born over 40 years ago. I feel like there was a general consensus in the 80’s that kids being born then absolutely would be “better off” than their parents.
Reality is sinking in and we’re seeing that wasn’t the case for a lot of people.
The fact that questionability surrounding “if kids born today will be better off than their parents” even exists today seems to suggest that they will not.
But the point is it is not about the situation today, it is about the situation in 20 years, heck just 10 years, of which these people will live into and experience very soon.
but society at large is getting better at the world scale over the long term.
That used to be true, it is no longer true. And it is not a natural law that this will happen, it is just something a lot of people who have lived in the golden period of the 1950s to early 2000s inferred, without actually considering a larger swath of history than that.
Year of the Linux desktop will be worth it
Windows 11 laptops requires a webcam. The internet now wants selfies to prove that you are a certain age.
The kids now will grow up thinking that this is normal. That is what I am worried about.
We definitely need to be loud about counter-education campaigns against this.
Pushing the masses and the corporate status quo is a Herculean task, but even things as simple as retro computing and electronics / maker clubs and endeavors like Archive.org keep that spirit alive.
Heck, “The Indie Web” is even making a resurgence, many times in pure opposition to what the web has become. Things like this make me hopeful!
Can I get a source?
Not the original user and can’t find anything since but that requirement seems to have been around for new models https://www.windowscentral.com/starting-2023-windows-11-will-require-laptops-have-cameras
No. I think that things have pretty steadily gotten better over time, and that a great deal of people being upset about now for any given now comes from a tendency to focus on negatives. Could be social media or news media tending to bring negatives to the surface because it drives engagement, political activists aiming to drive or leverage upset, or so forth.
That is completely ignoring the actual man made climate change crisis which is happening at this moment. A situation which is unprecedented in human history. Pretending everything has steadily gotten better over time is not only factually wrong, but deliberate ignorance. And no it is not “big climate change science” which is trying to con you into something.
It will affect us all, whether you have your head stuck in the sand or not.
Politics, economics and war are all hard to predict for long term, but just on the count of climate change kids born today are screwed.
Very much so. I honestly think it’s at least a little cruel and selfish to have a child in a dying world.
That said, I remain supportive of the parents in my life and I try to keep that feeling to myself–unless the parent brings it up (my cousin has two very young children whom he adores, but he also worries for their futures due to climate change and political instability, and he’ll talk pretty openly with me about it).
I think we are in for a very hard 30-50 years politically and economically speaking.
Current young people are already poorer than their parents, and that’s not getting solved. Next generation will be poorer and we will have to factor in a lot of tensions and unsolved problems that I think will derive in violence, a lot of violence. And very heavy societal collapses.
Maybe I’m dramatic, but the other day I thought that’s not unlikely that a “western” country will experience a famine in the next 50 years. Many don’t produce enough food for themselves by far, the moment they don’t have the money or the possibility to buy it from other countries… Starvation it is. And with a growing population getting near the 10 billion humans, a few years of globally bad crops could devastate humankind.
So, yep, I think kids today are in for really hard times.
Maybe not societal collapses but costly upheavals certainly.
Yup, the fossil fuel foundation that enabled us to reach 10 billion is going away. Sunshine and puppies won’t sustain 10 billion eaters.
The carrying capacity of a renewable energy system is not the same as a system that uses massive amounts of surplus energy coming from the ground.
It’s lower. Far far lower. And getting there will be ugly, and your time frame is correct IMO.
Renewable energy production is increasing exponentially.
Electrical, yes. Oil is a feedstock for pretty much anything you can see in your house.
Please fertilize modern agri-business with electricity.
I’ll wait.
In the meantime, try the trick of flying across the Atlantic in 6 hours with batteries.
No doubt we’ll have electricity for as long as we can, but… the underlying civilization that uses it will not look a thing like what we have now.
Do you not already see housing supply issues, inflation, war everywhere?
War everywhere? See WW1 and WW2. Although there is certainly a risk with a large war across Europe it isn’t guaranteed and generally seems like most don’t really want one.
Maybe I’m dramatic, but the other day I thought that’s not unlikely that a “western” country will experience a famine in the next 50 years.
Drought and famine are coming for everyone in the next 50 years.
Global freshwater demand will exceed supply 40% by 2030, experts warn
You are born in the very very very best stretch the human race has ever known.
We have solutions for almost every problem which exists today.
Wars are at an historical low point.
Chances are good you’ve never been even experienced war first hand.
Housing is expensive, yes. But chances are you’re reading this on a couch or bed in a home, heated (or cooled), with a working stove, light at night and a fridge with edibles in it. And lets not talk about your immediate almost unrestricted access to all of human knowledge.
That would be unbelievable, impossible even during 99.9% of human history. (Or somewhere near this figure)
You should stop doomscrolling and start reading the real human history.
All of human knowledge at your fingertips. And this is what you chose to distill from it.
I think you’re missing the point.
Dying of disease because there simply isn’t a cure is a tragedy, but dying of disease because the cure is too expensive, not because of material and resource limitations but because some shithead just wants to be rich, when in reality we could produce enough for everyone - is a farce beyond comprehension.
We escaped the wolves and I sure am glad for it, but we have senselessly created new wolves just to throw people to them.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not making an appeal to nature, or using the noble savage fallacy, nor am I reactionary moron who thinks everyone went to Galas or that in the past I’d be admiring the decorative architecture rather than be the slave making it, I’m a huge simp for science and technology, but I also can see that the world is headed in a very dark direction compared to the 2010s.
As a minority in both legislation and in practice my rights and safety have been actively eroded since the 90s and things were quite literally just better back then for basically everyone.
I struggle to think what exactly would be worse for your average Westerner being born earlier in actual human scales of time, like e.g. the 1990s.
The boomers around me don’t even understand that you don’t just “get” a job for existing, and my parents can’t imagine having a degree and worrying about making rent or skipping on heating or meals in a “first world country” like the UK, and they grew up in the fucking soviet union and not exactly during it’s heyday.
Living in wartime is awful. Living while wishing for things to be fixed, or even for any kind of hope, even if it means death in war, isn’t that much better.
deleted by creator
Wars are at an historical low point.
Factually incorrect statement.
Even a cursory search shows the statement to be factual. Pick one
Blatantly incorrect.
New data shows record number of armed conflicts. In fact only the period of WWII saw more armed conflict than we are currently experiencing.
Are you living under a rock?
You don’t need to google this shit…
There is a large land war in Europe with combined casualties likeling going to hit 2 million within a year. north Korea entered the war on Russian side.
Israel is exterminating Arabs in Gaza.
There is a big war in sudan
RWANDA invaded DRC.
Europe is re arming. China has been re arming and rattling saber for Taiwan.
India and Pakistan always doing their thing. Yemen is in chronic proxy war.
There is a proxy war in burma
Thailand is testing Cambonia
You repeating propaganda from 15 years ago.
Get educated.
Still an historical low point. Did you not check a single link I posted?
You don’t need to google this shit…
NM, you admitted it.
ALL of that has been going on since WWII, and slowly dialing down. The Ukraine war is such a shock because it’s so damned unusual.
I didn’t say the world was at peace, but war and death is at an all-time low. Look at the casualties reported in the news today. We’re stunned if 100 people get killed in a single attack. There were WWI and WWII battles you’ve never even heard of where 4,000 men were killed at once.
As to my education: I have 2 years of Advanced European History under my belt and 4 college credits to show for it. Not to pull the age card, but at 54 I’ve lived a fair bit of modern history. I’m guessing you weren’t around when global thermonuclear war was hanging over our head as a day-to-day fact of life?
You posted a google link, so no, noone read it.
I posted a non-google link which factually disproved your claim.
Ukraine war alone reserved the trend.
The only thing that comapres is korean war.
You larping old regime propaganda in earnest jfc
Quit being a boomer and look at the numbers.
This is such an odd conversation. I provided many charts, many numbers to look at, and you’re still arguing, what exactly?
BTW, Boomers were my parents, and I still have no idea what propaganda you’re referring to. If anything, American propaganda has always been about how violent the world is and how we need more defense spending.
Can you name any propaganda where the government has espoused how peaceful the world is?!
You have not provided any charts or numbers. I provided a link to an actual study on the subject disproving your claim.
I get what you are saying but everyone is ignoring the human condition. We feel things based on how they are around us in a relative sense.
It doesn’t matter if it is statistically better. Modern times are getting worse for people. Health, privacy, freedom are all declining in America. That is what people see and feel. I’m tired of people acting like we have life horizons that can see centuries.
Chronic health is a real current issue and it absolutely destroys quality of life too.
So yeah, great, best time to be alive. But since I was a kid many things have gotten worse. From health (cost, accessibility) and education to privacy. Maybe we will be much farther ahead in 20 years, but the next 10 are looking grim.
Your information is outdated by 5-10 years unfortunately.
Wars are at an historical low point.
Global conflict levels highest since end of Second World War.
We have solutions for almost every problem which exists today.
A very bold claim. We have lots of solutions, but not the will or resources to implement them. Climate change being the primary problem of which we have no real solution.
What? Are you stupid? Realism with a tinge of optimism in this thread clearly designed to be a crying, woe-is-me circle-jerk? Get with it man! /s
It is not realism though, since it is based on factually incorrect statements.
reading real history is work though. just like working out and eating well.
doomscrolling is like the equivalent of sitting you your ass and eating junk food/delivery and satiating that lizard brain to the exclusion of their higher functions and potentials.
majority of people are going to choose the latter as much as they can.
Word. Just because America is on a downward slide everyone acting like these are the worst times ever. LOL. The people need some history classes.
When I was a kid, cancer was basically a death sentence. AIDS certainly was! Some of the tech I’ve experienced blows my mind. Wondering if my wife and I had finally caught COVID (we did 🤬), so I busted out the free laboratory kit I got in the mail. That was work for a hospital lab, and you were going to wait a few days. Sliced the side of my finger off, and they grew it back. I could go on forever.
In the movie Armageddon (1998), talking about the age of the space station being 10-years old, “Most of us don’t drive cars that old.” A 10-yo car was trash, common knowledge. My truck is a 2004 and my wife’s car is a 2014. Both run great. And I could go on for ages as to how much safer vehicles are. None of the things we take for granted like ABS, air bags, crumple zones, none of that existed when I was a kid. Hell, some cars didn’t have safety glass!
People will next tell me that global warming is a new threat that will kill us all. Friends and neighbors, we already survived an ice age.
Once you can’t feed yourself, your children are dying, and the authorities are actively trying to kill you, how much worse of a times do you want!? People are being sent to concentration camps. The middle class is disappearing. Everyone not a billionaire is suffering.
All the time. I fake being happy for the parents and on the inside think What the fuck is wrong with you?
Im glad im not the only one.
Has nothing to do with lemmy or reddit either. I’ve always felt that way even when. I was a kid I couldn’t imagine why people want them. Must be something in the genes because im pretty sure my parents shouldn’t have had kids either lol!
Thirty-ish years ago, my grandfather said he felt sorry for me because of the state of the world.
Human nature is to say things are going to shit, everything is terrible, and things were better in some non-existent past.
Yeah, things suck now. But they also sucked thirty years ago and 100 years ago. The difference is that we know the outcome to (some) of the problems people faced then. And (generally) the worst case scenario didn’t happen.
Yeah, we need to fight the rich on climate change. But we will. And we’ll mitigate the problems we can. And we’ll tell our grandkids that we don’t envy their future.
30 years ago, if your microwave went out, half the time it might have just been the fuse, which you could buy a pack of really cheap at the local Radio Shack.
Today, what the fuck is a fuse? They want you to chuck that old microwave and buy a new one that connects to the internet…
Today, people have the money to buy a new microwave every time the old one breaks. Things were a lot more expensive then, and electronic repair was a viable industry because of it.
I can’t remember ever actually buying a microwave in the first place.
Then again, I’m not normal, I know how to diagnose, repair, overhaul and even Frankenstein microwave ovens, so if one ever goes out, I’ll just keep an eye out by nearby dumpsters for scrap parts microwaves and rebuild whichever of the two is in better condition…
I hate living in such a wasteful society, I’m all about the right to repair!
I agree that living in a more repair-friendly society would be superior, but I’m very curious; just how often is your microwave failing that you’ve semi-consistently dumpster dived? Are microwaves a hobby for you?
It’s not even often to be honest, maybe once every 5 years or so, and that’s counting more than just us, I’ve fixed/rebuilt microwaves for friends and neighbors as well, but definitely not often.
My late father taught me the basics of electronics repair starting at age 10, and once the internet became a semi-common thing (dialup days), I found https://repairfaq.org/ which expanded my knowledge and understanding quite a bit.
My late father was also a bit of a junk hoarder, so back in the day I had plenty of scrap electronics and appliances to practice on…
These days I don’t have to use those skills as often as daddy thought I might, but they’re still handy skills.
That makes some sense, and sounds like some quality experiences. Thank you for the link, I always get a little excited when I see a website with such a basic look, it usually means they care more about conveying their material than adding extra flair.
a new microwave is like $20-50 dude. And no, it has no internet.
I’ve never bought one, I always repair them. Spare parts are pretty easy to find near dumpsters, given how often people just throw them away…
Cool I’d rather go to the store and buy one than dumpster dive and spend hours of my time repairing something I can buy in 15m for $50. Hours of my time is far more valuable than the $50 I’d save dumpster diving. Must be nice to have a lot of free time to go dumpster diving to save a few bucks. I might have done that when I was broke in my 20s.
Meh, the dumpsters are within walking distance, and I’d say on average someone out at our apartments throws out a microwave around twice a month or so. As long as the keypad works, the typical issues I tend to find are either a blown fuse or shorted high voltage diode, both way cheaper than even the gas it takes to drive 8 miles to the nearest Walmart. And I usually have suitable parts in my parts bin anyways.
And between two microwaves, there’s almost always enough good parts between the two to make one work. It takes me less time to fix most microwaves than it does to even drive to Walmart. 🤷
My children are still very young, but oh are they happy!
They are enjoying their life and no future suffering will ever take that away from them.
I wouldn’t want to deny those awesome humans their right to play as merrily as they do. To create, to enjoy life. They exist right now as well, in 2025 and 2026.
The end of life is always painful. Life is still worth it.
It’s a very personal decision and I’m glad about every human that’s not born on this crowded planet. But collectively not having children feels pretty bleak to me. Are we as a species already giving up, rolling on our backs and wait to go extinct? Come on! There is so much beauty and so much to do in this world.
My children are having a great time, they bring joy, purpose and chaos to my life. I love having them around, even though their future scares me. That has always been part of becoming a parent.
I feel like some doomer lemmings need to go outside a little more, instead of telling themselves and their screens how awful everything is. Life was brutal a century ago.
Unclear. Maybe things are going to get better; it’s happened before right?
It hasn’t been all bad news lately, too. If you’re not straight, cis, or from the the West, being a boomer wasn’t such a great deal.
it’s happened before right?
not what we’ve done to the ecosystem. we’re in entirely uncharted territory.
That’s true, at least in our tenure as a species. We can project where it’s going pretty well, though, and assuming your kids aren’t in a Dhaka slum they’ll be 'ight, if deprived of the opportunity to ever see coral reefs and with higher bills and taxes to compensate for the weather.
and assuming your kids aren’t in a Dhaka slum they’ll be 'ight
you’re an optimist.
we’re all going to cook, it’s just a matter of how long it’ll take to catch up to you.
we’re gonna cook because some fucks said “I don’t care, I want more money.”
The science says we might see 4 degrees ultimately. That amounts to more severe weather of all kinds, and means a higher increase in places which will lose snow cover, but it’s nothing an AC unit and careful emergency planning can’t handle, and it won’t necessarily harm agriculture more than it helps it.
The science says we might see 4 degrees ultimately.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c166xxd4y36o
this is how hot it is today. add 4c average warming, and these spikes will be even higher and more lethal. people are dying in this heat today.
but it’s nothing an AC unit
lol, when everyone cranks their ac and the grid blows, good luck with that.
stick your head back in the sand.
Generators, batteries, just a better grid. If it happened tomorrow it would be scary, but it will be gradual. Really poor people in vulnerable areas might not have the option to adapt, which I mentioned, but the average Lemming does.
Is dying your retirement plan or something? I’m not the one contradicting the experts here.
if it happened tomorrow
it’s happening NOW.
buildout all the grid you can, it won’t be enough for everyone, and when it collapses, everyone’s fucked.
Is dying your retirement plan
Did your parents have any children that lived? I bet they regret that.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/potentially-record-breaking-heat-wave-180834697.html
stick your head back in the sand and stop replying if you can’t support your argument.
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-00239-4
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/european-heat-deaths_n_6798bfe6e4b0e3bbf46ca2ad
https://www.newsweek.com/extreme-heat-killing-more-americans-ever-1811274
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/report-extreme-heat-us-climate-crisis_n_61313a6ce4b0df9fe273debf
No. Only joy for the new parents and child. (Though I do put in work to shore up their finances, try to get them my next bonus.)
Several reasons: being a kid today is better than being a kid 20-50 years ago. Toys are cooler, parenting competence and training has broadly improved, minecraft exists, and there is some really good childrens TV.
Health risks are largely down, especially compared to 35 years ago. (Anecdotally about 10% of families around my cohort lost kids. Far fewer in the younger cohorts.)
While economic mobility is down, more people means a stronger voting block. Boomers run the world because their protests changed policy. I see indications that kids are a more competent politic than earlier generations (eg, climate and LGBTQ rights), we just need them to matter sooner.
For what it’s worth, the economy is not just bad, it’s breaking. If workers remain this exploited, there will soon be nobody to sell to. We are seeing large (usually stupid) interventions to try and address it, I put nontrivial odds on something sane eventually being tried.
War deaths are low and really don’t seem likely to increase dramatically (see here).
Edit: I forgot to add LGBTQ rights/acceptance! While there are definitely still places that are not safe, many of them were not safe before (and that was just the status quo), I believe the risks have decreased and will continue to do so, while the medical access has improved (and that hopefully will continue, though I’m personally expecting that to get worse before it gets better. I think kids today probably get good care in 10 years, some kids 6-12 are in for a bad time.)
Toys are cooler, parenting competence and training has broadly improved, minecraft exists, and there is some really good childrens TV.
You’ve got a lot of good points, but I want to quibble about this one. I’m not an expert, but everything I’ve read about childhood development tells me toys like blocks, string, dirt/sand/water, and paper/pencils are the best toys. They are open-ended and drive critical thinking, exploration, and creativity. TV is the worst as it encourages passivity. Even when educational, TV encourages kids to sit and accept input rather than doing anything with that information. Yes, minecraft is akin to online blocks, and it does have some logic training, but it teaches in-game physics instead of letting toddlers discover real-world physics.
Seems like a good one to quibble about! I’d like to think through it more myself. I’m going off personal anecdote, so if you have data sources to add I am extremely interested.
I think the strongest ‘yes, and’ is to point out that TV and toys competing with blocks were both very much present in the 90s and 00s. In the childcare settings I see, Bluey and paw patrol are world’s better than Clifford, teletubbies, or Barney. Hilde and SheRa are both excellent television. (I do not wish to disparage Mr Roger’s or Sesame Street; note they are still available!)
For toys, I note the spread of ‘Discovery Boxes’ that make those physics lessons you highlight substantially more accessible. You don’t need a mentor whose well educated to steer you towards the cool (and at least directionally correct) properties of nature. I saw only a handful of these before 2010, but they seem much more common now. Compare with the figurines, cheesy electronic noise makers, and furbies.
3D printers are also becoming more accessible (if you don’t know someone who has one, your local library might provide! They’re reaching that price-point), which has allowed kids (and me) to play with interesting mechanical devices, precise shapes, and have some say in the exact toy you enjoy. I know of one little girl who got special printed ‘poop’ emojis, which she helped customize and size for her intended play.
We also have much better board games starting to reach this cohort. Candyland, snakes-and-ladders, and sometimes uno are what I remember seeing 20 years ago. While they still make an appearance, I am also seeing Project L, Sushi Go, and unstable unicorns in playrooms. Classrooms now have Hex in addition to chess or checkers.
We can move the range we’re looking at to earlier, so that we aren’t comparing with the 90s low point (TV still present, mass produced toys still common). However I think as we slide back further, we find substantially more abusive parenting practices, and I think these wash out the benefits of more creative toys. I suspect this is partially causal; parents can manage their children without snapping psychologically partially because we do have quality entertainment for the kids. It’s hard work being entertainment all day. Someone could argue (but I am not confident) that entertainment time is replacing pointless labor/waiting/punishment time, and kids are still spending similar hours running around, playing in dirt, and stacking blocks.
My second argument would be to challenge the premise a bit. I know people who are living partially (or even mostly) for the next big cool movie/book/game/show/toy in their life. Silksong has a release date and I certainly feel better about this next week. I think it’s an objective improvement that the film nerds get to enjoy quality shows from age 3, and I don’t think it would be fair to begrudge them the opportunity (or that so many people take the opportunity). This is a reason to be happy for the kids.
Honestly, I don’t. I came up in the '80s, wasn’t diagnosed with autism until 2022. My life would have been so different if I had known about it when I was a child, and if autism was as well-understood as it is today so that I had the support I needed. Kids today who have issue like that are identified much earlier and helped more. The steady march of knowledge and science is almost always a good thing. So, the present and the future are always the place to be for most people most of the time. Of course a Gazan isn’t feeling the giddy excitement of scientific discovery at this moment, but for the human species as a whole, things have never been better. There is always someone suffering immense, unimaginable hardship. The human project is overwhelmingly not that.
Every generation has existential concerns, too. Climate change and the rise of fascism is on the cards right now. When I was a kid and adolescent in the '80s and '90s, I was in the middle of the N. Irish ‘Troubles’. Before that, people had the Cold War to worry about. Before that, WWII and WWI. But things are always better than they were ‘yesterday’ if you take stock of everyone as a whole and not just those suffering the worst in any given moment.
If you took the average kid born today in an average society, and transplanted them into the 1970s with the same socioeconomic starting point, it would be tantamount to gross child abuse given the vast ocean of stuff they could have had, but now will never have (in their childhood, at least). And I’m not even talking about technology and the internet; just the treatment of children by the state and schools alone would be night-and-day different. Kids are individuals today, in the ‘70s you were your parents’ property and didn’t develop a sense-of-self worth respecting until you were old enough to get drunk.
I still wouldn’t bring a kid into existence, but for those that are here already, 2025 is the best time to be born. Like if I were my parents, I would not have had me while the country was tearing itself apart with bombings and shootings every day. But I’m glad I was born when I was and not when my parents were kids.
IMO climate change is kind of a different beast than hardships from the past.
This mostly but also a lot of that support that’s available today is being stripped away.
Tell it to the young American men who were drafted into the Vietnam War, and were dead 3 months after receiving their notices to report.
Your point? Climate change has the potential to affect every living thing on the planet. Even the horrors of world war 2 didn’t have that kind of reach. Additionally, humans eventually have to stop fighting when enough of them are dead. Climate change is a threat that humanity can unleash but be potentially unable to stop. Like I said, a different kind of beast.
I am quite certain they would be happy to hear that their friends and family back home continued to live on past them.
Climate change is the sort of existential threat that will literally kill every single person you’ve ever met. It is not the same. If I could volunteer to give my own life to reverse catastrophic climate change it wouldn’t even be a question. But no matter how many of us go and die about it we are now past the point where we can make a difference. The ice caps are in runaway melt loops. This is now a self perpetuating problem that cannot be solved without some new major scientific breakthrough. Habitable portions of the earth are going to shrink to single digit percentages of what we have right now, over the next couple hundred years. We can no longer stop this from happening, and it all happened because some of the very worst parts of humanity decided they needed a few extra thousand dollars every year.
That is a very Americentric viewpoint. People are getting killed in wars as we speak, in fact more people are getting killed in wars as we speak than did in the 1960s.
They did not have climate change to worry about though, because they were blissfully unaware of that fact.
Slow and steady boil vs a quick(er) release.
Not the best way to die of course, but I’d choose the quick path if given the choice.But the path to the end is littered with grief on both ways just spread more and in a different way.
I think that, no matter when you were born in history, there were trials and tribulations.
Yes, but there were definitely parts of history where we looked towards the future and wanted to make something awesome. Where we were hopeful.
Today it seems we already know we’re on a completely fucked trajectory. That time is running out, but the people who care don’t have the power, and the people with power think nothing can touch them.
