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
My grandma was born pre world war 2, she was literally born during the rise of fascism, then lived through her family getting conscripted and some killed, having to flee to the country side during the bombing raids, then through years of post war rationing.
She then travelled around the world during the 50s, raised a family during the 60s and 70s, and enjoyed a long, happy, fruitful, and fulling retirement / art career from the 80s, through the 90s, and 00s, and just passed away this year.
And there was zero chance she regretted being born.
It’ll be over within the next century or so
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
That and the impending societal collapse from Climate Change lol
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
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!
Very. I already dont see a bright future. People born today dont know anything but a broken world. Me being born 2003 atleast saw a slight bit of it
I’m sorry, but you are wildly naive. You’ve seen 22 years of this planet. You have no idea how good you and your potential offspring actually have it.
Age has nothing to do with how one is naive. Humanity will survive the climat crisis. That is sure…but at what cost…and that is what scares me
I can agree with you on all of that. In this instance my argument is that it’s always been scary. We hide behind a false sense of security. It’s always been this scary. It will always be this scary. We were born to die. Humankind is just like a human life. At one point, whether we like it or not, it will all end.
We are not born to die, just as a book does not start to finish
Unfortunately, there are people in situations where they struggle to get much out of life, and I don’t think any large society without hierarchy and wealth divide has existed
We are not born to die, just as a book does not start to finish
Both of those things are true though. We are born to die, and a book does start with the intent of it finishing.
Maybe I meant “We are born THEN die.”
I’ve got a few decades on the other commenter. We are making gains in some areas: medicine, entertainment, and convenience. It is definitely true that our lives are much better in certain ways.
But then there’s shit that is also going very wrong. Runaway inflation (particularly on housing, healthcare, education, and childcare), loss of community / loneliness epidemic, increasing wealth inequality, increasing political polarization / extremism, climate change, and societal stratification caused by technology. The last 2 in particular are “big ticket” hazards that I don’t see reversing course and will only continue to get worse.
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.
deleted by creator
Even a cursory search shows the statement to be factual. Pick one
deleted by creator
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?
deleted by creator
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.
You posted a google link, so no, noone read it.
I posted a non-google link which factually disproved your claim.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
Climate change is the number one thing. The past had fascism, tools, slavery - but it didn’t have an Extinction level event looming just cresting over the horizon. I’m not having any kids until there is actual meaningful progress towards fixing that… So it looks like I’m not having kids.
deleted by creator
Of course it did.
If not for the courage and conviction of Vasily Arkhipov, civilization, and potentially humanity, may have ended in 1964. People had kids for 30 years under the very real threat of nuclear extermination. In the end it turned out pretty well.
People had kids during the black plague.
While a climate crisis is more than just a threat, we don’t know what’s going to happen. We have ideas, and models, and educated guesses… But not knowledge.
I wouldn’t tell anyone to have kids if they don’t want to. But no one should plan their life around sparing a hypothetical person from the hypothetical struggles of a slow moving crisis we don’t fully understand.
The thing is that was the threat of nuclear extermination. It didn’t actually happen. Climate change is not a threat, it is happening, right now and is only going to get progressively worse in the near future.
While a climate crisis is more than just a threat, we don’t know what’s going to happen. We have ideas, and models, and educated guesses… But not knowledge.
So far all educated guesses have been overtaken by the speed of events. It is getting worse faster than even the experts had anticipated.
It’s getting worse sure. But we have no idea how bad it will get, or what the total effect will be. We have no idea what role technology will play in the future of this crisis, or if recovery would outpace models in the event we decided to take the problem seriously.
Bear in mind that acid rain was a real crisis that was happening in the 80s and the hole in the Ozone was a real crisis that was happening in the 90s. When we made an honest effort to fix those problems… They got fixed.
Also, we can guess at what species will or won’t fare well, but not how they’ll adapt or what else might thrive in a new environment.
And yeah, it’s possible that temps will spike faster than we could ever imagine or deploy solutions and we’ll all bake to death in a sprawling global desert if we don’t all starve from the sweeping famine. I just have more faith in human ingenuity, and will than that.
How about sparing them from a life of working constantly to have job insecurity, no social safety net, and a bullet for a retirement plan? Birth is cruelty.
I think you may just need to talk to somebody this comment is out of my depth.
We’re all talking now. I don’t find that perspective to be one that equates uniquely to a depressed person. That perspective is relatively prevalent within this thread, but also somewhat prevalent within social circles that I find myself in.
“my life is so miserable that I would rather see the continuation of the species voluntarily end that risk someone else suffers like me” is depression. Maybe it’s not suicidal depression, but it probably requires intervention.
Maybe it’s just immature edgelord BS, but if not that’s a serious problem.
I really think you’re missing the target entirely.
There’s not a biological imperative for humans to reproduce. It’s pretty egotistical to assume that your species “deserves” to exist. Can you tell me what about our species is so special?
Calling something “a problem,” and failing to articulate on what specifically makes it a problem is MAGA level thinking.
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!
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.
Considering that my outlook on the future is grim, I would say that I do, yes.
But on the other hand, when I look at my 3yo nephew and how my sister raises him, teaching him inclusiveness, limiting his exposure to screens as much as possible, and encouraging him to draw and go outdoors, it gives me some hope that maybe not all is lost.
and how my sister raises him, teaching him inclusiveness, limiting his exposure to screens as much as possible, and encouraging him to draw and go outdoors, it gives me some hope that maybe not all is lost.
that’s incredibly rare
Now thats good parenting !
All ye who enter abandon all hope
Seriously, you people are a bunch of cake eaters. “The future is scary and things are getting worse.” It’s always been scary, you’ve just been privileged enough for it not to be.
All I can think of is how bad theyre going to have it.
Bro, people have it bad NOW. Life is and has always been suffering and struggle. Get out of your online bubble and go see some shit. Anyone here who says their life outlook looks bleak would have said the exact same shit 30 years ago or even 100 years ago.
Life is suffering no matter when.
Seriously. I regularly meet people who make top 5% incomes, like 250K+. They living in luxury condos, have had their entire life paved out for them by welathy parents, and will never have any real problems or struggles in their lives.
What do they talk about every time? How poor they are. How everything is so hard. How they struggle so much with daily tasks. How their job is so awful. Why can’t they just go be on a yacht somewhere forever? How their friend/boss/parent is mean and not giving them more stuff, etc. etc. Why isn’t their life perfect and wonderful life they were promised? Why aren’t they famous and rich like some other person they met once? Oh, and how the govt is evil because it taxes them too much and it’s not fair that their multi-million dollar inheritance might be taxed too so they might only inherent $20 million, not $28 million, the horror and unfairness of it all!
And the millionaires/billionaires… all feel this same way too. Hence why they are all building apocalypse estates in New Zealand and bunkers in old missile silos and whining about how the mean government taxing them is so unfair.
Just read all of Vonnegut’s works again. It’s weird hearing him outline, from the 1940s onward, the same exact issues we have today. There are easily 300 passages I could quote here and claim as my own commentary on modern life. No one would blink.
“The good Earth - we could have saved it, but we were too damn cheap and lazy.”
“America is the wealthiest nation on Earth, but its people are mainly poor, and poor Americans are urged to hate themselves. To quote the American humorist Kin Hubbard, ‘It ain’t no disgrace to be poor, but it might as well be.’ It is in fact a crime for an American to be poor, even though America is a nation of poor.”
Suffering is not new. It’s universal. To exist is to suffer. Even if we were to find an infinite source of energy and food, we would find a way to suffer.
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.
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.
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.
Maybe not societal collapses but costly upheavals certainly.
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
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.
I feel like most people today have kids just because they feel that’s what they should be doing or because they just want a kid. I feel having kids is almost, incredibly selfish? If that makes sense.
What an odd take. Reproducing is arguably the #1 motivation, and purpose, of all life on this planet. Biologically anyway. You’re taking issue with a fundamental trait of life that’s baked into our DNA.
May as well deem people selfish for wanting food and shelter too.
Yeah, I don’t get how people can think like this but not want nukes to take out everything. Like you’re living this shit, too, if you are willing to keep living this shit, why do you assume it’s a bad thing for anyone to bring someone else into it? Anti-natalism is pro-extinction from my pov.
Not that I have an issue with people taking themselves out of the gene pool or anything, I just find the position wildly inconsistent with anyone who wants to continue living themselves.
And to be clear, I mean specifically the “if you choose to have a kid, you are bad” position, I can understand “having kids is not for me, I don’t want to do parenting”.
Hey there, I’ll try to clear things up a bit. At this point in time, here’s a list of things going on in the world:
1.) Collapse of world democracies- the US is fascist now with several countries on their way. It’s a reasonable assumption that a child born today will experience less freedom than you ever have.
2.) Collapse of the environment. - The planet is becoming uninhabitable. 60% of insect species are gone. Temperatures are rising. There’s more than a few inferences that can be made from this…
3.) Collapse of the middle class - it kinda ties into #1, and a lot of people have seen this coming for a while too. We’re being split into an ownership class and a working class. If that divide continues growing (like graphs would indicate) we’re heading towards a neo-feudalist state. That’s not a pleasant experience for anyone other than those at the top. I’m not at the top, you probably aren’t either.
4.) Idiocracy Effect - the beginning part of idiocracy, where it’s explained that dumb people are popping out 10 kids while intelligent people are spending years planning their first. If you are one of the smart people, you’d be forcing a new version of yourself to live in a world with exponentially more dumb people than the world you live in today. If you’re one of the dumb people, well….
The last one doesn’t get a #, but I also have questions surrounding consent for existence. I won’t get into that because I don’t have a fully formulated opinion on that specific area yet. I’m still working it out for myself.
Might want to add resource depletion to your list.
Global freshwater demand will exceed supply 40% by 2030, experts warn and 90 per cent of Earth’s topsoil at risk by 2050
Fresh water is already low in many places and with no water or arable land to grow food in, that’s not a future that anyone is surviving.
