Quote:
Originally Posted by kool maudit
Having a kid makes me more acutely aware of the ambient, zero-population-growth messaging.
People can do as they like. But one argument that really gets me is the one where "I don't want my child to grow up in this world".
As readers of the foreign affairs thread know, I'm bearish. I think this decade hosts either a broad European war or a global one, and economic decline is a certainty.
Likely everyone, though, I'm the product of an unbroken line of ancestors, a line that goes back into creatures that weren't even human. And much more recently, I am pretty sure that at least a significant part of them lived lives like:
- Highland Scottish pig thief
- Victorian East London industrial worker
- Cornish serf
- Roman-era murder victim
and on down into proto-human lives that pretty much resemble those of Sasquatch.
So it's like... it's fine. I'm glad to be here. I'm grateful to all of them. I don't know what's coming but my line has likely had worse.
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I never bought the "I just can't raise children in this world" argument, either, and I suspect that people who say things like that never really wanted to have kids anyway.
I don't even know what a dark age collapse would mean in this day and age. Unlike 1200 BCE, we live in a world where there's more than one library and more than just a small class of people who can read and write. I don't think there will be the same kind of information loss. About 1 in 400 Canadians is a licensed electrician. There will always be somebody around to keep the lights on, in a literal sense. And whatever detritus is left over from the fighting won't be just broken stones and bones. There will be medical grade plastic, fibre optic cable, working solar panels, all that good stuff to work with...