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These stories get worse and worse. And nobody ever does anything to fix it. Yet another stressor for us oft-maligned millennials: We are supposed to be hitting

These stories get worse and worse. And nobody ever does anything to fix it. Yet another stressor for us oft-maligned millennials: We are supposed to be hitting the "grown-up" mile markers, and we are supposed to be having children. But we are smacked in the face with a doomsday scenario, with no signs of large portions of the US population taking it seriously. "How can we afford a green new deal?" How can we afford to not at least TRY to reverse course? Why aren't millennials having kids? Look at the devastation around you. Will they be born into a world careening towards mass-famine and war? What will be left of the earth in the coming years? What do they stand to inherit? With cloning and gene editing and CRISPR babies, are my genes even valuable? Why not just clone astronauts? And is it better for the whole earth if I choose to not have children? Personally, my partner and I have decided it is better if we do not have biological children. I come from a family that tends to adopt children instead of having them, so that is no huge worry to me. Am I afraid of missing out on an amazing, transformative human experience? Yeah. But if you look at the map of the possible paths human civilization can take, "here be dragons."

yostrovs 8y ago
Are you comparing this time to some other, better one? If so, which? Just curious when prospects were better for children overall.
KorematsuFred 8y ago
> But if you look at the map of the possible paths human civilization can take, "here be dragons." Take a chill pill. Entire US society was made to think just like you 30 years ago with utter garbage theories of population explosion and how our children will strive. Ignore these idiotic "expert predictions", these people are no different from the "experts" who made USA attack Iraq for weapons of mass destruction.
sarah8888 8y ago
The solution is to restrict immigration to other wealthy countries. We need fewer people in the world, and one way to achieve that is simply to greatly limit who can come into the first world. That means more resources for those already there, and higher wages. Besides, the potential population to come out of the 3rd world is potentially unlimited. We need to restrict immigration to avoid population replacement.
joefourier 8y ago
> Why aren't millennials having kids? Look at the devastation around you. Will they be born into a world careening towards mass-famine and war? What will be left of the earth in the coming years? What do they stand to inherit? If you were instead having children between 1950 and 1991, when the world was literally teetering on the brink of nuclear armageddon, would you not have reached the same conclusion? What about during the 1940s during World War II? Or 1930s, during the Great Depression? World War I and its aftermath is not ideal either, with a global pandemic killing a large percentage of the world's population, and many experts rightly predicting the resumption of hostilities in the coming years. 1871 to 1914 was great if you happened to be in a wealthy European country, of the right social class and ethnicity, and avoided dying of the many diseases (it was appropriately called "The Gilded Age" in the United States after all). Of course the past appears more certain with the benefit of hindsight, but individuals still had children despite the circumstances and possible futures at the time appearing far worse than those of the present. The world did go through large numbers of mass famines, warfare, pandemics and societal upheavals, but humanity kept on reproducing, surviving and innovating, and now we have much better tools to deal with our problems than ever before.

yostrovs 8y ago

Are you comparing this time to some other, better one? If so, which? Just curious when prospects were better for children overall.

KorematsuFred 8y ago

> But if you look at the map of the possible paths human civilization can take, "here be dragons." Take a chill pill. Entire US society was made to think just like you 30 years ago with utter garbage theories of population explosion and how our children will strive. Ignore these idiotic "expert predictions", these people are no different from the "experts" who made USA attack Iraq for weapons of mass destruction.

sarah8888 8y ago

The solution is to restrict immigration to other wealthy countries. We need fewer people in the world, and one way to achieve that is simply to greatly limit who can come into the first world. That means more resources for those already there, and higher wages. Besides, the potential population to come out of the 3rd world is potentially unlimited. We need to restrict immigration to avoid population replacement.

joefourier 8y ago

> Why aren't millennials having kids? Look at the devastation around you. Will they be born into a world careening towards mass-famine and war? What will be left of the earth in the coming years? What do they stand to inherit? If you were instead having children between 1950 and 1991, when the world was literally teetering on the brink of nuclear armageddon, would you not have reached the same conclusion? What about during the 1940s during World War II? Or 1930s, during the Great Depression? World War I and its aftermath is not ideal either, with a global pandemic killing a large percentage of the world's population, and many experts rightly predicting the resumption of hostilities in the coming years. 1871 to 1914 was great if you happened to be in a wealthy European country, of the right social class and ethnicity, and avoided dying of the many diseases (it was appropriately called "The Gilded Age" in the United States after all). Of course the past appears more certain with the benefit of hindsight, but individuals still had children despite the circumstances and possible futures at the time appearing far worse than those of the present. The world did go through large numbers of mass famines, warfare, pandemics and societal upheavals, but humanity kept on reproducing, surviving and innovating, and now we have much better tools to deal with our problems than ever before.