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> It’s only the world a hundred years on that leaves his hopes a blank. My son seems to take the end of everything, of all human endeavor and creation, for gran

> It’s only the world a hundred years on that leaves his hopes a blank. My son seems to take the end of everything, of all human endeavor and creation, for granted. This is so sad. It is the purposeful breakdown of obligation and responsibility. After all "Entitlement will thrive where there is a lack of obligation." And entitlement is the antithesis of responsibility. > If you don’t believe in the Future, unreservedly and dreamingly, if you aren’t willing to bet that somebody will be there to cry when the Clock finally, ten thousand years from now, runs down, then I don’t see how you can have children. If you have children, I don’t see how you can fail to do everything in your power to ensure that you win your bet, and that they, and their grandchildren, and their grandchildren’s grandchildren, will inherit a world whose perfection can never be accomplished by creatures whose imagination for perfecting it is limitless and free. This is the correct response that correctly recognizes each person's personal responsibility and societal obligation. We have a future should we choose it. Keep your children away from death cults who would say otherwise.

ekianjo 4y ago
> My son seems to take the end of everything, of all human endeavor and creation, for granted. That's called education failure.
- coldtea 4y ago
  It's also parroting what he hears from around him. It's not like his 8 year old had some unique insights and gave much thought to the situation. It's 99% imitation speach - like the faux-tweets and messages from kids parroting what their parents think (often with adult-like word choices, speech patterns, and everything).
mempko 4y ago
I think what we are finding out quickly is the true death cults are those that think we have a future if we keep doing what we're doing.
- kardianos 4y ago
  I don't object to reasoned change. I don't object to warning about dangers of continuing a current trajectory. I object to putting ideology over naturalistic reasoning. I object to not having kids or telling kids they don't have a future.
  - selfhoster11 4y ago
    If nothing changes, they won't have a future. It's that simple.
    - kardianos 4y ago
      I believe we have the capacity to live on Mars and even eventually the Moon. The Earth is still much more hospitable then either of those. We have proven oil reserves that will last 100 more years. So lets transition to electric and nuclear before then. Also, be careful of Marxians and other Ideologues who would look for any excuse to tear society down so they can try their social experiments again. Be that class, identity, or climate. Solutions, yes. Tear everything down because it isn't perfect, no.
      - selfhoster11 4y ago
        OK, great. But if we stick to oil for those 100 years, we'll continue killing planetary biodiversity, which will cause unknown knock-on effects that will make it hard to grow food the normal way, even if we're only looking at effects on humans. Is that really a good way to live? Saying that the current situation is imperfect is like saying that jumping off a bridge puts you in a situation that isn't ideal. We need to pull our collective heads out of our collective asses and start investing in alternative energy sources - now, not in 10 or 20 or 50 years.
        germinalphrase 4y ago
        My gut feeling is that the science/tech side of this is mature and becoming more so all the time. Our true cultural failure is articulating specific, accessible, and optimistic visions for what the future could actually look like. Our current teenagers and young adults came up in a time period where dystopian stories were prominent. Maybe we need to see a prominent success of an optimistic worldview. People won’t fight for an idea they can’t imagine.
pjc50 4y ago
> We have a future should we choose it. As in the old Tonto/Lone Ranger joke, who do you mean by "we"? The Ukranian crisis reminds us that a particular disease of power is that it collapses to "I". It is possible that the man with the power decides there should be no future for you. > Keep your children away from death cults who would say otherwise. Who do you have in mind here?
- kardianos 4y ago
  > Who do you have in mind here? Ideologies that see castrating yourself or you children as a moral good. Ideologies that see humans as a parasite upon the earth, where our best option is our own destruction. Ideologies that see humans as being naturally good, and when confronted with evil, do not confront the possibility of evil in themselves, on in others.
  - mkr-hn 4y ago
    >> "Ideologies that see castrating yourself or you children as a moral good." Can you expand on this? I've never heard of that one. I know some people confuse accepting and affirming trans people with this because they've been given twisted ideas about what acceptance means and what happens from media grifters, but I charitably assume that's not what you mean here.
    - pcmaffey 4y ago
      Circumcision.
      - notriddle 4y ago
        Circumcised people aren’t castrated. Castration makes you infertile. Circumcision doesn’t. (Infant circumcision is morally wrong, because it is a medically unnecessary surgery done without consent, but it doesn’t make you infertile.)
    - germinalphrase 4y ago
      I suspect it is more along the lines of “it’s immoral to have children when you’re only birthing them to suffer due to [insert existential fear]”.
beepbooptheory 4y ago
I think it's natural for older people to react with dismay when confronted with a younger person's pessimism about the future, but to say that it is failure of obligation or responsibility is seriously misunderstanding, even willfully, the kids thoughts on this. The situation is, in fact, quite reversed! Consider a child who is more pessimistic about the future than their parent at the same age, why is that? You could hand-wave it away, as people tend to do here, and say its a problem of education, or they have been brainwashed, but no one seems to consider just how much intellectual autonomy or rationality you are denying the kid to have, you are choosing to simply deny flat out any basis for the kids pessimism. You could also conclude that, in fact, the world is worse for the kid then it was for the parent, which I believe is occams razor here, and what else is that but the failure of the generations before? You can blame the apps, but you made the apps (quite literally around here); you could blame the schools, but who was responsible for the character of education in a country but the voting generations of the past? But instead, everyone would rather just doubt children, or say they are lazy! We inherit the world we are born into, yes, but there is no sense or ground to the world, it is flying blind. Older people are saddened by deep pessimism of younger people, because deep down, it is nothing more than an indictment of the world they have left the kids, and it hurts to reckon with that, so this thought rarely passes into consciousness, happy to be deflected onto presumptions about the kid's responsibility. It's sad to not have a shared future between generations, but like in the article, we need to take seriously the irreality of the Future. At the end of the day, kids do not like your future, the future you have left for them. The trajectory of the world as it stands. To me, it is heartening that kids, maybe not yet with a sense of agency, manifest profound pessimism, because it is correctly identifying a problem in the grandest, most existential sense: the narrative of history we have been operating on for a long time. Profound pessimism is a seed that can grow into powerful critiques about the most unsaid and damaging assumptions of our time. If you are so angry that kids would dare question the longevity of the world they find themselves in, you are saying something more about yourself. You take it personally, because deep down you know they have inherited, in part, your own failures.
- kardianos 4y ago
  Yes, you describe a failure of obligation quite well.

ekianjo 4y ago

> My son seems to take the end of everything, of all human endeavor and creation, for granted. That's called education failure.

coldtea 4y ago
It's also parroting what he hears from around him. It's not like his 8 year old had some unique insights and gave much thought to the situation. It's 99% imitation speach - like the faux-tweets and messages from kids parroting what their parents think (often with adult-like word choices, speech patterns, and everything).

mempko 4y ago

I think what we are finding out quickly is the true death cults are those that think we have a future if we keep doing what we're doing.

kardianos 4y ago
I don't object to reasoned change. I don't object to warning about dangers of continuing a current trajectory. I object to putting ideology over naturalistic reasoning. I object to not having kids or telling kids they don't have a future.
- selfhoster11 4y ago
  If nothing changes, they won't have a future. It's that simple.
  - kardianos 4y ago
    I believe we have the capacity to live on Mars and even eventually the Moon. The Earth is still much more hospitable then either of those. We have proven oil reserves that will last 100 more years. So lets transition to electric and nuclear before then. Also, be careful of Marxians and other Ideologues who would look for any excuse to tear society down so they can try their social experiments again. Be that class, identity, or climate. Solutions, yes. Tear everything down because it isn't perfect, no.
    - selfhoster11 4y ago
      OK, great. But if we stick to oil for those 100 years, we'll continue killing planetary biodiversity, which will cause unknown knock-on effects that will make it hard to grow food the normal way, even if we're only looking at effects on humans. Is that really a good way to live? Saying that the current situation is imperfect is like saying that jumping off a bridge puts you in a situation that isn't ideal. We need to pull our collective heads out of our collective asses and start investing in alternative energy sources - now, not in 10 or 20 or 50 years.
      - germinalphrase 4y ago
        My gut feeling is that the science/tech side of this is mature and becoming more so all the time. Our true cultural failure is articulating specific, accessible, and optimistic visions for what the future could actually look like. Our current teenagers and young adults came up in a time period where dystopian stories were prominent. Maybe we need to see a prominent success of an optimistic worldview. People won’t fight for an idea they can’t imagine.

pjc50 4y ago

> We have a future should we choose it. As in the old Tonto/Lone Ranger joke, who do you mean by "we"? The Ukranian crisis reminds us that a particular disease of power is that it collapses to "I". It is possible that the man with the power decides there should be no future for you. > Keep your children away from death cults who would say otherwise. Who do you have in mind here?

kardianos 4y ago
> Who do you have in mind here? Ideologies that see castrating yourself or you children as a moral good. Ideologies that see humans as a parasite upon the earth, where our best option is our own destruction. Ideologies that see humans as being naturally good, and when confronted with evil, do not confront the possibility of evil in themselves, on in others.
- mkr-hn 4y ago
  >> "Ideologies that see castrating yourself or you children as a moral good." Can you expand on this? I've never heard of that one. I know some people confuse accepting and affirming trans people with this because they've been given twisted ideas about what acceptance means and what happens from media grifters, but I charitably assume that's not what you mean here.
  - pcmaffey 4y ago
    Circumcision.
    - notriddle 4y ago
      Circumcised people aren’t castrated. Castration makes you infertile. Circumcision doesn’t. (Infant circumcision is morally wrong, because it is a medically unnecessary surgery done without consent, but it doesn’t make you infertile.)
  - germinalphrase 4y ago
    I suspect it is more along the lines of “it’s immoral to have children when you’re only birthing them to suffer due to [insert existential fear]”.

beepbooptheory 4y ago

I think it's natural for older people to react with dismay when confronted with a younger person's pessimism about the future, but to say that it is failure of obligation or responsibility is seriously misunderstanding, even willfully, the kids thoughts on this. The situation is, in fact, quite reversed! Consider a child who is more pessimistic about the future than their parent at the same age, why is that? You could hand-wave it away, as people tend to do here, and say its a problem of education, or they have been brainwashed, but no one seems to consider just how much intellectual autonomy or rationality you are denying the kid to have, you are choosing to simply deny flat out any basis for the kids pessimism. You could also conclude that, in fact, the world is worse for the kid then it was for the parent, which I believe is occams razor here, and what else is that but the failure of the generations before? You can blame the apps, but you made the apps (quite literally around here); you could blame the schools, but who was responsible for the character of education in a country but the voting generations of the past? But instead, everyone would rather just doubt children, or say they are lazy! We inherit the world we are born into, yes, but there is no sense or ground to the world, it is flying blind. Older people are saddened by deep pessimism of younger people, because deep down, it is nothing more than an indictment of the world they have left the kids, and it hurts to reckon with that, so this thought rarely passes into consciousness, happy to be deflected onto presumptions about the kid's responsibility. It's sad to not have a shared future between generations, but like in the article, we need to take seriously the irreality of the Future. At the end of the day, kids do not like your future, the future you have left for them. The trajectory of the world as it stands. To me, it is heartening that kids, maybe not yet with a sense of agency, manifest profound pessimism, because it is correctly identifying a problem in the grandest, most existential sense: the narrative of history we have been operating on for a long time. Profound pessimism is a seed that can grow into powerful critiques about the most unsaid and damaging assumptions of our time. If you are so angry that kids would dare question the longevity of the world they find themselves in, you are saying something more about yourself. You take it personally, because deep down you know they have inherited, in part, your own failures.

kardianos 4y ago
Yes, you describe a failure of obligation quite well.