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You’re benefiting from other people’s sacrifice. Your end of life care is entirely dependent on other people having and raising functional children. And these

You’re benefiting from other people’s sacrifice. Your end of life care is entirely dependent on other people having and raising functional children. And these are all pretty weak reasons — people with kids do all of the things you’ve mentioned.

lukevp 3y ago
If they work for money and use it to pay the children to care for them, what difference does it make if they also have kids or not? Why would your kids have to be the ones to care for you for it to “even out”? In that argument, is daycare banned because the child is not cared for by the parents of the child? What if one of the parents dies? Is it ok to pay for help then?
- nostrebored 3y ago
  The daycare bit is incoherent. The true cost of end of life care 1. Is already socialized in many western countries 2. Impacts human capital allocation in countries 3. Requires other people’s children to take care of you. If there are no kids, society stops functioning. 4. Will continue to rise in price as there are fewer young people When you consider that most old people do not fully fund their retirement even with existing subsidies, you can see that this is an odd proposition. Some people’s work will be valuable enough to offset their end of life care. It will be an increasingly smaller number over time given trends.
  - sunderw 3y ago
    You do realise this system is unsustainable, though ? We just cannot grow infinitely just because .end of life care costs money. We are way too many, and the #1 source of global warming is human activity. At one point we'll have to stop growing, so the system of how we pay for elderly care has to change.
    - nostrebored 3y ago
      We don't have to grow infinitely. Population collapse comes with a huge host of problems though. The problem of elder care isn't purely financial. It's not the model of paying that's the problem. At the end of the day, (kinda oversimplified) money represents a fractional value of the work output of a population. The output of the population depends on the number of people working in productive roles. The value of the currency is related to the consistent output of services and confidence in the existence of your country. Shifting over an increasing fraction of your population to elder-care is non productive. It has a tension with both stability of currency and value of currency.
bolduque 3y ago
So what he should have kids who are going to take care of him when he's old? Sure, that's a great reason to have children.
- nyokodo 3y ago
  > that's a great reason to have children. It’s a normal and perfectly healthy reason to have children if you also love and cherish them. I would bet the number of parents having children for the sole and totally disinterested benefit of the children is approximately zero. The OP not caring about humanity tells me they’re profoundly selfish and therefore probably not capable of the love and cherish part though.
  - kelnos 3y ago
    No, it's an incredibly selfish reason to have children. Certainly people have children for a variety of reasons, but if a big one is "who else will take care of me when I get old?", that's incredibly selfish, and not healthy at all. Loving and cherishing your children regardless doesn't change that. I love how you've somehow twisted the person upthread's words into the idea that they don't care about humanity. This entire subthread is bizarre.
    - TheCapeGreek 3y ago
      I agree with you. I respect my father more for telling me he actively doesn't place care expectations on me in his old age. "I made you, you are not responsible for me but I am responsible for you". Does that mean I won't care for him? Of course not, but it's good to know I haven't come into existence just for that.
  - TheCapeGreek 3y ago
    You can care about humanity without needing to want to have kids. Why are we acting like everyone's lifestyle preferences are of paramount importance to everyone else's existence? OP is not taking from any other parents here, and there are still plenty more humans to make more humans. Is there a hidden fear here that having an enjoyable childless life will somehow spread everywhere and we all die in a generation?
caskstrength 3y ago
> Your end of life care is entirely dependent on other people having and raising functional children. Presumably OP is in US and is not planning to have any kind of state pension or socialized healthcare when they are old?
- Amezarak 3y ago
  The US has both of these things for older people.
defrost 3y ago
> Your end of life care is entirely dependent on other people having and raising functional children. Sure .. although some of those children will be older than the people they look after. This morning my father delivered "Meals on Wheels" to 20 other elderly locals. He was born in 1935 and will be 90 next year. There are many older people, not all of whom immediately become bed and wheel chair bound at 60. https://mealsonwheelswa.org.au/ https://mealsonwheelswa.org.au/
religiousnut11 3y ago
[dead]
dingi 3y ago
This is one of the most selfish arguments you can make for having kids. You just want someone to take care of you when you are old. If we'll ever have capable robots, you people can stop having children.
- JR1427 3y ago
  Isn't it even more selfish to not have kids, and still expect someone else's kids to look after you when you're old?
  - kelnos 3y ago
    Assuming those people are being compensated for the elder care they provide, why is that selfish? I remember my grandmother moving in with us for a while when I was a kid. It was miserable. Our house wasn't set up for another bedroom. My parents were both stressed out about it and it put a strain on their relationship. My grandmother certainly wasn't thrilled with the situation. Certainly not all elder care situations are like that, but I bet grandma would have been way more comfortable in an assisted living situation, where people who are trained could have seen to her needs. And my immediate family would have been way more comfortable too.
    - carlosjobim 3y ago
      > Assuming those people are being compensated for the elder care they provide, why is that selfish? The thing is that an elderly person in care can never compensate those who take care of them, because they do not work and do not produce anything. They can only scam their caretakers by paying with fake fiat money that was allocated to the elderly before their care takers were even born.
  - dingi 3y ago
    I don't understand what's selfish with that since those kids won't be working for free. That's why people pay taxes until the end.
    - 3y ago
kelnos 3y ago
Yes, and I may be paying those children in the future to take care of me, giving them a job and income. Maybe that's not such a bad thing.
- carlosjobim 3y ago
  This is a false belief, that is increasingly common. Even if you're paying people to take care of you in old age, you are in fact contributing nothing while they are contributing everything. You will be only a burden, because the money is fake and in physical reality not worth anything. It is only in imagined reality that the money is worth anything, because it is something people agree to work for. Future workers will not be so dumb as to waste their life caring for somebody they are not related to, that are not a friend in any way, for no other benefit than fake "money". When the majority of elderly are childless, the cost of elder care and all other labour will increase faster than your bank account can ever keep up. It was different before atomisation of people, there was an exchange in the idea of "society" and "money". Now those concepts are only used to leech, abuse and destroy young working people, so why would they keep playing that foolish game?
  - jgwil2 3y ago
    Previous generations built the cities, farms, railroads and universities that we all use today. Just because somebody is no longer working does not mean that you are not still benefiting from work they did.
    - carlosjobim 3y ago
      That's a false myth, used to guilt young workers to more easily leech from them. The food you eat today was not farmed by the people who are old now. Your consumer products were made in China, not by the elderly. The infrastructure you use has been repaved and remade several times during the decades that have passed since old people worked. Except for a few relics, nothing remains today of what the elderly made. The exception being real estate, and that's why the elderly demand to each become a millionaire to let go of any of their real estate. It's not like today's elderly worked to build something for future generations. They worked to benefit themselves at the moment. In general when somebody comes to you selling guilt and murky reasons to why you are indebted to them, that's an enemy and a scammer, seeking to leech from honest people. Whether that's an employer, a generation of elderly, the government, a guild or whoever.
fzeroracer 3y ago
The funniest bits about this sort of argument is that I often see people become completely estranged from their parents because the attitude of 'I need my children to take care of me when I'm older' is like a package deal for a whole host of other shitty behaviors.
- nostrebored 3y ago
  Oh I mean you have an obligation to be a parent that your kids would want to take care of. I don't talk to my parents and have no interest in taking care of them, because, like you said, they are horrendous people. I think you're right that the entitlement to your kids time is something that comes with poor parenting. That doesn't mean that on-net people's kids won't take care of them. Like everything with your kids, it's a two way street.

lukevp 3y ago

If they work for money and use it to pay the children to care for them, what difference does it make if they also have kids or not? Why would your kids have to be the ones to care for you for it to “even out”? In that argument, is daycare banned because the child is not cared for by the parents of the child? What if one of the parents dies? Is it ok to pay for help then?

nostrebored 3y ago
The daycare bit is incoherent. The true cost of end of life care 1. Is already socialized in many western countries 2. Impacts human capital allocation in countries 3. Requires other people’s children to take care of you. If there are no kids, society stops functioning. 4. Will continue to rise in price as there are fewer young people When you consider that most old people do not fully fund their retirement even with existing subsidies, you can see that this is an odd proposition. Some people’s work will be valuable enough to offset their end of life care. It will be an increasingly smaller number over time given trends.
- sunderw 3y ago
  You do realise this system is unsustainable, though ? We just cannot grow infinitely just because .end of life care costs money. We are way too many, and the #1 source of global warming is human activity. At one point we'll have to stop growing, so the system of how we pay for elderly care has to change.
  - nostrebored 3y ago
    We don't have to grow infinitely. Population collapse comes with a huge host of problems though. The problem of elder care isn't purely financial. It's not the model of paying that's the problem. At the end of the day, (kinda oversimplified) money represents a fractional value of the work output of a population. The output of the population depends on the number of people working in productive roles. The value of the currency is related to the consistent output of services and confidence in the existence of your country. Shifting over an increasing fraction of your population to elder-care is non productive. It has a tension with both stability of currency and value of currency.

bolduque 3y ago

So what he should have kids who are going to take care of him when he's old? Sure, that's a great reason to have children.

nyokodo 3y ago
> that's a great reason to have children. It’s a normal and perfectly healthy reason to have children if you also love and cherish them. I would bet the number of parents having children for the sole and totally disinterested benefit of the children is approximately zero. The OP not caring about humanity tells me they’re profoundly selfish and therefore probably not capable of the love and cherish part though.
- kelnos 3y ago
  No, it's an incredibly selfish reason to have children. Certainly people have children for a variety of reasons, but if a big one is "who else will take care of me when I get old?", that's incredibly selfish, and not healthy at all. Loving and cherishing your children regardless doesn't change that. I love how you've somehow twisted the person upthread's words into the idea that they don't care about humanity. This entire subthread is bizarre.
  - TheCapeGreek 3y ago
    I agree with you. I respect my father more for telling me he actively doesn't place care expectations on me in his old age. "I made you, you are not responsible for me but I am responsible for you". Does that mean I won't care for him? Of course not, but it's good to know I haven't come into existence just for that.
- TheCapeGreek 3y ago
  You can care about humanity without needing to want to have kids. Why are we acting like everyone's lifestyle preferences are of paramount importance to everyone else's existence? OP is not taking from any other parents here, and there are still plenty more humans to make more humans. Is there a hidden fear here that having an enjoyable childless life will somehow spread everywhere and we all die in a generation?

caskstrength 3y ago

> Your end of life care is entirely dependent on other people having and raising functional children. Presumably OP is in US and is not planning to have any kind of state pension or socialized healthcare when they are old?

Amezarak 3y ago
The US has both of these things for older people.

defrost 3y ago

> Your end of life care is entirely dependent on other people having and raising functional children. Sure .. although some of those children will be older than the people they look after. This morning my father delivered "Meals on Wheels" to 20 other elderly locals. He was born in 1935 and will be 90 next year. There are many older people, not all of whom immediately become bed and wheel chair bound at 60. https://mealsonwheelswa.org.au/ https://mealsonwheelswa.org.au/

religiousnut11 3y ago

[dead]

dingi 3y ago

This is one of the most selfish arguments you can make for having kids. You just want someone to take care of you when you are old. If we'll ever have capable robots, you people can stop having children.

JR1427 3y ago
Isn't it even more selfish to not have kids, and still expect someone else's kids to look after you when you're old?
- kelnos 3y ago
  Assuming those people are being compensated for the elder care they provide, why is that selfish? I remember my grandmother moving in with us for a while when I was a kid. It was miserable. Our house wasn't set up for another bedroom. My parents were both stressed out about it and it put a strain on their relationship. My grandmother certainly wasn't thrilled with the situation. Certainly not all elder care situations are like that, but I bet grandma would have been way more comfortable in an assisted living situation, where people who are trained could have seen to her needs. And my immediate family would have been way more comfortable too.
  - carlosjobim 3y ago
    > Assuming those people are being compensated for the elder care they provide, why is that selfish? The thing is that an elderly person in care can never compensate those who take care of them, because they do not work and do not produce anything. They can only scam their caretakers by paying with fake fiat money that was allocated to the elderly before their care takers were even born.
- dingi 3y ago
  I don't understand what's selfish with that since those kids won't be working for free. That's why people pay taxes until the end.
  - 3y ago

kelnos 3y ago

Yes, and I may be paying those children in the future to take care of me, giving them a job and income. Maybe that's not such a bad thing.

carlosjobim 3y ago
This is a false belief, that is increasingly common. Even if you're paying people to take care of you in old age, you are in fact contributing nothing while they are contributing everything. You will be only a burden, because the money is fake and in physical reality not worth anything. It is only in imagined reality that the money is worth anything, because it is something people agree to work for. Future workers will not be so dumb as to waste their life caring for somebody they are not related to, that are not a friend in any way, for no other benefit than fake "money". When the majority of elderly are childless, the cost of elder care and all other labour will increase faster than your bank account can ever keep up. It was different before atomisation of people, there was an exchange in the idea of "society" and "money". Now those concepts are only used to leech, abuse and destroy young working people, so why would they keep playing that foolish game?
- jgwil2 3y ago
  Previous generations built the cities, farms, railroads and universities that we all use today. Just because somebody is no longer working does not mean that you are not still benefiting from work they did.
  - carlosjobim 3y ago
    That's a false myth, used to guilt young workers to more easily leech from them. The food you eat today was not farmed by the people who are old now. Your consumer products were made in China, not by the elderly. The infrastructure you use has been repaved and remade several times during the decades that have passed since old people worked. Except for a few relics, nothing remains today of what the elderly made. The exception being real estate, and that's why the elderly demand to each become a millionaire to let go of any of their real estate. It's not like today's elderly worked to build something for future generations. They worked to benefit themselves at the moment. In general when somebody comes to you selling guilt and murky reasons to why you are indebted to them, that's an enemy and a scammer, seeking to leech from honest people. Whether that's an employer, a generation of elderly, the government, a guild or whoever.

fzeroracer 3y ago

The funniest bits about this sort of argument is that I often see people become completely estranged from their parents because the attitude of 'I need my children to take care of me when I'm older' is like a package deal for a whole host of other shitty behaviors.

nostrebored 3y ago
Oh I mean you have an obligation to be a parent that your kids would want to take care of. I don't talk to my parents and have no interest in taking care of them, because, like you said, they are horrendous people. I think you're right that the entitlement to your kids time is something that comes with poor parenting. That doesn't mean that on-net people's kids won't take care of them. Like everything with your kids, it's a two way street.