PS: The point here is NOT that poor people shouldn't have kids, it's that no one should be having kids without having the basics of childcare covered, which necessitates widespread systemic, societal, and economic change so that no parent needs to worry about those basics, and kids can grow up in secure, healthy environments. I completely forgot to mention this when I originally posted it, and that's my bad.
I can’t help it. I’m glad to be infertile. Children born right now would inevitably face the extreme results of a climate crisis, depleting fresh water stores, the global sociopolitical breakdown currently happening in favor of far right fascists funded by billionaires, and everything that comes with that.
I feel we are past the point of no return and am confident that I will probably die before the absolute worst of it, but my generation’s children would not. I have never been more afraid for children in my life, and there are many in my own little village. I just do not and cannot foresee a future where this gets better, with as powerless as we are against surveillance and military technology. As nihilistic as it sounds, we are speedrunning extinction and the guard rails are gone. I do not want to see children suffer for it, and especially not my own.
If you truly believed that everything can only get worse from here I don't know why you're still here, frankly.
Edit: I'll elaborate. You will die before the worst of it. We all will. I went to school for ecology, I know how grim things are. Worsening climate crises are going to push desperate people out of increasingly hot and arid regions into places with more fresh water and that will cause terrible conflicts. We're driving a mass extinction event that's making the leaderboards. (I don't think we're hitting K-T numbers without nuclear war but it's gonna be bad.)
But we also, as a species, bounced back from a 98% population loss that lasted a hundred thousand years. And that was Stone Age technology. I have the utmost faith in our adaptability and I'm pretty confident humanity will survive our own bullshit. Further, I don't think morality enters into it. Life is amoral. Existence is amoral. The ability to contemplate the nature of existence does not elevate us above that amorality. So I'm not throwing in the towel.
Whew that’s a windy way to tell me to kill myself huh, and to your elaboration: someone else’s kids can get knocked back to the Stone Age to repopulate the earth if we’re as like cockroaches as you believe. Not mine though.
No like why are you here, why bother with society if it's doomed and miserable? Why make connections that will amount to nothing? Why not live as a hermit or descend into unbridled hedonism?
You mean why am I here if I’m not going to shit out babies and force them into an impossible situation? Why are you here asking fucking moronic questions when the community is labeled childfree? We all make choices
The community could be a place for people to find validation for choosing not to have children in a culture that's still largely hetero-normative and pressures young people to get married and have kids. It could even be a place for DINKs to jerk each other off about the cool shit they have money for instead of children. It sucks that it's mostly full of doomer anti-natalists and soft-genocide ecofascists. Y'all need therapy and antidepressants.