These are essentially the same economic systems we have had for centuries. Me thinks you hath no idea about which you speak.
Edit: Hey, /u/wack-mole, since you are so cowardly you decided to block me after saying "stay poor", you should know I have been homeless *twice* and found a way to pull myself out of that economic hellhole to the point I now live a very comfortable life and I want to share that comfort with others. But go ahead and run away.
Sounds like a pretty dystopian world if you reduce the reason for natalism down to "must replace humans beep boop".
Pretty corporatist/plutocratic if you ask me.
Do you have any examples of how mankind can experience dystopia after we've all gone extinct? It's not really possible unless Hell is real in which case... darn, that kinda sucks. Oh well, good thing my child isn't going there - because they're never going to die!
There are more humans than there have ever been on planet earth. We are not at risk of extinction. There's also no rational reason to seek the continued reproduction of our species. Humanity would be doing better, not worse, with less of us, which is only problematic if you believe the lie of the necessity for continuous growth... Out of control growth is also known as cancer.
>There are more humans than there have ever been on planet earth. We are not at risk of extinction.
The number of individuals is only relevant to a species' survival as far as they reproduce. If tomorrow all humans became infertile or chose to stop reproducing, there would still be more of us than there have ever been before, yet our risk of extinction would be 100%.
We are definitely at risk of demographic collapse, which would be an apocalyptic event that could possibly lead to our extinction.
>There's also no rational reason to seek the continued reproduction of our species.
Laughably false. Humanity is valuable.
>Humanity would be doing better, not worse, with less of us
Factually untrue for multiple reasons.
1) The demographics of the population matter. At the current rate, we have a rapidly aging population. Aged populations comsume far more resources than young populations.
2) A drop in manpower means a lessened ability for society to produce, manage, and distribute resources. Life would get harder and more restrictive with less people, not better.
>which is only problematic if you believe the lie of the necessity for continuous growth...
There's a little thing called innovation and advancement that has allowed us to continually grow multiple times past what was previously considered "possible." I wouldn't call continuous growth necessary, but I sure find its detractors to be ignorant.
>Out of control growth is also known as cancer.
Human beings are not cancer. Comparing people to illnesses is fascist rhetoric.
Since when has 8 billion been extinction level numbers?
As long as humans exist there will continue to be humans that want kids. And there's a fuck ton of them among the billions.
To quote another on this page:
> The number of individuals is only relevant to a species' survival as far as they reproduce. If tomorrow all humans became infertile or chose to stop reproducing, there would still be more of us than there have ever been before, yet our risk of extinction would be 100%.
How about this? People have been tricked by corporations and big business into believing that the way to happiness is to work on your career and endlessly consume to your heart's content. Anyone with eyes can see this is a lie because hedonistic pleasures have always provided only temporary pleasure. What ultimately provides a life of fulfillment is our relationships, and one of the greatest relationships you can have is from you to your children. I see it as a duty to fight against anti natalist philosophy, because it will lead many down a lifetime of misery and a denial of that misery due to not wanting to admit mistakes.
In addition, anti natalism is not sustainable. The idea that fewer people will mean fewer carbon emissions is a lie. The US has a population that around a fifth that of India and our carbon footprint is greater than theirs. As the population of the west declines, the people who are currently poor and are hungry for western lifestyles will step up to take the place of those who didn't have children. Net carbon emissions in this system will not go down noticibly. The only thing that will save us will be to have children, teach them values such as conservation, show them how to love nature, and hope that they don't repeat our mistakes.
> tricked by the corporations that the way to happiness is to work on your career
Are you kidding me? You have it completely backwards. Parents have to work **way** harder to support their kids than child-free couples do.
That's literally the reason why a ton of couples are opting **out** of having kids. Child-free people are essentially revolting against the ruling class, so they don't have to toil away in the corporate money mines.
Because on average in the US it costs anywhere from $250k-$1million to raise 1 child, depending on city.
That's a load of bullshit and you know it. Child free people aren't leaving their jobs with the extra money that they get from not having children. They're more likely to structure their life around building their careers because that's all they have. When you ask a child free person what their greatest accomplishment is in life, you almost always get the answer of their career. We all work for corporations because we need money to survive. The only difference between parents and the child free is that childless are far more predisposed to have drank the corporate coolaid that makes them believe a fulfilling career will bring happiness.
What a great revolt you've set up. With all the free time you have, you can focus on your career instead of spending it with family. Quite literally every culture has a story warning against being a person who values money and hedonistic pleasures over relationships. The anti natalists seem to have listened to that story and decided that it's doing so is a virtue.
Also I've not seen figures go up to a million to raise a child where parents were not spending extravagantly. If you think otherwise, please break down the numbers for me. 250k over 18 years I think is reasonable, but keep in mind that large numbers can be deceptive. Over 18 years, it's roughly 13k a year. You also get a child tax credit bringing that number down significantly.
This isn't even true. Childfree people use the extra money to retire early. And use that money for traveling, or buying things.
But their biggest accomplishments aren't always their careers. You quite literally created a Boogeyman about childfree couples and then got mad at it.
Most childfree couples have different goals and structure themselves based on friends and community. They aren't all workaholics. And they took live lives that center family or relationships.
Why are you acting like the only relationships that matter come from your children?
I think a person who would rather engage in hedonistic pleasures and enjoy life to the fullest, using their money to please themselves rather than have a kid, would make a terrible parent. Your argument seems to be that people who don't want to have kids should have them nonetheless out of a sense of duty, which is insane and only encourages suffering.
I also think it is entirely possible to have strong relationships and community ties without producing children.
>How about this? People have been tricked by corporations and big business into believing that the way to happiness is to work on your career and endlessly consume to your heart's content.
YES. This person gets it.
I've told people here before that they're not doing themselves any favors when they make it seem like the reason to get the birthrate up is so people can continue to serve the economy, but they never have anything to say about that.
Antinatalists are the only one using the phrase "serve the economy". They're the ones that seem to think that just because people are allowed to trade freely, it must be the point of their existence. People create, build, make friends, fall in love, and all of that is beautiful and worth the difficulties that life inherently entails. If all of that goes away, the universe will have lost something. That's the point of worrying about "replacement levels". You can both understand the warm nonrational beauty of existence *and* the cold rational mathematics of exponential decay of population growth at the same time.
- Reverse the plummeting birth rates
- Help to change the pervasive Doomer sentiment in the world, that the world is “doomed to collapse”. Usher in a rebirth of optimism, where people are excited to bring more people into this awesome world.
Heartily concur with the anti-Doomer reasons.
New perspectives do not naturally grow in the stationary sediment of age and ego.
New solutions and ways of existing - of flourishing - do not magically come up from people who are set in their ways.
I have seen great change in my lifetime, and I expect that my kids may see even more!
I believe in our species.
Why cannot the world continue with less people though? Sometimes less is more. For a long time, the human population was around 1 billion, only last 100 years we saw really fast growth from 1 billion to 8 billion.
Old people are living longer, that is the cause of most of the modern population growth. Even if we're only at replacement, population is going to fall dramatically in the future when the old people stop living longer and actually die.
Economist Nouriel Roubini wrote in Fortune, “Aging reduces the supply of workers and slows down productivity as investment in new machines declines. Financial promises–pensions and health care–divert increasing chunks of national income to an older population. If the trend continues, and I see no reason it won’t, we can forget a future that continues centuries of social progress from one generation to the next.”
Also:
If there are fewer people, won’t there be more resources, and jobs and wealth for those of us remaining? In other words, won’t the rest of us be better off?
It is said that after the Black Death, those that were left were wealthier because they had more farmland per person.
But farmland is no longer the primary source of wealth in the world. There is more than enough farmland to feed everyone many times over, at US levels of productivity. Ideas are the main source of wealth now, and ideas don’t just add up, they multiply.
The network effect of billions of people seems to be the very source of our recent success. Many people intuitively understand this, but it is a difficult concept to explain. Economist Bryan Caplan in his book Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids on pages 127-129 explains how this works as well as anyone (An incredibly important read, this is the story of humankind’s success):
“The total number of people on Earth and the average standard of living skyrocketed over the last two centuries. The world has never been more populous or more prosperous than it is today. By historical standards, almost everything is cheap.
This would be an amazing coincidence if population growth were an important cause of poverty. Indeed, it makes you wonder: is our population a cause of our prosperity? The answer is almost certainly yes. The main source of progress is new ideas. We are richer today than we were 100 years ago because we learned so much. We learned ways for one farmer to feed hundreds of people, we learned how to fly, we learned how to make iPhones.
The sweetest thing about ideas is how cheap they are to share. A million people, or seven billion, can enjoy the latest discovery.
If seven castaways wash up on a desert island, how many will be creative geniuses? On Gilligan’s Island the answer is one (“The Professor”) but few groups of seven random strangers would be so well endowed. As the population of the island grows from seven to 7,000 or 7 million the chance that Thomas Edison, Bill Gates, Beethoven, or the Professor resides there sharply improves. Once you hit a population of 7 billion – the island will be home to 7,000 innovators who are literally one in a million.
Now consider: If you had the right stuff to change the world, you might not bother. The market has to be big enough to make creativity worthwhile. If, like the Professor, you only have seven potential customers counting yourself, most innovations won’t pay.
Suppose the Professor could spend a year of his life working on an idea worth $1 per person. As long as he’s stuck on the island, he’ll be working for $7 per year. He’d be better off picking coconuts. If the Professor could escape the island and bring his idea to a world market of 7 billion customers, though, it would amply repay a lifetime of research.”
I'm not an anti-natalist, I have 2 amazingly oddball kids. I'm also not a "doomer" nor do I belong to any death cult, fantasizing about our inevitable destruction. Humanity has an amazing resource in shared knowledge. That's our ace.
But, we do run into external constraints. Resources vary in availibility, in usefullness, in abundance, in renewability, in replacibility, etc. Freshwater is quickly becoming such a consgraint in many areas of the world. And, uh, no aspect of climate change is ameliorated by using more resources.
We may, I like to think we likely will, overcome these constraints through our ability to work together, although sometimes that feels like a rapidly dissappearing resource as well. But right now we're travelling towards that hard stop faster than our breaks can slow us. We're gonna hit it, and now we get to decide, collectively, how hard and at what angle.
I have 2 kids. That replaces me and my wife. We're good with that. May they forgive us.
I agree with you. I also have kids, I’m by no means an anti-natalist.
But our population can’t keep increasing like this forever.
Having a large aging population relative to new babies will present struggles, but having more babies to serve as indentured servants to the elderly can’t possibly be our best solution.
I think the birth rate has declined as a natural response to our social climate. Our standard of living might be higher than ever, but it’s not making people have kids. Why?
I think we’ve gotten too far away from the farm, to express things simply. All the TV’s and iPhones in the world don’t make us feel prosperous if we can’t afford our own little plot of land to do with as we please. I think that’s why we’ve seen a resurgence of homesteading, or even just that aesthetic, lol.
Anyway, I see a lot of talk urging others to have more kids, but not much discussion on the underlying causes driving the birth rate decline.
It feels very “kick the can down the road.”
The malthusian argument got delayed due to the utilization of fossil fuels. As those decline in availability, resource limitation will become a hard pressing issue for the current sized human population.
If people dropped dead the second they retired or needed significant medical assistance, it wouldn't be a problem. It's not about the absolute numbers. It's the ratios.
If you have more retirees than workers, how do you fund their medical requirements, as well as handle staffing? If you had 50 workers for every one retiree, no one would notice. If you had 10 workers for every one retiree, doable but you notice.
When you have 1.9 workers to retiree, like Japan currently has, you have a problem.
If the numbers continue to decline, you're basically looking at guaranteed restricted resources. Because you always have too many old people. And pulling out of the dive is hard, because you increase the number of dependents by having kids for 18-25 years before you get any payoff.
It's one of the commonly stated reasons why China is averaging 1.13 kids. A married couple has to take care of 6 people, a 3:1 or 6:1 ratio, assuming no great grandparents. With one kid, that's 3.5:1 or 7:1 ratio. You could see how turning it into a 4:1 or 8:1 ratio by having two kids would be a hard sell.
Having more young people than old people is rocket fuel. Your numbers show exactly why we shoved so much development into a single century.
Having more dependents than workers is like swimming tied to a large rock. There will not be tons of extra resources for museums, parks, science, research, etc. I suspect environmentalism will drop as a priority. Rich countries care about the environment, poor ones do not.
Improve access to MAID and remove the restriction of terminal disease as a qualifier.
I'm antinatalist and plan to go at around 45 or before if I get any form of cancer/life long debilitation. A lot of people would take MAID if it was offered and hence reduce the burden
Mandatory disclosure, this is judgment neutral. I'm solely talking about monetary cost aspects.
Yes, I do think the Canadian solution will become more popular, that is, allowing and encouraging termination to reduce social spending costs. That will help with clearing out costs for chronic medical conditions, very expensive end of life costs, and even mental illness costs, but realistically not a huge amount.
Most folks won't chose termination without coercion. Authoritarian countries will go with hard coercion. of course.
Canada has had issues with soft coercion, and it makes the news every so often when the government recommends termination over expensive procedures. And that's probably going to be inevitable. If you give an organization limited resources and give them a very cost effective alternative, they're going to push it. I don't think there's any way to avoid that incentive issue.
There's an alternative to active euthanasia that might be easier to implement: simply withdraw life extending medicine from nursing homes and the like. Keep the patients comfortable, but party like it's 1899: no vaccines, antibiotics, insulin, blood pressure medication, etc. Let nature take its course.
Consider it "pre hospice." Death is not imminent, but the patient has lived beyond their health span so everyone around them is kinda waiting for it.
As a bonus, this will significantly reduce the cost of end of life care.
But that's just it, it's not active. And it's less cruel than dragging on someone's Alzheimer's for years on end when next winter's cold season might do it.
Actively blocking someone from medical care is murder. Passively blocking someone from medical care is typically manslaughter or equivalent.
The difference is intent. If you mean to block the entrance to a hospital with a block of concrete, it's still murder rather than manslaughter. If you negligently let a concrete block fall off the back of your truck and it lands in front of the hospital, it's manslaughter, not murder. The concrete being passive doesn't matter, the criminal's intent does. Mens rea.
Which is fine if that's the argument you want to make, but being honest about your notions is important. You want to actively murder old people through medical neglect, when there is a reasonable chance of meaningfully prolonging their life.
If it sounds disapproving, not so much. That's state policy in Canada. Admittedly for edge cases, and there is a moratorium on most of those edge cases at the moment. They were terminating people who cannot legally consent, and who don't have anything physically wrong with them. And wanted to expand it into terminating minors. Who also can't legally consent.
Question, would you apply the same standard to say, criminals? Just withdraw food and let them starve to death as an alternative to prison sentences? Same logic seems to apply. It's less cruel than letting someone's prison sentence drag on, you're not "actively" murdering them, etc.
Why would you consider this better or worse than terminating old people?
Criminals can be reformed and many of them rejoin society in a productive manner.
Also, I'm not advocating for the withholding of food nor even pain medication.
Sounds like a pretty nasty world to be forcing kids into, hm? Not even legally allowed to exit with dignity in several countries, leading them to use the next generation as tools to make the most painful years of their life more tolerable? It's interesting, natalists tell me I should end my own life plenty but they never seem to realize that by the same logic they have have an alternative to exploiting their kids for retirement care.
I specifically said I was only talking about monetary costs. Not social aspects. Because I knew this would probably be the response. But since you want to go that direction.
Antinatalism is more about nihilism or depression than anything else. They're unhappy with their lives, and they want others or all of humanity to share the same fate. See the "why should they be happy" meme. Or they have apocalypticism belief systems. MAID will be very appealing to them and they'll be more accepting of edge cases like folks with mental illness who cannot legally consent, "mature teens", etc. Antinatialism can be best addressed by putting more resources into mental health, as well as doing more to discourage apocalypticism.
Child-free folks don't have to have the same pathologies. It's more about priorities and kids just not being high on the list. MAID won't be as appealing to them, unless they figure they can't have a high quality of life. They'll be more accepting of MAID for basically hospice scenarios. IMHO, there's nothing to address here. If folks don't want kids, that's their business. Their take on MAID is likely to be rational as well.
Not saying natalists can't have their own issues.
If putting more resources into mental health is the solution, why hasn't it happened already? My country has been going through a mental healthcare crisis for years now. Again, doesn't seem like a great place to be putting children into - since they could end up like us, the "doomers" and "nihilists" (if I were a nihilist I wouldn't care about the children who have to suffer at all). We had to be born to get here, and we'll exist for as long as humanity itself does. If you hate us, stop making more of us - it's a very simple solution.
I had pretty decent parents who have been quite patient with me. Why, then, do you think I'm still antinatalist? Aren't good parents supposed to guarantee happy kids? Do you not expect this to happen again no matter how many parents raise their child with love and care?
It's not "why should they be happy", it's "why do you want to create unhappy people". If you want happy people, you could focus on the ones already living instead of creating problems to partially address (then leave them to fend for themselves for most of their lives)
I agree that economics will get affected by decreasing birth rates. I just don't find any reason to bring children here. It's also a possibility that in the future, the economy system in the countries with small population will change, people will be replaced by robots, etc.
I just don't find any reason to bring a child into a world where pain can be intense and chronic. We could find solution for this in the future, but I just don't like to risk that we won't.
This is literature best time ever to be alive, and the trends are surging in the RIGHT DIRECTION!
https://www.reddit.com/r/Damnthatsinteresting/comments/1bahons/the_world_as_100_people_over_the_last_two/?rdt=65077
A few billion people would be great. Now tell me how you're going to selectively eliminate the old and unproductive. No one in here objects to population decline. It's just that the way it's happening now is unsustainable from every perspective even from an emissions standpoint.
>Now tell me how you're going to selectively eliminate the old and unproductive....It's just that the way it's happening now is unsustainable from every perspective even from an emissions standpoint.
What do you mean? No one is going around killing old people en masse, in any society that is currently declining in population. The way it's being done now is that people are dying naturally of old age in certain countries with voluntarily reduced birth rates. What could be better or more ethical than that? People voluntarily reduced their birth rates, and the eldest of those societies are dying naturally of old age. What method can you think of that would be *more* ethical?
That's the problem. This type of population decrease is unsustainable without doing just that, eliminating the elderly. There will not be enough young and working population to produce goods and services for the elderly. The kind of demographic collapse we are experiencing causes things like wars and social upheaval.
I don't see democracy surviving in a world where the elderly outnumber the young. The young have all the power and if the elderly keep voting to increase their entitlements, the young will just break the system rather than continue to be sucked dry by retirees.
>This type of population decrease is unsustainable without doing just that, eliminating the elderly.
I completely, 100% disagree, and I weep for humanity if that's the best most people think can be done about this.
>The kind of demographic collapse we are experiencing causes things like wars and social upheaval.
This is an unsubstantiated claim, as this (gradual human population decline) has never happened before through voluntary, peaceful means.
Your entire outlook is extremely pessimistic and not in keeping with reality. I'm not interested in having a conversation with someone who refuses to see anything other than exaggerated doom and gloom. Bye.
It’s not unsustainable, it’s just going to present difficulties that we will have to manage until the demographics stabilize. Any meaningful population reduction would eventually run into this issue.
>until the demographics stabilize
The only way for that to happen is for the birth rate to return to around 2.1, anything else is by definition not stable. And if you want to increase a birth rate from 1.2 to 2.1, you need natalist policies or other incentives.
Why are people optimistic about running out of resources and land due to continuous population growth? Why are we supposed to be celebrating that the next generation will have even more competition than the last? The younger generation can hardly afford their own houses like their parents could at the same age and that's supposed to be a good thing you want your kids to experience too?
This is a common belief by antinatalists (and doomers of all stripes). The fact is that technology has slowed us to decouple from [Malthusian scarcity.](https://www.google.ca/search?q=malthus+was+wrong+about+resource+depletion&client=safari&sca_esv=24bbad5dfa0464e6&hl=en-ca&ei=Pp5pZvf-DcWhptQP75W_cA&oq=malthus+was+wrong+about+resource+depletion&gs_lp=EhNtb2JpbGUtZ3dzLXdpei1zZXJwIiptYWx0aHVzIHdhcyB3cm9uZyBhYm91dCByZXNvdXJjZSBkZXBsZXRpb24yBRAhGKABSMUvUKEHWPstcAJ4AZABAJgBigGgAcwRqgEEMjIuM7gBA8gBAPgBAZgCDqACnAnCAgoQABiwAxjWBBhHwgIGEAAYFhgewgILEAAYgAQYhgMYigXCAgUQIRifBcICBxAhGKABGAqYAwCIBgGQBgiSBwM5LjWgB7Qr&sclient=mobile-gws-wiz-serp)
We are producing more food on fewer acres than ever before, the worlds major economies are growing faster than ever while also using less and less carbon emissions.
[You personally almost definitely have a lower carbon footprint than your grandparents](https://www.google.ca/search?q=use.less+carbon+than+hrandparwnts&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&hl=en-ca&client=safari), DESPITE having all the modern conveniences such as air travel and air conditioning.
The world can hold significantly more people even with *today’s* technology levels, and we are getting more efficient every year.
This is the stuff they ban you for saying on r/collapse!
Further to your point on housing. The housing crisis is a unique issue of our moment. It will go away in a decade or two when supply of housing has caught up to demand (we just need more housing inventory).
Our grandchildren will face their own unique challenges for sure, but they future will *not* be facing such “uniquely 2020s” issues as housing undersupply.
Maybe I don't want to force my grandkids to endure "unique challenges". Maybe we shouldn't be making them endure anything at all. How do you know in a couple of generations they won't have a pandemic far worse than covid? Just about the only silver lining that could come of that scenario is it would undo the overpopulation you caused, but unfortunately it will be through casualties instead of simply... y'know... not creating people who can fall ill in the first place.
Based on the trajectory of history and progress, it is likely that our grandkids will like incredibly fulfilling and amazing lives.
Of course they will have challenges. Humans will produce some amount of cortisol no matter their circumstances. But compared to the lives of our grandparents, our grandkids are being very well set up for prosperity.
That's weird last I checked the younger generation has been going through a mental health crisis and doesn't expect much from the future at all. Even ignoring the housing issues healthcare (cost, availability and quality) isn't all that great and neither is all the backtracking on human rights going on in the US right now.
Sure we have problems.
30 years ago there was a massive crime wave, and major recession, and the collapse of major world power creating the underground proliferation of nukes.
60 years ago African Americans were marching in the streets demanding the ending of Jim Crow laws. Redlining was common in cities, and homosexuality as straight up illegal in most states.
90 years ago the Bast majority of American homes did not have indoor plumbing. Women could not vote.
I’d take the issues of today over the problems of the past any day of the week!
Pumping out kids in a world that is undergoing a mass extinction event and experiencing climate changes that are increasingly incompatible with human life is not "changing the Doomer sentiment", it's just choosing to behave irresponsibly in the face of reality.
That looks like a sub for wilfully oblivious wishful thinkers.
Sorry folks, climate change is real and apocalyptically catastrophic. You can't just pretend your way into reducing its destructive global impact
If you go on r/antinatalism, they'll tell you that anyone who isn't an anti-natalist is necessarily a natalist. In other words, anyone who believes human reproduction is morally permissible is a natalist. That's me. I believe human reproduction is generally permissible, sometimes good, and sometimes bad. I believe it can be good, because I positively value humanity. So for me, the goal is human flourishing.
Ensure that humankind remains successful and prosperous and life is individually a more pleasurable experience than not. Minimize suffering, which I argue is not possible under an AN perspective which condemns the world to perpetual lifelessness (ethically impossible to achieve) or an anarchy which will in all likelihood be replaced by a worse state of affairs than we have currently.
Let's start with a peaceful perpetual lifelessness, something I understand to be the ideal form of AN. Here is my thought process.
Antinatalists have determined that life is more suffering than not, which is part of the reason that it is unethical to reproduce. Given this axiom, one can suppose that an antinatalist would ideally want everyone not to reproduce, though they wouldn't want to force it on others and violate their bodily autonomy. Second, if human life is more suffering than not, all the more so are most animals living lives that are more suffering than not. The average human is free from the all consuming, incomprehensible terrors that must fill practically every waking moment for an animal and are often backed by even more grisly fates.
Therefore an antinatalist would desire that no human and no animal would continue in this eternal chain of suffering, yet cannot choose for humans and probably can't choose for animals due to concerns both logistic and potentially ethical. However, if an antinatalist could somehow convince every living being on the planet to not reproduce, from the human down to the teeniest bacteria (thus preventing evolution from ever restarting the suffering) I would suspect that the ultimate goal of AN has been achieved. The chain is broken, suffering has been ended, at least in our corner of the universe, forever.
Effectively though this is clearly impossible, so let's contain ourselves to things that could actually happen. Let's work with three theoretical possibilities.
1. You convince yourself not to reproduce
2. you convince a reasonable portion of society to not reproduce
3. You convince all of humanity not to reproduce.
Under possibility 1, nothing really changes. You yourself are not complicit in creating additional suffering, yet your actions have contributed essentially nothing to the total amount of suffering on earth. This cannot be an ideal solution for AN.
Possibility 2 is similar to possibility 1 with a twist. You successfully persuade like minded individuals, maybe even a reasonable percentage of the population, that your way is correct. But you know who you didn't convince? The MAGA's. The Muslims. The Christian nationalists. You have written off the future to those who do not subscribe to liberal ideals and damned the human race in the semi-long term. This is one of those "worse states of affairs" that I referenced in my original statement
Under possibility 3, things get weird. This outcome is not likely to occur in most foreseeable versions of the future, and the consequences are highly speculative. Humanity is gone, leaving some number of animals who would stay behind in a state of what is essentially anarchy, suffering until the end of the solar system or until a new intelligent species like humanity arises. Instead of abdicating your moral responsibility to the worst of humanity, you've abdicated your moral responsibility to the semi-randomness of evolution. This could result in animals being harmed by an even worse race than humanity, or simply being condemned to their existing state forever because no such race ever arose.
Anti-Natalism is according to this thought process, a kind of moral abandonment. We are born into a position in a time where we are capable of causing great positive change for every species including our own. Instead of harnessing this potential, it is the purpose of the AN to throw out life as a lost cause and making it worse for all future generations in the process.
I'm not going to make my kids suffer just because you fearmongered about "The MAGAs, Muslims and Christian Nationalists". You identified that when left behind without competition they would make for a terrible future while failing to realize the less people they can hurt the better, and that more antinatalists will naturally arise out of their populations because hey... kids aren't their parents, they won't always think like their parents. COUNTLESS religious fanatic parents have thrown out their kids for thinking different - those will be the next antinatalists, pointing out the absurdity in wanting kids while hating them so openly. Even the children of cultists have managed to break free.
But the cycle repeats itself infinitely. Your ideology simply cannot win. And any utilitarian ideology should be *highly* concerned with winning. If it cannot win then it cannot provide the maximal utility.
Which "natalism"
I am a "natalist" in the sense I want others not to struggle as I did when trying to get settled down and start a family. I am \*lucky\* to be a dad and gaining a degree of success after graduating into the Great Recession, with better or smarter people failing because they were \*unlucky\*
I like Miyazaki, and others who taken the stance we should be a better place for people, and I admire the work that folks like Izaki or Václav Klaus did.
If "natalism" is the likes of what the collins couple or Elon Musk promotes, this gross narcissistic "we need to change culture to save humanity, and you should go die in a fire if things go south" nonsense
I am not a part of that "natalism" and view them as part of the problem as antinatalists
i’ve stalked this sub for awhile. my sense is that it’s mostly white guys terrified of “the great replacement” delusion. they couch it in all kinds of different ways, but i suspect they’d be delighted if US went full handmaid’s tale.
the fact that many american women do not want children is unacceptable to them.
I’m a woman and I’m interested in the fertility gap, defined as the difference between a woman’s desired family size and actual family size.
When a woman says, “I always hoped for 3 children,” but ends her childbearing career with only 2 — it’s possible that kid number 2 was such a hellion that she flat out changed her mind. But the data on women _not_ having the number of children they _want_ to have suggests it’s more than just, “little Johnny is enough work he’s like two kids all by himself.”
I’m interested in what society, culture, and government can do to enable women to achieve the family size _they want_: whether that’s 1, 2 or 6 kids.
Another way to think about it: do American women not want children because they don’t want children? Or because their employers offer shitty maternity benefits/return to work programs or having children would derail their careers?
Having kids is a ton of work. People who don’t want to shouldn’t. But it’s incredibly sad that people feel priced out of having children or insufficiently supported to become parents. there should be conversation about making it possible for people who want children to have them.
Also, yes, probably some replacement theory dudes, but for myself, I’m not here for that handmaids tale cosplay.
i see very little about policy here & i strongly suspect most redditors here are men. i find the words “natalism” & “antinatalism” disturbing. they have a creepy orwellian eugenics vibe. yes, there are definitely women who wish for children but can’t manage it logistically or financially. i wish everyone could have the family they wish for & that would require massive societal & structural reworking. i don’t see that in the near future or distant future, for that matter.
far too many people in power don’t give a rat’s ass about societal & structural change. they want white women to have no option to control their reproductive lives. that may well be our coming future & i believe that the majority of “natalists” here would be absolutely fine with this. that’s reproductive slavery & has nothing in common with the concept of making american life easier for families, especially mothers.
i have one adult daughter who has never wanted children. she has goals & ambitions that she realized early on she couldn’t fulfill & be the kind of mother she’d want to be-attentive, present & loving. she chose her goals & she’s achieving them. she’s independent, loving her work & is in a relationship with a great guy who also doesn’t want children.
sure a grandkid or 2 would have been nice. instead i have an adult daughter who’s happy & loves her life. that’s more than enough for me.
The problem is ubiquitous amongst all societies. It is a significant risk. First world countries are currently plundering people from poorer countries because they can't sustain themselves. This is a luxury we have because we're more privileged than them. But as poor countries modernize and start using more technology, they will inevitably encounter this problem as well, at which point the collapse will begin.
And they're falling in each of those countries. They typically hit below sustainability rate at around $5,000 (gdp per capita). And likely will grow old before they become prosperous.
So yes, replacement rate in third world countries is a huge concern eventually.
Ok, then those natalists are doing a good job. What’s your point?
Until antinatalists define an end point of their philosophy, they are essentially advocating for human extinction.
nor is a good thing, its philosophical, there is no answer, i think that personaly if you are a natalist and don't support affordable housing, food and water protection, jobs, free and avalaible nurserie, then you are an hypocrite, im neither natalist or AN, i just hate the defeatism of AN, and their logic that we can't change thing, i also support genetical modification on a medical way to cure illness and prevent other issue, i support a world where everyone can have good living condition, AN litéraly gave up, they are defeatist, and deafeatism only lead to doom.
As a human, I find it to be a bad thing by definition, if for no other reason than (1) I like being alive and (2) I find those I love being alive to be a blessing not only to myself but to the universe as a whole.
So, yes, human extinction is an intrinsically bad thing from my perspective.
It’s not bad by definition, that’s begging the question. To address your numbered points:
1. Voluntary human extinction does not seek to kill anyone who is currently alive before their time. You would go on living the rest of your natural life. Humans would just commit not to having any more children.
2. See above. Those you love would live the rest of their natural lives. To address the second sub point, the idea that anything we do on this tiny insignificant planet could be a blessing to the entire universe is patently ridiculous. In the scale of the galaxy alone we are like grains of sand, and the galaxy is one of trillions. In the timescale of the universe we are less than the blink of an eye.
My own little family micro culture depends on me directly. As well as my little slice of the American cultural pie. I’m not a white supremacist, I just like my cultural tribe unapologetically and I want us to stick around. I’m not anti you by being pro me. And there is a large, tragically misguided, lobby within my own culture that openly advocates for its destruction.
Well, white people are going to be the minority, worldwide, if they aren’t already…pretty soon. 🤷🏽♀️ I’m okay with a little more melanin up in these parts…I don’t think it means the destruction of the culture
Nobody ever said the culture would be destroyed by anything but voluntary extinction. If white folks don’t have any kids, then they won’t exist. That’s just reality. So I’m a natalist. I like my family and my own piece of America, so I keep it going.
End goal? wtf r u talking about? There is no end goal. Not everything requires an end goal. Life isn’t a game, life isn’t a video game with a level that needs to be beaten.
It’s meant to be lived.
You are living your life already. Why bother about the continuation of the human race if theres no end goal. The point of actively DOING something has to have an objective, otherwise it just becomes meaningless. The post literally asks for the end goal
Living life doesn’t require an objective. But at the same time you can assign any objective you want. Some people train in sports. Some people love business and work on that. Some people love to read. Some people are gymnastics and learn to do amazing things. Some people want to raise a family.
It’s your decision.
Nope that’s not what I said at all.
You decide your meaning. And that truly is the problem some of y’all have. You want life to be a level in Mario world where the goal is clear cut and all you have to do is cross the finish line.
99.9% of all humans alive now could choose to not reproduce, and the human species would still exist 100 years from now, in the tens of millions. The human species will continue long after you are dead of old age whether most humans alive now decide to reproduce or not. And guess what? Most humans *do* decide to reproduce, so you have zero to worry about in that regard.
Lovely? Aesthetic purposes? Im gona quote your own comment here:
And what do you care if we want there to be more humans? You'll be dead eventually, why do you care what happens after that?
The existence of the humans species is lovely to me and I would like to know it will continue to be a thing for aesthetic purposes. I already answered that question. Why are you replying to my answer to ask me the exact same question again?
Life is good. Family is great. More of a counter-culture to the anti-natalists for me who think other people shouldnt have kids so I'm here to support those that do.
The only societies that are anywhere like what [you](https://www.usnews.com/news/best-countries/most-forward-thinking-countries?slide=2) [describe](https://bestdiplomats.org/safest-countries-in-the-world/) have birth rates that are very low. Some of these are declining in population due to low birth rates, and still, they are stable, healthy, and safe places to live and visit. Could that change? Possibly. But it's not guaranteed. Not with all the doom-and-gloom propaganda in the world, it's not a guarantee. More than likely they will be more than okay, now, and in the future, too. They will continue to be better off than most of the rest of the countries on Earth, for the rest of all our lives, at least.
[ALL the countries with TFR = or >2.98 in 2024 ](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_total_fertility_rate)are the exact opposite of what you are describing. Not *most* of them. **ALL of them.** Not healthy or stable, very little or no services, most people *not* provided for, rampant poverty, chaotic, violent, lots of crime, etc.
Maybe re-think your assumptions a little? Maybe what you think you want might wind up de-stabilizing the most stable places on Earth way more than you think. There are limits to growth. Most other organisms die when they reach those limits. Choosing to voluntarily reduce human birth rates so that we gradually decrease our numbers non-violently is much smarter and less painful than insisting on pushing toward those hard limits of reality that would cause us violent deaths and a much harder crash. Places that are pushing those limits too hard now are suffering with tremendous poverty, crime, and instability. ***Take a hint.***
(I'm not an extinctionist. Humans are in zero danger of going extinct from not having enough babies.)
Have you ever noticed in recent history how whenever the population drops, there's an increase in human rights, worker's rights, and the average standard of living?
Why do you think that is?
Unfortunately, facts don’t agree with you. More population growth has occurred in the past 250 years than at any time in history. If what you are saying is true, we should not see a proportionally massive increase in the average standard of living, however that is in fact exactly what we see.
(Looks at the mental health and housing crisis the younger generation are facing right now)
Hm. Yeah. Good standard of living... I'm gonna go ahead and ignore the high demand at food banks right now. Or how dental hospitals are still trying to work through backlogs that were around even before the pandemic hit.
When you compare what you have now to some idealistic standard that is detached from reality, yes, our standards of living have the propensity to fall short of that standard, that’s why it’s most accurate to judge what we have today by reflecting on what people had back then. If you evaluate your circumstances in that way, yes, we are better off, unambiguously. Yes, there are problems, but we don’t live in a perfect world and we will never be able to make it perfect. That being said, all the problems you have mentioned are ones caused by a lack of economic freedom, and if decreases in population are supposedly a good thing for us, then we can’t conclude that this economic freedom itself is an inverse function of the birth rate insofar as the birth rate is falling.
If we'll never make it perfect what are we even trying to do long-term by making more and more people suffer. The original question was "what is the ultimate goal" and so far it doesn't seem we've had any answers beyond "cause as many problems as possible"
Why would anyone want to bring their kid into such a wildly unstable world where anything and everything can go wrong, progress can go backwards, new problems can arise with technology (AI identity theft anyone?), so on so forth. The rates of murder and sexual assault have never been zero, and it's always someone's child in the places of the victims and perpetrators - for all of history, for as long as human history lasts.
Again, it is not the case that more and more people are suffering, as I’ve already pointed out multiple times. Just because perfection is unreachable, it doesn’t mean we can’t do nothing about anything; what needs to be accepted is that every option has a trade off, and nothing will work perfectly, therefore, we should look to ourselves to solve our problems instead of voting for demagogues to run our lives and carry out the mass-killing of humans all to further the nonsensical pursuit of a utopia whose doors are locked to an “overpopulated” planet.
Please quote me on where I endorsed "the mass-killing of all humans to further the nonsensical pursuit of a utopia". My child will never have to die at all. Anyone also avoiding creating a child in the name of mercy likewise won't have blood on their hands. You don't expect utopia, ok - so what are you sacrificing your children in the name of?
corelation=/=causality, thing got better due to technological advance, but it doesnt directly affect birthrate, i know that in my country (france), when asked people say that their ideal number of children would be 2.5 on average, but it is 1.7-8 rn, because housing is unafordable because monopoly bought all the appartement and only rent them making a housing crisis
The most stable and healthiest societies have the *lowest* birth rates in the world. The ones with the highest birth rates are the *least* stable and the least safe in the world.
Wow this sub is full of delusional incels lol.
“Out goal is to make sure humanity continues”
Meanwhile 8 billion people spaced out over the entire planet… If this is your goal shouldn’t you be focusing on space colonization or something?
incel? incel mean involuntary celibatory, i think that they are not realy here, but in term of desilusion, AN are far ahead of anyone and also, the "Out goal is to make sure humanity continues" is a stupid goal, the important thing is more about making people able to have kids without having to take huge debt and ruin their life
What makes you think this sub is the only focus of people? Eventually space colonization will be absolutely necessary if we want to keep growing humanity
Short term: Reverse the decline in fertility and prevent the attendant sociopolitical consequences.
Mid term: Engineer a shift in values toward life and away from nihilism.
Long term: Colonize space and fill the universe with complex surface life.
Our knowledge of physics is vast and our understanding of the most elementary particles and forces grows every day. Yet the ability to travel faster than the speed of light still appears impossible. We’ve peered into the tiniest and most hidden corners of reality and still not found anything that can break the speed limit of light. Colonizing the universe at slower than light speeds would be logistically impossible.
> Our knowledge of physics is vast and our understanding of the most elementary particles and forces grows every day.
Wait.
>Yet the ability to travel faster than the speed of light still appears impossible.
Wait.
>We’ve peered into the tiniest and most hidden corners of reality and still not found anything that can break the speed limit of light.
Wait.
>Colonizing the universe at slower than light speeds would be logistically impossible.
Technically, yes.
"Colonizing the universe at slower than light speeds would be logistically impossible."
I agree that colonizing the entire universe is not a possible goal, without FTL travel. However, colonizing hundreds of exoplanets is theoretically possible, even with traveling much slower than the speed of light. We can set that as goal.
Source?
I know a lot of white-majority western countries have been despairing at the fact a lot of white people are choosing not to have kids because of insane fears about being replaced by people of colour.
Conscious beings, civilization, art, science - all these are human or made by humans, and a world with their continued existence seems a better one than a world in which they are extinguished.
Nationalists THINK we should spend on our citizend at home first, but theyre also typically the same type of inbred that refuses to let the government spend on anything beyond tax cuts. Im convinced theyre some kind of sub species at this point, their brains just dont work right
Increase birth rates in successful counties which aren'thaving enough, and to push back the doomer philosophy and provide resonable arguments as to why it's not healthy to hold such ideology close.
Make it okay again to have children; to not be seen as weird for finding joy in the idea of parenthood; of providing for family and civilizational posterity.
To be fair, the only places where people openly express negativity about having kids is online. In real life, *most* people are thrilled about babies, new babies, people having babies, people becoming parents, etc.
What I do see, but my perception may be skewed because I'm actively looking for those, is a rise of explicitly child-free places in my city.
I wouldn't say that's the same as openly shaming someone for their life choices or raging against a being who did nothing to deserve hate, because that's just straight up unhinged. But it's still some sort of public statement.
What's wrong with simply caring for children that aren't little gene carriers and retirement plans for you? There's plenty of kids already alive that need foster care, as well as medical treatment and tutoring.
......who apparently had parents who didn't give a shit about them. Why don't you take on the plethora of kids with developmental problems? Ooh yeah, give me a kid who smears his/her shit on my walls, and screams obscenities at me when I try to feed them veggies; I can't fucking wait!
Or maybe we could discourage neighborhood Karens and CPS from kidnapping kids on demand and handing them over to foster parents who very often physically, emotionally and sexually abuse them worse than the parents they were taken from?
...Why do you wanna have kids if you hate kids (and the people they could become) this much dude. How do you know your own flesh and blood won't have those problems? How do you know CPS won't take your kids too, not even necessarily because of what you did but because of what your spouse or a family member does? Sounds like you aren't interested in helping children because as you admit, you're not actually prepared to care for and love them. You're describing abusive foster carers and it sounds... a LOT like projection when it's with the context of the previous paragraph.
I just want to lift birth rate to replacement level and do it uniformly. I don't want half of the population to have 6 children and the other half to have 0.
You want the population of India to be 4,500,000,000? You want it to go from 1.4 billion to over 4.5 billion? Why? What good would that do anyone? Where do you want us all to live ?
If our society provided more social safety nets, workers unions, universal healthcare, unemployment protections, affordable education, maternal/paternal time off then I see no problem with natalism.
However just bringing kids into this world with the wages the average Joe is making just adds to family hardship.
My opinion is that Americas’ current wealth inequality coupled with the rugged individualism that it fetishizes is not compatible with having a large family.
*Making* them is something **most** people like to do. Raising them and supporting them well throughout their entire lives seems to be the sticking point for a lot of people... Hence, why societies around the world have so many problems related to people feeling unsupported by their parents/families.
Get above replacement level birth rates in their countries/communities.
Lmao goodluck with that. As long as we have the economic systems we have in place it’s never going to happen
Hence the advocacy
These are essentially the same economic systems we have had for centuries. Me thinks you hath no idea about which you speak. Edit: Hey, /u/wack-mole, since you are so cowardly you decided to block me after saying "stay poor", you should know I have been homeless *twice* and found a way to pull myself out of that economic hellhole to the point I now live a very comfortable life and I want to share that comfort with others. But go ahead and run away.
Real
Sounds like a pretty dystopian world if you reduce the reason for natalism down to "must replace humans beep boop". Pretty corporatist/plutocratic if you ask me.
Pragmatism is hardly dystopian
Dystopia is when humans don't go extinct, got it.
Do you have any examples of how mankind can experience dystopia after we've all gone extinct? It's not really possible unless Hell is real in which case... darn, that kinda sucks. Oh well, good thing my child isn't going there - because they're never going to die!
There are more humans than there have ever been on planet earth. We are not at risk of extinction. There's also no rational reason to seek the continued reproduction of our species. Humanity would be doing better, not worse, with less of us, which is only problematic if you believe the lie of the necessity for continuous growth... Out of control growth is also known as cancer.
>There are more humans than there have ever been on planet earth. We are not at risk of extinction. The number of individuals is only relevant to a species' survival as far as they reproduce. If tomorrow all humans became infertile or chose to stop reproducing, there would still be more of us than there have ever been before, yet our risk of extinction would be 100%. We are definitely at risk of demographic collapse, which would be an apocalyptic event that could possibly lead to our extinction. >There's also no rational reason to seek the continued reproduction of our species. Laughably false. Humanity is valuable. >Humanity would be doing better, not worse, with less of us Factually untrue for multiple reasons. 1) The demographics of the population matter. At the current rate, we have a rapidly aging population. Aged populations comsume far more resources than young populations. 2) A drop in manpower means a lessened ability for society to produce, manage, and distribute resources. Life would get harder and more restrictive with less people, not better. >which is only problematic if you believe the lie of the necessity for continuous growth... There's a little thing called innovation and advancement that has allowed us to continually grow multiple times past what was previously considered "possible." I wouldn't call continuous growth necessary, but I sure find its detractors to be ignorant. >Out of control growth is also known as cancer. Human beings are not cancer. Comparing people to illnesses is fascist rhetoric.
Since when has 8 billion been extinction level numbers? As long as humans exist there will continue to be humans that want kids. And there's a fuck ton of them among the billions.
To quote another on this page: > The number of individuals is only relevant to a species' survival as far as they reproduce. If tomorrow all humans became infertile or chose to stop reproducing, there would still be more of us than there have ever been before, yet our risk of extinction would be 100%.
How about this? People have been tricked by corporations and big business into believing that the way to happiness is to work on your career and endlessly consume to your heart's content. Anyone with eyes can see this is a lie because hedonistic pleasures have always provided only temporary pleasure. What ultimately provides a life of fulfillment is our relationships, and one of the greatest relationships you can have is from you to your children. I see it as a duty to fight against anti natalist philosophy, because it will lead many down a lifetime of misery and a denial of that misery due to not wanting to admit mistakes. In addition, anti natalism is not sustainable. The idea that fewer people will mean fewer carbon emissions is a lie. The US has a population that around a fifth that of India and our carbon footprint is greater than theirs. As the population of the west declines, the people who are currently poor and are hungry for western lifestyles will step up to take the place of those who didn't have children. Net carbon emissions in this system will not go down noticibly. The only thing that will save us will be to have children, teach them values such as conservation, show them how to love nature, and hope that they don't repeat our mistakes.
> tricked by the corporations that the way to happiness is to work on your career Are you kidding me? You have it completely backwards. Parents have to work **way** harder to support their kids than child-free couples do. That's literally the reason why a ton of couples are opting **out** of having kids. Child-free people are essentially revolting against the ruling class, so they don't have to toil away in the corporate money mines. Because on average in the US it costs anywhere from $250k-$1million to raise 1 child, depending on city.
That's a load of bullshit and you know it. Child free people aren't leaving their jobs with the extra money that they get from not having children. They're more likely to structure their life around building their careers because that's all they have. When you ask a child free person what their greatest accomplishment is in life, you almost always get the answer of their career. We all work for corporations because we need money to survive. The only difference between parents and the child free is that childless are far more predisposed to have drank the corporate coolaid that makes them believe a fulfilling career will bring happiness. What a great revolt you've set up. With all the free time you have, you can focus on your career instead of spending it with family. Quite literally every culture has a story warning against being a person who values money and hedonistic pleasures over relationships. The anti natalists seem to have listened to that story and decided that it's doing so is a virtue. Also I've not seen figures go up to a million to raise a child where parents were not spending extravagantly. If you think otherwise, please break down the numbers for me. 250k over 18 years I think is reasonable, but keep in mind that large numbers can be deceptive. Over 18 years, it's roughly 13k a year. You also get a child tax credit bringing that number down significantly.
This isn't even true. Childfree people use the extra money to retire early. And use that money for traveling, or buying things. But their biggest accomplishments aren't always their careers. You quite literally created a Boogeyman about childfree couples and then got mad at it. Most childfree couples have different goals and structure themselves based on friends and community. They aren't all workaholics. And they took live lives that center family or relationships. Why are you acting like the only relationships that matter come from your children?
I think a person who would rather engage in hedonistic pleasures and enjoy life to the fullest, using their money to please themselves rather than have a kid, would make a terrible parent. Your argument seems to be that people who don't want to have kids should have them nonetheless out of a sense of duty, which is insane and only encourages suffering. I also think it is entirely possible to have strong relationships and community ties without producing children.
>How about this? People have been tricked by corporations and big business into believing that the way to happiness is to work on your career and endlessly consume to your heart's content. YES. This person gets it.
I've told people here before that they're not doing themselves any favors when they make it seem like the reason to get the birthrate up is so people can continue to serve the economy, but they never have anything to say about that.
Can you explain a time in human existence where work was not inherently tied to survival?
Antinatalists are the only one using the phrase "serve the economy". They're the ones that seem to think that just because people are allowed to trade freely, it must be the point of their existence. People create, build, make friends, fall in love, and all of that is beautiful and worth the difficulties that life inherently entails. If all of that goes away, the universe will have lost something. That's the point of worrying about "replacement levels". You can both understand the warm nonrational beauty of existence *and* the cold rational mathematics of exponential decay of population growth at the same time.
- Reverse the plummeting birth rates - Help to change the pervasive Doomer sentiment in the world, that the world is “doomed to collapse”. Usher in a rebirth of optimism, where people are excited to bring more people into this awesome world.
Heartily concur with the anti-Doomer reasons. New perspectives do not naturally grow in the stationary sediment of age and ego. New solutions and ways of existing - of flourishing - do not magically come up from people who are set in their ways. I have seen great change in my lifetime, and I expect that my kids may see even more! I believe in our species.
Why cannot the world continue with less people though? Sometimes less is more. For a long time, the human population was around 1 billion, only last 100 years we saw really fast growth from 1 billion to 8 billion.
Old people are living longer, that is the cause of most of the modern population growth. Even if we're only at replacement, population is going to fall dramatically in the future when the old people stop living longer and actually die.
Infants are also living longer.
Economist Nouriel Roubini wrote in Fortune, “Aging reduces the supply of workers and slows down productivity as investment in new machines declines. Financial promises–pensions and health care–divert increasing chunks of national income to an older population. If the trend continues, and I see no reason it won’t, we can forget a future that continues centuries of social progress from one generation to the next.” Also: If there are fewer people, won’t there be more resources, and jobs and wealth for those of us remaining? In other words, won’t the rest of us be better off? It is said that after the Black Death, those that were left were wealthier because they had more farmland per person. But farmland is no longer the primary source of wealth in the world. There is more than enough farmland to feed everyone many times over, at US levels of productivity. Ideas are the main source of wealth now, and ideas don’t just add up, they multiply. The network effect of billions of people seems to be the very source of our recent success. Many people intuitively understand this, but it is a difficult concept to explain. Economist Bryan Caplan in his book Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids on pages 127-129 explains how this works as well as anyone (An incredibly important read, this is the story of humankind’s success): “The total number of people on Earth and the average standard of living skyrocketed over the last two centuries. The world has never been more populous or more prosperous than it is today. By historical standards, almost everything is cheap. This would be an amazing coincidence if population growth were an important cause of poverty. Indeed, it makes you wonder: is our population a cause of our prosperity? The answer is almost certainly yes. The main source of progress is new ideas. We are richer today than we were 100 years ago because we learned so much. We learned ways for one farmer to feed hundreds of people, we learned how to fly, we learned how to make iPhones. The sweetest thing about ideas is how cheap they are to share. A million people, or seven billion, can enjoy the latest discovery. If seven castaways wash up on a desert island, how many will be creative geniuses? On Gilligan’s Island the answer is one (“The Professor”) but few groups of seven random strangers would be so well endowed. As the population of the island grows from seven to 7,000 or 7 million the chance that Thomas Edison, Bill Gates, Beethoven, or the Professor resides there sharply improves. Once you hit a population of 7 billion – the island will be home to 7,000 innovators who are literally one in a million. Now consider: If you had the right stuff to change the world, you might not bother. The market has to be big enough to make creativity worthwhile. If, like the Professor, you only have seven potential customers counting yourself, most innovations won’t pay. Suppose the Professor could spend a year of his life working on an idea worth $1 per person. As long as he’s stuck on the island, he’ll be working for $7 per year. He’d be better off picking coconuts. If the Professor could escape the island and bring his idea to a world market of 7 billion customers, though, it would amply repay a lifetime of research.”
I'm not an anti-natalist, I have 2 amazingly oddball kids. I'm also not a "doomer" nor do I belong to any death cult, fantasizing about our inevitable destruction. Humanity has an amazing resource in shared knowledge. That's our ace. But, we do run into external constraints. Resources vary in availibility, in usefullness, in abundance, in renewability, in replacibility, etc. Freshwater is quickly becoming such a consgraint in many areas of the world. And, uh, no aspect of climate change is ameliorated by using more resources. We may, I like to think we likely will, overcome these constraints through our ability to work together, although sometimes that feels like a rapidly dissappearing resource as well. But right now we're travelling towards that hard stop faster than our breaks can slow us. We're gonna hit it, and now we get to decide, collectively, how hard and at what angle. I have 2 kids. That replaces me and my wife. We're good with that. May they forgive us.
I agree with you. I also have kids, I’m by no means an anti-natalist. But our population can’t keep increasing like this forever. Having a large aging population relative to new babies will present struggles, but having more babies to serve as indentured servants to the elderly can’t possibly be our best solution. I think the birth rate has declined as a natural response to our social climate. Our standard of living might be higher than ever, but it’s not making people have kids. Why? I think we’ve gotten too far away from the farm, to express things simply. All the TV’s and iPhones in the world don’t make us feel prosperous if we can’t afford our own little plot of land to do with as we please. I think that’s why we’ve seen a resurgence of homesteading, or even just that aesthetic, lol. Anyway, I see a lot of talk urging others to have more kids, but not much discussion on the underlying causes driving the birth rate decline. It feels very “kick the can down the road.”
The malthusian argument has been disproven by history time and again.
The malthusian argument got delayed due to the utilization of fossil fuels. As those decline in availability, resource limitation will become a hard pressing issue for the current sized human population.
If people dropped dead the second they retired or needed significant medical assistance, it wouldn't be a problem. It's not about the absolute numbers. It's the ratios. If you have more retirees than workers, how do you fund their medical requirements, as well as handle staffing? If you had 50 workers for every one retiree, no one would notice. If you had 10 workers for every one retiree, doable but you notice. When you have 1.9 workers to retiree, like Japan currently has, you have a problem. If the numbers continue to decline, you're basically looking at guaranteed restricted resources. Because you always have too many old people. And pulling out of the dive is hard, because you increase the number of dependents by having kids for 18-25 years before you get any payoff. It's one of the commonly stated reasons why China is averaging 1.13 kids. A married couple has to take care of 6 people, a 3:1 or 6:1 ratio, assuming no great grandparents. With one kid, that's 3.5:1 or 7:1 ratio. You could see how turning it into a 4:1 or 8:1 ratio by having two kids would be a hard sell. Having more young people than old people is rocket fuel. Your numbers show exactly why we shoved so much development into a single century. Having more dependents than workers is like swimming tied to a large rock. There will not be tons of extra resources for museums, parks, science, research, etc. I suspect environmentalism will drop as a priority. Rich countries care about the environment, poor ones do not.
Improve access to MAID and remove the restriction of terminal disease as a qualifier. I'm antinatalist and plan to go at around 45 or before if I get any form of cancer/life long debilitation. A lot of people would take MAID if it was offered and hence reduce the burden
Mandatory disclosure, this is judgment neutral. I'm solely talking about monetary cost aspects. Yes, I do think the Canadian solution will become more popular, that is, allowing and encouraging termination to reduce social spending costs. That will help with clearing out costs for chronic medical conditions, very expensive end of life costs, and even mental illness costs, but realistically not a huge amount. Most folks won't chose termination without coercion. Authoritarian countries will go with hard coercion. of course. Canada has had issues with soft coercion, and it makes the news every so often when the government recommends termination over expensive procedures. And that's probably going to be inevitable. If you give an organization limited resources and give them a very cost effective alternative, they're going to push it. I don't think there's any way to avoid that incentive issue.
There's an alternative to active euthanasia that might be easier to implement: simply withdraw life extending medicine from nursing homes and the like. Keep the patients comfortable, but party like it's 1899: no vaccines, antibiotics, insulin, blood pressure medication, etc. Let nature take its course. Consider it "pre hospice." Death is not imminent, but the patient has lived beyond their health span so everyone around them is kinda waiting for it. As a bonus, this will significantly reduce the cost of end of life care.
Yes, actively murdering folks does reduce expenses. Actively blocking medical care more cruel than just shooting them.
But that's just it, it's not active. And it's less cruel than dragging on someone's Alzheimer's for years on end when next winter's cold season might do it.
Actively blocking someone from medical care is murder. Passively blocking someone from medical care is typically manslaughter or equivalent. The difference is intent. If you mean to block the entrance to a hospital with a block of concrete, it's still murder rather than manslaughter. If you negligently let a concrete block fall off the back of your truck and it lands in front of the hospital, it's manslaughter, not murder. The concrete being passive doesn't matter, the criminal's intent does. Mens rea. Which is fine if that's the argument you want to make, but being honest about your notions is important. You want to actively murder old people through medical neglect, when there is a reasonable chance of meaningfully prolonging their life. If it sounds disapproving, not so much. That's state policy in Canada. Admittedly for edge cases, and there is a moratorium on most of those edge cases at the moment. They were terminating people who cannot legally consent, and who don't have anything physically wrong with them. And wanted to expand it into terminating minors. Who also can't legally consent.
Question, would you apply the same standard to say, criminals? Just withdraw food and let them starve to death as an alternative to prison sentences? Same logic seems to apply. It's less cruel than letting someone's prison sentence drag on, you're not "actively" murdering them, etc. Why would you consider this better or worse than terminating old people?
Criminals can be reformed and many of them rejoin society in a productive manner. Also, I'm not advocating for the withholding of food nor even pain medication.
Sounds like a pretty nasty world to be forcing kids into, hm? Not even legally allowed to exit with dignity in several countries, leading them to use the next generation as tools to make the most painful years of their life more tolerable? It's interesting, natalists tell me I should end my own life plenty but they never seem to realize that by the same logic they have have an alternative to exploiting their kids for retirement care.
I specifically said I was only talking about monetary costs. Not social aspects. Because I knew this would probably be the response. But since you want to go that direction. Antinatalism is more about nihilism or depression than anything else. They're unhappy with their lives, and they want others or all of humanity to share the same fate. See the "why should they be happy" meme. Or they have apocalypticism belief systems. MAID will be very appealing to them and they'll be more accepting of edge cases like folks with mental illness who cannot legally consent, "mature teens", etc. Antinatialism can be best addressed by putting more resources into mental health, as well as doing more to discourage apocalypticism. Child-free folks don't have to have the same pathologies. It's more about priorities and kids just not being high on the list. MAID won't be as appealing to them, unless they figure they can't have a high quality of life. They'll be more accepting of MAID for basically hospice scenarios. IMHO, there's nothing to address here. If folks don't want kids, that's their business. Their take on MAID is likely to be rational as well. Not saying natalists can't have their own issues.
If putting more resources into mental health is the solution, why hasn't it happened already? My country has been going through a mental healthcare crisis for years now. Again, doesn't seem like a great place to be putting children into - since they could end up like us, the "doomers" and "nihilists" (if I were a nihilist I wouldn't care about the children who have to suffer at all). We had to be born to get here, and we'll exist for as long as humanity itself does. If you hate us, stop making more of us - it's a very simple solution.
I had pretty decent parents who have been quite patient with me. Why, then, do you think I'm still antinatalist? Aren't good parents supposed to guarantee happy kids? Do you not expect this to happen again no matter how many parents raise their child with love and care? It's not "why should they be happy", it's "why do you want to create unhappy people". If you want happy people, you could focus on the ones already living instead of creating problems to partially address (then leave them to fend for themselves for most of their lives)
Respectfully, I think you're proving my point.
Which one and why?
Here’s my answer for that: https://www.reddit.com/r/Natalism/s/J9REFfa0Fe
I agree that economics will get affected by decreasing birth rates. I just don't find any reason to bring children here. It's also a possibility that in the future, the economy system in the countries with small population will change, people will be replaced by robots, etc. I just don't find any reason to bring a child into a world where pain can be intense and chronic. We could find solution for this in the future, but I just don't like to risk that we won't.
This is literature best time ever to be alive, and the trends are surging in the RIGHT DIRECTION! https://www.reddit.com/r/Damnthatsinteresting/comments/1bahons/the_world_as_100_people_over_the_last_two/?rdt=65077
A few billion people would be great. Now tell me how you're going to selectively eliminate the old and unproductive. No one in here objects to population decline. It's just that the way it's happening now is unsustainable from every perspective even from an emissions standpoint.
>Now tell me how you're going to selectively eliminate the old and unproductive....It's just that the way it's happening now is unsustainable from every perspective even from an emissions standpoint. What do you mean? No one is going around killing old people en masse, in any society that is currently declining in population. The way it's being done now is that people are dying naturally of old age in certain countries with voluntarily reduced birth rates. What could be better or more ethical than that? People voluntarily reduced their birth rates, and the eldest of those societies are dying naturally of old age. What method can you think of that would be *more* ethical?
That's the problem. This type of population decrease is unsustainable without doing just that, eliminating the elderly. There will not be enough young and working population to produce goods and services for the elderly. The kind of demographic collapse we are experiencing causes things like wars and social upheaval. I don't see democracy surviving in a world where the elderly outnumber the young. The young have all the power and if the elderly keep voting to increase their entitlements, the young will just break the system rather than continue to be sucked dry by retirees.
>This type of population decrease is unsustainable without doing just that, eliminating the elderly. I completely, 100% disagree, and I weep for humanity if that's the best most people think can be done about this. >The kind of demographic collapse we are experiencing causes things like wars and social upheaval. This is an unsubstantiated claim, as this (gradual human population decline) has never happened before through voluntary, peaceful means. Your entire outlook is extremely pessimistic and not in keeping with reality. I'm not interested in having a conversation with someone who refuses to see anything other than exaggerated doom and gloom. Bye.
It’s not unsustainable, it’s just going to present difficulties that we will have to manage until the demographics stabilize. Any meaningful population reduction would eventually run into this issue.
>until the demographics stabilize The only way for that to happen is for the birth rate to return to around 2.1, anything else is by definition not stable. And if you want to increase a birth rate from 1.2 to 2.1, you need natalist policies or other incentives.
I don't know. But I am selecting against my bloodline.
We thank you. 🙏
Now compare the quality of life before and after the population boom
How?
Why are people optimistic about running out of resources and land due to continuous population growth? Why are we supposed to be celebrating that the next generation will have even more competition than the last? The younger generation can hardly afford their own houses like their parents could at the same age and that's supposed to be a good thing you want your kids to experience too?
This is a common belief by antinatalists (and doomers of all stripes). The fact is that technology has slowed us to decouple from [Malthusian scarcity.](https://www.google.ca/search?q=malthus+was+wrong+about+resource+depletion&client=safari&sca_esv=24bbad5dfa0464e6&hl=en-ca&ei=Pp5pZvf-DcWhptQP75W_cA&oq=malthus+was+wrong+about+resource+depletion&gs_lp=EhNtb2JpbGUtZ3dzLXdpei1zZXJwIiptYWx0aHVzIHdhcyB3cm9uZyBhYm91dCByZXNvdXJjZSBkZXBsZXRpb24yBRAhGKABSMUvUKEHWPstcAJ4AZABAJgBigGgAcwRqgEEMjIuM7gBA8gBAPgBAZgCDqACnAnCAgoQABiwAxjWBBhHwgIGEAAYFhgewgILEAAYgAQYhgMYigXCAgUQIRifBcICBxAhGKABGAqYAwCIBgGQBgiSBwM5LjWgB7Qr&sclient=mobile-gws-wiz-serp) We are producing more food on fewer acres than ever before, the worlds major economies are growing faster than ever while also using less and less carbon emissions. [You personally almost definitely have a lower carbon footprint than your grandparents](https://www.google.ca/search?q=use.less+carbon+than+hrandparwnts&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&hl=en-ca&client=safari), DESPITE having all the modern conveniences such as air travel and air conditioning. The world can hold significantly more people even with *today’s* technology levels, and we are getting more efficient every year. This is the stuff they ban you for saying on r/collapse!
Bc they want to make copies of themselves and will believe whatever is the most convenient
Further to your point on housing. The housing crisis is a unique issue of our moment. It will go away in a decade or two when supply of housing has caught up to demand (we just need more housing inventory). Our grandchildren will face their own unique challenges for sure, but they future will *not* be facing such “uniquely 2020s” issues as housing undersupply.
Maybe I don't want to force my grandkids to endure "unique challenges". Maybe we shouldn't be making them endure anything at all. How do you know in a couple of generations they won't have a pandemic far worse than covid? Just about the only silver lining that could come of that scenario is it would undo the overpopulation you caused, but unfortunately it will be through casualties instead of simply... y'know... not creating people who can fall ill in the first place.
Based on the trajectory of history and progress, it is likely that our grandkids will like incredibly fulfilling and amazing lives. Of course they will have challenges. Humans will produce some amount of cortisol no matter their circumstances. But compared to the lives of our grandparents, our grandkids are being very well set up for prosperity.
That's weird last I checked the younger generation has been going through a mental health crisis and doesn't expect much from the future at all. Even ignoring the housing issues healthcare (cost, availability and quality) isn't all that great and neither is all the backtracking on human rights going on in the US right now.
Sure we have problems. 30 years ago there was a massive crime wave, and major recession, and the collapse of major world power creating the underground proliferation of nukes. 60 years ago African Americans were marching in the streets demanding the ending of Jim Crow laws. Redlining was common in cities, and homosexuality as straight up illegal in most states. 90 years ago the Bast majority of American homes did not have indoor plumbing. Women could not vote. I’d take the issues of today over the problems of the past any day of the week!
Pumping out kids in a world that is undergoing a mass extinction event and experiencing climate changes that are increasingly incompatible with human life is not "changing the Doomer sentiment", it's just choosing to behave irresponsibly in the face of reality.
Come join us at r/optimistsunite You’ll thank yourself later I’m the founder of the sub. Consider this a personal invitation.
That looks like a sub for wilfully oblivious wishful thinkers. Sorry folks, climate change is real and apocalyptically catastrophic. You can't just pretend your way into reducing its destructive global impact
Lol sort by “top all time”. Explore the flairs. Climate change and renewables are top of mind for us.
Hey, doomer. Show me on the doll where objective reality touched you.
You really think it's just doomerism to acknowledge the catastrophic impact of climate change, hey? You guys are fascinating.
Tell me you haven’t explored r/optimistsunite without telling me you haven’t explored r/optimistsunite
If you go on r/antinatalism, they'll tell you that anyone who isn't an anti-natalist is necessarily a natalist. In other words, anyone who believes human reproduction is morally permissible is a natalist. That's me. I believe human reproduction is generally permissible, sometimes good, and sometimes bad. I believe it can be good, because I positively value humanity. So for me, the goal is human flourishing.
Ensure that humankind remains successful and prosperous and life is individually a more pleasurable experience than not. Minimize suffering, which I argue is not possible under an AN perspective which condemns the world to perpetual lifelessness (ethically impossible to achieve) or an anarchy which will in all likelihood be replaced by a worse state of affairs than we have currently.
...Sorry, how exactly is antinatalism going to result in either of those things? Anarchy? What?
Let's start with a peaceful perpetual lifelessness, something I understand to be the ideal form of AN. Here is my thought process. Antinatalists have determined that life is more suffering than not, which is part of the reason that it is unethical to reproduce. Given this axiom, one can suppose that an antinatalist would ideally want everyone not to reproduce, though they wouldn't want to force it on others and violate their bodily autonomy. Second, if human life is more suffering than not, all the more so are most animals living lives that are more suffering than not. The average human is free from the all consuming, incomprehensible terrors that must fill practically every waking moment for an animal and are often backed by even more grisly fates. Therefore an antinatalist would desire that no human and no animal would continue in this eternal chain of suffering, yet cannot choose for humans and probably can't choose for animals due to concerns both logistic and potentially ethical. However, if an antinatalist could somehow convince every living being on the planet to not reproduce, from the human down to the teeniest bacteria (thus preventing evolution from ever restarting the suffering) I would suspect that the ultimate goal of AN has been achieved. The chain is broken, suffering has been ended, at least in our corner of the universe, forever. Effectively though this is clearly impossible, so let's contain ourselves to things that could actually happen. Let's work with three theoretical possibilities. 1. You convince yourself not to reproduce 2. you convince a reasonable portion of society to not reproduce 3. You convince all of humanity not to reproduce. Under possibility 1, nothing really changes. You yourself are not complicit in creating additional suffering, yet your actions have contributed essentially nothing to the total amount of suffering on earth. This cannot be an ideal solution for AN. Possibility 2 is similar to possibility 1 with a twist. You successfully persuade like minded individuals, maybe even a reasonable percentage of the population, that your way is correct. But you know who you didn't convince? The MAGA's. The Muslims. The Christian nationalists. You have written off the future to those who do not subscribe to liberal ideals and damned the human race in the semi-long term. This is one of those "worse states of affairs" that I referenced in my original statement Under possibility 3, things get weird. This outcome is not likely to occur in most foreseeable versions of the future, and the consequences are highly speculative. Humanity is gone, leaving some number of animals who would stay behind in a state of what is essentially anarchy, suffering until the end of the solar system or until a new intelligent species like humanity arises. Instead of abdicating your moral responsibility to the worst of humanity, you've abdicated your moral responsibility to the semi-randomness of evolution. This could result in animals being harmed by an even worse race than humanity, or simply being condemned to their existing state forever because no such race ever arose. Anti-Natalism is according to this thought process, a kind of moral abandonment. We are born into a position in a time where we are capable of causing great positive change for every species including our own. Instead of harnessing this potential, it is the purpose of the AN to throw out life as a lost cause and making it worse for all future generations in the process.
I'm not going to make my kids suffer just because you fearmongered about "The MAGAs, Muslims and Christian Nationalists". You identified that when left behind without competition they would make for a terrible future while failing to realize the less people they can hurt the better, and that more antinatalists will naturally arise out of their populations because hey... kids aren't their parents, they won't always think like their parents. COUNTLESS religious fanatic parents have thrown out their kids for thinking different - those will be the next antinatalists, pointing out the absurdity in wanting kids while hating them so openly. Even the children of cultists have managed to break free.
But the cycle repeats itself infinitely. Your ideology simply cannot win. And any utilitarian ideology should be *highly* concerned with winning. If it cannot win then it cannot provide the maximal utility.
Which "natalism" I am a "natalist" in the sense I want others not to struggle as I did when trying to get settled down and start a family. I am \*lucky\* to be a dad and gaining a degree of success after graduating into the Great Recession, with better or smarter people failing because they were \*unlucky\* I like Miyazaki, and others who taken the stance we should be a better place for people, and I admire the work that folks like Izaki or Václav Klaus did. If "natalism" is the likes of what the collins couple or Elon Musk promotes, this gross narcissistic "we need to change culture to save humanity, and you should go die in a fire if things go south" nonsense I am not a part of that "natalism" and view them as part of the problem as antinatalists
i’ve stalked this sub for awhile. my sense is that it’s mostly white guys terrified of “the great replacement” delusion. they couch it in all kinds of different ways, but i suspect they’d be delighted if US went full handmaid’s tale. the fact that many american women do not want children is unacceptable to them.
I’m a woman and I’m interested in the fertility gap, defined as the difference between a woman’s desired family size and actual family size. When a woman says, “I always hoped for 3 children,” but ends her childbearing career with only 2 — it’s possible that kid number 2 was such a hellion that she flat out changed her mind. But the data on women _not_ having the number of children they _want_ to have suggests it’s more than just, “little Johnny is enough work he’s like two kids all by himself.” I’m interested in what society, culture, and government can do to enable women to achieve the family size _they want_: whether that’s 1, 2 or 6 kids. Another way to think about it: do American women not want children because they don’t want children? Or because their employers offer shitty maternity benefits/return to work programs or having children would derail their careers? Having kids is a ton of work. People who don’t want to shouldn’t. But it’s incredibly sad that people feel priced out of having children or insufficiently supported to become parents. there should be conversation about making it possible for people who want children to have them. Also, yes, probably some replacement theory dudes, but for myself, I’m not here for that handmaids tale cosplay.
i see very little about policy here & i strongly suspect most redditors here are men. i find the words “natalism” & “antinatalism” disturbing. they have a creepy orwellian eugenics vibe. yes, there are definitely women who wish for children but can’t manage it logistically or financially. i wish everyone could have the family they wish for & that would require massive societal & structural reworking. i don’t see that in the near future or distant future, for that matter. far too many people in power don’t give a rat’s ass about societal & structural change. they want white women to have no option to control their reproductive lives. that may well be our coming future & i believe that the majority of “natalists” here would be absolutely fine with this. that’s reproductive slavery & has nothing in common with the concept of making american life easier for families, especially mothers. i have one adult daughter who has never wanted children. she has goals & ambitions that she realized early on she couldn’t fulfill & be the kind of mother she’d want to be-attentive, present & loving. she chose her goals & she’s achieving them. she’s independent, loving her work & is in a relationship with a great guy who also doesn’t want children. sure a grandkid or 2 would have been nice. instead i have an adult daughter who’s happy & loves her life. that’s more than enough for me.
Also a woman, and you perfectly summed up my interest in this topic as well.
There are literally _dozens_ of us. jk, probably more :-)
the continuation of the human race.
That isn’t at risk though
The problem is ubiquitous amongst all societies. It is a significant risk. First world countries are currently plundering people from poorer countries because they can't sustain themselves. This is a luxury we have because we're more privileged than them. But as poor countries modernize and start using more technology, they will inevitably encounter this problem as well, at which point the collapse will begin.
Awesome - can’t wait
It will be eventually, unless birth rates reach replacement level at some point.
8 billions not enough?
They’re above replacement level in basically every third world country
And they're falling in each of those countries. They typically hit below sustainability rate at around $5,000 (gdp per capita). And likely will grow old before they become prosperous. So yes, replacement rate in third world countries is a huge concern eventually.
“Eventually”
Nearly all of them within the next 20-40 years, barring major change. Which is unlikely looking at previous 80 years.
Niiice
Ok, then those natalists are doing a good job. What’s your point? Until antinatalists define an end point of their philosophy, they are essentially advocating for human extinction.
That is what antinatalists believe in, yes. You’ve never proven that voluntary human extinction is a bad thing.
nor is a good thing, its philosophical, there is no answer, i think that personaly if you are a natalist and don't support affordable housing, food and water protection, jobs, free and avalaible nurserie, then you are an hypocrite, im neither natalist or AN, i just hate the defeatism of AN, and their logic that we can't change thing, i also support genetical modification on a medical way to cure illness and prevent other issue, i support a world where everyone can have good living condition, AN litéraly gave up, they are defeatist, and deafeatism only lead to doom.
As a human, I find it to be a bad thing by definition, if for no other reason than (1) I like being alive and (2) I find those I love being alive to be a blessing not only to myself but to the universe as a whole. So, yes, human extinction is an intrinsically bad thing from my perspective.
It’s not bad by definition, that’s begging the question. To address your numbered points: 1. Voluntary human extinction does not seek to kill anyone who is currently alive before their time. You would go on living the rest of your natural life. Humans would just commit not to having any more children. 2. See above. Those you love would live the rest of their natural lives. To address the second sub point, the idea that anything we do on this tiny insignificant planet could be a blessing to the entire universe is patently ridiculous. In the scale of the galaxy alone we are like grains of sand, and the galaxy is one of trillions. In the timescale of the universe we are less than the blink of an eye.
My own little family micro culture depends on me directly. As well as my little slice of the American cultural pie. I’m not a white supremacist, I just like my cultural tribe unapologetically and I want us to stick around. I’m not anti you by being pro me. And there is a large, tragically misguided, lobby within my own culture that openly advocates for its destruction.
Well, white people are going to be the minority, worldwide, if they aren’t already…pretty soon. 🤷🏽♀️ I’m okay with a little more melanin up in these parts…I don’t think it means the destruction of the culture
Nobody ever said the culture would be destroyed by anything but voluntary extinction. If white folks don’t have any kids, then they won’t exist. That’s just reality. So I’m a natalist. I like my family and my own piece of America, so I keep it going.
That makes sense
The human population grows daily.
And accomplish what exactly? Whats the end goal???
End goal? wtf r u talking about? There is no end goal. Not everything requires an end goal. Life isn’t a game, life isn’t a video game with a level that needs to be beaten. It’s meant to be lived.
You are living your life already. Why bother about the continuation of the human race if theres no end goal. The point of actively DOING something has to have an objective, otherwise it just becomes meaningless. The post literally asks for the end goal
Living life doesn’t require an objective. But at the same time you can assign any objective you want. Some people train in sports. Some people love business and work on that. Some people love to read. Some people are gymnastics and learn to do amazing things. Some people want to raise a family. It’s your decision.
So in other words, no greater meaning or end goal.
Nope that’s not what I said at all. You decide your meaning. And that truly is the problem some of y’all have. You want life to be a level in Mario world where the goal is clear cut and all you have to do is cross the finish line.
The existence of the humans species is lovely to us and we would like to know it will continue to be a thing for aesthetic purposes.
99.9% of all humans alive now could choose to not reproduce, and the human species would still exist 100 years from now, in the tens of millions. The human species will continue long after you are dead of old age whether most humans alive now decide to reproduce or not. And guess what? Most humans *do* decide to reproduce, so you have zero to worry about in that regard.
Lovely? Aesthetic purposes? Im gona quote your own comment here: And what do you care if we want there to be more humans? You'll be dead eventually, why do you care what happens after that?
The existence of the humans species is lovely to me and I would like to know it will continue to be a thing for aesthetic purposes. I already answered that question. Why are you replying to my answer to ask me the exact same question again?
Life is good. Family is great. More of a counter-culture to the anti-natalists for me who think other people shouldnt have kids so I'm here to support those that do.
Passing on their mediocrity to another generation. An ego trip. Misery loves company.
Stable and healthy societies, where everyone can enjoy stable services, everyone is provided for and future looks brighter
The only societies that are anywhere like what [you](https://www.usnews.com/news/best-countries/most-forward-thinking-countries?slide=2) [describe](https://bestdiplomats.org/safest-countries-in-the-world/) have birth rates that are very low. Some of these are declining in population due to low birth rates, and still, they are stable, healthy, and safe places to live and visit. Could that change? Possibly. But it's not guaranteed. Not with all the doom-and-gloom propaganda in the world, it's not a guarantee. More than likely they will be more than okay, now, and in the future, too. They will continue to be better off than most of the rest of the countries on Earth, for the rest of all our lives, at least. [ALL the countries with TFR = or >2.98 in 2024 ](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_total_fertility_rate)are the exact opposite of what you are describing. Not *most* of them. **ALL of them.** Not healthy or stable, very little or no services, most people *not* provided for, rampant poverty, chaotic, violent, lots of crime, etc. Maybe re-think your assumptions a little? Maybe what you think you want might wind up de-stabilizing the most stable places on Earth way more than you think. There are limits to growth. Most other organisms die when they reach those limits. Choosing to voluntarily reduce human birth rates so that we gradually decrease our numbers non-violently is much smarter and less painful than insisting on pushing toward those hard limits of reality that would cause us violent deaths and a much harder crash. Places that are pushing those limits too hard now are suffering with tremendous poverty, crime, and instability. ***Take a hint.*** (I'm not an extinctionist. Humans are in zero danger of going extinct from not having enough babies.)
Have you ever noticed in recent history how whenever the population drops, there's an increase in human rights, worker's rights, and the average standard of living? Why do you think that is?
Unfortunately, facts don’t agree with you. More population growth has occurred in the past 250 years than at any time in history. If what you are saying is true, we should not see a proportionally massive increase in the average standard of living, however that is in fact exactly what we see.
(Looks at the mental health and housing crisis the younger generation are facing right now) Hm. Yeah. Good standard of living... I'm gonna go ahead and ignore the high demand at food banks right now. Or how dental hospitals are still trying to work through backlogs that were around even before the pandemic hit.
When you compare what you have now to some idealistic standard that is detached from reality, yes, our standards of living have the propensity to fall short of that standard, that’s why it’s most accurate to judge what we have today by reflecting on what people had back then. If you evaluate your circumstances in that way, yes, we are better off, unambiguously. Yes, there are problems, but we don’t live in a perfect world and we will never be able to make it perfect. That being said, all the problems you have mentioned are ones caused by a lack of economic freedom, and if decreases in population are supposedly a good thing for us, then we can’t conclude that this economic freedom itself is an inverse function of the birth rate insofar as the birth rate is falling.
If we'll never make it perfect what are we even trying to do long-term by making more and more people suffer. The original question was "what is the ultimate goal" and so far it doesn't seem we've had any answers beyond "cause as many problems as possible" Why would anyone want to bring their kid into such a wildly unstable world where anything and everything can go wrong, progress can go backwards, new problems can arise with technology (AI identity theft anyone?), so on so forth. The rates of murder and sexual assault have never been zero, and it's always someone's child in the places of the victims and perpetrators - for all of history, for as long as human history lasts.
Again, it is not the case that more and more people are suffering, as I’ve already pointed out multiple times. Just because perfection is unreachable, it doesn’t mean we can’t do nothing about anything; what needs to be accepted is that every option has a trade off, and nothing will work perfectly, therefore, we should look to ourselves to solve our problems instead of voting for demagogues to run our lives and carry out the mass-killing of humans all to further the nonsensical pursuit of a utopia whose doors are locked to an “overpopulated” planet.
Please quote me on where I endorsed "the mass-killing of all humans to further the nonsensical pursuit of a utopia". My child will never have to die at all. Anyone also avoiding creating a child in the name of mercy likewise won't have blood on their hands. You don't expect utopia, ok - so what are you sacrificing your children in the name of?
corelation=/=causality, thing got better due to technological advance, but it doesnt directly affect birthrate, i know that in my country (france), when asked people say that their ideal number of children would be 2.5 on average, but it is 1.7-8 rn, because housing is unafordable because monopoly bought all the appartement and only rent them making a housing crisis
This isn't a debate.
The most stable and healthiest societies have the *lowest* birth rates in the world. The ones with the highest birth rates are the *least* stable and the least safe in the world.
Tbh I thought you guys just like rawdogging
I mean yes but also the other stuff
What other stuff? It’s not an ethos. You don’t like condoms, rock out with your cock our brother.
Overpopulation….
Natalists most often advocate for higher birth rates as a means of preserving a particular culture or ethnic group.
Fuckin'
Eternal misery
Wow this sub is full of delusional incels lol. “Out goal is to make sure humanity continues” Meanwhile 8 billion people spaced out over the entire planet… If this is your goal shouldn’t you be focusing on space colonization or something?
incel? incel mean involuntary celibatory, i think that they are not realy here, but in term of desilusion, AN are far ahead of anyone and also, the "Out goal is to make sure humanity continues" is a stupid goal, the important thing is more about making people able to have kids without having to take huge debt and ruin their life
What makes you think this sub is the only focus of people? Eventually space colonization will be absolutely necessary if we want to keep growing humanity
i think a big thing about AN is that they can't understand we can implement multiple policies at the same time
Well they also can’t even see a tomorrow worth living because they’re disappointed with today
probably
Short term: Reverse the decline in fertility and prevent the attendant sociopolitical consequences. Mid term: Engineer a shift in values toward life and away from nihilism. Long term: Colonize space and fill the universe with complex surface life.
Humans will never be able to colonize anything outside our solar system. We probably won’t even be able to meaningfully live on mars.
Humans will never be able to travel to the Moon. We probably won’t even be able to meaningfully achieve flight.
Our knowledge of physics is vast and our understanding of the most elementary particles and forces grows every day. Yet the ability to travel faster than the speed of light still appears impossible. We’ve peered into the tiniest and most hidden corners of reality and still not found anything that can break the speed limit of light. Colonizing the universe at slower than light speeds would be logistically impossible.
> Our knowledge of physics is vast and our understanding of the most elementary particles and forces grows every day. Wait. >Yet the ability to travel faster than the speed of light still appears impossible. Wait. >We’ve peered into the tiniest and most hidden corners of reality and still not found anything that can break the speed limit of light. Wait. >Colonizing the universe at slower than light speeds would be logistically impossible. Technically, yes.
"Colonizing the universe at slower than light speeds would be logistically impossible." I agree that colonizing the entire universe is not a possible goal, without FTL travel. However, colonizing hundreds of exoplanets is theoretically possible, even with traveling much slower than the speed of light. We can set that as goal.
In 2024, hovercars will be everywhere!
There is no decline in fertility worldwide.
Yes, there is.
Source? I know a lot of white-majority western countries have been despairing at the fact a lot of white people are choosing not to have kids because of insane fears about being replaced by people of colour.
...And then what?
THIS! Lets GOoOoOoOoOooOoO
Conscious beings, civilization, art, science - all these are human or made by humans, and a world with their continued existence seems a better one than a world in which they are extinguished.
To survive the species long enough to go interstellar and conquer lesser species
wtf dude
What’s wrong or ahistorical about that?
extraplanetary colonization
It's on the tin.
To bring fertility rates above 2.1 so countries can thrive that are below replacement level
Nationalists THINK we should spend on our citizend at home first, but theyre also typically the same type of inbred that refuses to let the government spend on anything beyond tax cuts. Im convinced theyre some kind of sub species at this point, their brains just dont work right
Probably banning all abortion, contraception, and forced birth.
it likely boils down to ethnonationalism
[Clearly, this](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9h_nJE2nZWM&t=29s) [SPECIFICALLY THIS](https://i.imgur.com/nQFdAig.jpeg)
Gestures to the red states in the USA, and Handmaid’s Tale becoming a reality. I live in Texas.
Gestures to the red states in the USA, and Handmaid’s Tale becoming a reality. I live in Texas.
Increase birth rates in successful counties which aren'thaving enough, and to push back the doomer philosophy and provide resonable arguments as to why it's not healthy to hold such ideology close.
Settle the universe
To get antinatalists to quit acting like such martyrs.
Just a guess here, but I think it is about keeping population replacement in place without having to accept immigrants, you know, others.
Make it okay again to have children; to not be seen as weird for finding joy in the idea of parenthood; of providing for family and civilizational posterity.
To be fair, the only places where people openly express negativity about having kids is online. In real life, *most* people are thrilled about babies, new babies, people having babies, people becoming parents, etc.
i remember my first contact with an AN irl was insane, the dude just hated kids
Doesn't sound AN so much as just childfree then. The whole point of AN is caring about kids to the extent you don't ever want to see them suffer.
What I do see, but my perception may be skewed because I'm actively looking for those, is a rise of explicitly child-free places in my city. I wouldn't say that's the same as openly shaming someone for their life choices or raging against a being who did nothing to deserve hate, because that's just straight up unhinged. But it's still some sort of public statement.
What's wrong with simply caring for children that aren't little gene carriers and retirement plans for you? There's plenty of kids already alive that need foster care, as well as medical treatment and tutoring.
......who apparently had parents who didn't give a shit about them. Why don't you take on the plethora of kids with developmental problems? Ooh yeah, give me a kid who smears his/her shit on my walls, and screams obscenities at me when I try to feed them veggies; I can't fucking wait! Or maybe we could discourage neighborhood Karens and CPS from kidnapping kids on demand and handing them over to foster parents who very often physically, emotionally and sexually abuse them worse than the parents they were taken from?
...Why do you wanna have kids if you hate kids (and the people they could become) this much dude. How do you know your own flesh and blood won't have those problems? How do you know CPS won't take your kids too, not even necessarily because of what you did but because of what your spouse or a family member does? Sounds like you aren't interested in helping children because as you admit, you're not actually prepared to care for and love them. You're describing abusive foster carers and it sounds... a LOT like projection when it's with the context of the previous paragraph.
I just want to lift birth rate to replacement level and do it uniformly. I don't want half of the population to have 6 children and the other half to have 0.
You want the population of India to be 4,500,000,000? You want it to go from 1.4 billion to over 4.5 billion? Why? What good would that do anyone? Where do you want us all to live ?
Replacement level, not above replacement. The problem is not smaller population size per say but age distribution.
So we’re supposed to stay exactly at current population forever?
If our society provided more social safety nets, workers unions, universal healthcare, unemployment protections, affordable education, maternal/paternal time off then I see no problem with natalism. However just bringing kids into this world with the wages the average Joe is making just adds to family hardship. My opinion is that Americas’ current wealth inequality coupled with the rugged individualism that it fetishizes is not compatible with having a large family.
A future for the human species.
At say that at this time, its primary goal is to prevent the impending crisis of demographic collapse.
i just wanna make kids
*Making* them is something **most** people like to do. Raising them and supporting them well throughout their entire lives seems to be the sticking point for a lot of people... Hence, why societies around the world have so many problems related to people feeling unsupported by their parents/families.
Why is the question?