Actually I do know who needs to hear it - people like this: https://twitter.com/kazweida/status/1521312672465051649
I know it's not the most important thing right now, but since the Roe v Wade news there have been a bunch of tweets encouraging men to get vasectomies, and/or trying to analogize between female birth control methods and vasectomies, that include some assertion to the effect of "you can just get it reversed later when you're ready for kids".
This is not true. Yes, the vasectomy reversal procedure exists but its success rate is not very good (70% at best), and the likelihood of restoring fertility only goes down as more time passes since the initial vasectomy. This is why urologists advise their patients to consider a vasectomy to be a permanent procedure.
I won't say much more about it, other than it would be nice if more forms of male birth control (e.g. Vasalgel) entered the market soon.
My biggest gripe with antinatalism is its Euro framing. Yes, world is burning. Adding more people may seem to be questionable. But who in the world has reproduction above replacement level? Are the black and brown poors of the world really being evil in their daring bid to... do something that is completely natural and necessary for the continued existence for humans? By and large, it's a very small part of the picture no matter the philosophizing that may accompany it. Antinatalism can also fall into blatant misanthropy at points, which is a slippery step away from a nihilistic disdain for all life.
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My take is that Anti-Natalism fundamentally misunderstands the point of reproduction/having kids. Like, it's not supposed to be a weird utilitarianist calculus to figure out whether or not the kid you'd end up having is gonna end up experiencing more Utils of pleasure (or whatever the fuck we're gonna use as a calculation). It's about the continuation of the species, and of human social bonds.
Oh yeah that's obviously bad.
those colonizing white europeans are good somehow because no babies
Yeah for me it's a purely individualistic thing. I couldn't look someone in the eye knowing that I was fully responsible for all the suffering inflicted on them and feel good about myself. My life has sucked, I don't believe that "But there are good parts of life, too!" line at all.
If I'm being honest, I find the "but there are good parts of life, too" argument convincing because I don't have depression.
See it's easy for people who spend some or all of their life mostly functional to be like "Yeah the good days outweigh the bad days". But like, I have bipolar disorder. My bad days are horrifying. Absolutely nightmarish in ways that I really can't explain because there's no real language for talking about what happens when your brain's normal cognitive processes break down. I would never, ever, place someone in a situation where they might have to go through what I've gone through. The only reason I stick around is that my standard of living makes the days when I'm functional tolerable, and because my family would be really upset if I killed myself. But in a vacuum? If I could just press an off switch and not have to suffer like this? No question. And that's from a position where all my immediate needs for food and housing are met, I honestly don't know how anyone survives what I've got when they don't have a stable social safety net that can care for them. Well, I mean, I do know, because how people survive is mostly that they don't. The suicide rate for people with serious treatment resistant bipolar is very high.
Like i don't resent my parents or anything, but I think it does speak to the vast gulf of experience between able bodied/minded people and people who have serious disabilities, just how casually and thoughtlessly people have kids. Like from a purely economic standpoint; Disability is incredibly expensive in America, and social support is dogshit when it exists at all. I know people whose kids will need total economic support for their entire lives, and at some point the parents will be too old to care for them, and then what? What happens to someone who is like 65, unable to work, unable to care for themselves? I know there are some programs for adults but, like, this is america; The truth is most people in that circumstance die ugly, either on the streets or in prison.
Like, this isn't something I ever talk about with people IRL, because what's the point? People are going to have kids, or they won't. But I think it's a subject that's very, very seriously, and people treat it very, very lightly.
The kicker is that most parents aren't even nice to kids who end up having mental problems. The people who are supposed to be most sympathetic and supportive to you instead treat you like you're at fault and deserve to be punished. It's an enormous injustice and a total abdication of responsibility. If you create a person whose life is constant suffering, the least you could do is be nice to them and do what you can to help.
I don't want to make a claim of universality. I don't want to claim that there's an achievable balance that's for everyone. I am aware that there are experiences worse than death that millions of people regularly live through.
It feels wrong going into this as a person with no major traumas and no depression. It may be frustrating to see me, someone with the privilege of being a contented person, going on to say "happiness isn't everything." But the promise of happiness is itself a lie in many regards, from the "pursuit of happiness" to the pseudoscience of "positive" psychology.
I don't want to judge you or invalidate your suffering. You seem to be having a tough time with things. I do want to contend that, outside of either of our experiences, there is a drive towards furthering life that nonetheless survives despite its abysmal failures. Some lives are destroyed in the mix, some mice meet owls, some people are born with debilitating conditions. No single part of this natural order is redemptive, just, or resilient. But the whole mass of life tends to stick around, one generation at a time. To me, antinatalism concerns itself with the obvious failures of life, but offers no real alternative to it other than letting everything die out within a generation. It avoids or disgraces many of the other things that are tied to the experience of living, and often appears to be little more than a philosophical dead end that appeals to those who find themselves at dead ends.
I've got another take on this and like most of the shit I post, it has to do with fish. Gambusia, probably the most invasive species of freshwater fish in the world, are prolific breeders. They're livebearers like guppies, so they give birth to free-swimming fry. Throw a dozen in your pond and you will have literally hundreds by the end of the year. You will never run out of gambusia if you have a stable population in a pond.
But the thing is, these fish are actually somewhat difficult to spawn in a tank. The females have the fairly unique ability to delay giving birth - sometimes for months - until there are no predators nearby, including the male parent. I've only had one give birth in my tank and the fry got eaten immediately. The gambusia simply aren't going to waste the resources that go into childbirth if it's unlikely that the next generation will reach sexual maturity.
I think anti-natalism as a movement is silly, but I understand why people hold to it as a personal philosophy. We want to give our young the best chance of survival, and when that's no longer an option, rejecting the idea of raising children altogether is a perfectly reasonable response. Look at the states where birthrates have been hit the hardest - these are some of the worst places to live in the US. The movement is problematic because of the underlying premise that population control is the answer, but simply refusing to have kids until things change and even politicizing this decision is perfectly acceptable. There ought to be a competing narrative - maybe a voluntary "birth strike" of some sort, we can we workshop it - so that left-leaning adults don't fall into an ideology with proto-fascist trappings.
real Lysistrata hours