Seriously almost all of my friends have kids now and no one has time to hang out anymore. This is bullshit and must stop!
in contrast basically none of my friends are having kids, to the point where my impression of population growth is that the human race decided to stop reproducing in 2020
None of my friends have kids, but nearly all of my coworkers do and even speaking of getting more. It's weird. Thankfully I'm leaving soon. I want coworkers who will have time to befriend my gay ass.
Could be age thing? I'm in my late thirties and most of my friends have had their kids in the last five years.
to some extent. gen mz is not having children due to the economic climate in several countries. id argue one of the reasons you might see more late 30s is because some women worry about becoming less fertile, as after 30, you progressively have a harder time to give birth, and gets much worse as time passes on, so those who want children are pushed to do so sooner rather than later.
That's about a good time to adopt a rando 5yo and find out which of your friends are racist or natalist.
I think some Elder Millenials were lucky enough to get enough scraps to still pull off the house/kids thing, but anyone younger prob. has way worse odds.
Go hang out at their house and play with their kids
Signed,
-A Parent.Heading over to do bong rips and watch the X-rated cut of RoboCop with your four year old rn
This is less of a dealbreaker for some people than you’d imagine as long as you’re not hot boxing the living room or blowing smoke in their face lol
No me and the little tyke would be trading rips on the back porch while he goes on the four year old equivalent of a hot couch guy tirade
I've gone outside or into the designated smoking room while hanging with friend's kids and essentially was this. Tbf they were hot couch parents as well. Not bad at the job and the kid is pretty much an adult now and more well adjusted than her parents by a bit. They were old train hopping punx doing the best they could, but yknow the face tatted before it was acceptable were always around and stuff. It was joked about that she couldn't really run away from home cause her folks knew everyone on the road
She was sent home in elementary school for having wayyy too scary a haloween costume. Full blood soaked black metal look.
Goddamn it this kid is way cooler than any of us
We don't deserve to hang out with her
I saw that dude get half-melted by toxic waste in Betamax when I was 4 and it is not at all why I didn't turn out fine
Seconding this. I had kids earlier than most of my friends and we essentially got abandoned for years by them because they were really weird about so many aspects of the necessary changes we were making.
Thanks I guess that explains years of gaslighting and ghosting instead of just talking to us since we were supposedly such good friends. We weren’t pushing them on anybody. We had a sitter. People just stopped inviting us.
The few friends that stuck with us just made some clear boundaries up front and we’ve been cool for over a decade. It’s not hard.
That blows. I'm not a huge fan of kids but playing the fun uncle for a few hours every now and then is pretty cool. It kinda sucks though when I go see a buddy I haven't seen in a year and they have to deal with the kids till 8pm and then be in bed 10. I don't work so I can hang out when ever but it can still be extremely hard to schedule things with parents. In another few years though I hope things will be easier, 8 years olds can entertain themselves enough to actually chill with your friends.
What if those babies are your little brothers or sisters, then do you wanna hang around with them?
Good call. You can leave a one year old cat by itself for hours and still have time for friends. I try to convince my parent friends to do that with their kids but everyone seems to think its a bad idea.
Just make a commune where everyone helps take care of each others kids and life is easier.
That’s basically what it’s like in my town because of how large the traditional indigenous population is. Only real downside is that you never get a moment of peace because they view you as an accessible family member and will walk into your house without asking all the time.
As a maximally alienated white person with no family and few something social relations that sounds pretty nice.
My Most Adult friend has a son and that kid kicks ass and we can't wait till he's old enough to join us for DnD.
nah kids rock
go round to your friends' houses, help them make dinner and make funny faces at the tiny, goofy-ass person. it rules
I hate people that complain all the time but never offer any solutions. How exactly am I (a sex haver) supposed to stop having kids?
Edit: Are you looking for friends?
Vasectomy works. Or tubal ligation. Whichever is appropriate. Seriously, who would willingly bring a kid into this soon to be uninhabitable world?
Seriously, who would willingly bring a kid into this soon to be uninhabitable world?
Anti-natalism is cringe.
My parents were born during the Great Chinese Famine and lived through the Cultural Revolution. Their parents were born during the Chinese Civil War and lived through fighting the Japanese and the KMT. All of these world shattering events and never once did any of them regret living.
Anti-natalism is cringe.
Denial is, well, denial.
None of those events produced the methane rich superheated atmosphere that runaway global warming is bringing us, which is ACTUALLY going to be "world-shattering". Feedback loops don't end until equilibrium is reached, the earth has seen it before, we are seeing it now. Ignoring it isn't going to make it go away.
yea lol people clearly still aren't grasping how terrible things are going to get soon if they think the Great Chinese Famine compares. it's not anti-natalism to not want your own child to have to go through that!
First-world problems will never get as bad as famine or Japanese occupation. Get a grip.
If you think 2040 USA is ever going to get anywhere as bad as WW2 genocidal occupation and famine, you are seriously uncalibrated.
Why do you assume I'm talking about the USA? Seems very Americabrained. Much of the world is not able to feed its own population and has to import a great deal of food. My country imports around half. In the event of global famine and caloric shortfall due to the consequences of climate change (eminently possible by 2040), what is going to stop famine for billions if capitalism and imperialism continue to exist? What is going to stop a state and political order that is becoming openly authoritarian and reactionary from carrying out genuine atrocities on a large scale to manage this crisis? You don't seem to have grasped how serious climate change is.
Do you think it's morally acceptable for Gazan Palestinians to have children, knowing that their children may live short, painful lives terminated by a violent death?
Was it acceptable for European Jews to have children during the Holocaust, knowing full well that they all might end up hanging on meat hooks?
Is it morally acceptable to have hope for the future?
Is it morally acceptable to resist genocide by having children?
Or do you think that anything less than a perfect life is unacceptable?
I'm not the person you were talking to, but in their defense, it doesn't look to me like they ever implied that any of what you listed is not "morally acceptable." By framing it that way, you're assigning them a position they never took and skirting around the valid issues that they are talking about. Acknowledging that anyone born today or in the coming decades will very likely see large scale ecological collapse that will only accelerate with time and the inevitable drastic decline in living standards (or even the very ability to live at all on a rapidly warming planet) doesn't necessarily have anything to do with whether a person thinks it's morally acceptable for victims of genocide to have children. It is worth giving pause and consideration to the kind of horrors that your children will have to face if you're in the privileged position of deciding on whether or not to make the conscious decision of having some (especially when there are so many already that need parents and don't have any). It is both stupid and reactionary to shame people for having children, especially if the people being shamed are "underprivileged" and facing dire circumstances. But taking into consideration the kind of future those children are almost certain to have should be part of a prospective parent's moral calculus.
I fundamentally disagree with so much of this I don't know where to even start, and as a communist and aspiring revolutionary who can't have children, it's downright offensive.
This is all nonsense, equating concern for the future and those who have to live in it with "nihilism" and pretending that the lack of such concern is "belief in a better future.*
"You can only afford to stop caring when you have no skin in the game." Disgusting. All those people who literally can't afford to have children have "no skin in the game." Fuck you.
"Having children forces you to care." Bullshit heaped on more bullshit. I have known many parents, some even in my own family, who didn't give a single shit about their children beyond what they could get from them or out of them. It's ridiculous and antirevolutionary to say that having children is a revolutionary act and it spits in the face of the many real revolutionaries who choose for themselves not to have children, despite very much wanting to out of their love for people and the health of their community that already is overburdened without enough adults to care for the children already in it. All of this also either pretends that adoption doesn't exist or worse, implies that parents who adopt don't or can't love their children every bit as much as biological parents. Fuck you even more for discounting the profound love that parents who made the decision to adopt have for their children.
According to you, I guess the quiverfull movement are the true revolutionaries. Not reactionary at all!
Recognizing the inevitability of what climate change is going to do to this planet and the consequences that future generations will face is not nihilism. Burying your head in the sand and pretending that climate change isn't the existential threat that it is because you "believe" that "a better future is possible" isn't revolutionary. It's just climate denial.
You are completely strawmanning my position. You are putting words in my mouth that I've never even said.
Funny, since that's exactly what you've been doing to everyone who responded to you, and was the reason I commented in the first place. But no, quoting what you said and responding to it is not misrepresenting what you said, just because you're now realizing how ridiculous what you said is when there's just a tiny bit of context around it.
Loving your children forces you to care about the future.
So does loving adults. So does loving your community. So does loving people in general. So does loving non-human animals. None of that requires bringing more people into a hostile world, which is the crux of this entire conversation.
Apparently I never considered that you would willingly misinterpret my statement to mean that I am encouraging people to have unloved children.
I never said you said that. You are just misrepresenting what I did say, which is that whether or not someone has biological children means fuckall as to whether a person "has skin in the game" or has the slightest fucking bearing on how committed a revolutionary a person can be. Which is all shit you did say. Stop trying to get out of what you actually said by lying about people misrepresenting you.
I also never discounted the love of parents who adopt children.
Everyone you've been accusing of anti-natalism have only said things that are entirely consistent with the adoption of children being a perfectly viable solution to the moral quandary of having biological children. Notice how the whole conversation is based on "bringing a kid into" this world? The issue here is biological reproduction. Adoption totally alleviates all the concerns of everyone you have been arguing with and calling nihilists, for fucks sake! So who is the one arguing against a spectre?
I also never claimed that religious fundamentalists who have many unloved children are the most virtuous people.
No, you just repeatedly claimed that having children is a virtue, and a revolutionary virtue at that. Just own up to what you said, jesus.
I have never claimed that climate change wasn't real or serious.
You completely discounted everything someone was saying about the effects of climate change that they are already suffering from, writing all of that off as nihilism because you "believe in a better future." That is some common and known climate denier tactics for trivializing climate change. You're not a climate denier? Then stop using their rhetoric to disparage comrades' concerns (and actual experiences) of climate change.
You are unironically advocating for Bill Gates-style climate anti-natalism.
Liar. I even explicitly talked about not shaming anyone for having kids, especially underprivileged people, and the closest thing to anti-natalism I said was that prospective parents should "give pause and consideration" to what the future their children will live through is likely to look like. Ooooh, that's such a Bill Gates thing to say!! Fuck you. You whine about people misrepresenting what you're saying and then you pull that shit? Go back to reddit.
Think about it for a second, just think about it.
God what a fucking smuglord thing to say. I have thought about all of this. A lot more than you apparently have, given all the nonsense about "nihilism" you've been accusing some of us of while pretending you're the REAL revolutionary because you believe in procreation!
Finally, why are you so hostile?
I wasn't, and even gave you the benefit of the doubt when you were blatantly misrepresenting the person you were replying to. I was much more polite than I should have been, until you started lying about people misrepresenting you and throwing around accusations of nihilism because some of us have the audacity to care about human suffering.
Did the arguments you've put in my mouth strike a nerve?
You fucking reddit-tier debate-bro loser. Shut the fuck up. What are you even doing on hexbear?
The Chinese had it all figured out with the 1 child policy: have 1 so you're below population replacement rate, and the reserve army of labor still shrinks, and wages go up, but at the same time you get to raise a tiny little comrade.
spoiler
don't take this post as a serious assessment of all the ramifications of the 1 child policy pls, it's a shitpost
It's funny and sad the nuclear family has eradicated inter-generational living to the point where we can only describe it in terms of cost. Grandparents get to see, interact with and help raise grandchildren, adult children are present to support their older parents as needed, children get a wider circle of familial behavior to observe and learn from as well as the more stable environment it provides. I've met too many people my age with no experience of what age does to the body, who can't distinguish between someone suffering from memory trouble and someone living with chronic pain.
I know you can't just say "we ought to do inter-generational living" and walk away. Can't just slot people into a structure like that and expect it to be hunky-dory. But I also can't deny this intractable sense of loss. That our lives are that much more shallow for its absence.
and don't forget that the uighers and other ethnic minorities were exempt, checkmate adrian zenz
Easily done, I can barely take care of myself and the whole birth thing makes me think of chestbursters from Aliens, big scary nope.
God I'm in my mid-30's and the idea of being responsible for a whole ass human being still terrifies me.
Incidentally this is also the reason I don’t date anymore..
I'm 35 myself,its more the pure body horror aspect first then all the horrors that I could never provide for them along with it. Maybe add some Eraserhead along with that Aliens.
this is very important because I need friends to chill with. please!
yes plz. I need to meet single people my age IRL. people should stop spending so much time working too.
hell yeah
