:volcel-judge: :volcel-kamala:

housing benefits, money, childcare, and more!

  • SuperNovaCouchGuy2 [any]
    ·
    1 year ago

    its a false equivalence to having a child and building a family. the equivalence itself relies on diminishing that experience into ‘finding a meaning’

    no but OP was the one saying that its a "fundamental part of life" and whatnot, im not saying that its vapid or stupid or anything, and am definetely not saying that we should strip minorities of bodily autonomy because thats fucked

    my main point is quite the contrary, that its dangerous in an abstract philosophical sense to put having kids on the pedestal as a means of finding meaning or having a meaningful experience because one also needs to consider the risks and the fact that you literally have someone elses life in your hands and/or are creating a being to have subjective existence in our world. Sure please go ahead if you know what youre doing but it shouldnt be done without acknowledging the gravity that the decision holds.

    • CarmineCatboy [he/him]
      ·
      edit-2
      1 year ago

      Sure please go ahead if you know what youre doing but it shouldnt be done without acknowledging the gravity that the decision holds.

      And in saying so, you've proved yourself wrong. Child rearing is a fundamental part of life. It has been so for, well, the entirety of the human experience. It must be treated with the seriousness of something which, as you put it, is on a pedestal. Wether someone is fit for parenthood or not does not make it any less fundamental. On the contrary.

      We live in a world that is not conducive to raising children. We have been rendered poorer, indebted and alienated. In other times, even those of us who couldn't or wouldn't raise children of our own would go on to engage it with others. Via foster care, or from fulfilling extended family duties. Even work, religious and military lives once held structures of kinship to them. Well, the extended family is dead by debt and so is the family unit. Corporate lives have no camaraderie or stability whatsoever. This leaves us with the cloisters of pretend Apostles and Salafis, of militias and soldiers. One wonders why the world is on permanent never ending fascist turn then. But I'm digressing.

      Understand this: you did say that it is vapid and stupid to raise a child. Inadverdently. I don't think it was out of malice or anything. I think it is a wider societal cope that is spreading. You know, the kind of thing that humans do when they post 4-5 times a day on social media how happy they are that they don't have kids. There's the reverse side of the coin too. In reiterating that one is responsible and won't have children, some times people will point the fingers at the poors who aren't and therefore crank out the babies. These ideas spread in such a way that we end up ignoring that countries are going below replacement rate, ignoring all the people who are perfectly capable to be parents, and put emphasis on the horde that supposedly isn't. Nobody is born father of the year, and no generation has raised a perfectly trauma-less successor. But they still did it. Forever.

      And yet through all of this new generations find themselves with no prospects whatsoever. Nevermind all the philosophical dilemmas about 'putting in a child in this world, just to suffer'. We are all going to work to death and only some of us will be privileged to entertain foster care. That's the future we are building. In this context problematizing a supposed sacredness of child rearing is to lose the forest for the trees, and to ignore the solidarity that humans will have to display if we are to survive this century at all. We are going to have to care for each other. We'll have each others lives in our hands. Where would you put that responsibility, if not on a pedestal?