If you knew their life would be misery and toil, would you have kids? I'm terrified for mine.
Our descendants might have terrible lives for a thousand generations and it would be worth it if it means humanity can get to better times on the other side.
Would it be worth it? There is likely no net loss for the universe if we or even the entire Earth disappeared overnight and that might be better than thousands of generations suffering painfully over thousands of years.
*But no not necessarily, but at the same time I had a lack of autonomy in regards to those decision made.
I was questioning your assertion that centuries of "terrible lives" (which, to me, seems a regression for most) would be an acceptable price to pay for "better times" later on. Compared to the past 1000 years where life has, in the main, improved gradually generation after generation, I feel this assertion at least deserves to be questioned.
If you look at the history, every discovery was made due to very rare and specific combination of factors, and the only way to create such combinations is by trying many life paths in parallel.
Perhaps concentrating attention on two children makes it that much more likely that they will have longer, fulfilling lives, and grace us with their eventual wisdom, rather than all three grubbing in the rubble of a collapsed civilization.
Sure, the odds of either path don't change much based on the single decision of whether to have another child, but every little bit helps, right?
Watching half of your kids die before age of 5 from something a set of pills cures now? Your wife risking her life with every delivery? Dying of very minor wounds, when flu is killer that covid can only dream about?
I could go on like that for very long time... No, our life isn't a misery and toil in any western society, unless we make mistakes and chose such a path. My isn't for example, nor is most people I know.
Its kind of sad to see how weak we have become. 100 years ago a mutated flu killed 100 million people which was significant chunk of global population, right after the most horrible war mankind has ever experienced, and people got through. We can get through almost anything. Its properly sad what's happening. As a nature, travel and adventure lover my heart weeps, but I have no doubt mankind will get through this. There is still so much beauty out there. I am not naive anymore we will get much wiser while getting through this, but somehow we will manage. Till then, taking it day by day, enjoying the little things life so often gives us, enjoying friends and family... that's still a great life to live. Only few in the history had such a luck. I am definitely not terrified for my kids.
Maybe instead of using your imagination and whatever garbage you saw in a Hollywood movie, you can read accounts of how native people lived in places like North America up until a few hundred years ago.
Sad. Sorry to hear it. It's always a shame when an intelligent person chooses to ignore the sacrifice every one of their descendents will make, just so that they don't have to risk the potential of having any hardship themselves.
I wrote two (I think) of the words in my comment, the rest were written by the person I was replying to about someone deciding not to have children.
We now close our eyes to stuff that does not bother us directly like devastating destruction of the amazon, attacks on armenia, several dictators using covid to assert unlimited powers etc, all of which would deserve global military intervention imho and thus wars, but do not, makes it a matter of who you ask if this is ‘worse or better’.
Agreed, over all it is better for ‘everyone’ but we have a solid 80 years to mess this up and turn the tables. Hope we do not but I for one do not think it looks good; this state is fragile, not robust.
We have the money and technology this time around to prevent things, but not sure if we will. Handling of Covid and the many dictators, racism, immigration issues etc are not good signs we learned much from 100 years ago. Covid being the most obvious (spanish flu followed the same curve); let’s see how the rightwing/populist will be handled in the coming 10 years to see if we even can learn.