so....Not having children=Selfish?

[dark-mortality]

Well, hur de hur then, I am hereby a scum of the current society, and you know what? I like it :3 Plus, what is more selfish: Not having a child, or having a child that you don't care about, making the child an arsehole which will leech of society?

 

[Timberwolf0924]

I have a 3 year old son, and I love him more than anything in the world. His mother and I aren't together so I don't get to see him all the time. My best friend has been with a girl for 4 years now, living together and doing litterally everything together. I've asked him what he thought about kids, and he decided he didn't want one because the kid would take away from his own 'toys'.

Examples:

He does anything RC, from cars, to planes, to helicopters and boats he has hundereds of dollars in thouse. He plays airsoft, been through about 10 guns plus upgrades. and has thousands of dollars in them. He's blown money on a car that blew up on him on day 1 and he let it sit and rot, he bought a pet rat that he spend a good chunk of change on to get it a nice rat house and such. He wants to make his car into a drift car, which requires a lot of work (and money) to be good.

And he said that having a kid will stop him from doing all these because then he has to "waste money on a kid that will never give him anything back"

I wish he could experince the joy of having a kid. I know most of you may not agree, and yes sometimes it's hard to take care of life and have a kid at the same time. But I wouldn't change it for the world.

 

[sketch_zeppelin]

Yeah theres nothing selfish about not having a kid. Your actually being responsible by looking at your self and deciding that you aren't parent material. Its better to never have a kid than to have one you don't want and end up ruining their life as well as your own.

I'd honestly get angry if someone told me i was being selfish by not having a kid.

 

[lacktheknack]

The same reason that we're not restricting family size because of overpopulation - we don't have cheap and reliable robot workers yet. The logic is that you're buying products but not supplying any labor in the long run to make them.

Well buying the products involves forking over cash. That really fills the full extent of what you owe them in getting the product.

In the short term, yes.

But if you look on a grand scale, ie. how those products ended up in the store you bought them from, you'll notice an immense chain of people involved. According to the "No Kids = Selfish" logic, the consumer who consumes without adding more people to the production chain is basically taking with little regard for sustainability, ergo, selfish.

Unless you find a method of producing the goods without human labor, then money just won't cut it in the long run.

But you do not owe it anything besides the money. If it isn't sustainable that isn't my fault, and it shouldn't be my concern. It would be too much to expect my money and for me to provide people to work. Asking for people is quite simply dehumanizing and not a reasonable request.

I simply disagree on all levels. Sustainability should be a major concern, and by continuing to support it it is indirectly your fault for allowing it to happen.

Why should it be a major concern? And it isn't my fault, it's their own for not taking care of their business model. They are, after all, not a charitable institution they are a business. I see no reason I owe them the means to make more money.

And if you want products, you should give them means to produce them.

Why? They ask for money, not slave labor. Why exactly are they owed more beyond the agreement we made?

Money will make people dig and harvest resources, put them together, ship them places, etc, but money does not make humans spawn (at least, not legally). Every business expects two things from the consumers - money and labor.

False. When it comes to selling products they only expect money. There is no agreement to provide labor in return.

Of course, if we have a massive stemming out of the population (that, last time I checked, is already happening), then the entire Western World falls through, I expect the people who refused to contribute to the population in the future will complain about it.

Yes, because you want to feel nice and self-righteous you're going to make a stupid claim against people who don't act as you like.

I don't care to continue this if you're going to project. We aren't seeing eye-to-eye anyways, and no amount of arguing on the internet ever fixed that.

Project? Oh I'm sorry, was I supposed to not reply that your self-righteous crap about how everyone who didn't do what you liked would complain at the results later? Oh I'm so sorry for hurting your feelings. I forgot that I'm not supposed to snap back when people act like self-righteous asses.

Now do you have anything reasonable to say, or are you just going to make hypocritical complaints?

Yes, projection. I'm not easy to offend, and your little back-handed slap a couple posts back did nothing. Your immediate assumption that it did hurt did exactly zilch in your favor. I just used my brain and noted that pretty much EVERY argument I've seen you in (and I've seen a lot) degenerates into superior-intellect insult-slap-fights.

You know, like the one you just tried to cause.

I have NO ISSUES with people who disagree with me, unless their ideology gets them into trouble and they have the gall to complain about it. And they WOULD. You're on the internet, man, everyone complains about everything. But I'm giving you the benefit of the doubt for now.

If anything, I apologize for hurting YOUR feelings. I assume I did, seeing how you're getting yourself worked up about it.

 

[Kl4pp5tuhl]

I won't have kids; Don't like playing around noobs online, would hate to have one in my own home.

 

[Bara_no_Hime]

Unless, of course, you have brothers and sisters.
I do plan on having kids, but I'm not super excited about handing down MY family genes. Excema, hayfever, asthma and other such unpleasantries run in my family.
And twins, that runs in my family too. No thanks, lol.

True. Assuming your brother(s) and/or sister(s) plan on having children. And if you're an only child - or worse, the only child of a generation where your parent was the only family member of multiple siblings to have children - then the pressure can be a bit more.

Besides, while your brothers and sisters might continue the family, my point about evolution remains. If we nerds want to inherit the earth, we need to make sure our nerdy DNA gets reproduced. ^^

Anyway, good to hear you plan on having kids. Your Sailor Jupiter avatar convinces me that you are clearly a good example of fine nerd DNA.

Oh, and studies show that allergies (such as hayfever and asthma) are less to do with DNA than with upbringing. Take your kids to the playground and let them stick random crap off the ground in their mouths - it has been shown to reduce the likelyhood of adult allergies. A properly exercised immune system is a happy immune system.

 

[Wingmna]

It is very selfish, both the West and the far East are dying, yet the world is still growing? Something is wrong, in no time at all the world will be at war again as retarded cultures out grow our better cultures.

You have the freedom, but at what cost? You have freedom, but does not mean you have responsibility.

 

[Charli]

If I were to have kids, I'd want to give them a sable environment to live in, i do not feel I can do that, so I am not going to, and I don't have sex, nor have a partner at this current moment, my sister and cousin likely have that all covered as far as my family goes, so I'm going to take advantage of being the black sheep. And pursue my goals and hopefully help when they stumble across the many difficulties of having a family.

I am a selfish person, not ashamed to admit it, there are people even more selfish than me though and see how they take advantage of families in particular, I'm not ready or strong enough to confront that. 'Me' comes first at the moment. And I spend a good deal of teenagedom helping look after babies (this includes all the awfulness of crying/poop/baths/teething/lack of sleep), I like it, they're adorable. But I've had my fill for the time being.

Also I'm perfectly happy for my sister to continue the family. I have some of the more undesirable genes. And this isn't counting my other cousin and my little brother, both of who are too young at the moment, but will probably continue in their own way.

I really am the only one in my rather extensive family with no continuing family plans.

 

[Faladorian]

This kind of argument comes from two fronts:

1) Misogyny: you're a woman, so you MUST want to stay at home with kids, right?

2) Rationalization: It's just a tu quoque argument parents give to counter claims that having a child just to live your life vicariously is also selfish.

 

[annoyinglizardvoice]

Personally, I feel having children is more selfish as you are contributing more to overpopulation that way. But I feel I must point out that I'm sickened by the presence of kids and a good portion of folks I've met who have kids are morons, so I'm probably a bit prejudiced that way

 

[Syntax Man]

There are so many layers to this, but lets start with the first three.

1st and foremost is that having children in a lifestyle choice, and in a free world we certainly don't want to force anything down anyone's throats.

Secondly, is the fact that there are too damn many of us, we've broken the 7 billion mark, and since the current population impacts the rate of population growth (its common sense if you think about it, there are more people there to be reproducing so more babies are born, thus faster population growth.) I don't understand the math but we will go from 7 to 8 billion faster than we did from 6 to 7, and so on. But with the fact that we'd be better if we had less people coming into being, we have the problem that if a generation has fewer people than the previous one, then we run into problems when the larger generation starts to retire. We've already seen this with the boomers retiring now, and the potential for newer generations to not have pension money because the boomers ate it all up faster than it could be generated.

Thirdly is the fact that there is a perceived responsibility, independent of the facts listed in part 2 for a generation to at least to it's best to replace itself, and hell if we could convince every damn person to reproduce just once per person then we'd fix the problems outlined earlier in the post, but some people take issue with the tools modern society has given us to do just that, and others just don't give a damn.


tl;dr?

We're fucked.

 

[ElPatron]

5. who says I have THAT kind of responsibility to my country?

If you don't want to protect your country, don't cry when your country doesn't protect you.

I wish we could ship people with that attitude to Somalia. Hey, you are now in a failed state! No responsibilities!

 

[Xeraxis]

I never understood this logic. Everytime I mention to somebody that I don't want kids, they go apeshit, acting like you are obligated to have kids in life.

For one thing, the world is already oversaturating with people (passing 7 billion), so wouldn't having a select few not breed being doing somewhat of a favor for the rest?

I get that it's a part of the evolutionary background, but I'm sure our species will survive even if some of us don't have kids.

 

[Sandytimeman]

snip.

Well according to the most recent numbers in 2011 we have a population of nearly 7 billion people on the planet. In 1960 we had a population of 3 billion. In 40 years we've over doubled the world population. I think we are doing just fine.

Source [https://www.google.com/url?url=http://www.google.com/publicdata/explore%3Fds%3Dd5bncppjof8f9_%26met_y%3Dsp_pop_totl%26tdim%3Dtrue%26dl%3Den%26hl%3Den%26q%3Dcurrent%2Bworld%2Bpopulation&rct=j&sa=X&ei=UZdOT_GvApDKiALep9nHCw&sqi=2&ved=0CDIQ6xYwAA&q=current+world+population&usg=AFQjCNGQAsLLx0s3UN5gdlbPpRl4ybaJSA&cad=rja]

Lets also keep in mind, I was hearing some good points in an episode of Penn & Teller's "Bullshit" - Episode: Organic Foods.

Where people where protesting, Genetically engineered foods and the counter argument was given by a nobel peace prize winner who stated that basically with traditional methods we can only currently produce enough food to feed 5-6 billion people. Unless we embrace these new methods of food production we won't be able to keep up to the food needs of the entire population.

After hearing that, maybe we should be slowing down on breeding. I mean shit...it seems like currently there are more people alive than have died in the history of mankind.

edit:

actually it seems I'm wrong on that point. around 90 billion to 110 billion people sense the dawn of modern man. But estimated population in 2200 is around 10 billion people.

Yes birth rates are going down according to world sources but there are more of us. So the population rate will level off and stabilize around 10 billion people over the next 188 years.

Source [http://www.worldometers.info/world-population/]

 

[ablac]

I only skimmed your post, but it's selfish because you are jeopardizing the economy and stability of your country by refusing to have children. Every couple must produce at least two children on average to sustain your population, but since there are factors such as early death, sterility, homosexuality inhibiting us, couple must produce above 2 children or the population will dwindle over the years. Then of course there's the fact that the ratio of boys to girls is not equal, so even more children need to be produced.

Lowering the national reproductive rates to below the par required for sustaining to population results in age demographic imbalances. China is famous for it's one child policy they introduced to help counter overpopulation. This has been disastrous because it actually worked to an extent and since people stopped producing enough children, the country's average age is very high compared to most countries, it's a big problem when your country mostly contains seniors for obvious reasons.

Canada's population is actually at risk because too many people don't feel it's worth their time to have kids. Personally I think the government needs to offer more incentives to parents. Sure you will have welfare bums who will only benefit further from this, but more good will come of it than bad I think.

Former Premiere of British Columbia, Gordon Campbell made the situation a little worse in 2010 with the introduction of the new tax system. Yeah, let's tax all children's clothing and goods, I'm sure more people will have kids if we do that.

Agreed. Just look to Japan for a worst case scenario. They have a rapidly aging population and no-one to care for them. Their economy is suffering for it too. Australia is in a similar boat, we have more Baby Boomers who will need aged care that we can afford while maintaining sensible tax rates.

So it's selfish to not want to raise kids to take care of a bunch of people you don't know? People need to care for the aging so it's the duty of the young to crank out kids to provide for them?

No no you misinterpret what theyy are saying. What they are saying is that if a generation does not have as many children as exist in their generation then when the 1st generation ages there is not enough people to support them. You basically have a majority or at least large amount of the population needing support which is not ideal and isnt good for anyone. The elderly dont receive the support they need just what can be given and the young give more than they should have to to support them. This sint simply physical care simply financial aswell. hing is this is the problem and its new because before baby boomers life expectancy was not nearly as high on average as it is now (at least for the average person). This mean no one really knows what to do about it and thats a scary thought. It isnt a matter of "we need to have more kids to look after old people" more a matter of the amount of old people will exceed the young and how will we be able to cope. Birthrates in first worlds have decreased and life expectancy has risen. Its bad for the economy in more ways than one.

 

[ablac]

5. who says I have THAT kind of responsibility to my country?

If you don't want to protect your country, don't cry when your country doesn't protect you.

I wish we could ship people with that attitude to Somalia. Hey, you are now in a failed state! No responsibilities!

'Protect' you while dictating how to spend a large part of your life. How... generous. It does a little bit to help you and in return you owe your happiness to it. Brilliant logic. Thankfully society in general ignores your rather ridiculous attitude.

Maybe extreme but the idea that you should contribute to the country you live in is hardly reprehensible. If you dont want to have kids thats fine its just that if no one did then the country would collapse. Maybe thats why people think those without kids are selfish because they feel you arent contributing to the future generation yet will still take from it one way or another when in your golden years.