Asklemmy

Cool, cool cool cool. I get you.

As for having a "stake" in anything, you're just making a lot of fancy excuses for parents making an educated guess, which is what some parents have done forever. Ultimately, it's projection and hope that parents can manage resources appropriately. They don't always do that. Maybe they end up succumbing to alcoholism or dying in a car accident or anything else that frustrates best-laid plans. Everyone simply not having children isn't the solution, though. For starters, generational gluts and booms can be debilitating to a culture and economy even in good times. Humans are animals, and we live on this earth not much above animals in terms of being subject to natural disasters that can wipe us away in moments. We only barely survived as a species about 900,000 years ago, with genetics research suggesting we withered to as few as 1,280 individuals. And it wasn't the conscientious objectors and resource managers with no offspring that let us survive. It was the foolish horndogs who passed on the genes of being foolish horndogs and from which we are all descended by virtue of nearly a million years of horndogging. Which is not a suggestion to "be fruitful and multiply." Simply that things balance themselves out or they don't until they do. Let people do whatever they want and my DINK self will educate and divert resources to my nephews nieces and cousins, and my friend's kids. And so it shall be until I have no more resources left to apply because disease and famine and climate change will boil this place until it's all either desert or rain forest.

As for your brand of Gnosticism, I'm not exactly too far off, just with different labels. So we might be able to meet in the middle that if consciousness is a form of energy as self, that we're "trapped" in order to experience - to have gnosis - of the world, and which carries costs that must be paid before freeing one's self from the trap. That is, we can't deny any being gnosis of any part, be that the gnosis of living a life filled with fear, like the parent that is an anti-natalist or a pro-natalist, or as the child born into a wondrous life of privilege, or as the child born into a dystopian hellscape. Who are we to likewise deny consciousness a chance to experience the chaos and possibly of thriving in it? Some humans just do. So why assume that every human, and human society, is frail and weak by default? Humans have survived worse. The Younger Dryas cataclysm, for example.

Which is all to say, both absolutes are silly because they're impractical, untenable, and wholly a disservice to individuals and to the collective consciousness to some degree.