Ask Lemmy

no im jealous because i miss screaming and shitting and puking constantly

You are born in the very very very best stretch the human race has ever known.

We have solutions for almost every problem which exists today.

Wars are at an historical low point.

Chances are good you've never been even experienced war first hand.

Housing is expensive, yes. But chances are you're reading this on a couch or bed in a home, heated (or cooled), with a working stove, light at night and a fridge with edibles in it. And lets not talk about your immediate almost unrestricted access to all of human knowledge.

That would be unbelievable, impossible even during 99.9% of human history. (Or somewhere near this figure)

You should stop doomscrolling and start reading the real human history.

All of human knowledge at your fingertips. And this is what you chose to distill from it.

When the mother bear in bondage at the bile farm kills her own cub and I gotta applaud that poor bitch

Considering that my outlook on the future is grim, I would say that I do, yes.

But on the other hand, when I look at my 3yo nephew and how my sister raises him, teaching him inclusiveness, limiting his exposure to screens as much as possible, and encouraging him to draw and go outdoors, it gives me some hope that maybe not all is lost.

Not in the least.

You should look at people born in the past.

Thirty-ish years ago, my grandfather said he felt sorry for me because of the state of the world.

Human nature is to say things are going to shit, everything is terrible, and things were better in some non-existent past.

Yeah, things suck now. But they also sucked thirty years ago and 100 years ago. The difference is that we know the outcome to (some) of the problems people faced then. And (generally) the worst case scenario didn't happen.

Yeah, we need to fight the rich on climate change. But we will. And we'll mitigate the problems we can. And we'll tell our grandkids that we don't envy their future.

Yes, climate change, microplatics in brains and balls and mountain fresh water and pollution all around.

Oh and forget about ever owning your house except you inherit.

And all of it is man-made.

No. Only joy for the new parents and child. (Though I do put in work to shore up their finances, try to get them my next bonus.)

Several reasons: being a kid today is better than being a kid 20-50 years ago. Toys are cooler, parenting competence and training has broadly improved, minecraft exists, and there is some really good childrens TV.

Health risks are largely down, especially compared to 35 years ago. (Anecdotally about 10% of families around my cohort lost kids. Far fewer in the younger cohorts.)

While economic mobility is down, more people means a stronger voting block. Boomers run the world because their protests changed policy. I see indications that kids are a more competent politic than earlier generations (eg, climate and LGBTQ rights), we just need them to matter sooner.

For what it's worth, the economy is not just bad, it's breaking. If workers remain this exploited, there will soon be nobody to sell to. We are seeing large (usually stupid) interventions to try and address it, I put nontrivial odds on something sane eventually being tried.

War deaths are low and really don't seem likely to increase dramatically (see here).

Edit: I forgot to add LGBTQ rights/acceptance! While there are definitely still places that are not safe, many of them were not safe before (and that was just the status quo), I believe the risks have decreased and will continue to do so, while the medical access has improved (and that hopefully will continue, though I'm personally expecting that to get worse before it gets better. I think kids today probably get good care in 10 years, some kids 6-12 are in for a bad time.)

Honestly, I don't. I came up in the '80s, wasn't diagnosed with autism until 2022. My life would have been so different if I had known about it when I was a child, and if autism was as well-understood as it is today so that I had the support I needed. Kids today who have issue like that are identified much earlier and helped more. The steady march of knowledge and science is almost always a good thing. So, the present and the future are always the place to be for most people most of the time. Of course a Gazan isn't feeling the giddy excitement of scientific discovery at this moment, but for the human species as a whole, things have never been better. There is always someone suffering immense, unimaginable hardship. The human project is overwhelmingly not that.

Every generation has existential concerns, too. Climate change and the rise of fascism is on the cards right now. When I was a kid and adolescent in the '80s and '90s, I was in the middle of the N. Irish 'Troubles'. Before that, people had the Cold War to worry about. Before that, WWII and WWI. But things are always better than they were 'yesterday' if you take stock of everyone as a whole and not just those suffering the worst in any given moment.

If you took the average kid born today in an average society, and transplanted them into the 1970s with the same socioeconomic starting point, it would be tantamount to gross child abuse given the vast ocean of stuff they could have had, but now will never have (in their childhood, at least). And I'm not even talking about technology and the internet; just the treatment of children by the state and schools alone would be night-and-day different. Kids are individuals today, in the '70s you were your parents' property and didn't develop a sense-of-self worth respecting until you were old enough to get drunk.

I still wouldn't bring a kid into existence, but for those that are here already, 2025 is the best time to be born. Like if I were my parents, I would not have had me while the country was tearing itself apart with bombings and shootings every day. But I'm glad I was born when I was and not when my parents were kids.

I'm not trying to doom on anyone's bloom here, but things are getting worse all around. Even if you ignore all of the political and social strife, and all of the war and terror, there's still the warming planet to contend with, and we don't have the magic technology to fix it 20 years ago yet.

As the planet gets warmer, resources will get tighter, people will be displaced, and that will only lead to further strife. Energy crisis, water shortages, famine. They're all guaranteed. We're in the cascade now.

Your future is about surviving now.

Born 1949 would be awesome. After world war, then Woodstock, cheap housing, fucked up the world with their plastics, dead before its getting hot. These mfs had the best timespan ever.

All ye who enter abandon all hope

Seriously, you people are a bunch of cake eaters. "The future is scary and things are getting worse." It's always been scary, you've just been privileged enough for it not to be.

All I can think of is how bad theyre going to have it.

Bro, people have it bad NOW. Life is and has always been suffering and struggle. Get out of your online bubble and go see some shit. Anyone here who says their life outlook looks bleak would have said the exact same shit 30 years ago or even 100 years ago.

Life is suffering no matter when.

I think the whole “wrong generation” thing is a bit of a misconception, at least in terms of culture. Say you really love 60s culture, you can dress like you are in the 60s and listen to all the music from that time - including obscure stuff your local record store wouldn’t have had then but likely do now. Then additionally you can also listen to the odd song for the 70s and 80s if they take your fancy. The 60s are a part of pop culture and you can swim in that stream for as long as you want.

Socially as well, I think people underestimate how much latitude we are given to be individuals in modern society vs even like 30 years ago where social pressures to conform were stronger.

Economically I think there could be some cause for concern for the future but there were really tough economic times in the past too. Stagflation in the late 70s for example is worse than what we are experiencing at the moment. Having a kid could be something people treat like buying a property and waiting for the ideal time to do it; however, property prices are unpredictable and trying to judge it perfectly is like trying to catch a falling knife. The best advice is just to buy a property when you can afford it, and that probably holds true for having a kid too (assuming you want one… that’s another benefit of living in contemporary times!)

Everyone here knows the solution; Eat the rich.