2 Reasons not to have children

Everybody has their opinions about whether or not someone should have kids. It is a bitter pill to swallow but let’s be honest with ourselves. Not everyone should have children.

There are a lot of damaged adults around.

I’m talking millions, if not billions. Some go around shooting people, degrading the lives of others, being racist, sexist and otherwise making other people’s lives hell to make themselves feel better. They go around abusing adults and children. Chances are you know them. Perhaps you are one of them.

Is that offensive? Then maybe I’ve hit a nerve.

Everyone is trying to cope with the side effects of these toxic people. Put their lives back together after the abuse they should never have had to endure.

I am reading the Body Keeps the Score: Brain, mind and Body inb the Healing of Trauma

Three things that genuinely shocked me:

• how rampant child abuse is
• children with emotionally absent parents were just as affected ( if not more) than those with abusive parents.
• the long-lasting effects of abuse, potentially lifetime

The narrative that parents should be healthy and understand what they are getting into is not usually mentioned. Instead, everyone assumes that everyone else has coped; hence they will be okay. They are doing a good thing. After all, we will need more nurses, doctors, scientists…. and so on.

I agree; however, the hard truth is that every abuser was a lovely baby at one point — someone’s angel. And no one says they are afraid they will raise the next Hitler, Mussolini, Pinochet, Stalin, Putin, <insert favourite dictator here> or the casual incel troll on the internet who thinks it’s okay to hurt children. Yet, someone did.

Because of that, millions of traumatised children and adults experienced things they should never have had to. Some of them suffer quietly. Others lash out, causing damage and restarting the cycle.

There are a LOT of us already on this planet.

We are 8 billion. Multiply that by the amount of waste we produce, the resources we take from this planet and the fact that this will only increase per capita as more countries develop ( as they absolutely should).

The planet would not be able to cope with that many of us.

Humans developed indices to track progress, measured mainly by output — i.e $$$ we spend on primarily useless junk. Then we ranked countries and designed financial systems based on this measure. Now we assume we are going backwards unless we consume more. Technically some think we are going backwards if we consume the same. If we have more people spending, that number goes up, and it looks like the country is doing great. Yay, look at the GDP growth and the economy. Share prices go up since there are more people to sell useless crap to. That’s why you have rich people shouting that we need more people on the planet.

Do we?

Isn’t it better to have a sustainable population and give everyone equal opportunities? Isn’t that better than constantly feeding the capitalist consumption machine and producing more slaves for the overlords?

Better for us, the planet, and, you know, the penguins?

We cannot support many more people on this planet. It’s not fair on the people affected by climate change they did not cause. It’s not fair on everything else that lives here.

The projection is that the max population will be at 12 billion, which scares me. It should scare you. It would scare any sane person. Currently, the billionaires have an idea of going into space but surely that should be plan Z? Like the last one on the list?

Each person in UK uses approximately 142 litres of water per day. That’s 3.6litres over 70 years. It’s a lot of water, and it has to come from our lakes, clouds and rivers. Then you have the rubbish, electricity, and clothes, and that’s just a start. Yes, we can do better but how much is enough?

There are lakes that have been dried because they were used to make clothes.

If there are 4bn more of us, and we are already killing the planet we cannot solve it by using 50% of what we do now. Not to mention most people will not reduce their consumption by half. Because someone else will solve the problem for them.

Except its very quickly becoming everyone’s problem. So let’s stop brainwashing people into thinking that they must have children and instead start asking them if they are sure.

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