[thomasahle]

> bringing a child into a dying world might be the ultimate selfish act.

That's a pretty bleak outlook on the future of our world. Do you really think getting born today is significantly worse than being born at a random time in human history?

[ruined]

today doesn't have to be the worst day ever to generate anxiety about the future. knowing that cavemen got ate by dinosaurs wouldn't make it any nicer to pitch a tent under i5. but i think it's pretty clear that barring some kind of unexpected radical change, and maybe even in that case, many of us are going to experience deprivation and terror unlike anything we've known before. at previous moments in history, if it got too bad and all else failed, you could just start walking and live off the land on your way to someplace nicer. it sucked and was often violent but people had the skills and the world had the space. that's not an option now.

i can't imagine surviving something like a famine or civil war in the modern world. and it doesn't look like that kind of risk is growing smaller. could you take on some total disaster like that while caring for a child? what kind of person would you be at the end of it? what kind of person would they be?

and it doesn't even have to be that dramatic. there will be a lot of suffering that doesn't touch us directly, but it will still shape the places we inhabit. could you stand to live in a total police state, even if you're safe (from the outside) and relatively wealthy (compared to a refugee)?

these are the questions on a lot of people's minds. and nobody has good answers, because there are none.

[thomasahle]

> i can't imagine surviving something like a famine or civil war in the modern world. and it doesn't look like that kind of risk is growing smaller.

I don't think anybody studying the history of civil wars or famine believe that that is likely to happen.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/civil-war-united-stat...

Besides, even if you talk to people who lived through wars or famines, few of them wish they hadn't been born. People find happiness and meaning everywhere. From interviews I have read, people living through wars find their lives more meaningful rather than less.

> could you stand to live in a total police state, even if you're safe (from the outside) and relatively wealthy (compared to a refugee)?

Probably. But I don't think anything like that is likely. I think there will be fewer police states in the future.

It's odd how people living in poorer and less well-managed countries are much more optimistic about the future than people living in the West.

https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/ng-interactiv...

I wonder if it's just spending too much time on social media and too little time reading history books that make people so pessimistic...