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Do you feel sad for people born today?
(sh.itjust.works)
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this post was submitted on 21 Aug 2025
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As a parent in the US, yes. The future looks very dim among climate change, water overuse, corruption of civic institutions by the capital class, etc.
Even people born 20 years ago have it rough - they’re just now graduating college into a crummy job market and massively inflated housing market, with MAGA policies and AI destroying the economy for both blue and white collar folks as quickly as possible.
It seems cruel to create new life in this environment. Are you going to tell the kids that it’s their job to fix the world that the previous generations abused and degraded for short term gains, because it’s somehow our duty as sane humans to produce more sane humans to continue the fight? Many people today already live a worsening paycheck to paycheck existence, with too little free time to focus on systemic change. How will adding to that help?
Nearly every generation has felt pessimism at one time or another that the world is the worst it’s ever been. But it sure seems different this time.
The folk heroes of tomorrow will be people like Greta Thunberg and Mario’s brother, and that’s not a great existence to root for.
They said that last time too. And the time before that? They said that then too.
Yep, they did. But they weren’t on the brink of tipping-point climate change negative feedback cycles. Exponential growth is great for the economy until it overruns the carrying capacity of the underlying fundamentals.
I expect to live to see worldwide famine and an unimaginably large worldwide refugee crisis as the equatorial band becomes uninhabitable. The groundwater we’ve been pumping out of aquifers took geologic timescales to accumulate, and as it runs out the effect on agriculture will be severe. The Colorado river is enormously oversubscribed, and almost none of the problems that Marc Reisner wrote about over 30 years ago in Cadillac Desert have improved.
I could go on, but it’s all depressing. Yes, this time is much worse. We might claw our way back out of fascism in a reasonable timescale, sure. But the underlying physical realities of the earth’s systems ~~will start~~ have already started to come crashing down and will only intensify within my lifetime, and definitely within the average lifespans of children born today.
Remember the hole in the ozone layer? Or the nuclear threat, some people were sure that the world was going to end before 1984. Then the aids epidemic. And 9/11, my god, nobody was safe anymore! And then the Yellostone caldera, that thing is going to erupt any time now!
The hole in the ozone layer is a great case study in effective amelioration of an anthropogenic climate problem. People got whipped up into a frenzy and politicians listened both to them and to the scientists. We switched refrigerants and have continued research and development to the point that heat pumps are now good enough to work in the winter in most places, using refrigerant blends. The ozone layer is well on its way to recovery. The overall response was excellent, and the Montreal Protocol was likely the most successful international agreement ever. That’s a stark contrast to our modern climate denialism and the vilification of science.
The nuclear threat is still real, but mutually assured destruction turns out to have been a pretty effective deterrent. But hey, maybe nuclear winter is the answer to global warming.
I don’t think anyone saw AIDS or 9/11 as an existential threat. I agree that there have always been things to dread, but you’re just building a strawman.
Dread about uncontrollable geologic forces is natural, but it’s not what I’m talking about. Yellowstone could erupt, sure. Many other geologic disasters could also occur, and humans would be along for a short ride of doom. That’s just life, and that’s okay.
But it’s especially depressing to watch the slow-motion failure of our social species to be able to communicate and organize effectively enough to stop a climate problem of our own making. It’s technologically preventable, but not socially. And at this point, I argue that it’s morally wrong to create children without realistic hope for a better future.