Found an … interesting? Tuber of You – The Functional Melancholic (geddat?) – who offers a fairly, well, dismal outlook with which mefound meself in subtle agreement.
Essentially, TFM discoursed re the global trend towards anti-natalism, that birth rates are declining in most places around the world (but for some areas of Africa and parts of the Middle East), and while the political apparatchik is generally twisting in a panic with flaming hair, modern generations (seeing you GenX, Millennial, and GenZ) are viewing the news with a collective “meh,” … a generational “yeah- no. Gonna pass on that.”
Makes reference to two contemporary philosophers … Dan Benatar (loveme some Pat, BTW), an anti-natalist and head of the philosophy dept (BKA the study of Why Bother?) at the Uni of Cape Town, wrote 2006’s “Better Never to Have Been,” and Romanian E.M. Cioran (birth-mourner, Hitler-admirer and now dead some 20+ years), author of the aphoristic “The Trouble with Being Born” who observed that birth is the real tragedy, life is suffering while non-existence is preferable as it encompasses the absence of suffering, although suicide is pointless because it is already too late.
Ummm … ohh-kay.
TFM goes on to offer that it is not people who are anti-natalist but rather the system itself, and modern, childless/free generations are simply paying better attention.
Women routinely endure a loss of career advancement in exchange for motherhood, while the inexorably rising cost of living pretty much demands that every household generate two incomes, and try selling shareholders that profits are down because employees’ work/life balance is up.
Yah, work on that.
America is dysfunction dancing in a top hat, but other, smarter countries like South Korea, Italy, Japan, and Finland are trying to unleash the effluvium of birth (eeewwww) with incentives … payments per kid, extensive parental leave, child care assistance and ohlookiethar … universal healthcare.
None of it, however, is working.
TFM opines — and this is pretty good — that social media has instilled a form of “social apathy” in modern humans, a type of “relational impotence,” whereby we seek affirmation, validation, and connection via screens rather than actual, tangible, fleshly interactions.
Humans are overburdened with debt … must survive high costs with low wages = unaffordability of life … stressed and medicated … elimination/replacement of 3rd spaces by social media filled with trolls and bots … climate change is now just the weather (when is “Fire Season”? what is “Hurricane Season”? why was there another “Snowpocalypse”?)*
*Fun fact: the Pacific nation of Tuvalu must relocate all of its residents because rising seas are likely to swallow the entire country right around 2050. Good times, ain’t we lucky we got ‘em.
Anyhoo, TFM believes one reason from the drop in birth rates is that modern folks have chosen masturbation over intercourse, with the digitized AI making it almost like – and sometimes better than – the real thing.
In sum, TFM suggests that it is high-past time to normalize life without kids, and that those in existence work to build a legacy not of bloodlines or DNA, but of kindness, of decency, of compassion.
Liking this guy’s vibe.
After all, Paul mentions that celibacy is actually a good thing {1 Corinthians 7:7} …
… given current conditions, might be better to adopt a suggestion from the Goodest Book of all.