And why does society have to exist? Society and humanity have no inherent value.

If this is your opinion, then it is only reasonable for those of us who do find value in society and humanity to ignore your opinions on how those things should work. Your statement is, in essence, a resignation from those groups.

avoiding things that have caused me suffering

I spend about 10 hours a week at the gym pursuing activities that (best that I can tell what you mean by “suffering”) cause me suffering. I am better for it.

When we make a moral choice, we have to think of the future consequences of that choice.

Yes. And since the consequences of having children is good, at least net good, there’s not much of a choice to make.

At most, I simply have to avoid the sorts of abuse that would cause them to turn out like yourself and believe absurdities such as “human extinction is a goal one should pursue”.

How can you make such a blanket statement when you don’t know any of us personally?

Because these sorts of genetic issues are exceedingly rare, and the people who have them and know they have them would have a very different attitude which you do not present.

Moreso, I’ve spoken to such people as yourself in person before, and the “conditions” they specify would be jokeworthy except that they’re typically friends or at least acquaintances I wouldn’t want to be blunt with. “My grandparents have diabetes!” and such. WTF.

I live in an absurd world populated by absurd people hellbent on making certain it won’t be populated at all anymore.

Suffering should be eradicated at all costs

What is suffering? I’ve lumped that word in with all the other religious claptrap like “soul” and “afterlife” and whatnot.

Are you talking about pain (the sensation)? It doesn’t seem that you mean that, but if you did it would be absurd. “Pain should be eradicated” makes no sense. It can’t even be said that pain should be avoided, since discomfort is often associated with worthwhile, and ultimately pleasant, activities.

Define suffering so we can be on the same page.

Humanity doesn’t have an inherent right to exist,

True, as far as it goes. But it’s like “turnips have no inherent right to exist”. Pretty meaningless, and in the context where people actually want to exist (and for others to exist), somewhat misleading.

I see your beliefs now.

Please, read my palm. Tell everyone what my beliefs are.

society can adapt around them in any way it sees fit

It can’t adapt to this. Society ceases to exist if there are no people, so saying “it can adapt to no one performing the process by which people create their replacements in the world” is dumb.

Fertility is weird in that young children grow up in the same society that is doing these things… they internalize what they see around them as “normal”. So if you teach children that having one or zero children is normal, they’ll grow up to want the same. They can always go lower than 1, but never higher. This means fertility trends in one direction only, it never goes up.

And once it drops below replacement levels, it won’t ever go back up to them (let alone above) ever again.

Your society is dying. It doesn’t realize it yet, and by the time it does nothing will be possible to do about it.

Who can make that judgement, you?

Yes. I do not claim to be the only one capable of making that judgement. Though it seems those like me are rare.

Judgement is nothing more than the measurement of a thing or an event. We are not talking about a legal process… I sentence no one, I convict no one, I condemn no one.

But I’ve measured, and accurately.

Trauma seems like a damn good argument for not having kids.

It may seem that way, but it isn’t. At most, it’s an argument to delay having them.

If you wanted or needed to do something in your life, and you were in a car wreck and broke both your legs… would you think it sane for someone to say “now you should never do that thing again, you’ve experienced trauma!” ?

Why is it any more sane if the injury is psychological? You take the time you need to recover, you work hard to get back to where you should be, and you do that thing. And you do it whether it’s having children or climbing some mountain or whatever. And you’d even agree with me if we hadn’t prefaced the achievement as “having children”, but some other trivial thing.

to subject another human being, who had no say in being born

This is a nonsense statement. Until the person exists, by definition they can have no say in anything because they do not exist. Therefor it is not necessary, and even irrational, to speak or think about whether someone has a say in “being born”.

You’re morally permitted to subject a non-existent non-person to “being born”. Unless you’ve invented some sort of time travel, nothing else makes any sense.

especially when some of that suffering may be caused by genetics, which will be passed down to said human being

This is the first intelligent thing you’ve said. Those who have incurable genetic diseases that cause true misery are rational to not reproduce.

None of the people in this thread, and few of those (1 in 10,000 or even fewer) who are childfree are childless because of that reason. You don’t have the Tay Sachs gene, and your receding hairline’s not comparable.

i.e. saying “people who don’t want kids are mentally ill” and then wondering why people would consider that to be an insulting statement.

It’s like saying “people who want to force themselves to vomit after every meal are mentally ill” and then wondering why the bulimics consider that to be insulting?

They’re bulimic. It’s a mental illness. They probably do find it insulting, at least when they can work up the nerve to do it… it wasn’t always that way. But wasn’t it Oprah who had a bunch of the crackpots on her show where they were starting to claim eating disorders were a lifestyle choice?

Same thing here. If you get enough mentally ill people together in one place, they can convince themselves that their perceived numbers alone make them not mentally ill.

I can’t tell if you’re playing devil’s advocate or one of the mentally ill, and I don’t care nearly enough to read your comment carefully to try to figure it out.

Insulting people

I’m not aware of having insulted anyone. I’ve come to learn in my life that some people are insulted by reality… that’s sad. Reality doesn’t change just because you feel insulted, it never apologizes, and it definitely doesn’t make amends.

that someone can rationally make that decision.

No. They can only irrationally make that decision. And it’s not difficult to discern that truth… just open your eyes. Trauma, gluttony, there’s always something right there at the surface pressuring that choice.

What a progressive take on psychiatry! That guy babbling about demons whispering in his ear as he uses feces to fingerpaint on the hospital walls isn’t mentally ill… he’s just making a choice.

A choice you or I might not make, but it’s no less valid and no less healthy.

Thanks for changing my mind.

i don’t want to have kids because i believe it’s unethical for some average joe, or in fact anyone that isn’t an expert in child psychology and child development, to subject a human being to potential lifelong trauma

Only PhDs in child psychology should reproduce? So, you want humanity to be extinct, that’s a more ethically sound position than “sometimes bad things happen to some people”?

society feeds you the lie that you need to have kids to feel fulfilled and happy,

You’ve got 4 billion years of genetic coding that insists, even demands that this is true. The last few tens of millions of years hardcodes it directly into your meat brain.

Society? If society ever did that, it ceased doing it almost a hundred years ago. Now, you can’t turn your head or hear a dozen words from some random stranger proclaiming the opposite is true and that anyone who says otherwise is a misogynist, masochist, or biblethumper.

There of course are many reasons for that. If you believe transexuals are healthy, important individuals… how could they participate in parenting if they’re mutilating their reproductive organs? So, parenting and reproduction now have to be bad or at least discouraged, to push the other message more fully. Not just them, of course, it’s not fair to single them out when there are so many other degenerate lifestyles that, if you embrace them, you also can’t embrace the idea that parenting is important without being hypocritical.

The end result will be, of course, that these lifestyles die out. The question is, will they take everything else with them.

How is it any more terrible than it’s ever been these last few million years ago? I don’t have to worry about my kids being eaten by some predator anymore, the smilodon problem’s taken care of. Horrible diseases still about, but many that would have crippled or killed them just 100 years ago are now bad cultural memories. They have the comfort kings wouldn’t have known in centuries past.

Only the neurotic would whine about how they can’t bring children into a terrible world. I’m glad you’ve gotten over yours. As you have time, do what you can to dissect that old worldview and figure out how it works so that maybe you can help other people someday.

God no. I can’t imagine a more horrific punishment than to be childless.

I wish we had more than the two we have, but my wife and I started late. My daughter (12) sometimes asks how many children she could realistically have… a good sign that she hasn’t been tainted by whatever mental illness it is that the “childfree” people have.

They likely would not only choose to act differently based on lessons learned, but they would have to.

Why? Why would they have to act differently? What would force this to be so? What if, for instance, they considered that the projected failure of their state 100 years after the founding to just be the price of utopia, and did everything the same way? What if they considered it a fluke, some extremely slight random chance that toppled their government? Like, I dunno, the misspoken utterings of a dumbass East German propaganda minister who should have kept his mouth shut or better yet “lost his job” a year prior?

There’s no reason to suppose they’d have to do things differently. It might even be unreasonable to think they would, given human nature and our propensity for trying the same thing over and over, hoping that it will work “this time”.

Didn’t the fall of USSR teach us anything?

That wasn’t true Marxism. We can know whether or not it’s true Marxism by whether it works or not, and since it didn’t work, obviously it wasn’t true Marxism.

will they do anything different than the dictators of the soviet union?

The saintly leaders of the Soviet Union were not dictators, but merely custodians of the people’s own will.

another mass murder seems to be perfectly fine!

Do not believe the western propaganda. The places he supposedly committed mass murder in do not even exist in reality. Go check a Russian map. This never-never land called Ukraine isn’t even real, but a fiction of western imperialists dreamt up to slander the great Russian people and by extension Marxism (or possibly vice versa).