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.

I agree.

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.

Well, that is your choice. If you genuinely enjoy those activities and believe they improve your quality of life, then I can’t say that they consist suffering for you. Suffering can only be broadly specified in general terms, but to be specified in more granular terms, it varies between people and one person’s definition of suffering may be wildly different from the next. Some people actually enjoy being professional soldiers and getting involved in violent conflicts. Others practice violent and radical sports and enjoy it. For those people, those activities do not classify as suffering. For others, they would.

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

In your opinion. Since for me they aren’t, my choice is different from yours.

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”.

Except, as a parent, you can’t really prevent that 100%. Perhaps not even 50%. The world takes twisted turns and your child might end up suffering such abuse at the hands of events or people you have no control over.

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.

The attitudes people have differ between people, because people’s mindsets, experiences and personalities are all different. I don’t think I’m making a radical statement here.

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.

What one person sees as a joke, another might see as something quite serious. It all depends on their own viewpoints and past experiences.

For example, although I should not be giving personal examples and opening myself to comments on my own character, due to some trauma I have with having been medically abused by hospital staff as a child, I have paralyzing, crippling phobia of needles. Getting the COVID vaccine, for instance, was a major psychological ordeal for me and I only ended up getting it because of the duty to society and public health (if it was something that affected just myself, I wouldn’t have). Having diabetes would mean getting regular, if not daily, insulin shots or blood sugar tests (depending on the type of diabetes), so that would quickly devolve into a miserable, fear-driven life. Fortunately it isn’t something I have to deal with at the moment and I take as good care as I can to ensure it won’t become an issue in the future, but there are worse things, which are unavoidable, that can happen.

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

I fail to see why that is absurd at all. It’s as valid a viewpoint as ever in my opinion.

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.

And why does society have to exist? Society and humanity have no inherent value. The value they have is the value we, as rational beings, give them. If we collectively determined that they should exist no more, they would cease to exist.

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

I don’t mind it. That alarmism doesn’t scare me. Remember I follow VHEMT, hence that is my end goal (at least, I’m doing my part towards that).

But I’ve measured, and accurately.

That is precisely what my question was targeting. You’ve measured (and you have every right to your measurement as the expression of an opinion), but who’s to say you’ve measured accurately? What qualifications do you have to make such a statement of fact?

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!” ?

I would. That is how I try to act in my daily life: avoiding things that have caused me suffering in the past, as much as possible. That is how I try to achieve a comfortable and happy life, by avoiding what has broken that comfort and happiness in the past.

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”.

It may be from a pragmatic point of view, but abstractly/philosophically speaking, it isn’t. When we make a moral choice, we have to think of the future consequences of that choice. From that point of view, we have to consider that the person being born will have no concept of the meaning behind their future suffering and will try to attribute such meaning to the ones who decided for them. People desire, naturally, to be in control and being born is the one action you have zero control over. That is also a reason why people seek religion: to justify and give meaning to their existence.

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.

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

Reality doesn’t change just because you feel insulted, it never apologizes, and it definitely doesn’t make amends.

In the words of Thanos, “reality can be whatever we want”. I am joking a bit of course, but really, although the laws of physics and the physical world don’t change, society can adapt around them in any way it sees fit. If society chooses, it can embark on a more positive path, with less suffering. In many ways, it has been doing that the past century. The conservative idea that “reality never changes” and that individual people should change because society as a whole won’t is a fallacy and can be proven empirically.

They can only irrationally make that decision.

Who can make that judgement, you? Do you have the qualifications required to produce a judgement on mental health like that?

Trauma, gluttony, there’s always something right there at the surface pressuring that choice.

Trauma seems like a damn good argument for not having kids. It’s not irrational. If I suffered, it’d be immoral on my part to want to subject another human being, who had no say in being born, to potentially suffer the same (especially when some of that suffering may be caused by genetics, which will be passed down to said human being).

So, you want humanity to be extinct, that’s a more ethically sound position than “sometimes bad things happen to some people”?

Yes. Suffering should be eradicated at all costs. Humanity doesn’t have an inherent right to exist, it simply does as long as it is perpetuated by both humans themselves and while external conditions allow it.

degenerate lifestyles

I see your beliefs now. Well, no wonder you also disagree with this viewpoint then.

Insulting people for having a different opinion to yours is not a good look. No matter how much humanity has evolved when compared to previous generations, there are still big enough problems in the world that someone can rationally make that decision.

I adhere to the https://www.vhemt.org/, so yes, that includes being childfree. In fact, that’s the main requirement.

You do raise some interesting points. I’ll admit I do have some bias (same as most westerners, probably) towards conflating Russia/Eastern Europe’s current situation with being the result of communism directly when it’s more likely that it’s a result of a communist country not being able to directly adopt a capitalist system without turmoil.

I am still skeptical of USSR’s regime in the matter of individual freedoms (which Karl Marx did not want to infringe on, distinguishing between private property and personal property AFAIK) and human rights, which I greatly value, but I’ll admit I was wrong regarding scientific/industrial/societal progress, even under Stalin.

Note that I do respect Lenin’s ideals somewhat, even though he never lived long enough to put them into practice and I do respect some policies enacted by later communist leaders, such as Khrushchev’s housing plans, it’s Stalin that I take offense to, mostly. And while you might argue that later leaders had their wings “cut” by the Cold War and US interference, I don’t think you can really make that argument for pre-WW2/Stalin-era USSR.

I believe so, am I wrong? Do note that I’m talking about results for the people themselves, I understand that the country industrialized fairly efficiently in the 20’s, but at the expense of a lot of suffering for minority groups mostly (Russians were the ones really favored, making it sort of an elitist/pseudo-fascist regime in a sense) and with little to show in terms of wealth distribution for the proletariat, which is, in essence, the goal of communism, is it not? An elite class centered around Stalin still prevailed and retained a lot of wealth, they merely traded the imperial elite for a new class of elites…

or did a very influential, wealthy and powerful country go out of it’s way to make sure the USSR failed and then say…“look, it didn’t work for them!”

I get what you’re saying, but the US was mostly a geopolitically irrelevant country before WW2 (which was the event that really put them on the world stage), and by then the USSR had already existed for more than two decades, with little positive results to show. That was also the era of Holodomor and other such atrocities perpetrated by Stalin. You may argue that Stalin was not a true communist and more of a thinly veiled imperialist (and psychopath), and I agree, but many modern communists won’t agree with that sentiment and will still defend Stalin’s actions.