I don’t think I should have children. 

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     Look, I know this isn’t a hot take, and  there aren’t a lot of people my age who want to have children. But I’m not talking about “right now”, or “waiting until the time is right”. I don’t think I should bring another life into this world because I don’t know if it is going to be a good place for them to grow up.

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     I like to think that this is something I am just worrying about right now, because there is a global pandemic and the economy is messed up or whatever, but it isn’t right now. It’s constant. I don’t know what the environment is going to look like in a decade, let alone for the next generation; there is a serious chance that we have passed the point where we may seriously address existential threats like biosphere collapse and ocean acidification. We’re far past the point where we can deal with the worst of generational apathy, post-truth, and global warming. I’m not saying that our species is doomed, or we’re going to look like mad max in a few decades (far from it). But I’m almost certain that it is going to look worse than what we live in now.

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     And it isn’t even just the environmental stuff. This pandemic has proven to me, beyond any doubt that I may have had before, that you cannot rely on a government entity to protect the people in an emergency. Political interests will always Trump human ones. This pandemic was actually a pretty mild problem, in the grand scheme of things. Yet throughout the world, we see violence over government regulations, antisocial behavior, blatant mischaracterization of the scientific process, and a large group of people who are purposefully trying to ruin the lives of those around them. I used to think that the people in my tiny rural hometown were some of the most crafty, reliable folks on earth. Our county had one of the worst outbreak percentages in the state of Illinois, and we have around 10,000 people TOTAL. Nobody listened. Nobody worked together.

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     I can’t bring a child into this world without knowing that they are going to have a good life. I don’t know if I trust myself to be able to provide one with the way our society seems to run now.

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-Phil