All Joy and No Fun
An extremely well-written overview of recent studies showing how and why the fun has gone out of parenthood:
Why is this important to the childfree by choice? Well, the next time someone says, “You’ll regret not having kid.” or, “Parenthood is such a joy, you’re missing out” you can send them a link to this article.
It is much much better to regret not having kids, than to regret for the rest of life after the fact. Too bad there is no 30-day return period. You can change everything else in life. Jobs can be changed, marriages can be ended in divorce, pets can be donated to shelters, yet you can’t dump or divorce your kids. Once you make that choice, there is absolutely no turning back.
A comment from a friend on facebook:
I know people who have raised their kids to the age of 26 & older, paid for their entire lives – drugs, vacations, college, rehab, wedding, given them jobs at the family business, cars – raise the next generation of grandchildren too. I blame it on the parents – not culture, not society. These folks get no respect from their offspring who wait for them to die, so they can inherit the house and properties. It’s pretty pathetic.
The fad of “living green”
“Green” is a major hype and propaganda these days. Hybrid cars, compostable cups, re-usable grocery bags, this and that. Makes us believe we care for the environment. Fancy TV advertisements regularly feature a smiling family of four “living green” in a huge mansion, driving a hybrid monster SUV.
What an epic hogwash in the light of overpopulation and global warming.
The biggest inconvenient truth is that we don’t need more humans for several decades before the world’s population comes down to a stable level. That means one thing – “thou shalt not reproduce unless you contribute to the society”. In other words, there should be incentives and rewards for people who choose to stay childfree, and high taxes for parents opting for more than two children.
Childfree by choice couples can even drive hummers and live opposite of a “green” lifestyle and still be consuming resources several orders of magnitude lower than a family with one or two kids. Living “green” is like saving up pennies, and when a child is born, the effective expense of the planet is of the order of several hundreds of dollars in comparison. Saving those hundreds of dollars and spending pennies in “guilty luxuries” is much much better in my opinion.
In a geek friend’s words: “Don’t have a kid unless he/she can invent cold fusion.”
The impact of having children
A few interesting reads:
1. Save the Planet, Have Fewer Kids
Under current conditions in the United States, for instance, each child ultimately adds about 9,441 metric tons of carbon dioxide to the carbon legacy of an average parent – about 5.7 times the lifetime emissions for which, on average, a person is responsible.
2. Having Children Brings High Carbon Impact
3. Having large families ‘is an eco-crime’
4. Population growth imperils future of humanity
5. The case against having kids
Lets look at what an exploding population is leading to:
a. Resource contention – leading to war, famine, malnutrition, epidemics
b. Lack of quality education for all – leading to crimes, teenage pregnancies and other undesirable consequences
c. Rapid deterioration of living standards everywhere
d. Extinction of wildlife and natural habitats
The great pacific garbage patch is a horrific reminder of the waste the world is generating. Imagine a plastic wasteland the size of Texas a few feet below the water. Truth be told, unless the global birth rate comes down, there can be grave consequences down the road. The irony is that we will just let it happen, because a bad “destiny” is much more acceptable to the common mass than practical steps (rewards for childfree and high taxes for large families) which might be regarded as discriminatory by many.
We have managed to tweak Darwin’s theory beyond recognition. Animals are far better in maintaining a balance in their numbers. We will see how mother nature re-establishes the balance for us.
The case of overpopulation
A few interesting articles I have read recently:
1. Birth control vs. overpopulation
2. Overpopulation and population control
Indeed, the only conclusion to overpopulation IS war. Its guaranteed to happen. People need food to survive and will fight for that food if necessary. Its a fact of life that will continue until we choose to change our societies towards a more healthy birth-rate.
3. A Malthusian nightmare made real
For a while the media will continue to ascribe riots and other violent upheavals abroad mainly to ethnic and religious conflicts. But as these conflicts multiply, it will become apparent that something else is afoot, making more and more places ungovernable.
Mortgage rate vs points
When you take a loan for a home purchase, the rational thing to do is to grab the lowest interest rate offered, right ? But that usually comes with an another variable, points. A point equals 1% of the loan amount, and lenders typically offer you to buy some points in exchange of a reduction in rate. So what will you do, pay some cash upfront to lower your rate, or take up a slightly higher rate ?
Basically it all comes down to a threshold number of years that you plan to stay in your home before selling it. If you take a higher rate then you must sell the home within N years to come out ahead versus taking the lower rate.
A nice calculator is here: Time to recover cost of points
A good read: Choosing Rates vs. Points in a Mortgage Loan
Here is how to use the calculator: Suppose you want to know if it is worth paying $2760 in upfront costs to reduce interest rate from 4.875% to 4.5%. Here is the calculation. We see that the break-even is 3yr 10months, that means the lower rate will be beneficial if I stay in the home for more than that duration.
Now some of you will argue that it is better to get a no-cost rate, but that rate will be higher than a lower rate at a cost. Suppose you get a no-cost rate now and then the rates went up, you can end up missing the opportunity of securing a lower rate which could be worth the upfront costs in a few years.
We are about to enter another ice age
I found a very interesting and downright scary post while researching on climate change and extreme weather.
http://english.pravda.ru/science/earth/106922-0/
We humans are all wound up with global warming and how we should reduce our carbon emissions, as if that will stop the natural cycle of earth’s climate. We are trying to understand and change a cycle of hundreds of thousands years from data worth only a thousand years. The most interesting fact from the article is:
…increasing atmospheric CO2 is not causing global temperature to rise; instead the natural cyclic increase in global temperature is causing global CO2 to rise.
And the scariest part is:
The Vostok ice core data graph reveals that global CO2 levels regularly rose and fell in a direct response to the natural cycle of Ice Age minimums and maximums during the past four hundred and twenty thousand years. Within that natural cycle, about every 110,000 years global temperatures, followed by global CO2 levels, have peaked at approximately the same levels which they are at today.
Today we are again at the peak, and near to the end, of a warm interglacial, and the earth is now due to enter the next Ice Age. If we are lucky, we may have a few years to prepare for it. The Ice Age will return, as it always has, in its regular and natural cycle, with or without any influence from the effects of AGW.
The article makes sense to me. It is only natural to be short sighted and not try to be scared of life changing events even if they seem to be knocking our doors. Media does not like to highlight the harsh scientific facts because truth is not popular.
I guess we got to get ready for a chilled future, if we get to live through the transition at all.
Top 100 reasons…
…not to have kids: http://childfreedom.blogspot.com/2009/03/top-100-reasons-not-to-have-kids-and.html
Absolutely brilliant “top 100″ post !
Another one: http://saynotobabies.blogspot.com/2010/01/101-reasons-i-dont-want-kids.html
One of the most articulated essays on this topic I have read so far: The Shame of Not Wanting Children by Carolyn Ray.
And from Liz Langley’s post 9 Silly Things People Say When They Hear You Don’t Want Kids:
Finally, it’s less what we do to the world as what the world is capable of doing to us that also made me leery of bringing anyone into a place this tough. You have to be an optimist to have kids, and I’m more your neurotic emotional claustrophobe. At least I know it; I also know, unshakably, that I made the right choice.
From the book “Childfree and Loving it”, chapter 3 – Parent Propaganda:
Selfishness is not living as one wishes to live, it is asking others to live as one wishes to live.
-Oscar Wilde
About pronatalism and childfreedom
Over the past few weeks I have been juggling with thoughts and ideas that make total sense for us and our lifestyle. We both believe in a productive life and are busy with tons of activities all the time. At an age when most of our friends are becoming parents, we definitely needed a critical evaluation of our priorities in life. It is easy to follow the herd, and not too difficult to be a rebel for rebel’s sake, but it does take a lot of brainwork to see the big picture in a neutral perspective, based on the current reality and the roots of societal norms.
So far I find that a simple logic of “no desire to commit my time and resources” is enough to lead a childfree life. This is not an anti-family perspective, rather I would actually love to see only the devoted, committed and patient couples taking up the incredible responsibility of parenting and doing a great job at it.
The primary cause of the herd mentality towards reproduction is pronatalism which is deeply rooted in the motives of a patriarchial society at times of wars and religious expansions. The pronatalist blog explains this very well in a thorough research.
…It defines womanhood as motherhood, thus limiting a woman’s capacity to be fully realized, appreciated and defined by qualities, aspirations, endeavors and accomplishments outside the boundaries of maternity…
The fact that pronatalism persists even today in the face of unsustainable overpopulation can be explained by the following paragraph:
Perhaps this may be explained by thinking about who benefits from a growing population – the government in a larger tax base and potential increase in military power, religions in the potential for increased membership, and mass marketers who rely on and profit from a growing number of consumers to purchase their goods.
The author conducted online interviews of childfree women which is a very informative read as well.
Anyhow, it is good to see that the internet and this information age is helping rational thoughts to come out of the corners and be more ubiquitious to fight with capitalist corporate propagandas. There is nothing more noble than to deliver knowledge to humans so that each of them can make rational choices about their own lives.
Ever wonder how many people will spend hours, days, even months in research before an expensive purchase, but won’t stop to think before bringing another human to this planet ? Because it is automatically justified by media, religion and other assorted tools of pronatalism.
Aperture vs Lightroom
Posted by therider in Photography on April 23, 2010
I have been a lightroom user for over an year and just wanted to try out the new Aperture v3. What got me excited about Aperture are the two cool features – making books with professional templates and slideshows with stills, videos and audios.
I tried to evaluate Aperture for my day to day editing which I am pretty fast in LR with the keyboard shortcuts. The feature that makes my workflow fastest is how the arrow keys work with LR. The left and right keys always browse through the photos. The up and down keys modify values whenever focus is on a adjustment slider like exposure, white balance, etc. This makes editing much faster than with wacom tablet and pen, since the increments are spaced apart thereby needing less computations. However, in Aperture, both left/right and up/down movement of arrow keys browse through the photos and I need to use mouse on the sliders – a big disappointment.
I might check out the book and slideshow features, but for the time being LR will remain my workhorse editing tool. Unless someone can show me that Aperture can be configured to be as fast as LR in the editing department.
The world is dumbing down
Last night I watched Idiocracy. Despite the exaggerated satire, I felt there is no other movie that relates to the situation and direction the world is heading to. If you look around you will find evidence everywhere. From quality of education to popular TV shows to the sheer incompetence of the financial and healthcare systems. Whether it is profit driven greedy corporations bombarding senseless advertising to every demographic, or stupid people breeding like rats, it is evident that the human race as a whole is getting no smarter.
Look at the senseless media explosion and the priorities of news consumption by the masses. A celebrity scandal is perceived to be ten times more important than the serious geographical, social, political and economic issues we face today. Why ? Because the former is a no-brainer entertainment while the latter demands some maturity. It is all about popular culture now. The government does not care since the big guys are well fed by the profit making corporations and can woefully ignore the smart and geek minority.
Creative destruction is rampant in the modern technology world as well. Social networks, facebook, twitter. Everyone is busy doing status updates of the most trivial things in their lives. It is a big cacophony. No one listens. No one has any attention span anymore. How important you are is proportional to how many followers you have. And anyone who has a decent number of followers is a “guru” or a “ninja”. It is unlike anything we have ever seen.
Look at all the usability initiatives that go so far as to make common sense optional. Everything should be so easy that even a caveman can do it. There you go. Products and services must be made to appeal to the dumbest people on earth. And then there is the biggest joke of legal machinery here in the west. Fine prints everywhere to prevent lawsuits for when people hurt themselves by accident or by lack of common sense. Beware, the knife is sharp. Beware, the coffee is hot enough to burn your skin. Beware, you can fall from the ladder. You get it. How about a generic “Beware, you can possibly kill yourself if you are stupid enough to be omitted by natural selection” label in anything and everything ? Ok, I digress.
When I look at the kids here in the west it makes me sad. No genuine curiosity, no manners, no respect for elders. Despite free public schools, the abysmally low standard of curriculum and lack of discipline from parents are making them far from the generation we need in the future. The amount of tax money that goes to pay for the wasteful education system here is just incredible. The developing countries are catching up as well. It makes me feel incredibly lucky to have grown up in a small place, with strict discipline and some real education. I actually had to work hard to get into one of the best undergrad colleges in the country. The entrance exam was one of the most difficult in the whole world. But, as I found out later, those tests are significantly diluted by now to bring average students with money to fill up increased seats and new colleges. It is downright disappointing.
Sometimes I think we humans are just another species who are on this planet for a limited length of time. Our collective intelligence might already have peaked a few years back. And while we still produce newer technologies, the proportion of smart people is dwindling in our societal system. Idiocracy could be awfully accurate. I just hope I won’t be there when the tipping point is reached.
Relevant reads:
Worldwide dumbing down: it’s happening
Dumbing down: the awful truth
About
Hi, I'm Joy. I am a developer at Yahoo! Finance. Besides having fun with software design, hacking and programming, I enjoy photography, woodworking and touring on a motorcycle. Read on, and welcome to my blog.
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