I gave her no illusions though. This world is fucked. This is either the beginning of another dark(enforced ignorance) age or the end of human civilization entirely. The kid is beyond fucked.
I have more of a "welcome to the shit show, kid" mindset. I can't protect him from this exploitative hellscape, any more than I could protect myself. Oh and please spare me the cliche "well you need to man up and find a way to give them an awesome life," as reality isn't a Disney movie.
I can show him the stuff I like and ways to protect himself a little, but man his generation's future is bleak.
My husband wants kids, I'm okay without for the same reasons as you and a big disgust of pregnancy. I have a lot of experience with kids in my career and we love kids, but it just seems the kindest thing to do for them is to not bring them into this world. We're planning on fostering once we're in a better financial position and hopefully adopting from there. I'd rather grow our family with a kid or toddler that already got the shit luck of being here.
Aside from global warming the world as a whole has been steadily improving. I think you are confusing the USA with the rest of the world. Empires collapse, it happens, that doesn't mean the whole world is on fire.
I live in Europe, in a country that still has its problems. The truth is though it's not just us. There are less deaths from war and less poverty throughout the world in general if you actually look at the statistics. This is despite all the bad things you see in the news. The modern news and internet make people more aware of the bad in the world, when the truth is things are actually getting better overall.
I get what you are saying. But that improvement has been possible only because of global warming. Today we have more energy (=workforce) at our hands than ever before. This has imported things, but it's living on bored time
Global warming will start to deteriate our world in multiple ways, I fact it is doing so right now.
A collapse of this system build on sand is a very real possibility. And it is a very real possibility that it will take less than a generation to happen.
You're not wrong, but that's just growing pains that every technologically capable species goes through. Like every other kind of alien, we have less than 1,000 years to figure out how to move our industry and other energy use and generation off-world before we cook ourselves.