How many of us are displeased with the way in which our parents brought us up? The answer may be about 50-50, but the consideration is convoluted because we are so much taught to respect our parents and that they love us as their children. Is this always so true? Is parenting so blameless?
Of those people who are content for most of their lives, a vast majority of these are unempathetic to the discontentment of the many others whose childhoods were compromised by abuse, neglect, worry, and stress. Those who are content in the capitalist system, which is essentially an "each person for himself" type of system, do very little to help those who suffer. Particularly in the adult world, we are not taught to be kind and helpful to our neighbors, other than for material gain.
In the nuclear family setup, we are all made to be so selfish and insular, unless we had many siblings, which is another type of problem in itself. No matter who you are, you will almost inevitably have come across a person crippled by their upbringing, and who gives you anecdotes and stories about it, but you may well have forgotten about them or, much more likely, not been able to do much to help them. The world is a very seedy, cheesy place. It's each man and woman to himself, most of the time. Whether children get successfully through their childhood is a huge lottery, with winners as well as [more] losers.
So, at this point, a confession: I do find it hard to talk to strangers. But that does not mean that there are no strangers out there with whom I cannot share a symbiotic relationship. They may not look the part, and in life the people who surprise you rarely do look as you expect—they may be crippled, wretched, needy, homeless, diseased—but they share the common spirit of life that all aspire to: the desire to be loved, cared about, and appreciated. It's so complex though, and breeding more humans makes things even more complex, because the world is reaching a breaking point where it does not have the resources for more of us. As almost 8 billion human earthlings situated on this small, fragile, vastly polluted planet, we most certainly have a management crisis.
The desire for new humans is not a new concept. Consumerism itself tugs at the heartstrings because we aspire for the newest, the best, the freshest. It's an ephemeral kind of irrationality that drives most of us out of the realm of simply existing and surviving. In this crazy world, if you are not partaking actively in any pyramid scheme (which is what capitalism is), you are automatically going to lose. Humans need humans, and the most convenient way to get them— at least at that level of accessibility and familiarity and familiality—is usually to breed more. You get to name them, play with them, see them grow and develop. You get to impose your character and attributes onto them, and have dominion over them.
The arguments in favor of breeding more children usually run along the lines of "it's my personal choice". Look out of your narrow field of vision, though, and you'll find that these choices that you make to open the world to more humans are slowly killing those that already exist. Influx of refugees? Intruders in your backyard? Being rejected as a result of too many applicants for the same job? Highways jammed up with commuters? Excess carbon emissions? All of these will come back to haunt you if you are pronatalist, since it was your personal choice to add to the mayhem.
I am incredibly lucky to have made it to 42 without suffering severe injury. My parents showed me neglectful attitudes during my teenage years, and I was in a deprived mental state where almost anything could have happened. My foot almost being run over by a car, candle-wax being poured onto my face and almost an eye. Now I have teeth with receding gums that I try my best to take care of, and fingernails at varying levels of disrepair. My voice is grainy from shouting too much in the past, and I lack the energy to exercise much. I had suicidal ideation from the age of thirteen. My parents turn a blind eye to many of my (especially emotional) problems and do not know how to empathise. They owe a debt to me that they cannot pay, even with their great fiscal wealth which they have been generally keeping from me. "This mortal coil" that people like me have is a knot too tight to untie, and I will live out the rest of my life with maladjustment problems and increasingly decrepit health.
Even though I have great faith in the potential of life to be "perfect", we are at least thousands of years away from that occurring through society. We really need to clean-up our act, before we even consider breeding further. Please do the Earth a favor: avoid breeding, and have fun on your own terms...not on the terms of some yet-uninvented soul.
MARCUS TEN LOW (@antibreeder1m) is a sufferance-abolitionist, vegantinatalist, minimalist and intellectual who has been published numerous times in journals such as Quadrant, The Big Issue (Australia), and others. He aspires to be "kind to all beings."