The Minion Joys Of Childfreedom
Not being burdened with children to take care of can help keep us open to forming other kinds of relationships.
At 42—the age of life, the universe, and everything—, I feel as young as when I was a kid.
I think many of us feel that way, but a greater number of us assume the burdens of adulthood as part of some kind of inherited lifelong ritual: get a job, get married, have a decent-sized house and car, have at least two or three kids. No wonder the burnout for most. Other than having jobs, which I have done minimally, I have not done any of these things, and I’m super happy that I have so many options left for the rest of my life. As shown in this photo, almost all that I have is my minion named Stuart. And playing with such soft toys is exactly the same as I did 35 years ago, hence feeling exactly as I did back then. Very little has changed, and why should it?
Stuart has been my companion for almost five years now, I think, after I won him in one of those metal-claw arcade booths that grabbed him by the butt. When Stuart still had his one eye (it's since dropped off), he was almost whisked-away by a toddler girl whom I met and allowed to dance with him, and I almost let her keep him, being the generous soul—but something in me told me to grab him back and take him home...and our companionship has become an important part of my YouTube media history. We regularly broadcast news of our childfree, antinatalist lifestyle for many hundreds to watch in a joyful, playful atmosphere.
Stuart does not shit, eat, or need regular optical checkups—the last of these because he has lost his singular eye which fell off sometime, somewhere. It's amazing how much he means to me, and yet he's blind! To me he looks like a huge edible pill. I hope he doesn’t hear me say that, haha... But he has such a cute lipsmile, very much like mine when I'm trying hard to stay happy. Fake it till you make it? I dunno. But I would be insulted to hear someone say Stuart was fake.
As you can see from his dungarees, Stuart seems to have been a farmer at some stage, minus the pitchfork. I’m currently doing some research on him and how he becomes (or became) the personality he is. He starred in movies like Despicable Me 2. Much more famous than me!
Well, okay...I will happily admit that being the “lone free-ranger” with Stuart has a sense of fakery or unfulfillment to it. While those in the first world talk of rites of passage and ways to improve their lifestyles with the fruits of capitalism, tens of thousands of the poor and trillions of sentient creatures are suffering in deserts and cages. Stuart doesn’t speak, but in my imagination he does speak to me, about the problems of the world. He tells me that climate change and overpopulation (of humans and \animals used and killed for agriculture) have brought floods, bushfires, drought, pandemics, poverty, widespread suffering, and much more; and that, as far as we attempt to deny the extent of our individual impact on the environment, we are at an individual and collective level responsible for the suffering that the Earth and its inhabitants are mostly experiencing.
In the course of an average human lifespan, of say 70 to 80 years, how much water, land, animals, and other resources will we consume and destroy? How much waste and pollution will we emit? The facts are calculable, it’s just that none of us 8 billion humans wants to calculate it with precision, for fear of learning the truth.
So there’s good reason for why I live as I do. It’s a certain mindset and ideology to live half-full, with the other half living for hope itself. The planet is dying for us to think this way; to be considerate of the needs of the many, not the privileged few. Once the environment is wasted away (soil degradation, ocean dead zones and acidification, garbage pile-ups, loss of species biodiversity and more), we will only have footage, our imaginations and our toy ‘minions’ to let those of us who are still here live in true paradise.
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."