{"id":2528,"date":"2016-06-09T02:32:30","date_gmt":"2016-06-08T21:02:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/13.201.39.237\/?p=2528"},"modified":"2016-06-09T02:32:30","modified_gmt":"2016-06-08T21:02:30","slug":"overpopulation-children-earth-procreation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/13.207.105.184\/?p=2528","title":{"rendered":"Why We Must Think Twice Before Having Children"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

A<\/span>s someone not particularly invested in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, I was eager to hop onto the <\/p>Avengers: Endgame<\/i><\/a> bandwagon and landed up in a cinema hall amid a crowd of dewy-eyed fans in their comic T-shirts rooting for their heroes. But that is only because I could relate with the supervillain much better than any of those superheroes hell bent on saving the universe and its population. Thanos \u2013 a derivation of the Greek Thanatos, the personification of death \u2013 has some pretty radical ideas about our fellow human beings and existence. In Infinity War,<\/em> he had me at, \u201cThis universe has finite resources\u2026 if life is unchecked, life will cease to exist.\u201d (I wish he were in charge of our environment ministry.)\n\nThanos made a lot of sense \u2013 although most certainly not in the \u201cgenocide is the answer\u201d way at all. But cross your heart and tell me that you\u2019ve never felt the pain of being crushed and stomped over in a crowded local<\/a>. That you have not struggled to buy a matchbox apartment<\/a> at Tuscany villa rates in a smelly city that gets by on some ephemeral, indefinable quality called \u201ccosmopolitanism\u201d. That you have not spent hours in traffic<\/a> because there\u2019s just too many friggin\u2019 people driving too many cars. Tell me that you have not looked heavenwards, sighed and said, \u201cIs desh mein kitni aabaadi hai.\u201d\n\nWe know the world is overpopulated; it\u2019s what was hammered into our brains in school during all those science projects. And yet, there are some seven billion of us on this planet right now, estimated to cross nine billion in the next 30 years<\/a>. We know that the growth in population is directly linked to the environmental effects we feel every day we step out into the blazing heat. We know that the earth<\/a> and its resources are massively strained in untenable ways.\n\nBut what we do not know is how to address the elephant in the room. Procreation.\n\nThis need to churn out an offspring is so ingrained in our life cycles, in our biological impulses<\/a>, and therefore in our culture, that we hardly pause to question, doubt, or debate it. Our Facebook walls are packed to the rafters with baby pictures and posts about friends expecting more babies \u2013 to which our instinctive and polite reaction is to squeeze out a cute emoticon. What\u2019s the option anyway? I once replied with a \u201cWhy\u201d on one such post and got blocked for being too rude.\n

We\u2019re considered vain, self-absorbed, and selfish, as if the burden of saving the world from extinction rests on our millennial shoulders.<\/blockquote>\nOutliers like me \u2013 women who either choose not to have babies or envision a baby-free<\/a> future \u2013 are actively judged and shamed for their inability to start a family. We\u2019re considered vain, self-absorbed, and selfish, as if the burden of saving the world from extinction rests on our millennial shoulders. I wonder if anyone pauses to ask whether it is selfish to not give birth \u2013 or bring a new life into the world to secure our own futures, no matter what the environmental and moral costs of it?\n\nThe world which is expected to lose almost 50 per cent of all its animal species in the next 60-70 years, the world that only has enough seafood and meat to feed us for the next 30-35 years, is running out of fresh water<\/a> at a rapid rate. We\u2019ve chopped down half of our forest cover<\/a> and are more or less always in a state of global war. And this race to the bottom is going to hit India hardest. By 2024, we will be the most populous country in the world. This dubious distinction is magnified when we realise that half of our rural population has no access to even sanitation facilities. Yup, we\u2019re sitting on a ticking time bomb, birthing babies whose parents cannot afford to raise them.\n\nBut what about well-to-do, middle-class families? What of us younger, privileged Indians<\/a> with our \u201cwoke\u201d do-gooder perspectives on the environment? Those of us who drive fuel-efficient hybrids or cycle to work, who buy organic sabzi and cruelty-free clothes and cosmetics, who lecture rank strangers on the street to upcycle and carry cloth bags \u2013 what is our excuse? Why don\u2019t we think of the cost of bringing a new life into the world? Surely we realise that our current privilege is no immunity against the overall impact of mindless population growth will have on everyone, when our cities run out of drinking water? Is it not selfish, cruel, immoral and anti-national then to bring a new innocent life into existence who will be the one to face the consequences of our mess, the one who will be left to suffer?\n\nFyodor Dostoyevsky once wrote: \u201cI\u2019d have let them kill me in the womb, so as not to come out into the world at all.\u201d\n\nThat\u2019s a thought that has found resonance in the \u201cchildless marriage\u201d, \u201cchild-free by choice\u201d and the \u201canti-natalist\u201d movements. David Benatar is a \u201ccompassionate anti-natalist\u201d, as described by a New Yorker essay<\/a> titled \u201cThe Case for Not Being Born.\u201d Benatar believes \u201chuman life is cosmically meaningless\u201d and that \u201cunpleasantness and suffering are too deeply written into the structure of sentient life to be eliminated.\u201d The essay attempts to make a case that the \u201cbest experiences in life \u2013 love<\/a>, beauty, discovery, and so on \u2013 make up for the bad ones\u201d. But Benatar\u2019s response is, \u201cFor an existing person, the presence of bad things is bad and the presence of good things is good\u2026 But compare that with a scenario in which that person never existed \u2013 then, the absence of the bad would be good, but the absence of the good wouldn\u2019t be bad, because there\u2019d be nobody to be deprived of those good things. This asymmetry completely stacks the deck against existence, because it suggests that all the unpleasantness and all the misery and all the suffering could be over, without any real cost.\u201d\n\nIs this perhaps what future generations \u2013 should there be any \u2013 expect from us too?\n\nConsider Earth to be a sinking ship, the immersion of which is accelerated by more and more people jumping on board. What do we seek by reproducing? Thriving as a race? Brilliant as we might be, humans are still the worst thing to have happened to Earth. Sir David Attenborough, in fact, thinks of humans as a plague upon Earth<\/a> \u2013 and when Sir David Attenborough tells you something, you listen. We are like that uncool guest at a house party who brings along a whole bunch of uninvited friends, who together take over the entire party, finish all the food and drinks, break all the crockery, and leave a pile of rubbish for the host to clean up.\n\nMaybe it\u2019s time to take up some of the responsibility for the clean-up. Maybe it\u2019s time to think about actual birth control. Let\u2019s just enjoy the party while it lasts and leave it quietly when it\u2019s over.\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Consider Earth to be a sinking ship, the immersion of which is accelerated by more and more people jumping on board. What do we seek by reproducing? Why don\u2019t we address the elephant in the room: Procreation?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":210,"featured_media":2529,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[107],"tags":[1619,1003,202,5034,1726,5147,5148],"class_list":["post-2528","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-pov","tag-avengers","tag-children","tag-earth","tag-infinity-war","tag-parents","tag-population","tag-procreation"],"yoast_head":"\nWhy We Must Think Twice Before Having Children<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Consider Earth to be a sinking ship, the immersion of which is accelerated by more and more people jumping on board. What do we seek by reproducing? 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