sk47
Well-Known Member
- Joined
- Nov 12, 2020
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- Jeff
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Hello; Allow me to plead the case for at least one boomer, myself. I finished my undergrad work in 1970. I had planed to work in Biology so took the needed courses. Wound up taking a teaching job to support my first wife and start to pay off my debts. By the mid 1970's there was enough information about what was likely to happen with the environment to make some good guesses. So after some discussion with my first wife I decided to have a vasectomy. I was around 25 years old.thanks a lot! Boomer's have been kicking that can for the last 50 years because of that exact mindset. The bill always comes due.
There's the whole ethics discussion of selling your yet unborn progeny into forced servitude and privation just to avoid having to face the economic reality of today. What did they do to rack up the bills? Nothing. Talk about visiting forcible injury on the 100% innocent.
I cannot say the student loan debt was one of the things I had figured on specifically. I was more focused on the exponential growth of the human population and the coming impacts. Of course there were economic problems caused by governments back then also. Anyway I did not wish to bring a child into what was very likely to be a bad situation. Some for the sake of the child and some for the more general sake of the general population. I was in favor of things such as ZPG (zero population growth), conservation and recycling.
I sometimes put it this way in conversations about these things. At least the children I did not have are not competing for resources with the children who are now alive. That no offspring of my own are around to inherit the ongoing legacy of human endeavor is perhaps the only real positive outcome. Plenty of others procreated in sufficient numbers to more than make up the difference.
Don't know how any of you will take this information. There has been a wide range of reactions from others, even ridicule. Does not matter to me any longer and has not for some time. There were a few times when I had doubts about my choice to be childless. In the fullness of time those doubts are gone. Things are as bad and in some cases worse than I had estimated. Some completely unexpected outcomes along the way that are also bad news.
I guess the only thing of much surprise to me is that it has taken a much longer time frame to happen than expected. At least twenty years longer. Will things hold together in a decent manner for 30 more years? I do not know. Right now I do doubt it. But I have been wrong on the time frame before.
Both environmentally and economically things seem to be at tipping points. Hard to say when or which will be the more troubling. Likely both will be worse soon enough. I am 73 so do not need so much more time.
By the way there were a number of other old boomers who kept their offspring numbers to replacement. Two adults = two children thus ZPG. A few were like me and had none. I do agree not enough of us did the right thing, else we would not be in the pickle we find ourselves in today.
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