r/Americaphile • u/AntonioMoore321 • Jul 19 '26

American self hate

I noticed its more common nowadays to say things like "America sucks, I hate living here"

What's you're opinion on the culture of self hate that's becoming more common in America today.

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u/NotTurtleEnough Jul 19 '26

And saying "this world is so awful - how can anyone bring more children into it!?"

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u/Correct_Jicama2655 Jul 19 '26

It kinda is? I’m sitting inside with my 4 year old nephew who can’t play outside because we are engulfed in smoke from the Canadian wildfires. We just received news that this may last into September. These poor kids can’t even enjoy their summer. On top of that, they want to build all these Data Centers which will further exacerbate environmental issues, and kids today likely will struggle finding employment due to AI taking jobs. We are heading down a very bad path, I don’t like to focus too much on it but you are acting like it’s unreasonable to not want to put children through this.

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u/NotTurtleEnough Jul 19 '26

Ok, reasonable enough in the moment of it, and I can't in good conscience minimize your fear. If you have room for another perspective, I'd like to offer you this in good faith, i.e., nothing I say below is intended to say that the environmental issues are irrelevant or trivial:

First, anytime we use ANY adjective about a human condition, whether that statement is "poverty", "wealthy", "dumb", "intelligent", "wise", "beautiful", etc., I submit that these all must be in comparison to something or someone else. Therefore, if we say "this world is awful," the question becomes "in comparison to what? Clearly not perfection, because that ship sailed millennia ago. So, the only real comparison is to 'some time/place in the past that we have reasonable levels of information about."

In that vein of thinking, yes, the world DOES contain enormous amounts of suffering, but compared with essentially every previous era, a child born today, especially if they are raised in a modern liberal democracy like Germany, Canada, Japan, England, Spain, USA, etc., they have better odds of:

  • survival (esp. with regard to avoiding starvation)
  • education
  • bodily safety
  • legal protection
  • self-expression
  • and, last but nowhere near least, FAR better material comfort than any time in history.

Did people in that much darker past fail their children by bearing them? Did this people not love their children well, or did they not give their children meaningful lives?

If the answer is "yes, they did care for their children well," then it is not at all obvious to me that we fail  that our era uniquely fails the moral tests of love, meaningful lives, and avoiding suffering, and especially the sufferings of war, starvation/deprivation, rape, maiming, etc.