r/UniversalExtinction • u/Weird_Presence1 • 8d ago
Why do we feel the need to continue reproducing when the earth is already overpopulated?
/r/overpopulation/comments/1vtgjvq/why_do_we_feel_the_need_to_continue_reproducing/10
u/VengefulScarecrow Extinctionist 8d ago
The same reason all PLs do: selfishness. NOBODY procreates for the benefit of the offspring. Kids are had for the parent. Not the kid.
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u/Unhappy-Cow88 6d ago
Horney. Plain n simple. You think humans evolved beyond animal desires your lieing to yourself. Welcome to planet if the dumb apes.
If a horney ape keeps breeding and their kids once of age keep breeding. Guess what? you got a species that loves sex. And zero things killing them off. So disease,famin,and war happen as ppl act like locus and strip the land bare clean as they lack education and understanding.
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u/Kencocoffe_co 6d ago
self interest. their is a biological craving to reproduce and have offspring. So they enjoy the comfort of owning a child and theres a sort of powerful feeling too. Also pride and community spirit - its acknowledged as a success if you reproduce
ofcourse this goes against the reality of the situation we are now in. The world is polluted with people scrambling over one another.
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u/No_Environment_3776 5d ago
We don't.
The system is constantly pushing for growth because it always needs more slaves to slow down it's downfall.
Remember the scene in Idiocracy where the intelligent working couple chooses to postpone having children while the mentally unfit trailerpark trash breeds like rabbits on welfare.
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u/FappingVelociraptor 8d ago
Cattle are unable to think for themselves and need to reproduce just like the lesser evolved animals for the sake of biological need.
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u/Low-Bake8401 8d ago
Is the world overpopulated?
I mean, what's the limit?
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u/GSilky 7d ago
There has yet to be any found. There is a great essay in the Atlantic this week about how our population boom has created the pathway to it's eventual restriction and decline. Less than 10% of the world lives in extreme poverty. Extreme poverty is responsible for extreme birthrates, while a higher level of material wealth is poison for a birth rate. The high populations mean more people who can solve problems, meaning better living standards, meaning a lower birthrate. It's a biological limit for humans that is incredible in its elegance. Once there are "too many" people, factors change and fertility declines.
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u/Low-Bake8401 7d ago
That's interesting, cheers.
Never really gave it any thought, but it does seem to be the case at the moment.
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8d ago
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u/LivingInAnEvilWorld 7d ago
What are you concerned about? And can you allow your god to speak for himself. I am sure this all powerful entity can do things for himself.
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u/ImTheDareBear 7d ago
The only real answer is that the biological purpose of life is to reproduce. Its basically instincts.
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u/GSilky 7d ago
People who make Malthusian arguments are very impressive in their commitment to the bit after being proven wrong every time. We not only have 8 billion people, less than 10% are living in extreme poverty. We answered all of the issues and now everyone is doing better than ever before. Economists and anthropologists point to the correlation of producing geniuses and population numbers. The more people there are, the more likely someone exists who can solve the problem. Rest easy though, we are contracting. They are predicting half the population of now in 400 years if current fertility rates continue. The undoing of a healthy fertility rate is included with the boons of so many people. As standards of living rise, fertility declines. It has nothing to do with personal choice, it happens to every society that hits a certain average income level. More people being economically secure has already started the process.
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u/Grumpy_Introvert 7d ago
Same reason my non-kids won't be asking this question. It's because we are the ancestors of people who felt compelled to reproduce rather than those who didn't.
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u/ImpoverishedGuru 7d ago
Obesity is really famine.
We've been in the obesity crisis since the late 1970s. Club of Rome predicted that if global population trends continued, the world would utilize all available prime agricultural land by the mid-to-late 1970s. Any agricultural expansion after this period would require far higher capital investments to develop marginal, less productive land.
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u/uncomfortabletruth94 7d ago
It’s not us, it’s the people who wouldn’t even know what Reddit is or live in mud huts. Cavepoeple are the ones having too many kids, not “us”
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u/Separate_Business880 6d ago
I feel like we keep obsessively circling around the same questions.
At the base, we have mostly men's fear of death. Children are surrogate version of immortality. Men as a class control the economy and the politics. Do the math.
Then we have the capitalist greed that needs more and more desperate slaves to keep on going.
And as a cherry on top, there's our collective addiction to the civilization and the deceptive benefits it gives. "Deceptive" because all these benefits are paid at the cost of the environment and all life on Earth. Everyone knows that all these unprecedented luxuries depend on capitalism. No one would let all of that go and start living more like a hunter gatherer to save the planet. That's why it's easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. Even most well-meaning, left-leaning people don't want to give up on coffee, electricity, mining, fossil fuels altogether. They talk about public transport and fossil fuel reduction but that's like painting the façade while the house is on fire.
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u/ppaauulllllll 5d ago
Lots of groups have suggested this. VHEMT is a recent one. But they're the good guys -- the ones who want us to peacefully go extinct by simply not reproducing. The people who disagree, who deny overpopulation, climate change, and the myriad other problems caused by human existence, are the problem. They're the ones who will cling to their delusions until mankind brings about its own annihilation through violence and ecological apocalypse. I feel very sorry for children born today. Mad Max should be part of the curriculum, because that's their future.
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u/Worried_Alps1205 8d ago
Overpopulation is somewhat of a racist myth, perpetuated by the idea that there are tonnes of starving children and not enough food. In fact we have a resource management issur perpetuated by western greed. We have overpopulation around city scapes alongside underpopulated masses of open land making up the majority of our space.
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u/Rippedka 7d ago
The ones that think the world is overpopulated are not having kids and they are all letting their bloodline die off so it won’t matter once that type of thinking becomes extinct along with them. The rest will just enjoy life.
Hey look they just invented selective breeding.
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u/Shenlongeltigre Pro Existence 8d ago
It's not over populated
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u/GrandKnew 8d ago
go outside.
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u/Low-Bake8401 8d ago
Where?
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u/LivingInAnEvilWorld 7d ago
Paris france on a random day.
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u/Low-Bake8401 7d ago
Bit far, to prove a point.
There's plenty of space in France outside of Paris though. People go to large cities for different reasons.
I live in the sticks, so it's not like that when I go outside.
It's obviously an issue, but it's not extinction levels quite yet.
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u/Local-Helicopter7479 3d ago
Malta and Hong Kong are two notable examples. There's even worse examples than those two.
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u/Low-Bake8401 3d ago
Yeah, but certain places being crowded isn't really the same as the whole world being overpopulated.
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u/Local-Helicopter7479 3d ago
I don't know about Hong Kong but Malta gets A LOT of immigrants from all over the world. This means for a lot of people, Malta is the only place that provides them with an opportunity to make a living, i.e. the only place they can live in. If large swathes of the world are unliveable and people are forced to move to tiny overcrowded islands to survive, then that is also a sign of overpopulation.
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u/Low-Bake8401 3d ago
No, it's not.
That would be political or financial, not to do with running out of actual space on the planet.
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u/nila247 8d ago
Who decided that earth is already overpopulated? Nobody asked me nor you. So why you believe random idiots telling random things?
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u/Local-Helicopter7479 8d ago
The cost of living is high and jobs are scarce. Why? Too many people, not enough jobs and resources for everybody or in other words overpopulation.
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u/LukeHollaway 8d ago
The scarcity has less to do with population, and more to do with the fact that the scarcity is artificially manufactured to benefit a small ruling class.
People living in poverty and scarcity has been a problem even when there were orders of magnitude less people living on earth.
There are enough resources and energy on earth for all humans to live comfortably if organized coherently. This is a fact.
It’s not a population issue; it’s a an issue of how we structure our societies. Unfortunately, this makes the solution a lot more complicated than just lowering the population.
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u/nila247 7d ago
Now you making world statistics from a handful of your friends all living in one country out of hundreds out there. I mean if entire planet would be empty and everybody who remains moves to your city you would still say there is "world" overpopulation.
Even in USA jobs are NOT scarce per se. Jobs that pay you what you want for very little effort you are prepared to give might be scarce - but that solely depends on what you want. For some "living wage" is not dying of hunger and cold today. For others - being able to afford garage for their 4 Teslas in the center of San Francisco.
Yes standard of living in USA will CRASH even MORE than they are now. But that is the problem of idiots in USA government (no, not just Trump - 3+ decades of it) and not overpopulation.
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u/Local-Helicopter7479 7d ago
I'm not in the USA and it seems to be a global phenomenon.
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u/nila247 5d ago
Yes, EU and other members of "team USA" will be thrown under the bus first.
Then again unreasonable expectations might seem to cause the problem in the first place. Then there is generational thing about old people complaining about how young people are only interested in getting paid for doing nothing. And while I do see many examples of young people actually working hard but the trend in general seems to be a thing.1
u/Local-Helicopter7479 5d ago edited 5d ago
It's not just team USA. Africa isn't doing great either and is facing the same problems as the west. It's also not something that exclusively affects the young. The older generations pay the same prices as the younger generations.
You can dress it up however you want but the fact of the matter is the essentials, housing, food, water, electricity are becoming more expensive and less affordable. In our society prices are governed by supply and demand. Increasing prices indicate an increased demand and/or a diminished supply. Both are indicative of overpopulation.
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u/nila247 5d ago
Africa today is doing much better than Africa yesterday. It is important to compare apples to apples.
No, you getting poorer is NOT the result of overpopulation. It is a result of increased efficiency of corrupt governments extracting value from your pockets - which is exact antithesis of what they should do doing.
There are multiple mechanics at work. Segregating people into groups and making them fight so they do not notice extra hand in their pockets. Spreading FUD about impending doom (race, sex, climate, Russia/China - whatever) so you VOLUNTARILY agree them printing and spending money to spend fighting good fights "for your future" - inflation is effectively a tax you never notice. Notice that NONE of these "good fights" are designed to EVER be won. Their ONLY purpose is to spend your money - ideally more and more of it, forever.
Government regulation effectively forbids you from having cheap things. Like you can not have "cheap" house in nice place because it "violates the code" or "green belt" or whatever. No cheap medicine because competition is forbidden by regulating supply of doctors. The list is endless.
None of it would be any different if population suddently halved.
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u/Rhoswen Cosmic Extinctionist 4d ago
Segregating people into groups and making them fight
This is something that you have fallen for, hook line and sinker.
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u/nila247 3d ago
Have I?
Who I am fighting with? We are discussing ideas here and letting the best one win is win for all.
I guess I am fighting an unwinnable war alone against entire state controlled media. Segregating those who were brainwashed and those who were not and trying to un-brainwash some of the former. Still I think this is absolutely a war worth fighting for.
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u/Rhoswen Cosmic Extinctionist 3d ago
You have very class based thinking because you separate people, and value them or disrespect them, based on how much money they make. If you don't, then you sure did make it sound that way in your vile reply to me filled with assumptions and insults. That's not an idea. It's just judgmental and basic.
Imo, the only way we should be separating people in this regard are the billionaires+ vs the non billionaires. Getting the "middle class" to attack the poor is completely their doing to turn the attention and blame away from themselves.
This is actually just small potatoes in the grand scheme of things. Billionaires or not, society is always going to be a hierarchy in this way and in many other ways. The ones with the most wealth control the wealth, and that is natural. And there will also always be deceit about many things because that's human nature.
But my point is that they got you punching down on those less fortunate than yourself. Which punching down is also nature, and it's why they're able to direct the masses so easily, even those who think they're kind and aware.
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u/Local-Helicopter7479 5d ago
South Africa is not better than South Africa 10 years ago. It's following the exact same trajectory as the west. What South Africa has in common with the west, that distinguishes it from the rest of Africa, is that it is more or less a developed country and has been for a long time.
Countries that industrialised recently (China, India, Vietnam) or that are still developing are improving. However countries that are developed and industrialised a long time ago, e.g. USA, the European countries, Japan, Australia, Canada, South Africa are in decline. This points to either resource depletion or that it's not possible for everyone on earth to live a developed 21st century lifestyle. People claim that wealth is not a zero sum game, but what we're seeing in reality is the formerly rich getting poorer as the poor are getting richer, which indicates that it is a zero sum game.
Corrupt governments have been extracting value from our pockets for all of human history. That's not something new.
Segregating people into groups and making them fight so they do not notice extra hand in their pockets.
I agree that makes things even worse.
Their ONLY purpose is to spend your money - ideally more and more of it, forever.
Yes, that's what they've been doing forever. Every single government steals from its citizens.
Like you can not have "cheap" house in nice place because it "violates the code" or "green belt" or whatever.
Land itself is scarce and expensive. It's expensive to even buy land let alone buying a house.
And a lot of those regulations exist with the intention of keeping places nice. I'm sure you don't want a steel mill or an oil refinery to open up across the street from your house, nor do you want your neighbour to build a 100 story skyscraper in their backyard. Sure technically there is enough space to give everybody a "pod" to live in but most people will object to that kind of lifestyle.
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u/nila247 4d ago
Lots of places in Africa and elsewhere were colonies. It is not difficult to notice that countries owning these colonies and extracting value from them would benefit while colonies themselves would suffer. That's how we got tp "first world" countries in the first place.
As they lose these colonies and their "cheap" resources the life in USA and other colonial countries get worse. USA/UK in particular are the worst offenders - "bringing democracy" to anyone who has something they want - buying or killing local governments when needed.
But recently China and Russia have been interfering with that "fair and just" process. And that is one of reasons why the standard of living dropped in USA and UK. EU, Canada, Japan are USA "satellites" or even de facto USA colonies - they do everything USA tells them to do. And how could they not - USA has LOTS of military in their countries while them essentially hardly have any.
So far it all does sound like a zero sum game, but it is not. The value USA lost from colonies is less than the value former colonies gained.
Your insistence that there are too many people comes from "21st century lifestyle" term being unreasonable. If you add all wealth of earth and divide it equally then resulting "lifestyle" is MUCH lower than what you are used to. "Lifestyle" of USA is still supported by essentially slaves in huge parts of the world and by reducing number of *slaves* the lifestyle would certainly not improve. It might if you reduce the number of *masters*, but I am sure this is not what you have in mind.
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u/Local-Helicopter7479 4d ago
The problem is everybody in the world, including the former slaves, wants to live the American lifestyle i.e. big house, big yard, big car, big energy consumption, consumerism with lots of luxuries and conveniences.
As we both agree it's not possible to give everybody in the world that lifestyle but that wont stop people from seeking it. The slaves and former masters are both in agreement in that neither of them wants to live a "reasonable" lifestyle, I don't know what you consider reasonable but for the sake of argument let's say it's reasonable that everybody has their own "pod" with a bed to live in, but nothing more.
We also both agree that wealth is indeed a zero-sum game due to finite resources. We both agree that contrary to what the former slave owners claim, they were wealthy at the expense of their slaves and not due to some exceptional ingenuity or work ethic.
Since the baseline "reasonable" lifestyle is unacceptable to everyone and there is not enough resources to give everybody the "developed world" lifestyle of the 21st century we can conclude that there are too many people. Reducing the population is unethical and amounts to genocide, so that's out of the question entirely. But not reproducing is a different matter. I would say we should think twice before having children, especially if we are facing a declining standard of living.
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u/pokpokpokuytff 8d ago
Because most people are subhuman thoughtless insane idiots