The rise of doomers, preppers, and antinatalists on the Left reveals something deeper than the hollow posture of rebellion: a collapse of belief in tomorrow. A Left that chants “No future” isn’t just demoralized — it’s unserious, misanthropic, and bound to lose.
Tldr: How do you inspire people to work for a better tomorrow if you don't believe tomorrow can be better? Trump and the American right have a vision of a future America that they claim will be great and glorious. The American left - and the global left - have lost sight of the future entirely. Instead of promising a bright future, they merely seek to endure the crises of the present - and some on the left have given up even that.
The article speaks to the desperate need for hope - for a clear, compelling, leftist vision of the future to serve as a guiding light for left-wing activists and politicians.
And hey, what political slash environmental slash aesthetic movement focused on a hopeful future just got its instance back up?
(Welcome back, everybody!)
Hmm, I find that argument not very convincing. Except for some online nutcases no one on the left seriously argues for voluntary human extinction 🙄
It is rather the lack of long term planning that brought us to the current situation that the planet has way more humans than it can easily sustain.
Trying to organize a soft landing by slowly reducing the population, especially in areas that have a high resource use foot print, seems rather like long term planning to me. And it also makes it easier to welcome others from regions that will likely become uninhabitable due to climate change in the medium term future.
In addition, I find it rather hilarious that someone seriously thinks humans procreate because of long term thinking 😅
I mean, kids are a lifetime investment. Most people think about whether they can afford to feed and educate their kids over the next few decades, and what kind of life the kids will have after that. In countries without social safety nets, children are often the only retirement plan. I think the decision to have kids (or not) is the longest term planning the average person will ever do.
I'm not saying it's necessarily good planning, but it's certainly thinking long term.
With that being said, I think this article isn't claiming not having kids is a problem in itself. It's a symptom of the real problem - despair for the future.
People choosing not to have kids for positive reasons? Because they have a vision of the future with a lower population and choose to live their values? Great! No problem there.
But when people choose not to have kids because they think the world is collapsing around them, that they can't give children a good life, that there's no hope for the future and it would be immoral to expose a child to the coming tribulations - those decisions are made because people give up on the future.
The despair is the problem - the decisions made out of despair are just the symptoms.
And it's hard to motivate people to work for a better world now when they have no hope for a better world in the future. If we're all doomed anyway, why not burn all the oil you want and let the fascists take over?