Don’t Have Kids
Don’t have kids.
Don’t have kids.
Don’t have kids.
Don’t have kids, my lovelies. Don’t have kids.
This is the thing you don’t want to think about. This is the nightmare that breaks the unwritten rules of the dream and descends upon you during the day. You’re trying to convince yourself everything is normal and a-okay while wearing short sleeves in February, and this is the dark spectre lurking within you that knows, knows, that everything is really, truly not okay at all.
We are beginning to boil, my sweet frogs, and we aren’t capable of processing it.
Those beautiful children your aggressively normal friends on Facebook insist on mass-producing — they will likely die fighting over water.
Please don’t click away. I know you want to, because I do the same thing. I devote enormous proportions of my time and energy to not thinking about impending oblivion, a task made difficult by the way impending oblivion tends to draw your attention.
You go through phases, right? I do too, my angels. You’ll read something, hear something, some incomprehensibly terrifying statistic or report. You’ll hear that the Arctic is experiencing temperatures like nothing humans have ever known, and for weeks after the enormity of these facts just crushes you. We were never meant to carry the weight of our world’s impending destruction with us everywhere we go.
You recede into your coping mechanisms — maybe it’s sex, maybe it’s alcohol, maybe it’s hours and hours of video games and porn. Whatever your thing is. I’d never judge.
And then, little by little, it’ll recede. You resolve to get on with it, or to enjoy the time you have now, or you just forget about it as your quotidian concerns reassert themselves. Gradually you are able to function again.
This is a cycle we need to break.
First, here’s a pointless game you can play when thinking about the political right: try to guess to what extent their rejection of climate change is due to how starkly it reveals the inadequacy of their idiot ideology.
(I never said it was a fun game.)
Because the sad truth of the unregulated free market, which its advocates may or may not appreciate, is that it is fundamentally incapable of coordinating the massive international action required to stave off imminent planetary disaster. And even if it could, it wouldn’t.
The leaders of the free market are nothing more than lucky-sperm wastrels, justifying their stripping of society’s bones by convincing themselves they earned the right to do so. No one has to guess what they would do in the event of a genuine, global, humanitarian crisis. They’re already doing it.
The obsequious shitheads on Twitter who parrot them are not worth your time. Do not waste your anger on the “we need energy security” rubes, on the “it’s all a hoax” charlatans, on the “globalist conspiracy” maniacs.
Save it for every politician who continues to take the money. Save it for direct action. Save it for writing to your representative, save it for calling their office, save it for fucking turning up.
This is the big one, my sweets. Recycling will not save us. Vegetarianism will not save us. One of late capitalism’s most successful cons was convincing us that the mess of the world all our fault, the consumers, because we buy the products they pillage the world to make.
“Oh, we buy too many things with plastic packaging,” we fret, tutting at ourselves as we read of the oceans choking on plastic, never questioning why these products were allowed to be sold in the first place. Why did no one stop this idiocy before it reached my supermarket?
The corporate suits are reprehensible, yes, but the real failures here are the politicians who capitulated to them. These are the people who stood for election and promised to make things better. These are the people who stood on platforms of “A Better Future” while ensuring, through callousness or ineptitude, that we probably don’t have one.
This is the part where you have to do something. Those representatives need to know your name. At every meet and greet they hold, through every channel they offer, you need to demand to know what they are doing to fight this existential horror. Tell them you want bills raised in Parliament. Tell them you want a stand taken against fracking in your area, in the entire country. In the UK, Theresa May’s conservative government is embarking on a breathtakingly stupid abandonment of solar power. Tell your representative that policies as punishingly, bewilderingly asinine as this must be shown no quarter.
Tell them that if this does not happen, you simply will not vote for them.
And on that note, fuck political parties. Want to know my dirtiest secret, my loves? I would cheer on the grossest authoritarian imaginable if they promised to devote everything they had to battling climate change (and I believed them). There is, for my money, really no counter-argument to this. What kind of civil liberty or progressive policy can effectively tip the scale against “a habitable planet”?
Don’t let party loyalty hamper you —we have men and woman of wildly varying moral fibre in charge of our futures, and if your representative in your chosen party shows signs of weakness on this, turf them the fuck out.
I mean, we have to try, right?
I’ll say it again my dears: save your anger. Save your anger for the moment when you have to stand in front of the machinery that wants to drill away your future, the machinery that robbed you of the chance to be a parent to a child who will live a long, prosperous, happy life.
Those idiots on Twitter I mentioned earlier? You cannot waste your anger on them any longer. You know the exact idiots I mean. Here is the secret, my lovelies, here is one of my key takeaways: you must never give these fools one second of your time ever again.
If you want my advice, my loves, delete Twitter entirely. It is a revolting cesspit. The Twitter right, that bizarre coalition between the radicalised anime-addict and the middle-aged football fan, has choked up the place with incessant bleating and made it unusable for anyone with anything approaching a conscience.
The Twitter administrative team has amply proven that they would be too stupid and inept to fix the endemic harassment on their service if they weren’t already too morally bankrupt to even try.
If you’ve managed to make it work for you then keep going, but honestly my doves, I’d delete it. Change your password to a random string of characters then hurl it into the sea. I cannot predict what the future will look like, but I can predict one thing with certainty: you will regret the time you spent debating idiots on Twitter, or at least, you will not look back on it with anything approaching fondness.
Your existence is a flash of brilliance between two eternities of nothing. It is simply too short to accommodate people who say things as asinine as, “Oh, so everyone who disagrees with you is automatically a Nazi?!?” Delete them.
Delete Uber too, while you’re deleting things. This isn’t relevant, but it’s a good thing to do.
And look after yourselves, my babies. Take pleasure where you can find it. Sterilise yourselves so you can fuck until you pass out. Travel, if you want to and if you can. Yes, flying is tremendously damaging to the environment, but those gargantuan airliners will be shepherding herds of indolent boomers to their third holiday of the year with or without you, so you might as well enjoy the opportunity while it’s there.
The aforementioned idiots in the Twitter right will call you a hypocrite for that. ‘Hypocrite’ is the only word they know. The good news is that, as per my earlier advice, you will have deleted them from your existence.
You won’t have time for them anyway. You’ll be busy.
Just imagine how satisfying a third act it would be if those idle, driveless, phone-obsessed millennials saved the world from the crisis boomers made through greed and stupidity. The boomers would go to their graves denying it, but that would be acceptable, because it’d mean they’d have finally gone to their fucking graves.
So do the work, my lovelies. Do what you can. Save your anger for the people who matter. Live in the now — eat brunch, travel abroad, fuck someone you’ve just met — and enjoy how much that irritates the people who robbed you of your future.
Reconcile yourself with the likelihood that we will fail, and love yourself for trying.
And don’t have kids.
