I'd rather be an optimist

I was chatting with a friend of mine the other day and he said something I’d heard before but didn’t think twice about until I heard it again. 

He told me that he didn’t want to have kids because of a child’s negative impact on the climate. He felt it was selfish to have kids with the environment being at risk. 

I’d heard someone say that in the past but thought it was a one-time opinion. But, after my friend mentioned this same sentiment I decided to look more into if it’s more widespread than I thought. 

Apparently it is… with a recent poll finding that one in four childless adults say that the climate and a child’s impact on the climate was a major influence on their decision. 

To me, not having children is one of the fastest ways for us to stagnate as a population and have less opportunity to solve the problems that we’re facing. Having kids and raising them to be intelligent, thoughtful, conscious contributors to our world is by far a more positive externality than abstaining. 

But, if you’ve been reading along with me for a while now you know my core beliefs are that the majority of the sentiments around big issues facing our world today are incorrect or misguided. 

Much of these sentiments, including the sentiment that not having children is a positive for the environment, are rooted in a pessimistic belief that tomorrow will be worse than today. 

The pessimistic belief that tomorrow will be worse comes from beliefs that the problems we face today are unsolvable or cannot be solved fast enough. 

And, the belief that our problems cannot be solved, in my opinion, comes from a regular bias that humans have that the world is mostly a static place (what’s true today will be true tomorrow). And, if there is change it happens in a linear, step-by-step fashion.

But, one of the most central tenets of life, evolution, and the universe is that existence is random, unpredictable, and exponential. This applies to the development of technology too but in a more predictable way. 

We live in a world where one small change can have huge impacts (positive and negative) on our world. 

For sure, certain parts of life are static. The sun will always rise in the east and set in the west. The Earth takes 365 days to orbit the sun (I was going to say the sky is blue but fact checked myself and turns out the sky has not always been the same color!). 

The Universe is constantly in a state of flux. 

I believe that humans intellectually understand this. We know that over time things change. What we’re not good at, however, is understanding how fast and how unexpected that change occurs. 

When it comes to applying this framework to predicting what’s going to happen in the future most people apply a static or linear model. In my opinion, this is the root cause of the pessimism around our species being able to solve the big problems we’re facing today. Most people unconsciously extrapolate our world today into the future and just see more problems. 

As an example, there’s many people who argue against solar power saying that it’s only a small fraction of power generation and has too many problems to be our main source of energy for the world. 

But, that point of view leaves out the opportunity for one innovation in power storage to solve that hurdle. 

Change happens slowly, then all at once. What’s true today is likely not true tomorrow. If we as a species develop one battery that can store large amounts of power and discharge it for days at a time all the calculus around solar power changes. 

Once that happens (because it’s a matter of time at this point), the whole world will be scrambling to install as many of these batteries as possible (because it will be cheaper and more efficient than natural gas or coal) and the curve of solar and wind power generation will go exponential. 

We see these events happen all the time. One small invention, creation, or change rapidly shifts the direction of energy and creates random exponential change. 

My point being, those people who believe that they will damage the world by having children are looking at the world through the wrong lens.

Life and progress is chaotic. We take huge exponential leaps forward and small steps backwards, especially with technology. But, our brains see and model the world as a static slowly changing place. 

Seeing what’s not yet there can be difficult. But, I’d rather be an optimist that has faith in the ingenuity of the human race than a pessimist any day of the week.