But it is abstract if you don’t know whether it’s ever going to personally affect you or your progeny and whether truly global events such as nuclear apocalypse or some kind of environmental tipping point are going to happen in the lifetime of any children you might have. Until this is guaranteed, you risk making real world decisions based on problems they might only potentially experience. I’m really glad that my parents didn’t decide on my behalf that the world was too unpleasant and the future was to bleak for me to have even had a crack at life. Of course, if they had decided they just didn’t want children, then that would have been a different issue they were perfectly within their rights to have made.
As @ttf says there are metrics which argue we’ve never had it better, and if you are born in the West to parents with a degree of security, then this is probably the case and could continue to be for a good while yet.
Besides, if global catastrophe does come to pass, you may be giving them front row seats for the end of times. In which case they’ve nothing to lose so you might as well give them the opportunity to look around and enjoy themselves for a while first. There’ll be nothing else to do after.
