As I inch closer to 30, the world—or society as we know it—seems to lurch closer to collapse. While my younger self certainly had quaint suburban fantasies of a nuclear family, including a gaggle of children I’d take camping in my native Peak District, my current self struggles to visualise what my future might look like.
Maybe our collective obsession with ageing, with freezing our faces at 21, goes beyond toxic beauty standards. Maybe it’s not just our appearances, but our planet that we wish we could maintain exactly as it is. Not that our planet as it stands is perfect; wildfires rage annually and biodiversity is declining at an alarming rate. But it’s liveable, just about.
Those who are having children right now aren’t bringing a new generation into an entirely broken world, but it’s certainly a world on the brink. And I know these existential feelings around having children are not unique to gen Z; I’m sure many millennial parents have also felt compelled to factor “potential planetary collapse” into their family planning. I’m at least grateful to have the luxury of time left to consider my decision. I always say I’d love to have children, one day, but my choice will be entirely dependent on what we do in the next five years to get climate change under control. The appointment of a second Trump administration hasn’t exactly filled me with hope.
Not to add any more fuel to the intergenerational fire, but it was bad enough that baby boomers had robbed us of homeownership, affordable higher education and a functioning welfare state. They also seem to have robbed us of our future. Of course, I know it’s billionaires who are the most to blame, not the average boomer. Avarice, not age, has everything to do with it. But it’s fun to point fingers and make sweeping generalisations, isn’t it? That’s what media is for, as I understand it.
Anyway, every time I make the ill-informed decision to switch on the news and see a 78-year-old man doing his absolute best to trash the planet, my blood boils. I think to myself: “You fucking fuck. You get to live all of that life and—then what? —ruin it for the rest of us?”
I’ve passed the point of caring about buying a home or financial security or the “career ladder” or the concept of one day retiring with a healthy pension pot. I just want to turn 78.
I know that “tomorrow is never promised” and it’s a waste of my time and energy to be getting so bogged down in the existentialism of it all, but the difference here is that my worries are not about chance or coincidence or freak accidents. I’m not thinking about whether I could get hit by a bus tomorrow or how lives can be upturned overnight. This is about decisions and choices that are actively being made by governments and billionaires the world over.
By refusing to do enough about climate change, the people in power are taking “tomorrow” off the table entirely. They (not we, the common people) have five years—max—to turn this sinking ship around, yet Trump is making a rallying cry of “drill, baby, drill” to crowds of the very people who will suffer when the planet burns. He’ll either be in the ground or pointing and laughing at us from whatever planet he decides to colonise.
I just want to be able to take my hypothetical, completely imaginary children for a day out in Margate, where they can safely swim in the sea. When I was younger I’d visit my grandparents in Norfolk. Their main concern was that I’d get stung by a jellyfish (a little painful, but by no means lethal). These days we have to worry about kids ingesting raw sewage and contracting something akin to dysentery.
I want to show my children all of nature, including the ugly bits—jellyfish, slugs, woodlice, moths—but the natural world is shrinking day by day. Biodiversity loss, deforestation, seasons replaced by extreme weather events. What if they don’t get to experience the first daffodils of spring? Or the park on a sunny day? What if they never know the revulsion inspired by slugs, or don’t get to race snails? I want to be able to take my children sledging on “snow days”, not have them stuck at home in front of a fan because school got cancelled owing to “record high temperatures”. Is that too much to ask?
