Chapter 1.1: Not having children makes you a good parent.

Before I get started i would like to say that I am a network administrator from South Africa born in 1996 which means i’m very much a part of the “y generation” and am fully aware of the volatile world I was born in to. I am also aware that many people claim to not want children when they are young and eventually do but I could never forgive myself for creating life with the way things are now, allow me to explain how I and possibly (hopefully) other people from my generation feel about modern life in general. Keep in mind that I had quite an average life with no bullying during school and a loving family to always support me but what i’m talking about are the problems out of their control, your control and most of ours. Its no secret that our generation enjoys watching movies and playing games but within them we a reflection of the real world, within those heroes on screen we are constantly reminded of our powerlessness and irrelevance. Alien invasions and other potentially world ending catastrophe’s aren’t merely fiction but a possibility of what could be an infinite number of realities and even after watching doctor strange i found myself wondering “who am I in this vast multiverse?”, I spent many of my younger years thinking deeply about my place in the world until i learnt about the milky way and figured that there’s really no point in wasting time on things I could never comprehend. However, if my children are anything like me then they may feel the same way, I wouldn’t recommend melancholy as an everyday feeling for anyone and certainly wouldn’t force unborn children to endure a world with so much hate pain. If you have children you should do your best to protect them from the high expectations of the modern world and accept that at some point someone will witness the end of the world because you wanted to have a family or even worse, didn’t wear a condom.

• “I just wanna live like the trees” – This is a personal favorite line of mine from ‘Tree of life’ by Ab Soul. After about 14 years of waking up and going to a learning institution, being given assignments and wasting my time in sports and cultural activities, realizing that my parents also went to school and worked harder than I did only to end up in the middle class makes me feel like my life has already been planned out for me. With that being said, having been so unpredictable and spontaneous in my youth I learned a very important lesson: Regret is not an option, anything that happens has happened because it couldn’t have gone any other way because if it did then it would have, but it didn’t so stop thinking about what you could have done.
• Its just the internet – Very often i hear generation x talking about how their children are constantly on the phone and not interacting with the world around them but what they don’t realize is that we wouldn’t be starring at our phones  if the world around us was any more entertaining or pleasant. In my experience, issues discussed on social networks are almost always social issues that can be avoided by simply blocking someone from sending you anything, not to say they can’t escalate to something like having a twitter follower following you on the streets. The issue for me is that i someone’s entire social life evolves around uploading information on profiles and dashboards found on the internet then what would happen to that person when they don’t have access to the internet and would it be safe to say that for some online users its very important what someone across the world thinks of you, at what point does this person decide that peoples opinions no longer matter? How you do you give personal advice to a generation that has for the first time in all of history been raised by a library of libraries, a network of networks right in our pockets waiting to answer any questions we might have. So in this world you have created full of big fish and countless pages of information, what can you teach me that the experts opinion connected to my smartphone’s browser can’t? Any sane person looking to learn something goes to the best source of to get the best information and make no mistake, the internet is the best source of information for those who know where to look and information on where to look for those who don’t.

This chapter is not meant to insult anyone’s existence or beliefs but growing up in Africa i know that not everyone feels the same way and most people feel differently however, the opinions of those affected directly or otherwise must be heard or there will always be people who are misunderstood. Please comment on this my first 700+ word article as i intend to write the second part of it before chapter 2.