LET'S LIVE HARMLESSLY! PROTECTING NATURE AND PREVENTING OVERPOPULATION

One way to harm people, especially those of other generations, as well as other non-human animals, is to damage nature. Therefore, it is advisable that we take the measures recommended by the majority of scientists to prevent this. Unfortunately, most of these measures may be no more than a patch, since, no matter how many environmental regulations are approved, the more humans there are on the planet, the more it is destroyed.

Perhaps the main problem is overpopulation, which, in addition to devastating the Earth and its limited resources, leaving less and less for future generations, involves exploiting and mistreating billions of sentient beings so that the excessive human population can live according to its tastes and whims.

This overpopulation is caused by over-natality, especially in the third and fourth worlds, and artificial over-longevity, especially in the first world.

OVER-NATALITY

In some countries of the second and especially third and fourth worlds, parents tend to have many children but provide them with scarce education and resources to progress, prioritizing quantity over quality. This demographic model contributes to maintaining poor and dysfunctional countries, which leads many people in these countries to try to emigrate to the first world, generating migratory and integration problems there.

Every parent is free to have as many children as they decide, but freedom comes with responsibility. It is preferable to have fewer children and dedicate more resources to them, both material and educational and emotional, so that they have a better childhood and adulthood. Let us exercise responsible parenthood.

Instead of having so many children to use them for our own benefit from adolescence, pressuring them to work and help us financially, let’s do the opposite. It is the parents’ responsibility to take care of their children, not the other way around.

And let us also be responsible with the planet as a whole. Let us not think only of what we desire, but also of what is good for the world as a whole and for sentient beings, because the more children we have, the greater the number of non-human animals exploited and mistreated.

ARTIFICIAL OVER-LONGEVITY

The population growth of many species is kept in balance due to the existence of predators. In contrast, humans no longer have the predators that once limited our longevity, such as lions or tigers. So far, this is fantastic, as it allows us a better life.

On the other hand, we have achieved nutrition and medical treatments that ensure many people do not have to die prematurely, as was previously the case with famines or epidemics. So far, so good.

However, it is a different matter to spend large amounts of public money to achieve artificial, assisted, and unnatural over-longevity, leading to overpopulation that lives at the expense of enslaving, exploiting, and mistreating hundreds of thousands of sentient beings in industrial farms. To this must be added the horror of millions of non-human animals used in medical experiments in laboratories precisely to increase this longevity, more than 90% without anesthesia to avoid altering the results.

LET’S NOT BE SO MISERABLE!

Read LIVING WITHOUT HARMING: Let’s enjoy positive selfishness and avoid negative selfishness.

Each species is naturally genetically programmed to live a certain number of years: dogs average 10-13 years, cats 12-18 years, and horses 25-30 years. The human species previously lived an average of 35 years due to high infant mortality, but if we remove that effect, as well as that of epidemics, the natural life cycle in Homo sapiens is about 70 years.

Trying to artificially increase longevity to an extreme can ultimately generate more drawbacks than advantages, as it causes overpopulation which in turn leads to:

• Destruction of the planet.

• A serious problem of pension sustainability, decreasing the ratio of working people to non-working people, which implies that the former are overburdened in exchange for less purchasing power, as they have to pay many contributions and taxes to support the over-aged population and their medical treatments.

• Economic stagnation, as happens in Japan, Spain, or Italy, since over-longevity implies diverting resources from the productive sector to spending on pensions, healthcare, etc. It can end up creating an economic model based more on expenditure than on investment.

Isn’t quality of life preferable to quantity of life? Doesn’t prioritizing limited resources for the former rather than the latter benefit us more? Isn’t it better to invest in research to achieve a world with the least possible suffering and the maximum happiness than to allocate large sums of money to artificial longevity?

Everyone has the right to try to have an over-long life through expensive medical treatments, to the extent that they can pay for it with their own resources and are willing to endure the ailments, pains, and poor quality of life typical of old age.

However, after about 75 years, when a person has already exceeded their natural life expectancy by five years, is it fair to force other people to give up other things that give them quality of life to pay for these over-aged individuals’ medical interventions, sometimes at exorbitant costs? (for example, the average cost of a complete cancer treatment is around 90,000 euros).

It is one thing to be given free pain treatments and palliative care so that one can enjoy old age with quality of life, but it is another thing entirely to have over-longevity financed by the efforts of others instead of one’s own.

Is artificial over-longevity a right or a luxury? And if it is a luxury, is it fair that each person pays for it out of their own pocket, if they want access to it, or that others are forced to provide it?

Death is not something horrible, but something neutral, through which we cease to enjoy our pleasures but also free ourselves from all our suffering. And in any case, it is something that will come sooner or later, no matter how many therapies we undergo. Let’s see it for what it is: a law of life, something natural.

Thank you for being demographically and ecologically responsible,