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Writer Rhonny Dam’s Story: I’m fairly happy in life and have zero regrets about never having a child

Rhonny DamThere was never a time when I wanted to have a baby. When I was of that doll-getting age, the ones that you could feed and that you had to change were all the rage. Even at age 4, I felt that was too much effort! What did I want to do all that work for? I never lost that feeling. To this day, I have never changed a diaper. I don’t think I have even ever fed a baby. I don’t like the smell of them, I don’t need to sniff their heads, and frankly, I find them a little too moist! I hold them only under extreme duress.

As I hit my teens, I thought the world was a little too uncertain to bring in another life. The ‘80’s were my teenage years. With acid rain, nuclear threats, and killer bees, I thought it mad to add another life to the mix. I started to joke that I loved my kids too much to bring them into this world. Young adult angst and depression hit, and with that came another reason to not procreate. Why would I subject a new human to this kind of misery? What if my child felt these terrible feelings? I would have felt guilty for that.

Years and years later, I’m fairly happy in life and have zero regrets about never having a child. I feel the future of our environment is really at risk. Humans are not endangered – far from it! There are way too many of us. There cannot be infinite growth in a finite system, yet that is what we are doing. Over 7 billion humans and going up every minute. We have overshot the carrying capacity of this world, of our resources, so I am more content than ever that I didn’t contribute to the issue. It is said that we should have the children, because what if that one child who was going to fix everything isn’t ever born? I can’t subscribe to that. That’s just silly on the face of it.

We have turned away from Nature and are out of touch with the planet through technology, and now we hope technology can save us. It won’t. Nature always wins. If we don’t slow our numbers down ourselves, Nature will do it for us. Climate change is something that the planet will survive, but we will not. We cannot adapt quickly enough. We’ll be miserable. Maybe my child would have made a difference. I wasn’t willing to take that chance. It blows me away that people do not take climate change and overpopulation into account when thinking about having children. They say we are selfish for not wanting any. To me, it’s way more selfish to think you have to have one. In these times, we don’t know what our kids’ kids will be facing. Having a child is basically sentencing it to a future of suffering. Now that is selfish.

Rhonny Dam’s book, “An Atypical Chick: A Gay Man in a Woman’s Body Out to Change Life As We Know It”, is available on Amazon.

Would you like to share your story? Send it to: [email protected]

Comments

  1. Hi Rhonny, thanks for sharing your story. I agree with you that Nature does indeed always win and that unless we take drastic measures to curb rampant population growth, nature will do it for us. Like I said in another post, the inaction of governments around the globe will inevitably come back to haunt them. This lack of leadership on one of the most pressing issues of our times, is simply shameful.

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