The year will be 2020, and I will be 29 years old. By then, I will have graduated with a master's in history and a teaching diploma. Hopefully I will be teaching at a public school, and encouraging kids to fall in love with history like I did.
I would like to be married, and perhaps pregnant or looking to get pregnant with my first of two children. Ideally, my husband will earn enough for me to be a stay at home mother, or perhaps only working one or two days. My mother does not work, and hasn't since she had my sister. I value the time she gave us, and would love to be able to do the same for my children.
I will have travelled, and perhaps lived overseas for a year - most probably somewhere in Britain.
Most importantly, I want to be happy with where I am at life. I don't want to be the woman who dreads turning 30. I want to be able to embrace it and celebrate my life lived so far.
19 comments:
What if he's the perfect guy, has an ECE degree and wants to stay at home with the kids? Will he be able to while you work full time?
Keep in mind that by 2020 life will be extremely different throughout the world. The battle for climate survival will be engaged. Your life will be very very simple. 90% of your income will go to provide water, food, medical coverage and shelter as oil will be $350 or more a barrel and alternate energy will be expensive. Tourist travel will be dead by international decree and reserved only for international aid to the hundreds of millions who need to be transplanted for survival. Should be exciting times.
http://www.newsoffuture.com/oil_price_in_near_future_peak_oil.html
http://www.newsoffuture.com/oil_price_in_near_future
*laff* Hilarious stuff there. Sky falling much?
Sixteen - You had me going up until the stay at home part. I strongly agree that a parent should be around, but I think that can be accomplished without giving up any career aspirations you may have had. That said, the world is not as accomodating towards shared parenting as it could be, I wish career type jobs would allow 30 hour workweeks for both men and women to allow them to truly split parenting time. Its an issue I struggle with since both my partner and I have serious careers, but I want children one day as well.
I don't think its healthy for children to go without one parent in favor of the other, I think both are important and I wish I'd known my father better rather than him being that guy who was eating, sleeping, or gone when I was a kid.
Reflex - I agree about the having no father part. I want him to be around too. I am lucky enough to have a mother who stayed home, and a father who still had time to hang out and read me bed time stories. I want the best of both worlds, greedy perhaps, but dreams are free, right?
No hint here that the "sky is falling" ReflexVE... just a realty check for dreamer16's life twenty years down the road. A small example- New Zealanders who ignore the fact that most of their food is imported. NZ pop. vs arable land = 1 acre per person (UK is 0.25 acre per person) yet sustainable farming for a vegetarian diet requires 5 acres per person/ 20 for meat eaters. In contrast, for example, Canada has 5 acres arable land per person. Dream on or accept a realty check. The world will be far different in 2020.
Anon - My fiance is a zoologist with a focus on wildlife ecology. She has worked on multiple research projects, including some involved with global warming studies. She is intimatly familiar with the issue. No one seriously involved in the field buys into the disaster scenario you state. Yes, things will get tougher, but the worst effects are slated in the 100-150 year time frame, not in ten years. Yes, increasing oil costs will change some things(although even now oil significantly underperforms inflation, cost wise), but once again the time frame is not what you seem to imagine. Most of us will be dead and gone before the consequences of our actions are fully realized.
Unlike some, I do not deny that action needs to be taken, and taken quickly. But one does not build support for necessary societal changes by unreasonably screaming that the sky is falling and lying or exaggerating the impact. In fact, that only hardens the resistance to necessary change as time goes by and those disaster scenarios are disproven.
We already did this in the 70's. We did it in the 90's. Lets not do this for the next decade and simply create another generation of unreasonable skeptics.
Anonymous may not be far off the mark, but 16 can continue to dream.
My sister, a PhD in Geomorphology has been to Greenland every freshet for 15 years. She has grown alarmed over numerous rivers the size of Canada’s Fraser up there just these past 10 years. Perhaps your zoologist fiancé has not read Sea Sick – The Hidden Crisis In The Global Oceans by Alanna Mitchell or leading scientific books like The Weathermakers - Tim Flannery OR Heat: How to Stop the Planet From Burning - George Monbiot OR Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed AND Guns, Germs and Steel - Jared Diamond
OR these leading academics Climate Wars by Gwynne Dyer, A Green History of the World AND again in 2008 A New Green History of the World Clive Ponting; Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent AND Upside Down: A Primer for the Looking-Glass World - Eduardo Galeano or World Made By Hand - James Kuntsler and Shock Doctrine - Naomi Klein.
The very worst catastrophe is the quickly melting Arctic permafrost in Russia and Canada and their Tar Sands.
"plenty of time to think" she said NOT "dream".
Google "Coming World Famine" and see CBC Multiple Threats Mounting
http://www.cbc.ca/world/story/2009/03/19/food-shortage.html
This is an irreversible shortage 16 might think about!
Linny - Or she could just do what she has been doing and follow the IPCC reports, which represent the consensus opinion of over 95% of the scientific community involved with global warming research and which predicts nothing of the sort of garbage listed above.
Once again, yes things are going to get bad, but the time frames are not in the next ten years. That does not reduce the eventual severity, but it does mean that there is little reason for going off on a teenager for daring to dream of their future without the world burning up.
BTW, the tar sands you mention are part of why the peak oil theories are balony. There is more oil in the tar sands of Canada than in all of the Middle East put together. Whenever oil is above $90/barrell they become economical to harvest. A similiar situation exists with oil shale in the US, which is larger in quantity than all the rest of the proven oil reserves in the world put together, but is only economical above a price point of around $150/barrell. Certainly those prices are not ideal, but they do destroy the myth of "$350/barrell oil" as proposed above.
At any rate, two seperate predicted crisis here. Peak oil and global warming. To some degree there is a measure of truth to both. But the time frames mentioned are ludicrous and fly in the face of reality and what the actual scientific consensus is.
Hey your guys!
Just watch YouTube
Acid Test: The Global Challenge of Ocean Acidification
And OMG -Tar sands!?!
The entire Athabasca water system is being sucked into a vortex of pollution while a barrel of oil is burned to produce 4 AND hundreds of tonnes of high grade steel pipes are replaced monthly - my brother was welding there for a year, saw it all and quit.
Age nineteen is beyond time to grow up to reality from little girl fairytale fantasy world.
ReflexVE - I'm the anon who simply said she should start thinking too, about how much different her world will be in ten years. I'm going to go out on a limb here and say it will be hugely different and a lot more difficult perhaps more like the days of our great-grandparents before WW2. We'll be hoeing our own weeds to scratch out enough food especially in New Zealand.
I'm a guy and I'm 30 and I'm smarter than all of you so shut up.
Anon - And by making such predictions you only throw fuel on the fire of skepticism. As the predictions fail to pan out, you make the entire problem appear much smaller than it really is. Ten years ago people made these predictions and they did not pan out. Ten years before that people made these predictions and they did not pan out. Al Gore famously predicted in the 70's that it would all be a mess by now and as a result he is routinely dismissed now based on his failed predictions.
In ten years oil will be somewhat higher. The world will be somewhat warmer. Ill effects will be seen in some regions. And chances are Sixteen will see very little different.
These changes are gradual, and will happen over the course of the coming centuries. The sooner we being to address them, the easier and cheaper it will be to mitigate them. The longer we wait, the more drastic the changes that will be required.
In the 60s we had centuries to deal with this.
In the 80s we had a century or three.
In the 90s we had until 2125-50
The “permafrost” wasn’t going to melt for another hundred years, now it’s happening like crazy. The Arctic ice was going to be around for another century; no wait - until 2050; wait – make that 2035; hold on in the past 5 years it became clear it will be ice-free in less than 10 years THAT’s when Sixteen is talking about. Climate changes are happening exponentially and when the methane explodes from the perma-frost shortly – then you and your turtle paced crowd will be eating what’s left of the crows. BUT the sky is still not going to fall as you insist on sharing with Sixteen!
http://www3.imperial.ac.uk/newsandeventspggrp/imperialcollege/newssummary/news_27-8-2009-14-13-15
Hey ReflexVE - climate change gonna be really slow coming?
Vancouver, Canada 2010 - snowboard, etc. mountain green as anything, no snow at all for those events - all time record warm January average up 2+º.
This is happening all over the planet. California record heat burning up, record hurricanes, 1st ever in Maritimes, 1st ever Tornados in Ontario, record flooding in EU, record snow in England? Slow coming hey! Sixteen - seriously get a reality check on your future just for good planning's sake.
Sixteen, ReflexVE, others take note
"Seas melting faster than ever expected..."
Vancouver Sun, CANADA
Arctic ice meting faster
Here's a sad truth -
Polar Bears Are Gone Now
Not that I expect this will be noticed, but I was randomly skimming this old blog I used to comment on and wow, here we are, 2020, and pretty much every prediction (including my own) are crap. Who knew it would be a virus taking us out this year??
The question that will forever go unanswered, however, is "Did 16's wishes come true?"
Most people change quite a bit, but I am curious and will likely never know the answer.
I hope everyone is all right, it's interesting to see the things we all expected a decade ago...
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