It is one of these mornings that I wake up with a tight chest and a racing heart, because I dreamed about the climate future. This time, I dreamed a conversation with my mum – about whether or not I will have children. “I want to… I really do. But my child will experience famine and war” I told her in my dream, as tears started to choke me until I startled awake.

Am I the only one having dreams like this? The only one asking herself: can I still have children today? To some of my friends I am “childless”, to some I am “childfree”. To myself, I am just confused. Is there any way to have children today consciously? To know and care about where the world is headed, and yet decide to create new life?

I am 30 years old. I am with a wonderful man, and I am in love with him. I am a human being. And I dream of being a mother. But I also live in 2025. I had chosen a career in producing long-term projections on energy consumption, land-use, emissions and temperature rise for the worlds’ governments. I cannot unsee what I saw, I cannot unknow what I know.

What I know might be more than the average person at the grocery store, but it is not fundamentally different from what, I believe, we are all sensing in the air, feeling in our bones: that shit is going to go down. Even if you aren’t working in climate or one of the few actively trying to understand what is going on with our planet – you cannot escape the general sense of “something is very, very wrong” any longer. It is not just that extreme weather events are now happening to us or those on the news in a rhythm of days, it is also that the social and political climate worldwide is spiraling into a vicious cycle of polarization, fear, and aggression.

If I am lucky, I still have 50 years or so on this planet. My child might still be alive in 2100. I am not going into the details of how exactly we are f***** – for those wishing to know that is not difficult to find out. Let me just say this: we have treated the earth like we had 1.8 of it for decades now, and that has logical consequences: during the next 100 years, climate collapse and the loss of most living species will shrink the carrying capacity of our planets’ ecosystems to about 2 billion people in 2150. We are 9 billion today. What this means for life on earth, starting now? Go figure. As Naomi Klein puts it: “Climate change is not about the world getting hotter. Its about the world getting meaner”.

For much of my life, when picturing parenthood, I realized that I wanted “a baby”. The image in my head went as far as a toddler running around a merry Christmas tree. However, I realized that my decision on whether to create new life or not should not just be based on an image of their first five cute years, but all of them. I must imagine my child as a 20-year-old struggling to find their role in this crumbling world, I must imagine them as a 50-year-old, maybe raising their own family, and I must imagine them as a 70-year-old, increasingly dependent on their society to take care of them. And while I might still pull of the merry 5-year-old, albeit with a whole lot of repressed emotion, I cannot fool myself into believing the other scenarios would look particularly good for my child. “Having a baby” means having a human being that will, hopefully, far outlive me, possibly into the next century. Doesn’t that warrant some contemplation?

Nevertheless, the certainty that our civilization is crumbling in front of our eyes is still a complete taboo in all my social circles. If I want to be real with the people in my life about what I know or how I feel, I have to be the party-pooper and risk being alienated by a society that copes with denial and distraction. Many of my friends are creating families now. When we meet, we discuss the perks and perils of what pregnancy and birth is like. Our Whatsapp chat is full of adorable photos of little chubby beings exploring the world. My parents are storing my favorite old toys in a box in the basement, for reuse within the family. When I go visit my grandma, she talks about how much she is looking forward to kitting a little jumper for my future child. Do I want all that too? HELL yeah I do. Yes I want to experience the miracle of creating life inside of me. Yes I want to see my own parents juggle my own baby on their lap. And yes I want the experience of raising it to become a good person, together with the love of my life. So what the F do I make of these two realities?

Inside of me, I am oscillating between strong and conflicting emotions. Swinging between two poles of madness. On one side of the spectrum: my own wishes clashing with anger, fear, and judgment. I don’t believe that, at this point, anyone can still pretend to not know. Having children in the 2020s is, then, a conscious decision to expose human beings to this kind of future, in order to fulfill one’s own private dream. Seems pretty selfish, doesn’t it?

My government, in its attempt to secure a stable – preferably Caucasian – taxpayer base, is telling that its not. That I need to have children to be a good citizen. However, I know that people are quite literally lining up to take my unborn child’s spot, and I can think of better ways to be a “good citizen” than procreation. My family, driven by their own dream of having a new baby in the family, tells me that having children now can be a selfless act for different reasons; that “we need the good and smart people to make children, to create a better future”. I don’t buy it. Mother nature is better off without my kid, no matter how much an environmental hero they might become. And who decides over “good and smart”? Who says that’s me, or that will be my kid? On any rate, I don’t want to put the expectation on a life to be a certain way – aka perfect – let alone to be “the savior of this crumbling world”. That is too much to bear. If they are born, they must have the right to be a fuck-up, like all the rest of us.

Society’s interests for or against my child aside – what I am concerned with here are the interests of my child itself. The ethical implications of parenthood for the climate or the wider world are already heartily debated. But what about the ethical implications for the future generation itself? It might be unborn as of yet – but if you ask me, it has rights nevertheless. And so I ask myself – why do I want a child?

I find that I want to have certain experiences. I want the experience of making life and transcending pain through childbirth that life offers women as a solace for all the other crap we get. I want to translate all the cute little images of family-life into reality. I want to have what my parents and grandparents had. I want to see my lover’s face mixed with my own in another being. I want to apply and pour into another human being all I learned about life. I want the solace for my ego to have left a legacy when I die one day. I want to love. And I want be loved, loved and needed like no one ever loved and needed me before. All these might be selfish reasons – but they are powerful enough to make denial and distraction pretty compelling. I’d be a hypocrite if I said I wouldn’t understand.

Getting real with myself about my own selfishness has helped me to overcome anger and blame against others who do decide to still have children. Exposing my whole range of confusing emotions with openness is, for me, the only way to overcome false righteousness. There is still a lot of negativity at this tail-end of madness: there is worry that all these little beings entering the world right now will be okay. There is fear of my own anxiety, a state I worked hard to learn to manage and accept, will become crippling if I’d have my own child walking this earth. There is rage against reality for handing me such a shit hand to deal with, for forcing me into these very questions. Sometimes there is envy, for those that manage to make “ignorance is bliss” work for them. And finally, there is guilt, the strongest of them all – a preemptive guilt, that unfolds as, in my mind, my future child asks me with an angry face: “Why did you have me?”

This is what gave me the final blow, and led me to decide, for a few years, not to have children. The fear of being hated by my own child for having given it life was too overpowering. I felt the reasons I had were not good enough as answers. In the attempt to “do the right thing” and act in an ethical way, I broke  my own heart, and grieved my own lost dreams.

But suddenly, unexpectedly, a new kind of madness was growing in me: wisdom. Isn’t it always at our lowest points that the real moments of learning, of deepening, occur? Isn’t it always through suffering that we begin to open? At the depth of my anger and ecological grief, I discovered, through meditation and the intentional use of psychedelics, another state of consciousness. A peace and calm beyond my hopes and fears, my heights or depths. A presence that understood what the point of all this is, why I am here. And why I am here is nothing to do with having only good times.

In moments of complete presence and expanded consciousness, I began to break my culturally conditioned short-term thinking. I began to see the bigger picture. The much bigger picture. At which at timescales way beyond my ordinary sense of human perception, it all makes sense. At which at a level of magnification much beyond my human lifetime and my personal interests, there is harmony, and a movement towards good. At which suffering – including the suffering brought about by climate change – is not an error in the game, but a part of it.

Some tell me I am overthinking. They tell me that if I want a baby, I should have it. But from here, there is no turning back to “ignorance is bliss”, even if I wanted to. Facing the truth of the present moment, including the immensity of climate catastrophe, and moving closer to my real thoughts and emotions about it, has made life heavier with sadness at times, but it has also made it deeper, more meaningful, more real. It has deepened my compassion and strengthened and internal moral compass that is a much stronger motivation to engage in environmental action than fear used to be. I don’t want to go back from that – and either way, I can’t.

Working with my own suffering, that I began to see what seems like an atrocity to say, but feels like the deepest truth I ever discovered: that suffering is part of the perfection. Experiences of transcendence and ego-dissolution allowed to find a peace and acceptance of the mess we are in right now – and a trust that in the long run, the whole game is benevolent. Looking at suffering that way is not to wish it on anyone. My acceptance is not approval. My commitment to protect our planet and all life is still there. It is stronger than ever, because it is no longer based on fear and self-preservation, but love. The perfect paradox is that my very commitment to relieve suffering is part of the perfection that is already there.

What I am trying – and inevitably failing – to describe is the transcendent dimension of being, an ineffable experience that, albeit not uncommon, is personal and subjective. I will therefore not try to convince anyone that it is “the truth”. What I am trying to say is that I found a radically different answer to my conundrum of whether or not to create new life at this point in time. For a while, I realize I wanted children to find meaning in life or a reason to be here. This is not the case any longer. Through much inner work, I now find all the meaning and reason to be here in the sound of rain or the feeling of wind on my face. I care less and less about “leaving a legacy”, as my identity shifts away from “Leonie Staas and what she did in life” towards “I here and now, part of the web of life and its unfolding”.

I see that the transference of knowledge and wisdom – call it “mothering” – can be done in many more ways than being a literal mother. I no longer believe that boundless love is only to be found in a parent-child relationship. And I understand that the projection of fulfillment into certain experiences is precisely what removes it from all the others. Nevertheless, the wish to create a family of my own remains alive in me. And as more and more of my old “mind-reasons” to have children are starting to fall away, a radically new one is emerging: I see that the point of life is not to live without suffering. The point of life is to transcend it.

It was precisely the experience of suffering that put me on a path towards reconnecting with the magic of being alive. It was precisely the experience of suffering that taught me to once again see the miracle of a single flower, to find peace in watching a cloud and meaning in the eyes of a friend. I learned the art of tapping into deep joy and abundance even in the utter mundane or times of extreme hardship. If I could teach this to my children – could that make it all worth it? I can’t ask my child, so I can only ask myself: what makes a life worth living? If I could ask a soul – do you want to be born, would it chose to avoid this messy planet? Or would it chose to immerse itself in all its terrible, beautiful chaos?

What, on the one end of the spectrum of my madness, is the biggest reason not to have children – the suffering that climate change will bring – is, on the other hand of my spectrum of madness, an unprecedented opportunity for growth and transcendence. In my own experience, it is through the cracks that the light comes in. And while I wish for my future children and any other living being on this planet that they may live happily and healthily, I no longer see the possibility – or likelihood – of suffering as a reason to deem life not worth living.  We can look at the breakdown of our ecological systems and, in turn, our industrial civilization, as catastrophe, as tragedy. And it is. But, in the words of Joana Macy (“Active Hope”), it is also this: a grand turning. Much of the comfort and security I enjoyed growing up in Western Europe is built on grave injustice and exploitation of other life. I and my children will now have to face the unraveling of that – and to me, that is not all bad. It entails the chance to create something better.

My children, if I were to have them, will witness much change, much loss, much unraveling. But it was my experiences of transcendence that showed me that change is never only bad, that loss never comes without gain, and that unraveling never comes without a new beginning. My children, if I give them the tools, have the chance to be part of that. I cannot promise them comfort or ease, maybe not even security or food. And oh, I wish that was different. But I can offer them meaning.

If my children were to be anything like me, what is going to happen will break their hearts. But if they were to be anything like me, it might be this breaking that will open them to learn real, universal love. If I am to become a mother, it is my job to teach them how to do that. To teach them how to live with suffering, and how to transform suffering into love. To me, love is the whole point. And even – or especially – in a world of climate breakdown, I am now confident that I will be able to give them that.

Will I have children? I still don’t know. I realize that what I present is a perfect paradox: if what makes life worth living is not to never suffer, but to relieve suffering in others, then why would I not chose my own suffering, instead of that of a new life that wouldn’t have had to be here without me? Maybe that would be even more outrageous than all the other, much simpler reasons of wanting to see my baby on my mother’s lap. But I cannot unsee that bigger picture, beyond my lifetime, beyond even that of my children – at which it’s all going to be okay. At which my humanity, including my selfish desires to become a parent, is part of that bizarre, paradoxical, beautiful perfection. Will that answer be good enough if I am one day faced with the question: “Why did you have me?”. I don’t know either. But I know that I will want to be honest with my child. I will not say that I didn’t know, or that I didn’t care. I will reveal to them my entire spectrum of madness. I will raise them with love, compassion and presence, and I will hope that they will understand.