You too can have grandchildren: no children required?

This is one of the reasons I mostly think that the "anything is possible -- follow your dreams" way of thinking is corrosive. Even if you somehow get past the idea that the world has a carrying capacity for circus clowns and trapeze artists and that some people are going to have to do things they don't always want to do if that same world is to function, you still have to contend with things like this:

But it's [56-year-old] Anna DiPede-Sexton's simple dream that stops the lively conversation cold. “I don't know if this is feasible, but I want to be a grandmother. And I don't have children.”

She obviously thinks she hasn't peaked yet.

In dealing with an aging population, I don't think we can simply put baby boomers that haven't planned for retirement out in the street in a shopping cart with their belongings. Somehow, we have to take care of them. But things like the above make me wonder what else we are going to be paying for in funding this massive retirement project and where the boundaries around "non-negotiable" will be found to lie.

When the European Union considers a scheme to fund vacations with taxpayer dollars after declaring travelling to be a "human right", all kinds of other unimaginables don't seem so far-fetched anymore:

The European Union has declared travelling a human right, and is launching a scheme to subsidize vacations with taxpayers' dollars for those too poor to afford their own trips.

And wouldn't that be lovely. But I wonder at what point I would start asking myself why I am working toward improving my situation in a challenging, sometimes-stressful job when the top end of my income from this point forward is going to be taxed at nearly 50% in order to pay for other people to not only sit at home and do nothing or to birth children into unsustainable situations as we already support, but now  to go on holiday as well.

This way of thinking is out of control. Stop this planet spinning because I want to get off!

But, since space programs are under attack, my options are limited about where else I might go. The moon is now off the table, but Obama does apparently intend to mount an asteroid by 2025:

"By 2025, we expect new spacecraft designed for long journeys to allow us to begin the first-ever crewed missions beyond the moon into deep space," [Obama] said. "We'll start by sending astronauts to an asteroid for the first time in history."