Most of the world is reproducing their populations at or below replacement rate, especially western developed nations. This quiet shift has been forming for decades even as paleo-doomsayers perpetuated the outdated belief that the world will be over-run by out-of-control reproduction. While that is still the case in isolated countries, particularly in Africa, most the earth’s inhabited land mass hosts nations that are declining. If it seems more crowded, it’s because populations are increasingly concentrated in mega-urban settings. The global net population is presently still growing but only because of large aging populations that have yet to exit this mortal coil. That will flip in about one generation, and then begins the great decline.
Is a declining population a big deal? Some are actively gunning for it. Some have argued that the global Covid pandemic was nothing but a depopulation program. The WEF flirts with programs that would promote the cause. Bill Gates is said to be a big advocate. What would it really be like?
I can admit that as a natural introvert and as one regularly disgusted with the ever more shocking rot demonstrated by modern humanity, that natural depopulation has an appeal to it, but I also know this is a simplistic and personal bias. Its not about me – or you. The animal Homo Sapiens is naturally hardwired with the same underlying mechanisms to repopulate the same as the rest of the animal kingdom; with exceptions of course, to cognitively choose an optimal rate of replacement, but it appears we, our species, are entering a unique new period, to collectively and intentionally do otherwise, to mindlessly choose extinction.
You can point to dark nefarious ‘masters of the universe’ and blame them for instigating mass depopulation. While they seem to be relishing the task of pushing it along, most of the blame can be laid at the feet of the individuals; passively, by succumbing to modern toxins and lifestyles that have dramatically reduced fertility, and actively, by choosing every possible priority except procreation.
The distractions that would short circuit humanities natural inclination to replenish ourselves, are apart from our biological instincts and anything found in the animal kingdom. Modern minds are reprogrammed to choose wealth, status, and especially leisure, over the expansion of families, tribes, and nations. Perhaps our ultimate self-extermination is already encoded into our DNA and we have no realistic means of changing it. Or perhaps we’re fundamentally evil and negligent such that we’ll gladly inflict our progeny, our descendants, with eventually collapsing societies so that we can own a second home.
Humans are making a collective decision to eliminate ourselves and we may be successful. You, or perhaps, many people you know, have made the decision to delay childbearing, or marriage, or heterosexuality altogether. Money is a factor for most, an understandable one when faced with the raw cost of bearing and raising a child to adulthood. There are few societies that take an active and invested view in promoting birthrates. Some are doing so on an emergency basis, too little too late. Childbearing is all too easy to put off until…a few years from now: college, career, college loans, much later and longer courtships, house, a job change or two, tenure… The clock ticks and by the mid-thirties, the chances of conception are biologically reduced. By the forties, its over for most.
A generation is usually regarded as twenty years. Let’s say you are twenty years old. You’re young and at the peak of whatever fertility you’re going to have. You’re free to choose to delay or not have children, an endeavor exclusive to a male and a female conjugal union or sterile lab facsimile of the same. All your friends choose the same, your entire city, your entire country, and all countries beyond, all for the same ostensibly legitimate reasons that you’ve made that choice. The generation coming after you is also making that same choice. Congratulations: in approximately twenty years, you have all collectively brought the entire human race a hard stop crash, to the moment of extinction. You will all live another twenty, forty, maybe even sixty years. Within twenty years, your generation will be functionally incapable of conception. That much is gone for good. The entire human race will live out their span with plummeting resources and that will be the end.
There are fanciful dreamers that believe we’ll be rescued by technology. What that doesn’t consider is the decimation of the entire infrastructure upon which technology depends. This applies to low level resources like energy production and transmission, to staffing advanced manufacturing, to developing and maintaining complex software, to all the collective brain trust that is rapidly dying off at that point. Maybe the ‘Brave New World’ infrastructure of mechanically produced babies will be made and set before this all goes down. Will there be real humans to man it? I doubt it.
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