#102. The fate of humanity

casual friday

When my mom’s name flashes across my home screen with a link to an essay she’s just texted me, I’m trained to flinch. In years past, chances were good it would be an opinion piece of psycho-babble from some conservative blog, which my mother would often treat like a highly credible news source. I’d spend the next half hour tearing through the piece like I was late for an appointment, getting cramps in both thumbs as I furiously tapped out an incensed response. Then I’d delete it.

On and on this went, until at some point, both my mother and I realized we simply cannot discuss anything that dips more than a single toe into the political realm if we both desire peace –which we do! – despite the fact that we are both extremely Opinionated, and on opposite sides of political spectrum.

So imagine my delight when – with only one eye open like I was preparing for a jump-scare in a horror film – the essay in question my mom sent over last week was from The New Yorker, one of my favorite publications. I think I audibly exhaled, even though my mom has been sending me completely non-incendiary articles at this point for months. (Years??? Really mom, you’re doing great.)

Despite the fact that my mother identifies as pronatalist, she goes out of her way whenever she sees “my topic” being covered to make sure I’ve seen it. This really, truly feels like progress in our relationship. I love this for us.

The essay she sent last week was “The End of Children” by Gideon Lewis-Kraus, which poses the question: “Birth rates are crashing around the world. Should we be worried?”

It took me an hour to consume in its entirety, but I looooove this shit. If you have a spare moment this weekend, grab a coffee and set aside some quiet time to read it (or listen to the audio recording). I love a deep-dive, especially one with a dipping sauce of existentialism, and this one was worth it.

I am guilty of using the United States as my frame of reference when I talk about my decision not to have children, because that’s where I live (even though I looked the other day and realized that this community lives in 72 different countries!!). I know I’ve talked about the horrible policies (or lack thereof) that the U.S. government has in place to support women, children, and parents, and how I think our ass-backwards approach drives many women in America to decide not to have children.

“The End of Children” has a more global approach. Part history lesson, part examination of different cultures around the world, the piece reminded me that the “total fertility rate” is actually down everywhere with only a few exceptions in Central Asia and sub-Saharan Africa. The U.S. didn’t actually join the declining fertility party until two decades ago. In the span of human history, declining fertility rates are very, very recent.

I could write 100,000 words in response to this piece and how insanely interesting I find all of this, but my favorite line was actually this:

“Anyone who offers a confident explanation of the situation is probably wrong. Fertility connects perhaps the most significant decision any individual might make with unanswerable questions about our collective fate, so a theory of fertility is necessarily a theory of everything—gender, money, politics, culture, evolution. Eberstadt told me, “The person who explains it deserves to get a Nobel, not in economics but in literature.”

And it seems like many people are trying to explain it. I took the week off of my usual essay-writing last week only to find that I’d quickly accumulated a backlog of essays, articles, and opinion pieces about this topic in just the span of two weeks. I think maybe we’re all searching for answers, explanations, justifications, statistics, theories, comfort, or community right now.

Having children (or not) is a very individual decision, but the ramifications on a global scale are obviously much bigger. If everyone chose not to have children, eventually we would have total societal collapse. Theoretically, there’s some truth to the idea that the population can change rapidly in a relatively short period of time. In just 500 years, we’ve gone from a global population of 450 million to over 8 billion people. Less people on the planet means it would be more difficult (or impossible) to maintain some of the societal structures we currently rely on (i.e. capitalism!), but it doesn’t immediately spell disaster for the human race. (This is why MAGA bros are so freaked out – they like the way things are.) We’d have to change a lot of things about the ways we live, certainly, but haven’t we already been doing that for centuries? Think of all the ancient civilizations that have already come and gone. Isn’t that what humans have been doing all along since the very beginning?

So to me, the question “should we be worried?” depends on your point of view. If you are a person who wants everything to continue on exactly the way it is, then yes. Maybe you should be worried.

I think declining global fertility feels like a situation that probably needs decades or potentially centuries of self-correction to fix. Pronatalists are seriously worried about the relatively imminent collapse of civilization, though – most are more worried about this than climate change (i.e. destroying the planet and making it no longer habitable for humans, no matter how many of us there are.)

If we, as a species, cannot figure out a way to make it more desirable to re-populate the human race at scale, someday civilization will collapse, and something different will spring up in its place. (Or we’ll destroy the planet first, which I personally think is a much more pressing threat!!)

But maybe civilization should collapse if we keep setting up our global societies in a way that makes a lot of young people shake their heads and go, “nah, I’m good,” when they consider parenthood. Maybe we actually need this!

“Demographers often worry that indulging in sci-fi speculation might inadvertently prompt governments to adopt draconian measures. Still, the demographer Leslie Root admitted that she sometimes wonders, “Is it possible we actually evolved to be too smart for our own good, and we’re just too interested in other things to go along with the bullshit of having to have enough kids to perpetuate the species? I don’t know! Maybe?” She collected herself, then added, “What’s most interesting to me, when I think about what it might be like to maintain a stable human population, is that there’s a very real possibility that we’ll need to reinvent society.”

Women are more educated now than at any other time in history, and we are simply not lining up for the gruel that societies around the world (mostly run by men) are serving now that we have ~choices~. And I don’t mean parenthood itself, which is a difficult but joyful thing many women still want to pursue in addition to intellectual pursuits, or would if things were different. I mean shitty support, shitty societal pressures, and shitty men.

If a significant portion of the women of childbearing age on this planet find their role in re-population unacceptable or uninteresting, that’s just not a simple childless-cat-lady attitude problem, no matter how many men in power (cough, J.D. Vance) want to it to be.

(Note: I did not say all, I did not say most, I said: a significant portion of women, and I mean that in a mathematical way – the replacement rate is 2.1 children per woman to maintain the population at its current size. Lower than 2.1 and it shrinks, higher than 2.1 and it grows. If a significant portion of women are recording zeroes, it means that the women who do have children have to have 3, 4, or 5 kids to make up for it, which they’re mostly not doing.)

It is not at all surprising to me that many of the idiots in global power right now are choosing coercion or bribery over cooperation and compassion, literally trying to shame or force women into procreating. Surely Putin has the answer: Let’s just criminalize “child-free propaganda” on the internet, and in the media, films, and advertisements! That will fix it!

(You know what might actually help fix it? Putting women of childbearing age in power and helping them stay there. Jacinda Ardern was only the second world leader to give birth while in office, and then she resigned in 2023 due to “occupational burnout” after nearly six years as the Prime Minister of New Zealand. She was 42.)

Generally speaking, humans are simply not selfless enough to live our entire lives just for the good of the next generation (or the economy, or capitalism, etc.) if it’s detrimental to us, right now, in the present. Many young women who would otherwise have children are choosing to stay single because they can’t find a suitable partner, and they don’t want to venture into parenthood alone or with a man who won’t pull his own weight. I can’t blame them.

Something has to change, and eventually, it will. Societies like Korea (their fertility replacement rate is .07, the lowest in the world) or Singapore (1.04) might actually collapse in the coming decades, and maybe then we’ll start paying closer attention. But it won’t be government subsidies (bribes) for having children or criminalizing/fining people who choose not to that will fix this problem. It doesn’t work.

I think so many people, our current administration included, are pointing the finger at the wrong thing. Women deciding not to have children en masse is a symptom of a much larger issue (probably several interconnected problems!!!), not a problem to solve in and of itself. Childless cat ladies and our “shitty attitudes” are the reason the global population is less interested in having children than at any other time in history? Sure, Jan.

Lewis-Kraus mentioned the dystopian masterpiece “Children of Men” in his article, so I will, too. I can’t help but think about one of the last scenes, when everyone stops killing each other for a few minutes to let the only baby born in the past 18 years pass through a warn-torn city unharmed. The killing starts again almost immediately once both mother and baby are safe, but that’s the larger metaphor about our world, isn’t it? We’re a violent bunch. Why choose cooperation when we can use force?

If we don’t treat women and children like they’re the key to our survival, maybe we don’t deserve it.

“The Coming Democratic Baby Bust” by Kristen V. Brown for The Atlantic

Here in the U.S., Trump’s victory in 2016 created a very clear effect: Democrats had less babies, and Republicans had (slightly) more. The same thing is bound to happen again this time:

“[…] as the ideological distance between Democrats and Republicans has grown, so has the influence of politics on fertility. In Trump’s second term, America may be staring down another Democratic baby bust.

So far, no country has hit on the magic public policy that will reverse population decline. Taiwan introduced more paid family leave, along with cash benefits and tax credits for parents of young kids. Russia, Italy, and Greece have all tried paying people to have kids. Japan has tried an ever-changing list of incentives for some 30 years, among them subsidized child care, shorter work hours, and cash. None of it has worked.”

“The new fashion woman has good sex” by Leandra Medine Cohen for The Cereal Aisle

In this delicious essay, Leandra talks about fashion trends in a way I love. It’s less about the clothes themselves, and more about what they communicate about the woman wearing them. She’s suggesting that “minimalism” is over and we’re moving into a new era of sensuality, fantasy, and sexuality with fashion:

“We are in a new era. And in this era, the most meaningful trends don’t signal exterior status. They tell of rich inner-lives. This shift is why I suspect we’ve become so neurotic about articulating and breaking down and teaching and learning personal style. Through personal style you get to convey the richness of your inner-life.

Until now, these lives have been informed by an innate curiosity about the arts (be they fine arts, be they books; never has it been so fashionable to read) met by understated sophistication and a subtle, restrained but extremely poignant interest in clothes.

On the surface, this interiority has looked like minimalism, which was exciting and dynamic to witness and partake in for so many years because even though the clothes were simple, they appealed to the moment and reflected how a mature woman wanted her interiority to be perceived.

More often these days, the same kinds of clothes read as flat or dull because we’ve reached our culmination with them. Because the woman is ready to unfold otherwise areas of her nuclear richness.”

“‘My Friends Abandoned Me When They Had Kids’” by Emily Gould for The Cut

This issue of Ask Emily is good, but the comments are even better. This is a truly unavoidable dilemma, but the sentiments about what to do about it are alllllllllll over the fucking place. I don’t think there is any one right answer, either. Here are a few comments that stood out to me:

“I needed to see this so bad today” – mearabrady

“As someone in her 30s with friends all around me who are getting married and having babies while I remain fabulously unmarried and childless, my advice is to DIVERSIFY.” – brock.audra

“I'm a classic bUsY mOm of 2 (ages 8 and 4) and since having children my MOST PRECIOUS friendships are the friendships I have with a couple of kid-free women.” – rhiannonadmidas

“I can say now as a new mom that ALL I WANT is for my friends to text me about non-kid things. I love it. I wish I had the free brain space to initiate it; I hope I will someday soon.” – mhck

“A little galling that the childless friend should just accept that her friends treat her ambivalently at best, thoughtlessly at worst, and she should be grateful for the breadcrumbs. “It’s not realistic or kind to expect them to be able to keep pace with your dating and professional life.”?! Ouch.” – runawaybunny

I have a few other books I’m excited to tell you about, but this is the one that felt thematically appropriate for this issue. I Who Have Never Known Men by Jacqueline Harpman was originally published in 1995, but this 160-page feminist dystopian novel was re-released in 2022 with a stunning new cover, and BookTok grabbed hold of it.

I was primed to like this book because it’s weird, fucked up, and bleak, lol. There’s no sizzling romance to make the dystopia go down more smoothly – I’d be more shocked at how many women went feral for this book (in this economy?) if not for the prior success of The Handmaid’s Tale. When shit feels bleak, there are two types of readers: Those who like to dissociate and read mostly happy, fluffy stories, and those who like to dive deep into the depths and imagine themselves joining the resistance (even if that eventually ends up being just one person, like the protagonist of I Who Have Never Known Men.) This book is only (only!!!!) for the second type, but if that’s you, I’d say this book is worth your time.

Did anyone else find Kieran Culkin’s Oscar acceptance speech a little weird??? It was genuinely funny and I probably would have just huffed a laugh and moved on (his “ye of little faith” line was good) if the camera hadn’t cut to his wife’s face at the very end of his speech. Kieran asks them not to play the music so he can tell a little story about his wife, Jazz Charton, and how she jokingly promised him a third (and fourth) kid if he ever won an Oscar. After Kieran says, “so let’s get cracking on those kids, what do you say?” to end his speech, Jazz shakes her head and mouths “no!,” looking genuinely in shock.

Like okay. This man has just won the highest award in film, and he uses most of his speech time in front of the entire Academy and all the viewers at home to remind his 36 year-old wife – no pressure – that she “agreed” to have two more kids if he ever won an Oscar???

IDK, I got the ick. Jazz looked stunning, though.

If you read “The End of Children,” or I Who Have Never Known Men, let me know! Come drop your juicy thoughts about the collapse of civilization in the comments.