Suddenly, a demographic winter is upon us. We’ve seen it coming for decades. However, the effects of this population implosion are now starting to be felt. Nation after nation report low birth rates and aging populations.
No amount of monetary incentive is enough to change people’s minds—even in more traditional societies. Women and couples seem intent on remaining childless.
Many are discussing why no one wants to have children. Experts debate the causes, but few present convincing conclusions.
Looking for Causes
Of course, many people cite the financial challenges young people face, such as student debt, inflation, or barriers to homeownership.
While these financial obstacles do exist, many young people today are actually in better financial shape than their parents were at their age. Lack of money alone cannot explain the dearth of children.
Others cite climate change and political instability, but past generations have endured catastrophes while having families.
A Shallowness, Full of Emotions and Feelings
The problem is much simpler than it appears. People try too hard to find deep philosophical or psychological reasons for the crisis. They search long and hard and only find shallowness in the end.
However, this shallowness could well be the reason for what is happening. We are immersed in a world of emotions and feelings that trumps any profound considerations beyond self. We throw ourselves passionately into these surface sentiments that consume and absorb.
What makes these delights so harmful is that they need not involve grand or luxurious passions that require fortunes and commitment. They can be quite trivial and insignificant. They are accessible to everyone. Indeed, the shallower the emotion, the more passionate the attachment to it.
Rousseau’s Confession
A quotation from Rousseau commenting on his all-consuming yet shallow life is illuminating. The eighteenth-century philosopher was known for celebrating the atomistic, autonomous self, immersed in emotions without commitments.
This quotation helps explain the cause of our population crisis and the prevailing attitude that excludes the need or desire for children.
Commenting on his life of pleasures, he claims: “The sword wears out the sheath, as it is sometimes said. This is my story. My passions have made me live, and my passions have killed me. What passions, it may be asked: Trifles, the most childish things in the world. Yet they affected me as much as if the possession of Helen or the throne of the Universe, had been at stake.”
A Culture of Self
Our culture carries this subtle Rousseauean message of self-absorption. It tells youth: Live your passions without sacrifice or effort. There is no need for great pleasures; seek the “trifles” of mediocrity that surround you. Make these “childish things” the objects of existential desire. Let nothing, not even a small child, come between you and them.
This call to triviality finds its expression in generations that fail to grow up. They live in basement apartments with their parents, playing video games, posting on social media and putting off the responsibilities of adulthood until later… or never.
This flight from meaning is not exclusively the fault of young people. As our secular and liberal society exhausts itself, little profundity and meaning remain. Everything becomes Facebook-trivial. It is hard to escape.
These young people no longer find support in their families (now broken) or their faith (no longer taught). They have no roots to anchor themselves amid the shredded meta-narratives of our postmodernity.
They are further mired in modern education’s habits of immaturity, which make it harder to have the will and discipline to move toward goals. Thus, they are stuck, unable to move forward, scared to make commitments, and willing to bypass what was once taken as a given: children.
A Tipping Point
Not all youth follow this tragic path. Some have managed to break out of the bonds of mediocrity by embracing the remnants of stability found in family and faith. They yearn for tradition and follow it with a passion.
However, we have reached a tipping point, and significant numbers worldwide are entering this dark Rousseauean descent into passionate shallowness. We need not look deep; it is all around us.
The population implosion is not caused by economic obstacles or political fears. It is an existential crisis that involves the religious and moral issues that give meaning and purpose to life. If we want to avoid population implosion, we must address these deeper issues to find a way out of our shallowness.
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The featured image is “My Children” (between circa 1896 and circa 1910) by Abbott H. Thayer, and is in the pubic domain, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.
I think you under- estimate the economic element and also the anxiety about the future. True, those things were present in the past, but the world had a Christian ethos that exalted children and marriage. Now it does not, and the ubiquity of contraception and abortion allow people to indulge their natural and powerful sexual appetites without producing children. Having children and providing a loving commitment and a willingness to sacrifice is not encouraged by the influences shaping kid’s mindset today. It’s true that kids seem self-absorbed but what model of fulfilling family life do most of them have?
What is to be expected when the press calls murdering teens children amid gang warfare in most of the large cities in the US. There are the people more concerned with overpopulation and climate change than illegal immigration and the crippling deficits of the federal government. It is all well that these people don’t have children.
What if the economic problems facing people relate to the shallowness they exhibit? If a man can’t afford to adequately provide for a family (because of the lack of opportunities or the rising cost of living), maybe he’ll take what little pleasures he can and live for himself. In turn, women will do the same, leading the two sexes to never consider dating, marrying, and having kids.
In the past, a bad economy wouldn’t invert a person’s values like this. A whole life revolving around little pleasures wasn’t as much an option, and a life of sacrifice was more easily accepted.
But I’d agree that shallowness is a problem. I think taking away the screens would be the first step to fixing this problem. Simple solution, though hard to implement.
I…don’t know. I feel like a bit too much is put on the Romanticists shoulders at times.
I mean after a fashion shallowness is certainly a big part of it. I remember a woman at the Atlantic wrote a pro-childless piece that was supposed to be about how that wasn’t selfish. As a childless Catholic person I could think of many ways that could be true. Perhaps she was going to say the child-free women were devoting themselves to a cause that they could focus on better without children. Given the source that would likely be a progressive cause, but I could see that as non-selfish even if erroneous. Or perhaps she would say childless women can do dangerous, but beneficial to society, jobs that might not be proper for mothers. Or perhaps they could devote themselves more thoroughly to the community…Needless to say “nope.” Or at least it felt like most of it was how childless women aren’t selfish was because kids are bad and they could have more fun without them. Which struck me as outright admitting she failed at her task, because “my personal fun” is fairly shallow and selfish.
Still I feel like people of fertile years right now express higher rates of anxiety than ever so I wonder if fear is a factor. Not fear of climate change so much as fear of failure. They feel they have to reach some elevated state of wisdom or they will fail as parents. They are also told failing at parents is far far worse than never having children. But they’ll probably never reach some perfect wise state and if they do then they (if women) will likely be too old to conceive.