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.