An Interesting Observation On Falling Populations

Japan was the bellwether for this I think. Their population was living longer but having fewer children. Now this is happening in China. (Watch from about halfway – but it’s all worth a watch anyway.)

The problems outlined as populations grow and shrink are pretty well described there – if one thing goes out of balance, it has a domino effect into the future. These two countries are hardly outliers though. More and more countries are hitting this inflection point or already have.

Japan is investing in robotic technology to look after their elderly, as they haven’t enough working age population to keep their industry and business sectors alive let alone an age care service. Quite a few other countries ar heading that direction too, and more and more will follow, for one or more of several possible reasons.

What’s Eating The Population?

In a word, stress.

China (let’s go back to China for a moment) has, FSM knows, made mistakes in the past, including killing off sparrows believing that they were eating crops that they needed for a burgeoning population when in fact the little birds were killing the pests that ate the crops, and once they were all eliminated China had a succeedingly-more-mismanaged few years of famine that killed millions to tens of millions.

So they decided to have a One Child Per Family policy, only to find that most families (remembering that The Modern Age is still a very recent thing all over the world nd was especially so in China) decided that if they could only have one child, a son would be what they needed to carry on the family business, and so they unbalanced the population M/F ratio, and in fact to account for misadventure you need a ratio of 2.1 children per family in well-off countries and more like 2.2 to 3 in less developed countries – which China still was back then.

And while the population is still thronging and surging, it isn’t quite as much of a surge as the government would like… It is in fact still falling, with many young Chinese people opting for a “no child per family” policy and even a “no family per person” in may cases with the young generation opting for unmarried bliss instead.

To make matters worse there are many doing their equivalent of “quiet quitting” over there which they call “Bai lan” which translates to “Let it rot” and manifests similarly in total lack of enthusiasm for capitalism, which is ironic as China is a communist country. (Albeit with a huge capitalist backbone at its core…)

Similarly, here in Australia we’ve had several years of WFH (Working From Home) which despite the most strident efforts of the corporate sector proved that the whole idea of one HUGE office with EVERYONE driving a gazillion kilometres a year to commute was in the end no better than letting people work from home, and had the benefit of a calmer, less stressed workforce.

It’s given rise to a new corporate property market, that of “satellite offices” in the suburbs and are now centres of “working close to home,” proving again that we’re community-driven creatures and corporations are NOT a community but rather a forced labour facility.

And young people here are also choosing to bai lan and do less, have fewer children, and stay single for longer. It’s a worldwide thing and the reasons are all stress.

Stresses? Stresses?

there’s also the problem of “not from around here are ya?” that happens when you assemble a hundred people into one rabbit warren office cubicle farm and expect everyone to get along just fine all the time. The fact that intimidation from those further up the chain of command is always more stressful in person, and in fact happens less when the intimidator and intimidatee are separated by email or phone line or Zoom.

So the main reason the administration puts pressure on the employees to come back to the workplace or face termination would appear to be because they have all this office space they’re paying for.

It’s a major stressor.

Then too the parlous state of the planet and climate is causing many to abandon plans to bring a child into such a dangerous situation. This too will result in a large and significant dip in young population numbers in the immediate future. Don’t forget that “2.1 per family” rule of thumb. It’s not just a good idea for later on down the track, it’s either needed *right now* or else get used to the idea of executing old people.

And there’s another reason – we know there’s pretty much never a period where the world doesn’t have at least one or two wars going on – and the frequency of outbreaks is getting higher, the sheer horror and intensity of the battles is the stuff of nightmares, and the Internet ensures that everyone is getting about equally intensely bombarded by horrific images and reportage.

Have you heard about those “forever chemicals” that are everywhere? Microplastics? Skyrocketing CO² levels? Bullshit chemicals leaching into the ground under our feet and gardens and homes? There’s one other thing they’re doing besides fucking the planet up – they’re literally fucking up the concept of fucking for reproduction.

Male sperm counts are down for reasons like those chemicals (also turning male frogs and many other species’ males into castrati and females, BTW) and those aforementioned stresses, the stupid custom of tight-fitting jockey briefs, and the appearance of another sex gene besides the X and Y genes. Yeah. It’s like a total shitshow of demolition of the modern way of life.

Maybe that’s for a reason…

In every civilisation that’s sprung up, blossomed, gre, and grew, and grew, and grew – there comes a crash. It’s quite literally there in the archeology and anthropology we’ve dug up, in our histories and our myths and fables as well. And no-one ever seems to get that THIS time right now is the stuff that a future “The Rise And Fall of Technological Homo Sapiens of the End of the Dark Ages” will be written about.

We are going to be the history that a new human race in a few thousand years will write about and – probably – ignore.

Unless we start actually BELIEVING it’s the same tale of rise and fall, only happening right now.

Hate that idea? I do. I really hate it. We could be much better. Please please please share this article using the share icons below, donate the price of a cup of coffee so that I can keep this running without spending all of my income on it, and please whatever else you do, talk to your social group about it, your family about it, your work colleagues about it. Try and keep us out of future historical disaster books…

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