I got into a conversation on Facebook. I don’t know where you folks were and why you didn’t talk me out of it, but here we are.
It started with this article in the New York Post: “New dating ‘phenomenon’ proves traditional relationships are over“. Well, that’s old news, it must be a slow news day. Relationships have changed, and I could get mired into a lot of details about that based on the strides we’ve made in women’s rights (though ladies have had a helluva setback recently), the simple socioeconomics of our world where a family could once survive on one person being gainfully employed, etc, etc.
What did we expect would happen? Those not in developed nations largely have a completely different view of the world, not unlike fish – it’s as alien to those in developed nations as that of fish.
Out of the blue, someone brought up the ‘population crisis in developed countries’. Wait, what? A decline in population isn’t necessarily a bad thing. It’s a crisis? It’s the first I’ve heard of. The vast majority of the global population don’t live in developed countries, and developed countries have had a noticeable decrease in middle income households. As the joke goes, the poor scare the middle income, the middle income scare the rich, and so on. The poor in a developed nation are generally better off than the poor in a less developed nation. It’s the way it is. This is the world as it is, whether we like it or not.
He went on to say that the problem was that the infrastructure couldn’t be supported if there was not a high enough birth rate. That’s sort of an immigration issue, is it not? If you don’t have enough people to do something, you import them – that’s how immigration has worked for millennia. So by not even acknowledging immigration… I began to get a feel for where the argument was from.
Birth rates are complicated. Death rates are also complicated. People tend to look at statistics of one and not the other, and they tend to look through the lenses of the way people shave the stats.
A decrease in birth rate in developed nations is hardly something that alarms me. I’m pretty sure it doesn’t alarm the majority of the people in the world, either, since they’re not in the developed nations.
Things normalize over time. Things fall apart. Things fall together. Managing all of that mess is hardly something anyone is good at because there are just too many variables, and one of the premises of life I have in the forefront is amazingly simple:
Life is an experiment on itself.