Fertility And Humanity’s Failure. By Rod Dreher.
There are a variety of explanations for why population is dropping. Most experts seem to agree that when female education and emancipation from male dominance occurs, [total fertility rate] drops. It has been pointed out too that societies that make it more expensive for young people to form families will see fewer families form. I can imagine that, but how do you explain Europe, whose social welfare states have made it much easier for people to support families, still having among the world’s lowest TFRs?
Anecdotally, I find that when talking to non-religious Millennials and Gen Z’ers, many simply don’t have marriage and family on their minds, except as something they might do in the far future. I have noticed that they can be totally unrealistic about biology and fertility (“I have lots of time left to have children,” an unmarried 28-year-old told me), but more than that, many of them just don’t want to have families. …
He quotes a Gen Z student called TFE:
I write this essay as a Zoomer university student. In many ways, I am one of the most successful of my generation. I got a near-perfect SAT score, and earned a BS in a STEM degree from a major university in only 3 years. Although I am not an incel, I have had to give a lot of thought to the question of my generation’s sexuality in the past several years, because a large fraction of the guys I have met in high school and college seldom or never went on dates, had sex, or had girlfriends. Many of them still hung out with girls, but a lot of them never connected romantically or sexually.
All of it seemed very ominous to me: if one guy can’t get laid, people can write him off as a loser, but if a large percentage of young men are sexually frustrated to the extent that they rarely get any attention from women, there is something very odd going on. …
Why, overall, do men and women desire one another less? …
Generation Z on balance is the weakest generation, having been raised by a micromanaging and decadent society to be soft and utterly dependent on the system. …
They are thoroughly spiritually bankrupt, atomized, and lonely, leading to corresponding longings, confusion, and rage which will at minimum unbalance the system. … I have witnessed, in both statistics and personal experience, the widespread destructive trends of poor mental and physical health, inability to socialize or pair-bond, and loss of faith and spiritual values. …
Dreher’s son Matt, who is a 21-year-old college student, responded skeptically:
I fail to understand why these people have to blame some amorphous evil Marxist soyboy ray for all this when the explanation is simple: most peoples’ lives consist of being plugged into a screen, driving, and sleeping.
Like my roommate last year — desperately trying to work out why no girls are interested in him when he has no life outside his computer.
This is what it means to be alienated from the world by the horrible suburbanized existence we’ve made for ourselves. Amateur endocrinology doesn’t enter into it. We could all be chiseled muscle hunks and just as miserable as we were before.
He needs to hang out where the girls are. Join an organization where there are girls, if necessary. And find the remaining girls who are still interested in having kids, rather than hanging out in a cubicle until they’re 40 because they were told career had to come first.
hat-tip Stephen Neil
