The Nature of the “Fertility Crisis”

This has fascinated me for years now. South Korea holds the current top spot for lowest fertility rate, and after having lived there for ~3 years and spending countless hours in cafés and parks in Seoul, Busan, Daegu, and Jeju thinking about and seeing this stuff first hand, I’ve compiled what I believe to be the most important/essential things about this topic.

This is worldwide.

They call it a fertility crisis as if it needs emergency attention. But this framing feels off to me. I like to approach things from the standpoint of nature, the source, of why things are the way they are. And I don’t believe in directly solving things, for real/lasting solutions come from approaching things Whole. One re-configuration, one re-framing, one re-understanding, and multiple problems knocked down.

When our lives revolved around nature, children were weaved into life seamlessly. A six-year-old was already useful to the parents and society at large, already participating in the biodiversity of the forests, already knee deep in the dirt.

It’s rather similar for animals. A lion cub is hunting by 2 years old. A chimpanzee infant is foraging and using tools within its first few years. A wolf pup is contributing to the pack’s hunts by adolescence.

This is simply not the case in modernity.

Today, from 5-22 years of age, humans are placed in boxes that abstract life so finely, that soul and potential are eroded, all while being rendered useless. At ten, they’ve produced nothing. At eighteen, nothing. At twenty-two, after all that schooling, still nothing. Skills, what skills? We call those credentials now, and they are becoming obsolete, by the hour, at the hands of AI anyway.

If that weren’t enough, school is largely instrumental in turning a person into a troubled teenager and scatterbrain, and later into a sycophant and puppet. It, along with other forces, systematically saps a human, and often irreversibly. And the parents are lulled into being assistant directors for this entire apparatus.

Rare is the person who learns the ways of nature/reality, early, and becomes Useful. A human, from the very beginning, is dying to experience and play the game of Life. To build what they were meant to build, to realize their fundamental nature, to hone their unique ability, and now, to also turn AI into their personal genie.

The parents too actually. In another corner, they go to jobs not in line with their core circuitry. Empty friendships. Love life wrapped in tension and pain. Pharmaceuticals for health problems. Pulled into the world of politics. Literally nowhere to hide. The child is the respite.

Now regarding dismal birth rates: think pieces dissect it — could it be feminism, Netflix, contraception, or economic anxiety? Pick your poison. But none of these really touch the essence. So what’s really the deal here? The deal is as follows.

When you’re marinating in abstraction, working to generate revenues for companies that pride themselves on metrics, surrounded by institutions that are uninspiring at best and corrupt at worst — when your environment is fake and you know nothing of Nature — when you are a perpetual renter or Mortgage carrier — the idea of continuation simply doesn’t compute. It doesn’t check out, and no amount of policy or persuasion will make it check out.

But suppose you’re none of those things. Suppose you’re living Whole, hands in the “soil”. Your children — if you decide to have them — then arrive as overflow. You’ve built something true, something outside the institutional apparatus, something that will survive on its own. What some people call “purpose”. It’s real.

Many such people actually have no physical/practical/emotional need for children — some do, some don’t — that’s just how it goes. Now, if your life is already Whole, if you’re already fulfilling your destiny through your life’s work — and you, for whatever reason — decide to bring a child into that and let them learn by watching you live? That sounds like a beautifully integrated system and contrary to how 99% of the population approaches parenthood.

Let me go further and touch on what nobody else is really touching on.

They say children give meaning. They say parenthood is the deepest fulfillment. Okay. If that were true, every parent would be glowing … enlightened even. Look around; what do you think? I said earlier, that the child is the respite — yes — and often, not the assistant, friend, unconditional source of love, or legacy they were hoped to be.

“Purpose” is what’s already there when one is not fragmented. It’s the integration. There’s no reward for abiding by the rules, for accumulating, or for following what you think to be biology. No, there’s only a reward for integration, and integration, is itself that reward.

The logicians want to logic their way out of this. Incentives, credits, appeals to duty. “Think of civilization. Think of the future.”

The system that is panicking about birth rates is the same one that pulled people away from nature, and into a life of abstraction. You can’t write a better story. And you can’t, also, optimize for Wholeness. It just isn’t something you can hack.

The systems, all around the world, run on a conveyor belts: young bodies enter, produce, consume, pay taxes, fund the pensions and healthcare of those ahead of them in line. Then they age out and wait for the next batch to do the same for them. That’s the scheme. Young subsidizes old, and growth covers the cracks. And the moment the conveyor slows, the whole thing starts to break.

So when many say “fertility crisis,” what they also mean is: not enough new entrants to keep the show going.

Why do we need endless growth? Why do we need more bodies to fill roles that didn’t need to exist in the first place? Half the economy is people pushing paper for other people who push paper. Nonsense jobs sustaining nonsense jobs. If those disappeared tomorrow, what exactly would be lost in terms of real value to the planet? Would nature give a damn?

And now, AI is here, and the timing is rather poetic. It is time to be relieved of our mundane duties. Maybe shift gears, and build syntropic integrated systems, say, a food forest, and live in harmony with nature, have a couple kids if that’s truly in the heart’s desire, knowing the pillars behind the structures. We’ve gone very much astray. Some will continue straying. A few will find their way back.