in a way, this is my username:

Epicurus rejected any possibility of an afterlife, while still contending that one need not fear death: "Death is nothing to us; for that which is dissolved, is without sensation, and that which lacks sensation is nothing to us."[72] From this doctrine arose the Epicurean Epitaph: Non fui, fui, non sum, non curo ("I was not; I was; I am not; I do not care."), which is inscribed on the gravestones of his followers and seen on many ancient gravestones of the Roman Empire.[73]

In 20 years its stabilized tho, just gotta get over the baby boomers bump right? that are creating gray pressure on health and housing rn, soon a lot of people will inherit their gold, rich stay rich, tax inheritance. Japan is a glimpse in our future, they have to work 60 hours, and focus on automation and rely heavily on immigration even tho they don't want to.

current population of Europe

Prediction in 50 years:

I would blame declining birth rates to liberalism and capitalism.

oh no declining birth rates, how horrible for the ones who decided not to have kids, and hence don't have anyone to worry about

Oh you're finally finding out? Oh noooooo all that fucking around for nothing. Oops.

While I understand the reason why a demographic dropout would be a catastrophe, I fucking hate how they say it's our fault, when they were the ones who fucked up everything in the first place

I don't think over population is the issue or under. It's the dated, old systems we continue to rely on. I think we have a energy, and transport problem. We are scaling 1800s and 1900s tech. Instead of innovating modern approaches. We have a systems issues.

There's been a rash of people like Elon Musk posting rants about "declining birth rates in the developing world" (and sometimes dog whistling while at it) - getting upset that contrary to the worries of Malthus and Ehrlich, it turns out humans are not the same as bacteria in a petri dish just exponentially reproducing until they exhaust all the carrying capacity of their environment. Instead, it seems that those of us that are in paradigms where we have relatively high per capita energy and materials consumption, respond to economic, cultural and environmental stimuli, and slow our roll once we feel we are at an "x" threshold of population density and environmental & economic stress.

Given that we live on a finite planet with finite resources this small bit of self control might just be what saves humanity from a truly dystopian future.

What the demographic shift of less younger workers versus more retiring seniors does mean is that our systems of depending on constant growth of consumption for our faith in our currency and financial institutions, and for providing for government guaranteed retirement funding, both end up under threat - but those issues could still be easily fixed simply by allowing more immigration from the multitude of places on this globe that still have relatively high birth rates, that have plenty of people with strong work ethics seeking greater opportunities.

Okay I’m gonna play devil’s advocate, it’s worrying because we are not adapting our system.

I’ve always thought over population is a big issue but when I found out how our social security is intentionally a Ponzi scheme, it made me very worried.

I don’t give two shits about the replacement theory but I’m worried that I am getting paid shit throughout my adult life since labour isn’t expensive yet but ~~when~~ if I need to retire, labour could become super expensive.

Of course a sane society would just use all the excess wealth today to invest in automation but if we were sane, a lot of things would be better.

Yup. I'm just one private citizen. The replacement ratio of my country's population is not my responsibility. 🤷‍♂️

It's not that they're afraid of society collapsing. They clearly don't care about that, as most of what they do ignores that.

What they're worried about is the "Great Replacement", where white people become a minority. If that wasn't what they were really afraid of, then they would consider the problem of declining birth rates to be easily solvable with immigration.

For real, if right wingers are so hell bent on burning the world down, then I'ma make sure the future of humanity isn't my problem.

If things get bad enough I've got three bullets, in case two don't work.

It's interesting because it's obvious that the reason why people are having less children is because they can't afford it and they don't think it's a good idea for the children.

However, rather than actually remedying this situation, the people who want us to have as many children as humanly possible so they have more workers are doing everything in their power to make life worse.

Spoiler alert: they'll just ban contraception, abortion and sex ed instead

Don't care, I'm not producing wage slaves.

Declining birth rates and house prices dropping are both things the media love to make out are terrible things.

And they just aren't.

We are in a shitty pay to win permadeath coop mmorpg where the game balance has been totally broken by indivualistic whales. Of course no new players want to subscribe to this shit.

The world is literally on fire due to climate change, numerous wars and conflicts with global repercussions, and everything is getting more expensive, while people see that politics - which is supposed to serve society - is subservient only to its masters in the business world. Overpopulation has also become an increasingly pressing issue. The outlook is bleak. Why on earth would anyone want to bring children into this real-life dystopia and deliberately subject them to this?!

They have to decline or stabalise at fucking point, since we cant have 10 trillion people or something on the planet. Truthfully we just need the brains to figure out how to run our economy without an unending supply of increasing labour.

The rich already decided they don't want to prevent this, they'd rather just replace everyone underneath them. That's why the AI bubble just won't pop even though its a blackhole for money

Hey, I didn't ask to be born.

Alternatively they can assure more children by crashing the economy so hard people will be forced to have like 9 children so that there's a chance that at least 2 of them can take care of their parents when they get old.

That's how Trump decided to make America great again. It's gonna be frontier lynchings, robber barons and slave trades all over again.

Make the US 3rd world again.