It's not very surprising that people living in what is essentially a zoo experience catastrophically reduced birth rates. Who would want to perpetuate their life in a cage? It's a lot more nuanced in practice, I know, but focusing on narrow causes makes us blind to the simple truth of our times, the experience of being atomized from anything of importance, and drifting from one meaningless task to another.
It's hard to want to have your own family if you barely spend time with your own, since everyone is on their screen during family gatherings. It's hard to want to live for someone other than yourself when you live in a society entirely geared towards selfishness, down to the implicit solipsistic metaphysics of the screen—things only move when you tell them to, the screen shows you only things that you mind can grasp (since they have to be programmed for a computer to understand), amongst many things. It's hard to be a parent for children when you yourself have been made into an immature manchild by your society.
I'm not saying any of this to absolve anyone of responsibility. Everyone is responsible for their own life, but within the system, no one is really to blame, because the forces which bring it into existence are far beyond any one of us. The system works in a decentralized manner, which is why trying to find fault in any specific group of people is hopelessly futile, and why trying to peer pressure people into having more children when there are deeper systemic reasons for this trend is very naive. Societal collapse happens on many dimensions, and obviously the falling birth rates are one of them. Surprise surprise, but we can't keep growing forever on our finite planet. 1
Falling birth rates are the result of the general trend by which the system atomizes social reality. Young people barely spend any time with older generations, including their parents, which means that they do not live or think in a way which is embedded with the whole of human experience, from young to old, but rather only their clique. This trend continues well into adulthood, into their entire life in fact, because that's what the system needs. Separating people into age groups makes it easier to target young people who are necessarily more moldable (and also more desperate) to fit the demands of the system.
Real community is an obstacle against the development of the system because the latter requires replaceable parts to slot into its machine-structure, which is why the entire social dimension is being homogenized, and all the natural boundaries we usually think of, such as the family, the village, the country, and even gender, are being abolished.
People who prefer their family over strangers make the system less efficient and less accomodating. People who value the sense of conviviality provided by a local community will not work hard in the technological system, and people who are content with small local productions, focusing on quality rather than scale, get outcompeted and eventually replaced by larger companies. The system favors scale and power, not what people consciously want.
Wanting to raise a family requires someone to be selfless enough to take on the burden on themselves, in terms of time, energy and money, and to have a healthy enough relationship with someone else to want to commit to such a task. But the system is inherently geared towards selfishness, even if that "selfishness" can manifest in a totally masochistic, "nice" door-mat guy or girl. 2
This is also why we live in such an infantilizing word. Children are wonderful of course, but infantilization is something else, it is an act of stunting someone's maturity by pandering to their vices: their laziness, their fears, their desires for comfort and pleasure, etc. Hence, coloring books for adults, reruns of the shows and animes that someone watched as a kid, removal of all pain and discomfort, including mental discomfort, and of course video games and pornography, the hallmark of the manchild.
Another facet of infantilization is the domestication required by the system, the act of removing the independence and wildness from someone. Domesticated people, also known as cucks, are much easier to mold because they need the system to survive. This is why those who fear about all of the propaganda in our world are so besides the point, because you do not need to tell lies to keep a zoo animal inside their enclosure, they are simply unable to escape. Worse, they will come up with rational justifications as to why the cage is preferable over the wild.
When someone is so dependent on the system, a system which makes them interact through Reality through the screen, rendering them solipsistic as mentioned in the beginning, then they start only living for their self, a self which only sees in the act of having children a way to perpetuate themselves. But this narrative of imposing one's will onto reality isn't very popular in our overly agreeable world, which is why people tend to default onto solipsistic entertainment, hence the addiction to the screen and its myriads of distractions, retreating into techno-wombs because the self prefers that type of comfort, over the difficulty of living for other people. 3
Taking care of children is a full-time job, which is why historically the wife devoted most of her time to housework and looking after the children. This is to not romanticize the past, because feminists are very correct in pointing out that the ways that women were forced to live could be quite oppressive, denying them of any freedom and reducing them to mere houseworkers. But the modern world has not made people more independent to live the life that they want, it has merely made the shackles more abstract, made the problem harder to blame on a single group of people.
The "emancipation" of women hasn't led to a more loving world where women are allowed to be women, instead it has pushed them to work in alienating and soulless jobs, whether in the office or in academia mostly, something which we are supposed to think of as "progress". In other words, the only way that women are allowed to be free is if they submit themselves to be essentially male, in how they think and in how they work. This is the fundamental blind spot of modern feminism, that it confuses nominal progress, the kind of thing that can be tracked with statistics, with real progress, the liberation of consciousness, both for women and also for men.
Feminism got co-opted by the technological system because every movement does. All concerns about equality arise from genuine observations about social dynamics, but then get captured because of the basic fact that there is never enough growth for the system. The more people work in it, the better, which is why women are encouraged to work in office jobs, rather than live slow, embodied and loving lives.
The system then rebrands this atomized form of freedom as a desirable thing, which is why women are made to think of marriage as a prison 4, of men as hateful people only interested in sex, and of children as a burden on their career, which is now the only thing they have to look forward to. Freedom is great of course, but freedom within the system is nothing like the real deal, it is slavery to a machine which has its own insane demands on top of the priority list, and nothing that (conscious) humans care about.
The result of this new-found form of female "emancipation" is that women are going out of their mind, or rather going into their mind because they have nothing left, and their embodied presence, their soft and gentle empathy, and their innate intuition are systematically punished, or at the very least totally useless to the operations of the world. This is why the "role-models" that women can aspire to are all "successful" but utterly loveless, because that is the type of person that is useful to the system.
So the main cause for the falling birth rates is the atomization of our world, an inevitable result of the technological system and how it requires individuals to be separate from any broader context, because those are barriers to its homogenized and globalized processes. Two secondary but important causes are then, firstly, the increased difficulty in affording housing, and all of the downstream consequences of that, and secondly, the anxiety about the future which is quite well-warranted, since societal collapse has been the fate that all the civilizations before ours have met.
It is now the norm for couples to both have a full-time job, because of the increased price in housing. In those circumstances, taking care of a (or several) child is significantly more difficult, because it means that both parents come home exhausted and stressed out from work. This means that they either rely on a caretaker, which is firstly unrealistic because if both the man and the woman have to work in the first place, it means that they struggle financially to make ends meet to begin with, and secondly it means that your own child spends most of their time away from you, either at school or with the caretaker, which kind of puts into question the whole point of having a child in the first palce.
Historically, people lived as part of a community, which meant that taking care of a child was more bearable even if they were poorer than we are now. They could rely on the grandparents, or perhaps an uncle or aunt to help with the parenting, which cannot be said for many families nowadays, where people have to relocate around for their job, or where they simply don't feel close to their family to begin with.
It feels like a copout to blame the difficulty of raising children on a financial reason, because the domains of family and economics feel like they should be disjoint, but the reality is that we have become largely economical people precisely because we have lost a sense of community to begin with. It is true that the best things in life are not about money, but the system forces us to buy back the life that we have lost due to it, and forces us to live with the consequences of its unchecked, decentralized processes, which is why we live in such an atomized world where only money matters, compelling rich people to use real estate as a way to further enrich themselves, at the expense of regular folk.
On top of that, if you struggle to afford the basics of your life such as housing, why would you feel compelled to make your needs even larger through having children? Most people cannot even dream to own a house in their 40s or 50s with the way the economy is going, and them even struggling to have a job in their late 20s, why would they try to have children? Maslow's hierarchy of needs is far from perfect, but the basic insight that we need a foundation of stability before focusing on more secondary needs such as community, fulfillment and self-actualization strikes me as undeniable. A real, interconnected culture addresses both the lower (practical needs) and the higher (connection to something beyond yourself), because it's hard to struggle in anything if you don't feel connected to something bigger, but when faced with the lack of the higher in their life due to the disappearance of supporting environments, people naturally focus on the more practical needs.
This is compounded by the fact that the future looks more and more gloomy. A lot can be said about how the screen broadcasts the worst in our world, which is an undeniable distortion of what is really happening, but also the reality of societal collapse is not just a pessimistic interpretation, it's the truth. Societies can't keep growing forever, especially when essentially all of our wealth is based on the abundant and cheap energy provided by non-renewable fossil fuels, which is why even the West keeps getting more and more poor (in real terms, not the figures that "economists" try to give us) as the years go by.
This ongoing economic decline is then accompanied by an array of geopolitical conflicts, which no doubt affect the way that people think and make decisions about their future, many openly saying that they do not have the heart to bring children into such uncertain times. 5
One of the major consequences of a declining size in population is that the fundamental assumption in economics, that things get more and more valuable as time goes by—which is why interest rates are positive, and why people put their money in various investments hoping that they become more valuable over time—will be wrong. 6 Real estate won't magically become more and more valuable over time if there is less and less demand for it. Company stocks won't keep going up (on average) if the demand for products decreases. And the office jobs at said companies, such as the roles of managers, marketers, HR and many others I do not even know, will be in far less of a demand, if at all as a result of a shrinking economy.
This contraction in population and its effects on the economy is very likely a major driver for mass migration, besides the other cause that warfare across the globe displaces large amounts of people. The Western world cannot keep up its fake economic "growth" going without at least a steady population, and so it does everything it can to maintain that as long as possible, until everything converges to its real value: what it actually provides for a human being, not what you can sell it to someone else, hoping it will increase in value later on.
I also suspect that the real reason for job "replacement" will not be so much that so-called 'AI' will be great at replacing actual human intelligence, but instead because it will be a good excuse for having less and less people work away at bullshit jobs that don't provide anything of real value. It's offensive to kick someone from the company because they didn't do anything that was actually useful, but if you can convince people that they lost their job because 'AI' is simply too amazing to compete with, then suddenly it becomes a societal issue, not a personal one.
But this is me putting my tinfoil hat on. I don't really know how the future of 'AI' will unfold in the short term, but I know that in the medium term it won't matter much, bcause in a collapsing world of reduced energy, you can't do much with it. The future will be more like farming your own food with your neighbors (if you survive through the initial shocks) rather than travelling around the galaxy in search of new solar systems. Such a low-energy world is seen as a dystopia for some modern people, because they equate manual work with literal slavery, but alas Reality doesn't care much about our whims and fancies, and we will have to deal with ecological realities whether we like it or not.
1 And interplanetary travel consumes far more resources than it provides so no, we can't simply hop away in another planet.
2 It's selfish in the sense that it is driven by one's fears. Doormats aren't loving, they are afraid of disappointing others, or of facing rejection. This is why they are obsessed with what the other person thinks of them, instead of first checking with themselves whether they care about the other person to begin with.
3 Not that sheer difficulty is inherently meaningful, by itself, but on the other hand, an utterly solipsistic (and comfortable) life could never be meaningful. Which is why everyone knows deep down that spending hours scrolling on a screen is a complete waste of life, even if they can't articulate why.
4 Same thing with young men who want to have sex as much as they can without any of the responsibility of being a father.
5 Granted, people still were having children during the two World Wars and the Cold War of the 20th century, but then again, the social and economic environment was also completely different than it is now
6 See also John Michael Greer's piece called 'An Unfamiliar World'
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Zoo Cuck Jailworld Demographics Atomization Technosystem Economics Collapse Ai
2026-04-01