The urge to procreate is instinctual, and having children is essential not just for the survival of our species, but also for the continued functioning of society, let alone the economy. Governments should, among a great deal of other things, be supporting parents. At a minimum, parental leave and tax incentives are essential under capitalism. Otherwise, yeah, it’s easy to feel beaten down by a society that expects you to take care of multiple people with an income that is increasingly barely enough to take care of yourself, and also expects all of your time to do it, so you must choose between taking care of yourself or your family. Then to add insult to injury, they hate you for it, make memes mocking you, and devote entire forums to discussing how entitled you are.
All of that is true, with the backdrop that while we do need to have some children, we probably actually need fewer humans on the planet. The fact that society is structured so that we need to keep increasing the population is a problem that we need to admit exists and solve, but we aren’t because that also involves examining if capitalism in its current form is really the best way to run society and the billionaires have a vested interest in making sure the general populace doesn’t realize that it is not.
And there are also cultural things in the way to reasonable child rearing. There is nothing stopping people from making communes where groups of parents share responsibilities for a flock of children (it takes a village and whatnot) but we’ve somehow gotten to a point where it’s all on the nuclear family and both parents work and if and only if they’re lucky grandparents chip in. It’s insanity.
Edit: and I agree that making mean memes about parents is silly and counterproductive.
I don’t necessarily disagree, and I definitely don’t think we should keep increasing the population without limits. But rather than jumping to extreme solutions like limiting births or promoting depopulation, we should first rethink how we structure housing, family systems, and resource distribution. Right now, we’re trying to fit humanity into an economic system that prioritizes profit and hoarding over sustainability and well-being.
The truth is, we could support the current population, and likely even more, using far less land and fewer resources if society wasn’t organized around individualism and competition. According to the UN, a third of the food produced globally is wasted, and the wealthiest 10 percent are responsible for nearly half of global emissions. The issue isn’t raw population numbers, it’s how resources are controlled and distributed.
As you pointed out, there is a vested interest in keeping people convinced that scarcity is natural and that we’re all to blame just for existing. Media narratives often push this idea, especially through social platforms, that subtly frame nihilism and depopulation as common sense. Meanwhile, the wealthiest few continue to hoard not just wealth but the power to shape public discourse.
The idea that we’ll have more if there are fewer people serves only those who already have the most. It diverts our frustration away from the structures of exploitation and toward each other. We should be asking why we’re being told to stifle nature and make do with less while billionaires accumulate enough to support entire nations.
The fact that people think promoting depopulation is extreme is part of the problem. There is obviously a limit to the population we can reasonably support (we call this carrying capacity in biology) and whether you think it’s now or later, at some point we have to stop growing the population. Unlimited population growth is literally impossible.
Edit:
The idea that we’ll have more if there are fewer people serves only those who already have the most.
And this is the opposite of true. The oligarchs want more bodies to feed the pyramid scheme that is capitalism.
There are already 8 billion humans, countries have destroyed 80-90% of their forests to put plantations to feed animals to feed ourselves and our children while we waste a big chunk of it. Not to talk about the tons of rubbish we create in the process and a pollution that may already doomed us.
And we want more and more. When will be enough? At 20 billion? Or do we make infinite children? Maybe actually stopping having children before it’s too late is the essential for the survival of our species.
And for the continued functioned of society and the economy? Yeah you are right here. But again when will be enough? At 20 billion? Or do we make infinite children for infinite continuation of the economy? The economy is slowly collapsing already.
Overpopulation is not the cause of global collapse. That way of thinking always leads to the poor people getting blamed for even existing. We can sustain more people. What we can’t sustain is our wasteful Western materialistic way of life. Let’s start by eliminating industrial scale cattle farming.
Self-cherishing attitude is the cause of all our problems not just global collapse.
Industrial scale cattle farming is a must to support the current demand and it exists because we can’t care enough to renounce the pleasure of eating meat. It is always me, me and me. And the problem is always because the other, the other and the other.
Of course we can sustain a lot of more of people, but not with our mindset.
Right, so then don’t reduce population, but consumption. Blaming people will lead to the worst outcomes. Who are the ones who should stop existing? Can’t you see how that way of thinking is promoting fascism, genocide?
You can’t stop existing if you never existed. It’s not promoting genocide. It’s promoting not reproducing when there’s already plenty.
In a roundabout way, that’s a part of lower consumption. Everyone is a consumer. And more babies = more consumers = more consumption. It’s a conscious choice people make that increases consumption.
Don’t kill the cows that already exist. Stop killing them, and stop breeding them. Sustain the ones who are already here, and stop making more than we can easily sustain.
But how do we reduce consumption? I believe that for whatever mess we are in we have to start by blaming ourselves, not just our personal problems. Blaming the other won’t change anything. I blamed myself of all the world problems and I reduced my consumption to aprox a 90%, I started to use my car only when really needed, started to buy locally, cancelled all my shit and even went vegan, and I feel that I still could do better, sorry for the “holier than thou”, I’m trying to give an example.
I don’t really know how you got that my conclusion was to make someone stop existing. For a start you can’t make stop existing something it doesn’t exist yet. I also don’t believe we should literally stop having children, but be more mindful of what we do, and that our mindset is the problem. The “I want this, I want that”. But my other point was, do we really need more population when we do not have our shit together? We don’t even understand what the problem is. We will consume to our extinction while blaming the other.
The urge to procreate is instinctual, and having children is essential not just for the survival of our species, but also for the continued functioning of society, let alone the economy. Governments should, among a great deal of other things, be supporting parents. At a minimum, parental leave and tax incentives are essential under capitalism. Otherwise, yeah, it’s easy to feel beaten down by a society that expects you to take care of multiple people with an income that is increasingly barely enough to take care of yourself, and also expects all of your time to do it, so you must choose between taking care of yourself or your family. Then to add insult to injury, they hate you for it, make memes mocking you, and devote entire forums to discussing how entitled you are.
All of that is true, with the backdrop that while we do need to have some children, we probably actually need fewer humans on the planet. The fact that society is structured so that we need to keep increasing the population is a problem that we need to admit exists and solve, but we aren’t because that also involves examining if capitalism in its current form is really the best way to run society and the billionaires have a vested interest in making sure the general populace doesn’t realize that it is not.
And there are also cultural things in the way to reasonable child rearing. There is nothing stopping people from making communes where groups of parents share responsibilities for a flock of children (it takes a village and whatnot) but we’ve somehow gotten to a point where it’s all on the nuclear family and both parents work and if and only if they’re lucky grandparents chip in. It’s insanity.
Edit: and I agree that making mean memes about parents is silly and counterproductive.
I don’t necessarily disagree, and I definitely don’t think we should keep increasing the population without limits. But rather than jumping to extreme solutions like limiting births or promoting depopulation, we should first rethink how we structure housing, family systems, and resource distribution. Right now, we’re trying to fit humanity into an economic system that prioritizes profit and hoarding over sustainability and well-being.
The truth is, we could support the current population, and likely even more, using far less land and fewer resources if society wasn’t organized around individualism and competition. According to the UN, a third of the food produced globally is wasted, and the wealthiest 10 percent are responsible for nearly half of global emissions. The issue isn’t raw population numbers, it’s how resources are controlled and distributed.
As you pointed out, there is a vested interest in keeping people convinced that scarcity is natural and that we’re all to blame just for existing. Media narratives often push this idea, especially through social platforms, that subtly frame nihilism and depopulation as common sense. Meanwhile, the wealthiest few continue to hoard not just wealth but the power to shape public discourse.
The idea that we’ll have more if there are fewer people serves only those who already have the most. It diverts our frustration away from the structures of exploitation and toward each other. We should be asking why we’re being told to stifle nature and make do with less while billionaires accumulate enough to support entire nations.
The fact that people think promoting depopulation is extreme is part of the problem. There is obviously a limit to the population we can reasonably support (we call this carrying capacity in biology) and whether you think it’s now or later, at some point we have to stop growing the population. Unlimited population growth is literally impossible.
Edit:
And this is the opposite of true. The oligarchs want more bodies to feed the pyramid scheme that is capitalism.
deleted by creator
There are already 8 billion humans, countries have destroyed 80-90% of their forests to put plantations to feed animals to feed ourselves and our children while we waste a big chunk of it. Not to talk about the tons of rubbish we create in the process and a pollution that may already doomed us.
And we want more and more. When will be enough? At 20 billion? Or do we make infinite children? Maybe actually stopping having children before it’s too late is the essential for the survival of our species.
And for the continued functioned of society and the economy? Yeah you are right here. But again when will be enough? At 20 billion? Or do we make infinite children for infinite continuation of the economy? The economy is slowly collapsing already.
Overpopulation is not the cause of global collapse. That way of thinking always leads to the poor people getting blamed for even existing. We can sustain more people. What we can’t sustain is our wasteful Western materialistic way of life. Let’s start by eliminating industrial scale cattle farming.
Self-cherishing attitude is the cause of all our problems not just global collapse.
Industrial scale cattle farming is a must to support the current demand and it exists because we can’t care enough to renounce the pleasure of eating meat. It is always me, me and me. And the problem is always because the other, the other and the other.
Of course we can sustain a lot of more of people, but not with our mindset.
Right, so then don’t reduce population, but consumption. Blaming people will lead to the worst outcomes. Who are the ones who should stop existing? Can’t you see how that way of thinking is promoting fascism, genocide?
You can’t stop existing if you never existed. It’s not promoting genocide. It’s promoting not reproducing when there’s already plenty.
In a roundabout way, that’s a part of lower consumption. Everyone is a consumer. And more babies = more consumers = more consumption. It’s a conscious choice people make that increases consumption.
Don’t kill the cows that already exist. Stop killing them, and stop breeding them. Sustain the ones who are already here, and stop making more than we can easily sustain.
But how do we reduce consumption? I believe that for whatever mess we are in we have to start by blaming ourselves, not just our personal problems. Blaming the other won’t change anything. I blamed myself of all the world problems and I reduced my consumption to aprox a 90%, I started to use my car only when really needed, started to buy locally, cancelled all my shit and even went vegan, and I feel that I still could do better, sorry for the “holier than thou”, I’m trying to give an example.
I don’t really know how you got that my conclusion was to make someone stop existing. For a start you can’t make stop existing something it doesn’t exist yet. I also don’t believe we should literally stop having children, but be more mindful of what we do, and that our mindset is the problem. The “I want this, I want that”. But my other point was, do we really need more population when we do not have our shit together? We don’t even understand what the problem is. We will consume to our extinction while blaming the other.
I don’t see the survival of our species as a great selling point. We’ve basically fucked everything up.