29. Finally People Aren’t Getting Married and They're Not Having Babies

How To Be a Person for Monday July 22nd, 2024

Birth rates around the world are falling. This is not a crisis, it’s a correction.

Unless you are a baby boomer then there is a massive crisis emerging due to a demographic bubble. However, for once, we’re not looking through that lens.

Young people in Japan aren’t marrying. The state formed a committee two years ago to find out why. I could have told them in one succinct email: We are less religious, better educated and more independent. More people are feminists. Therapy as a route to self-awareness is no longer stigmatized. We are free from the societal bonds of: fall in love once, marry, have babies, spend the rest of your life mitigating a relationship to someone you’ve grown out of while paying down your debt to one of the five big banks.

I know what you’re saying. That I’m cynical. Let’s look at the facts.

Many have realized not going to church doesn’t mean they will go to Hell. You would agree with that, right? We don’t have to blindly sign up to die in an old man’s war either. Therefore, wouldn’t it follow that we don’t have to be yolked to one person, one house and one job anymore, forever and ever, Amen.

How is this not progress?

The status quo wants the middle class to forever be there as tax payers and canon fodder. But now there is another way. An eschewing of norms that no longer serve.

Free agency — from my own personal vantage point — looks great.

“The rate at which a person can mature is directly proportional to the embarrassment he can tolerate.” - Douglas Engelbart

I have done my due diligence and marriage is not for me. And there are many around me that repeatedly provide me with evidence that I have made the right choice. Not only to not get hitched again but to not even get into a relationship.

Have babies, sure. I love babies. I miss the babies. But can we not move on from the ancient contract born of a 13th century fad among the French royal court that has more to do with treating women as chattel than love? Can we not move on from signing up for a debt so large we must amortize it over more than a third of our expected life? Must we buy into a lifestyle that goes from settling-down to keeping up with the Jones’s to just settling?

Due to said Jones’s Canadians are shouldering more debt than ever before. Meanwhile ScotiaBank keeps telling us we’re richer than we think. Both cannot be true.

My prediction is soon it will only be members of the LGTBQ+ community in a rush to wed. Starve a person long enough and even Jack in the Box tastes good.