Weird How a Generation Without Houses, Health Insurance, or Money Also Does Not Want Babies

For about 15 years now, things sure have been shitty: the housing market collapse, followed by the entirety of the Trump administration, covid-19, the rise of the gig economy and subsequent decline of health insurance—not to mention stagnant wages and staggering student debt. And with all that happening, mostly all at once, it should not come as a surprise to any scientist alive that no one feels quite like having seven pounds of obligation rip through their vagina, usually with the obligation that the progenitors will then pick up the tab for that human as well for the next two decades.

Yet experts do seem to be shocked, or at least alarmed, at falling birthrates. “The number of babies the average woman in the U.S. is expected to deliver has dropped from nearly four in the 1950s to less than two today,” reports CBS.

And while not everyone was living the sweet life in the Mad Men era—notably women, people of color, and especially women of color—it is highly unlikely that the urge to procreate has been stimied by progress alone, leading one expert to label declining birth rates a “barometer of despair.”

That barometer certainly seems to be sinking by the day. As recently as the 1970s, experts were worried about too many people. Now, the global population is set to plummet by about a billion towards the end of the century, especially in the U.S., which isn’t churning out babies at anything near a sustainable rate. And guess who is set to get fucked by the consequences of not fucking to biological fruition? You guessed it, those of us lucky enough to have reached adulthood during the summer and autumn of America’s discontent:

“We need to have enough working-age people to carry the load of these seniors, who deserve their retirement, they deserve all their entitlements, and they’re gonna live out another 30 years,” University of Southern California Professor Dowell Myers, who studies demographic trends, told CBS This Morning. “Nobody in the history of the globe has had so many older people to deal with.”

Truly cannot wait to keep living. It has been awesome so far and sounds like it’s only gonna get awesomer.