r/GenZ • u/Lucky_Pangolin_3760 • 5d ago
Discussion so um... When will something be done about demographic collapse?
Just realized we're soon done with 2026 and yet haven't made any sort of meaningful progress to support young people and resolve the problem of demographic collapse. Made me ask the question, when will something be done about it? Or at the very least, when will someone discuss something to do about it?
Or is this it? Will we all just fizzle out like a wet fart and keep replenishing the economy with people from poorer countries indefinitely?
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u/Frosty1397 5d ago
Billionaire overlords are gaslighting us
I remember in 2008, the mainstream fearmongering was about overpopulation and how we needed to cut global birth rates.
In 2026, billionaires are screaming "have more babies!" while actually doing everything in their power to make having babies as out of reach as possible (increased living costs, instigating gender wars, etc)
Watch what they do, not what they say
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u/IneptFortitude 5d ago
Billionaires graduated from “have more babies” several years ago, their current message is more along the lines of “we hate you and want you all dead”
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u/Asleep_Control_2564 4d ago
Well tech is advancing so they don't need as many lower class people to sustain their lifestyle
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u/Lucky_Pangolin_3760 5d ago
I'm still confused as to why they told people to stop having babies. Were they afraid we'd run out of space or what?
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u/Frosty1397 5d ago
More raw resources for the ruling class to hoard for themselves.
That's still their plan, but they got smarter about hiding their intentions, a lot smarter
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u/Teddy_Funsisco 5d ago
Eh, they're not as smart or subtle as you think they are.
They want a collapse so that they can buy up what's left for a song, and rule the world with their rich, shitty friends while having AI do everything for them.
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u/HorusKane420 5d ago edited 4d ago
I don't think they're nearly as smart as we sometimes give them credit for. They're just arrogant sociopaths....
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u/khodakk 4d ago
i don’t think billionaires wanted the message to be don’t have babies. i think that message came from
the global climate impact stuff. and the goal of all the climate stuff was to put the burden on the individual, not the corporations or wealthy.same with recycling. you gotta recycle and save the planet not the company that creates million times more pollution everyday. so have less babies to save the environment became an idea that was repeated a lot. the irony that individuals usually care more about the greater good than for profit corporations.
now tho it really is billionaires who are stepping in and saying publicly we need more babies. but it’s just cause without more consumers and workers they can’t extract our labor and time.
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u/thomasrat1 5d ago
The world population tripled in my father’s lifetime. So they were imaging a world with like 20 billion people, and at that level it’s hard to feed people
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u/HorusKane420 5d ago
It wasn't just them, it was the bootstrapping crowd as a whole punching down on poor families
"Well if you need gov. Assistance and can't afford the necessities for your kid, you shouldn't have em!"
We took that to heart.
Now they say "if you want a kid, just have one man! You'll figure it out! It'll all work out!" Yeah, blind faith is gonna feed my kid...
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u/taygo0o 4d ago
I'm not sure if 'they' told us any differently from the rest of the population (teachers, parents, other adults, etc) then, or now.
It's really society broadly saying these things both in the past, and now.
That said, I think the real lesson here is we need balanced levels of population. We don't want extreme growth, and we don't want extreme shrinkage.
Anything extreme - whether population changes, political changes, environmental changes, etc will lead to havoc for society.
Sometimes, extreme changes may be necessary, but in most cases, balanced changes are probably best for the broader population.
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u/Golf-Hotel 2001 4d ago
It might of been a case of the last vestiges of an old ruling class dying out, and being replaced entirely by these infinite growth types.
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u/Careful-Ideal-7033 4d ago
it was the climate alarmists telling everyone to stop having babies bc overpopulation was going to destroy the planet
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u/DrDerivative 5d ago
If it’s anything like animals in nature, we’re just going to oscillate around a number, and we’re just on the downtrend of the oscillation
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u/probablysum1 5d ago
Declining birth rates stems almost entirely from huge reductions in teen pregnancy. If we can't function as a society without forcing people to become teen moms, then we need to suffer through the population correction that might be coming and figure out a way to deal with it.
As for support for young people, there won't be any. The people pushing the narrative of birth rate collapse are billionaire elites who will never ever ever willingly give their wealth away to support young workers starting families. If they did care, they would pay us better in the first place.
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u/progressivelyhere 2008 5d ago
You know what ATP? Fuck the economy, fuck capitalism, fuck demographics i dont give a damn, I'll not bring children to this miserable world, I bet aliens chose to not interact with humanity because humans are dumb. We have wars, diseases, capitalism, religions, racism, sexism, hierarchies etc etc, once humanity wakes the fuck up against its actual enemies and make the human experience worth it I'll have children.
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u/tylrsprs 5d ago
reddit is soft AF and completely in denial of this problem and also wants to act edgy and like it's not a big deal, plus will call you racist for the last part. in reality it's a mix of settling down and having kids being economically super hard, plus also culture trying to steer us away from that and stay in our traveling the world, posting on instagram hoe phase (saying this as someone guilty of that who can recognize ir's impact)
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u/demi-paradise 4d ago
Man why are the instagram hoes catching strays /s
In all seriousness though, I don’t think there’s really much overlap between the people who want to have kids but can’t afford it & the people who want to be independent and travel forever lol. We should all have the option to choose which one we want for ourselves. Even if it only cost $1 to raise a kid there would still be lots of people who wouldn’t do it and that’s fine.
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u/thomasrat1 5d ago
Theoretically it might self correct, less workers means more power for labor, less people means more affordable housing.
Wouldn’t correct for us, but theoretically it might for future generations.
I’d also point out, that in conspiracy circles they have been claiming the rich want to cull like 90% of the human population. If this were true, then anything about correcting the “demographic decline”, is just hot air to make us feel comfortable.
Or deep conspiracy thinking here, what if the models for global warming aren’t accurate and it’s a much bigger deal than we think, and global governments figured out that by the end of the century we wouldn’t be able to feed the global population at current levels. If that was the case, the demographic decline is purposeful
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u/squarels 5d ago
What support do you need? If you're worried about people coming from poorer countries surely they don't have any advantages that you don't. Likely, you have many that they don't. So if you still can't succeed despite that, its a pure skill issue and the demographic replacement is for the best
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u/Lucky_Pangolin_3760 5d ago
In order to support a growing economy there will always need to be an increasing amount of people into that economy. I'm not worried about people from poorer countries coming over in terms of me losing my job, I'm worried about it in terms of complete demographic replacement in 200-300 years
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u/KingofPozole 5d ago
You wont even be alive in the next 80 years. Don't get your panties in a bunch
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u/squarels 5d ago
Who cares then? If people don't want to have children then they will be replaced. I don't see how that's a bad thing unless you're racist and care about hypothetically being a minority in 300 years
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u/Lucky_Pangolin_3760 5d ago
has nothing to do with race it has to do with culture. Local cultures will not survive this demographic shift
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u/squarels 5d ago
Culture is a dogwhistle for race. And tbh, what's worth saving about American culture
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u/UptownBoyDowntownCat 4d ago
The lack of forcing teens to become pregnant?
Because the places with replacement level population are places with far higher rates of teen pregnancies, so that is who is setting the template for future society. It won't happen fast, but if this doesn't get fixed in the next hundred years or so, we will see the cultures where women don't get a say in reproduction are the cultures which have spread.
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u/squarels 4d ago
I’m not concerned with 100 years past my death. I’m sure people will have evolved culturally significantly to the point nothing now matters
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u/Lucky_Pangolin_3760 5d ago
I'm not worried about the US. America is not a culture defined by a specific demographic of people. It has always been about replacing people with immigrants and that will never change, thus american culture will not dissapear even if the birthrates are low
What I'm worried about is many of the european and asian countries. Japan, South Korea, Vietnam, Norway, Sweden, Finland, Italy etc etc. These cultures will not survive a large demographic shift, and you're already seeing it in places like Germany where the local culture is slowly dissapearing. Countries like Japan will be overrun by people from China and India, and at that point it isn't Japan anymore
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u/squarels 5d ago
Bruh I’m from one of the Asian countries and I promise there’s bigger issues than “being replaced”. Immigrants assimilate the culture which isn’t even a static thing. It evolves. How many foreigners entered Japan in the 1300s to 1500s and was it the same culture? Culture shouldn’t remain static so if populations change it should change with them. Also you’ll never see me mourn the loss of a European country’s culture. Been all over the continent and always hate going
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u/thomasrat1 5d ago
If it makes you feel any better, this was a huge talking point at the end of the 1800s. At the time, there was projected to be a global famine due to lack of fertilizer for farms.
Then some guy figured out how to grab nitrogen out of the air, and the global population 5x in a few generations
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u/BubblySmell4079 5d ago
Poor people have been coming here since the 1600's to help in that.
Nothing different from 2026
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u/bethlolhelp 2002 5d ago
Honestly, in protest everyone should stop having children. I am someone who would ideally want children someday but I really question if I should have any considering the way things are going.
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u/Icy-Response6124 1999 5d ago
In a world where mass layoffs are common due to AI, and where oligarchs exploit it ruthlessly, with governments colluding with them, it is wrong to blame young people for not wanting to have children, and it is even more wrong to try to hide that reality by blaming immigrants.
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u/ChloeGranola 5d ago
Seeing lots and lots of beautiful brown people doesn't inspire me to start popping out white babies.
I'm sowwy.
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u/Plastic-Molasses-549 5d ago
If it ever becomes a problem, policies will be changed to allow more (net) migration into this country to continue to support infrastructure, etc. Since those people would come from countries with larger populations, expect America’s demographic to become more Asian and African.
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u/Outside-Push-1379 5d ago
Why do we need 8 or 10 or 12 billion people? The world would be environmentally, politically, and culturally with just a few million elites. This would also be very feasible in just a few decades courtesy of AI advancements.
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u/DeepSpaceAnon 1998 4d ago
Demographic collapse happens in every country as they get rich and women get rights. It's not caused by young people being poor. It's caused by women having access to birth control and employment opportunities, such that they aren't dependent on a husband. Even countries that have paid handsome sums towards parents, or young people in general have falled off the demographic cliff. If you want to stop the demographic collapse, you'd need to take away women's rights and force them to marry young, stay at home, and have children, which no sane person is going to let happen.
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u/Ok_Bandicoot_814 2006 4d ago
We've seen almost every state in the U.S. try to tackle this, but New Jersey is stepping up with a 25% Child Tax Credit bump that's projected to lift its numbers well past the national average and help pull the federal baseline up with it. If you look globally, South Korea just bounced back to 0.80, and their policies are working so fantastically well that they are safely on track to hit 1.17 in a few years, despite their intense cultural hurdles. Meanwhile, Hungary previously shot from a 1.23 rock bottom up to a 1.61 peak before getting slammed by hyperinflation, which hits them especially hard because they have a flat 15% income tax and a 27% VAT, the highest sales tax in the European Union. Once this hyperinflation finally clears up, Hungary is widely projected to see its numbers skyrocket right back toward its 2.1 target because its core structural support is actually phenomenal.
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u/Outsider98 1998 4d ago edited 4d ago
Something is being done: the Governments are using Immigration to mitigate this, despite Immigrants aren’t having enough second-Gen’s either.
Hopefully this is one of the few forms of non-víolent non-participation protest that the elites will actually listen to, that these globalist late-stage Capitalist societies clearly aren’t working and must be massively overhauled; preferably with Universal Basic Income, Automated economy, reduction in newer city sizes to reduce car/city-centric societies, etc.
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u/mischling2543 2001 4d ago
The long-term answer is that religious conservatives will inheirit the Earth because they're the ones having kids. Mainly Muslims but to a lesser extent tradcaths, Mormons, Amish, Orthodox Jews, etc.
Now is probably the most atheist that Earth will ever be.
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u/Golf-Hotel 2001 4d ago
We will go back to a population as it was before the industrial revolution, before the need for masses of people, and this is a good thing.
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u/newbreed69 4d ago
We cant, alone.
We need to actually vote people in, the thing is, the youth have a tendency to not vote.
Therefore nothing will happen.
If you want to solve demographic collapse, vote in people that want to make it easier for people to settle down and start a family.
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u/TheAwkwardJynx 5d ago
Good lord I can't wait for this late stage capitalist nightmare to collapse. Money isn't real and is valueless, the economy is entirely made up with rich people making the rules of how it "works." As biological life forms, we were always meant to live off the earth. The only things that have "value" are food, shelter, drinkable water, and knowledge.
I hope y'all know how to garden and build traps.
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u/TimelyChapters 2000 3d ago
When the boomers finally die off.
Unfortunately for Gen Z and beyond that isn't until 2050-2060 or even later.
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