Fuck this narrative. Decreased birth rates is a major success

Why are you of that opinion? Something like 30% of Japan’s population is over 65. Low birth rates are obviously not sustainable for them and will have extreme issues for their country if it continues.

Our current growth has almost made the planet uninhabitable. We need degrowth.

“Has almost made the planet uninhabitable” The Earth is definitely worse off since we have proliferated, but this is such a clickbaity untrue statement.

Humanity has and will continue to cause changes to the world that are negative, I agree, and that sucks. But like it or not, humanity is good at adapting and surviving, and we will be fine, even with the worldwide population overall continuing to grow for a very long time into the future.

LoL. You think we’re gonna grow gills or something? How do you think we’ll adapt to food chain collapse?

I’m sure that life will adapt in some form, but most life in the history of this planet has not been human. And we would not be this planet’s first mass extinction event.

This isn’t just about humans. We’re in a mass extinction period caused by humans. We need to lower our population to save other species

Low birth rates are obviously not sustainable

Please explain why this is obvious. Less people seems more sustainable, not less.

Old people can’t work and need someone to pay for their retirement.

If there are more old people than young people (population pyramid wrong way round) every young person needs to pay a crapton of taxes so that old folks don’t starve to death

Why can’t immigration replace births?

Because Japan doesn’t do that.

There is an -ism they’re pretty big on, it starts with R

Okay, but then we can’t just frame the discussion as “increase birth rates or society collapses” because there’s a very obvious third option that they aren’t taking.

Because Japan doesn’t do that.

They apparently don’t do procreation, either.

Nah. Food is cheap and plentiful. We don’t need young people working in fields for old people to be fed.

The two biggest issues off the top of my head are rural towns in Japan will continue to lose population and completely disappear, and there won’t be enough young working people paying into health care and social funds to support the old non-working population. I think there are a lot of other major negative impacts Japan will face as a country but I’m just not that knowledgable on the subject.

I assume we just have fundamentally different views on this topic because I really wish humanity would change to a more scientific and explorative approach entirely, where we expand outward into space and become a multi-planetary species, which will need a huge sustained population growth to support. I assume you don’t support that.

We need to inhabit at least one other plant on a continuous basis before we encourage exponential population growth.

We are going to be resource constrained on this planet long before we expand to others.

It’s not obvious. Low birth rates are completely sustainable, you just kill anyone who can’t afford to retire and can’t work anymore, and society functions perfectly well.

We have machines that can do the work of 100 people in the past

I’m sure that we could make it work without killing anyone

We also consume bullshit at 100 times the rate. People will be unhappy to see that go away. But yes, we produce more than enough for everyone as is.

So the solution is to rip off souls from the non-existence aether, bring them to this ever-bizarre world in order to condemn them, like Sisyphus, to a lifetime pushing of a social boulder which is fated to always go downhill? (In other words, why the unborn should sustain the faults of an unsustainable society that weren’t their faults to begin with?)

“Unsustainable Society” No matter your opinion on current governments, humanity has been around for an awful long time, and it will likely continue to be around for significantly longer into the future of the universe. In my opinion, that’s pretty cool.

In the grand scheme of things, just looking back over the past couple hundred years, the vast majority of humanity is in a better spot than we were, no matter how bad things may seem on a small time scale.

Yeah, global climate, carbon dioxide levels and even biodiversity are in a better spot nowadays than they were before, huh? That’s pretty cool! /s

You definitely are right some things are worse, but I more so meant quality of life in almost every single aspect for people that are alive. No shit, there are atrocities across the world still and things locally suck in many ways to varying degrees for a significant portion of the population in the world. Either way you can’t argue I’m good faith that the average humans quality of life hasn’t gotten exponentially better over the past thousand years. And I think that trend will continue into the next thousand years.

Infinite growth is unsustainable. A decreasing population will accelerate the collapse of capitalism, when the capitalists run out of cogs.

I just disagree on the infinite growth being unsustainable thing. Humanity, in my opinion, is destined to expand to the stars where we will continue to grow Indefinitely on a time scale that actually matters to you and me.

Obviously, that could not happen if we somehow all die, but despite all the doom and gloom, I really don’t think that’s likely.

Because it means less people to fuck up the planet.

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