Young People Are Having Fewer Children. Could Millennials Be Killing The Human Race?
by Boobie
Fertility rates have been dropping in America for decades. Given the rapid social changes that have taken place in the last decade — chief among them improved medical care increasing the probability of infants living to adulthood and women entering the workforce — this is perhaps not surprising. As the number reaches another low with the millennial generation firmly within what would traditionally considered their childbearing years, one has to question just how long this trend can continue. After all, there is only so low the number can drop.
Changes outside of women working and better medicine have exacerbated this downward trend, of course. Most young people are leaving college deeply in debt, and older millennials entered the workforce during the 2008 financial crisis, hindering their ability to pay down that debt and save for future-looking things like home ownership, retirement — and child rearing. Add to that the continued stagnation of real wages compared to output growth and the “recovery” from the Great Recession leading to less stable employment and more contract work and the rise of the gig economy, and it’s easy to see how marriage, home ownership, and children become less appealing risks to young professionals. However, there could be another, more pernicious cause behind the lack of millennial mothers and fathers: the desire to put an end to the human race.
The millennial generation is a self-loathing one. Whether this is a function of the issues outlined above that they have faced, one of growing up with the internet and facing the worst of humanity every day through clickbait headlines and anonymous trolls and then seeing those trolls shed their anonymity to widespread acclaim and success, or a combination of the two, millennials are less inclined than their predecessors to look on the bright side. They watch touching short videos about soldiers coming home to surprise their family on ESPN and see not the love and joy of the reunion but the pointlessness of the perpetual war that makes the reunion necessary. They see Jeff Bezos and his unprecedented wealth and focus not the possibilities granted to everyone by America and capitalism but some sort of unfair disparity between him and the poor. They see the marvels of modern engineering and manufacturing and the exponential technological growth that has continued unabated since the Industrial Revolution and dwell not on the convenience but on the disastrous effect on the climate. They ask, is it wrong to bring a child into this fallen world? And if so, why would I pay hundreds of thousands of dollars to raise and educate them when their future is so bleak?
Millennials are killing or attempting to kill seemingly everything: chain restaurants; the concepts of lunch and vacation; the sports of football and baseball; rock n roll; drunk driving; you name it, they’re killing it. If even such traditionally American pursuits as the country’s national past time and the last centuries most iconic form of artistic expression are in danger of being ended by a generation that hates nothing more than itself (with the notable exception of its preceding generations), it stands to reason that millennials would, whether consciously and in collusion with one another or subconsciously and independently, want to end the human race as well.
This would be a troubling development. In the past, anyone set on annihilating humanity would be seen as a villain. Indeed, the villain hellbent on world domination and destruction is such a cliche that in recent years action/comic book-style movies have sought to humanize them by giving them motives that are on the surface relatable if not entirely reasonable (for example, Samuel L. Jackson’s Richmond Valentine from Kingsman: The Secret Service, looking to cull Earth’s population to combat climate change, and Josh Brolin’s Thanos from Avenger’s: Infinity War, looking to do the same for the universe to combat poverty and scarcity). This sort of portrayal might only make the problem worse though: millennials, full of self-loathing, desperation, and generation-wide misanthropy, could mistakenly see these villains as noble heroes and role models the same way young men in the late 1980s saw Michael Douglas’ greedy Wall Street scammer Gordon Gekko as one.
The most dangerous and frightening thing about the potential of millennials deciding that humanity has had a bad and destructive run and deciding to discontinue the species, though, is that eventually, if they put their minds to it, they can do it. There’s nothing the the Greatest Generation, Baby Boomers, or Generation X can do about it. Those generations can fight back against millennials’ bastardization of baseball (Three True Outcomes?) or their disdain for capitalism (look at all the countries that have tried socialism), and they can win their own converts, but ultimately, humanity’s survival is a collaborative effort, and if enough of a generation decides they’re not going to collaborate any longer, well, that’s humanity done. The race could, one supposes, rely on the young generation that follows them, Generation Z or whatever the preferred nomenclature turns out to be, but come on. Their favorite musical artists are guys called 6ix9ine and Lil Xan who have face tattoos and drone on about drugs and nihilism. Is that generation continuing the human race even worth it?
