Millennials and Gen-Z are truly the lost generation.
Imagine still living with parents in your late twenties or even early thirties because you simply cannot afford to even rent your own place. Now imagine that work pays like shit and you are busting your ass working long hours to chase an eternal pipe dream of economic prosperity. You can’t even seek psychiatric help for your ailing mental health because it’s expensive, inaccessible and oversubscribed.
For a man, being in that situation makes you downright undateable so it’s not like you can rely on the joint incomes that couples do either.
And we wonder why toxic masculinity is on the rise…
The rich have done a smash & grab on the economy and made everybody poorer as a result of their own greed. It’s a dangerous game.
It’s not just millennials. I was born 5 years after the end of the Baby Boomers and by the time I was 20 everything was becoming out of reach. Add a energy crisis or two, 40 years of Republican austerity for anyone but themselves, and a few financial crashes We the People ended-up bailing out, and I never got anywhere enough traction to do more than just get by without a mountain of debt. We never outran the entitlement of the Boomer generation.
Good luck Millennials - and I mean it - but the only way out is to get out of the US while you can.
Hasn’t the fertility rate in the US been going down from the 1960s? With immigrations covering the shortfall?
Actually looking at the data. It went down significantly in the 60 and 70s. Then picked up in the 80s, 90s and early 2000. Then started dropping again from 2010.
But one thing to note to seem to be that it never went past replacement rate after 1972. 2.1 is considered to the global number for replacement. So for the last 60 years or so immigration has kept the population growing in absolute terms.
Not making a political statement, I find it weird when people club a huge group of people into one bucket and brand them.
I do not like the terms but sticking to the terms here. It looks like the young boomers had a similar number of children to today and the older boomers were already dropping the number of children they were having.
The surface area of just the land alone on Earth is more than enough to house every human alive right now. Its actually more than enough to house every human that ever lived since the dawn of human history on it with room to spare according to expert calculations. The global population didnt even hit 1 billion people until like 1800. Now, if you subtract out all the currently unlivable areas because of nuclear radiation and harsh weather and such, you’re still going to have enough land for every human alive right now to live comfortably.
Its just that modern humans hate the idea of living so spread out, and apparently all want to be stacked into the same 10 miles of land. Also, governments charge money for land, they’re not giving that away for free.
EDIT: In case you or someone else wants to check exact math, heres the data:
Earth Land Area: 148,326,000 square km (this is actually only 30% of the Earths total surface area, the other 70% is covered by water)
Human population (total since dawn of humanity, estimated): ~110,000,000,000
Human population (current) ~8,000,000,000
My estimations put it at around 15,000 square feet per person ever born, or approximately 200,000 square feet per person alive right now.
Humans need to eat. The land needed for agriculture already covers significant percentage of the habitable land. About half based on our world in data [1]. Yes most of this is due to livestock so this can be significantly reduced but still.
Other species also need space to live. Even if you look at it in s strictly selfish fashion and disregard the right of other species to exist - we are part of the ecosystem so if it dies we die.
It’s a complex subject that deserves legitimate scientific study. There are known detrimental effects of low fertility rates in a country, but they often take a long time to manifest. However, there are also many examples of horrific consequences of governments trying to affect fertility rate.
I’m 33 and me and my so are not having children. Cope you capitalist pigs. I’m living my one life the way I want and you can fk off with your credit cards and apple pies.
Looking at the way things have been going for years (decades) now, giving someone a birth would be a huge disservice - they'll inherit a simultaneously more globalized and divided world, a world with technology that has the potential to trivialize sharing knowledge and experience, which is instead use to drive up engagement for the sake of profits, effectively breeding hate groups and echo chambers, a world with economy consisting of bubbles and not-so-careful manipulations, leaving our offspring in a position few would probably envy. Oh, and there's rapid climate change that is being ignored and actively accelerated by the people and other entities that are capable of doing anything about it.
I know more than a few people who have never considered any of the above, and I'm sure many people here know such people as well, so it's more than safe to say that whatever the humanity is facing in the near future, it's nothing similar to extinction through lack of birth.
The future seems really good for certain groups of people, but I doubt my kids could be a part of these groups, or even want to a part of these groups. Not that I would actively indoctrinate them, but I'd imagine that living with me through the years when they're developing and shaping themselves is going to leave its mark regardless.
Maybe I'll regret that decision when it's already too late, of course, but then again, this is not going to be a world-ending decision by no merit.
If you wanted the younger generation to continue producing workers for the capitalist machine, you should have made sure that potential parents had enough resources to actually maintain a family if they started one.
But yeah, that would have slightly reduced quarterly profits, and we can’t have that kind of long-sightedness messing with the short-term returns of our shareholders.
