Babymaking over Buttsechs

In these days where the escalating nuclear dick waving of North Korea has become daily headline news and you are increasingly finding yourself thinking that the wild-eyed lunatic from that show Doomsday Preppers, who is living in a container on some booby trapped piece of property in Mojave desert with an arsenal of guns large enough to destabilize a medium-sized banana republic is actually making some good points, it is important to remember to put things into perspective and focus on what matters:

We are not going to get exterminated by a nuclear warhead with Kim Jong-Uns fat, smiling face painted on it

It will be the Western world’s inability to have babies that will actually do the trick

No need to press that big, red button Kimzie – we got you covered!

It’s actually some pretty grim figures: In 2016, the average fertility rate in the US was 1.82, 1.58 in the EU, 1.41 in Japan, 1.25 in South Korea and an abysmal 0.82 in Singapore. Neither the current approach of the EU of trying to fill up the homes of deceased senior citizens with Syrian refugees nor the Japanese approach of trying to produce as much kinky pornography as possible are apparently bearing fruit, so what are we in the modern world to do in order not to (un)breed ourselves to extinction?

What makes us not want to have babies? It is not for a lack of wanting sex, it is just that most of the sex tend to be happening in and around orifices in the body that were not really made for baby making or with people we are not interested in forming a family with.

Economic outlook is said to be one of the main reasons why young Japanese people are not interested in settling down and creating a family. Indeed, most of us can sympathize with not wanting to be put in a situation, where you are working 80 hours a week as a shop clerk to pay for your only child’s college fund and the mortgage for a tiny house made of cardboard in some god-forsaken suburb of Tokyo and are crying while getting blown in an alleyway by a prostitute in a schoolgirl uniform because you know that you have a masters degree in chemistry and that your child will grow up with even worse job prospects than you. However, for most of human history we have been living in holes in the ground and the richest man in the tribe being the guy with two sharp rocks instead of one, and back then we had loads of children, so what gives?

One simple fact is that your life is no longer all about you. The fact that you after having children have to put your own wants and hobbies on the back burner for some eighteen years and that you are now actually completely responsible for the well-being of another creature are understandably a scary thought for many people.

Raising a child and especially more than one, is an expensive and often stressful endeavor. I would lie if I said that it is not often an immensely rewarding experience too, but when the big one have pulled the hair of the little one for the umpteenth time resulting in a prolonged screaming contest and the knocking over of several expensive and/or irreplaceable objects in the living room, the thought of ditching these little bastards in the nearby woods and go buy a new computer and messing with the newest Linux distro while sipping Scotch has crossed my mind. Back in the time of our great grandparents, work took up most of the day and the only source of recreation you had was banging your wife and getting drunk and since alcohol cost money you did not have because the turnip harvest just failed again, there was only baby making left.

Children also used to be an economic asset rather than a liability. Back in the day, children meant more hands to help on the farm or in the workshop and if you were so lucky as not to die from a lung infection at age 30, it also meant an economic safety net when you became too old to work. Today, children are an expense that takes away resources from your hobbies and realizing that the car of your dreams had to give way to the college fund of the ungrateful 13-year old living in your attic, who spends most of his day playing Minecraft while bitching about how uncool his dad is, is not everyone’s idea of a good time.

I don’t care that you wake up at 6 AM to pay for all the stuff I could not live without, I still think you’re lame!

It has reached a point where most of the people I have met that I found to be exceptional are most likely not having kids at all, meaning that the chance of them meeting equally exceptional people to create some kind of super-exceptional Einstein lookalike, is zero.

We have to reverse this trend if we are to survive as a species, but what it takes I don’t know. Maybe it will just mean asking her if she is up for some good ol’ fashioned missionary without protection over your normal inversed cross anal-spanking session, maybe there are good policies to be implemented or maybe you just need to take a good hard look at yourself in the mirror and realize that your genes are too awesome to go to waste.

I don’t know, I am just a man