The optimism of parenting
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Somebody I know shared this New Yorker article on The End of Children which shares "It will take a few years before we can be sure, but it’s possible that 2023 saw the world as a whole slump beneath the replacement threshold for the first time." Many of us think that it's a good thing for there to be less people, as we have heard of the dangers of overpopulation for decades and the cost humans have on the earth is undeniable.
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But I hadn't heard of how quickly the exponential trend can reverse; in South Korea, the replacement rate is 0.7, which means that each generation will be one third the size of the previous one. In two generations (50-60 years), that means South Korea will be 1/10th the size it is today.
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And the article points out that the trend actually accelerates. Once people no longer are used to having children around, parents will get pushed to the side even more. South Korea has an increasing number of "no kids" zones, which makes parenting even harder, which means even fewer people will want to do it.
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Korea is only one example of this trend. The article also shares that even in progressive places like the Scandinavian countries, where the governments encourage parenthood and support it with child care and generous parental leave, the fertility rate is declining.
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The inevitable corollary of this demographic trend is that there will be fewer young working people to support an ever-increasing number of senior citizens. This is already evident in Japan (and a growing issue in China as a consequence of the one-child policy). Kevin Kelly takes an optimistic view that AI and robots can take up the caretaking load and do the work so that humans can maintain and increase our standards of living, but I'm highly skeptical of that possibility.
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Here's a more data-driven analysis from McKinsey which concludes that "In confronting the consequences of demographic change, societies enter uncharted waters. Absent action, younger people will inherit lower economic growth and shoulder the cost of more retirees, while the traditional flow of wealth between generations erodes." And we don't know how to reverse these trends: "no country where the fertility rate has ever fallen below 1.9 has a rate above replacement today."
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It’s interesting to consider this through a cultural lens. Among my peer group, many people took pride in not having kids, either to focus on their own careers and having an impact that way, or to say they were saving the planet from climate change because adding more people to the planet load was irresponsible.
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The empowerment of women is also part of this trend. In every country where women get access to birth control or abortion and can support themselves financially rather than being dependent on a man for survival, birth rates decline. Which makes sense - having kids is draining, both financially and energetically, so if you have a choice, why accept those costs?
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But if everybody thinks that way, that leads to this global trend.
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To have kids (when you have the choice not to) is fundamentally an act of faith, a belief that investing in kids is worth the long term investment, a belief that the world will be a place worth living in for decades (who would want to have kids in a collapsed society?), and a belief that such an investment is of higher value than other things one could do with one’s time and energy. Given the uncertainty in the world, I get why people don’t do it.
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That being said, I have 3 kids (above replacement rate!). It’s exhausting and expensive, and there are days when I wonder about what else I could be accomplishing if I was still childless. Are kids a better legacy for the world than the writing or entrepreneurship I might have otherwise done? It’s hard to say. But my wife and I are fundamentally optimistic - we knew kids would be a challenge and trusted that we would figure it out. And more globally, we believe that humanity and the world will figure it out, even if that belief is being tested by the chaos of US politics right now. Choosing to have kids is the ultimate expression of optimism in that sense.
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P.S. Another factor here is patriarchy. The burden and career costs of childcare falls predominantly on women today, and if those women have a choice, they will tend to have fewer children. If dads took on more of that burden (as I try to), would that change the trend? Hard to say. And how much should we be incentivizing children? I'll admit that when I was single and expecting to remain childless, I was somewhat resentful of the accommodations made for parents as a benefit I wouldn't have access to. How do we create a sense of togetherness where children are seen as a gift and a responsibility of the community (it takes a village) rather than putting all of the burden on the parents to manage?
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And now for the normal personal development content…
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- I have a few coaching slots to fill, and I get my best clients from referrals. If you know somebody who is ready to take the next step in their leadership, please encourage them to sign up for a free coaching conversation with no obligation.
LinkedIn: These are ideas that have helped my clients (or myself), and that I share via LinkedIn to help a wider audience, and archive here.
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- Your life will change when _you_ change your life. You have limited control of your circumstances. You can't change the past, you can't change other people, you can't change a lot of the events happening around you. But you can control how you respond to those events and to what other people do. That's where You Have A Choice (the title of my book). I want you to own your choices. Choose the life you want to live. You may not have good choices or easy choices, but there are still choices. Since you can't do it all, be conscious and thoughtful about what you choose to do.
- Doing something hard and scary can put things in perspective. Trying something harder can bring a new perspective, where things that had seemed hard before now seemed much easier because there was a new comparison point. This is where a coach can help. Having a trusted voice who can identify opportunities for you to go beyond your self-perceived limits is how those limits expand.
- Do one thing at a time. My kids were off school a couple weeks ago, and I focused on being with them. I didn't try to work or do emails or read something. I didn't feel like there was something else I "should" be doing because I cleared my schedule and decided that everything else could wait. And it was a much more pleasant experience for me, and for them because I wasn't constantly distracted or resentful.
- What if efficiency isn't the goal? I appreciated Victoria Kirst's essay challenging the inevitable supremacy of AI and the assumptions embedded in its rise. Maybe AI helping us do things faster isn't the point. I want to feel alive. I want to express my own experience. And AI is a shallow simulacrum of human expression, much like social media is a shallow simulacrum of actual human connection, and fast food is a shallow simulacrum of nutritious, filling food. It's more efficient and convenient, perhaps, but it does not have the depth of experience, and I choose depth over efficiency.
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A few articles on the future we might build together:
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we are trying to just change the top layer of this very layered cake, this very layered process, this system of governance. We think that if we just win the presidency, that then we’ll be able to change the world.
And it clicked for me that actually, it’s a fractal system. And it’s layer on top of layer on top of layer. And if none of us are practicing democracy anywhere, it’s not going to just suddenly work at the top layer. [laughs] And I got it, and then I realized — so I started asking people, because I was touring a book we had written. And I started asking people, Do you practice democracy — anywhere in your life? [laughs] Not even politically, but just in your household? Who makes the decisions about the budget?
There was almost nobody who was practicing it on their block or in their community or in their organizations or other places. Everyone’s kind of dodging the actual work of democracy, small-d democracy.
So then, of course, we are in this crisis right now where we cannot figure out a way past this political impasse moment. To me, what it reveals is we haven’t been practicing democracy for such a long time anyway. We’ve really outsourced almost every aspect of governance, and the only part we’ve held onto is complaining.
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- To use Lincoln's phrasing, democracy is meant to be a "government of the people, by the people, for the people" but most of us don't want to govern - we just want to complain that we don't get what we want. We want to be children throwing a tantrum about our parents denying our whims, not adults making tradeoffs among limited resources. I appreciated Brown's thought provoking challenge to embrace democracy at every level, and more deeply appreciate those who have made an effort to change the system from within like Lexi Reese. How can I apply small-d democracy in the systems within which I participate?
- Another way to change the system is to leverage the power of AI, as Ravi Gupta suggests in his essay, AI or Die (also covered in this podcast interview) where he quotes Dario Amodei (the founder/CEO of Anthropic) as saying "In a decade, perhaps everyone on earth will be capable of accomplishing more than the most impactful person can today" because we will each have access to a "country of geniuses in a datacenter". I have been avoiding engaging with AI, partially out of fear and because of the issues with how AI has been trained (stealing and privatizing valuable content people shared on the Internet) and is biased (I read Dr. Joy Buolamwini's book Unmasking AI recently which documents and explains how AI replicates the structural biases that already exist). And yet, I was challenged at a coaching retreat over the weekend to acknowledge the perils and downsides of AI while also acknowledging its power; if those of us with pure intent avoid grasping that power, the only ones using AI will be those who want to use it for their own selfish ends. Can I train AI to do good in the world, to serve as a force for positive human growth?
- Maggie Smith's poem Good Bones expresses my mixed feelings:
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Life is short, though I keep this from my children.
Life is short, and I’ve shortened mine
in a thousand delicious, ill-advised ways,
a thousand deliciously ill-advised ways
I’ll keep from my children. The world is at least
fifty percent terrible, and that’s a conservative
estimate, though I keep this from my children.
For every bird there is a stone thrown at a bird.
For every loved child, a child broken, bagged,
sunk in a lake. Life is short and the world
is at least half terrible, and for every kind
stranger, there is one who would break you,
though I keep this from my children. I am trying
to sell them the world. Any decent realtor,
walking you through a real shithole, chirps on
about good bones: This place could be beautiful,
right? You could make this place beautiful.
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The world has terrible things happening, and what will you do to make this place beautiful?
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Thanks for reading, and see you in a couple weeks!
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At the coaching retreat in San Francisco, we walked out to the Golden Gate Bridge. Still stunning, no matter how many times I've seen it.
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This is the Too Many Trees newsletter, where I share what I’ve been writing and reading in the realm of leadership and personal development. My executive coaching practice is centered around the idea that we are more effective in moving towards our goals when we become more conscious and intentional in focusing our time and attention, and learn how our unconscious patterns are holding us back. If you know somebody that could benefit from my perspective, please forward this to them or let them know they can set up a free intro chat with me.
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