If it makes you feel better, we're ahead of schedule on population decline, especially due to covid baby bust. It's quite plausible humanity will find balance with nature with a much smaller population in the long term.
This winter Brussels Airlines made 3,000 unnecessary flights just to maintain their airport spots.
We certainly have a lot of efficiency gains to make first with regards to our consumption before looking at the sheer number of people we have to feed
I totally agree. And it's important to remember that, at least in the US, the airline industry is one of the most heavily subsidized industries
We went from a western world where one salary could support a partner and 3 children, to a world where to two full-time salaries are barely enough for one child.
And where one salary is being soaked up on child-care fees much of the time...
Maybe the threat of a viable alternatibe was keeping things in check?
This is an exceptional time in history that required most of the world to be in a broken state (WW2/post-colonialism) while the people you describe benefited from this arrangement. Now that this arrangement is going away, reality is setting in.
Women in the 1800s had an average of ~3.5 children that lived past 5 (about 4.5 children total, but child mortality was much higher in the 1800s). We're presently hovering a little under 2. The 1950s did have a spike up to ~2.5, but was still lower than the 1800s.
Small families are an oddity in human history. "Support" also meant something very different back then too, though. People still might be able to support 3.5 children on a single salary if they were also willing to live by 1800s standards.
People are currently able to. There are populations in the US where some demographics do have higher averages and definitely there are individual families where people do have 4 children. It's not common, but not too rare either and they aren't "affluent". Many are the opposite of affluent.