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We should empower people who want children to succeed, and empower people who don't want children to never have them. What happens after that, we can solve for.
It's easy to imagine 'oh we'll just fix it if it becomes a serious problem like that' but imagine the state of society when that starts happening. All markets/consumption will be decreasing by 50% every 20 years, there will be a very upside down population pyramid where the overwhelming majority of the population will be elderly and need care, so forth and so on. Japan, for instance, hasn't even hit the worst of it yet. Their fertility plummeted about 40 years ago. So their 'final stage' is yet still about 20 years away. Today are the good times for Japan, relative to what they have ahead of them.
Given most of the Western world can't maintain a remotely stable fertility rate in the current situation, doing something that would likely quite substantially lower it even further is indeed speedrunning the extinction of Western civilization!
The state of my own personal society is my apartment costs $1000 more than it did two years ago and my food costs about 25-30% more than it did two years ago. I definitely wouldn't consider having another kid, nor would I encourage my own to have one.
So what will the systems and societies of tomorrow look like? Every child born tomorrow is basically just a lottery roll against all people having children today. And today you have vast numbers of intelligent, educated, conscientious, and far thinking individuals are simply removing themselves from the gene pool; that lottery roll for the children of tomorrow is looking less and less pleasant.
There's this irony that the sort of mindset that might consciously make the decision to not have children is the exact sort that should be raising a family 1800s style, if we want a better world. Maybe there's just something about successful urbanization that ultimately causes societies to reboot. The Roman Empire also faced a major fertility crisis in its final years.
What will end up happening is that some groups will maintain replacement fertility levels or higher, and some groups won't, but we'll trend towards an equilibrium, or flop between too little fertility and too much fertility. Either way we won't go extinct unless we explicitly kill each other.
So, for instance, many people don't realize that right now is still the good times for Japan. Here [1] is their population pyramid. It currently still looks kinda-sorta pyramidish. But in ~20 years, their population pyramid will be completely and wholly upside down. And their population, economy, and everything else will fall into complete collapse. They'll be losing about half of their population each 20 years at that point. No culture can survive this. This will be made even more true by the fact that it will likely trigger a vicious cycle where the massively skewed age ratios, collapsing economy, and other issues will further reduce fertility.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Japan#/media/F...
Our society needs to treat children as a gift and not just "thoughts and prayers" about raising them.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/may/29/baby-boomtown-...
[2] https://ifstudies.org/blog/pro-natal-policies-work-but-they-...
That's not even close to replacement. It's somewhere above 2 (often cited as 2.1, but it may be more like 2.04 in times of peace) for it to be replacement. If you could magically make fertility be that number, population increases would only come as a matter of life expectancy increase.
1 actually implies some sort of high-speed demographic implosion that will wreck an economy within a single human lifetime.
> It's easy to imagine 'oh we'll just fix it if it becomes a serious problem like that'
If it takes 30 years to recognize the problem, then one generation has already aged out of ever possibly being able to fix the problem, and the next generation is getting too old to be able to fix it (unless you can do so instantly). You've only got a few generations at a given time that can fix it.
> Japan, for instance, hasn't even hit the worst of it yet. Their fertility plummeted about 40 years ago.
There are fewer people living in Japan today, than there were a year ago. They didn't leave to go elsewhere. They died. And it will be like that every year until there are zero Japanese left. They have been functionally extinct for a few years now, though they may not know it yet.
> it even further is indeed speedrunning the extinction of Western civilization!
There haven't been distinct, compartmentalized civilizations on Earth for over a century at this point. There's only the one civilization. And, if it dies, there likely won't be another. Who had "can't be bothered to fuck" on their Fermi's Paradox bingo card?
Western civilization was always a good idea, never achieved, and they have had their day
Contentedness, satisfaction, at-peace, and so on - there endlessly more rational, logical, desirable, and attainable things to aim for. Yet everybody always says happy. Maybe this even goes some way towards explaining the plummeting mental state of the West at large. If one sets their life goal towards happiness, then they're ironically certain to end up unhappy, unsatisfied, and discontented.
Could you explain to me how this is not another name for happiness?
You are happy to receive good news, or for something to turn out well, or whatever else. But it is not a resting state. It's a liminal state. Contentedness, by contrast, is a resting state. You can awake contented, fall asleep contented, and spend your days contented. You may rarely, if ever, experience happiness - yet find yourself able to find satisfaction in life nonetheless.
By contrast a pitiful, depressed, self loathing individual, can experience happiness as much as anybody else. But he is most certainly not content nor satisfied. Perhaps a junky would be another example. A junky certainly experiences happiness when his poison enters his veins, yet he almost certainly is far from content or satisfied.
Contentedness is not happiness. And happiness is most certainly not contentedness. They're are just entirely different states of being.
Second, "happy" and "happiness" subsume numerous meanings. You're picking one, and as I and others have, at times, done with many other words, trying to restrict the world to only that meaning.
Perhaps a more similar word to your meaning would be "joy"? It seems more generally restricted to descriptions of brief periods, in common usage.
The words are simply not synonyms, or even particularly close to being synonyms.
But I find that most people, when they say that, actually mean reduction of suffering. That's easier to quantify--but still quite difficult, like most quantities in social research.
Happiness is not a metric, cannot be measured, and is one of the most important things
Despite it being unmeasurable we know that economic security increases it