Safe Sex: The World-ending Consequences

As the world's population reaches 8 billion, we're slowly running out of babies.

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So the world's human headcount has officially reached 8 billion people. Three hip hip hoorays for us all, for we are too many to issue participation trophies for everyone.

But also, you know what this means. Al Gore is gonna wake up in a sweat and threaten to release another audiobook unless we start taking the effects of overpopulation seriously. And it seems that 2 billion ago, Earth was already beeping like an elevator suffering from exceeded weight capacity — which might prompt some of you to go make an impulse buy at a vasectomy clinic, but trust me: these are rookie numbers.

8 billion people don't even begin to cover the amount of genital redundancy we're gonna need if it turns out that smartphone radiation really was overcooking our baby makers after all, putting us on a tight ticking clock to find a vegan alternative. I mean, fertility rates have been going down for 50 years; women are having half as many children, and some are so focused on their careers they might as well repurpose their wombs into walk-in closets.

Picture a Tokyo subway car during rush hour now.

You know that thing is so packed you could not move yourself an inch to the left without getting somebody pregnant — still, Japan is one of the wealthy countries that can't even spawn enough babies to replace the older population. Are we millennials so busy coming up with pronouns that we can't find a weekend to make copies of ourselves? Damn, we're gonna have to tune up next season of Love Island so it serves to breed us in enclosed captivity, like frigging panda bears.

And sure; an extinction caused by a worldwide dry spell is a long way into the future, but it's still a sad way to fade out of existence. I'd rather take whatever Vladimir Putin has on his shopping cart at Lockheed Martin's website, light it all up and wait for the nuclear mushroom as I find comfort in the fact that at least we got to choose how we vanish.

With an epic bang. Like the dinosaurs.

But deep down I get it. Babies are a huge opportunity cost. Financially speaking, they are like winning the lottery but backwards. You can't even think of having one without cancelling your subscription to a good night's sleep. And if you take into account inflation, economic recession, and the rest of the news cycle's highlight reel, even a one-child family can seem to have one too many mouths to fish Lego pieces out of. Honestly, I don't see how babies could possibly come back as the preferred lifestyle choice for couples in their 20s unless they start powdering their own butts and side-hustling on Fiverr to cover some of their expenses.

And don't get me wrong, I love a childless plane ride as much as the next coach-flying light sleeper, but at this pace, the world's population is going to flatline at around 10 billion in 50 years, and then what? We're all gonna smell of damp old book by then, and if we don't spawn enough young blood now we're gonna see the extinction of the soccer mum van — for there won't be enough kids to even fill up the seats of a Vespa moped.

Yes, babies are the leading cause of vomit stains, but they are also the taxpayers of the future. They are the reason why your 87-year-old self won't have to drag their wrinkly ass out of retirement to clock in overtime at an Amazon warehouse just to keep the economy going.

"Oh well, by then we'd have automated all jobs with robots, for sure," you think. Are you really making an argument for why we don't need more babies to be brought into this world? That is a bit on the side of fucked up if you ask me.

Don't fool yourself; we're not overpopulating ourselves to global economic and environmental meltdown; we're slowly fading out, like a pop song on the radio. People thought that, during the Covid lockdowns, couples would start lapping around all 64 positions of the Kama Sutra (67 if you bought the extended translation) and create a healthy uptick of toddlers, but they were wrong. Turns out people hoarded toilet paper but not a lot of new asses were conceived.

Everything about modern life feels hostile to kids, but we're just too busy burning out at work and having Tinder-concocted, monogamish relationships to notice.

I don't know, maybe we'll get over it. Maybe governments will wake up to the urgency of this issue and start implementing ways to encourage young people to take a look at Ikea's crib catalogue. Or maybe we'll drag it out and let it snowball into a fully-fledged dystopian crisis that will force us all into a last-chance, heroic gesture to save humanity from termination.

In that case, see you at the orgy.