The Maldives has a fertility rate of 1.69 births per woman (2021).
I am talking to my friend Aman (not real name) who’s in a big city in Midwestern US. He’s telling me about a guy he’d met recently, who’s pursuing a doctorate in the humanities.
‘He applied to fifty different scholarships can you imagine?’ says Aman.
I can’t.
‘He went salmon fishing in Alaska to put himself through college,’ says Aman. ‘Imagine those cold winter mornings. They’d be like nights. Everything would stink of fish. And it would rain. Imagine.’
He takes a moment to reflect on what he’s said.
‘We don’t know how good we have it,’ he says. ‘We still depend on others to do things for us while we can do everything on our own now. We don’t give that power to ourselves.’
This is one ideal of the present-day person, the one who does everything, the one who sacrifices the present for an ideal future. Is this ideal beyond the reach of us who’ve become specialised and exhibit the deformations of our speciality – we cannot do things beyond that which we normally do, and we don’t even want to.
And how many of us are exhausted before we even begin the journey to attain that ideal?
What is the point?
If our biological imperative is to propagate, we as a country have become failures. There are reasons for this. It takes an act of faith as well as passion to bring a child into this world. When we no longer have faith in the world to provide for us and our offspring, what then?
Is this faith something that’s only to do with us? An issue with our worldviews and not so much a problem with the external world as such?
It seems the more affluent we are as a nation, the less fertile we become. The countries that top fertility rates (per woman) are actually in Sub-Saharan Africa with Niger, Chad, Mali, and Congo all scoring above 5.0. All have an average GDP per capita (nominal) that’s less than USD750.
Meanwhile, the top five world economies of the world – USA, China, Japan, Germany, and India – have fertility rates far below replacement levels. Yes, even India and China with their billions have issues with fertility.
Why is that? When increased productivity does not correlate with an increase in reproductivity doesn’t it mean something is very off, given that we are biological beings? Yet, as individuals in a globalised economy, we’re affected by many things, including economic shocks, fiscal vulnerability and insecurity created by novel technologies, war, disease, climate & ecological crises, among others. We are more connected to each other, have better living standards, and greater wealth than ever before. Yet none of it gives us a sense of security, at least enough to bring children into the world. In fact, we’ve become more insecure in that respect than our parents and grandparents.
The English poet Philip Larkin wrote:
Man hands on misery to man.
It deepens like a coastal shelf.
Get out as early as you can,
And don’t have any kids yourself.
Larkin might be dismissed as depressed or plain pessimistic, but he wrote in the stagnant British economy of the early 70s. The context of the struggling, deindustrialising economy, with its growing levels of unemployment provides an interesting backdrop for the poem. Here is a former global empire in decline, and one of its most important poets advocates not having children. Sounds about right?
So, then, friends. Why struggle to be productive? Why feel embarrassed when you’re unable to feel inspired to work? The system asks so much of you, that you not only do the work that needs doing, but to love your work. And what it does give you in return, money and a sense of pride in yourself perhaps, is ultimately not meaningful at all if it does not result in a faith in tomorrow, a faith in the world.
(to be continued).
Comments