ANSWERS AND RESPONSES
TABLE OF CONTENTS:
Very low fertility rates are the root cause of all social breakdowns
The deadly combination of rising sovereign debt and shrinking active population
The future is bleak, there are no solutions
Social constructs that trap us in self-destruction
Long period of peace has eroded social cohesion
The complexity of our societies makes us extremely vulnerable
Too much individual freedom and rights, not enough duties and constraints
The growing public deficit and debt level that will collapse societies
My recommendations for adapting to the collapse of our social system
The draining wealth transfer from young to old
The inability of politics in a democracy
European values and conformity imposed on EU citizens
My proposal to rescue the social welfare system
- Introduction
When I started to write this book and my closest friends found out about it, I received a lot of feedback expressing disappointment that I didn't offer solutions to the problems I described.
Let me quote Art Berman on why looking for solutions is irrelevant:
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Asking for solutions misses the point. Solutions are part of the future, and we’re notoriously bad at predicting the future. We rush to fix problems without fully understanding how they developed or the complex factors at play.
It’s the kind of thinking that treats the world like an engine, assuming it just needs a quick tune-up or a new part. What we ignore are the ripple effects, how those “fixes” cascade through the system, often creating new problems we never saw coming as we push deeper into uncertainty.
My work focuses on energy, the environment, and tipping points where solutions fail just as badly. Fossil fuels drove climate change, plastics created a pollution crisis, and nuclear energy left radioactive waste. Hydro dams, fracking, wind farms, solar, and deep-sea mining all brought unintended costs. Well-meaning human activities have inadvertently pushed the oceans and the Amazon to the brink of collapse.
All these new problems came from our relentless pursuit of progress, with little thought given to the unintended consequences along the way.
The problem is our human-centered perspective, which blinds us to the reality that we’re not separate from the planet but deeply connected to and dependent on it for survival and prosperity. We treat the Earth as a resource to exploit, ignoring that its health is inseparable from our own. This disconnect fuels short-term thinking and decisions that erode the very systems we rely on to live.
Let’s start learning to adopt an earth-centered perspective.
I’ve said many times that the scale of energy consumption lies at the heart of the human predicament. It’s woven into every facet of the challenges I write about. While reducing energy use, fossil fuels and renewables, isn’t a solution in itself, any honest assessment of our situation must acknowledge it as part of the pathway forward for humanity and the planet.
The response I hear most often, and one I can’t disagree with, is: “That will never happen.” Fair enough. But if we’re unwilling to even consider a key piece of the puzzle, how serious are we about the solution?
Or is this really about change, feeling like we’re doing something, without actually facing the hard truths? We can’t cherry-pick the parts of a solution we like and ignore the rest, then expect it to work.
So, in response to your calls for solutions, I ask: Do you truly want them, or are you just looking for a simple answer to avoid the complexity of the problems we face?
I suggest putting everything back on the table for discussion, including renewables. They’re just another way to burn through more energy while convincing ourselves we’re solving the problem.
Can we start trying to see the world through an earth-centered lens? It’s the shift that I think must happen before anything else. Instead of rushing to fix problems and slap on solutions, let’s pause and think about how our actions ripple out to affect everyone and everything around us.
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- Very low fertility rates are the root cause of all social breakdowns
Demography is the real reason for all societal problems, aside from climate change. Most people are ignorant and misinformed, and are unaware of the real root cause behind societal issues: The lack of children (fewer than two children per woman) over the past 50 years. Immigration, declining quality of healthcare services, skyrocketing housing and rental prices in cities, social inequalities, public debt, inflation, and a decline in productivity are all consequences of the low fertility rate bellow replacement rates since 1970s. Even overconsumption and climate change can be linked to childless adults with abundance of time and resources, so that the lack of children is a reason (not a solution) to climate change. Yet people somehow prefer to blame something else than the demography for societal problems. People avoid the topic of low fertility when searching for root cause and solutions of societal issues.
Over the last two decades, low-wage workers have lost purchasing power and living standards, and are struggling to make ends meet. They will blame politicians and the rich for their misery. Pensioners are now expected to work until they are 70, whereas only three decades ago, the retirement age was 60. Everyone is getting nostalgic for a better past and turning to the far right or far left, claiming that they want to return to the good old days. People will claim that we lack true leaders nowadays. Everyone blames politicians, billionaires or company CEOs for the decline in living standards, but the truth is much simpler and a taboo that nobody dares to address in public: The lack of children over the last 40 years means that there are fewer young adults aged 20–40 to work and pay taxes into the system, while the elderly are living longer and better than ever, with an average life expectancy of 83 years. The drop in fertility rates to well below 2 for 50 years explains most societal problems: Stagnant economy, deindustrialisation, immigration, insecurity, lack of health care staff, long waiting times for doctors, lack of manpower in the education system, reduced purchasing power, inflation and deepening inequalities. Due to the lack of a young workforce, governments have had to increase immigration levels over the last 20 years. This has been necessary to keep our social system going for a little while longer, but it has also created other issues, such as difficulties with integration, a loss of national identity among locals, and an overall increase in insecurity. Mass immigration is both a problem and a solution of the low fertility rates that we have experienced for over 40 years.
People falsely believe that they can have fewer or no children and that life will go on as usual. There must be some young workers somewhere and other people having children. The issue is that we not only lack children today, but we also lacked them 30 years ago, meaning that we actually lack adults under 40 today. The lack of a young labour force, consumers and taxpayers is the major reason for the decline in society, public services, inequalities, public debt and unaffordable housing. Nobody in their 30s or 40s believes that if they don't have children, they are responsible for the budget deficit, overwhelmed health services, high taxes or slow economic growth. People simply believe that they can choose the life they want, with or without children, and that it has no impact on society. Other people will work the jobs and have children. There is immigration in any case. But if people could give birth to 30-year-olds instead of babies, and if they could produce 30-year-olds without the 20 years of feeding, breeding and education, maybe they would understand how impactful their decision to have fewer than two children is. The reality is that there is a drastic shortage of workers aged 20 to 45, and an abundance of pensioners who are living comfortably until the age of 83 on a social system that relies on workers aged 20 to 40 to support them. This imbalance is the real root cause of all our societal troubles, and it will only get worse over the next 30 years. We are in the final decade of prosperity or the first decade of social breakdown, civil unrest, reduced public services and widespread protests.
Nobody dares to speak up about the low fertility rates below replacement level that have been seen over the last 50 years. People fear being marginalised and stigmatised as fascists, machists, patriarchs and old-school conservatives who only want priviledged men at work and women at home, without an education or a job, taking care of the household and raising three or four children. If someone speaks up in public about the demographic collapse, their career and reputation are threatened. Over the last 60 years, women have gained considerable influence and positions of power in society, the media, politics, education, justice and liberalism, so they would denigrate any comment about having too few children. They would treat anyone who claims that we have too few babies as if they were claiming that white people are the superior race. They have made the topic of fertility as taboo as racism or Nazism. The discussion surrounding a reduced allocation of public funds, particularly in the context of healthcare and pensions, to individuals with fewer or no children, or the prioritisation of job or housing opportunities for those with children, is often portrayed as an attack on women's freedom of choice regarding their bodies. The reality is that our collective laissez-faire attitude and freedom of choice is societal and human suicide, affecting not only women, but also men and everyone at any age in our societies. The consequences are already being felt in the 2020s and will be much worse over the next three decades.
People will complain that we no longer have strong political leaders, and that our leaders are dumb and selfish, without a great vision. Some will claim that there is too much immigration. Others will blame Putin, Trump, the Chinese or social media. Everyone will blame someone for the slow loss of prosperity in our society. Many will be nostalgic for the past and the 'good old times' of the 1990s and 2000s. They will either vote far right or far left in the hope of reviving our past glory, or they will emigrate to Dubai, Singapore or Switzerland. The reality is that no politician, leader or billionaire is responsible for our societal decline. The lack of children over the past 50 years, coupled with unpunished or non-penalised behaviour, is the root cause of all our societal troubles. Having fewer than two children per woman over 40 years will cause societal breakdown, mass poverty, high inflation, supply chain disruption, civilisational collapse, social unrest, civil protests and divisions, and an overall loss of prosperity, the end of our democracy and our social welfare system.
There is nothing we can do now; it is too late to steer the ship. Children do not fall from the sky or grow on trees, and neither do young workers. We should have enforced a pro-natalist society and modified the rules of the social system in the 1980s and 1990s when the fertility rate started to fall below two. However, after 50 years of inaction, which many celebrated as freedom and liberation to have the progress and ability to choose not to have children without facing consequences, there is nothing we can do to avoid social breakdown. The only option is to allow pensioners to suffer poverty in order to give under-40s the chance to have more children and enjoy a decent life, allowing society to prosper again by 2060 and beyond. Even then, the downfall of society is inevitable over the next 3 decades.
People are blind, misinformed and lied to. They are unaware of what is happening in society caused by the low fertility rate. It is too pleasant and comfortable to have a generous welfare system and a wide range of life choices. Our cultural reluctance to debate the birth rate in favour of discussing climate change, immigration, taxation and inequalities has caused us to lose sight of the real root cause. Our utopian and idealistic belief in a world free of choices and free of long-term consequences has made people blind to the consequences of their actions or rather inaction in terms of fertility. Our unprecedented demographic of an ageing population, high life expectancy, a large number of inactive elderly people and a small number of young workers is unprecedented. We are in uncharted territory and there is no existing model for this scenario, our reality. This issue is not only present in France, Italy, South Korea and Japan, but across the world, apart from the Middle East and sub-Saharan Africa, albeit at different stages of development. No industrialised country will escape this issue. Social collapse is inevitable over the next 30 years, worsening year on year, regardless of what we do individually or collectively, who leads the country or what political decisions are made. This is the simple, tragic reality. I wish it were otherwise; I wish that 40-year-old, childless, middle-class citizens of industrialised countries could continue to work and earn well, and receive healthcare and pensions in the future. But it won't happen. Enjoy the best of our society now while it lasts. People have no idea about the disaster, poverty and social unrest that is about to happen over the next 30 years.
- Why is humanity in crisis?
Humanity and the world are in crisis because of a fundamental psychological and behavioural trait: We always want more comfort, all the time. We want more comfort in terms of belonging, wealth, free time, house size, food quality, etc... We want more comfort than our peers and want more comfort over time. This means overshoot in consumption by using the cheapest and most abundant energy source we have found: fossil fuels. We want more comfort, even if it causes damage elsewhere. More comfort, even if it means destroying and polluting the planet. More comfort for me, even if it causes troubles to others. More comfort now, even if it means more unpleasant inconveniences in the future. Worst of all, more comfort for me even if it means not passing on my genes to the next generation.
Attempting to address economic, financial, environmental or demographic issues goes against our universal human nature. It does not work. Attempting to fix society or the planet merely treats the symptoms, but the real root cause is unfixable. We won't change human nature. As technology improves, fossil fuel usage, energy overall and material footprint have increased, the desire to maintain our great social welfare has led to more debt, and the impact of human behaviour on a finite planet has increased steadily over time, with fertility rates declining far below replacement level in a society and species that depends on reproduction for survival. Fifty years of excessive human comfort growth on steroids has led us to this point: Somewhere else is now everywhere; environmental damage is now starting to affect our daily lives; other people are now everybody; the future is now the present; and the missing babies are now the missing workforce.
I wish we could do something to stop climate change, but unfortunately, we can't. It is inevitable. The media, politicians and celebrities will spread the false belief that we have technical solutions and that we will reach net zero soon. But this is just lies and propaganda to keep people appeased and under control, to avoid anarchy and mass rebellion, to keep people working, paying tax and behaving in a good manner, and to avoid generalised depression and anxiety. That's the unfortunate reality.
I wish we could stop growing our national debt, or that it could grow forever without consequences, but it won't. Growing deficits and debt mean exponential money printing over time, and currency devaluation will accelerate faster than salaries. High, sustained inflation and a severe loss of purchasing power are inevitable in the coming decades, leading to social unrest and civil wars.
I wish the world could be a better place with fewer children and a smaller global population, but it won't be. A world with fewer young adults can only maintain its standard of living by having fewer elderly people, but we cannot abandon retirees completely. It is simply impossible to shrink the working population, maintain or grow the elderly population and maintain our general standards of living. These goals are incompatible and something will have to give. Our standards of living will decrease significantly year on year and decade after decade from now on, and some people will suffer more than others.
- The deadly combination of rising sovereign debt and shrinking active population
Government debt is used to please and appease citizens, to secure election and re-election, to avoid mass protest and social unrest, to compensate for a banking crisis or a pandemic, to support both the low-wage workforce and entrepreneurs, to stimulate the economy, and to honour our pension commitments. Issuing public debt is like a miracle that cures all ailments. However, the magic of borrowing comes with a temptation. If a country is deemed creditworthy enough to cover its existing debts, it can borrow more. Manageable debts mean you can issue more debt. It is therefore all too easy for debt to grow.
If this continues for too long, or if economic growth starts to slow down, governments face pushback in the form of fewer lenders being interested or willing to lend to them, and lenders requesting higher interest rates. The bond markets that meet their debt needs start to charge higher rates. Investors demand higher rates because they sense danger. New borrowing becomes more difficult, as does rolling over old debts. If governments do not then tighten their belts, the country’s all-important creditworthiness can easily spiral out of control. Ultimately, there is little political appetite for austerity measures.
You might hope that productivity growth powered by artificial intelligence (AI) would relieve the state of difficult budget choices. But that would be wishful thinking. If AI were to have a miraculous effect on growth, this would push up interest rates, making legacy debts more expensive to service. Meanwhile, AI and robots do not consume or pay taxes to offset the effects of demographic contraction and increased social welfare spending.
When a business is about to go bankrupt, banks can step in to rescue it if it is engaged in a critical activity. When private banks failed in 2008 due to excessive credit and loan overleveraging, governments and central banks stepped in to rescue the banks by injecting liquidity. But when governments are in excessive debt and a shrinking active population starts to shrink the economy, there will be no one above to rescue them. They will try to fix the situation by printing more money to guarantee nominal obligations such as debt and pensions, which will lead to a high inflation cycle. This will make everyone outside the top 5% of the wealthiest population lose purchasing power, resulting in more poverty, inequality and discontent, and less prosperity. Riots and authoritarian regimes are also likely to follow. In our modern neoliberal system, with an ageing population, interconnected global supply chains, high levels of debt that the economy can no longer service and high social welfare expectations, there is no other way out.
Historically, such debt crises have mostly been a problem for poorer countries. Yet today, the majority of the biggest and richest countries are falling into the dangerous pattern of borrowing ever more. Budget deficits are piling up, sovereign debts have reached vertiginous heights, and bond markets are showing signs of strain. Gross public debt as a percentage of GDP in advanced economies is approaching 110%, which is close to an all-time high. Since 2022, interest rates have risen — initiated by central bankers to control inflation caused in part by government spending sprees — making debts far more burdensome. Nevertheless, governments in wealthy nations continue to borrow. In 2025, the average deficit in advanced economies will exceed 4% of GDP. In the USA, this figure is over 6% of GDP, despite 2024 and 2025 being relatively stable years without a pandemic, major war, national emergency, natural catastrophe or financial crisis. See figure 1 below for the rise in the debt-to-GDP ratio of the top advanced economies since 1980 and the spending cuts that the G7 countries would need to make to reduce and stabilise the budget deficit.
Figure 1: Debt-to-GDP evolution and austerity required now
The major difference between the 1820s, 1945 and the 2020s is that our active population has grown tremendously over the last 250 years, boosting production and consumption, and making it possible to service past debt and achieve budget surpluses in order to reduce our level of debt when needed. However, barring mass immigration, the active population is shrinking now and will shrink faster in the coming decades, which makes debt — a promise of future payment through future production of goods and services— impossible to sustain.
How long can governments continue to live beyond their means? France, the UK, Japan and the USA are recent examples of governments that experienced turmoil due to budget deficits in 2025, but essentially all advanced economies will face the reality of sovereign debt and budget deficits sooner rather than later. There are two painful pressure points: Firstly, citizens of advanced economies have become accustomed to state benefits and subsidies for too long, taking public debt spending for granted, while governments have been living beyond their means since the end of the budget discipline era in the 1980s in order to buy popularity and votes. On the other hand, the real economy and tax revenue will slow down in the coming decades simply because of our shrinking workforce, consumer base and taxpayer pool. Our societies are stuck between falling revenue and an addiction to spending 'free' money. If history is any guide, the trajectory of debt will worsen considerably at an exponential pace, and the real trouble are coming faster than any of us are projecting today.
Therefore, it is increasingly likely that governments will resort to inflation and financial repression to reduce the real value of their debts, as they did in the decades after the Second World War. Central banks have the protocol in place for such a strategy, given their large footprint in bond markets. Lasting inflation will cause a prolonged upheaval of fortunes and could very much destroy the middle class, the glue that holds democracies together, and disrupt the social contract. The combination of continuous budget deficits and rising sovereign debt, together with the demographic challenge of an ageing population and a shrinking labour force, will trigger the collapse of the entire world order, as all nations are interconnected in terms of supply chains and trades. The painful collapse of our thermo-industrial civilisation, which began at the end of the 18th century, is bound to happen within the next few decades.
- The future is bleak, there are no solutions
Whether you look at it from the perspective of climate change, national debt, demographics or over-dependence on a finite amount of fossil fuels, all scenarios lead to a bleak future, poverty, suffering and the brutal collapse of modern industrialised civilisation. Nothing can stop the inevitable crisis of humanity, there are no good solutions and we will have to face the crisis in the next 10 to 50 years. Not in a hypothetical future in the year 2500, but in an immediate future that young adults of today will experience and that our children will definitely face and experience.
People hate the idea that we are passive observers, destined to suffer a fate that is set in stone. We prefer to believe that we have the power to shape our own destiny. People want to be in control and love to believe that there is a solution, that we can change our collective destiny and act to create a better future for our civilisation and humanity. If you told an 18-year-old that they were going to study this subject, live in this city, have this job, marry this person and have kids at this age, they would not believe it and would hate the idea of a scripted life. They would believe that they are fully in control of their destiny and can alter the course of their life at any time. While this is partly or mostly true at an individual level, at a collective level our destiny is set in stone:
- Fossil fuels are the cheapest and most energy-dense source of fuel, and because humans like convenience and always want more over time, we will continue to burn more and more fossil fuels, making climate change inevitable. Environmental pollution and climate change are our destiny.
- As long as our societies are based on the freedom to choose whether or not to have children without facing any consequences for our reproductive choices, individual life being much more convenient without children than with two or more children, we will continue to have fewer and fewer children in our industrial world. After 50 years of massive emancipation and freedom of choice, a return to traditional gender roles and the idea of individual sacrifice for life accomplishment is utterly unthinkable and implausible. This will lead to a demographic and economic collapse, especially affecting public finance and the social welfare state. A dramatic reduction in social welfare (public health services and pensions) is our destiny due to the demographic collapse.
- With the old-age dependency ratio set to worsen dramatically over the next 50 years and the working-age population shrinking, all industrialised countries are in a public debt trap with no easy way out. We will continue to experience fiscal deficits and increasing public debt year after year. This will lead to high inflation and a loss of purchasing power, resulting in social protests, civil wars and authoritarian regimes with increased population control and surveillance worldwide. Inflation, loss of purchasing power and living standards, and state control are inevitable.
The world is the way it is today because it is exactly what the consensus of humanity wants: As many machines as possible to do our physical work for us, all powered by fossil fuels. As many computers, cell phones and data centers as possible to assist us in digital ways of creation and comunication. More extraction and more consumption to satisfy our instinctive need for more and better. No children, because adult life is better without them. Politicians who say what people want to hear instead of what they need to hear, just to get elected. Money, a proxy for work and a medium of exchange for goods and services, is now pursued for the sake of money rather than for added value or service created. More comfort and better living standards, even at the expense of others, of our future and of the planet.
That's the life we want. That's who we are as human beings. Most of the problems of the world mentioned in this book have no solution because they are the symptom of voluntary actions that people want, that we will still want in 10 or 50 years. If you accept human nature, human psychology and understand human behaviour, then all results, symptoms and side effects or ripple effetcs are normal, intentional and voluntary. Fighting the problems is fighting human nature. This will not happen unless the whole of humanity is faced with a catastrophic event, which is what is likely to happen with the coming population collapse.
I believe that radically changing our society by voluntarily reducing the consumption of fossil fuels, as well as radically changing our economy by immediately stopping all government budget deficits, would cause dramatic suffering and pain for the majority of the population and lead to enormous poverty and social unrest, so that burning more fossil fuels and going deeper into public debt every year is the less bad option.
A sustained economic degrowth in GDP would cause far more pain and suffering than continuing to grow at 3% globally and borrowing more money every year in the industrialised world, so continuing to grow our economies is the less painful option. Stopping government budget deficits would severely degrade our social systems, health care and infrastructure, so the status quo of continuing to issue debt is the less painful option for governments.
Also, I believe that not having children as a young adult living in a Western European city offers the best quality of life personally, prodiving many options and freedom of choices, while having children is very constraining. That's why we see fertility levels falling year after year. Adults enjoy their present self-centred lives full of options, neglecting the future and the basic animal instinct within them to reproduce and pass on their genes, knowledge and wealth.
Everything happens for a reason. The situation we are experiencing is the least painful of all, that's why we are here now. Any attempt to solve any of the 4 crises (fossil fuel consumption, national debt, fertility rate, environmental damages) would make the situation drastically worse for our standard of living in the short term, and that's why the consensus of the last 200 years has brought us to where we are now.
We are not biologically and neurologically programmed to live in such comfort, without imminent danger, to have abundant access to food and water, to have such an easy life, to have so much free time and entertainments options, to have such easy and unlimited access to quick dopamine rewards and to have such an opulent society. Our life is supposed to be difficult and dangerous so that we stay sharp, focused, fit, to cherish the simple things we have, to appreciate the good times when all our basic needs for food, shelter and reproduction are met. We are now surrounded by plenty of distractions that are destroying the planet, capturing all our attention and taking us away from our basic need to reproduce and pass on to the next generations.
If there was a solution to the civilizational threats (climate change, debt, alternative to fossil fuels, low fertility rate) without negative effects, without misery, without civil war, believe me, the solutions would have been found and applied long ago. The people themselves, or the governments, would implement these solutions, but if nothing happens, it's because there is no better solution. That's why society is the way it is and the world is the way it is.
We are caught in an avalanche, we are sliding down, there is no stopping now, and the further we slide down the bigger the avalanche gets. We are in a situation like a plane without a pilot, or a ship without a captain and sailors.
We are all doomed. The 2020s are the last decade of prosperity before things take a turn for the worst.
I would like to live in a world where my son will live in a better world in 20 years, but that's absolutely impossible. With a scientific background and an analytical mind, I would like to have solutions, as I have for every scientific problem in life. But there are no solutions to this problem of the Anthropocene. It is sad for my son and kind of depressing for me, but it is also enlightening, awe-inspiring and brings more spirituality into my life, my behaviour and my thoughts. There are no solutions to fix our world, and that's why I decided to write this book and wish to spread the word, not to point finger or suggest what we should do, but simply to draw attention to the collapse of our society that is about to happen. I do have some solutions, but they will never be implemented for various reasons.
We can't go on growing forever on a finite planet, destroying ecosystems, harvesting the earth's capacity faster than it can regenerate, and suffering more and more from natural disasters and climate change. We cannot stop using fossil fuels because our entire civilisation is based on them, everything around us exists because of them. So somehow we have to reduce, find a middle ground.
Planning for degrowth, for people to voluntarily reduce their consumption, is not going to happen because of the natural human behaviour and psychological traits of laziness, accumulation and always wanting more, and also because of the financial pressure and the national debt pressure that forces us to keep growing the economy.
So what will happen is a suffered degrowth, a reduction imposed by nature. It will take the form of supply chain disruptions, high inflation, civil wars, declining social services, poverty, declining quality of public services, and loss of purchasing power.
Economic growth, pension security for all, the maintenance of a social welfare system with rapidly growing demands: All these promises are unsustainable without population growth, or at least population renewal.
If you were to group the expectations of the voters, regardless of political party, you would basically get these demands:
Lower immigration, more economic growth, stable prices, more affordable housing, protect the environment, get to net-zero carbon, high employment rate, everyone gets a solid welfare system and decent pensions, better education, more freedom of choice.
All these policies do not fit together. You can't have them all. Something has to give. You either walk slowly or run fast, drink expresso or cappuccino, go out for a drink or stay at home. You can't have both worlds, which are contradictory. And because humanity in the Western world has chosen to have fewer children over the last 40 years, our destiny is already set in stone: Over the next three decades, because of a declining working population, less pensions, less welfare, less economic growth, high employment rates. By 2050 and beyond, because of a declining total population: less consumption, less carbon emissions, less total fossil fuel consumption, more affordable housing.
There are basic human instincts and physical needs that will not change over time, but there are arbitrary rules of society that we could potentially tweak and change.
Lions and cheetahs hunt and eat gazelles because they need food for energy, it just so happens that fossil fuels are the cheapest, most dense and powerful, transportable and storable source of energy for humans, so we will continue to use fossil fuels. Count on it, it is a given.
Animals poo, but they do not live, sleep or eat where they poo. The same goes for humans, except that our poo (carbon emissions and chemical waste) is so massive, toxic and polluting that it affects not just the local area, but the entire ecosystem of the Earth. Since we will continue to burn fossil fuels and use chemicals for our consumption habits and convenience, we will continue to pollute the environment. This is also a given, and fighting climate change is unfortunately a waste of time.
Then there is all our human psychology, our intrasect traits of "me now", always wanting more, accumulating, not being satisfied, envying others, etc. .... The capitalist system will not change, even if we returned to dictatorship or monarchy, our psychology and behaviour will lead us to consume more. Degrowth will not happen by choice, that is a given.
Then you have the great society we have built, and the freedom to choose the life you want, the freedom to choose to have children or not, without consequences to our ability to receive all the benefits of society: Accessible food in the shops, doctors, hospitals, roads and houses, pensions, etc. Even if you do not have children who will eventually work and contribute to society, people are entitled to these benefits of society. This leads to the natural phenomenon that most of us choose not to "suffer" the burden of raising children, but to enjoy all the great things of modern life provided by other people's children. But what happens when other people do not have children neither? The result is a society in which there are simply not enough young adults to work, provide goods and services, pay taxes and consume. This leads to a socio-economic tragedy.
As long as childless adults are not penalised and given all the social welfare priviledges while they do not contributing to the social system in the long term by not making babies and not raising young adults into this world, people will keep having fewer and fewer children. They will enjoy the best of modern life while avoiding the burden of raising children. If you take it for granted that people should be free to choose whether or not to have children, and that women should not be forced to bear babies, then we must expect and accept a drastic reduction in public services over the coming decades, as fewer and fewer new young workers compensate for the growing number of pensioners.
The only thing we can really change, that is not embedded in our human traits, psychology or instincts, are the rules and the policies of the social system. They are all arbitrary. Retirement at 65 is as arbitrary as retirement at 75 or 55. Same with the health care system and the tax rate, it is arbitrary, decided by the government, but it can be changed at any time. The government has the ability to change overnight how much it taxes people, companies and goods. It is arbitrary to have 20% VAT on goods. It could be 10% or 30%. Nothing is set in stone on the policy side. And that's our only leverage, our only way to get meaningful change. All other changes are a waste of time because they go against the universal laws of men and women.
Changing the pension and health care system is our only way through the coming decades of depopulation of the workforce. We need drastic changes to alleviate the suffering of the workers, because these workers provide for the dependents (pensioners and children), these workers hold the society together, and it is these young workers who make children to supply the society in the future. That's why we need to reduce the burden on the 20-45 year old cohort, even if it means increasing the burden and suffering of the over 60 years old cohort. Don't get me wrong, drastic policy changes will only spread the pain and help some, but overall there are no good solutions and we will all suffer massively from a reduced workforce. My proposals are personal ideas for policy changes that could make our system fairer and more sustainable in the long term, especially to encourage young adults to have more babies.
- Social constructs that trap us in self-destruction
People don't take reality as it is. We interpret and socially construct it, and then use our confirmation bias to ignore or dismiss any evidence that our reasoning might be wrong.
The energy transition, renewable energy, electric vehicles, dematerialised services, decoupling economic growth from fossil fuels, even scientific studies: Politicians and the media create false narratives, usually claiming that some kind of progress or technology is good for the future, and people tend to believe it because it feels comfortable and reassuring to have strong beliefs and ideologies pointing to a positive outcome. The more you hear something, the more it becomes embedded in your brain as the ultimate truth. That's how we came to stop questioning our habits, our way of life, our principles, our economy, our desires, because they are part of the assumptions, no longer debatable or arguable.
Our society has pushed for more individual responsibility and less collective or societal responsibility. You must go to university, shall have a great career, be the best of yourself, develop your skills, make a lot of money and consume a lot of stuff, travel a lot. These are all individual goals. But unfortunately, there is no social or collective imperative to make our planet and our civilisation sustainable. That's what's missing: strong, difficult, painful, restrictive policies that deprive individuals of some of their infinite freedom and abundance, that deliberately deprive individuals of selfish pleasures and desires, for the greater good of the commons, to save the future of the planet and humanity.
Climate change, fertility rates, the use of "green" energies... we want to pretend that people and individuals should change and make wise choices, but the whole system in which we live does not really give us a choice: you cannot buy food without packaging, most clothes are made of polyesters in a developping country in Asia, you cannot walk 20 km to go to work, you have to go by car or public transport. You cannot grow your own food if you live in a big city, surrounded by concrete and bitumen, in an eight-storey housing block. You have to use a smartphone to stay in touch with people and to pay anything, you have to sort your waste, etc. We are pressured and forced to behave in the right way, but we have no real choice to make the planet and humanity sustainable. The solutions, if any, will have to be collective. And since it will not happen voluntarily due to its extreme unpopularity, it will have to be imposed on all of us. If you let humans play the game of the wolves, everyone and every kind of life on earth will be eaten alive.
People assume that the future will be similar to the present day, only slightly better or worse. In reality, past civilisations rise slowly over decades and centuries, but fall quickly over a few years or decades. This happened with the Incas, the Roman Empire, the Egyptians, as well as with the fall of the Soviet Union.
People are emotionally biased because they grew up in a growing and booming economy; it is the only thing they have experienced in their lives, so it is the only vision of the future they can imagine. Ask anyone over 100 years old who experienced the Second World War, and they can fairly easily imagine a future involving world war, mass poverty, supply chain shortages, and a drastic simplification of living standards. But ask anyone under 70 years old and they will only know better living standards decade after decade.
Nowadays, people have high values and morals. When they set out to prove a hypothesis, they seek a conclusion that pleases and fits their narrative. When a story fits your narrative, you become caught up in confirmation bias and refuse to see the physical and statistical facts that prove it is nonsense, just so that we can maintain our moral and ethical identity. This leads to a society based on utopia and unrealistic expectations and demands, which ultimately results in the collapse of the social model.
Some examples of non-refutable assumptions and utopian religious beliefs that have been proven wrong in practice:
<< Europe has had high living standards for centuries, so it will continue to be a great place to live.
Democracy is great and will be here forever because nobody wants another political system.
Climate change is really bad, so we need to implement intermittent renewable energies and heavily tax carbon.
If you have worked and contributed to the public pension system for 45 years, you deserve a pension adjusted to the minimum or average salary.
Having fewer children is good for women and the environment; it's positive that fertility rates are declining worldwide.
Due to Russia's invasion of Ukraine, we must stop all commercial deals with Russia and impose sanctions.
We will electrify the whole world and won't need fossil fuels anymore. It is only big oil lobbyists who are blocking the energy transition. >>
It is time to accept the blatant and painful truth, reset our priorities and expectations, stop basing our lives on failed assumptions and prepare for the drastic societal changes ahead. This is not surrender. It’s an opportunity to build a life that fits the world we actually have. One with a declining active population, strategic geopolitical positioning of resources, and alliances and friendshoring replacing globalisation, not to mention massive public debt everywhere.
- Long period of peace has eroded social cohesion
For most of the industrialised world, we have lived largely peacefully for the past 80 years. The sad reality is that in a given population, if there is no designated consensus enemy from the outside on which the vast majority of people agree, then the enemy comes from within and social cohesion slowly erodes and people divide and polarise themselves from each other.
In times of war, as in WW1 and WW2, people come together under a common goal and purpose, there is a togetherness, a sense of national pride and belonging that unites and binds all inhabitants and everyone rallies to fight the external enemy. We have had such a long and peaceful period since 1945, without a common enemy, and so naturally the population tends to divide, unity disappears, individualism grows and social cohesion erodes: people tend to polarise and segregate into different groups according to their beliefs, their migratory background, their religion or their political views. That's why most advanced countries are now divided politically and socially, with those on the far right and those on the far left, those who want more migration and those who want less, and so on.
Identifying an external enemy that creates a consensus is great for politicians and great to unify the population. Pearl Harbor, World Trade Center attacks of 9/11 and the cold war of 1950s to 1980s all were good motivations to unify the american population against ennemies. When the Covid-19 pandemic appeared in 2020, the threat of a dangerous virus gave the governments reason and motivation to promote a state of emergency and instigate lockdowns and mandatory vaccinations. Whether you agree with the policy or not, whether it was scientifically effective or not, people tend to agree on the measures and apply the new policy, and it unites people under the same fight against the virus.
Another example is the last two wars in Gaza and Eastern Ukraine, which were used very differently by the media and politicians: Since there are very few Russians living in Europe, we could call Russia Europe's enemy to create the threat of a continental war, sanctions, massive government debt, huge investments in defence and make the high cost of energy in Europe an easier pill to swallow. But when Israel attacked and devastated Gaza, because there are huge communities of both Jews and Arabs all over Europe, there would be no popular consensus to name one side as the enemy, and so the whole war was hushed up, no clear position was taken by our leaders, and the notion of 'threat' was not given too much media attention, and no one side was given the role of good or bad. Simply because this war does not help the media and politicians to rally the people, because there is no consensus among the citizens of Europe due to the large number of communities defending each side of the conflict. But to be fair, all wars are disasters, all wars are a failure of diplomacy, all wars should be avoided. And when war breaks out, both points of view are relevant, and each side has a valid reason to attack the other. If a consensus view is possible, the war is used by other nations to strengthen the unity of the people, and if no consensus is found, attention is diverted and no leader dares to say which side to support.
Historically, with some rare exceptions, a civilisation or society has been defined as a community that shares the same blood, god and enemy. While a mixed libertarian cosmopolitan society is great in times of growth and prosperity, when times get tough, the population divides into groups based on ethnicity, political ideology or vision. This results in a lack of unity and social cohesion within the population, as people from different backgrounds have different opinions and interests. When tough times arrive, every minority group fights for its own interests to the detriment of other groups within the same nation or population.
The last 80 years of prosperity around the world, but especially in Europe, has led to more individualism, positive egoism (seeking one's own achievement and fulfilment), but it has also massively divided the population into groups with opposing views, increasing the risk of civil war. And when the ripple effects of our demography kick in over the next 3 decades, it will ignite a fire and anger among people, because social cohesion is not there in the first place.
If there is no social cohesion, people are less likely to put in the effort, pay more taxes or work more for the good of the society and people are less likely to accept restrictions, tolerate lower quality of public services or lower purchasing power. Why would you make sacrifices and put in effort and self-restrictions for the benefit of a society whose other members you don't identify with? A divided society is not willing to go the extra mile for the good of the nation if people don't see the whole nation as their brothers and sisters. With an ageing population and a shrinking workforce trend starting in the 2020s, massive immigration is the only answer, but it will test the social cohesion and unity of nations that is already shaky and crumbling.
- Civilisation collapse
- The complexity of our societies makes us extremely vulnerable
Everything is interconnected in our modern world. The interdependence between countries, suppliers and materials is so vast and complex that it makes the entire world highly efficient but extremely vulnerable, unprepared for any major disruption. The world is a bit like an aeroplane: ultra-complex, with 1000 suppliers, tier-X suppliers of other suppliers, no one knows all the suppliers, no one really knows exactly how an aeroplane flies, each knowledgeable person relies on the knowledge of another person. But if one part in a million is missing, the plane won't fly. If the toilets are out of order during a flight, it is an emergency landing for safety reasons.
The internet, your telephone, the drinking water network, the electricity grid, your car... Many people have no idea that it takes dozens of countries, 50 materials, globalisation and world cooperation, oil, gas, coal, copper, aluminium, ciment, steel, for all this to exist. Our society is ultra-complex and ultra-globalised, which makes it ultra-vulnerable.
No one fully understands climate change, the effects of tipping points, the effects of coral reef die-offs due to temperature and acidification, or the effects of melting permafrost, or the effects of melting Arctic ice on the AMOC, or on birds and insects in Europe. They are all interlinked and cause an extremely complex chain of events.
No one really understands the global economy, why a subsidy in Vietnam can lead to job cuts in Germany, what tariffs in the US could mean for the Australian mining industry. It is all interconnected and extremely complex.
No one really understands the power of AI, its impact on jobs and productivity, its consequences on the broader internet, its implications on education, the future of business decision making, or the future of media and social media.
We like to think that we have a technical solution to every problem, but we are really looking at silos, not looking at the problem in its context.
Yes, solar panels produce carbon-free electricity, but they require lots of materials, mining and chemical processing.
Yes, not having children is great for young adults and for the planet, but what about 30 years from now when there is no one to work and care for the elderly?
Yes, the Covid-19 lockdowns were a good way to slow the spread of the virus and relieve hospitals, but what about the long-term psychological and social effects on teenagers locked up in loneliness for almost 2 years?
Yes, public investment in infrastructure, defence and other public services is good, but who is going to build or maintain that infrastructure if there are fewer and fewer young adults to do the work, and fewer and fewer workers overall to service the debt?
The complexity of our societies, which we do not fully take into account in our decisions because we do not understand the full implications, makes every solution a pain somewhere else, every fix a burden somewhere else. There are really no solutions to the 4 major threats, because every solution on one side causes damage on the other.
Things are beginning to break down since 2020, the purchasing power of average people is reducing, the working population is shrinking, raw materials and energy will become scarce at some point later in the 21st century, debt will become unsustainable unless interest rates go to zero which will create another problem, the biosphere is losing biodiversity every year, the climate is bringing more frequent and more violent natural disasters every year such as floods, tornadoes, forest fires and droughts, and so the only alternative in the near future will be misery, facing multiple crises at the same time with less labour to repair and reconstruct, less money available, less abundant energy and a more conflicted geopolitical world.
Living in a minimalistic way in a small local community on home-grown mushrooms and potatoes and helping each other is fine if you have internet, heating, a repaired house, a car to go shopping in, electricity 24/7, etc. In fact a return to a simple life is not possible any more because we are no longer able to hunt and gather food like in the Middle Ages, we are completely dependant on internet for everything from work to payment. We've become totally dependent on many complexities, materials, suppliers, countries, goods and services. That's why we can't simplify systems, objects or administrations, we can only suffer the sudden supply shortages of several goods and services and there will be misery and civil wars coming.
Europe's unrealistic ideology: A sustainable community
based on tolerance, freedom and harmony with nature
The administration and regulations have become so complex over time, with amendments to laws, special cases, special rulings and exemptions, that you need an army of public employees to collect and redistribute the right amount of taxes, an army of lawyers to make sure we apply the complex law correctly to get a building permit or to get any government approval. The only solution is to go back to the drawing board and write a new constitution from scratch, with extremely simplified laws: flat tax, simple rules, no exceptions, so simple that they become machine-readable laws. But that will not happen. A system only gets more complex over time until it breaks down and nobody has a clue how to fix it, so you let the system die and start a new, simple one from scratch.
Societal problems are not simply the result of policy or governance failures, but rather symptoms of deeper systemic realities. In his work, The Collapse of Complex Societies, Joseph Tainter illustrates that civilisations typically fail not from an inability to solve problems, but from the unsustainable complexity that each solution adds, and from the marginal returns on investment and technical solutions in complex societies.
Collapse is defined as the relatively sudden and rapid loss of a civilisation's prosperity, as well as its loss of economic, political and social complexity.
Many empires have collapsed due to a shortage of resources such as wood, food and raw materials, which has led to inflation. Others collapsed due to the rising cost of conquest and armies. However, the common feature of most collapses is diminishing marginal returns.
When supply chains and technologies become very complex, when laws and regulations become an abominable bureaucracy and when economic intermediaries become more numerous, societies weaken and become less able to react, adapt and solve problems. They become prone to shortages and malfunctions and cannot really grow output without increasing physical and administrative input by almost as much, which impedes growth and adaptation.
This is absolutely the case for our current modern industrialised society, which is now global and worldwide. Never before have all industrialised countries depended on each other financially, for supply chains and technologies, as they do today.
Fossil fuels have enabled us to make our society more complex without paying the human labour cost. The internet and digitalisation have enabled extreme complexity to be managed and administrated easily and quickly.
Before the Industrial Revolution around 1760 and the start of the fossil fuel era, complexity meant higher costs due to the need for more human labour. More people were needed to work harder to produce a more complex product. Complexification was not welcomed unless it provided affordable, tangible added value, as it meant higher taxes or more work. However, since 1850, complexity has been seen undeniably as a positive thing because we simply burn more fossil fuel to do the work, meaning people can afford and enjoy complex products such as smartphones and aircraft. This is also why our societies have become absolutely dependent on fossil fuels, an extremely dense and cheap energy source, enabling us to obtain complex products without hard human labour. Innovation and the exponential speed of technological change are only possible because of the complexity of our societies and the abundance of fossil fuels.
AI consists in extremely complex data centres comprising extremely complex GPUs (the computing microchips), which are made using highly sophisticated tooling. The supply chain for GPUs is complex, high tech, involving a dozen suppliers with very few alternatives. The tooling required to manufacture GPUs is highly sophisticated and depends on hundreds of suppliers, as well as an ultra-high level of precision and know-how.
An EV is ten times more complex in terms of materials and supply chain than a 1970s car.
Weapons used to be simple, such as cannons and gunpowder, axes and stakes; now they are self-flying drones with cameras and satellite telecommunications, made from materials such as carbon fibre and titanium.
An electrical grid is now very difficult to manage and balance. Fifty years ago, there were some power plants with a similar design, and electricity flowed in one direction from a large producer to several small consumers. Now, the grid comprises hundreds of production sources of all kinds and sizes, and electricity flows in both directions. We need to manage a larger grid due to the need for import and export because of intermittent supply.
We use our smartphones to communicate, pay, authenticate, find directions, search for information, and so on. These small machines are indispensable for modern life and are extremely complex, containing 50 different materials from dozens of countries.
Medicine and drugs are now ultra-complex, requiring high-tech laboratories and chemical specialists. Our food is ultra-processed and contains dozens of additives. Even basic foods such as fruit and vegetables now depend on fertilisers, pesticides, harvesting tractors, plastic packaging and transport trucks. We could go back to regional, seasonal, organic, manually harvested food, but this would require drastic changes in prices and a higher proportion of the workforce employed in agriculture, and would drastically limit the diversity and availability of food.
Our modern life depends on a globalised world, an abundance of resources, and the goodwill and collaboration of all countries and suppliers. Our logistics are just-in-time and very fragile. We are one factory closure, one export ban from China, one electrical blackout or one supplier bankruptcy from stopping the entire automobile and aircraft manufacturing industry. Our societies are efficient and productive, but not resilient and prone to failures and shortages. If one material runs out, or if one country stops exporting for any geopolitical reason, we are bound to experience massive shortages in our daily lives.
- It's all about trade-offs
Every system, every decision is about trade-offs. Every situation and every solution has advantages and disadvantages. If you change one situation for another, you will gain something and also lose something in the transition. There is no situation or solution that has only positives.
I'll give you some examples:
- If you live in the countryside, you have more space and a greener environment, but you may have less social interaction, less job opportunities or fewer entertainment options in your area.
- If we swap electricity generated from fossil fuels for electricity generated from solar and wind, you gain in carbon emissions, in the cost of the "renewable" generation, in energy efficiency, but you lose in dispatchability, in the total cost of the grid, and in the material and land footprint.
- Living in Dubai is great for making money, exciting start-up culture, no crime, diverse melting pot place, but you live in a bubble in the middle of the desert, uncomfortable 40°C every day, no local tradition and history, and no forest, lake, natural parks or mountains around you. You can't have the big city of New York, 5 times smaller, affordable like in Bali, and located in Norway with fjords and beautiful landscapes. You can't have it all, so it's about your choice of preferences.
- Large companies usually have unions that protect workers' rights, provide job security, good pay and other benefits. But in the long run, these unions make the companies uncompetitive with companies elsewhere in the world in countries where there are no unions. Basically, in the long run, unions put the company out of business. I am not saying unions should not exist, I am saying unions are a tricky act and a fine balance between protecting workers without making employers uncompetitive.
- Capitalism is a bad political system, but it is the least bad of all political systems. It exacerbates inequalities, incentivises activities that make money without adding value to society, and wrongly treats natural resources as infinite and free, and waste as free of charge. Capitalism certainly has its drawbacks. But capitalism incentivises individuals to work harder and be the best they can be, it raises the floor for everyone in terms of standard of living, it optimises the allocation of money to get the best value for money for all our goods and services, and it promotes innovation, progress and new discoveries.
- Taxing rich people or rich companies to redistribute in a social way to people in need, such as disabled people, refugees, unemployment benefits, health care, education, pensions, sounds great on paper. But the reality is that rich people and corporations have the best financial advisors and lawyers, they know all the loopholes to avoid taxation, and even if they can't find a loophole, taxing them more will simply push them away and they will move or outsource elsewhere and the result is that you have no one left to tax in the first place. The left-wing ideology of taxing the rich and redistributing to the poor does not hold up in practice and discourages hard work, entrepreneurship, and value creation. We need a social safety net to help people in need, but just the bare minimum to survive, not too much social support, otherwise people tend to get lazy, pull as much support from the system as they can, get used to it and become dependent on state support, and you end up with a society of subsidies-addicted businesses and state-support addicted people unwilling to work much and provide for others.
- Democracy is great for freedom of choice, freedom of speech and freedom of lifestyle. But when it comes to global problems that require restrictions and sacrifices from everyone, such as climate change, over-consumption, falling birth rates and threats to the welfare system, it is better to have authoritarian regimes with a single leader or party at the top for decades who can make tough decisions, such as in China and Russia. When the economy is improving year after year, it is great to have a democratic decision on how to spend and allocate the growing pie. But when the pie is shrinking, a democratic approach to finding a consensus on who should take the cut is impossible, everyone is trying to defend its piece of the pie, in which case you need an authoritarian voice to make the tough decision without debate.
- As we will have fewer taxpayers or more taxpayers in the coming decades, all solutions related to the welfare systems have pros and cons: raising the retirement age is a burden on manual workers, taxing workers more will lead to less consumption and less fertility among young adults, reducing pension benefits will be unpopular and in some cases will lead to elderly poverty, mass immigration comes with all the problems of integration and total costs of acclimatisation of foreigners. There is no perfect solution, only a decision on what we give up, what we decide to sacrifice. Do we sacrifice the over-60s in order to save our economy and our civilisation by making life more affordable and manageable for young adults with 2 or 3 children, or do we keep our old and rich society, which is shrinking economically and in terms of the labour force, and which is currently only surviving through more public debt? I know which side I am willing to sacrifice and which side I want to save.
- Whenever an economist, a politician or anyone with conviction claims that we should do this or that because it has a certain advantage, always argue by asking what are the inconveniences of your proposed idea and what positive thing we have today would we lose if we implement your idea. Because every time someone claims that a solution is obvious or an idea is great, that is only half the truth, one side of the coin.
- Misaligned incentives
Our society has wrong incentives almost everywhere, which is why our social systems, governance and economies will slowly fade over time.
Imagine a car without a fuel level indicator. This would make the car unusable. If you had no idea how much fuel was left in the tank, would you dare drive the car and risk it stopping suddenly in the middle of the motorway? Cars have fuel level indicators and car owners perform routine checks at regular intervals for this reason: otherwise, the purpose of a car — to transport people over long distances — could not be guaranteed.
Our societies are flawed by a multitude of misguided incentives:
- The welfare system, healthcare and pensions provide the same level of benefits regardless of how many children you have, even though children are the future young workers and contributors of the system it requires when people reach 60, 70 or 80 years old and rely on the social system the most. It's basically a free lunch, where everyone gets the same amount of food, whether they cooked a meal themself or not. It's absolute madness that is about to generate havoc in society and civil wars over social rights.
- Politicians who pass laws are mostly old and rich, so they tend to favour older people and the rich. It's no wonder that social inequalities are getting bigger.
- Candidate politicians and incumbent politicians both have the incentive to please the majority of people in order to be elected or re-elected. This leads to more debt being incurred in order to spend more and distribute benefits in order to please the population, even though what we need as a whole is fewer benefits for non-workers and childless people, in order to sustain a prosperous society over the long run.
- In democracies, voters decide political trends. As the population is getting older, most voters are over 50 and either hoping for or enjoying solid pensions. This means that elected parties do not include any unpopular, restrictive policies on pensions. Even though everyone knows that the public pension system is broken and cannot be maintained with the current demography, any intention to reduce the pension scheme is unpopular with the majority of voters and is removed from all politicians' programmes. If you want to be elected, you have to please the elderly, who make up the majority of the population nowadays.
- Politicians are short-sided, elected for two to four years and would rather sacrifice the nation's situation in ten to twenty years' time if it means instant gratification over the next three years in order to be popular and get re-elected. This short-term vision has caused debt to increase decade after decade, as if there were no tomorrow. However, kicking the can further down the road simply makes the issue bigger and more unmanageable.
- Young adults aged 20 to 40 are encouraged, praised and rewarded for not having children. They are encouraged to remain independent, fulfil their ambitions, earn good money, consume, spend a lot and have a lot of free time. There is no law, social pressure or fiscal policy that encourages young adults to have children. In a world where there are mostly positive consequences of not having children and no negative consequences, young adults consequently do not have children. When our socio-cultural values no longer prioritise family life and do not incentivise parenthood, and when people receive all the benefits of society regardless of whether they have children, it is no wonder that young adults decide to remain childless.
- Our capitalist, consumption-based economy encourages us to buy more stuff to be happy and achieve a certain social status, but this comes at the hidden cost of destroying the planet, outsourcing work to poorer people in desatrous working conditions, and increasing material extraction and toxic pollution. When we incentivise frequent consumption, we are also incentivising climate change and environmental degradation.
- When a key performance indicator (KPI) becomes the target of a company or an administration, this indicator becomes a poor and irrelevant metric as the system becomes one that feeds on and pleases the metric. This is true of the education system, statistics such as GDP or CPI, the R&D departments and business finances. you can make any statistic looks good on paper, but it does not make the product behind better.
- Incentives to reduce CO2 emissions cause more mining, material extraction, water consumption, and the release of toxic chemicals. If the incentive focuses only on one part of the problem, it may be possible to solve that part, but at the expense of the other parts, so that overall, it is a worse solution.
- When becoming rich is seen as the ultimate goal, when money is the objective of a career and money can buy almost everything, people are pushed out of engineering, creative jobs and social care to go into finance and sales. This turns many people into making money out of money instead of producing goods and services for our society.
- Social media platforms are incentivised to maximise our screen time to collect data and generate revenue. This promotes polarising topics, divides society and amplifies human addictions such as sex, drugs, shopping and gambling.
- When industries are incentivised to be more efficient, companies develop more efficient products over time. This leads to greater adoption and more people using them, resulting in greater total consumption via the rebound effect. This is true of car and aircraft fuel consumption, computers and semiconductors, and electronics in general. Claiming that efficiency reduces environmental impact is just a marketing strategy that actually provokes the opposite outcome.
These are some examples of incentives being misallocated in our society, which corrupts it over time. "Show me your incentives and I'll tell you the outcome," said Charlie Munger. It is time to review the values, priorities and ambitions of each system and administration in our societies, and to be honest about what we prioritise and what we sacrifice. Whenever we optimise for something, we must be honest about the restrictions and detriment it will cause elsewhere.
Good intentions with the wrong incentives can have negative consequences. For example, a social welfare system may be created with good intentions, but if the incentives for having more children and maintaining a balanced government budget are lacking or even negative (if women are incentivised not to have children in order to receive a solid public pension one day), the consequences will be disastrous for our civilisation.
One example is the 'cobra effect': in the early 19th century, the British were colonising India when they discovered deadly cobras everywhere, resulting in thousands of British deaths every year. They decided to offer a bounty reward for each cobra captured, with the good intention of reducing the population. However, this quickly led to cobras becoming worth a lot of money, and secret cobra breeding factories popped up. The British colonists were confused because the number of collected cobras increased, but the number of people dying from cobra bites also kept going up. They finally realised what was happening, stopped the bounty programme and all the breeders stopped their business and released the bred cobras in the nature. This led to an increase in the number of dangerous cobras in the wild, so the problem got worse. Morality: Set the wrong incentive and you will get an unwanted outcome, the opposite of what you intended.
Other examples: Social networks started with the good intention of facilitating social interaction and keeping in touch with people. However, the incentives have shifted towards maximising attention, time spent on the app and engagement, and the result is an addiction to screen time and scrolling that is having a devastating effect on young people. It is the incentives in place that matter, not the intentions. Social media technologies are great, but the incentives and business model are wrong, so using the technology is detrimental to humankind.
AI will most probably turn good intentions, such as being productive and generating an abundance of goods and services, into bad outcomes because of misaligned incentives, as we allow tech giants to race to be the first to reach AGI.
There are many misaligned incentives in our society that are slowly destroying social welfare and the population, increasing wealth inequalities, rewarding individualism at the expense of the collective and sacrificing the future of nations. The two most negative consequences of misaligned incentives are rising public debt and falling fertility rates.
I believe that the vast majority of society's problems stem from the fact that public institutions have outdated rules and regulations that are ill-suited and, above all, provide the wrong incentives or misaligned incentives, which results in clever individuals and smart private companies take advantage of these flaws and ruin the system and society.
Here are a few examples:
The public pension system in a pay-as-you-go odel needs young workers to support retirees. A 30-40-year-olds need to have children so that there will be a 30-year-old worker when they are 70 and retire. So the incentive for public pensions should be based on the number of children you have, something like: no children = $1,000 pension benefit per month, 1 child = $1,400 per month, 2 children = $1,800 per month, etc. But the actual incentive of all pay-as-you-go pension scheme is based on your salary over the last 40 years. And the best way to earn a big salary is not to have children and to have a great career. So the pay-as-you-go pension system is doomed to failure because it has a counterproductive self-destroying incentive as currenty designed since the 1950s.
Let's take intermittent energy sources like wind and solar: In an electrical grid where consumers pay a flat rate on their total consumption, whether they consume 1kWh at noon or midnight, summer or winter, the consumer price is the same. Except that for the past 10 years, with the wide adoption of intermittent sources on the grid, the cost of production at noon in the summer is negligible, while the cost of production in the winter at 7 p.m. is very high. If the price of a product is not adjusted to its true cost, you will have a non-stop deployment of more intermittent sources but no new implementation of sources producing at winter peak times, leading to blackouts and a to a continuous increase in the average price of electricity. Keeping flat rates based on volume, without introducing hourly rates, destroys the reliability of the electrical grid and increases the price of electricity. Not having an hourly rate is totally destructive to the stability, reliability and cost of the electricity grid.
Let me give you another example: in our democracies, politicians are elected for a fixed term of four years, for example. Whether politicians are good or not, they serve their four years and then there are new elections. This system encourages two things: Before election, lying and selling oneself with outlandish unrealistic appealing and endearing utopias to get elected, then, once elected, spending beyond one's means to please the people, avoid anarchy, and get re-elected. No politician has a 10-year goal, because it would be their successor who would reap the rewards. No one cares about public debt because no one is judged, compensated or fired on it and there are no consequences for their position. Politicians elected for 4 years keep their job for 4 years even they sacrifice the long term prosperity of the country. These fixed-term democratic elections encourage the destruction of society.
The incentive that would be needed is for politicians a job in which they remain in power depending on continuous measurable results. For example, a list of criteria, such as maximum public deficit allowed, minimum GDP growth per capita, social inequality growth limit, maximum unemployment rate, etc. And every year, if politicians meet their KPIs, they stay in power for another year. If not, they are automatically fired, new elections are held, and non politician of their party is allowed to run again. If you are good for your citizens based on measurable results, you stay in power for an unlimited number of years. If you lie and don't deliver tangible results to the people, you are fired, and the results are checked every year of your mandate.
Other examples: If you let vote the unemployed, retirees, the long-term sick, long-term students up to the age of 28, and other beneficiaries of the public system. This economically unproductive population is growing over time, they make up an increasingly large proportion of the electorate reaching almost 50% or more, and by giving them a right to vote, the democratic system inevitably promote politicians who give even more "free" handouts to everyone, and society is ruined as the contributors are hammered with tax and public debt devaluating the currency.
If social security covers all medical expenses, it doesn't encourage people to be less sick or to see the doctor less, but rather to get as many X-rays, physical therapy sessions, medications, etc. as possible, which ruins social security.
While the median age in europe is 42, the median voter is about 51 years old in Europe, because we let retirees vote. the consequences is that inevitably no politician will take drastic measures to lower pensions because they would lose their electorate. Pension reforms or health care reform is impossible to pass in the current democratic and demographic context, and so the nations are bound to debt explosion, poverty, loss of purchasing power and declining quality of social welfare services.
When public employees salaries count towards GDP, inevitably this encourages an increase in the total payroll of state employees to artificially inflate the figures, even if the jobs created are redundant and useless.
When working part-time and receiving social benefits brings in a total of €1,350 per month, and working full-time means losing benefits and bringing in total €1,400 per month, it's inevitable that part-time workers won't desire to work full-time.
There are so many perverse and destructive incentives like this.
In all the problems I discuss in my book, I see that incentives are not aligned with the desired objectives. There will always be clever people or private entities who take advantage of the system and slowly destroy our societies.
- Evolving narratives
Taking the big picture and long-term view, you realise that narratives change as frequently as teenage girls change clothes.
Having three to five kids was the norm in most developed countries in the first half of the 20th century. Having several kids meant being healthy and enjoying life. It was praised for caring for others and ensured a safer future. Now, having kids is seen as a burden and a sacrifice to one's career and leisure options; it reduces women to baby-making machines, limits their freedom, makes them dependent on their partner for life and causes financial ruin.
How did we turn the millennial long narrative of "the more kids, the better" into a new narrative of "have no kids and fulfil your own potential"? How can a species turn off reproduction, multiplying itself and surviving against others? How did that happen? How did we convince ourselves of the new narrative? I am flabbergasted. We are destroying our species, and people are not only accepting it, they are proud of it. What a shame! Perhaps we deserve to suffer and return to survival mode in order to reproduce again.
Other examples of changing narratives over the last 10 decades:
Nuclear power was the next big thing in the '70s and '80s; then, for the next 30 years, the narrative was that it was dangerous and generated dirty waste. Now, nuclear power is being hailed again as a low-carbon, reliable, efficient and stable source of energy. However, the product itself has not changed; we are still talking about nuclear power plant technologies from the 1980s. Only the narratives of the mass media and politicians have evolved.
Just 15 years ago, Russia was considered a reliable and essential economic partner to Germany, with Merkel and Putin shaking hands to open the Nord Stream gas pipeline, which has brought economic and industrial stability and prosperity to Germany and Europe in the 2010s.
Merkel (Germany), Medvedev (Russia) and other European politicians all smiling in November 2011
And now, only 15 years later, the narrative is that Putin is a demon, Russians are terrorists, we need to build up our military forces against Russia, and that Russia wants to conquer Warsaw, Berlin and Paris. We also need to impose various economic sanctions against Russia. What a reversal in just 15 years! The same Putin that was in power 15 years ago went from a reliable business partner to Europe to the next Hitler in just 15 years. Stop it, it can't be true.
In the 1950s, women were happy to care for their children and enjoy household appliances, finally living in peace and freedom from the bombings of WWII. Only two generations later, not working full time or having children is viewed as a disaster for women, an inacceptable reduction of woman's role.
Having children is now viewed by many as contributing to environmental and climate destruction. That's the narrative. But never before 1970 did people say that children were bad for the planet. So why is it bad now when it was never bad before? Non-sense again! Only narratives, feelings, ideas, but no tangible scientific evidence.
Now, the narrative is to build more solar panels and wind turbines, but in the 19th century, we had plenty of wind and water mills, and the narrative then was that we needed more coal furnaces and steel industries.
Just 10 years ago, most people in Europe would have opposed taking on debt in order to invest in tanks, bombs and other weapons. Military equipment was associated with destruction and war. There was a peace and love movement. Now, however, people are in favour of spending money — and incurring new debt — on defence and the military. What a quick reversal of opinion! Suddenly, tanks and bombs are seen as good things.
For more than half a century, the automotive industry has been a status symbol for successful Western families. Advertisements for combustion engine vehicles were everywhere; Ford, BMW and Mercedes sold petrol cars for half a century and were beloved brands that provided thousands of jobs. And all of a sudden, within the last 10 years, owning a petrol car has become a bad thing and you are seen as someone who is destroying the planet. Please, stop this nonsense! How can a product be a positive status symbol turn to a bad planet destroying one?
I could go on forever about narratives that have been turned on their head at some point in the last 70 years for a large proportion of the Western population:
Eating meat or fish, weddings, drinking tap water, shopping, entrepreneurship, fast food, smoking, dating, approaching people, plastics and homosexuality, among others.
How can we convince people of something for decades, turn those beliefs into culture and unquestionable social values, and then say the opposite and still convince the masses that the new narrative is obvious, that it is our new common value and culture that we must not challenge? People are caught up in the moment and don't have the critical thinking skills to challenge the current narrative. Only narratives that have existed for more than 100 years form part of our common values. Any quite recent narrative is just a made-up story designed to enforce the current political interest and agenda.
If a narrative in the social, cultural or mass media changes, it means that either we lied to you for decades or we are lying to you now.
- Too much individual freedom and rights, not enough duties and constraints
The most impactful event of the 20th century was the Second World War. Hitler started the war and lost it. When the war ended, the common belief was that we were all anti-Nazi. This evolved in the '60s and '70s into anti-racism and anti-sexism. We wanted love without commitment or social pressure; women's empowerment; equal rights; better education for everyone; and more freedom of choice. We have only three generations' experience of this theory. Feminism and women emancipation have not always existed throughout human history, nor are they an absolute given or a universal human value. However, in just three generations, those who believe in these values have turned into societies that have very few children, and these societies will simply vanish and become extinct because they are outnumbered by societies that don't share these values. This is also due to the economic collapse caused by not having children in an ageing population. In 100 years, humanity will look back on this phase of women's emancipation and individualism, and the age of freedom of choice of 1950–2050, and say: It was a nice try, but it didn't work because the rights and freedoms given to people weren't balanced by duty, constraints and sacrifices, and those societies collapsed. Too many people enjoying and receiving, not enough people working and giving to others.
Were all women before 1940 unhappy because they didn't have the same rights, roles or freedoms as men? Do you think young women in Africa today, who have an average of 3 to 6 children, are all unhappy and feel abused and limited to childbearing and living under the instruction of men? My point is simply to draw attention to the fact that, until 1940 and even today in some developing countries with high fertility rates, the notions of emancipation, equality of roles, and the freedom to choose what to study, who to partner with, whether to have children, and whether to be single, in a relationship, or married are extremely recent and not universal values that have always existed in our civilisations.
Again, I am not advocating a return to women belonging to men, not being educated and staying at home to do household tasks and have five babies. I am in favour of all these rights being given to women. However, when society provides these rights and freedoms to women and promotes individualism and free choice, it must also impose constraints and duties, and penalise those who choose a lifestyle that is too individualistic and self-indulgent. This includes strongly punishing childless adulthood for both men and women with extra taxes, low pensions, and low priority for public services. The goal is to rebalance the pros and cons of having children against not having children, which today clearly favours not having children.
- The growing public deficit and debt level that will collapse societies
- My recommendations for adapting to the collapse of our social system
So how do you prepare for the worst? What should we do if you are all doomed soon? Let me suggest some ideas of behaviour, spiritual thoughts, best preparation to adapt to the bleak future.
There is no solution to the polycrisis or metacrisis. That's why I wrote this book, quite counter-intuitively and against the mainstream. The world is in crisis because of natural human behaviour and psychology, and because of the demography and lack of children of the past 50 years. Both of those 2 root causes are not solvable. If there was a solution, it would already be applied. So what should we do and how can we prepare for the end of our civilisation? I will give some answers and ideas on how to react and adapt. These are only answers and responses, no solutions.
I would reintroduce national military service of 1 year. It has many advantages: a sense of social and community bond, a unique way to be with people of different horizons and social classes, learn discipline, skills, train your body and mental toughness, prepare for a possible future of conflict, give a sense of belonging and usefulness, etc...
Earn as much money as you can, as soon as you can, no matter what the job content is, even if your job is not fulfilling or meaningful. Don't be picky. The idea that a job should be interesting, passionate and enjoyable is a very recent idea, born out of the abundance and luxury provided by the use of fossil fuels. The function of a job is to serve society so that you can personally afford food and shelter. A job is not supposed to be pleasant and meaningful, it is a duty.
Save and invest as much money as you can. Spend as little as possible, live minimally, and save and invest as much as you can. In the future, public services will break down, pensions will mostly be financed by your own savings, and public healthcare will be in such disarray that only costly private health insurance will help you in your old age. The future will be bleak, the middle class will become poor, the poor class will suffer and rebel through crime and riots. The rich will be the last to suffer.
If you can, move and go live in a country or a place with a large working-age population and a small elderly population, such as Singapore, Hong Kong, Dubai, Kazakhstan or Switzerland, to avoid high government taxes in support of an eroding social welfare system.
Spend as if you were earning 20% less so that you are prepared for a future of crisis, loss of purchasing power, disfunctions and hyperinflation. You will need a lot of reserve money in the future. Invest your savings in stocks, property, gold, bitcoin or whatever you believe will hold and increase in value over the coming decades.
Feel guilty every time you buy a good or service. Ask yourself if you really need it or if you could live without it. Buy second-hand as much as possible.
Have children. The more children you have who you love, cherish, support and spend time with, the more you will have a safety blanket in your latter days. The only things children need is attention and affection. Your children and grandchildren will become the social system again, as they were 300 years ago.
Eat locally and seasonally, eat less meat. Avoid junk food. You are what you eat. Exercice regularly, stay in shape, even past your prime. Do sports several times a week. Walk, cycle or use public transport as much as possible. Your health discipline is your health insurance.
Live in a smaller place, rent a cheaper place, have fewer gadgets at home. Become minimalistic. Liberate yourself from expensive items. I have no couch, no TV, no Netflix, no car, and I don't miss it at all.
Material things will not make you happy. Consumption is a drug that makes you addicted and sad in the long run. The less you consume, the more you enjoy the simple things in life. Relationships, moments and feelings will make you happy and last in your memory for longer that the things you buy.
Learn about the world around you, how things are made, where it comes from. Be aware of the things around you, the asphalt on the roads, the sodas you drink, the sausages you like to eat or the jeans you like to wear.
Educate yourself and share your knowledge with your local communities and friends. Be curious. Learn every day. Read books. Listen to podcasts. Watch long technical presentations by experts based on facts, statistics and science. Too many people are misinformed and rely on soundbites or 3-minute speeches, 30-second videos, and do not spend time understanding the physics or economics of things, believing in feel-good stories that sound good but are either not realistic or feasible. Having technical knowledge will always give you an edge.
Be prepared for the worst: Civil wars, end of democracy, loss of purchasing power is coming, so enjoy the present moment, we are currently living in an abundance of wealth and well-being. Life is really good in Europe right now and it will not last, so enjoy the present, do not regret not doing something. Go talk to this stranger, say yes to any invitations, explore and discover the world.
Embrace all facets of life, be curious and explore. Be proud of your uniqueness and don't try to copy or mimic others' main trends.
Be grateful for all the good things around you, such as abundant food and water, shelter, and an electricity and heating system. Be grateful for the people around you, including your friends, colleagues, and family members.
Maintain perspective on your situation. There will always be situations that are better or worse than yours, so look up as well as down to assess your situation relative to others, whether in terms of health, wealth, love, work or any other aspect of your life.
Exercise regularly, do sports, live a healthy life. There will be no functioning public hospital, no public health care as we know it today. Any decent health service will be private or unaffordable. Your best ally is a healthy body. Your best health insurance is prevention, through exercise and a healthy diet.
Have children! It is the most fulfilling thing in life. What is the point of living if not to learn and then teach? My mantra is to live and experience things by being curious, travelling, developing, growing, talking to lots of different people and then passing on my knowledge and expierience to others if they are willing to listen.
Allow children to face adversity, difficulties and challenges. Don't cocoon them too much or overprotect them. Children need unconditional love and attention, of course, but also some challenging experiences are good for preparing them for the chaotic future. Do not overprotect your children from danger and adversity. Expose them to adversity under your supervision. Children need to learn how to defend themselves in order to be prepared for future difficult situations, to face sometimes aggressive and threatening children, to learn to accept a "no" from their parents. Allow them to explore the world and express their creativity. They only need your presence and care, not your knowledge or monologues.
- The draining wealth transfer from young to old
If there is one message to remember from my book, it is this one: The most criminal and disgusting act of the last 70 years is the global transfer of wealth from young people to older people. This is not about the poor giving to the rich, as many leftists are infuriated about, nor is it about fighting inequalities between rich and poor. That would be a lost and futile battle. Rich people and businesses are necessary for a functioning society, and inequalities are innate to any society.
The tragedy of our modern world is the continuous transfer of wealth from young people to older people.
The public healthcare system is a scam in which young people pay as much as old people, but it is mostly the old who receive treatment.
The public pension system is a Ponzi scheme where the young effectively pay to support the old, but the system is broken because the ratio is totally unbalanced nowadays. There are already not enough people to maintain the Ponzi scheme and the situation will worsen terribly over the next 10 to 20 years.
Tax policies are a scam when businesses are heavily taxed, with most of the money collected being redistributed to older people. Pension benefits are growing faster than the minimum wage, which means that the bottom 50% of the working population is losing purchasing power over time, while the elderly continue to be supported by taxation and public debt.
The real estate market is a scam. Fifty to thirty years ago, people could afford to buy houses, make a fortune out of their investment and now many older people have the privilege of owning a house rather than paying rent. Conversely, young adults can no longer afford to buy a house nowadays and have to pay rent, which is increasing faster than their incomes. Therefore, young people cannot replicate what older people did 30 or 50 years ago.
Politics is a fraud because most voters and politicians are old. Laws and regulations are therefore passed or maintained to favour the elderly, the large voting base, so that the broken system is never turned upside down. More public debt is created every year to support the elderly at the expense of younger adults and future generations, just so that politicians can win votes and get elected, to the detriment of young workers who are heavily taxed and cannot afford to start a family.
This continuous transfer of wealth from young to old is ruining society and is a burden on young adults, exacerbating the trend of falling fertility rates and creating a vicious circle that worsens exponentially every decade, as each decade sees a shrinking pool of young adults asked to support a growing pool of older adults.
Every retiree should live off their own savings, if they have them, or be assisted daily by their children or grandchildren, or live in poverty on the bare minimum of state support. This has always been the case for millennia in all civilisations. Instead, in our modern societies, the elderly live in abundance, like rich tourists on holiday all year round. A situation only made possible by the contributions of young workers. Once you have passed your prime, you fade away quietly and let those in their prime run the show. Instead, under-45s are the economic slaves of the over-60s.
Maintaining a social welfare system that was designed in 1950 with an average life expectancy for pensioners of five years and an average worker-to-pensioner ratio of 8-to-1 has turned into an unsustainable ratio of 3-to-1 with an average pensioner life expectancy of 20 years. The maths simply don't work anymore. By not changing the system over the last 40 years, we have ruined our demographics, our ability to produce and maintain an economy, our ability to service our debt and support the social welfare system. Our near future is doomed, and there is no escape now after 50 years of fertility rates below 2.0 with no action taken. We are bound for mass poverty, social unrest, economic and financial disaster, civil war, and the collapse of civilisation. Private businesses will always survive because people will always need food, clothing and shelter, but governments will go bankrupt, fiat currencies will lose value and lead to high inflation, and public services such as public transport, infrastructure, hospitals, pensions and education will deteriorate fast due to a lack of public funding.
On one hand, students struggle financially and are most at risk of poverty. Young adults either don't have children or only have one because of the financial burden, among other reasons. Young entrepreneurs struggle because of high corporate tax. Everyone earning below the median salary — hence 50% of the population — is financially restrained and has difficulty coping with the cost of living. Meanwhile on the other hand, many pensioners live in their own homes without mortgage or rent, a home they bought when they were still affordable 30 years ago. Their pensions are adjusted for inflation, unlike private salaries which grow at a slower rate. Many have plenty of savings and enjoy regular travels, dining out and cultural activities, while receiving abundant and expensive healthcare almost for free. All of this is financed by workers, while the imbalance and ratio between the two populations of workers and pensioners diminishes year after year. This has to stop. We are witnessing the greatest transfer of wealth from young to old generations: a legalised, organised and unavoidable drain of wealth that is arbitrary and designed by our regulations. We have the means to reverse it by offering fewer benefits and services to pensioners, in order to give the workers the life they desire and deserve. We have the choice of how we spend public money on government services, which allocates today about 5 times more public budget spending on over-60 years old than on under-40 adults.
It is extremely difficult, if not impossible, to force women to have three children, so that the working population can grow in the future. We have very few means of coercing women into having children, and honestly, nobody wants to force anything on women's bodies. However, we can counterbalance the demographics and make young adult life more attractive and affordable by simply cutting the over-abundant privileges given to elderly people, and spreading the public spending to all age-groups in a fair manner.
The lack of young adults, especially children, will cause our prosperity and solid social welfare system to disappear. Women's empowerment, combined with monogamous culture, is an aggravating factor. Climate change will also be a contributing factor in the coming decades.
Whatever happens now, it is too late to avoid the end of prosperity and the terrible suffering and misery of the next 40 years. Our only chance of survival as a society and civilisation beyond 2070 is to act now with drastic measures to return to a fertility rate well above two children per woman. I have some proposals and ideas which I hope will be read, heard and passed on. I love my current life in Europe and the great society we have built over the last two centuries. It is tragic to think that my three-year-old son will never be able to enjoy the same prosperity and social stability that I have experienced over the last 40 years.
- The ageing population
In 100 years we have gone from 2 billion to 8 billion people, which is absolutely unsustainable for the regenerative capacity of the earth for our type of civilisation, with huge consumption per capita, and with the equivalent of 200 virtual human machines working on fossil fuels to power our civilisation 24/7. We are too many people on the planet and we have to get down from 8 billion to 2 billion somehow, one way or another. The majority of people in India and Africa live in a sustainable way, minimalist in their consumption of goods and extraction of resources. These people are not the problem, even if their populations double or triple in the next 30 years. The problem is the Western standard of living.
In this industrialised civilisation, we have had a declining fertility rate since the 1970s, going from about 3 in 1950s and 1960s to below replacement rate of 2.1 around 1980 in most advanced economies, with fertility rates now well below 1.6, putting extreme pressure on the economy and the welfare system due to a shrinking labour force and a ballooning number of retirees on welfare. So we need more children and more young adults in our industrialised countries.
The decline in the fertility rate created the temporary illusion that it was not an issue from 1980 until 2020. This is because the effects of low fertility rates are initially positive when there are no children in the household, but become negative 30 to 60 years later. When a person does not have children between the ages of 25 and 40, the person becomes a better worker, consumer and taxpayer until they are around 50 to 60 years old. Not having children is a net positive for society in the first 20 to 30 years. However, when a childless adult turns 55 or 60, they start to require more healthcare and treatment, become more frequently unwell, and then need a public pension. And because they did not have children 30 years prior, there are fewer 30-year-old workers in society. This results in a shortage of labour and taxpayers (due to the lack of children), which is felt when the person turns 55 to 90, i.e. 25 to 60 years after not having children.
For the last 4 decades, therefore, we have been under the illusion that having very few children overall is perfectly fine for our societies, not to mention being great for individual freedom of choice. However, this was an illusion and the reality is starting to kick in; it will be extremely painful in the coming decades, and we will have to adjust drastically and make difficult sacrifices.
As the proportion of children and young adults under 40 is rapidy declining, this means, in mathematical terms alone, that the cost of ageing of the population must be reduced. The proportion of people over 65 will either have to shrink if society as a whole is to continue to function over the next four decades, or the cost of the over-65 population to the rest of the society will have to decrease. I am not saying that we should wipe out everyone over 65, I am just saying that with hard times come hard decisions and we have no choice but to take drastic measures against the unproductive elderly in order to protect the working active population and encourage young adults to have kids, in order to avoid societal collapse and to keep some working people. I am keeping an open mind about possible ideas, but the fairest and least painful redistribution would be to let the elderly become poorer and receive less physical and economic assistance, so that the working population has more room to breathe, more purchasing power, and a greater appetite for children and families. The current transfer of wealth from young workers to the elderly must stop immediately.
Do you tax the 20-45 year olds like hell, force them to work 12 hours a day to support the spoiled Boomer generation and soon the GenX? Do we let the baby boomers and GenX enjoy the money they made in the past golden age and let them live based on capital interest while the younger population struggles to buy food, houses, cars? The falling birth rate will have drastic consequences, we cannot ignore this debate and let things collapse. Let's have a debate about how we share the pain. Let's put every idea on the table. It is easy to have a democratic conversation about how to share the extra piece of cake when the cake is growing, but it is extremely difficult to debate about reducing the size of the cake, and literally impossible to agree on a decision about who will not eat the cake or have less cake. That's why I don't think our democracies will survive the next 30 years. We will have autocrats in Europe with an authoritarian regime in place for 20 years, like Xi Jinping or Putine, who are able to make tough decisions and live with the consequences.
The over-60s have been a blessed generation. They could buy real estate when it was affordable, experience the 'glorious thirties' when salaries and purchasing power increased with 5% economic growth and a full employment rate. They are now the population least at risk of poverty and receive pension benefits that have kept pace with post-Covid inflation better than median salaries. They often own their homes and don't pay rent. They live in more square metres on average than the rest of the population. They receive the majority of public healthcare, which is funded by taxpayers and young workers. They live longer due to medical and health progress. They often receive pension benefits higher than the median income without working or contributing to society. They outnumber the under-30 population. This is unfair and unsustainable, leading to pain and cracks elsewhere in society. We need to stop giving the over-60s privileges and rebalance the social benefits for all age groups. We need to stop giving retirees pension benefits above the median salary, so they can afford to eat out, visit exhibitions and enjoy luxury entertainment and travel on all-inclusive holidays. If the purpose of a 'social' system is to support those in need, then pensioners are definitely not among them, but rather students, young adults, young parents, immigrants, and people with disabilities or serious illnesses.
The issue with public money and the social welfare system is not a problem of taxation or tax collection, nor is it a problem of taxing the rich (the rich actually contribute a lot to the system, so we need them; they are a net positive). The problem lies in the redistribution or spending, because the vast majority goes to the over-60 population, who mostly do not provide any goods or services to society but take most of the public benefits. Technically, being old or over 60 is not the issue. In the 1970s, public finances were fine: public debt was at a low 30% of GDP, and we had budget surpluses, economic growth was high and fertility rates above 2. The issue is that the over-60s are starting to outnumber the 20–45 age group, who are key in providing labour-intensive workers, infrastructure and maintenance workers, social and care workers, taxpayers, and the population that boosts the economy through high consumption and procreation to ensure a stable future. The welfare system is based on an 8:1 ratio from the 1950s, but the ratio is now 3:1 in the 2020s, and we have not adapted the system accordingly. That's the problem. The massive and continuous transfer of wealth from under-45s to over-60s is the cancer of our societies.
One solution would be to withdraw most social benefits from the over-65s. For example, the state pension should become a handout of $1000 a month, not a full pension you can live on. Or maybe when you retire you get a full pension and full public health care for 10 years, but then after 75 you are on your own financially and have to pay for every public service. This is not what I want at all, my dad is over 75 and I love him and I am glad he gets a pension and health care when he needs it, but I know it is delusional to think that this system can survive the coming decades. Why should he get all these benefits now, on top of everything he has had as the golden generation? He has had an amazing last 70 years, the best time in history, no war, jobs and growth everywhere, the baby boomers are the spoiled generation, and now they are taking over the millenials, the GenZ and the GenAlpha? The social system we built for them after the Second World War was designed with a ratio of 8 workers to 1 retiree in 1950, 5 workers to 1 retiree in 1980 and is now tilting towards 3 workers to 1 retiree, how can this social system be sustainable in the coming decades? Again, I am simply realistic and pragmatic about possible scenarios and responses to this crisis. I wish we were still in 1990 and we had a booming working population with 2.5 children per woman, but here we are in 2025, the situation is drastically different.
The other solution is obviously massive migration, mainly from Africa, to compensate for the shrinking young workforce. But then you have the problem of cultures, language, integration, adoption by the locals, acceptance, and the problem that basically for every 22-year-old born in the country entering the workforce, we would need one 22-year-old immigrant entering Europe. Yes, we are at a stage where every year, for every young person entering the labour force, two elderly people are retiring. So, to maintain the current working population, we would need to double the number of 22-year-olds by welcoming the same number of immigrants as there are young people entering the workforce each year. This would mean that immigrants would no longer be a minority in the young age group, and this would lead to extreme difficulties in terms of identity, teaching, acceptance, and so on. Immigration would be possible, but not on such a scale and so quickly. The scale of the need for immigration is simply too great for the immigrants to be absorbed and accepted in the host country.
An ageing population is better suited to jobs such as administration, coordination, management, office work, strategy, luxury production, teaching and coaching. An ageing population is less equipped to perform physically demanding jobs such as infrastructure maintenance, shift work in healthcare or industry, construction work, mining and material processing, and military service.
This raises two questions: What will happen to countries that grow old before they become wealthy, and what will happen when the majority of the world's population is ageing? The first question could be answered by following the Japanese model of outsourcing low-wage and low-value jobs while retaining only local services and high-skilled jobs. However, the second question is more pragmatic and will become a reality: 80% of the world economy won't be able to delegate and relocate to the remaining 20% of countries with a young population.
In an environment of declining birth rates, an ageing population and a restrictive immigration regime, shortages are becoming quite severe in the construction sector, engineering, energy utilities and the electrification domain, as well as all care and labor intensive sectors like hotels, restaurants, hospitals, elderly care centers.
Construction of an electricity power line
Road maintenance
How will we defend ourselves militarily if we have no young people? How will we maintain our infrastructure, such as roads maintenance, or the renewal and expension of the electricity grid? How will we support an ageing population in terms of personal assistance and healthcare? These activities can only be carried out locally and cannot be outsourced; they require a predominantly young, active population under 50, or even under 40. How will we manage the situation in 2050, when the median age in most countries will be 50? There is no political trick, no amount of money printing, and no technology or innovation that can solve this issue. People who were not born in the last 30 years will never suddenly appear. There are no fixes.
- The pension system
Between 2035 and 2050, many countries will have half their population aged over 60 (South Korea, Japan, China, Germany, Italy, Spain, among others).
This is completely unprecedented in the entire history of homo sapiens: there has never been a society where half the population is past working age. This is uncharted territory. We have no model for how such a society could work. What is certain is that it will put a huge strain on the remaining declining working population to support such an old population physically, socially and financially. Another alternative: We will leave the elderly mostly on their own without providing them with much social and economic support. There will be insufficient labour to care for them and insufficient financial support and healthcare, unlike in the good times of a more balanced population of 1990–2020. When you combine a shrinking active and productive population with a growing retired population in need of all kinds of support, the overall productivity of society will definitely decline, and the only possible outcome is more poverty, lower living standards, loss of purchasing power and some disruption to the supply chain. It will be fascinating to see how society and politicians deal with this situation, and in particular how we decide to spread the poverty and suffering: will it be pensioners who lose the most quality of life, or will the working population struggle more, or both? The question is not how to avoid the degradation of public prosperity and a decline in quality of life due to an ageing population, because this is unavoidable. The question is how society will react and adapt, and which population will suffer the greatest loss in living standards.
Our demographic situation is unprecedented. Nobody has the answers, nobody even dares to address the situation publicly. The current social system is unsustainable in its current form with a rapidly ageing population.
It won't happen suddenly, like the moment when the COVID-19 pandemic hit. It's a slow process that started slowly in the 2010s: a year-by-year deterioration in the ratio of taxpayers to tax recipients. With a deterioration of just 0.5% every year, nobody feels the pain or attributes the slow growth in Europe or the decline in the purchasing power of the middle and lower classes to demographics, even though demographics are the major factor.
The proportion of GDP spent on pensions is rising steadily every year, with OECD countries currently spending an average of 8% of GDP on this purpose. As shown in figure 3A below, spending on public pensions varies greatly between countries. Those with an ageing population, such as Italy, Greece or France, spend the most on public pensions.
Figure 3A: Share of public pension spending to GDP
Now, with the current welfare state, the situation is certainly going to worsen for at least the next 25 years. This will lead to a huge budget deficit and new debt, and with rising interest rates, this is absolutely unsustainable. Something has to give: Either there will be more debt and high inflation, or we will raise taxes which will lower the purchasing power for the working-age population, or there will be less welfare benefits for the retired and/or the elderly working population. Unless there is a significant influx of migrants from Africa who are willing and able to contribute to the workforce quickly, our current welfare system is unsustainable in the long term.
You don't need a Master's degree in finance to understand the issues surrounding the public pension system in an ageing population. For example, if the average salary in a given country is $2,000 and the average pension is $1,600 per month. For the sake of simplicity, let's say they are equal. In 1970, there were 8 workers for every 1 pensioner, so 12.5% of each worker's salary was needed to finance all the pensions. That was very manageable. By 2010, the ratio had fallen to 4:1, meaning that 25% of a worker's salary would need to be deducted to pay for pensions. This is becoming increasingly difficult to accept, so we took on debt to bridge the funding gap. In 2050, we forecast that the ratio will be 2:1 (and demographic projections are quite accurate and predictable). This would mean that 50% of a salary would need to be paid in tax just to finance the pension system. Average workers would have to give away $1000 in pension tax alone to finance public pensioners. The system will have broken down long before 2050.
There are only two solutions: either create monetary debt by printing money by the central banks, which devalues the purchasing power of the currency and creates inflation. This is the chosen path so far, with exploding public debt since 2010 post financial crisis. The other solution is to reduce the amount of benefits that pensioners receive on average. For example, if each pensioner receives $1000 a month instead of $2000, then in 2050, workers would only need to pay $500 tax on a salary of $2000 to finance all the pensioners. It's simple arithmetic.
However, the second option is unlikely to happen because, by 2040, half of the population in many industrialised countries will be over 55 and would vote against and protest any measure that reduces the pension scheme. We have a majority (the over-60) that benefit the corrupted system and a minority (the under-50) that supports the system by paying tax and are less conpensated in net income than they should be. So, we will end up with money printing, currency debasement, general poverty and a loss of prosperity for everyone.
While the idea of balancing the pension gap with income, corporate tax and VAT taxes sounds reasonable on paper, how would you reconcile the need for healthcare, servicing high debt, higher military spending, and investment in energy transitions and infrastructure? You cannot tax companies at 80% on their net income or set VAT at 50% on consumer goods for obvious reasons. There is only limited room for taxation before it erodes consumption, employment and the economy, and higher taxes cannot fund all our spending needs.
Postponing retirement is simply going against the laws of nature and biology. Would you let a 75-year-old surgeon operate on you? Would you let a 65-year-old shovel sand on a construction site in 35°C heat? Would you let a 70-year-old make important business decisions when their memory is deteriorating? Although science and medicine have made progress in delaying death and age-related diseases, we still have physical, biological and cognitive limitations and capacities that deteriorate with age past 55 years old. Postponing the retirement age beyond 65 or 67 is not the answer; you would end up with employees who are showing up at work but unable to produce or add value at work due to their advanced age.
The only solution is to drastically reduce pension benefits and force elderly people to live in simple condition, closer to the poverty level, in a minimalistic lifestyle, as has always been the case in all civilisations for millennia.
One popular solution is to transition from a public 'pay-as-you-go' redistribution pension system to a private capitalisation or savings pension system, in which each worker saves each month for their own pension when they retire. The problem is that this can only be implemented for young workers aged under 40 or 35, so that they can have time of at least 20 to 30 years to accumulate savings. Try telling a 55-year-old worker that all public pensions will be gone next year and they will have to save for 10 years to accumulate enough for a 22-year pension. Older workers would be impoverished and in financial extreme poverty.
One alternative would be to introduce a private pension scheme for under-40s and maintain the public pension system for everyone over 40, including today's pensioners. However, this would mean that all workers under 40 would stop contributing to the public system or would have to contribute twice: once for their own private pension and once for the public pension system. This would either place an additional financial burden on young workers or create a significant financial deficit in the remaining public pension system.
There are no good solutions. Demographics are what they are, and whatever system you choose, there will always be too many pension recipients for too few pension contributors or taxpayers. You can't fix simple maths.
There is really no political solution for the European pension system. The pensioners of the 2030s to 2060s will suffer from poverty, lack of support, lack of health care and loneliness. As shown in Figure 3B below, while some countries have managed to increase the number of people aged over 65 who are still working, there is a biological limit to postponing the retirement age, especially for those in physically demanding careers. While only 12% or less of the over-65s in the UK, France and Germany are still in work, 26% of Japan's and 40% of South Korea's over-65s are still in employment. This is an incredible display of the societal differences in work culture and public financial benefits for the elderly between Europe and South East Asia.
Figure 3B: labor force participation of over-65
None of the options to solve the public pension system are feasible: you cannot raise the retirement age to 72 just to balance the public pension system, especially for blue-collar workers. you cannot reduce the pension benefit to around €800 a month, because nobody can live on that little money. You cannot ask taxpayers to pay 30% of their brutto salary for pensioners, especially with a shrinking workforce, fewer taxpayers and more tax takers (pensioneers) to come. And you cannot suddenly switch from a public social pension system to a private capitalised individual pension system. How do you tell a 55 year old low income person that from now on he has to save money for his own pension when he has no savings and is struggling to make end's meet and survive financially each month without savings? So there is no real solution to the pension system collapse. The only scenario I see is more and more government debt to pump money into the system, generating currency debasement, inflation and making everyone poorer over time.
One idea of a solution to the pension problem would be to stop having a common legal date or age at which a person transitions from full employment to full retirement, given that individuals have different abilities and capacities at different ages, and that some jobs are no longer feasible or healthy after the age of 60 or 65, while other office jobs can be done at the age of 70. I would suggest an intermediate status for people aged 60 to 75 who are no longer active workers but not yet fully retired, and place everyone of age 60-75 in a pre-retirement pool. When someone turns 60, they can either continue working as before or enter a dedicated pre-pension workplace or job market for people aged 60–75. There would then be dedicated job offers, mostly in teaching, training, administrative tasks, directing people, talking — all jobs that are still possible and not too demanding at an elderly age. Depending on their physical and mental abilities, skills, talents and desires, people over 60 could accept one or several job offers with reduced working hours adapted to their individual capacity. For example, as a 60-year-old aeronautical engineer, I could work full-time until I am 65, then perhaps work 20 hours a week. Once I turn 70, I could transition to working 10 hours a week as a mathematics teacher in a secondary school and 10 hours a week in administration. When I turn 74, I would retire completely and receive a full public pension.
The idea of the 60-75 pre-retirement pool is to create a job market for people over the age of 60, with adapted working hours, so that they can continue to work for as long as possible. The reality is that many people who retire at 65 are still capable of doing some kind of work. For example, if you are a construction worker, you might stop working at 60 and become a part-time trainer, retiring completely at 64 if your physical abilities have diminished, but you can still teach your knowledge to young trainee until the age of 70. The benefits of pre-retirement work would be tax-free and would add up to a basic public retirement income, which should be as low as 20% below the minimum salary, without pushing elderly people into poverty.
This pre-retirement job pool would benefit everyone: People would work for longer on average, which would match higher life expectancy and alleviate the ever-worsening old-age dependency ratio of public finances. Over-60s would transition from being inactive beneficiaries (costing society and the working population) to being contributors at some level, and from being major tax recipients to minor tax recipients. They would remain active and integrated into society for longer, which would make them feel good about themselves and help them to stay fit and healthy. Many part-time, support or assistant jobs would be filled by people over 60, providing a small boost to the economy and additional income for elderly people at a time when public money for pensions is becoming scarcer.
- Health care
As you grow older, you will naturally require more healthcare. It is estimated that half of your lifetime healthcare costs are incurred before the age of 60, and the other half after turning 60. This highlights the significant financial and manpower burden that an ageing population will impose.
Healthcare spending in OECD countries is expected to double between 2023 and 2050 due to the ageing population. Meanwhile, the working-age population is expected to decrease by 10% to 25%, depending on each country's immigration rate, because a large cohort of adults over 50 will retire, stop contributing as tax payers but demand more health care services, and those will outnumber the small cohort of under-20s entering the labour force that start to pay taxes and produce goods and services. Simple maths: Where will the public money and staffing needed for healthcare and pensions come from? The answer is clear: it will lead to more federal debt, inflation, loss of purchasing power, lower quality health care services, higher living costs for young adults and greater financial pressure not to have children.
The current health care system in most industrialised countries is either private (personal insurance) or public: As an employee you pay a health tax based on your income bracket, this money goes into a pool and is spent on public health care and hospitals for those who need care and treatment. What this public health care system really is, for a given income, is a system in which young adults pay but hardly ever go to the doctor or receive treatment, while older adults and pensioners pay the same but receive much more health care. This is again a transfer of wealth from the younger generation to the older generation, similar to the state pension system. To make the system fair, i.e. to make sure that on average you give as much as you get, there is an obvious solution:
Instead of indexing the health care tax rate to income, index the tax rate to the average health care expenditure of a given age group. You would have one health care tax rate for the 16-30 year olds, one for the 30-40 year olds, etc... until the 90-100 year olds and above. For example, every young worker aged 20-30 should pay a monthly health tax of only 2% of his salary, very little because for this age group people rarely go to the doctor and need treatment, so the sum of health expenditure for the 20-30 year olds is low and they should pay less for receiving less service on average. People aged 30-40 should pay 5% of their salary. A 50-60 year old worker should pay a health tax of 20% of their salary because these older people receive on average much more health care and treatment value per month. People aged 70-80 should pay 30% of their retirement income, a very high rate. This would be a fair system based on age, which is more representative of the cost of the health services you receive, rather than based on salary. It is still a social system because some 65-year-olds are relatively healthy, while others are less fortunate and require extensive treatment, medication, care and rehabilitation. In both cases, the two individuals would pay the same, but one would receive more healthcare services depending on their needs. Remember that this social system was created after the Second World War, when 90% of adults were under 50 and working, so it made sense to have a tax rate based on income at that time, because every retired person could be attended and cared for fully because of the large working population. But today, with almost half the population over 50, it is clearly a massive disadvantage to young workers under 40 and a massive transfer of wealth to the 50+ age group.
This would obviously be a better and fairer system, but it will never be proposed or voted on because, again, almost half the population is over 50, including leaders and politicians, so it would disadvantage the majority in power and the majority of voters, and so politicians prefer the status quo and the current corrupt system to remain popular, which in the meantime is ruining our society.
- Paid sick leave
With an ageing population needing more health care and a shrinking workforce to pay taxes, things are going to get bleak. One thing I have noticed that is dragging down the whole system is sick leave. if you are sick, whether you are really lying in bed with a fever of 40°C or just pretending to be sick because you have a little headache or are tired, the social security system pays for your sick leave while you are unproductive for society. This has a perverse long-term effect on people because you can just pretend to be sick with no acute control and get away with the extra time off being paid. over time and years, people abuse the system and push the limits.
Figure 4: Average paid sick leave days per person in year 2023
As seen above on figure 4, in Germany in 2023 post Covid pandemic, there was an average of 24 paid sick days per worker. That's six more days than in 2019, before the pandemic hit. That's 4.5 weeks off, on top of the regular 5 weeks holiday, 10 days of bank holidays and 110 weekend days! That's a total average of 170 days not worked in a year of 365 days, or 46% of the days are not worked, almost every second day! How can an economy function in such a world of priviledges? How can you have a work contract named "full time", but eventually work only 54% of the days and only 7 hours per day?
This system of perverse incentives and extreme socialism has made the world a lazy place. If a person is paid 100% of their salary for staying at home with mild symptoms such as a headache or low-grade fever, and their employer does not care because social security pays for it — in fact, employers promote staying at home, resting and recovering — then why would a person go to work when they are not 100% fit, but could actually work if necessary? Any minor ailment is used as an excuse to stay at home. Many ailments are now psychological or stress-related, not just physical or biological. This 'fake' sick leave, which is paid, reduces overall economic productivity while increasing healthcare costs and individual taxes for the entire public health system.
I'm not suggesting that everyone who is unwell should go to work regardless of their health condition. Obviously, there are plenty of illnesses where people must stay in bed for a week to recover, and mental health issues that require treatment and can take a month or two. It is very difficult to assess the severity of an illness and judge whether or not a person is able to work. Doctors often recommend taking three days off to recover, whether you have a mild sore throat or the worst flu of your life. However, there is a tendency to go to the doctor claiming you feel very tired, dizzy or have a headache and ask for sick leave without providing any evidence. Even worse, in Germany, you can declare yourself sick online for up to three days in a row without any doctor checking on you, and the public social system pays your salary for those days when you are absent from work. I could fake an illness for three working days without explanation and simply stay at home, go jogging, read books, do yoga and watch TV all day, while I am actually 100% healthy and feeling great. The original intention was a good idea, unloading doctors of minor illnesses (such as colds or sore throats) that simply require some rest at home and do not require a doctor's check-up if the condition does not worsen. But as a side effect, it has created a perverse system of 'rights' where people can take fully paid days off without actually being sick. Another example of added rights without a duty.
Let's be honest with ourselves: people need personal incentive to do a job we don't fully enjoy. Only a carrot or a stick will move a donkey. We either need a personal reward to push us into action to get the desired pleasure, or we need the fear of punishment to push us into action to avoid the pain. Any system where you get paid the same whether you work or not, whether you perform well or badly, will over time drag down performance and lead to nonchalance and laziness. We have all the communist experience in the history of mankind to prove that a flat reward system, in which you get paid the same whether you don't work, work poorly or work hard, leads to poverty and socio-political collapse.
So here is my proposal to combat this trend:
I would give every employee an extra 2 weeks holiday per year, but no pay for any sick leave, whether it be 3 days off for the flu, one Friday off for a hangover, or 3 weeks off for anxiety, depression or other illnesses.
This system is not perfect, of course, but it does have some advantages: It would immediately eliminate the fake sickness, the people who are not feeling well, who could still work that day, but choose not to because the system allows them to stay at home without individual punishment. It would increase economic productivity and reduce the overall cost of the social security system. It would encourage everyone to have a healthy life, because you get rewarded an extra 2 weeks anyway. It would make everyone more responsible for their decision not to work. It would relieve all the doctors in the world who often do a basic standard check-up without finding anything serious. How many people go to the doctor for a light flu, a cold, just to get a quick check up and are simply be told to stay at home for a few days and drink tea. Let's stop this nonsense, let's be responsible, stay at home when we are really sick and let a brilliant doctor out of this theatre trick of light sickness to deal only with serious illness. People would go to the doctor when they have a big ailment, something serious, not for some cosmetic complaints. Keep in mind doctors are going to be overwhelmed by the wave of over 60 year old patients that is coming in the next 2 decades. The time available for a proper examination of a real illness or a serious disease will be limited, so we need to free doctors from this paperwork of getting an administrative stamp to claim you are sick.
Of course you would have to adjust the rules: under 35 years only get 5 extra days off, over 55 years get 15 days. People who work in construction or with their physical body get 3 weeks, but people who work in an office and get paid for their brain get only 1 week. That kind of adjustment.
Of course, this proposal is far from perfect. What if you break your leg or get cancer that requires 3 months of treatment? we could certainly make special cases, but that would make the rule very complex. The idea is to cover most people's illnesses: headaches, fever, flu, bad cold, those kinds of diagnoses that can be faked to abuse the system.
- Low fertility rate
There are 2 very important things in life that I never learned how to do, neither at school nor from my parents. The 2 things are how to have good sex for myself and especially for my partner, and how to be a father. For both sex and parenting, you can have your best friend to share experiences and best practices with, but an the end, we tend to have a natural instinct towards sexual encounters and toward parenting, so that all we learn is from our own practical experience based on instinct, so that there is no obvious need for a learning phase.
Nevertheless, everyone would benefit greatly from learning the basics at school rather than from the 'alpha male' in their class or on social networks. A sex education course could cover topics such as why we feel sexually attracted to others, discovering and understanding everyone's preferences in terms of erogenous zones, learning to respect a partner's boundaries, and recognising that sex with an emotional connection is more fulfilling than casual sex. It could also address the risks of sexually transmitted diseases and how to prevent them, and normalise sex outside of marriage and reproduction.
Also, what being a parent means, the respnsability and what is not under parental control, taking care of a child and bringing up children is not a standard and universal procedure that you can find in a book or agree upon with friends. Everyone has some ideas and intentions, but no one really agrees on how to be a good parent, what is the spoce of parenting, what kind of education is the best for the child. Bringing up children is so heterogeneous, nobody does it the same way. We are influenced by our culture, our social pressures, our best friends and our own childhood experiences.
My point here is that I believe that the lack of awareness, training and communication about what sex is and what it means to be a parent during our teenage years could be a brake on future relationships and future choice to have children and a daunting task that lasts into adulthood, which could lead many adults to believe that raising children is difficult, an unknown task to them, anticipating a huge burden of nursing and caring, which makes them unsure of how to do it well, which ultimately discourages people from having the responsibility of raising children.
So maybe my suggestion here would be to have a sex class and a parenting class next to Maths and English in high school, this could demystify a very common and natural task, it would remove any taboo and prepare future adults to better handle a birth and the different stages of raising children. Also, these public classes would be interesting, teenagers would finally learn some soft skills in a classroom, it would make teenagers feel like grown men and women, and it would be a good way to promote all the benefits and joys of having children, whether it is true or not for everyone is personal, but at least society as a whole could sell the greatness of having children, with the ultimate goal of raising the fertility rate above 2 for the survival of civilisation, none the less.
If you had asked anyone 500 years ago during the Middle Ages what would happen if they had no children, they would definitely have said that they would die from famine and misery because there would be no children to take care of the farm and the home. Although we now live in a globalised society with a lot of state support and societal structure, this remains true today. You don't need any investigations or studies, don't need to be a politician or an economist to prove this: Without children, a population and especially the elderly population will crumble under famine and poverty in the long term. There is no miracle solution involving public debt, robots or AI. Without a young workforce, there can be no prosperity. It's that simple, and it's been true from the Middle Ages until today, and it will ever be.
If everyone in the world was suddenly aware of the deep crisis we are in with regard to low fertility rates and an ageing population, world leaders, the media and culture would shift towards a message of the importance of families and children for our survival, prosperity and social stability. We should be talking about the impact of low fertility rates every day on mainstream media outlets such as radio and TV, as well as on social media. The low fertility rate is a topic that should be discussed and debated. Instead, we talk about celebrities, football, scandals, rumours, the weather, and which politician has the highest approval rating. It's a complete waste of time focusing on irrelevant topics.
The problem is that people would respond with mixed feelings, saying things like:
"I can't afford to have kids. I haven't found the right partner yet. Housing for a family is too expensive. I don't want to sacrifice my career for children. Childcare is too expensive. I am biologically infertile."
That's why we need to address all these issues with policies that consider the technical, financial and legal aspects. Promoting family life with nice speeches only will not work. Financial incentives alone are not enough; we need profound changes in our society to achieve a fertility rate above 2. I have plenty of realistic and pragmatic proposals.
Public society is so good for people that you can get any service at any time: Health care, home repairs, police or fire brigade, plenty of cheap food in supermarkets, online shopping and home delivery in one click, roads and public transport, etc. In this world of convenience, adults do not need other adults to help each other, to share responsibilities. Relationships have become optional, desired for romance but not for necessity. Children, who used to help in the home, on the farm and in the garden before massive urbanisation, are even more secondary. Nowadays, with the internet and the proximity of everything in a city, adults do not need children to take care of them when they are sick or old, do not need children for a comfortable life. Children have lost their attraction, they have even become a burden and an obstacle to leisure, entertainment, hobbies, careers, etc.
So the real change we need is to re-incentivise having children. How do you do that as a society? Penalise adults without children and incentivise adults with children, everywhere in society, by regulation. Some random ideas: Financial support for maternity leave, free childcare 8 hours a day, tax relief on nannies and babysitters, priority for parents when renting an apartment, priority for parents when getting a job, income tax for childless adults and income relief for families with several children. Accomodate part-time jobs in businesses and society by compensating young parents on part time jobs as if they were working full time. An alternative to that proposal would be to exempt mothers of two or more children from income tax for the rest of their lives. Add an extra tax on renting an apartment if you are childless, and a government subsidy if you have 2 or more children. Enforce a rule that companies must have a maximum of 40% childless employees and a minimum of 30% adults with 2 or more children. This would make it disproportionately easier for parents to get jobs and more difficult for childless adults. Adjust income tax and especially pension tax according to the number of children. Additional tax for childless adults, tax deduction for parents with 2 or more children.
These kinds of incentives, which basically aim to take money from childless adults and give it to parents of 2+ children, would in the long run really get into people's heads that life overall is easier with 2+ children. Of course, this scheme is not perfect. How do you deal with lesbians, gays and biologically infertile adults? But again, I would rather penalise minorities for not contributing to the future welfare of society, rather than let our entire civilisation collapse with massive poverty, riots and civil wars everywhere. That is the criticality at stake.
As a legislator, you must view the falling birth rate as an existential crisis and a threat to a peaceful and prosperous society. You must therefore take unpopular measures to encourage childbirth and stop pretending that it is acceptable to choose not to have children. While life is better at an individual level without children, society's prosperity and stability collapse without them. We are aware of our tendency to prioritise our own lifestyle at the expense of the group, so the leaders of a country must act to protect the whole group and shield us from our selfish tendencies in order to ensure the longevity of our society and public welfare. Political leaders must police citizens because, individually, we will never act in the best interests of society; we will always act in our own best interests. The fact that we have a low birth rate and do nothing about it is unacceptable and irresponsible, it is social suicide, it is a slow destruction of our own civilisation and of future generations, and it should be treated almost like a crime. Desperate times requires desparate measures. Providing incentives only for having children does not work, so we need to take the next step and penalise those who do not have children. It's hard to admit, but it's the wise approach for the big picture. Nobody likes to be penalised or punished. Children don't like to be reprimanded by their parents. Employees don't like to hear they perfored poorly from their bosses. However, if we want to change our routines, we need to penalise bad habits.
Also, I would bring all women to the negotiating table and ask them what they need to have 2 or more children. Is it free housing and a basic income, is it childcare and nannies on demand, is it the end of social pressure on imposed exclusive monogamy standards, especially for mothers? Maybe some women want children but don't want a mate for life and don't want to commit to one partner for life. Is it a ban on both parents having full-time jobs once they become parents, so that by law there will always be one parent who can only work part-time at most, in order to protect parents from career temptations? Mabe force the father to move to a part-time job instead of the mother. Is it an income issue? Is it a legal protection in case of divorse? Does it include discussions about sharing household responsibilities 50/50 with your partner, including career choices and work commitments? Whatever it is that women want to feel comfortable about having more children, we need to have a serious conversation about it and make it happen, otherwise our civilisation is heading very fast towards self-extinction. As simple as that!
- The inability of politics in a democracy
Human adults are really big children. We are all grown-up children in our behaviour and motivation: we want to have fun in life, we don't like to work unless it's pleasant or we're forced to, we want new toys and more toys, we like to accumulate, we enjoy a lot of attention, we focus on ourselves first, we like unhealthy food, etc. Many behaviours carry over from childhood to adulthood.
When you are a child, your parents are the authority who make the rules. Imagine if, as a child, your parents let you do whatever you wanted and tried to please you all the time.
As a child, you would never wash your hands or brush your teeth, you would never tidy your room, you would only eat chocolate, biscuits and junk food, you would never force yourself to learn anything at school, etc... You would certainly have a lot of fun at the moment, but in the long run, as a teenager, this relaxed, happy attitude of your parents would be devastating for you and your growth: you would be sick, overweight, with infections. You would have bad habits and a spoiled character, you would not be knowledgeable, you would not be able to sustain any effort or prolonged concentration for study or work, you would expect to get money without working, you would be willing to do whatever you want and would never follow instructions or obey the higher authority, you would always be looking for a quick dopamine kick and a quick reward and would not be able to produce anything of value.
Well, the same thing happens in modern politics in developed countries. In order to be appreciated, voted for and re-elected, in order to have a high approval rate, politicians tell us and give us what we want instead of what we really need for long term prosperity: More free time, more salary, more holidays, paid sick leave, more pension and health care, keep all our privileges, add new ones and never take away any of our privileges, more rights and less duties, freedom not to have children without penalty for ruining society. We have been getting more and more rights and less and less duties for the last 60 years: Politicians are like parents who always want to please us, the children, the citizens, even if it is detrimental to our society, our future generations, just to get a vote in their favour. But if you really want what's best for a country and its people in the long term, you have to be tough, fair, just and not fulfil everyone's wish.
And that is why no politician is capable of doing what is necessary to tackle the real crisis: reduce the debt, bring the birth rate back up to 2, redistribute the wealth from the over 60s to the under 40s and balance the social system by cutting all those social privileges that are unfunded, unfair and aggravate the debt crisis.
Candidates and aspiring politicians looking to be in charge do not promote cutting privileges and reducing citizens' quality of life as part of their election programme, in order to get a large voting base.
Incumbent and acting politicians, if they decide to implement unpopular measures, would face backlash, massive protests and death threats, and would probably be removed from their position.
Due to a lack of full power and authority, our leaders cannot implement the unpopular and restrictive measures needed to adjust our society to high debt and a shrinking workforce due to low fertility rates. That's the tragedy. Our institutions and constitutions do not give our leaders the full authority to implement necessary but unpopular measures, as this could lead to an abuse of power, as we have seen in the past with Hitler. As a result, we are passive and can only watch our civilisation decline. The only solutions that the general public deem acceptable are to tax the rich, which has two consequences: it makes countries uncompetitive, causing companies to go out of business under high taxes and relocate to tax-friendly countries; and it causes wealthy individuals to find loopholes to avoid tax or to relocate their wealth to a tax-friendly country like in Dubai or the Caiman Islands, meaning they don't pay any tax at all in the original country and thus weaken the economy and tax revenue overall. This worsens the fiscal situation year on year.
Eventually, high inflation and general poverty will force misery upon us, leading to social unrest. People will claim to "fight back" in order to retain their past privileges, but the current demographics do not allow for prosperity and social welfare any longer. We will blame politicians, but nobody with fewer than two children will blame themselves. The decline in birth rates over the last 50 years is actually the reason for the gradual erosion of social welfare. Society and politicians have allowed people to have fewer and fewer children without taking any measures to counteract this trend, financially support family and penalize those without children, which will ruin our societies in the long run.
Under the current 4-year or 5-year election cycle, no political party would implement a policy or political measure that would cause hardship, difficulties and struggle for the population for 2 or 3 years, in the hope that the nation would be better off 8 to 20 years down the road. This is because it would bring massive social protest, unpopularity and a bad legacy to the current administration, while its successors would reap all the benefits. This is why short political cycles are bound to have a short-term impact, sacrificing the long-term health of a country for a quick, illusory victory to please and appease people.
There is evidence to support this: if China and Russia have not been able to increase their fertility rate to above 1.7 (currently standing at 1.0 and 1.4 respectively), then there is absolutely no chance that North America, Europe or South America can achieve anything against the demographic collapse at a political or governmental level.
Politicians are like actors or prostitutes who sell good ideas to please and seduce the citizens, such as economic growth on the right or more social spending on the left, but these are in contradiction with protecting the environment and reducing the debt. In our society more and more people are getting rights and benefits every year, everyone is pulling the rug out from under themselves, but fewer and fewer people are giving or willing to contribute to the whole. Our society is broken, failing, and no one has the courage to tighten the rules. Everyone wants to keep the good life, the free lunch, everywhere, with the minimum of work. We are a bunch of spoiled children and there is no authority that can deny us what we want to force us to get what we need. In a democracy, if you let people dictate the laws, they will always demand more privileges and benefits with better conditions and less hard work. You can't let the people rule; otherwise, you end up with a world of only takers and no givers. Democracy is fine when the pool of givers (workers) is growing because it can accommodate most of the wishes and requests of the takers. However, when the pool of givers (the active population) is shrinking, democracy is unable to handle the situation. This is the hard reality of industrialised countries with a fertility rate below 2 for the last 50 years and still falling, which worsens the ratio of givers to takers every year.
Also, the vast majority of politicians are old and rich, and their entourage, family, friends, co-workers tend to be rich and old too, and that's why their policies will always be biased in favour of the rich getting richer to the detriment of the middle class and the poor, and the pension system will never be questioned because they will all benefit from it soon.
If someone on the political side came out publicly and said: <<Vote for me, I will drastically reduce pension benefits, I will cut off health care for those over 70, I will enforce max 3 weeks holiday per year, 45 hours work per week, no paid sick leave, I will drastically raise taxes for adults with 0 or 1 child. Ignore climate change because it's our nature to polute and there's nothing we can do about it. Vote for me!>>
This politician does not have a chance. No one would support such a candidate. Worse, he might get death threats or be assassinated. As a result, no law is passed, everything remains the same, and countries sink deeper into the demographic crisis each year. The status quo is convenient for politicians. Unfortunately, this is the kind of change we need to have a chance of avoiding societal collapse, civil war and drastic loss of purchasing power in the coming decades.
This kind of policy will never happen. We will suffer slowly, spreading the pain through high inflation and loss of purchasing power in order to avoid restarting the system with balanced redistribution. The lower income people will be the ones most suffuring. Everyone will blame the politicians and the rich, and everyone will be nostalgic for the good old days of civil wars and dysfunctional public services. The far right or the far left will come to power and govern in most countries within the next 10 years. I guarantee you that will happen definitly before 2040, maybe as early as 2030 or 2035.
I have never voted in my life and will never vote for anyone because politicians are interested in their own careers and short term results rather than the big picture of a nation and the interest of the median citizen. Their narratives are often dubious and inaccurate, and they always prioritise their own interests over those of citizens. Politicians are actors who want to please us and sell us sweet dreams in exchange for votes, but what we really need is a hard reality check. We need to be educated through hard lessons like fairness, perseverance and hard work. We need to be forced to act for the group instead of acting for ouselves. We need unpleasant instructions, discipline, fair rewards based on merit and contributions to the group, rational decisions instead of ideological utopias.
High-level politicians want to stay in power or have access to power; they don't want to do what's best for the citizens. As most politicians in the Western world are elected for four years and wish to be re-elected, they need to prove quickly that they are doing good for the people. Even in the USA, there are mid-term elections after two years, meaning the newly elected president has just 18 months to enact change and convince people. What a short time window! What can you really do in such a short timeframe that people will immediately feel the positive consequences? Every achievement in life comes after a long period of work, not after the quick dopamine hit of easy, instant pleasure. If a politician demands sacrifices from the population for two years so that they can reap the benefits in ten years' time, this is not on the political agenda because the politician will only be remembered for the difficult climate of the first two years. This is why politicians do not introduce strong, restrictive measures, why politicians accumulate debt in order to please people in the short term, neglecting the future when the bad consequences will be seen.
Nobody claims that the labour shortage of young people today is the result of poor political policies from 30 years ago regarding fertility rates. Nobody associates former politicians with the bad consequences of today. Nobody blames Merkel for the high electricity prices in Germany today, preferring to blame the recent Ukraine war that started in 2022 or the current German leader, but nobody associates the high prices with the decision to shut down nuclear power stations 10 years ago. Politicians are only remembered for their short-term impact; they don't care about the long term. The impact of low fertility is only seen 20 years later, so nobody cares. Politicians play the "me now" game, when they should be playing the "people in 10 years" game. But even people don't really care about the future if it means pain in the short term. I can't really blame the players; I blame the rules. I'm not talking about lower-level politicians, such as sheriffs or mayors of small towns, who do good things for their communities. I'm talking about high-level national politics. If you want political leaders who make decisions in the nation's best interests 10 years down the line, you need a system that gives a leader full authority for at least 10 years, like Xi Jinping or Vladimir Putin. Obviously, when too much power is given to one man, you risk the excesses of someone like Hitler, who conquered Europe and exterminated the Jews. That's the risk of handing too much power to one single person.
Democracy works when there is a large cohort of active, working baby boomers, as there was from the 1970s to the 2010s. However, when the baby boomers are over 60 and retired, the younger generations are few in number, social privileges have been accumulating for decades and are taken for granted, and the administrative layer becomes a bureaucratic maze, we are bound to experience a decline in public services and a loss of living standards and purchasing power, as well as widespread poverty and civil unrest.
Democracy is fine for discussing and allocating a growing share of the pie. However, when the size of the pie reduces, everyone in a democracy fights to keep their share of te pie and points finger elsewhere to make cuts. Tensions rise and gentlemen's agreements cannot be found to distribute pain, restrictions and sacrifices. Humans are psychologically not wired to accept losses and pain. From the time we were injured and bleeding, our instinct has been to patch it up and stop the bleeding. We are not wired to accept less comfort, budget cuts, fewer services or fewer privileges. Democracy is not suited to socio-economic degrowth or population shrinkage after 50 years of growth and abundance from the baby boomer era.
authoritarian regimes or dictatorship is the only political regime that works in a world of population decline, which will most likel happen one way or another in the 2030s and beyond. Nobody wants to admit it because we like democracy and freedom, but democracy is not suited to the scenario of active population degrowth we have entered into in the 2020s.
Some might argue that the governments should work like a private company. If money is tight, a company cuts spending, reduces its workforce, and sells some inventory or assets. Why can't the government do the same?
Of course, the government needs to reduce spending when revenue is barely growing. Everyone agrees on that. The difference between a government and a private company is that a company's CEO has full authority and can implement painful measures immediately because its survival depends on it. A CEO can fire 20% of their employees within six months, sell machinery or tools, sell a production site or relocate production to a country with lower costs.
In contrast, a government president or prime minister is paralysed because they do not have full authority. Depending on the country's legislation, a law must be adopted by the assembly and the senate, requiring a democratic majority among politicians of different parties and opinions. If a politician decides to cut public pensions, postpone the retirement age, cancel tax breaks or introduce a new tax on childless adults, for example, they will be hated by 90% of the population. Their new law or regulation may be blocked by the Senate or Assembly, and the politician may be dismissed, expelled from their own political party and never be elected again. Without full authority for a long period of time (10 years), a politician cannot implement adaptive and adequate measures in response to demographic issues. This is the tragedy facing every industrialised country. Even Putin and Xi Jinping, leaders with long tenures and considerable authority, have been unsuccessful in raising the fertility rates in Russia and China, which currently stand at 1.2 and 1 respectively. Even leaders with authority face backlash from public opinion and lobbyists. If South Korea, Japan, China, Russia, Germany, Italy, Thailand and the USA are unable to do anything about it, it obviously means that the problem lies not in one particular political leader, but rather elsewhere, in the human nature or in our democracy and constitutions. If demographic issues could be solved by politicians, some leader somewhere would have managed to do so by now. Politicians have no control over this issue. The problem lies elsewhere, in the structure of our societies based on capitalism and democracy and in human psychology. It cannot be solved by politics in a democratic system that gives citizens freedom of action.
Nevertheless, if I were a governing politician in Europe, guaranteed of 10 years of full authority, my agenda would be:
- A flat-rate pension for everyone at the minimum wage of a country, currently around 1400 EUR per month in western Europe at the age of 65, regardless of previous career earnings or work annuity, for a maximum period of 15 years. You will also receive free public health care for a maximum of 15 years after you retire. If you are over 80 years old, you are supposed to finance yourself with your own savings if you are wealthy enough, or live with your children or grandchildren who will take care of you. Working 40 years and expecting 25 years of public pension and public system is unsustainable when half the population will be over 60. That's the sad reality. I wish it was different with 10 workers for every retired person, but it's not the case anymore, we are 4 workers to 1 retiree, going to a 2-to-1 ratio. I'm sorry, but the current system has to change, otherwise it's the 25-60 age group, the ones who make the economy and pay for the social system, who suffer poverty and loss of purchasing power to maintain a broken system that favours people over 60 who have had a wonderful life as the golden generation.
- High childless tax for every adult from the age of 25, even if you are still studying, if you have no children or only 1 child after 30. Tax benefits for adults with 2 or more children, regardless of your sexuality, to encourage people to have a family earlier and to punish those who do not contribute to society in 25 years time. This is not punishing people for their sexual orientation or their life choice preferences or their biological inability. This is about penalizing people who do not contribute to the social welfare system by not putting young adult into the world.
- No paid sick leave if less than 2 weeks off. If you are sick for a week or less, you do not get financialy compensated, and you have to take personal day off (vacation). 2 weeks additional vacations per years to be given to any employee, then each employee is responsible to work or not. Only serious illnesses should be entitled to paid sick leave paid for by the social security system. Too many people abuse the health care system and European companies cannot compete with American or Asian work ethics.
- Re-establish local currencies and borders in each country of Europe. The only 2 things that remains within the EU are free movment of people and no visa needed to live and work within the EU for EU citizens, free trade of goods (no tax) within the EU. No policy coming from the european institutions. By re-establishing borders control, each country can decide its own migration and commerce strategy. Restoring one's borders means loving one's country and protecting it; it does not mean hating the neighbors of other countries. And by re-establishing national currencies, countries can set their own interest rate. Having a common interest rate from the ECB (European Central Bank) for all euro nations forces compromises that make no country happy, and it encourages countries to make more debt and trade deficit, while other "good pupil" countries making efforts on national debt and trade deficit essentially pay for the "bad pupil" countries, dragging everyone down in the long run.
- Lower taxes on working adults to encourage more work instead of the current heavy social and financial support of non-working adults. It is an absolute systemic failure to have 5% to 10% unemployment in a society with a labour deficit. It makes no sense, almost everyone should have a job, otherwise it means that the system currently incentivises inactivity.
- A pro-natal policy with free childcare, 1 year paid parental leave for young parents and part-time jobs paid as full-time up to the age of 6. Financial prospects and reconciling work and parenthood should not be a barrier to having children. Those who want children should have a social system in place to help them accomodate work and parenting.
- Selective pro-immigration strategy to attract under 30 year olds, as USA, Australia, Switzerland, Japan do. We will need more and more workers in our ageing society. Let's make sure we attract immigrants, integrate them and let them work in areas where society has a gaping hole and need.
- Pro-nuclear, pro-natural gas and gas pipelines (in Europe from Russia) over LNG imports. Natural gas is the cheap and abundant energy source that burns 2 times cleaner than coal. Natural gas made European heavy industry successful in the 2000s until 2021. If you look only at the commercial aspect, I would have a commercial win-win relationship with every country, regardless of the politics, values and religion in those countries. And let's be honest: Russian pipeline gas is cheaper and cleaner for the environment than LNG from the US or Qatar. Europe depends on Russia for raw materials and energy, on China for manufactured goods, processed materials and "green" technologies, on Africa for raw materials and young labour, on the US for oil and gas and defence, and so on. To believe that we can suddenly stop a trade agreement without suffering is purely ideological and a fantasy of a good-hearted, do-the-right thing wishful thinking population.
- If you are not part of the working population, you should not be able to vote because you do not pay taxes and do not contribute to society. If you are under studying, you should not vote. If you are unemployed and on benefits, you should not be able to vote. If you are on public welfare like unemployment benefits and not part of the productive workforce, you should not be able to vote. If you are retired, you should not be able to vote. As a pensioner you are dependent on the welfare system and the taxpayers. The taxpayers are the ones who contribute to society, they are the people in power, they should be the only people who have a say in our laws and regulations, how they want their public money to be spent, they should be the only people who have the right to vote. People on parental leave should be able to vote because they are contributing to future generations and the future sustainability of society. By removing the votes of pensioners, the results of elections would much more accurately reflect the voice of the younger working population and would help to stop the drain of wealth from the young to the old, as is the current setup of pension and health care system.
- I would do anything possible to ensure that as much of the chip manufacturing, cloud and AI data and company in Europe (e.g. healthcare, military, aircraft, etc.) as possible is located in Europe and is a European company. Europe needs to buy European digital services. The US tech industry has a monopoly on Europe, and has full access to and control over our data. Economic growth, added value and tax revenue either go to Ireland (home to the headquarters of most tech multinationals) or to the USA. Europe is losing out economically and in terms of independence, as well as leaking sensitive data. China is trying hard to develop local chip manufacturing and has no US cloud or US apps for Chinese users. It is also as advanced as the USA in AI development. So why is Europe using US apps on US operating systems with US or Taiwanese semiconductors, running on US servers for US companies? Even with some solid start-ups, Europe is way behind and completely dependent on the US for everything in the digital world.
- Europe
Here is Europe in a nutshell: a leader (Ursula von der Leyen, president of the european comission) who was appointed, not elected by citizens, and who makes decisions on behalf of 27 countries that have lost their sovereignty. Every European country has its own traditions, culture, history, economic strength, geopolitical allies and interests, and each country has a different vision for how Europe should be governed. It is difficult to find a common agreement with 27 different people who have different interests. Behind closed doors, each country tries to pull Europe towards its own interests, to the detriment of others. The European institutions are simply a bunch of highly paid lobbyists funded by public money, fighting each other in private and pretending to be unified in public, yet unable to make decisions that satisfy all 27 countries. The dream idea of a United States of Europe, similar to the USA, will never become a reality given the 2,500 years of history and wars between European countries.
It is a continent devoid of oil, gas and minerals for the most part, mired in bureaucracy and the complexity of multi-layered laws and regulations, and absolutely dependent on many other countries for its survival (The USA for energy and defense, the USA and Qatar for gas, China for raw materials and electrical appliances, Vietnam for clothing, etc). Europe is ruled from above by illegitimate institutions that have taken away each country's ability to govern itself and enforce its own laws to protect its own interest.
Europe has very limited oil and gas reserves, very limited mining and raw material processing, so we depend on our high-tech exports (such as chemicals, cars, luxury goods and aircraft) to pay for them, as well as on the willingness of some exporting countries, such as the USA, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and Russia, to sell us their excess oil and gas and china for raw materials. Even when energy imports are fine, gas and electricity cost Europe two to three times more than in the USA or China, so we cannot be competitive in either energy-intensive or labour-intensive industries due to Europe's high wages. We depend on China for most raw materials and electrical technologies, and on many Asian countries for food and clothing. Figure 5A below shows that imports of goods and services account for 45% of Europe's GDP — a very high proportion — which forces Europe to maintain its niche exports in order to pay for the imports. These exports include aeronautics, cars, high-tech machineries, luxury goods, chemicals and pharmaceuticals, among others.
Figure 5A: Total imports compared to share of GDP
Europe is absolutly dependent on the USA for defence, energy and technology, and this puts Europe in an extreme vulnerable position.
Europe is absolutely dependent on the USA for defence and military support via NATO, particularly with regard to drones and air defence missiles. Europe depends on the USA for its oil and gas supply, especially after the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline was blown up in 2022 (organised by the USA, Britain and Ukraine), and after the recent agreement to triple its LNG imports from the USA between 2025 and 2028. LNG gas costs three times as much as Russian gas from a direct pipeline, and it is paid for in US dollars, whereas Nord Stream 2 gas was paid for in euros, further weakening europe's negative balance of trades. This makes Europe uncompetitive indefinitely for energy-intensive activities. Also, Europe is dependent on the USA for technology, cloud infrastructure, AI, data centres and social media, semiconductor design and licensing, and data surveillance. The USA (through Taiwan) has a monopoly on chip manufacturing and usage in Europe. Even worse, the USA has access to and control over most individual and enterprise data because information flows through or is stored in the data centres of American big tech companies. Europe is completely at the mercy of US tech giants, and that's frightening in the digitalization age. Finally, Europe is dependent on the US dollar as a reserve currency and for foreign exchange and cryptocurrency via US dollar-based stablecoins. Europe has become the political, economic and digital slave of the USA, an american colony and is at its mercy.
In February 2022, Russia attacked an area in eastern Ukraine that was 60% Russian in terms of language, passport and culture. This area is neither part of the EU nor NATO. So why are European leaders overreacting by sanctioning Russia, rearming Europe via public debt as if WWIII had started, and cutting off all energy and material supplies from Russia, Europe's biggest commodity supplier before 2022? This is essentially sabotaging and destroying European industries, the economy, and competitiveness. When Venezuela declares its intention to conquer Guyana due to new oil discoveries, Europe does not care and does not sanction Venezuela. Why do we construct such a negative reputation and generate so much bad propaganda about Russia, a traditional European partner whose western Russians are a white Christian people sharing some some traditions and habits with European culture ?
I understand that Eastern Ukraine is on the EU's doorstep, but let's be honest: the Russians have no intention of invading Paris, Berlin, Warsaw or Rome, nor do they have the military ability or the youth to do so. The cost of cutting off all geopolitical, diplomatic and economic relations with Russia will be seen as the reason for Europe's downfall in 10 years' time.
Bear in mind that just 15 years ago, Russia was Germany's best economic partner and diplomatic ally. How did we reverse course so quickly, and why is Europe being sabotaged? I believe that the USA's interest in defence, tech and energy has made Europe completely dependent on the USA, a diplomatic slave of the US, and now Europe can no longer decide its course independently.
The reaction of EU institutions and leaders was a typical display of political posturing: acting to please the people and endear themselves to mass public opinion instead of making the right decisions for the future of a nation. After the Russian killed thousands of Ukrainians and civilians and destroyed buildings and infrastructure, when policians claim that it is an act of terror, sanction Russia and halt all diplomatic and economic deals, they get the approval of the vast majority of Europeans, who show their appreciation and unity. But, in reality, by doing so, you are sabotaging Europe's economy and prosperity, weakening the energy and electricity grid for at least a decade, destroying jobs and further weakening Europe's competitiveness, and making every European lose purchasing power, which has pushed ahead the far right voters the anti-Europeans voter base, Politicians have essentially sacrificed Europe's future for a year of approval ratings. This will backfire in the near future, especially if Ukraine loses the war and cedes occupied territories to Russia. Europe will have lost billions in weapons to support Ukraine, billions in debt to rearm Europe for a war that has ended, and the EU will have been indirectly involved. Europe's energy-intensive industries will be destroyed for decades, and its supply chain will be cut off from its major commodity provider (oil, gas and metals).
People applaud the sanctions on Russia, but they complain about car and chemicals companies cutting jobs, and about electricity bills doubling and the budget deficit growing and soon about the required cut in public pension and public health care spending. However, these consequences are all correlated to the sanctions against Russia; they are the other side of the same coin. People don't understand the consequences of what they wish for.
A much better approach would have been to condemn the invasion of Ukraine, maintain a minimum economic partnership with Russia on gas, oil and metals, and stop supporting Ukraine after about a year, when it was clear that Russia had more firepower than NATO as a whole and that the conquested territories would never been Ukrainian ever again. This would have forced Ukraine to negotiate peace early and stop the war, the casualties and the damage.
This is why most European countries are rallying behind the USA and supporting Ukraine in the war with Russia, declaring Russia a threat to Europe. Europe has no choice but to support American decisions because of Europe's submission to the USA regarding military, technology or energy. Europe has become completely dependent on the USA, too weak to ever challenge its supremacy, but resilient enough to be a loyal client and supporter.
Let's be honest: nobody in Paris or Berlin fears Russia will attack or invade those capitals. The vast majority of Europeans would not willingly go to the Ukrainian front to fight, nor would they send their children. Most Europeans do not feel involved in this war located far from them; they just want peace, democracy and justice, and an end to Russian brutal destruction. But the reality behind closed doors is that Europe has no say, no negotiation power and simply follows the US lead because of its weak position in energy, technology and defence.
Figure 5B: Hydrocarbon trade balance per region
Europe imports 97% of its oil, 90% of its gas and 50% of its coal. As shown in Figure 5B above, Europe has the largest absolute and relative fossil fuel energy trade deficit of all the continents or major region. This leaves Europe in a weak geopolitical bargaining position, making it vulnerable to political and economic conflicts, as well as future resource depletion, energy security and competitivity of its heavy industry.
Over the last 30 years, Europe has chosen to stop the growth of its nuclear energy fleet and to build more solar and wind power over the last 20 years. However, the weather and climate conditions in most of Europe are not optimal for solar and wind production. Intermittent sources must be backed up by dispatchable energy sources such as hydropower, which has limited potential for new installations, or natural gas, which is in extremely short supply on such a densely populated continent. Natural gas and oil production in the North Sea has already peaked and is set to decline in the coming decades. Since cutting ties with Russia on energy imports in 2022, Europe's only options for local or regional production or import are North Sea gas, as well as coal like the highly polluting lignite. Europe's long-term energy supply situation is precarious, as it is absolutely dependent on the goodwill of hydrocarbon-exporting countries from other continents. In the coming decades, Europe will have to choose between ecological goals and national security. At some point, it will have to revert to Russia and expand its coal-fired power plants and increase the number of LNG terminals. All European climate goals are nice fairy tales in times of abundance, but the reality of basic needs will kick in very soon.
Since 2022, Europe has started to rearm itself, investing more of its budget in defence and the military. However, war and military has a long tradition of consuming a lot of resources and brings no economic benefit or future returns, unlike infrastructure or businesses, unless it is used to attack or defend another country in order to access their resources. Given Europe's low position in the fossil fuel and basic materials industries, such as steel and cement production, mining and metals, combined with an ageing population, an economic growth close to zero and a declining working population, I believe that rearming Europe will lead to greater scarcity, more widespread poverty, higher debt levels and higher inflation. European citizens want better living standards, not to spend their high taxes on artillery for a country that is not part of the EU or NATO.
The current political climate is leveraging the wars in Ukraine and Gaza, as well as Trump America's first politics, to increase military spending, but this spending might end up being used to produce military equipment in other countries or foreign companies, and might lead to those equipments to be used for military missions that do not involve defending Europe. Instead of isolating itself and preaching good social behaviour to the world, Europe should reconcile with the Middle East, China and Russia to gain access to resources and make commercial deals with as many partners as possible.
By integrating intermittent renewables on a large scale into the grid, the cost of electricity in Europe is now three times higher than in China or the USA, which is reducing Europe's competitiveness. By replacing cheap, abundant Russian gas with more expensive, more polluting LNG, Europe's industrial heating source is now twice as expensive as it was prior to 2019. Salaries and tax levels in Europe are much higher than in many Asian countries, and excellent working conditions put companies and factories on european soil at a disadvantage in the global market. Constraining and complex regulations from the EU Commission and governments make new industrial production longer to build-up, more difficult and more expensive than in countries with lighter jurisdiction on permitting and environmental control. Burning fossil fuels is now artificially more expensive in Europe due to the virtual carbon tax, forcing key industries and jobs to relocate to other continents without carbon tax. Europe is losing its sovereignty over key chemical products and jobs, aggravating its commercial deficits and losing tax revenue, also pushing multi-millionaires to evade their wealth outside the EU. This is weakening the euro's purchasing power.
Figure 5C below shows that chemicals production has been declining in the USA, the UK and Germany over the last 20 years, while China has absorbed most of the world's chemical manufacturing, with Indonesia and India following behind.
Figure 5C: Chemicals production 2005-2025
Europe now depends on imports of steel, cement, industrial salt, sulphuric acid, ammonia and fertilisers, as well as many other key materials. The countries producing these materials and chemicals often pollute more than Europe used to when production was based in Europe. Therefore, the idea of protecting the planet and the climate is counterproductive because the opposite is happening. In 20 years, Europeans will realise that trying to save the planet by imposing restrictions due to environmental concerns was a dumb idea when we now suffer from poverty, ageing infrastructure, blackouts, high inflation and supply chain disruptions, while climate change continues to worsen because of environmental damages elsewhere, so that Europe is losing on both fronts, economics and environmental.
In life, we don't get what we deserve, but rather, what we can negotiate. Apart from some niches like aircraft, high-end chemicals, and pharmaceuticals, or high-end machinery, Europe has very few monopoly, dominant position, or competitive advantages over the rest of the world. Take any area like demographics, labor costs, energy costs, material resource availability, intellectual property and patents, technology, artificial intelligence, and agriculture, among other factors, Europe is not in a dominant position. Europe does not lead in any of the most important geopolitical or economic areas, especially the basic needs like food, energy or materials. Other countries or regions have an advantage in specific domains: Latin America (raw materials and agriculture), North America (technology, hydrocarbons, finance, and military), China (minerals refining, technology, and robotics), Indonesia, Chile, Congo, Zimbabwe, Australia (mining), Russia, and the Middle East (cheap hydrocarbons).
If you still believe in politics and think that a courageous, strong politician could turn things around in any European country, you are wrong. You have no idea about the collapse of the system and the impossible mission facing our politicians. Nobody can save Europe now. As long as retirees are allowed to vote, as long as 50% of all taxes are spent on people over 60, as long as we work 50 hours per week with a maximum of three weeks' holiday per year, as long as we try to save the planet and the environment through laws and regulations, as long as social media is in the hands of under-18s, as long as young adults are given the option to not have children without facing penalties in our society, as long as we have the common euro currency, as long as the European Union and its institutions overrule the legitimacy and sovereignty of individual countries, and as long as European countries have open borders, Europe is heading for a dead end and is bound to collapse amid massive protests and poverty. No single politician can do anything to steer the ship after decades of acquired social privileges, a continent heavily dependants on imports for basic and essential materials, energy and digital technology, and an ageing population expecting and demanding a comfortable pension and free health care.
It is actually sad for Europe. For centuries, it was the world's role model with its world-leading empires. Denmark, the Netherlands, Italy, Greece, France, the UK and Portugal were all at the top of the world at some point in the last 25 centuries. From 1960 to 2020, Europe was likely the best place to enjoy a comfortable and safe lifestyle of prosperity and growth. What remains today is a population that is ageing fast and accustomed to social welfare. It is uncompetitive and idealistic on many topics, and under the total influence of the USA. It has no local energy source or significant resources or mining industry, and most of its top 100 companies are at least 50 years old. There has been no successful innovation or start-up success. Europe has not been able to reinvent itself. It still gives lessons internationally on how to behave and lead the world, but it is unable to increase the prosperity of its ordinary citizens. Europe is like an ageing museum. It is still a good place to live, but it is slowly fading away due to its debt and ageing population. It is unable to reinvent itself due to progressive ideologies that drain young workers in order to maintain an unsustainable, generous welfare system for the elderly. There are fewer than 30 years left for Europe. Probably 20 years at most.
European population is ageing, which has terrible socio-economic consequences. We have very few geopolitical allies outside Europe, and even within Europe, we are a disparate group of chaotic and disorganised countries with various ambitions and objectives. This is Europe's geopolitical status in a nutshell.
Europe economic decline will be slow but inevitable; nothing can stop Europe's downward spiral. We are trapped in nostalgia for our past, our ancestral culture and beliefs, and our social gains and fight for freedoms and rights, while being in total denial about the current reality. I am not suggesting that Europe will be engulfed in civil war next year; I am merely stating that, for at least the next 30 years, Europe will experience a steady decline in living standards, purchasing power, and the quantity and quality of public services year after year. As shown in Figure 5D below, GDP growth in the USA and Europe was around 5% per year in the 1960s, but has declined since then, primarily due to demographic changes. However, while the USA is still experiencing growth of around 2% per year, Europe is now at 0.5% and is set to experience structural decline by 2030 and beyond.
Figure 5D: GDP growth comparison in USA and Europe
Europe is a highly regulated continent, full of unrealistic ideologies and heavily reliant on public spending and social benefits. It is the continent with the highest level of state involvement in the economy in the world. Figures 5E and 5F below show the OECD countries with the highest tax rates as a percentage of GDP. The top ten worldwide are mostly European countries. Most of these countries are experiencing rapid population ageing, as in the cases of Italy and Germany. This will probably lead to an increase in taxation to fund the growing needs of the pension and healthcare systems in the coming decades.
Figure 5E: Tax revenue to GDP ratio in several countries in 2022
Figure 5F: Tax revenue to GDP ratio in several countries in 2023
Since 1945, the US has taxed between 15% and 20% of its total economic output (GDP). This seems to be the sweet spot. If taxes are too high, the economy slows down as people and businesses have less disposable income to spend or invest. Conversely, if taxes are too low, the economy may boom, but the government will collect very little revenue, meaning it cannot spend much on healthcare, pensions, the military, education, infrastructure or debt servicing — all of which are needed for a prosperous society. For comparison, the tax revenue of most European countries is between 30% and 45% of GDP, which is much higher than in the USA. This means that European governments are much more involved in the economy at all levels. Yes, Europe is flirting with a communist planned economy.
This is Europe in a nutshell: a lot of taxation, no incentive to grow a business or become economically successful, in exchange for a massive socialist or communist system of redistribution, often redistributing public money to people who do not need it, every activity managed and planned by the state, creating a lot of unproductive public administration and duplication of layers and roles of institutions. Europe also has an elderly care, public hospital and health care system that is rapidly being overwhelmed by the massive number of people over 60 and the shrinking 20-40 year old labour force, creating an imbalance between supply and demand for health care.
Europe is becoming a deeply socialist-communist area with a planned economy. People expect governments to solve all their problems: finding a job, higher salaries, solid pensions, reducing energy bills, improving the education system, protecting the environment, controlling immigration, improving the healthcare system, and so on. The governments of Europe have become both the cause and the solution to all of society's troubles. The European institutions are not leaving much room for innovation and business creation. High taxation at every level (individual income tax, VAT on goods and services, and corporate tax) is dampening entrepreneurship, start-ups, and business growth. Whatever value is created by businesses is spread to a social welfare system. There are heavy regulations and complex bureaucracy. This makes every individual and business fully dependent on continuous and growing government support for welfare and incentives.
Social redistribution systems, such as those in Europe, are designed to transfer money from those who produce goods and services (the workers) to those in real need. The idea is great because you don't get to choose whether you're born into a rich or poor family, nor do you get to choose whether you develop a terrible mental or health disease. However, social redistribution does not help poor people to become wealthy, free or independent. Over two generations of excessive and generous redistribution to anybody, the European social system has become a dysfunctional system that incentivises laziness and selfishness, turning people into public servants who are dependent on public benefits and not responsible for their own actions or destiny, like giving free drugs to a drug addict. Overall, it demotivates and weakens workers, creating more poverty and bringing the middle class closer to the lower wage class, bankrupting a country slowly.
If a country provides benefits to the poorest 5% or 10%, it is a great system to help people out of poverty and off the streets. However, when a government hands out the equivalent of a minimum salary to everyone, whether you work or not, whether you are truely in need or not, it destroys motivation and sends the wrong signals and incentives. It turns the middle class into a minimum wage-earning class, shrinks the purchasing power of a minimum salary and plunges public finances into a bloated abyss of bureaucracy and massive public debt, ruining a country fast. Why would you work for €1,600 a month when you can get €1,400 in basic public benefits without working? Why would you work when you have a sore throat or light fever if you can stay at home and be paid without contributing to value creation? Why would you work when you have to give your entire salary to a nanny or preschool to take care of your two children when you could stay at home and take care of them yourself while receiving public compensation? Europe has gone way too far in handing out public benefits to everyone, promoting a culture of selfishness and reliance on a public system that is drained of financial resources, with very few people contributing to the economy.
Don't get me wrong: I am in favour of a social system that provides a basic income, public healthcare and insurance, and a public pension. However, spending must be limited to match revenue, and taxation levels must remain low to encourage work and value creation. However, too little taxation and very libertarian markets, as in countries with a very low tax-to-GDP ratio, such as Mexico, India, Indonesia, Saudi Arabia and Nigeria, mean that everyone is on their own, relying on good health and family support with no public social system. This does not necessarily bring prosperity and stability; it usually promotes huge social and economic inequalities depending on the family you are born into. Too little government and public sector involvement in the economy is also a bad thing. However, Europe is clearly at the other extreme, relying too much on governments and politicians to solve every individual issue via public spending.
Europe has its advantages and disadvantages.
Europe is a rapidly ageing continent, with an increasing number of retired people every year and a decreasing working population every year, but it still has a very good standard of living, jobs, a working society and solid social protection so that nobody is left behind.
I am not advocating for a model like Saudi Arabia, with a tax-to-GDP ratio of only 8%, a system where everyone is on their own and everything is private, where the top 1% of the people own 99% of the wealth. Not at all. A social system is a great collective safety net, with people giving according to their means and receiving according to their needs, this is a great human progress that we must preserve, but the system must be financially balanced and fair in terms of give and take, as it is today with a huge financial deficit and heavily tilted in favour of the oldest generations.
When almost 50% of the added value of a country (GDP) goes to the state through taxes for planned economy, state control spending, this is a very advanced form of socialism and a communist dictatorship. A planned economy organized by the state always mismanages, overproduces in some areas and underproduces in others, as history shows. This modern form of communism, as history shows, will fail again and lead to the collapse of civilisation, poverty, civil war and suffering.
A continent of old people, under a communist pro- government intervention system, with no incentive for work or productivity, where the state is involved everywhere in complicated layers of bureaucracy and regulation, where money is heavily taxed and redistributed to unproductive state administration, to all kinds of social support and community financial benefits, and especially to the pension and health care system, which is reeling, struggling, eroding and overwhelmed by the increasing demand of its old people and its decreasing financing of the shrinking young working population.
As 50% of the voters in Europe are over 50 years old and concerned about their health and their pensions, the majority of voters and political leaders maintain the status quo with a very generous pension system and an almost "free" public health system, financed by the burden on young workers and by public debt. This is a classic exemple of the well-known "free-rider problem". Due to very predictable demographics, the situation will worsen over the next 10 to 20 years until there are no workers left, not enough taxes paid, no one willing to buy government bonds for public debt to finance our growing deficit, and the entire social system will collapse. It is bound to happen, unfortunately, and nothing or no one can stop it. Immigration is a necessary means of cushioning the fall, but it will not be enough to save the present system.
If we look at public spending in Europe in 2023, as shown in Figure 5G below, public spending by EU countries equals to 49% of the european GDP. About 55% of the total spending, equal to 30% of the EU GDP, goes on pensions and health care, which are mainly used by people over the age of 60.
Figure 5G: Public spending in the EU as a percentage of european GDP
Think about it: 27% of Europe's total value added goes into pensions and health care, that's a huge number that will keep growing! This means that the existing public system is a continuous transfer of wealth from the active working population to the inactive elderly population. This system is totally unfair, especially as the elderly already own most of the wealth, and totally unsustainable as the population ages and that percentage will go up. Also, for today's 40 to 55 year old workers like myself, expecting a wealth transfer in 10 to 20 years when we retire is not going to happen on the scale of the last 30 years because there are very few children for a lot of old and elderly people, so today's 40 to 55 year olds are getting screwed twice, now because we pay high taxes and later because we won't receive the level of pension benefits and healthcare services we have been accustomed to.
This wealth transfer system will have to slow down or stop, and our entire democracies and constitutions are at risk. With a rapidly growing elderly population, a rapidly shrinking young working population and increasing ethnic diversity, this population cocktail is explosive.
With half of Europe's population expected to be over 50 by 2040, both voters and political leaders will resist drastic reforms and hard choices to reduce the public pension and health care privileges that the current tax system favours.
We will have all the young workers, especially those without children, moving to the cities or abroad to a country with better economic opportunities and a fair system for workers, which will self-reinforce the budget deficits of European countries, while governments will be forced to print more money to maintain this unbalanced social system of more spending and less tax revenue year after year. High structural inflation of 8% to 20% is coming, faster than many believe, and this will mean the end of our democracies, our prosperity and the beginning of massive social unrest and civil wars.
In Europe, we are the only people preaching good morals to the rest of the world. We believe in Santa Claus and defend our past values of social welfare, peace, equality and democracy. We promote freedom of speech and respect for other people, as well as international human rights. Only Europeans are idealists and utopians who are reluctant to see the real world of self-defence, self-interest and refuse to accept that parts of the world have people with other culture, opinions or interest. We are the only continent trying to save the planet and the environment before saving our own European people and ensuring human prosperity. We have the shortest working week, the longest holidays of all continents, and we have free healthcare and education, but we take all of this for granted as if it were a permanent deal forever, without adjusting our spending and benefits to the reality of our demographics and economy. Europe used to be the dominant continent in the world. We are now an isolated and mocked minority; spoilt children who have lived too comfortably for two generations. We have surrendered the future of the next two generations with poor political decisions and lax policies, and with an ageing population and low birth rate. We are stubbornly clinging on to an extravagant social welfare system when the demographic imbalance no longer allows for it.
Many europeans naturally assume that the next decades will be a continuation of the past decades, with continued prosperity and growth and garanteed health care, pensions and solid public infrastructure, but those are absolutely wrong. Europe is slowly collapsing at all levels: Energy security, raw material supply, political sovereignty, the European Union, the euro currency, polarised and heterogeneous society, debt, ageing demographics, deindustrialisation, public relations, geopolitics, digital sovereignty, and so on. We are really experiencing Europe's final moments of glory in the 2020s.
- European institutions
- The Euro currency
- European values and conformity imposed on EU citizens
- Social inequalities
- My proposal to rescue the social welfare system
- My personal ideology
- Polyamory
First, let's define the concepts of monogamy, polyamory, and open relationships.
Monogamy is when two people commit to an exclusive sexual and/or emotional relationship. In an open relationship, two partners have a sexual (and, optionally, emotional) relationship, but also allow each other to have sex with a third person, without necessarily forming an emotional bond or committing to a relationship with them. This involves tolerating sex with another person. Informing a partner that you have a sexual encounter with a third person is optional.
Polyamory is the belief and realisation that you can love several people at the same time. Love is not exclusive, either to you or to your partners, it is similar to friendship: You have and like several friends at the same time, all your friends know about the other friends, and that's perfectcly fine. In polyamory, people can have several emotional bonds or relationships at the same time, which may or may not extend to having several sexual encounters.
Polyamory is the philosophy and practice of loving multiple people at the same time in an open, honest way. It emphasizes choice regarding the number of partners one can choose instead of adhering to social norms such as monogamy.
Unlike open relationships, polyamory is characterized by emotional as well as sexual or romantic intimacy among partners. In contrast to infidelity, adultery, and extramarital sex, polyamory is disclosed and agreed to by everyone involved.
Polyamory is not bigamy or polygamy, which involves marriage to more than one person and is illegal in most countries. It Is not "swinging" or "spouse swapping" in which couples in established relationships have casual sexual encounters with people in other couples. It is not an "open" relationship, in which a couple agrees that one or both partners may have sex with other people, not necessarily with disclosure.
People of all orientations and identities can participate in polyamorous relationships, including those who are straight, gay, bisexual, lesbian, transgender, nonbinary, or pansexual.
Most in the polyamory community reject the idea that polyamory and sex addiction are related. Sex addiction is not a defining characteristic of polyamory, and polyamorous people do not necessarily engage in the excessive sexual activity that is characteristic of sex addiction. However, people with sex addictions based on the desire for multiple partners may be particularly drawn to the polyamorous community.
The key difference with traditional exclusive monogamous relatioship is a common term used in polyamory: compersion, or the feeling of joy from seeing your partner happy with another partner. This is the opposite of jealousy.
The need for clear communication and boundaries among all concerned is a key feature of the polyamorous philosophy. The complexity of interrelationships can leave some individuals vulnerable to exploitation.
Issues that may cause polyamorous relationships to fail include lack of boundaries, lack of support, comparison, jealousy, and poor communication. Addressing these issues is essential in a polyamorous relationship.
Polyamory differs from open relationships. Polyamorous people require an emotional bond before having sex, and polyamorous people disclose every emotional bond they have with all other partners. Sex does not happen without strong emotional connections, and honesty is implied and required from all parties regarding their feelings, state of mind, and relationship status, as well as which partner they currently spend time with and have feelings for. Everyone is aware of the attraction one feels for another person, even before sex occurs. There is no lying or cheating. Cheating occurs when a partner does not disclose a sexual encounter or strong attraction to a third person.
Many people believe we can have several loves in your life time, one after the other. I believe in polyamory: the idea that you can love several people at the same time, or have several relationships simultaneously, each one of a different kind: a daily home partner in which you enjoy stability and comfort, a partner for sharing parenting duties, an affair partner, an intellectual love partner, a partner for having fun with, a sexual partner, and so on. 80% of species on Earth have different partners. Humans are no different in terms of our primitive instincts, values and drives. Deep down, we have a natural instinct to desire romantic or sexual relationships with different partners.
Let's have a quick look at the history of monogamy:
Fundamentally, in past cultures or other religions, a man of high status would have several wives or partners. When the Christian Church came into being, polygamy was still practiced by the Jews. Jewish polygamy clashed with Roman monogamy at the time of the early church, as polygyny (one man having more than one wife) was allowed and practiced but polyandry (one woman having more than one husband) was implied to be unlawful by the Hebrew Bible's laws of adultery. Many Christian leaders spoke against polygamy, condemning it. The goal of monogamy was to reduce adultery, rape and the number of single mothers raising children without a father, or to prevent men from abandoning their children after birth.
Looking back through history, only 16% of the societies listed in the Standard Ethnographic Atlas — a database of the cultural practices of 1,200 pre-industrial societies — are described as monogamous. Most kings, emperors and sultans of past civilisations were known to have several wives, and most high-ranking men of noble families and the aristocracy had concubines — women who lived with a man and often had children with him, but who were of a lower status than his wife or wives. Even in Roman society, where monogamy was imposed, there were no restrictions on sexual partners, so that adultery or having several sexual encounters was the norm (including homosexual encounters). Concubinage, whereby a man has sex and children with several women, was always common among the landholding class, even if he was legally married to one woman. Monogamy was introduced by Christianity. The reason was not moral or egalitarian; rather, it was a practical solution to the problem of half-brothers arguing over inheritance. By allowing one legally declared wife, illegitimate children from other women were prohibited from inheriting. The only remaining issue was young brothers murdering older brothers over inheritance. Nevertheless, the upper class continued to have many concubines because men (and many women too) desired multiple sexual partners throughout their lives, and women desired men of high status, often abandoning one man for another man of an even higher status over time. Although polygamy became illegal, adultery (the act of sexual relations between a married person and someone who is not their spouse) or serial monogamy remains commonplace and continues to this day in every society. While polygamy is banned in most societies today, if you broaden or loosen the definition, almost everyone is practising it. Isn't serial monogamy — having a series of exclusive relationships one after the other — just polyamory with a time constraint? What about young unmarried people who have casual hook-ups every weekend? If strict monogamy is defined as having one sexual partner for life, how many people today have had only one sexual partner in their lifetime? Probably no more than 5% or 10% of the population.
In our era of women's emancipation and freedom of choice, contraception, social media, high level of education and rapid societal changes, with rape cases being extremely limited, an exclusive monogamous culture in society no longer makes sense and only survives as a legacy of our past heritage.
Our world is full of polyamorous relationships:
I was born to two parents, a dad and a mum, and I love them both. They were both great to me, and each one brought something different to the relationship. I didn't have to choose between them; I was glad to have both. So why can we love two parents, but only one partner?
I grew up with my sister, who also received attention from my parents. I did not have my parents' undivided attention. Sometimes my parents were there for me, but sometimes they were occupied with my sister. Why do people demand exclusivity from their partner when our first love, as babies and children, is shared among siblings?
If you have two brothers or sisters, or two kids, you love them both. They are all different and have different personalities, but you love them all the same. You don't want to pick one sister you like and ignore the other sibling, or one child you like and ignore the other child. You want and love them both. So why can we love two siblings or two children, but have to settle for just one romantic partner?
I can give other examples: You might have three best friends from school or university. You enjoy every second spent with them. They are all very different. Maybe one is very funny and always cracking jokes, one is great for deep conversations and sharing life insights, and one is great at business and knowledgeable. But you like all three of them. Spending time with one of them doesn't mean you dislike the other two. You might also spend time with all three of them at the same time. If you spend a weekend with one friend and then the next weekend with another, you don't end your friendship with the first friend on Sunday evening so that you can spend time with the second friend the following weekend. All three friends know about each other, and it's perfectly fine to have several best friends. So why can't we have several loves or partners in our life at the same time?
The same goes for food or music. Even though you have your three favourite dishes and two favourite music bands, you sometimes enjoy eating or listening to something else. Why should love and a partner be unique? Why should a partner be with us for the next 60 years? How can we commit to love in the future through weddings and declarations of commitment? Nobody knows what our feelings will be in five years' time.
Let's broaden our perspective: 80% of species and animals on earth have several partners in their lifetime. Only 5% of mammals are monogamous. Humans are mammals and are non-monogamous by nature. Monogamy is a concept imposed by the Church — a mental construct turned into a social norm — but it is not in our nature or instinct.
Fish, rabbits, horses, monkeys and many others are all polyamorous. Penguins and swans are among the few exceptions that bond with one partner for life and have children with them. However, most animals have several children with several partners in their lifetime. Even ducks that appear to bond with their partner and baby ducks for life are not actually monogamous: Most ducks form strong pair bonds for a breeding season, which typically lasts 6 to 8 months, but they may seek out new mates each year. That's a lot of partners over the course of their 10-20 year lifespan.
Ducks are non-monogamous over the course of their life
Monogamy is not suited to modern society. Polyamory, however, does.
As society has shifted towards more options and freedom of choice, promoting monogamy is outdated and no longer fitting. It's like letting a child into a candy shop or toy store and forcing them to choose only one thing — that's torture and unnatural to the new setup.
Monogamy is a social construct for both men and women, but the culture of monogamy is much more prevalent in women than in men. From a young age, girls are indoctrinated into monogamy much more than boys. Fairy tales and Disney stories and movies show girls looking for and finding "the one love": the charming prince, the love of their life with whom to share a family and be happy. Our culture mostly instils the idea of monogamy for life. For boys, the culture instils more dating and being successful at seducing girls. Teenager boys and those in their early 20s value the 'body count', or how many girls a boy has slept with. The pressure on men is more like James Bond, who ends up with a new girl in each film. Our social construct of boys is more about a succession of conquests, with a different partner for each stage of life. This is why polyamory seems more conceivable to men than to women.
The other reason is obviously evolutionary: When a woman becomes pregnant and during the first year or two of breastfeeding and nursing, the mother is absolutely dependent on her partner (or relatives and state benefits, more recently). From an evolutionary perspective, therefore, women have a two-year window during which they cannot really be polyamorous. Outside of this window, however, women are instinctively as polyamorous as men, especially in modern society where they have acquired so much power and freedom through women empowerment. For men, when they procreate with a female partner and have a child, it means investing time, effort and resources in raising the child. Therefore, men want to ensure that they are investing in their own offspring, rather than the child of another man. Therefore, evolutionarily speaking, men expect their female partners to be faithful and monogamous during the reproductive period.
From an evolutionary perspective, only the pregnancy year and the following two years are supposed to be monogamous for both men and women. These are the only three years during which men and women need or expect exclusive commitment. While I agree with this theory, it only applies to those three years of your life. Nowadays, with social welfare, financial support and government benefits, even those three years do not necessarily involve exclusivity: Some men split up with their female partner when she is pregnant, and some women decide to raise a child alone, which is a tough task but made possible by great societal support. Our evolutionary instinct for exclusive monogamy does not apply to our entire lives, not even to the three years surrounding procreation.
After two or three unsuccessful relationships, a woman would still believe that the next one will be 'the one', increasing both her standards and her expectations. After two unsuccessful relationships, a man would likely lower his expectations of the outcome of a potential third relationship, or give up entirely; some men might even lower their standards and demand on a potential new partner's profile.
In a society where you grow up and live under constant social and cultural standards, monogamy is the norm and the belief of the vast majority. It's hard to be the black sheep and rebel of the group. Believing differently in polyamory is extremely delicate, difficult and awkward, and even more so to admit it to your peers or publicly, fearing backlash and non-acceptance from the masses.
Modern society is nothing like it was just a century ago, and the concepts of 'one love forever' or 'one love at a time' does not fit with a society that offers so many options and temptations.
Most of us live in cities surrounded by millions of people. From an early age at school, you are surrounded by 200 peers and have plenty of time to socialise and form bonds, unlike in villages a century ago where there were limited people in your age bracket. You can now choose a university or profession where you can meet people who share your passion, strengthening bonds and chemistry. Even work has changed radically: while we used to have one job for life, nowadays people change jobs or positions every three years, so you meet lots of colleagues throughout your working life. Your desires and aspirations evolve over time, so the kind of partner you want now is not the same as the kind of partner you were looking for five years ago. It will also likely be different in five years' time. It is extremely unlikely that you will have one partner who suits you throughout your entire life.
In modern society, people are bombarded with fast changes and new people. Our personalities evolve tremendously. Between the ages of 20 and 35, we mature and change a lot through life experience and the people we meet. How can the expectation of a 'one-person-for-life' relationship pragmatically work in this environment? How can a partner you had at 25 still satisfy you and fulfil your needs at 35, when you are at a totally different stage in life with a different mindset? Our socio-cultural norms regarding monogamy are no longer suited to modern society.
Don't get me wrong; some people do meet "the one" and stay happy with their partner for 50 years. I wish this were the norm for everyone. But the reality for most of us is that we will have a series of monogamous relationships throughout our lives because people evolve, as do our needs, desires and expectations. Other likely alternatives to a series of monogamous relationships are living mostly single, staying together in a monogamous relationship but being unhappy, or being happy together but cheating on each other at various times. These are the four most likely scenarios, much more likely than "the one love forever". The scenario where you have one or two short relationships before the age of 26, then meet 'the one' at 26 and stay faithful and happy together forever is rather unlikely. I am not talking about 70-year-olds talking about their past 50 years. I'm talking about today's 45-year-olds and under, talking about their past 25 years; the millennials and Gen Z of this world, living in a fast-changing, interconnected, modern, digital society via the internet and social media. Marriage rates are down. Divorce rates are up. The number of single adults is up. Fertility rates are down. That is our reality. Our society is not like Snow White meeting the charming prince and living happily ever after.
The normal happiness loop is as follows: you sit around, you're bored, you want something, you decide that you won't be happy until you get it, and then you suffer while you wait for it and strive to get that thing. If you get it, you get used to it, and then you get bored again and want something else. If you don't get it, you're unhappy for a while, but then you get over it and want something else. Then you repeat the happiness cycle again and again.
This is true of material things, life goals, achievements, careers and money, as well as dating. The same is true to some extent of couple relationships, where once you are in a relationship, you don't want to lose it because you enjoy the trust, companionship, comfort and daily love and affection you receive. However, over the years, you become intrigued by other people and wonder what it would be like to be with someone else.
Contrary to common belief, more women than men are bored with monogamy. This is probably because women need more confirmation than men, and they need the full package to desire a sexual encounter — an attractive, kind, emotionally sensitive, wealthy, intellectual and funny partner — so they tend to wish they could get all those traits or some of those missing traits from another partner.
In our society, there is a lot of pressure to find 'the one love'. The reality is that the right person for us now might not be the right person for us in 5 or 10 years' time, and there is no such thing as 'the one'; rather, there are several potential partners who could be good for us at the same time. Most of us decide to pick one, but there are several potential partners, each of whom could fulfil our needs in some way. The expectation to find "the one" who will fulfil all our needs forever is unrealistic and leads to unhappiness, breakups or unfaithfulness.
People can be stubborn and delusional when it comes to finding 'the one love', even in their late 30s or 40s. It's one thing to believe in it in your early 20s, but when you've experienced two or more long-term relationships that ended for various reasons, how can people remain delusional and stick to the belief that "the one" will inevitably come along, and that they'll meet someone one day and experience pure love for the rest of their lives? After two hard break-ups and maybe a child or two in between, how can people stay confident — or rather, delusional — about their ability to attract someone and be in love forever? It's like a religion, where everyone is convinced that they deserve and definitly will meet that person one day. Shouldn't we learn from our own experience? Why is 'the one' an irrefutable, universal belief that people hold onto, even in their late 30s or early 40s, despite having had several long-term relationships and children? At some point, you should realise that most people have several loves in their lifetime, sometimes simultaneously. Relationships never come with guarantees about the future, such as how long they will last or if one of the partners will one day meet someone they feel even more attracted to.
I'm not promoting hookup culture or casual sex, where people have a sexual encounter with a different partner every week. This devalues sex and intimacy, and ultimately damages your mental stability. What I'm saying is that you can have strong feelings, intimacy, and a lasting emotional relationship with several people at the same time (not five or ten, but two or perhaps three), as long as everyone is aware of each other and each other's feelings, so that there are no lies and trust can be built between the partners.
In evolutionary terms, 95% of human societies in the past were polygamous; the most desirable males at the top had several wives or children from several mothers. Monogamy is a recent phenomenon at humanity scale, only been around for about 1000 years old, constructed by Christianity. Even today, polygamy is the norm in some societies, and the norm for most of other species on earth.
Polyamory is not just a way for men to have multiple female partners. It is also beneficial to women. Many women would prefer to share Leonardo DiCaprio part-time than have a full-time male partner on a low wage. Wouldn't some of the female partners of steel manufacturing workers enjoy also being partners of a very successful podcaster or influencer? Wouldn't the female partner of a minister like to occasionally be the partner of a professional athlete? Polyamory is not just a man's fantasy; it reflects the desires of both men and women. Polyamory could be a way for certain groups to increase their fertility rate: If we realise that finding "the one love" is not a prerequisite for having a child, perhaps more people would consider becoming parents without waiting for a "the one partner". If some people embraced the idea of having strong feelings for multiple partners, perhaps the likelihood of staying with your original partner would increase, rather than experiencing a series of exclusive monogamous relationships and painful breakups.
Take the following three things:
1. Women's empowerment and feminism.
2. Christianity and its monogamous construct, based on the cultural belief of 'the one true love forever'.
3. Having children at a fertility rate above two.
These three things are fully incompatible. It is not possible for these three values to coexist in our society. Our society has prioritised the first two to the detriment of children, resulting in a sharp decline in the young population and its dramatic consequences.
Women have acquired power, control over their lives, independence, rights and freedom. For many of them, having children is contradictory to the empowerment acquired and means renouncing those privileges.
By culturally and socially pushing for 'the one love forever', many people have higher expectations of a partner and are more selective about who they choose as a life partner. They see a lifelong commitment as a burden and a restriction of their freedom, hence choosing single life or casual dating over committing to settling down with one partner and having children. Having children is viewed as a commitment to a partner for 20 years, but in reality it is a commitment to a child for 20 years and to a partner for only the first 2 years. If having children without living with the other parent long term and having several partners was seen as the norm, I believe many would feel less pressure to have kids, which might bend the fertility rate curve upwards.
In a polyamorous relationship, people don't need to hide having an affair, a new crush or chasing a new partner they are attracted to. They don't risk losing the love or companionship of their existing partner. There is no need to hide or lie to yourself or anyone else; only understanding, acceptance and openness about one's feelings and attractions.
In our modern society, there is a lot of social and cultural pressure to remain faithful and pretend not to be intrigued by anyone else outside of your official partner for 60 years, while we are bombarded with emotional, visual and erotic stimulation in the real world, in advertisements and on social media on social media every day. How can you not succumb to temptation? How can we live in a society where we "sell" sex everywhere but expect everyone to be married and faithful for 60 years? How can we have a society that tolerates or legalises pornography and prostitution, yet expect everyone to be in exclusive, monogamous relationships? It's a double standard, and it's a lie to both ourselves and our human nature. Even if people love their partner and don't want to lose them, people in monogamous exclusive relationships get bored at some point. This is true for both men and women. Polyamory is in our nature and is a positive thing in our modern society of rapid change and social protection. Monogamous, exclusive relationships and happy marriages might work for some of us, but let's be honest: 70% of 25–45-year-olds today fall into one of the following four categories:
1. People who are mostly single and have no experience of a long-term relationship.
2. Those who have had several on-off relationships, with two or more relationships of two years or more, and are now single again.
3. People in a relationship, married or not, who are happy together, but where at least one of the partners has cheated or is secretly cheating on their partner.
4. People in a couple relationship who have never cheated but are unhappy and considering splitting up.
Polyamory is a real solution for adults in one of those categories, and nowadays those four categories combined represent the vast majority of Millennials and Gen Z. I'm not saying that everyone should be polyamorous. I'm just saying it should be accepted and embraced in society like gay and lesbian relationships are. I'm not saying every man should be gay, but if you are gay, you shouldn't fear any stigma, discomfort or exclusion in society — you're perfectly fine as you are. You are normal, just like people with blonde hair or a big belly are normal. Sometimes men love men and sometimes men love women. The same should be true of monogamy and polyamory: both should exist and be destigmatised, not marginalised. In a perfect world, polyamory should even become the norm, and exclusive monogamous relationships should become a fully accepted minority, just as gay and lesbian people are today.
When Copernicus claimed that the Earth rotates around the Sun and not the other way around, he was seen as a fool and a possessed man. When Elon Musk first said that all cars would be electric in 20 years' time, cheaper and way better to drive than existing petrol cars, nobody believed him. When Netflix and Spotify first claimed that, within ten years, all the world's films and music would be available to stream online for $10 a month, without the need for physical media such as DVDs or CDs, people thought it was a crazy idea. Any paradigm shift is initially dismissed as a foolish idea, an impossible dream. It challenges common beliefs and cultural norms. I hope that polyamory establishes itself in our modern society (again) because it is a return to our deep human nature and behaviour. It could also definitely help with our fertility crisis.
Humans are definitely polyamorous and would have multiple partners in a perfect world. The difficulty and time it takes to raise children has created a societal need to promote monogamy. This was important 500 years ago to prevent rape and crime, and to increase the chances of children surviving by forcing both parents to stay with their partner and children. However, in the modern world, with all the progress and prosperity we have, this virtual and arbitrary construct of monogamy is obsolete and does not make sense. We should return to our primitive instincts and embrace polyamory, especially given the declining fertility rates in our society over the last 50 years and the drastic consequences this will have. A return to non-monogamy is one solution for our civilisation to survive.
I am not saying that this non-monogamous model is for everyone. Some people love only one partner their whole life and are perfectly happy. That's great for them. It's like being a lesbian: It's fine, and it should be accepted everywhere, but the reality is that lesbians are a tiny minority. Happy monogamous relationships that last a lifetime without cheating on each other are rare. We need to deconstruct the moral and social pressure to have only one partner at a time, preferably for life, and abandon the expectation of exclusivity from our partner(s). These standards should be abolished. Polyamory is human nature. it is not an outlier minority, it is the majority trend.
Nowadays, culturally and socially enforced monogamy often results in romance vanishing from a relationship after a few years, especially after children are born. Couples either stay together unhappily or cheat on their partner secretly. This is the reality for most couples in the Western world. Of course, it's possible to stay with the same partner for 60 years and remain happy, and this is what most people wish for, myself included, but this is more the exception than the norm. Because we are told from a young age that we will fall in love and stay in love forever, people become deeply saddened, depressed and distressed when it doesn't happen. Incidentally, this is also one reason why some people don't commit to a partner or have children: they see how many young parents break up, and they want to avoid the pain of separation and being a single parent. This pushes up the number of single people and childless adults. This is why open relationships and polyamory should be brought to the negotiating table if they can help people to have more children.
My point is that having affairs, new romances and possible sex with partners other than the 'main' one is totally natural and acceptable as long as everyone is aware of each other's emotional and relationship status. People value honesty and trust more than the act of having sex with someone else. Learning that your partner has cheated on you is more painful because of the loss of trust and honesty, and because your partner lied to you, than because of the actual physical act of sex that your partner had secretly. The emotional pain of finding out you have been cheated on is so great that most people either stay in an unhappy but faithful relationship or cheat secretly to avoid dealing with the consequences of their actions. If you proactively tell your partner that you have feelings for someone else, or have or have had sex with someone else, there is no loss of trust, and the affair is respectful, honest and natural. If you feel attracted to someone, why should you lie about it? Why should you be blamed for having feelings of love towards someone? Feelings and emotions are natural and neither good nor bad. You can have feelings of love for two people at the same time, loving both for different reasons and enjoying the company of both, so why restrict yourself to only one?
To me, having strong feelings for someone other than your regular partner, thinking about your secret love interest every day, even if you do not have sex with your secret crush, but not telling your regular partner about your secret feelings for your crush is already cheating. You are cheating emotionally, not sexually. On the other hand, spending time with different partners and potentially having sex with them while all partners know about it from day one is not cheating. You haven't let down any of your partners emotionally because you never lied to them. The trust to all partners is still there and strong. You are reliable. Everyone knows that you have sex with other people. You are not cheating emotionally.
You can love two parents, two children, two sisters and two brothers, but only one partner? Why? If the answer is that love with a partner includes sex, and sex is exclusive, then what about your ex, with whom you had sex, and who you are no longer in contact with, and don't care if they have another sexual partner? Having sex doesn't mean you're committed to a partner for life. It doesn't even commit you to one partner or a single relationship. Many people have sexual encounters without committing to a relationship with the other person. When you really think about it, there are no valid reasons for partner exclusivity. It's just a constraint you put on yourself, a social norm or the idea that being exclusive shows more commitment to your partner and means you'll be together forever, but this isn't necessarily true. You never know how long you'll be with your partner, it could be forever or you could split up next year. Pledging exclusivity to yourself and demanding it from your partner only provides imaginary security at the start of the relationship. It is a commitment when you make it, but it doesn't guarantee that it will last forever or prevent you or your partner from developing strong feelings of attraction for someone else in the future.
People remain exclusive and faithful to avoid hurting their partner's feelings. However, if you tell your partner about your feelings and sexual encounters, you won't hurt them much; you'll be honest and true to yourself. You hurt someone more by not letting your partner know about your secret affair or sexual encounter, by the broken trust you had, rather than by physically cheating on them.
Polyamory is similar to gay, lesbian and bisexual relationships: They have existed in every civilisation for millennia, but have mostly been discriminated against, stigmatised or marginalised by societies and cultures over the last centuries in the Western world. Only the very young generation, 25 and below, is starting to recognise and embrace polyamory, becoming accepted to some as part of life's diversity in sexual and emotional relationships. Monogamy is a social construct of the past that does not apply to all humans, yet it is still taboo to publicly criticise it. As a result, people regularly engage in polyamory in hidden forms, such as cheating in a monogamous relationship, or in official forms, such as dating without long-term commitment and splitting up to experience a succession of monogamous relationships, which is no longer monogamy. Yes, we all want to fall in love, and when it happens, we focus on one partner and never envision having another. That's true, but how long does this feeling of love and exclusivity last? Even when love evolves and takes another form, how many of us have never had secret feelings for another person after five or twenty years in a relationship? Love is so strong at the start that we commit to loving only one person for the rest of our lives, only to realise that people evolve, and we fall in love with someone else years later. It is only societal and cultural pressure that prohibits having several love partners at once. We should recognise that this situation happens a lot and it should be commonplace and destigmatised, like hobbies, food taste or personal interests, they change over time.
Only a very small minority of people live in open relationships with several partners — reportedly 4% of the US population. They are still an extremely small, discreet minority under social pressure to be perceived as sluts for girls or horny unreliable sex players with commitment issues and immaturity for boys. Polyamory does not mean being sex-addicted and having a different partner every day. We still want to build trust and intimacy when choosing a partner before starting a relationship of any kind. Polyamory has only recently started to receive media recognition since the onset of the pandemic, but a polyamory adult is still perceived by the masses as immature and unable to commit, and as a personality type that is merely looking for free sex, which is false. This has to change; we need to start accepting polyamory as part of our reality and primitive instinct of attraction, and it should be recognised like lesbian and gay relationships are. We need to unlearn monogamy if it does not suit us.
I view love and romance like food and friends: you have a few favourite dishes and a few good friends, and you enjoy trying new things and spending time with different people. If you were forced to eat the same dish every meal and only have one friend, that would be a terrible life, wouldn't it? To me, attraction, romantic partners and sexual partners are the same. Committing to one person forever is silly and unnatural, and I refuse to do it because it is not part of our genes, but part of an invented social construct that makes no sense in our modern world. There are 2 types of people: Those who want to know more, and those who want to defend what they already know. Many people are afraid to change their mind and most of their beliefs aren't even theirs to begin with.
I know most of you will disagree with me. People are too proud or have too much self-esteem to even consider their partner having someone else in their life. Most people are proud and, when they engage in a relationship, they expect and demand exclusivity from their partner. The only thing I wonder about is why you would demand 50 years of exclusivity from your partner when you don't even know how you will feel about them in the future. How can you or your partner commit to exclusivity when love, romance and attraction come and go and nobody knows what the future holds? The only commitment you can make to your partner is to be honest about your relationship status, how you feel about them and if you develop feelings for someone else, commiting to tell the truth about feelings. The only long-term commitments you can make are honesty and sincerity. Committing to love forever is a lie from the outset. If it works out, that's great, but weddings involving a commitment for life are a big lie made in public, and it's a commitment you cannot guarantee.
Why do most people demand exclusivity from a partner or refuse to share one? There is an evolutionary explanation for this behaviour in both women and men.
For women, getting pregnant was dangerous: your body weakened, you had to protect yourself from physical aggression during pregnancy and you risked your life giving birth, so you wanted to carefully select the father. Once you had given birth successfully, you needed security. You need to recover safely from the birth, you need protection at home, you need someone to feed you and the baby, and you need an income or resources because you obviously can't work for several months. You also need emotional support and someone to share your incredible experiences with, as well as someone to stabilise your mental state when the release of pregnancy-related hormones suddenly stops. From an evolutionary point of view, women obviously needed their husbands, the fathers of their children, to be around to provide all the support they needed during this time. If the father ran away during pregnancy, it would be a potentially fatal catastrophe for both mother and child. This is why strict monogamy is best for women around the time of birth.
For men, the consequences of a pregnancy are that they must double their efforts at work and at home during pregnancy and for at least the first year of the baby's life in order to feed and support their family. Birth is a significant investment of time, effort, resources and money. If a man had shared his partner with other men, how could he be sure that the child was his and not another man's? The risk of investing so much in a child that is not actually his is too great, so naturally, men demand exclusivity from their female partners during the time their femal partner tries to get pregnant.
These historical evolutionary reasons still push most of us towards exclusive monogamy, especially around the time of pregnancy and during the first year or two. Now, let's revisit this historical legacy in modern society.
First, for women: Pregnancy in industrialised countries is well controlled and any malformation issues are detected at an early stage. The death rate for mothers has fallen from 1% to 0%, and for children from 10% to 0.1%, over the last 400 years. Hospitals, healthcare, midwives, and medical technologies such as the epidural and caesarean section are wonderful innovations. After birth, there is maternity leave, state child support, childcare, tax credits, etc. Mothers who give birth alone and are separated from their partner are in more financial difficulty, but it is not as disastrous nowadays as it was centuries ago. The support person at home does not have to be the father; it could be a sibling, the parents of the mother, a friend, a babysitter or a nanny — literally anyone. Young mothers always have someone available to help out and provide support at home nowadays.
For men, the risk of mistakenly believing a child to be his own when he is not actually the biological father can easily be eliminated with a DNA test. After two or three years, the child should start to resemble the father physically. Hiding the identity of the father poses more of a risk to the mother of being found out and being left alone than to the men involved. Again, it is extremely improbable that a woman will have a sexual encounter with a man who is not the father of the child during pregnancy or in the first year, as mothers form a strong bond with their child and have no desire for another partner during those early days.
This is where we stand today: because our brains are evolutionarily programmed to be exclusively monogamous during the two years around birth, we naturally believe that we are an exclusively monogamous species. In reality, even if you have three kids, that's only six years out of the 18–45 reproductive age range where men and women expect monogamy (and even then, you can have kids with different partners). This leaves 20 years where monogamy is a superficial and unnecessary mind construct. People still have emotional and sexual relationships after the age of 45, but not for reproduction, rather for bonding and pleasure. The monogamous trait that humans inherited from our ancestors is no longer applicable or useful in today's society. Single mothers today are able to balance childcare, raising a child alone, and going to work thanks to government support and flexible working policies. A mother and father can split up and arrange a fair 50–50 split of childcare duties, giving both parents a balanced life with time for parenting and time for other personal activities. Women today can have three kids, split from their father, and live off child support and government benefits without working. Take it to the extreme and anything is possible nowadays: Single women can use a sperm bank and IVF to get pregnant and raise their child alone, without a legal father. They can surround themselves with relatives, friends or whoever they want to help with daily duties. You don't even need to be in a relationship to be a parent nowadays (check out www.familyship.org for more information). You can adopt a child and become their legal guardian or parent without being biologically linked to them. You can be a heterosexual, gay or lesbian couple and use surrogacy — an arrangement where a woman carries a pregnancy for another individual or couple, who will become the child's legal parents after birth — to have a child where one or both members of the couple is the biological parent. Anything is possible nowadays. Exclusive monogamy is no longer necessary or required for any birth or relationship at any point in our lives. Our ancestral culture does not apply to the present day in modern societies.
Actually, from a pragmatic point of view, the chances of two partners remaining together for a long time are greater if they are in a polyamorous relationship. This is because they do not set boundaries, are honest about their feelings and needs, and can develop their own identity and fulfil all their needs with different partners. If you set monogamous boundaries, you risk frustrating your partner and yourself at some point if your partner looks to fulfil a need that you cannot provide.
So why is it so difficult to accept and embrace polyamory? We all have an inner child that is afraid of losing someone valuable, which is why we set the rule of exclusivity — to create the illusion that our partner will not leave us for someone else. The desire for an exclusive monogamous relationship is driven solely by the fear of losing a partner and the associated pain and distress. This little voice inside you is afraid that, by giving your partner the option to have other potential partners, you might lose them to someone else. However, from the perspective of a rational, mature adult, if you don't fear losing someone because you believe you are good enough, allowing your partner to have other partners is perfectly fine and can actually enhance the chances of maintaining a relationship long term. If you truly love someone, you want what's best for them. You want them to be happy and fulfilled in every way. If having several partners and emotional bonds fulfils your partner, you should embrace it, because that's the key to making them happy.
The mature, rational adult in us is polyamorous and wants to spend time and have sex and a relationship with different partners and be in several emotional relationships across their life. The child in us wants security, acceptance and affection. It needs a mother constantly by its side and fears the loss of affection. Thus, monogamy is the safe way to secure our partner. Those with a predominant wounded child will predominantly choose monogamy; those who grew up with an abundance of love and attention from their mother are more inclined to choose polyamory, cheat on their partner in monogamous relationships, or have a succession of monogamous relationships. If your worst fear is losing your partner and being single for a long time or losing your partner, then polyamory is probably not suited to you.
Why are people afraid of losing their partner, and thus preferring monogamy and exclusivity? I think people associate their partner with ultimate intimacy and security, acceptance and affection. The partner is the person who says: 'you are good enough as you are', and this reminds us of the bond we had with our mother. Losing a mother figure, even briefly in childhood for a few hours or days, can leave lifelong trauma. Adults fear losing a partner in the same way that they feared losing their parents when they were babies and children. They want to believe that they control their destiny and control their secured environment. Imposing and expecting trust and exclusivity is a form of control that makes people feel secure.
Personally, I don't fathom entirely this mindset, as I have never experienced it. I have never been jealous or demanded exclusivity. I have never felt the fear of losing a partner. I have always wanted the freedom to explore, spend time with and seduce many girls, like I spend time with several friends. I admire many of my friends in the same way that I feel attracted to and admire several potential female partners. Feeling emotionally and sexually attracted to several people at the same time feels absolutely natural to me.
I would simply say that you don't fear losing something if you don't possess it in the first place. I am not afraid of losing the air, the streets, the subway metro or the supermarket near my home because I don't own those things. Similarly, I am not afraid to lose a relationship because I don't own them; I experience them, and they evolve.
I am not afraid to lose a good friendship because I know I have spent time building a strong bond with a friend and sharing moments, so I see no reason why a friend would suddenly stop contacting me.
I feel the same way about romantic relationships. If the last time I spent with a partner we had a positive connection, why would this person suddenly break up with me? Unless proven otherwise, relationships are forever and deteriorating relationships are not sudden, but the result of a long, slow process that you can always see coming. I have never feared losing any relationship, but rather I fear losing the freedom to choose, having my identity diluted towards a 'couple' identity, and losing the ability to behave as I wish. I fear the negative impact this would have on my personality and actions and freedom. That was always my fear whenever I pretended to be monogamous or when I tried to fit in society by trying out a monogamous relationship. By rejecting exclusive monogamy, I am definitely putting myself in the minority, and making that statement upfront will turn off many potential partners. It sucks not to be liked, but it sucks even more not to be yourself.
Polyamory is the best of both worlds:
You can have an intensive emotional relationship with a special partner and a strong bond, as well as the freedom to explore, learn and evolve through other partners. There is no commitment to one partner, no pressure to fulfil all partners' needs, no control or possession of the other, less fear of break-up and being left alone, and no jealousy or lies.
You can be yourself, the person you really are, without compromising your needs and desires too much to please a partner. Discovering that I am polyamorous has been liberating for me. I currently have one polyamorous partner, which is great for both of us. I will never go back to monogamy or lie again about how I want to have relationships.
Humans have two needs: The need to explore and the need for security. You might be safe behind one empty bush, but the other bush with fruits is tempting to discover. However, there might be a lion over there, so the other bush could be dangerous. We have both needs and desires: security and novelty. Polyamory allows both to coexist: A known, safe partner and the novelty of discovering another. It enables us to learn, grow and experience new things while maintaining safe and reliable connections and relationships.
Most of you are either blind to the reality of long-term partnerships in the Western world or extremely lucky to have found the perfect match who might remain the perfect, loving partner forever. This is all well and good for you, but you are the exception, not the rule, and things can change after 10 or 15 years of commited relationship. The romantic expectations of people, enforced by monogamous culture and the fairy tales of our childhood, are so high that most of us are bound to experience drama, grief and sadness at some point in our lives. Again, if it works out well for you, as it has for my best friends, that's great, but I simply observe around me that most people do not remain happy and faithful forever. This has led to breakdowns, broken hearts, distrust, separation, and so on, or simply led to a succession of monogamous relationships. That's just the reality for most of us nowadays. Accepting and embracing this from a young age will save you from drama and difficult emotional moments. It might even boost the fertility rate of industrial nations. And yes, polyamory might be a practical solution solution to the issue of declining fertility rates. Polyamory is a great proposal at both individual level and societal level.
In our modern Western societies today, there are five kinds of monogamous relationship status:
1. Singles who only flirt or date, with no intention of anything serious or committing to anyone.
2. Former couples who have experience long-term relationship, sometimes many of them, have been together with a partner for more that 2 years, split up after a long relationship (usually after having children), and return to being single because their relationship did not work. Those people experience a series of successive monogamous relationships.
3. Couples who are unhappy together but remain together due to convenience and logistics (sharing an apartment, sharing kids, finance, etc.).
4. Couples who are happy together, but where one or both partners cheat secretly on their significant other or has cheated secretly at least once in their life.
5. Partners who are happy together, faithful, have never cheated on their partner and intend to stay together forever.
From my observations, I can guarantee you that category 5 is becoming a tiny minority. Young adults (especially girls) assume that they will end up in category 5, but if you look at 35-45 years old today, the vast majority is not part of category 5. Category 5 was maybe a majority in the 1950s and 1960s, but definitly no longer today.
Most people I know belong to categories 1, 2, 3 or 4 — that's the vast majority. Even friends who I thought would be in category 5 forever turned out to be in categories 2, 3 or 4: couples split up, couples cheat and couples become unhappy. That's the usual course of monogamous relationships.
Children are told from a young age that they will one day find true love and stay happy with one partner for life. But the reality is that during your life, you will probably have a series of monogamous relationships, or you will become unhappy with your partner at some point and probably split, or you or your partner will cheat on you or develop strong feelings for someone else. This is life; things happen. The perfect relationship we imagine barely happens in reality. Those are facts and stats. Look around you!
I am now part of a sixth category, a non-monogamous category: I have one or several partners, each of whom knows about the others and our feelings, I tell my true feelings any time they evolve, and I don't demand exclusivity from anyone. I even encourage my partner to meet with other people and potentially feel attracted to somebody else, so that my partner receives as much love, confirmation and positivity as possible. One day I might enjoy spending time with one partner, but the next day I might suddenly fall in love with someone else and spend time with the new partner without breaking up with the first partner. We humans all need tenderness, affection, love, deep conversations, sex and reassurance. One partner will never fulfil all my needs, neither do I believe I alone can fulfil all needs of my partner. The only rule is to be honest about my feelings. I tell anyone who I am currently in love with and spending time with. This is polyamory and it suits me; it feels like the most natural kind of relationship for humankind, free of possession, wanting the most hapiness for other people and accepting the fact that we love several people over the course of our lives. Any form of monogamy or exclusivity is a social construct and a cultural pressure to be someone we are not.
Polyamorous relationships are probably only intended for only 10% to 20% of the population because the two main reasons why most people would prefer an exclusive monogamous relationship are the fear of losing their partner and the belief in the one true love. Not fearing the loss of a partner and not believing in one true love, but rather in multiple loves, is quite rare among the population. So I understand that polyamory does not fit many of us. Polyamory is similar to being homosexual or adopting a child. They are a minority, but this minority should be fully embraced and recognised, and no longer discriminated against or stigmatised. My message here is for people in their thirties or forties who have experienced several long-term monogamous relationships and breakups. Perhaps polyamory is the way forward for them to avoid remaining single or experiencing another difficult breakup. They could also consider having children without necessarily finding 'the one'.
Some might argue that we have been in exclusive monogamous relationships for centuries, with weddings and families at the heart of it, and that this model has proven successful. So why should everyone embrace polyamory now? Well, exclusive monogamous relationships and marriage definitely worked from 1700 until 1960. During this time, our society flourished with higher standards of living, better sanitation and healthcare, a booming economy and innovation, and a lower rate of criminality. The exclusive monogamous model was definitely a success for society as a whole until 1960. However, it has not worked since around 1960: 50% of married couples now end up divorcing, fertility rates have fallen way below the replacement rate and continue to plummet, more and more people feel lonely and remain single, many couples cheat on their partners and many people experience a series of monogamous relationships in their lifetime. The idea of a wedding at 25, followed by several children and 'happily ever after' now applies to just a tiny minority. So what happened around 1960? Women's emancipation! Women started to join the labour force and become financially independent, the birth control pill was introduced, enabling women to date without risking becoming pregnant, and the traditional role of women as homemakers, wives and mothers slowly vanished. Religion faded away, and a culture of individualism and self-realisation took over. While one salary could support a family of four in the 1950s, nowadays you definitely need two salaries to support a family of two children. In modern society, where women have the same rights and household roles as men, the traditional model of a married couple in an exclusive monogamous relationship no longer works for the majority of us. Mental health issues and anxiety are on the rise. People have more desires and aspirations, and their personalities change more quickly. People want to remain flexible in their jobs, remain independent, and there are plenty of leisure opportunities. People remain single or end up breaking up. The model that worked for seven centuries does not work for our modern society of the last 60 years. When I say 'the model does not work anymore', I am not referring to individual lifestyles and preferences. Obviously, the more options one has to live the life they want, the better. I am referring to the societal level and the fertility rate, which has fallen far below 2. This is causing serious trouble and existential risks of civil war and the end of prosperity in our civilisation.
Times have changed and society has changed dramatically over the last 60 years, but the foundations of society have remained the same: wedding, exclusive monogamy, decent public pensions and healthcare for everyone over 60, and the freedom to choose whether or not to have children, with no penalty, punishment or restriction for adults who have fewer than two children. Our model is still the same as in the 18th century, and our public social structure is the same as in the 1950s. Yet we are a rapidly ageing population, in the digital era, with smartphones, social media and AI everywhere and at any time. Our social model is totally outdated. Exclusive monogamy is just one outdated model that cannot cope with modern society.
Another outdated belief in our society is that you need to be in a romantic and loving relationship with someone in order to have a child with your partner. This is not true, and it prevents many young adults from having children nowadays, because they are told that they need to find the perfect loving partner in order to have children. All what children need is love, attention and affection. They need reliable and trustworthy caregivers, preferably two or three or more, who will show up regularly and play with them and care for them. Ideally, they need a mother figure who provides cuddles, healthcare and basic needs, and a father figure who provides authority, exploration and playfulness. These two roles can be provided by anyone: it could be a mum and a dad living together or not; it could be a lesbian couple; it could be a single mum and the grandmother; it could be two single mums living together as flatmates with their respective kids; it could be a single dad and an opair girl or regular babysitter; it could be anyone, as long as the caregiver is available and happy to spend time, affection and attention on the child.
The idea that you need to be in love with your partner in order to have children is wrong and is absolutely reducing the birth rate. You could literally co-parent with anyone willing to take on the other co-parenting role. This could be a good friend, neighbour, ex-partner or anyone else. So many couples break up after having children and continue to raise them in two separate homes. As long as the children receive enough love, affection and attention from each parent, they won't suffer any major psychological damage. In fact, parents who separate often live happier lives after splitting up, and this is usually reflected in their children. Happy caregivers make happy kids.
Children can experience lasting psychological effects and be traumatised by the breakup of their parents between the ages of 2 and 15. Children need stability and continuity from their parents. If you choose co-parenting from the outset, before babies are born, both parents are already split up from day one, so the child experiences no disturbing changes.
There are all kinds of real stories out there about people who are willing to raise and educate children, essentially offering co-parenting services, but who don't want to enter into a romantic partnership with the other parent or who are infirtile and seek alternatives. I know a real story about a lesbian couple who wanted the male sperm donor to spend a couple of days a week with them to fulfil the role of a father figure and let the child know that he is the biological father who passed on his genes. I also know of a married couple with one child who divorced but remained very close, like best friends, and loved parenting so much that they decided to have a second child and share co-parenting duties from two homes after divorcing. These are rare examples of co-parenting roles that are not connected to romantic emotional relationships. The classic family model is obviously a great goal and probably the best model for everyone, but in a world with more loneliness, more single people, more anxiety and fear, and more divorce and separation, a society that imposes a loving romantic relationship as the basis for having children is bound to become extinct. The rules of parenting must evolve alongside the societal and emotional state of the nation. The classic family model of a loving father and mother living under the same roof in an exclusive monogamous relationship for 50 years is a dying breed and should no longer be the only accepted model for parenting and relationships.
If you have full-time custody of a child or live with a partner under the same roof, polyamory is very difficult to achieve: with full-time child custody, you have limited free time to meet new partners, bond without the kids around, and spend romantic time together. If you live with a partner, you will always see them first and any other partner would be second-ranked, which can be awkward for both partners. It can also feels clumsy to tell your home partner that you are going to spend the night or the weekend with someone else. I recognise the logistical difficulties of polyamory, which is why I have created the best conditions to make it possible: I don't live with any other adults in my apartment, and I have 50% custody of my child. This gives me free time every other day to meet partners at my home or theirs.
People who are lucky enough to find the right partner and make a continuous effort to maintain an exclusive monogamous relationship can experience a long-lasting and happy monogamous relationship. This is great, and it's the ultimate grail. This is what we all wish for: to be loved, appreciated and cared for until the end of our lives. However, for those who have had a series of monogamous relationships and do not experience jealousy or fear of losing a partner, polyamory is definitely an alternative.
Some might argue that exclusive monogamous relationships, including marriage, have worked pretty well for centuries, so why change the norm now? Monogamy has certainly been successful in many ways over the last 700 years, leading to greater prosperity, lower criminality, lower infant mortality and higher reproduction rates. However, since 1970, this model does not worked anymore. Since the 1960s and the widespread use of the birth control pill, alongside the rise of women's emancipation and feminism, the industrialised world has experienced structural depopulation, with fertility rates falling below replacement levels every decade. When most women were happy housewives with three to four children and one salary could cover all the family's expenses, exclusive monogamy and marriage for life was a working model. However, the model has now changed. Women's expectations of independence, hedonism, and participation in the labour force have lowered the birth rate and shifted women's focus towards careers and leisure. This endangers the stability of our social system and forces public healthcare and pensions to disappear, while inflation is inevitable to service the debt and spending on the elderly. When women were housewives with three or four children, they were less tempted to cheat on their husbands, get divorced or move to a different home. Exclusive monogamy suited most of us, including men. However, today, young women under 30 are more educated and earn more than men. They want fewer children, or none at all, and want to have children later in their thirties. They are also ready to end a relationship if they are unhappy, as they can afford to do so. The gender power dynamic has shifted towards women, and monogamy is no longer suited to a rapidly changing society with evolving personalities, career opportunities, multiple encounters and mating options. Women now expect a 50–50 split in income, labour, household tasks and childcare, but many men are not willing to share all duties and would rather not have children than have the burden of sharing 50–50 childcare duties. While women acquiring the same rights as men was a blessing, it must come with the added responsibility of reproduction, as well as a change in the social model, which could lead to the end of the monogamous tradition. Exclusive monogamous relationships used to protect families, but nowadays they have become a tough battle against our instincts and desires. They are a constraint that promotes either hook-up culture, remaining single for as long as possible, serial monogamy (having several long-term relationships one after the other) or secretly cheating on your partner. Exclusive monogamy now has negative consequences for most of us in modern society.
Let me provide some personal background information regarding my emotional and psychological state, as well as my childhood trauma. Both of my parents were always there to provide me with care, attention and love. I never felt abandoned (as if I were a burden to my parents) or enmeshed (as if I were expected to fix my parents' psychological and emotional issues). However, my father lacked assertiveness, authority and masculinity in his relationship with my mother, which affected my view of women in general and the meaning of romantic relationships. I also grew up with a four-year delay in biological growth development, so when I was at school, my face and body looked four years younger than my actual age. I was always the skinniest and shortest kid in my class (until the age of 15), which resulted in the boys treating me like a baby and the girls looking at me like a cute little brother rather than a potential mate. I have always had low self-esteem of my masculinity and ability to satisfy women in relationships, and I felt that I was not good enough in relationships, not masculine enough, and of lower value to women than other men, that I do not deserve any woman in my life. On the other hand, I grew up in regular contact with my sister and my twenty-something cousins. I had dozens of mother figures, father figures and care-givers through my uncles and aunts, which gave me an abundance of love and validation and made me feel welcomed and beloved in the world as a child. This gave me incredible self-confidence in my abilities and my existence on Earth, extreme confidence in my acts and my projects outside relationships, and explains why I never felt any fear of loss or jealousy. As a result, my attachment style is primarily "avoidant dismissive", with a bit of "secure".
In terms of my cognitive background, I am considered to be autistic (ASD). I do things in the way that I like or believe to be right, even if my actions are rejected or disagreed with by my peers. I am obsessive about the quality of my work and knowledge in the fields I specialise in and I am very demanding of myself. I hate having my freedom to explore and experiment restricted by other people's instructions, or being told to do something that does not feel right to me. I am still hyperactive mentally and was hyperactive physically (from my 20s to my late 30s), as I constantly need to experience and learn new things and stimulate my mind with new information. Relaxing more than 30minutes feels like a waste of time to me, any day of the year. As a teenager, I was quite the video game nerd, avoiding too much group contact and large social interactions. However, this changed drastically in my 20s, when I used friendships and group dynamics to boost my low self-esteem around women. I am extremely analytical, rational and pragmatic with a scientific mindset, always asking myself why things are the way they are and looking for evidence and proof on common beliefs before accepting main trends narratives. Based on my grades at school, I am probably a bit above-average in intelligence, although I have never taken an IQ test. I like it when people accept the blame and critics for their own mistakes. I hate the victim mentality, when people blame their surroundings, context, bad luck or other people for their failures and problems.
This book is obviously not my biography. However, the traumas I experienced in my childhood, my destiny and the personal events I experienced in my dating life obviously affected me and sparked my interest in the subject of why people are having fewer children. This is because my two longest-term partners I had, both German women over 34, did not want children. The fact that two consecutive girlfriends did not want children has shaped my life, my current situation and my view of the fertility crisis. It has also led me to express my frustration and anger through this book. Having children and spending time caring for and educating them was much more important to me than having a girlfriend. I thought I was very unlucky to have met two women who had no desire to have children, but when I started looking at the statistics, I realised that nowadays, you are more likely to meet people who don't want children than people who do.
Today, I have the following values, and I believe and aspire to the following: I don't believe in 'the one love forever', but rather that people have several loves, sometimes simultaneously. I don't believe in marriage because nobody knows if we will still love or enjoy the company of a person in 10 years' time, as people evlve rapidly. I believe in long, emotional relationships, not superficial ones. I don't believe in sex without a deep emotional connection. I believe in polyamory and not being exclusive with partners. I believe in happiness through a balance of comfort and stability, autonomy and curiosity, and learning new things. This can be achieved through spending time with family, friends, at work, with partners and alone. I have always wanted to have children (two preferably) and to live on my own, without a partner living with me full-time, except during pregnancy and the first year of the baby's life, when women obviously need the father by their side.
As you can imagine, coming to terms with my vision of life and aspirations has been a tough battle, as has finding a partner who shares this vision. It has been impossible to realise without suffering on the part of my partners and myself, as extremely few people share my views and opinions. Which woman would want to have a child with me in a non-exclusive polyamorous relationship where we don't live under the same roof? Only 0.1% of women share my vision. I had to sacrifice my natural preferences and was unhappy, or I had to pretend to a partner that I wanted a traditional exclusive monogamous life under the same roof, just to convince her to have a child with me. Maybe not the cleverest idea of my life. I now finally have what I want: I am a father to a three-year-old boy, and I spend 50% of my time raising him. I live alone and I am currently in a great relationship with a woman who absolutely knows and embraces all of my polyamorous and independent values. I am looking to potentially have a second child once I find a partner who accepts me as I am. It took me 25 years of adulthood to realise who I am and what I want, and I broke two hearts in the process. Anke and Kristin, I'm sorry for being immature or dishonest during our respective relationships.
The biggest challenge of my life, as many of us have experienced, was working through my childhood traumas. For me, these manifested as low self-esteem and a lack of self-worth, and the belief that I was unworthy of being a woman's partner. The second biggest challenge of my life was reconciling my deep desire to have children with finding a partner who would accept polyamory and still have a child with me. This second challenge was almost impossible to solve, so I had to simplify it. I had to lie to myself and others the whole time and pretend to female candidates that I was looking for monogamy, forever love and a classic family, in order to convince them that I could be a good father. For the record, I never cheated on the mother of my child during our four years together because I knew it would devastate her. I tried to live a classic monogamous exclusive relationship. My main focus was on getting my partner pregnant, and then caring for our baby. We split up for other reasons. Now that I have a lovely child, I don't need to lie to anyone anymore, and I am open about my values from the very first date. I do not close the door on the idea of having another child, I wish to have a second child one day, but I will definitely not lie about my belief in polyamory from day one, since the pressure to convince a partner that I am the right father for her is no longer necessary, as I have already achieved my ultimate goal of having a child.
Essentially, my ex-partner wanted a traditional relationship involving faithfulness, exclusivity and monogamy, as well as living under the same roof, but no children. I wanted the opposite: an open relationship and polyamory, and I absolutely wanted children. That's what caused our dispute. You might ask why I didn't tell her the truth from the beginning. The reason is that my desire to have a child was much greater than my desire to have a partner. If I had told her the truth, she would have left me immediately and I would never have become a father. I can live without a partner for years and still receive all the affection and emotional connection I need from friends and family. However, I could not see myself without a child or the experience of being a father, and time was running out as I was in my late thirties. This is why the plummeting fertility rates and the fact that so many women don't want children bothers me. It is mind-boggling to me, and it is the reason why I wanted to write a book about it.
Let's come to the conclusion now.
- Why kids are great
Children will increasingly become your social welfare, going back to what it was centuries ago. Elderly people needed three or four children to take care of them in their old age. With the government in financial trouble due to public debt, an ageing population and a shrinking workforce, the state pension will not be enough to live on, and public healthcare will be poor, overloaded and diminishing. The situation will be so dire that having children will actually be a survival necessity in 20 or 30 years' time. That's why we need more children now so that we have a chance at a good life support in a few decades. The more children you educate, love and nurture, the more material and financial support they will provide for you in your old age.
Above all, children bring us pure joy and surprise us every day. They are life and our purpose in life. Once we have gathered knowledge and experience and taken so much from our parents and society, the best thing we can do is pass it on to others. When you're over 40, the consumerism of travelling, partying and buying gadgets doesn't satisfy you as much as it did in your 20s, and you're looking for something bigger than yourself, and that's why kids make so much sense to fulfil your life past midlife.
You become an adult when you start taking responsibility for others.
Happiness comes with self-fulfilment, success, achieving goals. But there comes a time when individual happiness no longer fulfils our lives as it once did, because at some point individual growth slows down. Adults then tend to look for meaning, a purpose in their lives, and meaning comes in the form of doing something for people other than ourselves. It can be working for a community, a project, an NGO, or simply helping people in need. Or it can be having a child, having a family and caring for it, being responsible for it. When you see your own baby grow and become its own person, it is beautiful and it gives meaning to your life. Having children gives us the most meaning in our lives.
What really matters in life is love, in all its forms: love for your partner, love for your parents, relatives and children, love for your best friends. If you don't have children, you miss that bond of giving love to them, and then later, at the end of your life, you miss your children and grandchildren giving love back to you.
Also, if you are over 70 and have no children, life is depressing, the capitalist machine does not care about you because you are no longer a worker or a consumer. In a retirement home, the staff is just waiting for you to die. It is sad but true. The visits of your children and grandchildren are what keep you alive and give you joy in the last moments of your life.
The joy of seeing my little boy make his first steps, first words, learning, growing, developing his own personality, discovering what he likes and dislikes, expressing himself, being spontaneous, pure in emotion, joyful .... it is the best in life. I don't understand people who don't want to have children in their lives, I only respect their decision, because raising children is extremely restricting in all aspects of life, compromising everything, but at the same time so rewarding.
My son Mika is my inspiration and the only thing that gives meaning and purpose to my life.
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- THE LAST DECADE -
December 2025
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