“Before one studies Zen, mountains are mountains and waters are waters; after a first glimpse into the truth of Zen, mountains are no longer mountains and waters are no longer waters; after enlightenment, mountains are once again mountains and waters once again waters.”
>Lowered birth rates is actually a good thing, if we're going to be honest about our way of life and its sustainability problem. As a species, we are going to have to make some hard decisions about what quality of life we want to have, as the answer to that question will determine how many people should exist at one time.
So, I actually agree with you here. I'm also not advocating for eugenics, but I'm approaching the "problem" from a slightly different angle. Re: "As a species, we are going to have to make some hard decisions about the quality of life we want to have" - this is where I disagree. I think we're fundamentally uncapable of doing that at the scale necessary to get back to a sustainable world as such a decision essentially equates to eugenics which no one will go for.
Most people simply aren't intellectually honest about sustainability problems. My mental model of it all is "it isn't sustainable and hence it will not be sustained" which leads me to the conclusion that "at some point this ends". The question is when / how? You mentioned the lowered birth rates being a good thing and I said I agreed in part because it's the only way you can get to a lower population in a gentle manner without die offs from mass starvation or worse genocide.
Where I'm very, very bearish about all of this is that I don't see a gentle transition to a more sustainable world taking place. Your take was we're going to have to make some hard choices, my take is we're going to continue to make the unsustainable choices for long enough that our hand will likely be forced.
I just can't help but think that there is a critical mass of people required to maintain the infrastructure of our society below which the behavior of the system becomes non-linear and essentially the whole thing crashes. The scale of infrastructure and the complexity that underpins it was build and based on the assumptions of society as large as we have now. Now, we may be able to scale some of that back and reduce the complexity to match, and that's probably a best case scenario, but I think our need for optimism leads us to don the rose-colored glasses here and adopt hope as a strategy. I don't have a crystal ball and can't tell which particular way it's going to go, but I'm at least prepared for it to go the way of the worst case scenario in which things end up like the end of the bronze age.
There seems to be two camps of people in the comments here. One camp is saying more or less what you say, and the other camp is people who have had it happen to them personally and don't wish to expose themselves to the possibility of the downside risk again knowing how sucky it can be.
Source: I've experienced a situation where I gave honest feedback and nothing bad happened, and I've experience a situation where I gave honest feedback and it impacted a subsequent employment opportunity.
I gave one doozy of an answer once in an anonymous feedback survey. I then started to feel quite bad about it and realized probably it's not so hard to figure out who that feedback possibly came from. I went to my skip level boss and leveled with him about the feedback I had given. He was remarkably cool about it and told me they didn't get enough responses to that particular question to pass some threshold and hence he hadn't even seen that response. Luckily he wasn't a psychopath type manager and was generally just a wise old guy who was a great politician and I didn't wind up burning a bridge. But I definitely learned never to give honest feedback under the guise of anonymity.
I have shared direct, honest feedback to my skip level boss before, during and after the course of somewhat disastrously run projects. I've kept in regular contact with my old team since leaving and thanks to my feedback the company has completely turned around... NOT! Still the same old, same old patterns playing out day after day. Learned my lesson on that one. It's just not worth it.
Well lets not forget the whole physically stronger and pumped more full of testosterone aspect of it too. But yes, this is also a good point. If you had a choice about sending people who could manufacture new humans to the slaughterfields or keep them out of harms way, you'd be better off keeping them out of harms way.
>There's a conundrum where you either have to respect women's choices and see the mid career pay gap as inevitable, or see women's desire to be prioritize child rearing over career as internalized misogyny.
There's also the conundrum where you either have to have 2.1 children on average to continue your species or see your population crash generation after generation until there's not enough people to maintain the aggregate level of complexity your society relies on to keep functioning and then the bottom falls out of it completely. It seems our WEIRD way of life is fundamentally at odds with the continuation of our species, but this particular facet of the culture war seems to have been won so long ago these days you'd have a hard time publicly taking any position that would maybe bring us back in line with a birth rate not below replacement level. I was raised on the values of the current narrative, so I've always been in support of all these things, and now I see the writing is basically on the wall and it makes me kind of sad to know that at some point when we or our children get sent back to the stone age that women will basically wind up barefoot and pregnant again :(
If every single platform or watering hole is deemed 'toxic' and all they have in common is that people frequent them then I guess what that really means is that people in large quantities when they exchange ideas and information are 'toxic'.
I think you've reached enlightenment.