Humans and Pandas

As my six-month old daughter is sprouting teeth and making mostly unsuccessful attempts to crawl, I’ve been thinking a lot about fertility. Too much of it brings one set of problems as resources inevitably become scarcer, but too little of it brings its own problems.

The conventional wisdom is that vast state support is required for people to have kids, especially more than one. There’s certainly some truth to this, and I see it creates a reverse parabola in Dutch society: posh families, not needing state support, have two to three kids, the poor, able to maximise state benefits, have many children, while middle income families, not qualifying for most benefits but not wealthy enough to weather the financial burden, have one child. A stroll through mixed social-class neighbourhoods shows this.

Another factor in declining fertility is that young people simply aren’t forming couples or more bluntly, not having sex. I recommend Anna Gromada’s recent editorial in The Guardian on the matter.

The main statistic is:

Nearly half of Poles under 30 are single. Another fifth are in relationships but live apart. This generation, in particular those aged 18 to 24, surveys show, is more likely to feel lonely than any other – more even than Poles over 75. In 2024, almost two in five young men said they had not had sex for at least a year. Abstinence, too, has become partisan: right-leaning men and left-leaning women are the likeliest to be sexually inactive.

It would be nice to have more granular categories than simply “sexually inactive”. This could range from people who have dedicated part or all of their lives to religious celibacy, those not interested in casual sex while looking for a long-term partner, or it could mean someone who has turned to online pornography for sexual fulfilment in lieu of a personal relationship. Anecdotally, I know of young men who somewhat subconsciously have made the choice to shirk all of the responsibilities of a committed relationship, basically living like teenagers playing video games all day, without any motivation to change because online pornography gratifies all of their sexual urges. It’s an extreme form of not buying the cow when you get the milk for free. It seems like more people are at least willing to bring this up now. Mentioning this even a few years ago would have marked you as some sort of religious fundamentalist.

It’s not just men though. Gromada continues:

What the family and the church once provided, the therapist’s couch now supplies. Raised on [a] low-calorie emotional diet, many Poles have turned to psychotherapy…But the 22% of Poles who rushed to couches in the past five years are disproportionately young, female and unmarried. They emerge fluent in the language of “self-care”, “needs” and “boundaries”, directed toward men who often respond in the idiom of “duties”, “norms”, and “expectations”.

The article distinguishes from qualified psychologists treating patients with real diagnoses. What the above is about is the sort of person who just goes to a completely unqualified “therapist”, decides that everyone else is “toxic” and becomes impossible to reason with.

Another point Gromada brought out is more subtle, and it’s one that I’ve also noticed in the West: as gender roles have equalised in education and the workforce, women still expect a partner who earns substantially more than they do. When men and women earn roughly the same, there are suddenly far fewer fish in the sea.

And so we’ve come to the point where young humans are in the same predicament as pandas. We’re just not mating well in captivity.