The last thing any country wants is a steadily rising average age and a steadily falling birthrate.
Seems like no-one's watching the herd right now. Except Japan. Think of Japan as a bellwether: The Ageing Shrinking Nation Of Japan. The world's human population is growing in some places but I'll be willing to bet long odds that the Western world's population is on a downturn and probably about to hit a very steep drop.
Just in some of my blogs alone, What Are You Eating? and Water Is Now Unsafe Everywhere and "Modern" Diseases and COVID19 Second-biggest Killer In Australia are just a few spots where I pointed this out. But you can go back a lot further on any of those blogs and find more places where I raised similar concerns.
Thanks to the long-term effects of a bad case of "Global Lead Plastic And PFAS Poisoning" along with our insistence on eating foods made with stuff that never existed before we created it, human fertility has dropped considerably, the range and severity of illnesses we now routinely contract has increased, and the climate we're enduring is placing further stress on every form of life on the planet, including us.
Things like our brief - but oh so catastrophic and toxic - love affairs we had with leaded petrol, the PFAS compounds in fossil-fuel-created plastics - and the plastics themselves - will poison the planet for centuries, even if we find a way to neutralise them, those poisons are now spread ALL over the globe, getting into the food chain from every direction. No-one's quite realised yet that to have a hope of reversing our procreation issues, we're going to have to get almost all of it and isolate it again. And the particles are TINY. And in their billions if not perhaps even trillions. . .
Pointing to plankton and saying that they seem to be only minimally affected is no indication that this means that the "Pb-PFAS 1-2 Punch" is insignificant. Far from it. Lead has ruined at least two Western generations directly and will continue to accumulate in animals and plants that we rely on for food, in our water. And those plankton have never had to deal with the rest of the toxin load we've given ourselves:
From my parents' generation to whatever Gen we're up to now, we're among the first humans ever to have willingly ingested carcinogens - bleaches - fats that hadn't existed before this era and share more in common with engine oil than any biological lipid.
And also around two thousand food additives, only about half of which are (and some only very slightly, at that) related to a biological food. What biological food we took, much of it was grown with glyphosate and other pest and weed control, antibiotics and growth hormones, chemical "supplements" that also never existed in the world before we began feeding it to one another.
In addition, we also willingly took tobacco and nicotinoid products, alcohols that never saw a shred of natural produce in their origins, and inhaled the fumes of cars and factories and sweating out of the plastics we use and handle in their tens thousands in our daily lives. Go on, tell me we're not screw-snookered.
To Hell
A Hell
We Made
Welcome
Now we also have viruses like SARS-CoV-2 and the COVID19 it causes. Have you noticed no-one mentions COVID any more? While it still kills more people per day than almost every other disease? Also the return of some diseases we thought we'd all but eliminated, because along with shovelling BAD chemicals into themselves with every mouthful, people are refusing the GOOD ones that prevent us dying from preventable causes?
Weltschmerz
There's another cause for the decline. Whether you want to believe it or not, we all know, somewhere in our subconscious mind, that the world is wrong. This isn't a food we can thrive on. (But it's cheap... We can afford it...) But WHY can't we afford it? This is the Age Of Plenty - we're digging and extracting resources out of the planet at a hitherto unequalled and unimagined rate - surely that's creating enough wealth?
Quiet Quitting
QQ is just another aspect of this weltschmerz. We know we're doing things that should be improving the lives of ourselves and others - but we can plainly see that this isn't so. We're working, we're creating wealth and goods and products, but no-one seems to be benefiting from it.
Fertility Rates
I'm quite willing to bet that alongside the chemical, hormonal, and physical causes of the declining fertility rates, a lot of people have just not felt right about bringing a child into this world. I know because I'm one of those people. My wife's another. Several of our friends and acquaintances also feel that the world doesn't need another person to live in squalor and relative poverty. Or they're too focused on attaining enough wealth to be comfortably off, and children just hinder that plan.
Not Just Japan
China's having similar birthrate and ageing population issues. Their workforce currently provides a significant portion of the world's total goods. Factories are going understaffed. And the reasons are much the same as in the last paragraph. (Also hey - we have all these scandals caused by greed, are we worth reproducing?)
It's a whole combination of things, as we just saw in that short whip-around of issues just above here. Third World countries are seeing the advance of globalisation bring more and more of these toxic issues home to them in the form of access to news, access to processed foods, and seeing their work also not lead to increased wealth.
And places like India and Pakistan either haven't gotten the memo yet either, or aren't letting on what's happening within their borders.
Russia's doing well at reducing their entire population by making Russia a less desirable place to live and by squandering their wealth on a pointless dick-army-size exercise.
And there you have the problem in a nutshell - we've snookered ourselves. Always we've exploited every advance for personal gain and wealth, for exercising power over others, and in the process we don't check ourselves every once in a while to see what we're actually doing.
I told you - I did a personal QQ decades ago, no sympathy here. Unless you were wanting to help me and others make a difference in this deplorable state of affairs.
ChatGPT
My mate ChatGPT has this to say about this blog post:
"This writing style is closest to a person who is expressing a sense of hopelessness and despair about the state of the world, particularly in regards to issues such as overconsumption, declining fertility rates, and the negative effects of globalisation. They also seem to have a strong sense of social and environmental responsibility. They express a sense of frustration and disappointment with the current state of the world, and suggest that people have become too focused on personal gain and wealth at the expense of the greater good. They also seem to express a sense of personal disengagement from the world, and a desire for change."
I just fed the whole text in and asked CGPT to tell me about the person that wrote it. Am I that obvious? 😸
Please Read Down Here Too.
I blog because I like to share. Things you can read about on my suite of blogs (which I'm the sole person creating, researching, writing, and publicising) range over topics like cyber-ethics (AI, sustainable energy, EVs) and 3D printing and recycling plastics and other waste streams, general tech and personal ramblings, environmental and ethical issues, rants about sustainable and eco-friendly tech and bad actors on those scenes, COVID news and opinion, even a recipe blog that has less chit-chat and more recipe..
There are a few others but they're not really my main topics. On top of that I design and make the odd machines and things to help with recycling, my vegetable garden and soon to be reinstated mini aquaponics system, and more. It's a lot to do. I can only manage it because I'm retired on a disability pension. I've included a link below to Chat with me on Mastodon (which is a Twitter alternative without the bitter after-taste) if you think you'd like to write the odd article on one or more of the blogs and help out, or if you have an idea you'd like me to investigate and follow up.
Lastly, if you'd like to help me defray the costs of domain names, server hosting, parts and materials for the show projects, you could donate the price of a cup of coffee - or even make that a monthly donation - by going to my Ko-Fi page, and you could also Paypal Direct.
