I have never understood this mindset. People used to have many children even though the world was a worse place by almost any metric. The lack of contraception certainly played a role, but people still had more children after the invention of the pill than they do today. I believe that such talk is just a rationalization for the desire not to give up one’s child-free life.
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Exactly. A person has a feeling that they don’t want a child. And then it is rationalized in some (socially acceptable) way. They might even think they are being honest with themselves about it.
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Everyone can justify it however they like and believe whatever they want, but why do these things need to be explained or their justifications submitted for others to evaluate in the first place?
Having children in itself is not some great feat or achievement in this world. Raising socially responsible citizens, on the other hand, is.
As for past birth rates, changes in the standard of living are surely a central part of the story. Almost systematically, birth rates decline as nations become wealthier. And in the poorest countries, having offspring is one’s own pension security.
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Good question. Personally, I believe it’s specifically about rationalization, where one wants to justify their own lifestyle to others and to themselves. This, of course, is just a belief as well.
edit. as an addition, I don’t think there is anything wrong with childlessness on a personal level, even though it causes challenges for society as a major phenomenon. I just feel that people are not being fully honest with themselves, even unconsciously.
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Estonia’s population shrinks again
The news covers the population changes of our southern neighbor for 2025:
Last year, Estonia recorded 9,240 births and 15,688 deaths. At the same time, 15,212 people immigrated and 18,014 emigrated, meaning net migration turned negative for the first time in more than a decade.
The birth rate is falling and migration has turned negative. Ukrainian refugees initially increased the population, and now their emigration is decreasing it.
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Itätuulen tuomisia (a blog published on Facebook) had a good post on the subject:
Chronicles of Our Time
“Children Are No Longer Needed”
A quote from the end:
"For the generations living before the millennials, children ‘came or were received’ as a default. When this default changes into a voluntary decision requiring awareness and desire, a collapse occurs.
And no amount of state administrative support is capable of fixing this change in the default value.
Japan and South Korea have paid bonuses, offered incentives, and provided paid parental leave. Yet, the birth rate has continued to decline. You can subsidize the purchase of cheap diapers, but you cannot subsidize meaning.
The birth rate crisis is not just an economic problem. It is a problem of meaning.
The modern state can buy almost anything: education, healthcare, defense, infrastructure, and care. But it cannot buy back that sense of the future in which we humans want to pass our lives forward."
That was quite well said.
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In that context as well, saving is mentioned as one of the reasons for being childless. Quite a few FIRE practitioners (Firettäjä) seem to be following this path.
However, it might just be that in the future, almost no amount of money will be enough to buy care or services. When there aren’t enough caregivers, only those with the biggest stacks of dollars will be able to purchase services for themselves.
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They might try that, but in democracies, the elderly will naturally first try to use their voting power to steamroll society’s resources toward healthcare and elderly care. This leads to the under-resourcing of the police and defense forces, an increase in crime, the rise of extremist movements, regime changes, and the redistribution of wealth. Those stacks of dollars tucked away for old age might just end up being some younger guy’s stacks in the future.
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In these stories, they always mention the same thing: “no one moves to a village if there isn’t a school.” That is quite true, but even if there is a school, one or two families moving in won’t save anything. Even though people respond to surveys saying they want to live in the countryside, realism seems to turn most heads toward moving to a growth center instead.
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What people always forget in these discussions is how anyone is supposed to move to a village if there are no houses for sale, and the neighbors block any new construction because they don’t want a new neighbor too close to them.
Even in Vähikkälä, which was mentioned in the article, there isn’t a single home for sale; the nearest house on the market is 5km away, and even that is already located in a different municipality.
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Hopes for a baby boom fall on millennials. | Image
I tried to dig up some Finnish-language reading on this antinatalism and ended up with that. It’s a long text, but perhaps it explains a bit why such a large portion of young adults end up (unwittingly) as antinatalists and why some do not.
Antinatalists believe that human reproduction is morally wrong. The idea is simple: the world is a bad place, and human life usually ends in death through suffering. Argentine philosopher Julio Cabrera describes reproduction as harmful manipulation, where a person—the newborn child—is sent into a painful and dangerous situation without their consent.
Nothing we use to justify to ourselves why we continue living matters to someone who does not yet exist, Cabrera reasons.
Note: the article is from 2019, i.e., before the upheavals brought by COVID-19 and the war in Ukraine. At that time, environmental destruction was perhaps more prominent than the general anxiety prevailing today.
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Even in the countryside, living rarely means living in a remote area in most people’s minds. Based on a general gut feeling, it seems that “countryside” usually refers to a location within, for example, a half-hour drive from a major city, where services are still in reasonably good condition. A general problem with moving to the countryside is that Finland has an outrageous number of different rural parishes; there simply aren’t enough interested people for all of them, and they are most likely to concentrate in the trendier areas.
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Yeah, “the countryside” isn’t a uniform area; there are many different types of regions. For example, the “countryside” in Sipoo and Hyrynsalme both consist of forests and fields, but one has a growth center nearby and services close at hand, while the other is truly in the middle of nowhere. (This is, of course, reflected in property prices.)
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Exactly. Let’s look at some examples:
- E.g., Sipoo: Countryside close to the region’s vibrant central city. Properties will remain fairly liquid in the future, even if they might be difficult to sell right now.
- E.g., Somero: Core countryside, a strong agricultural area, but selling a property is bound to be difficult. This is despite being a reasonable distance from the region’s central city.
- Remote areas (Eastern Finland, Northern Finland, dozens of localities): Property values are near zero or even negative; there is no longer a functional housing market in the area, and there are plenty of vacant properties.
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This thread has got me thinking about what will even hold value in 20–30 years.
If development continues at this rate:
By 2045, only about 15,000–20,000 children would be born in Finland per year. Most schools and daycares will be closed; smaller cities will have lost their Universities of Applied Sciences (AMK) and vocational schools. The need for larger apartments will decrease, and especially for detached houses.
I bet that in 2045:
There will be only about 10 cities in Finland where property values have remained even somewhat stable. Elsewhere, houses are being demolished at an accelerating pace. Today’s owners of high-rental-yield investment properties will be left with nothing. The Helsinki metropolitan area continues its rapid growth.
Globally, drought reduces arable land, and timber is still needed, so forests retain their value and even generate yield. The value of farmland in Southern Finland improves. Plastic packaging has been partially phased out, which increases demand.
The S&P 500 has risen as before following trends, but most “ordinary” stocks have become “eternal zombies” (ikimörnijöiksi) as there are no buyers for their products.
The decline in China’s population and rising wages will cause major problems for China.
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There you can find the population projection given in 2004, which extends to the year 2040. Back then, just over 20 years ago, it was projected that Finland would now have 5.4 million inhabitants, but the reality is 5.6 million even though the birth rate has fallen faster than projected.
The page also contains municipality- and region-specific projections, but for the municipality-specific ones, municipal mergers must be taken into account.
And here is a recent article suggesting that the global population might even collapse:
Surprising new estimate of the world’s population – Not a forecast, researchers emphasize | Tekniikka&Talous
Forecasting is not easy on a 20-year or 40-year horizon.
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