Researchers have finally identified the root cause of the sudden, universal decline in human reproduction, concluding that the continuation of the species is currently being rejected by the populace as a fundamentally derivative endeavor.
Anna Louie Sussman’s exhaustive meditation in The New York Times, ostensibly positioning this demographic winter as a byproduct of a generalized twenty-first-century weltschmerz, stops timidly short of the more devastating truth; it is not that the modern subject is simply too anxious about the geopolitical future to procreate, but rather that the prospect of child-rearing has revealed itself as a deeply unoriginal text, a repetitive performance piece lacking the narrative propulsion of even a moderately curated smartphone feed.
To bring a child into this late-capitalist milieu is to participate in a biological reboot that nobody asked for, a grueling exercise in derivative pacing that suffers terribly when compared to the sleek, frictionless delivery mechanisms of modern technology. One is invariably reminded of the suffocating domestic inertia depicted in Chantal Akerman’s grueling, three-and-a-half-hour masterwork Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, wherein the sheer, punishing duration of daily maintenance becomes a physical weight upon the viewer; yet, unlike Akerman’s meticulously framed bleakness, or indeed the labyrinthine, memory-soaked parlors of Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, the daily mechanics of modern parenthood offer no such redeeming architectural beauty.
The contemporary prospective mother, empowered by feminism to take control of her economic trajectory and thoroughly educated in the diminishing returns of the nuclear family, rightly identifies the biological imperative as a chore fundamentally lacking in both dramatic tension and decent cinematography. Why, one must ask, would an educated populace voluntarily submit themselves to the unedited, eighteen-year runtime of a human infant, when the digital realm provides a much tighter, more ruthless editorial standard?
It is a matter of basic critical discernment; the modern citizen looks at the trajectory of human history, glances at the mounting ecological dread, and simply gives the entire enterprise a devastating two-star review.
The socio-economic justifications so often cited by panicked economists—the soaring rates of female labor-force participation, the blessed proliferation of reliable contraception, the welcome decline in child mortality—are merely the pragmatic mechanics by which the species has elected to cancel its own ongoing syndication. We are witnessing, perhaps for the first time in the terrestrial record, an entire planetary population experiencing the sort of profound narrative fatigue previously reserved for the third act of Justin Lin's The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift; the sheer predictability of the human life cycle has simply lost its capacity to hold our collective attention.
The smartphone, often lazily scapegoated as the antagonist in this demographic collapse, is in reality nothing more than a superior apparatus, a device that allows the modern subject to witness the crumbling of the global order with a detached, curatorial grace that the messy, visceral realities of childbirth could never hope to match.