I utterly despise the New York Times as a publication, and I despise the New York Times podcast especially, but the mere existence of this podcast (and the non-existence of newly born children) is of some historical significance…
so I will note…
in November of 2026, the New York Times broadcast an ersatz opus of low-I.Q. edutainment (made by morons, for morons) entitled, Public Schools Have a New Crisis: Not Enough Students.
LINK: https://youtu.be/jF6qHdbDXzo?si=pBB3j7vjRUj-58zK
The neighborhood I live in used to be noisy during daylight hours, because it was full of children playing in the streets: it was known for children playing hockey along the roads and sidewalks —with the inconveniences for traffic that this entails. There are now no children at all. Zero. I have never seen a single snowman. I have never seen a single snowball fight.
Tragicomically, one child being born in a neighborhood a short walk away from here was covered as a major news story: the provincial TV news reported that it had been several decades since anyone raised a child in that particular neighborhood. This was done without any sense of humor or wry irony.
In this province, more people are dying than are being born every year: the fertility rate (which is in some ways a misleading statistic) is now at 1.08 —below the (equally misleading) replacement rate.
Antidepressant use is probably around 16 percent for Canada as a whole, and it is probably around 25 percent for the province of Newfoundland: this is a "prevalence rate" that will have a few footnotes and clarifications (it probably only includes adults and not children, for example, and there may be some other jiggery pokery in the calculus that I'm unaware of: when Pepsi calculates what percentage of people drink their product, they only want to know the percentage of people that could). Here is the source for these statistics, specifying 25.6 percent in Newfoundland circa 2023: https://www.iqvia.com/-/media/iqvia/pdfs/canada/fact-sheets/snapshot-antidepressants-2024-en.pdf
Newfoundland's provincial disability rate is thirty percent: this is the percentage of the population 15 and older with at least one disability that is serious enough to do government paperwork for. Keep in mind that I really have been disabled for most of the last two years, due to both the surgery and the spinal injury, but I would not have been included in this statistic during that time, and I have never asked for government disability benefits. I would assume that a significant portion of alcoholics and drug addicts don't do the paperwork to register as disabled people simply because they're busy being alcoholics and drug addicts —and they may lack the wealth and stability (such as a regular mailing address) required to get that paperwork done. This was a huge issue in Laos and Cambodia: the poorest people were often "invisible" to survey research, and could not make their existence known through government paperwork at all.
As an implicitly absurd indication of just how unreliable these quantitative indicators can be, "Newfoundland and Labrador reports the lowest prevalence of mood (8.3%), anxiety (9%), and substance use disorders (14.9%) in all of Canada, but also the highest rates of poor mental health (30% compared to 26.1%)." [Emphasis added] Source: https://cmha.ca/wp-content/uploads/2024/11/State-of-Mental-Health-profile-Newfoundland-Labrador.pdf
Keep in mind that I live in downtown Saintsville: this is where the whole province comes to party —so the rate of "substance use disorders" may be drastically higher in these few streets than it is amongst the population scattered around the rural periphery. Nevertheless, anecdotally, the few I speak to who relocated to this small city from even smaller towns reports that drug addiction has made life miserable for everyone in that aforementioned rural periphery.
I will mention polyamory here in parallel: to make polyamory work, you need at least two people who find polyamory interesting and who are —therefore— willing to be self-disciplined and make a positive effort for the sake of that common interest. It begins with curiosity but doesn't end there: why exactly anyone would find something interesting and then develop a kind of disciplined approach to learn more about it is neither widely discussed nor widely understood in our culture —in part because of our reliance on simple coercion in the education system. There is no complex question of why you'd choose to read a particular book (or practice doing a particular mathematical equation) if you're simply forced to do so by your teacher —and if you know you'll be punished for failing to pretend that you find it interesting. The process of pretending is the main thing that people learn, from an early age, instead of learning how to identify and develop their own interests. We neither learn discipline nor self-discipline: we learn fear and fakery.
In this culture, in this decade, very few people are interested in raising children. It may be less popular than polyamory, at this point. If you are interested in having children, it entails some very obvious kinds of self-discipline, such as not smoking cigarettes —or, at least, never smoking cigarettes again. An unknowable percentage of people who could raise children are instead interested in "the pursuit of happiness" through cigarettes, alcohol, marijuana, and taking psychiatric medications (such as antidepressants). I dare not mention video games.
One reasonably beautiful young woman (who claimed that she was (and is) interested in raising children) screamed at me when I pointed out that her vacation schedule —time and money spent going to beaches in Jamaica— really did entail that she now wouldn't have a child for several years hence —and, in her case, it may already be too late. I do not resent the fact that she screamed at me in the least: I am certainly worth screaming at, and this topic is certainly worth screaming about. However, I was pointing out, in an entirely calm and detached manner, that she had not been making any of the preparations necessary to have a baby —nor even reading about it. If you're interested, you'll read about it.
Vacations in Jamaica may not seem tantamount to an irreversible decision to never have children, but the window of opportunity for women is short: if just ten years of their lives revolve around these vacations, those revolutions will entail a loss of time and money that would have made starting a family possible. I am mentioning this because I realize that "travel" is glorified in our culture as if it were the purchase of some kind of profound "personal growth" —even if the kind of tourism being alluded to is merely an airplane ride leading to yet more of the same self-indulgence (dancing, drugs and alcohol) that these same people would have engaged in over a long weekend at home. Trust me, it is possible to learn absolutely nothing in Thailand: I learned a great deal from my years in Thailand, but I actually spent my time in libraries, museums and archives, studying languages, history and politics (etc.) —and I spent my time there sober. The kind of learning I benefitted from in Thailand was almost identical to the kind of learning I'd become accustomed to in Toronto, before: neither swimming in the ocean nor hiking up a mountain will teach you anything that you cannot learn from a swimming pool and a stairmaster.
It is what it is: raising children is a choice, and we should hardly be surprised that people who live utterly meaningless, self-indulgent lives don't feel that they have anything positive to share with the next generation. If you were meeting these people, face to face, you wouldn't try to convince them that they're wrong: you wouldn't want to talk anyone into raising children who (1) isn't interested in it, and (2) isn't willing develop the kind of self-discipline that this interest entails. Raising children is a complex commitment that will change the rest of your life —and it may mean that you never dance on the beaches of Jamaica again —and it may mean that you never get to play Grand Theft Auto 6.
