I Regret to Inform You That We Will All Grow Old, Infirm, and Unattractive

they say time is the fire in which we burn

A new buzzy book about the fertility crisis is out, and its two authors, editors from The Point, are doing the media rounds. These conversations have mostly been a little unsatisfying in the way this topic usually is - people want to have wonky discussions about what is fundamentally an a-rational drive, one developed by natural selection and bred into our bones over the course of millions of years of evolution. It’s not rational to try and answer this question rationally; it lives in our viscera. Still, the wonky answers that Anastasia Berg and Rachel Wiseman give are as good as any others: some feel they can’t find a suitable partner and coparent, professionally ambitious women delay childrearing until they discover they can’t or don’t want to, the perception (rightly or wrongly) that raising kids is too expensive for ordinary people to accomplish, an increasing social acceptance of pursuing hedonistic lifestyles rather than ones that satisfy cultural scripts, the decline of religiosity, the use of climate change and other forms of existential risk as an excuse for what are actually inchoate and inexpressible desires. Whatever the truth, as you may have heard the developed world is facing a fertility crisis, and the developing world is slowing down. We’re in unprecedented territory.

I personally think that another influence lies in the bizarre modern ideology that insists that everything that people have always done is so much harder now, against all evidence. There’s this pervasive cultural attitude that everything is so. damn. hard. now, that human beings have never faced so much difficulty just getting by. This notion is bipartisan, though I do mostly associate it with left-of-center culture, which for the record is politically ruinous. The reality is that it isn’t, actually, uniquely hard to live now, and if you are lucky enough to live as a healthy person in the middle class or above in the United States, you enjoy a life that 99.99% of human beings in history would look on with incredible envy. Which is not to say that life isn’t hard; life is very hard, for big-picture reasons that I’ve laid out many times. It’s just that life was always hard. It’s hard to be a person. Our existence is a cosmic accident, our lives are outside of our own control, and we inevitably die, so of course life is hard. But it was always hard, and that which is hardest about being a human is that which never changes. There’s nothing special about now. It’s just that a lot of people have made the bizarre choice to promulgate an elite culture in which everyone complains all the time about how hard everything is, to socially deleterious effect. (And, for the record, the only real escape from the hardships of life is to find the dignity to bear them without showy complaint, which is the opposite of what everyone is doing.)

That’s all a little abstract, though. What I want to do today is home in on a particular culprit in not just the turn away from having kids but in a number of other cultural changes - the refusal to acknowledge that you will someday be old, like really old, elderly, senescent. It tolls for thee.

Apparently, a new novel by Miranda July has inspired some middle-aged women to leave their marriages for greater sexual experimentation and, supposedly, sexual fulfillment, or so says Alyson Krueger. This is part of a larger phenomenon of women who have been inspired by feminist cultural developments to look outside of love, marriage, and the home for fulfillment. They’ve decided that they’re not going to accept what life has planned for them and pull an Eat, Pray, Love, only with more halfhearted attempts at S&M, or something, it’s not entirely clear. I encourage you to read that piece, in particular, but it’s not at all novel in its essential interest; there’s this whole micro-genre now about how women are giving up on lifelong partnership and family and embracing a groovy life of serial sexual partners and, I don’t know, sophisticated Instagram life or whatever.

For me, this is as obvious of a setup for your own personal episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm as I can imagine - it’s the sort of thing that sounds very romantic and empowering in your head, and then the next thing you know, you’re on a date with a guy named Chuck who’s too old for you and who you don’t find very attractive but he was the only guy you found on Bumble for drinks that night and you meet and go “oof” and he smells like fish but you really wanted to do this empowering Miranda July thing so you end up having sex with him anyway and when you were texting on Bumble it was really hot and you talked about wanting to be tied up, but now it’s just really awkward and the pantyhose tied around your ankles is giving you a rash and Chuck isn’t really doing it for you, at all, but you talked about getting breakfast the next morning and then maybe doing it again in his car or something, but now it’s finally over and you’ve got a headache and he wants you to spend the night in this creepy Red Roof Inn and you say you’ve got an early morning and have to go so he calls you an ugly old slut and, well….

That piece, and pieces like it, remind me of #vanlife. You know? #Vanlife? Where you escape the day-to-day miseries of a 9 to 5 existence and the expense of housing by buying a van and tooling around the country in it, living off of the earth, owning only what you need, with your photogenic spouse and “unschooled” children and German Shephard? And, yeah, there’s like a dozen people out there doing that who are actually happy, almost all of whom are the ones who have parlayed that life into sponsorships that allow the family to secretly sleep in hotels four nights a week. Meanwhile, a lot of the people who try #vanlife are shocked to discover how expensive the used camper van they want is, they buy it at an outrageous interest rate, experience a sinking feeling when they realize what it means to live on the road at 15 miles per gallon, end up in a situation where they have to unexpectedly shit in a bucket and then take a pathetic solar “shower” afterwards, find themselves parking in this one spot in Nebraska at a hideous shopping complex that provides convenient walking access to Target for two weeks until the cops roust them, experience their first July living in an uncomfortable 80 square foot tube of metal, then give it all up, take a 20% haircut when they sell the van to the next sucker, and end up even worse than they were before. Such is the space between the lives we imagine and the ones we get. You should take chances in life! But don’t lie to yourself about the odds.

A woman quoted in the Krueger piece says, “The character is just so determined to live the life she wants, the best, most interesting life she can…. We all toasted to that.” That’s nice, honey. But no one lives the life they want. No one lives the best, most interesting life they can. And the tiny shred of human beings who live in these permanently romantic states are all people who got immensely lucky in some way, usually including being born into wealth. I’m not trying to be a dick, here, and I of course believe in transcendent experience. But transcendent experience is usually unplanned and always fleeting. You’ve got to remember that after even the most radical, romantic, and satisfying change you make, your life will eventually just go back to being ordinary life, your life, the mundane life of perpetual boredom and mild disappointment that most successful people lead. And while I certainly have sympathy for the fact that women’s choices have been deeply constrained for so long by sexism, I also think that women’s media is doggedly fixated on selling women a bag of goods, insisting to them that there’s a level of life satisfaction that they can reach when they really can’t - the culture of lunatic overconfidence and deranged empowerment.

OK, but what does this have to do with declining birthrates? I think both the burgeoning attitude of “I’ll just fuck whoever I want forever, no partners for me” and of “I don’t need kids to have a good life” are united in a few ways - they are of course perfectly legitimate choices to make; they certainly work for some people; they often betray an inability to understand the inevitability of our future infirmity; they are a reflection of a deepening cultural belief that the only thing we should care about is ourselves, our immediate desires and independence.

You don’t want to have kids, god bless you. I don’t have kids myself, at least not yet. A lot of people are perfectly fulfilled in that lifestyle. But from a social standpoint, from 10,000 feet, the cavalier dismissal of having kids betrays a failure to understand a key point: you are going to get old, someday, the kind of old where you’ll be physically infirm and need a lot of help just getting around, where you might have Alzheimer’s or dementia, where your social opportunities are much more constrained and you risk being very lonely. You can dismiss this as transactional if you want, but the durable societal script of “you take care of your children when they’re too young to take care of themselves, they’ll take care of you when you’re too old to take care of yourself” has a lot going for it. There’s a retirement crisis facing us; as our population ages, there are more and more people who need to draw on benefit programs like Social Security and Medicare and relative to that number fewer who are paying into those programs. (Taxing the wealthy adequately would go a long way to fixing this.) This isn’t a new problem. The trouble is that as fewer and fewer people have children, the difficulty becomes even more acute, as we have an increasingly-stressed public benefits system and more and more seniors who have no familial support in their golden years. As I said, this is an emotional dynamic as well as a pragmatic one. Old people love their grandkids! Their grandkids bring them joy and give them something in which to invest their hopes for the future. Maybe that means something to you, but it’s fine if it doesn’t. At scale? I think it’s a problem if too few people see things this way. Taking care of our elderly can’t be a task left entirely to the monetary economy.

I’m surprised that more people don’t grasp this self-interested reason to have kids, if they can have kids. (Because of course some can’t, for medical reasons, and some want to but have struggled to find a partner.) And I suspect that a lot of people don’t think that way because some deep part of them just genuinely doesn’t believe that they’ll ever grow old. Our culture has abandoned any pretense of not worshipping youth, at this stage; go on social media and you’ll find 50-somethings lobbing insults at each other about being old, OK Boomer. There’s a complete collapse in the notion that aging is a natural and dignified thing, and a sweaty insistence on celebrating the young and instilling in them all of our hopes for renewal and justice, despite the fact that our actually-existing young people are afraid to talk to the cashier at McDonald’s. We’ve instilled our whole cultural space with the idea that to be old is shameful. So I’m not surprised that so many wander through life never contemplating the fact that, someday, they’re going to need to be taken care of again¹. Someday they’re going to experience “second childishness.” And people who have kids, in general and on average, are going to have a better support network than those who don’t.

Similar story with the idea that romantic love is an antiquated concept, we weren’t meant to be monogamous, I’m just gonna have a string of spontaneous and romantic relationships for my entire life, and no one is ever going to intrude on my precious, precious freedom to do whatever I want whenever I want to…. I got news for you: as somebody once wrote, on earth we are briefly gorgeous. The notion that you’re gonna leave your marriage in your mid-40s and then pursue a life of endless sexual fulfillment depends on the assumption that people are always going to want to fuck you. They aren’t. I’m afraid that all of us, all of us all of us all of us, eventually grow old and unfuckable, and you will too. Again, I think modern culture has rendered a lot of people unable to process that idea. Remaining physically attractive has become an all-encompassing obsession, one that generates billions of dollars of economic activity. Every social network and media platform is choked with content about how to stay hot forever. It’s profoundly cruel, given that there’s nothing in life more certain than that we will age. But I think we’ve generated a fear of losing our looks so profound that many people just remove the concept from their brains. I’m afraid, though, that it happens to everyone. It’s happening to me. And you can see the pathology in our ugly treatment of aging female celebrities, the most gorgeous women in the world, who have access to the most expensive technologies we have to ward off aging looks. If we aren’t saying “she looks so old,” we’re saying “God, look what she did to herself in her quest to look young.”

All of this stuff is a drag, and in its own way, these attitudes are expressions of what I defined before as eternal human problems. But what’s not eternal is our culture’s rabid commitment to treating aging as something to be hidden away in the dark corners of our mind, old people as troubling reminders of what we least want to be reminded of. That we could maybe work to change; it’d be as heavy of a lift as I can imagine, but we really have no choice, I think, but to try and fix this shit. Because hating aging as much as we do is so corrosive. (No, AI is not going to come and save you from death, there’s no One Weird Trick for the problem of mortality.) Once we’re thinking about aging and death, maybe we can gently remind people that, while they have no obligation at all to be in a lifelong monogamous relationship or to have children, they may find in their last decades that those structures are very useful. They may be reminded that we built them for a reason. Me, I’m a big fan of the romantic ideal, in the broad sense, and I believe in love and family and all that jazz. And I think in time we may finally return to it, as a society. This culture of limitless self-involvement and the pursuit of nothing but absolute personal freedom is a road that leads only to the grave.

I haven’t read their book yet, but one thing I think Berg and Wiseman get very right in interviews is when they say that even the childless tend to work from an expectation of a human future. That is, researchers research for the good of future humans, musicians make music for future humans, philanthropists give money to improve the conditions of future humans…. There aren’t, in fact, a lot of committed anti-natalists out there. Most people who don’t have kids don’t want everyone else to stop having kids too. Personally, I have a strong hands-off commitment to the birthrate; I find both anti-natalism and muscular pro-natalism pretty creepy. But the fact remains that the human species depends on its own willingness to perpetuate itself. We aren’t in fact in danger of dying off anytime soon, and this might all look quite quaint and backwards in a decade or two. (Much as the “population bomb” stuff looks ridiculous now.) All that said, I do want ours to be the kind of society that makes the choice to have babies as free of a choice as we can make it. And speaking as part of a couple who has been trying for three long years to have our own, I do hope everyone understands just how precious a thing the opportunity can be.

1. I am aware of the tradition of claiming that you’re going to die before you get old and go out in a blaze of glory and blah blah but no, you aren’t, shut the fuck up, and if you’re unlucky enough to die before old age, you’re not going to be happy about it, because it turns out that nonexistence is even less romantic than existence.