u/madrid987

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Yesterday, someone next to me was watching a Korean drama, and the show featured nothing but stories about marriage and childbirth without a break.

I suspect that Natalism is being intentionally injected into the cultural sphere as well.

https://biz.chosun.com/en/en-policy/2026/06/24/PNEVEOXAM5A45PCHMPB7S74PSM/

Wow/s, it is increasing beyond my expectations. The growth rate of newborns is getting higher and higher.

Recently, Europe has been showing a trend of rapidly declining birth rates. In Europe, where children are viewed as objects of educational investment and this mindset has intensified, the entire region is struggling with the problem of low birth rates.

Of course, countries like Korea have recently introduced aggressive incentives and implemented birth encouragement policies that are almost radical, and indeed, Korea's birth rate has rebounded significantly recently. However, despite this, it is a time when one cannot guarantee whether this is a genuine escape from low birth rates or merely a temporary one.

In Europe, the bourgeois view of child-rearing—that "children require significant educational expenses"—has spread even to the working class. Consequently, many young people prefer not to have children if they perceive that sufficient investment is difficult to make.

This trend is particularly pronounced in countries like Spain, where modern values ​​are thoroughly internalized and educational investment is taken for granted.

While the biological reasons for Europeans choosing not to have children are unclear, economically, it is clearly connected to bourgeois logic. This is because the more they internalize the logic of capitalist efficiency, productivity, and rationality, and the more thoroughly they consciously function as consumers based on individualism, the more they cannot help but worry about the risks and costs associated with child-rearing. In the past, local communities served the function of sharing childcare responsibilities and passing down know-how, but this is difficult to expect today. Parents must shoulder the entire burden of childcare and learn the methods on their own. Rather than investing in childcare, which entails significant risk, they are choosing options that are more cost-effective and less risky.

Ultimately, it is quite natural for the younger generation in Europe to hesitate about childbirth and child-rearing.

In Israel, the outdated family view that child-rearing is solely the responsibility of the household or couple has been dismantled. However, this is not the case in Europe.

South Korea is about the same size as Portugal, but its population is five times larger, at 52 million.

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They say 51 million people live here, but I can't help but wonder, "Do that many really live here?"

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Of course, there are many high-rise apartments, and while there are some spots in Seoul and Busan where people tend to congregate...

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I have lived in Korea for quite a long time, and I have also lived abroad and seen many different places, but I never felt that Korea was that densely populated.

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It is just at the level of an average American residential neighborhood, or perhaps slightly less so;

you rarely see people around in korea.

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https://www.cheongwon.go.kr/portal/petition/open/viewdetail/PRI5bda4204bf4440ae865c93b3c46afef7

In South Korea, individuals with autism(or aspergers) who do not have severe autism are not officially recognized as having a disability.

Therefore, legally, I am considered a "normal" person. (Of course, ordinary people never see us as normal.)

The problem is that being excluded from this welfare system is extremely detrimental in South Korea.

South Koreans are generally extremely hostile toward people with Asperger's syndrome, and if one has this label, they are naturally blocked from employment altogether. Furthermore, adult men with Asperger's syndrome cannot serve in the military; since the record of Asperger's remains as the reason for their inability to serve military, it is critically impossible to hide it through masking.

That is why we strive to obtain disability registration to receive protection against such discrimination.

However, the government thoroughly rejected our request once again.

The reason for this is absurd, as can be seen in the government's response.

They expressed their refusal with a brief answer stating, "Disability registration is permitted only when a significant level of disability severity is recognized in accordance with the purpose of the system; therefore, it is difficult to accept an expansion of the scope of recognized disability."

Their lack of sincerity was evident regarding other demands as well; the petitioner had submitted petitions concerning other matters, but the lack of sincerity in the responses was particularly severe.

For instance, there were instances where the response seemed to interpret "enabling a to b" as "enabling b to a." This implies they were speaking without even looking at the details properly.

In this regard, I felt that the government completely lacks interest in the difficulties we face.

The truly ironic aspect is the extreme contradiction: while the general public in South Korea tends to treat us as people with severe mental disabilities, discriminating against and excluding us, the government refuses to acknowledge us as disabled at all.

For a long time, advocates of progress have scorned the idea that humans are bound by natural limits and have condemned those who question the illusion of infinite growth as "Malthusians."

However, Malthus remains an important figure. This is because his view of society clearly presents an undeniable insight: that the laws of nature apply to human society as well.

Earth's Resource Depletion Day in 2025 is July 24.

Then, when exactly is it this year?

Humanity is consuming natural resources at a rate approximately twice as fast as the Earth's regeneration rate every year.

This gap between supply and demand is called resource depletion, and its pace is accelerating.

So, what is the real cause of resource depletion? Is it due to overpopulation, or is it due to excessive consumption? As we will examine further, the answer is both, but their proportions are not equal.

The climate crisis we face is now evident to everyone.

This serves as a reminder of the serious danger humanity is facing due to its failure to curb carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gas emissions.

Today, our population of 8.3 billion has far exceeded the level that can be sustained in the long term without depleting ecosystems, exacerbating climate change, and threatening food and water security.

According to a new large-scale study, humanity may already be living far beyond the Earth's sustainable carrying capacity. Researchers discovered that while past population growth fostered innovation and expansion, this trend began to change decades ago.

Homo sapiens has evolved to reproduce exponentially, expand geographically, and consume all available resources. For most of human evolutionary history, this expansionist tendency has been restrained by negative feedback.

However, the scientific revolution and the use of fossil fuels have reduced various forms of negative feedback, enabling humanity to achieve exponential growth. This natural capacity is being further reinforced by growth-oriented neoliberal economic policies.

The problem is that human activity constitutes a 'consumptive structure' and subsystem of the ecosystem. Humans can only grow and be sustained by consuming and dissipating energy and resources extracted from the ecosystem to which they belong, and by releasing waste back into the ecosystem. As the population has increased from one billion to eight billion and the actual Global Warming Potential (GWP) has increased more than a hundredfold on a finite Earth in just two centuries, modern technological industrial society has reached a state of extreme overconsumption.

We are consuming and polluting the biophysical basis of our existence. Climate change is the most well-known sign of overconsumption, but mainstream 'solutions' will actually accelerate climate change and exacerbate overconsumption.

The world will inevitably collapse, and humanity will undergo a massive population 'adjustment' within this century.

However, we also modeled what could happen if major environmental crises abruptly imposed severe carrying-capacity limits on Earth, through climate collapse, pandemics, conflict, or resource shortages.

Under a deliberately conservative worst-case assumption that Earth's sustainable carrying capacity suddenly dropped to around 2 billion people, our model predicts a rapid global population decline, with humanity potentially halving by around the year 2064.

When translated it, it argues that all support for people who do not have children should be abolished and all support should be concentrated on those who do have children.

The reason they are making such claims is simply because "there is a shortage of population."