Will the World’s Population Rise Forever?
What goes up, eventually… reshapes society in surprising and bizarre ways
Overpopulation has been a doomsday topic for centuries. The topic overlaps with food production, resource availability, and more recently environmental sustainability. The anxiety of overpopulation is that numbers would escalate out of control, bringing with it a dystopian meltdown. The rapid explosion of the human race across the planet was successfully predicted by many, but the true, as-yet-realized fallouts were predicted by very, very few.
The effects so far have been counterintuitive, such as disproportionately aging populations, unplanned childlessness, and the breakdown of the family unit. These uncomfortable and little-known truths go deep down into our humanity. What our species is currently going through is a strangely sensitive, societal reshaping. A population tipping point that seeps below our senses like an odourless agent.
“Everything we’re studying demographically has never happened before, never in human history,” says Peter Zeihan, a demographer and geopolitical strategist. “We’ve never seen this sort of decay even in times of war, or genocide, even in times of the Black Death, it’s never happened this fast, it’s never been this wholistic, it’s never happened everywhere.”
