The Hope Crisis： Suicide's Connection to Demographic Collapse
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Summary
In this episode, Simone talks to me about the growing problem of declining fertility rates, and why we can t just blame technology for it. We also talk about the un-evolving oneself problem, and how technology can play a role in it.
Transcript
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Hello, Simone. I'm excited to talk with you right now. Today, we are going to talk about
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the hope crisis as it relates to declining fertility rates, but also society more broadly.
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And this was brought to me again. It's something I regularly see in a recent article in The Atlantic
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called The Real Reason People Aren't Having Kids. It's a need that government subsidies and better
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family policy can't necessarily address. And this really reminds me of, we were talking with
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redeemed Zoomer not too long ago. And he was saying, when you talk to boomers about all the sadness in
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this young generation right now, they'll reflexively be like, oh, it's phones. And if you talk to the
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media, because it's very urban monoculture, very distributed as much cash as possible,
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is always all economic situations. Now, you look at something like, oh, it's phones. And this is
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pretty quick to disprove. The studies on this show generally that it does make up a portion of the
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decrease in mental health in youth, but less than half. And that's some more generous studies.
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For example, Amy O'Brien, a lead author at Oxford University, did a study of 350,000 participants
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across the US and the UK on teen mental health use and technology. And she found that a teenager's
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technology use or a teenager's social media use can only predict less than 1% in the variation of
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their well-being, which is so small that it's surpassed by, for example, whether a teenager wore
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glasses in school. You can look at economic situations. They don't explain it at all. Like,
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they have a correlation to well-being. But if you look at the way that Americans live today versus
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the way we lived 100 years ago, it is very clear that people in 100 years ago lived in significantly
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more poverty than people today. But the statistical evidence is even more damning than that. It turns
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out that upper class teens actually have worse mental health than, well, any other group. A study by
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Sonia Luther at Columbia University's Teachers College found that adolescents reared in suburban
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homes with an average family income of $120,000 report higher rates of depression, anxiety, and
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substance abuse than any other socioeconomic group of young Americans today. And so those can sort of
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be thrown out. And then if you talk about fertility more broadly, even some of the answers that we throw
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out don't really explain everything, right? So we're often like, well, if you had more pride in
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your identity, you would have higher fertility rates. And yet, I mean, does not Russia and Ukraine have
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pride in their identity, right? I mean, clearly they do to motivate these wars, and yet their fertility
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rates are desperately low. Or I may say, well, you need a strong religious system, right? But does not Iran,
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a literal theocracy, have a strong religious system and strong religious pervert in their country,
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and yet their fertility rates are abysmal. So what is it that, you know, when everything else that we
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want to blame this on is out the window? And I think that everyone kind of internally knows
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the hope crisis is real, because we aren't just dealing with a fertility crisis. We are also dealing
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with an unaliving oneself crisis. We went into not recently, fairly, we've talked about in a few
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episodes recently, that by recent CDC statistics, if you look at high schoolers in the United States,
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one in 10 considered unaliving themselves, no, sorry, tried to unalive themselves on any given year.
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And one in four girls made a plan to unalive themselves at any given year. Like the rates are
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It's like American high schools have become the happening. And everyone's acting like it's totally
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normal. But if you look at the other countries that have fertility rate problems,
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like South Korea, they also have a really high unaliving oneself problem within the useful
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generation. And they look at countries that have actually pretty robust fertility rates, like Israel,
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the unaliving oneself rate in Israel is actually on the fairly low side. Interestingly, in Israel,
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while in places like the US, the unaliving rate is going up, it's been going down in Israel. So here
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I'm going to pull up a heat map by unaliving oneself rate. And what you'll notice is remember, I was
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like, oh, like, so here I am showing a map. Now, I do not think that this explains everything.
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But it does explain a little bit. Okay, so I'm saying that this is not like a definite like this
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is this is where this is coming from. But it's definitely a big part of it. And when I talk to
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young people, when we're talking about the massive shift we've seen recently, and I do need to clarify
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how massive this shift is, because a lot of people when they believe like the UN statistics on how
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quickly fertility is going to fall, those statistics are so laughably wrong. To give you an idea of how
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laughably wrong when the UN is like, oh, we'll have a steady, continuous decline in the United States
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that will then level off. First of all, it's like, why is it going to level off? But the second and more
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important, right now, if you look at the expected fertility rate of women in the actual fertility
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rate of women, so if you ask women, you know, in their early 20s, how many kids they expect to have,
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and then you look at how many kids they have, it's typically around, like, I think it's like 20%
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lower, depending on what you're looking at, right? This study showed it to be 25% lower.
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Now, if you today ask kids their expected fertility rate, you get something like over 50% of young
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women saying they don't plan to have any kids at all. Sorry, it's worse than that. It's 57% of people
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under the age of 50 was it being weighted towards the younger generation. This was not the case
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historically. If you go to the previous generation, our generation, I think it was like 80% plan to have
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kids. So what we can see from this is if this pattern holds, and I love it that a lot of the
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data, they assume that now for this generation, the actual fertility rate is going to be above the
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expected fertility rate. Well, for our generation and what we know from the past, the actual fertility
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rate is almost always below the expected fertility rate, which means you're going to be seeing a
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catastrophic crash here. But the thing is, is what is driving young women to decide that
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they don't want to have kids. And when I talk to people, yes, there's some like urban monoculture
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re like, oh, it's for the environment and stuff like that. But I really feel like this is a just
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so story. I feel like the much bigger thing is, is they just don't have hope that the future is going
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to be a place where they want humans living, or they want humans related to them to live. And you see
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this very explicitly in the Korean fertility rate, when people talk to, you know, people in Korea,
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because I've seen lots of these interviews, a lot of them are just like, yeah, but I don't want my
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kid growing up in this environment. And when you have an environment where one in 10 kids is trying
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to unalive themselves every year, like that obviously is a psychologically very damaging
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environment. And to talk about the silliness of cash incentives, I'm gonna read a quote here from
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the Atlantic piece, because I thought it was actually pretty good. Cash incentives and tax relief won't
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persuade people to give up their lives. People will do that for God, for their families, or for
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their future children. In other words, no amount of money or social support will inspire people to
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have children, not unless there is some deeper certainty that doing so makes sense. And then the
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God thing, another thing I'll put on the screen here, a breakdown of religiosity by demographic, i.e.
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you know, millennials, Gen Z, zoomers, etc. And you'll see in Gen Alpha, it falls off a cliff,
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which, and in Gen Z to an extent, which isn't captured in the mainstream demographics.
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There's a lot of people who are like, oh, the younger generation is moving right, which I agree,
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it is moving right. But it's not moving right towards the old religions. And this is a huge mistake
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that a lot of religious people I know are making. They're like, oh, all the kids are turning back
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to these old systems. And it's like, no, they're not. They are moving right in like a, okay,
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the urban monoculture doesn't work. But they don't, the vast majority don't view you guys
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particularly better than the urban monoculture. And the big problem that the small religious
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renaissance that we're having right now has is that it's like almost all male. So the Gen Alpha
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faction that is actually like, okay, I'm going to go ortho bro, I'm going to, you know, convert to
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whatever. They're struggling because there's not an equivalent number of females making the same
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switchover. And so they're not able to easily find partners. And this causes a pretty big problem
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because then it solves nothing, even though they might be good fathers now, and they might be able
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to motivate a high fertility rate. They don't have a partner to marry, so they don't end up having
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kids. So I wonder what your thoughts are on this. How much do you think this is an epidemic of
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hopelessness versus an epidemic of ennui? Because I get that the unaliving element of this implies that
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it's more of a negative affectation aside from just a lack of feeling anything. But I also get the
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impression that a lot of the low fertility stems not from deep unhappiness, though maybe there's a
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lack of contentment that's pervasive, but rather a lack of meaning in general and a lack of desire
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to do anything that's not necessarily actively miserable. I think you have a really good point
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there. So I think the meaning crisis, as it's called, is a really good way to look at this. And
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I think that you've laid this out. And this was actually the core point of our first book and our
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shortest book, The Pragmatist's Guide to Life, is helping people develop a sense of meaning without
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trying to push them in any one direction. Very different than the type of people we are today.
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But one of the things I realized when I was writing that book is there just was no other tool like
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that. And I think that that is part of what led to the meaning crisis. So it used to be, if you go back
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to the 50s and the 60s in the United States, when you went to school, they would teach you what you
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should live for. Now, it might be wrong, but they gave you a moral system. Then going into-
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Well, they didn't just do that. They gave you a moral system. They told you how to live, how to
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date, how to maintain your household, how to navigate in-laws, how to do all sorts of things.
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We shared a culture that said, here's how to deal with life. And here's also what you do. And of course,
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No, I agree. But here, I'm just specifically in this point talking about the moral system.
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That's all I'm talking about here. No, no, I'm talking about your ennui question and what I
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think it comes from. And then in the 80s and 70s, they had like the satanic panic and stuff like
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that. And what this caused was because there are different religious systems in the U.S.,
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many of these conservative religious systems, yes, unfortunately, this problem started because
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of conservative religious systems and not the progressives, began to say that schools couldn't
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teach meaning. Because, you know, your Protestant evangelical might be afraid that the meaning
00:12:05.220
being taught was a little bit too Catholic. And the Catholic might think it was a little
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too Protestant evangelical. And the Jew might have a problem with, you know, each of those.
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And so schools were just like, well, we won't touch on questions like, why do I exist? What's the
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purpose of my life? Why should I keep existing? Why does humanity have value? And then you go
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forwards, you go forwards, and then it's the the atheists in the 90s who are like, oh, you can't
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teach these systems. But then if you try to teach an atheist version, the Christians are like, oh, you
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can't teach these systems. And during this whole time, intergenerationally meaning was still being
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communicated to kids to some extent. But the system for that really broke down in the scaffolding and
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the ways that we have to think about and address these questions completely broke down to the point
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we're now in society when people are looking for meaning. And if you want to understand more on how
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we think about this, you can look at our levels of thought video. They often look for it in an
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aesthetic sense. So, you know, this is really what we did a video on. Oh, I'll put a title card here.
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I forgot his name. But he was some like red pill influencer. And I remember before like major life
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decisions, he'd be like, oh, what's the most masculine decision I can make in this moment?
00:13:21.900
Yeah. And to an extent, Andrew Tate does this as well with some of his philosophy.
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Well, it's not even I did. Yeah, it's like an aesthetic based objective function. It's,
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it's what would somebody who is and you see this on certain parts of the left as well. I think parts
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of the trans movement has gone in this direction, where they begin to make a major life decision
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thinking, what decision would my gender identity make around this? But this isn't just a gender
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thing, right? Like, you'll also see this in what kind of decision would a good person make in a
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moment like this? Or what kind of decision would like a good crunchy hippie make in a moment like
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this? And that these ethical systems have caught on at all shows how barren the landscape was and how
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unsophisticated the world had become in terms of how we address questions of meaning.
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And the first book I wrote, and I actually got it copyrighted. And I wrote it in high school,
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never published it or anything. This title, Why Do Anything? Because that's when I had this
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crisis, I was like, why should I do anything? Like, where is value in reality? When I mean,
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like, why do anything? I mean, if I'm, you know, motivating going out of my house at the beginning of the
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morning, or I'm, you know, choosing which college to get into, I need to be optimizing for something.
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And I think a lot of people, they don't even think, what should I optimize for, right? Like,
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they just think that that's not even a question that they're allowed to ask. Or when they answer
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it, they answer it with very unsophisticated and unfulfilling answers, like, you know, my own
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personal satisfaction, or maximizing positive emotions throughout a population, even though they're
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just the things that led to our ancestors having the most surviving offspring, very
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serendipitous thing to maximize. So, and I think most people know how faulty these logical systems
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are. But they attempt to maximize them anyway, because they just don't have anything else. And
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I think that when they, a lot of people, when they realize how silly it is, they're like, but those are
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just the things that led to my ancestors having more babies, you know? And they don't have any good
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alternatives. They don't have a framework for searching for alternatives. And then they hit this
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ennui that you're talking about. And so now, if you're thinking about something like, okay,
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should I have a child or not? Or should I go on living or not? And your life doesn't feel good,
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right? Like you're experiencing en masse negative emotions. You're like, okay, well, because my life
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is about how many positive emotions I can feel, and how many positive emotions I can give my children,
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then it's clearly not worth living. What's really interesting about this is that the number of
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positive emotions that somebody today should be feeling, when you look at the wealth they have
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access to, when I say wealth, I mean all human knowledge at the touch of their fingers, not
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really having to worry about starvation, not really having to worry about, you know, many of the things
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that if you go 200 years ago, you know, you'd expect half your kids to die, right? But people back
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then, it is clear from the writings, were much more mentally healthy, and were much more satisfied with
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their lives, and likely experienced actually less unhappiness than someone today. So one,
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they don't have a system that can motivate them continuing to live in the current unhappiness of
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our culture. But two, they've adopted cultural systems that directly lead to this unhappiness.
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And the cultural systems lead to this unhappiness for two reasons. One, the urban monoculture that we
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talk about all the time, it sort of is completely built around removing in the moment negative
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emotional stimuli. Think of trigger warnings and stuff like that, the Hays movement. But of course,
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if you remove any in the moment negative emotional stimuli, you're going to become incredibly
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sensitized to any negative stimuli, right? And then have these massive reactions to them,
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because your body just isn't used to them and focuses on them as the core purpose of your
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existence, like avoiding them as the core. So of course, you're going to quickly spiral out of
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control the moment somebody like misgenders you, which should be like a non-issue for a human being,
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right? But because you're so unused to negative emotional stimuli, you just have no system for
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dealing with something like that. And it really does cause this spiral in deep unhappiness. But
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then the second problem is just your sort of mental receptors and way of engaging with the world gets
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totally fried. I often argue that the way that the urban monoculture teaches things like how we should
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relate to pleasure and self-affirmament is like eating a bowl of sugar every morning instead of
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cereal. Like just literally like sitting up to a table and pulling a bowl of sugar. Like this belief
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that, well, you know, like even the idea, for example, we did an episode recently on PrEP, which is a drug
00:18:07.760
that you really only need to need if you are regularly going to orgies and sleeping with people who you
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don't know well enough to know whether or not they have AIDS. Because if you're in a marriage and
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you're on modern AIDS drugs, you will be something called U equals U, which means very low rates of
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transmission. So it's like really like just an orgy drug. And the government, Obamacare mandated that
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it's on all of our insurance plans and a ton of states in the United States like pay for it. And so you
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look at something like that, like, like, like orgies are a human right in this government, which is kind
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of wild. They're not considered like a lifestyle choice. They are considered like a literal human
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right, because that's why the government has to fund it, right? Like if it was a lifestyle choice,
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like having a nicer house or a nicer car or something like that, then the government would
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be like, well, you know, obviously we don't, we're not going to upgrade you there. Or I want to take a
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trip every year because it makes me feel better. It's like, so why is this different from those types
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of things? It's different because it kind of is considered a human right to these groups.
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These unemployed men have been having sex for several days. We're doing the only thing we can do.
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We're trying to turn everyone gay so that there are no future humans present day America. Number
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one. Yeah, America. We've entered this moment. We're going out and doing whatever makes you feel
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good in the moment, whatever your basal emotions are telling you to do has increasingly become seen
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as a human right in these groups. Well, at the same time being affirmed for whatever you want to
00:19:30.700
believe about yourself has also, I'll put on screen here because it was shared with me by one of our
00:19:35.120
fans. I just found it wild. Is there is a movement right now to try to normalize being a Therian and
00:19:43.160
to build surgical techniques to get people to align more with their, sorry, for people don't know,
00:19:49.840
furries are people who go to conferences for fun and have these fursonas, which are like these
00:19:54.820
pretend animal identities. Totally cool with that. Therians are people who think that they're actually
00:20:00.000
those animal identities in the same way that like a trans person thinks that they're actually a
00:20:04.680
different gender than the gender they were born. And, and I'm not saying that to diminish trans
00:20:09.380
people. I'm just saying that they literally would liken themselves to trans people. If you asked a
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Therian in this, well, that's how far this has gone at this point that they're like, yeah, we need to
00:20:17.220
start developing surgeries. And, and this is how you could do a muscle graph to look more like a canine
00:20:22.800
and stuff. And I'll put those images on screen. Cause it's, it's really fascinating to me how thorough
00:20:26.960
they go on with this stuff. If you'd like to check out this organization yourself, you can go to
00:20:31.240
freedom of form.org and it is a nonprofit registered in the United States. Having registered nonprofits
00:20:38.700
before, I know that that means it is definitely not a joke because it's not easy to do. Also to
00:20:43.000
clarify our position on this stuff, it is not that we are, you know, anti Therian exactly. It's that we
00:20:50.660
are anti caring at all. The way your identity is perceived by other people. It just shouldn't be
00:21:00.100
important. You should have a higher purpose in life than affirming a specific identity. You want
00:21:06.360
to believe about yourself, likely some sort of consequentialist action on reality. For example,
00:21:13.260
saving a collapsing society, making humanity better, giving your kids a good life. And I,
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and, and what we, what we are so against is the normalization of focusing first and foremost
00:21:28.340
within your life on how you are perceived by the world and how you perceive yourself. Because
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neither of those things should matter at all, or like not more than like 0.5% of an individual's
00:21:44.160
mental effort. But when your entire life becomes about, people can be like, come on, mainstream,
00:21:49.500
culture is not obsessed with being able to affirm yourself, you know, with whatever you become,
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being constantly affirmed for whoever you happen to be. And I'm like, then how common is the statement,
00:22:02.240
learn to love yourself, learn to be comfortable with yourself, learn to care for yourself. Whereas
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within any traditional culture, they would have said, learn to become somebody worthy of loving,
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you know, learn to become somebody that you can be proud of, you know, not learn, like manipulate
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your own brain into affirming yourself, whatever. But these are like mainstream. These are like,
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these are like, you go into like vanilla mom houses, right? And you'll see these on the walls.
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What's your thoughts on this, Simone? Like, of course, to me, of course, this is going to lead to a
00:22:36.480
short circuiting of all these pathways and lead to constant depression and anxiety. And then because you
00:22:40.560
don't have any other moral system that can pull you out of this, you're also completely directionless.
00:22:45.740
Yeah. And I think this is pretty self, self explanatory and something we discuss a lot in our
00:22:52.240
materials and in our podcast as well. I am going to push back on your argument that
00:22:59.140
instructions on how to live and norms around what is done in life isn't relevant in a conversation about
00:23:07.780
meaning. And here's why people's explanation of meaning is often, and you've already alluded to
00:23:16.560
this earlier in our conversation, a just so story resulting from someone's lifestyle choices.
00:23:23.180
So you alluded to the person who that archetype of someone who says, I'm not having kids because
00:23:29.060
the environment is, is falling apart or, or humanity is in a terrible place right now, or
00:23:37.680
whatever, insert excuse. And I think that's a product of the way that they live and the culture
00:23:43.460
that they've surrounded themselves with. And if instead we were to give people the steps that lead
00:23:50.440
to a life of a different type of meaning, that they would come to a conclusion that gives them that
00:23:55.880
meaning. And that sometimes you have to surround people with the right set and costumes and co-stars
00:24:02.300
to have them as a character, have a hero's journey. That's meaningful. So in other words, I'm, I'm,
00:24:11.160
I'm adopting the dress for the job. You wish you had version of an objective function.
00:24:18.580
And I don't think that you're giving enough weight to the importance of showing people cultural norms
00:24:26.080
that lead to healthy outcomes. I can agree with this, but I think one of the dangers of this way
00:24:33.440
of thinking, and I was going to say reverse, there were two reasons is it's not just the urban
00:24:38.020
monocultures problem. Another problem is of the people who realize the, the disillusionment of the
00:24:46.800
urban monoculture, a number of them have turned to cargo cults. And we've talked about this in regards
00:24:52.380
to the trad wife phenomenon, but we should just remind you of what a cargo cult is for people who
00:24:57.740
might've forgotten. So in World War II, planes were active in the South Pacific and they would often
00:25:02.980
give food and supplies to the people of the region while they were operational in those areas.
00:25:08.900
After they left, the people sort of developed an almost religion around this time in the past when
00:25:14.340
there was more prosperity and they will build out of, you know, rocks and palm fronds and stuff like
00:25:19.420
that, um, runways for planes to land on and then build like fake radio sets and fake antenna and
00:25:26.000
talk into the fake radio sets to try to get the, the plan, do the, the words that they remember the
00:25:31.360
people saying the last time they saw them and dress up with like USA written on them and do marches.
00:25:37.280
And this is a cargo cult, right? And in a way the trad and light phenomenon, it is not, these people
00:25:43.820
didn't like look up how did wives actually behave normatively in the 1950s. What they did is
00:25:51.080
Yeah. They looked at, well, not just a caricature, they're cargoing, copying often ads and Hollywood
00:25:57.740
based media. It would be as ridiculous if a hundred years from now or something, somebody was trying to
00:26:05.420
live like a classic person from the, you know, 2024. And they based everything off of like ads,
00:26:14.680
right? Like Sears ads or something like that. Right? Like it's, it wasn't the way a huge portion
00:26:20.460
of the population was ever really living. And as such, it was never like an internally consistent
00:26:25.560
way of living. And if you're like, well, why was the media of the time motivated to manipulate
00:26:31.660
people to live a lifestyle that almost no one was actually living? Well, specifically it was
00:26:37.960
because this period of ads was right after World War II. During World War II, when all the men went
00:26:44.280
to war and the women started taking on lots of industrial jobs, women really began to normalize
00:26:50.460
to that. And so both government and big business, when the men came back to prevent a major economic
00:26:56.280
catastrophe, uh, needed to get these women out of the workplace that had just flooded it.
00:27:01.080
And so they created this image of, oh, you want to be a stay at home wife. That was the goal of all
00:27:07.600
of these ads. It was to counter a trend that was already happening. They were produced like this
00:27:15.520
specifically because this lifestyle was so rare. We've touched on this with trad wives. The bigger
00:27:21.100
problem for me is the religious cargo cults that I've been noticing popping up. Um, so you know,
00:27:27.680
earlier I talked about ortho bros and I think for a large portion of like the ortho bros, it's really
00:27:32.600
become a bit of a cargo cult about trying to ape the most religious looking of the Christian religions
00:27:39.720
in the most religious looking way. You know, they, a lot of people, when they return to one of the
00:27:46.600
traditional faith systems, what they do is they advertise, like they, they, they search among
00:27:52.840
them for the one they want by the one that aesthetically looks most to them, what their
00:27:58.240
sort of pop cultural memory of what a religion is supposed to look like. And so from modern 2024 pop
00:28:05.020
culture, you know, uh, orthodox Christians look more Christian or more like, you know, traditional-ish
00:28:11.440
than other Christians. They, they, they jumped to that, you know, without looking at the fertility
00:28:15.400
rates of that community without looking at the, which by the way are very, very low without
00:28:19.100
looking at, you know, okay, how many people who are joining this faith are actually getting
00:28:22.180
married or achieving any sort of outcome or anything like that. It's like, if I act out
00:28:26.720
this thing, I will get the benefits from this. When historically speaking, most forms of Christianity
00:28:33.440
that were in any way thriving and not in some sort of a dark age were what I call an active
00:28:39.460
theological conversation that people were actively and excitedly engaging in. You know, if you look
00:28:47.260
at, you know, what was happening in America during any of our great awakenings, that's what was
00:28:51.680
happening, right? We were constantly excited about what the newest religious ideas were, right? And I think
00:29:00.380
that they forget this in this cargo cult mindset that when these faiths, whether it's the orthodox
00:29:05.080
faith or the Catholic faith or one of the Protestant faiths or the Jewish faith has been in its moments
00:29:09.940
of most thriving, that's when it was in this active conversation about how it was going to progress
00:29:17.880
instead of what was right and what was wrong. And I don't mean this in a progressive sense of being
00:29:23.980
like, oh, these things don't change. I mentioned, you know, before when somebody says that, it's like, well,
00:29:28.360
I mean, do you consider that Catholics only started believing that life began that conception was Pope
00:29:33.200
Pius IX, you know, around 200 years ago. You look at like Thomas Aquinas or Augustus Pippa,
00:29:37.540
they didn't believe this. So if you hold to that Catholic belief, then you are okay with the church
00:29:41.860
continuing to evolve its beliefs. And should it not continue to evolve its beliefs from here?
00:29:47.420
If you are a Mormon, I mean, anyone who's actually like a Mormon and familiar with a Mormon faith must
00:29:51.760
know how quickly the active theological conversation used to move in Mormonism. And I think one of Mormonism's
00:29:58.420
core challenges right now is it moved from having a group of intelligent men in this active conversation
00:30:04.620
to being more and more just the current prophet, which removes the active conversation from the
00:30:11.020
table. But I think I see that coming back. But I think more broadly, we have to be wary of the cargo
00:30:16.940
cults of religion. Because when you do the cargo cults of religion and you think, I just act out X,
00:30:21.660
Y, and Z, like, you know, the old 1950s ads, and all of a sudden, the prosperity of the 1950s,
00:30:27.140
or the spiritual prosperity of the 1950s, will come back to me, you know, you'll be sorely
00:30:31.900
disappointed. And we've seen, there's been a lot of videos of, you know, trad wife to like despair
00:30:38.820
pipeline. And it makes a lot of sense, because they are entering these relationships, where now
00:30:45.600
divorce is common, and they're not fully considering this. And now the guys have five kids with him,
00:30:50.900
he got all the utility he wanted from them. They're old, they're not that attractive anymore.
00:30:54.260
He's made a lot of money. And he just divorces them and marries somebody younger. And they are
00:30:59.100
quite screwed. So like, how do you how do you protect against stuff like this? But anyway,
00:31:05.120
what are your thoughts? In general, I agree. But I just I think that giving those defaults to people
00:31:13.740
helps to get them there. You have to obviously you can't just give the costume and the set and the
00:31:19.320
surroundings and nothing else and assume that people are going to come to the right conclusion.
00:31:22.600
But it makes a huge freaking difference. And right now, I feel like people are concluding that
00:31:30.620
nothing matters, because they're set up, or either nothing matters, or literally, they're better off not
00:31:38.720
living, because they're set up in such a bad way, where how can they help but conclude that we have
00:31:45.540
people who think that they're never going to be able to own a house, they're never going to have
00:31:48.780
a meaningful career, they're in debt, they're in a desperate situation, they can't find a partner,
00:31:53.900
what else are they going to conclude? I think if we set people up for success, and if we gave them
00:31:58.800
better cultural defaults, that people would find more meaning more easily. Even right now, for example,
00:32:06.560
if we just gave people meaning, or if we just gave everyone the pragmatist guide to life and had
00:32:11.420
everyone truly and very carefully think for themselves what mattered, I think the problem
00:32:15.800
is that people would probably come to a very nihilistic and negative utilitarian conclusion
00:32:19.960
to a great extent, given where they have been placed, given the priors they've been given,
00:32:25.080
given the societal defaults that they're growing up with.
00:32:27.660
Yeah. Well, I mean, I guess that to me, this is why I think a lot of people wonder why we risk our
00:32:36.740
reputation on projects like technopuritanism. If you want to learn more, you can go to
00:32:41.120
technopuritan.com, or you can check out our track series on YouTube, which is sort of a religion
00:32:48.040
that we now believe, but we're also in the process of, not really a religion, it's more like a
00:32:53.080
Christian denomination, that we're in the process of fleshing out and building, and trying to determine
00:32:58.680
from going back to the original text, what do we think this part actually meant? What do we think
00:33:02.180
this part actually meant? And a lot of people can be like, why would you risk your reputations
00:33:06.340
on something like this, given all of the other important stuff that you're working on, like the
00:33:11.560
pronatalist advocacy? And the core answer is, is because I think that this is literally as core to
00:33:19.480
the pronatalist advocacy as anything can be, as core as the Collins Institute. If we can't find or engage
00:33:27.000
in an active theological conversation about how we find meaning in life, like our ancestors did,
00:33:33.200
we are pretty screwed, generationally speaking. And people are like, why can't you just go back to
00:33:41.360
one of the old traditions? And it's like the old traditions have shown more resistance
00:33:45.760
to the urban monoculture than other things. They have shown higher fertility rates,
00:33:53.000
but they're still losing. They're still losing, like, and losing hard. There's a reason why when you
00:34:00.580
look at the old religious systems, more of gen alpha is deconverting than gen Z and more of gen Z
00:34:05.380
is deconverting than millennials, right? Like you guys are on the losing side of a battle and you're
00:34:10.700
like, why don't you come join us? And it's like, Hey guys, why don't you come hang out at the Alamo?
00:34:16.000
Like, I know we're under siege, but you know, I think I got this. It's like, no, you are,
00:34:21.420
you are clearly in a bad situation right now, but I am encouraging you to maybe fortify differently or
00:34:28.460
get out of the Alamo because if the statistics continue in the way that they're moving right
00:34:33.760
now, you will be decimated by the time you get to the other side of this.
00:34:37.740
One piece of advice I may commit to the audience here is I get the impression that people from some
00:34:45.680
of these religious traditions think that they can instill confidence in the tradition from an outsider
00:34:52.420
by denying the problems that they're facing. And trust me, it really does the exact opposite.
00:35:01.300
The two faiths that are most common to do this are the Catholics and the Orthodox.
00:35:05.780
We're in this faith that don't really seem to have this problem at all. You're looking at groups like,
00:35:09.580
you know, Mormons and mainline Protestant groups. So like if I go to a Mormon and I'm like, wow,
00:35:14.580
you guys have a major deconversion problem right now. They're like, yeah, we do have a major
00:35:18.380
deconversion problem and here's how we might work on it. Or, you know, your fertility rates dropping
00:35:23.460
a lot. They're like, yeah, and here's some ideas I have for it. But often when I go to Catholic or
00:35:27.680
Orthodox groups about this, they'll be like, no, we don't. We don't have that problem. And I'm like,
00:35:32.560
well, I mean, here are the statistics. You do seem to have a massive fertility rate problem and
00:35:38.580
deconversion problem. And it's actually much bigger than the Mormon problem who are admitting this
00:35:44.520
problem. And they'll be like, ah, it's not a problem in our most devout groups. Don't worry about it.
00:35:48.380
And I'm like, well, I mean, even if that's true, you know, look at this statistic, look at this
00:35:53.820
statistic. The devoutness of your groups doesn't seem to correlate that highly with things like
00:36:00.080
their propensity to use plan B, even though that's a direct sin within the tradition.
00:36:04.400
Why aren't the more religious members using it at lower rates? Which we have a whole episode on.
00:36:08.960
You can check out our Catholic fertility rate episode. But I don't know. It is very interesting
00:36:13.460
to me how culturally different groups are and how they relate to problems. And I really fear this
00:36:19.080
denying that the problem exists strategy is going to be effective in a modern era at addressing it.
00:36:27.800
I guess that the assumption is like, I'm trying to figure out why these two groups, specifically the
00:36:33.460
hierarchical groups with large bureaucracies deny their problems at a much higher frequency than other
00:36:38.020
groups that I've seen. And I'm guessing it's because they have sort of a history of, well,
00:36:43.580
if there is really a major problem, then the upper echelons of the bureaucracy are going to recognize
00:36:48.900
it, come up with a solution and tell us what it is. And it's our job to just defend the bureaucracy's
00:36:56.620
honor. And we can best do that by denying that the problems exist, which is, which is why we're
00:37:02.340
working on this project and why we risk our reputation on this. But I think also a lot of people,
00:37:06.340
when they begin to engage in prenatalism, a lot of our ideas seem really stupid at first.
00:37:11.460
They're like, why don't they just do cash handouts? Why don't they just try to get cheaper housing?
00:37:14.380
Why don't they just do more generic religion? And then anybody who actually seriously engages
00:37:22.860
with the topic, and I've seen this evolution of people over time, where at first they think that
00:37:27.500
we're like crazy or extremists, and then they've been in the movement for like a year and they've
00:37:32.180
actually personally dove into all of the other stats and they're like, oh, I got, I get now why
00:37:38.540
you came to, you need to create an alternate education system and you need to build social
00:37:44.180
technologies of a religious variety to, that are either totally new or augmented versions of our
00:37:51.200
historic systems. Instead of just saying, well, we can go back to the way we used to do things
00:37:55.780
because it's clearly not working. And the cash handouts clearly aren't working. And the smaller
00:37:59.640
apartments clearly aren't working. And the, you know, I also think it's interesting. We
00:38:03.540
should do a different episode on this, but I'd also love to hear your sauce on this.
00:38:06.680
Why do you think as we become wealthier and wealthier as a society, when I say wealthier
00:38:11.700
and wealthier, people are like, no, look at how much this costs. Look at how much this costs.
00:38:15.080
And it's like, do you really think your life is harder than someone in the 1800s? Really?
00:38:20.180
Really? When we talk about that, why has society become so much less satisfied as it's gotten
00:38:26.000
so much wealthier? Do you think it's all downstream of the other things that we're talking about in this?
00:38:29.640
We only know the context in which we exist. We only can really compare our lives to where we stand
00:38:37.940
now. And we normalize to where we stand. So it's, I think it's not fair to expect someone to
00:38:47.580
consider their situation as though they had just stepped off the lifestyle of their ancestors,
00:38:58.360
if that makes sense. We're just not really wired to do that. We're wired to look at where we stand
00:39:04.740
vis-a-vis our peers, but not where we stand vis-a-vis our ancestors.
00:39:10.020
You know, that is where you get in social media, a bit of the downside, which is the peers that you
00:39:15.080
are being shown or the peers that the most other people are looking at.
00:39:18.180
Yeah. Instead of the average human, right? Which is kind of the peers that are near the top of our
00:39:23.840
society, which causes things like women to completely misjudge what the average male looks
00:39:28.200
like men to misjudge what the average female looks like people to misjudge, you know, what is real
00:39:33.780
expected wealth for them? What is real expected societal outcomes for them? So you might be right
00:39:39.260
there. I often have people like, be like, oh, you know, Simone is, is mid, but you guys really seem
00:39:46.840
to like each other. And I'm like, okay, dude, go to an airport, look around, see how long it takes
00:39:53.320
you before you find somebody who is over 30 and anywhere near Simone's level of attractiveness.
00:40:00.500
If you think she would know you're like, I think death initially in the top 1% of attractiveness
00:40:06.960
for your age range. Um, just if you guys, isn't he the best? No, because people don't judge by public
00:40:16.220
spaces. No, but that's, that's very true. It's in, and it is the top, not even 1%, but like 0.01% that
00:40:22.900
we're really primarily looking at on YouTube. And of course, not even that, but the top 0.01% with
00:40:30.300
a filter on with makeup, with the best possible camera angle, the best photo of 50. So it's not
00:40:38.000
great. This reminds me of a little experiment I ran with Simone once where you still didn't believe
00:40:42.640
me that I was like, no, that's just use. Like you pointed out a few people in an airport and you're
00:40:46.080
like, they were nearly as attractive as me. And I was like, Simone, that girl is like 17 or 18 years
00:40:53.980
old. And you're like, nah. So then later we were at a, an event where we had to go to like a,
00:40:59.240
a nightclub venue for like an industry event. So it had people of all different ages and everyone
00:41:04.620
going in there under age had to get an X on the back of their hand. Um, I said, look around the
00:41:09.080
room, Simone, and see anyone who you think is more attractive than you. I should point people out.
00:41:13.240
And then I'd walk around to an angle where I could see their hand and it was always an X. And I was
00:41:17.140
like, you misunderstand how much use. I mean, it is insane, especially in women, how much beauty is
00:41:24.900
not even beauty. It's just signs of youth. It's insane. It is completely insane.
00:41:30.280
It just is though often. And people completely missed this. And I am very defeatist about this
00:41:37.940
in an online environment because it causes people to make missed expectations, but also about their
00:41:41.580
life and trips. Like, okay, when you're, for example, judging how often you should take trips
00:41:46.200
online, people are going to disproportionately post when they're taking a trip because you always have
00:41:52.160
the trip album after the trip. That's where you have the camera. What are you going to take photos
00:41:55.300
of in your day-to-day life that you haven't already taken a photo of? So, and so people like create
00:42:00.520
these, these norms where like one of my cousins was like, well, you know, your kids won't be able
00:42:05.000
to go on trips because you're having so many of them. And it's like, yeah, but my ancestors didn't
00:42:09.140
go on trips, you know, like, and I'm denying a human the chance to live over that. And another thing
00:42:15.620
that they'll notice people like, no, like housing costs so much more these days. That's why. And I'm like,
00:42:20.520
well, you know, you could just choose to live with other people. And they're like, well, come on,
00:42:25.160
you can't raise kids in an environment like that. And I was like, remember the 1800s thing I noted
00:42:28.880
here, this house was in use during the 1800s, the ones that we live in. And it had like four or five
00:42:33.540
different families living in it back then. People used to live like sardines where I grew up
00:42:38.180
historically, which was with Dallas. You know, I hung out with a lot of recent Hispanic immigrants,
00:42:44.000
but they'd often have like three or four related families in very small houses.
00:42:52.640
This is a cultural expectation that you have created for yourself that doesn't really even
00:42:58.740
improve your quality of life that much. Sharing a house with other people really doesn't negatively
00:43:04.920
impact quality of life that much. I know that's a sin to say, but it really doesn't.
00:43:10.160
Well, even, and this is what really blows my mind about our lifestyle. If you're a severe introvert,
00:43:15.820
I thought I was genuinely worried that I would never get to be alone again,
00:43:21.740
that our kids would never leave us alone again. Many of our kids, not all, but many of them are
00:43:27.140
extreme introverts as well, who love being around their siblings, but also really love their alone
00:43:32.400
time, even alone time from us, which is just so awesome. So it can happen. Dreams can come true.
00:43:38.720
You marry a partner who handles that stuff for you.
00:43:42.800
Well, yeah, but also both of us, I think are pretty genetically introverted. And that means that
00:43:48.920
it should not have been a surprise to me that we would have children who tend to appreciate time
00:43:55.720
alone. Which is great. Appreciate time alone. I love the way you put it.
00:44:01.860
But no, I mean, there's always ways in the modern environment to, I mean, if you look at AI these
00:44:10.240
days, for example, you can live like any fantasy you want to live, right? With the chatbots and stuff
00:44:16.400
like that. You live in such an area of, I think, stimulational wealth that because you're making
00:44:26.240
these miscalculations about what should be normative for you and what you should expect before having
00:44:29.780
kids, you know, it's not happening. But yeah, this is why I think vitalism itself is like the vitalist
00:44:37.040
movement and the pronatalist movement these days are like one-to-one in terms of the people I see
00:44:41.640
cheering for them and stuff like that. Like Richard Ananya often talks about the vitalist movement,
00:44:45.720
but I'm like, yeah, you know, also pronatalist, right? So we got to rekindle that historic vitalism
00:44:54.360
and the vitalism, which motivates sacrifice in one's behaviors, but also the pleasure that can
00:45:02.840
come from sacrifice and austerity that I think as a culture, we have forgotten.
00:45:15.240
I think we're on our way. I think we're on our way as a society. Anyway, I love you to Desimone.
00:45:19.320
I love you too. And what do you want for dinner?
00:45:24.260
Oh, um, you know, do we have anything in the fridge that's like defrosted? We should probably
00:45:29.280
start defrosting some lasagna and some of the curry that I made from the freezer. I slow cooked it.
00:45:37.600
Well, on Sunday, we only have one more night here after tonight. So just one thing then. Do you want
00:45:57.580
Family drive to Hampton Bay's afternoon at the Hamptons.
00:46:03.000
Hampton's family time. No, this has been in here. Can I see history of creation?
00:46:08.160
It doesn't show history, but no, this has been here for a while.
00:46:17.800
You just can't bother to know that we're going to the Hamptons.
00:46:22.740
Hamptons. Don't worry, guys. We're not paying for it ourselves. So can you then...
00:46:27.720
So, well, I can make you your curry with rice tonight. I can't.
00:46:36.060
No, why don't I finish off the soup and do some pasta with pesto?
00:46:42.940
Or macaroni thingies with little flavor twists. You notice that they put ridges on the macaroni.
00:46:49.480
Yeah, let's try the macaroni things this time, actually.
00:46:53.120
You're a woman of sophistication and a wonderful chef. You know, you cook for your husband now, right?
00:47:03.040
No. I think our evening setup works really well. So I'm happy to do it.
00:47:08.500
I appreciate you giving me time to do it tonight. I love you. Bye.