V. What about my little happiness?
Can life be happy without many children? For sure, there will always be children. The issue is not voluntary childlessness; it’s whether a world of 1.3 or 1.8 babies per mum such a good deal, psychologically, when we age? Aren’t young people trading their future happiness, which means more babies now, for the immediate gratifications of the present?
Happiness requires food and TV, but also love and companionship. Few want to be sick, frail and alone. Throughout history, economically and emotionally, the old were neatly integrated into their big family, surrounded by spouses, children, grandchildren and other relatives. Being among one’s kith and kin, sharing their joys and hardships gave one the desire to go on. Those days are long gone. Today’s old, the best fed ever, don’t have much company: a spouse if there still is one, a pet in other cases. Children and grandchildren often live faraway. As for nieces and nephews, well, maybe you will see them again in your next incarnation. At the very end, the elderly are often cared for by nursing professionals who, while good feeders and curers, won’t stay longer than their shift. Modern old age, unless you trust the commercials, can be the hard season of loneliness and isolation.
These problems, however, are not caused by a lack of children. The current generation of seniors has had more than enough babies to replace themselves: these are the parents of babyboomers, the big belly of the population pyramid. What causes problems is the modern society itself. These days, your kids, boomers or generation X/Y/Z…, are unlikely to live next door, work in your profession or ask you whom to marry… Life must go on the moment they move out, having been the center of your life for so many years now. Family is no longer that tight-knit combat unit fighting for common survival. Being fruitful is not sure guarantee against loneliness anymore. Something else, certainly not children, is lacking in this generation’s recipe for a fulfilled old age.
The missing ingredient may be an aptitude for fun, whatever that is. Those who chose funs other than kids in their youth may soon pioneer a new, different old age. In the coming years, retired boomers will be testing time-tested notions about being old. How many of these stem from the hardships of life in the past? Do people just grow old that way, naturally, or were they forced to?
The age frontier of fun has been steadily advancing for several generations. Childhood as we know it appears very recently, when child labor was outlawed at the end of the 19th century. Next comes, in the 1950s, the teenager. Ever since, the age at which people grow up and settle down hasn’t stopped to rise. Today’s twenty-somethings are in a state of prolonged adolescence while 30s are increasingly the new 20s, when people used to get serious. Those in their 40s and 50s, the babyboomers, also look (Botox?) and act young compared to their parents at the same age. Will they carry on enjoying themselves in their 60s and 70s? Having fun is best learnt young. This generation, the first ever brought up in affluence, has proved all along that they weren’t cast in the puritan mold of their ancestors. Hedonism, the true legacy of the 1960s, is the new faith. How well this group - also the first unwilling to replace themselves - is going to fare in their last decades will tell whether happiness in old age is possible without multiple children. Will the Clintons regret someday of having only one daughter? And Oprah for having none? Life’s last season may never be the same again after them.
This rosy picture could be just a dream of aging and denying boomers, a kind of mirage they want to believe in to escape the desert ahead. If the new lifestyle is economically unaffordable or emotionally disappointing, nothing can stop humanity from shifting back. Though not foolproof, children will always be the best insurance against loneliness, as blood may really be thicker than water after all. Scared by the depressing image of the well-fed but lonely old, the future’s youth may strike a different balance and bring kids back. For humanity as a group, it’s never too late for a U-turn: even a few hundreds lukewarm generations would not be enough for the uterus to atrophy. A few millenniums in the wrong direction would mean nothing beside the millions and millions years of life afterward.
Nevertheless, if people keep going down this road in 50, 100, 200, 3000… years, it will mean that they are doing fine. If its future members feel life still livable at fewer than 2.1 babies, humankind will be in big trouble. The fate of the species belongs to our descendants, not us.