Podcast Episode Details
Back to Podcast Episodes
The Hope Crisis: Suicide's Connection to Demographic Collapse
Join Malcolm and Simone Collins as they dive deep into the root causes of declining fertility rates and the broader societal crisis of meaning. This thought-provoking discussion covers:
* The limitations of economic explanations for low fertility rates
* The role of hopelessness and lack of meaning in modern society
* How the "urban monoculture" contributes to increased anxiety and depression
* The dangers of religious "cargo cults" and surface-level cultural imitation
* Why traditional approaches to increasing fertility rates are failing
* The need for new social technologies and active theological conversations
* How social media distorts our perceptions of reality and success
* The importance of vitalism and finding meaning beyond self-affirmation
Whether you're concerned about demographic trends, struggling to find purpose in life, or interested in the intersection of culture and fertility, this video offers valuable insights and potential solutions for our society's deepest challenges.
Malcolm Collins: [00:00:00] Hello, Simone! I'm excited to talk with you right now! So today we are going to talk about the hope crisis as it relates to declining fertility rates, but also society more broadly.
And this was brought to me again, it's something I regularly see in a recent article in the Atlantic called the real reason people aren't having kids. It's a need that government subsidies and better family policy can't necessarily address. And this really reminds me of, we, We're talking with redeemed zoomer not too long ago, and he was saying, when you talk to boomers about.
All the sadness in this young generation right now, they'll reflexively be like, oh, it's phones. And if you talk to the media, because it's very urban monoculture, very distributed as much cash as possible. It's always all economic situations that you look at something like, oh, it's phones.
, and this is, , pretty quick to [00:01:00] disprove.
The studies on this show, generally that it does make up eight portion of the decrease in mental health in youth. But less than half. And that's the more generous studies.
For example. Amy O'Brien a lead author at Oxford university did a study of 350,000 participants. , across the U S and the UK on teen mental health, youth, and technology. And she found that a teenagers technology use or a teenagers social media use can only predict less than 1%. In the variation of their wellbeing, which is so small that it's surpassed by, for example, whether a teenager wore glasses in school.
You can look at economic situations. They don't explain it at all.
Malcolm Collins: Like they have a correlation to well being. But if you look at the way that Americans live today versus the way we lived 100 years ago, it is very clear that people in 100 years ago lived in significantly more poverty than people today.
But the statistical [00:02:00] evidence is even more damning than that. It turns out that upper class teens actually have worse mental health than well, any other group? , a study by.
Sonia Luther at Columbia university's teacher college. Found that adolescents reared in suburban homes with an average family income of $120,000 report, higher rates of depression, anxiety, and substance abuse than any other socioeconomic group of young Americans today.
Malcolm Collins: So And so those can sort of be thrown out. And then if you talk about fertility more broadly, even some of the answers that we throw out don't really explain everything, right?
So we're often like well, you know, if you had more pride in your identity you would have higher fertility rates. And yet, I mean, does not. Russia and Ukraine have pride in their identity, right? I mean, Clearly they do to motivate these wars. And yet their fertility rates are desperately low. Or I may say well, you
Published on 1 year, 4 months ago