The Vasectomy Dialogues: Shooting Geezers Into Space

No one is more worried about population collapse than Elon Musk.

Fewer human beings means fewer people buying electric cars, fewer 150 characters contributions to X’s cesspool, and fewer bros to launch into space.

There is also the worry of an aging population; after all, rocketing into space at twenty times the speed of sound does not bode well for osteoporosis.

It is weird that so many people are sounding the alarm on population collapse. Having fewer people wouldn’t be a bad thing. I never went to the store and thought, “Wow, there is nowhere to park. How fun!” Or “look at all these people at the beach. The best way to go for a swim is soaking my feet while standing up and not moving.” Or “I hope there is toilet paper at the store so I can weather this respiratory disease pandemic. How? I don’t know. I just hope there is tp there.”

Economists, business leaders, and politicians worried about population collapse believe this decline will inevitably harm the economy. They are operating from the “Endless Growth” paradigm. This paradigm reduces the individual, the single human, into a unit of productivity. The human is only valuable if it can contribute to the massive wealth generated through consumption.

It might be time to consider a different paradigm, one where people can contribute to the economy and the growth of a specific company and industry and, at the same time, they can enjoy their family, contribute to homemaking, and be around in their lives of their kids, if they have them, or enjoy whatever they want to do with their free time if they don’t.

Population collapse and the aging population also put the spotlight on governance issues that politicians don’t seem to want to address.

1. We do very little to support new parents and encourage them to have kids. We expect citizens to have more Medicare/Social Security contributors while at the same time, we expect them to commute 4 hours a day and work 70-hour workweeks.

They expect kids to spend entire days at daycare facilities that get all the money these workers bees get from soul-crushing corporate jobs.

No one wants to talk about the evolution and near extinction of the old “village” mode. These leaders just see us as an object of what they think we should be doing:

“Work Harder.”
“Pay more taxes.”
“Have more kids!’
“Be in their life. Raise them well!”
“Save for a ridiculously expensive, outdated education model.”
“Have them work harder.”
“Have them pay more taxes.”

2. Once an older individual is spat out at the other end of a working machine, governments do very little to support them, and with skyrocketing inflation and expensive cost of living, many senior citizesfind themselves with inadequate retirement to live the longer lives modern medicine enables us to live.

We need to provide the elderly in our communities with spaces that meet their needs for housing, transportation, caregiving, entertainment, and connection.

The conversation is complicated and goes beyond just “Have more kids! Uncle Elon Needs You!”

Parenting is hard, and while we’ve never had safety nets provided by the government, we used to get a lot more support from the village.

But the village can’t support us anymore when they live in a different city, or they are still working because they can’t afford retirement even though their bones want to give out, and both parents are expected to work full-time jobs just to subsist — especially in larger metros.

On second thoughts, rocketing into space does sound great but not everyone can afford it.