this post was submitted on 24 Jul 2025
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I was going to say "No one is saying that", but there are many going down that road.
The preferable approach is degrowth. A lower birthrate leading to a smaller population with no deaths required, just vastly fewer births and lower consumption until human civilization can not only fit with our planetary boundaries, but restore a lot of wildlife and wildlands, then stabilize at a population and consumption that is healthy and comfortable.
This is already happening, but i don’t think it’s fast enough: with the exceeded life expectancy, we are first seeing an increase and aging of population. Only after the wave of now 50-60 year olds will be dead will we see a stable degrowth. Is that soon enough? Sure it’s preferable to extermination?
I'm not keen on a society were seniors are the majority of the population, it would be a disaster.
I'm not keen on a society dominated by resource exhaustion, grossly exceeded planetary boundaries leading to ecological overshoot and collapse and billions of early deaths due to climate change, pollution and conflict as everyone fights for whatever is left.
An againg society is a necessary step towards a sustainable population. Anything other than a sustainable population (number of people x consumption amount) will, by definition, not be sustained. A collapse will be chaotic and devastating. A managed descent of degrowth will have difficulties but could save humanity and the biosphere as we know it.
It's not as much a disaster as you seem to think.
Surely, you'd have a lot of people who are not in the active workforce. But due to automation + AI, we're going to see a mass layoff crisis in the next 10 years anyway, so if people retire, that's a good thing that young people can find workplaces.
Also it should be noted that large swaths of the population didn't participate in the economy back in the 19th century, when 1/3 of people was below 15 years of age. Still the world didn't end because of that, the opposite, that's when growth really set it. The lesson to learn here is that a large active workforce is not required to have a good economy.