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It's a massive problem when you have an older population outnumbering a younger population. We have a system that is built and designed around a certain number of able-bodied workers supporting the structures that this labor is built on.

It doesn't even take very much to wreck economies and send nations into depressions or catastrophic collapse. Wartime in history has hurt small percentages of populations and caused this effect, but the declining birthrates we're seeing around the world are going to be worse in the long run than even all the plagues and wars if the trend continues.

The problem is nobody can talk about it because so many authoritarians and fascists have coopted the issue and made it about ethnicity and immigration. This is a huge problem so don't let the narratives spin you around.

Our problem is, once again, lack of community. In a world of information and isolationism, we're not nurturing each other in positive ways, we're not sharing love and empathy, we're not helping each other so why would anyone want to have kids? To say nothing of the incredible costs of living that are basically preventing people from even having free-time, much less 18 years of focus on raising another human being. We don't have paid leave, we don't have wages that can support a growing family, we don't have child-care and healthcare in much of the world, we don't have incentives to bring children into the world and even for people who have all that lined up, there's a lot of dread and pessimism towards what the future will be like, so people are also making a moral decision not to inflict more suffering on people who didn't consent to being born.

I don't see a solution that doesn't involve major social reform. Cities will crumble, economies will collapse, and maybe eventually something better will come from it.

It's not so much the decline but the ageing. A society mostly consisting of OAPs can't support itself.

Here's a simple problem from it: taxes.

If the infrastructure was built to main x people but there's suddenly a huge drop in how many can pay taxes, then you can't maintain the infrastructure.

Say you made trains for a population for a million people. But in a single generation it's going to drop to about 700,000 people.

Those 700k are now going to have to pay nearly 1/3 more just to keep the same trains running. Drop that population further another generation and the cost will only go up. Yet you can't just not have the trains because the existing people still need transportation.

Now multiply that problem to everything else that needs maintenance and is essential in a modern society - universal healthcare (which gets an added extra cost of older people costing more than younger), sewage, roads, natural disaster mitigation, etc. Even taxing the rich like crazy won't make up for it if it's bad enough, and that's in a system where you assume the population goes down because basically everyone has at least one kid. What Japan is facing is most of the population having no kids, and this is after there being a baby boom at some point. That's an extremely steep drop.

That's not even getting into the housing issues with such a densely designed cityscape like Japan has. If there's too many apartments, they'll just start closing down at some point rather than just going down in cost because apartments act kind of like a micro city in costs, and a lack of tenants because there's just no people to fill the space is the same issue as the trains mentioned earlier. This one takes longer to manifest though.

Where, though? I live in Okinawa and visiting Tokyo with my family sucks because people there are so uptight like you said. Also, old people there are so fucking entitled.

Edit: I forgot to write how Okinawa is like the opposite. Kids are more free to be kids here.