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 need a [00:03:00] strong religious system, right?

But does not Iran, a literal theocracy, have a strong religious system and strong religion in their country? And yet their fertility rates are abysmal. So what is it that, you know, when everything else that's that, that, that we want to blame this on is out the window. And I think that everyone kind of internally knows the hope crisis is real because we aren't just dealing with a fertility rate crisis.

You're also dealing with an unaliving oneself crisis. We went into not recent fairly, we've talked about it in a few episodes recently that by recent CDC statistics, if you look at high schoolers in the United States, one in 10 considered an unaliving themselves.

No, sorry. Tried to unalign themselves on any given year. And one in four girls made a plan to unalign themselves at any given year. Like, The rates are catastrophically high,

It's like American high schools have become the happening. And everyone's [00:04:00] acting like it's totally normal.

Christ, men! Amen!

Malcolm Collins: But if you look at the other countries that have fertility rate problems, like South Korea, they also have a really high unaligning oneself problem within the youthful generation.

And then you look at countries that have actually pretty, you know, robust fertility rates like Israel, the unaliving oneself rate in Israel is actually on the fairly low side.

Interestingly, in Israel, while in places like the US, the unaliving rate is going up, it's been going down in Israel.

So here I'm going to pull up a heat map by

unaliving oneself rate. And what you'll notice is, remember I was [00:05:00] like, oh like, so here I am showing a map. Now, I do not think that this explains everything.

But it does explain a little bit. Okay. So I'm saying that this is not like a a definite like, this is, this is where this is coming from, but it's definitely a big part of it. And when I talk to young people, when we're talking about the massive shift we've seen recently, and I do need to clarify how massive this shift is because a lot of people, when they believe like the UN statistics on how quickly fertility is going to fall Those statistics are so laughably wrong to give you an idea of how laughably wrong when the UN is like, Oh, we'll have a steady continuous decline in the United States that will then level off.

First of all, it's like, why is it going to level off? But then second and more important right now, if you look at the expected fertility rate of women in the actual fertility rate of women. So if you ask women, you know, in the early twenties, how many kids they expect to have, and then you look at how many kids they have, it's [00:06:00] typically around.

like, I think it's like 20 percent lower. Depending on what you're looking at

This study showed it to be 25% lower.

Malcolm Collins: now, if you today ask kids their expected fertility rate, you get something like over 50 percent of young women saying they don't plan to have any kids. at all.

Sorry, it's worse than that. It's 57% of people under the age of 50.

With it being weighted towards the younger generation.

Malcolm Collins: This was not the case. Historically, if you go previous generation, our generation, I think it was like 80 percent plan to have kids.

So what we can see from this is if this pattern holds, and I love it that a lot of the data, they assume that now for this generation, the actual fertility rate is going to be above the expected fertility rate. Well For, Our generation and what we know from the past is The actual fertility

rate is almost always below the expected fertility rate, which means you're going to be seeing a [00:07:00] catastrophic crash here. But the thing is, is what is driving young women to decide that they don't want to have kids? And when I t