Generations and Survival, Part I: A Generation Without a Horizon

There’s a service in Tokyo nobody talks about openly. A young man pays $150–230 for a stranger to come to his flat: to tidy up, cook, listen. No romance, just care. The Japanese call it “dzukujo”, and behind it sits not an oddity but a diagnosis. The country’s fertility rate has fallen to 1.2. Japan isn’t dying out because it doesn’t want children. It has forgotten how to be together.

Japanese psychology named this condition decades ago: “amae”, the unconscious wish to stay a child someone else takes care of. A generation raised without emotional contact at home doesn’t fear loneliness. It fears responsibility. But this isn’t a Japanese problem. It’s a global shift wearing different faces in different countries.

China spent thirty years enforcing a one-child policy, and is now living with the consequences: later first births, a rapidly ageing population, a demographic hole no single generation can refill. Russia is testing a different model. Its maternity capital programme, launched in 2006, has reached more than 11 million families. It didn’t change the culture. It changed the arithmetic. Where having a child stops being a financial risk, people are more willing to have one.

South Korea holds the world’s grimmest record: 0.72 children per woman in 2023, the lowest fertility rate ever recorded anywhere. Over sixteen years the government has poured more than 280 trillion won (roughly $210 billion) into incentive programmes, and the rate has crept back up, to 0.80 by 2025. But in Seoul, the country’s most expensive city, it still sits at around 0.55. Subsidies soften the arithmetic. They don’t cancel it out where the cost of a child outweighs any payment.

Across the Gulf states, a large family remains a living institution, not a museum piece. At the opposite pole is the United States, where the childfree movement has moved from subculture to social norm. Individual choice is respected. Its collective consequences are not yet reckoned with.

The one real counterpoint in this picture is Africa. Niger: 6.7 children per woman. By 2050 the continent will be home to 2.5 billion people with a median age of 25. But that’s a continental average, not an urban one: nearly half of Africans already live in cities, and there the curve tracks the rest of the world: a generation that raised 8 to 10 children is giving way to one that wants two or three. Dakar, one of Africa’s densest cities, is a case in point. What keeps Niger’s birth rate high isn’t culture. It’s that urbanisation hasn’t reached it yet. But youth without education, without jobs, and without adequate healthcare isn’t a demographic asset. It’s a crisis deferred.

These aren’t isolated stories. The UN projects that population has already peaked in 63 countries, including Japan, China and Russia (three cases already in this article). Globally, the population will keep growing for another six decades, reaching 10.3 billion by 2084, before it starts to fall. This crisis isn’t national. It’s structural, and it’s already under way.

There’s an unexpected biological parallel to this shift. In 1968, the zoologist John Calhoun placed a colony of mice in an enclosure with unlimited food, water and no predators: the only constraint was space. The colony grew to 2,200 animals, then, at peak density, the mice began losing interest in mating and raising young. Infant mortality reached 100%, the birth rate hit zero, and by 1973 the colony had died out entirely, amid total abundance. Scientists dispute a direct read-across to humans, but the observation lines up: poverty isn’t what kills fertility. Density and comfort can do the same job.

“When young people stop having children, it’s neither rebellion nor freedom. It’s a symptom. We are biologically built to reproduce, and refusing that hits the psyche harder than any workplace stress.”

— Denis Milov, VOSTOK ONE

But the real question isn’t only whether children are being born. It’s who will pay for the ones already alive and who will treat them.