The Demographic Trap: Missing the Question of Meaning

Global Demographic Collapse Is Real

Europe now faces a demographic shift of historic scale. In 2024, 3.55 million children were born in the European Union. Six decades earlier, that number stood at 6.8 million. The fertility rate has fallen to 1.34, far below the replacement level of 2.1. These figures do more than describe a statistical trend. They reveal a civilizational change and force us to ask a deeper question than family policy alone can answer: what purpose does procreation still hold?

In 24 out of 27 EU countries, fertility dropped in 2024 compared with the previous year. The gap between Bulgaria at 1.72 and Malta at 1.01 remains wide, but the direction stays the same. On average, women now have their first child at 29.9 years old, a full year later than a decade ago. Across the world, fertility has declined steadily from its peak of 5.3 in 1963 to around 2.2 today. According to UN projections, 85 percent of all children in the world will be born in Asia and Africa by 2026. Europe, North America, and Oceania together will account for only 8 percent.

Still, one example offers a measure of hope. South Korea, which alarmed observers with a fertility rate of 0.72 in 2023, has recorded growth for 2 consecutive years. In 2025, the rate rose to 0.8, while the number of births increased by more than 16,000, the largest jump in 15 years. More marriages, the arrival of a large generation into prime childbearing age, and shifting social attitudes all helped drive this change. This case shows that decline does not always move in only one direction.

Philosophy, Literature, and Why Have Children

Psychologists and sociologists have long tried to explain why people choose parenthood. They usually name several recurring motives: joy, continuity, authority, the transmission of values, the preservation of tradition, and symbolic immortality. Yet thinkers explored these ideas long before modern social science gave them labels.

In Plato’s Symposium, Aristophanes tells the story of the original human beings whom Zeus split in half, leaving each person to search forever for completion. People can read parenthood through that lens. It expresses a longing to go beyond one’s own limits and to survive in symbolic form. Hannah Arendt gave this intuition a public and political meaning in The Human Condition. She argued that natality, the fact of birth itself, grounds politics because every new life brings the power to begin again. New human beings interrupt repetition. They introduce freedom, initiative, and unpredictability into a world that would otherwise close in on itself.

Albert Camus approached the question from another angle. In The Myth of Sisyphus, he described the absurd as the clash between the human hunger for meaning and the silence of the world. Parenthood can answer that condition not through proof, but through commitment. A person chooses to say yes to life despite suffering, injustice, and uncertainty. A person chooses to pass life on, not because reason guarantees success, but because hope sometimes begins where certainty ends.

Cioran’s Antinatalism

Emil Cioran pushed in the opposite direction. The philosopher of aphoristic despair rejected procreation altogether. He did not see children as an answer to absurdity or as a source of renewal. He saw birth as the transmission of suffering to someone who never asked to exist. In his harshest formulations, he suggested that no one should be born and that every parent carries moral guilt for bringing another being into pain.

Today, people describe this position as antinatalism. It rarely stands at the centre of mainstream demographic debate, but it continues to shape private moral reflection. Some people do not reject parenthood because they fear inconvenience or lost freedom. They reject it because they cannot justify exposing another human being to suffering, instability, or loss. That argument may sound radical, but it remains part of the moral landscape surrounding modern decisions about family.

Each of these perspectives offers a different answer. Yet when researchers ask ordinary people what they want, the answer often turns out to be much simpler.

A Crisis of Opportunity, Not Desire

Anthropologist Paula Sheppard of Oxford University argued in an interview for New Scientist that public panic over low fertility often misses the point. Her research suggests that many people still want 2 or 3 children. In the United Kingdom, however, only 2 children are born for every 3 that people say they want. This gap does not point to a collapse of desire. It points to a collapse in the ability to fulfil it.

Research from the German Federal Institute for Population Research reinforces that conclusion. Relationship stability and economic security strongly shape decisions about parenthood. Studies from Finland, Germany, and Spain show a similar pattern: where women carry a disproportionate share of domestic labour and where the labour market offers little support, the distance between intention and reality grows wider.

This pattern helps explain why fertility remains so low in many wealthy Southern European societies, even though young adults still express the desire to have more than 1 child. It also helps explain why South Korea, after years of pessimism, has shown signs of recovery. When social conditions shift, private decisions can shift with them.

When statistics show a historically low rate of 1.34, they do not tell us that Europeans have stopped wanting children. They tell us that many people now struggle to turn that wish into reality.

The demographic crisis does not reflect a collapse of love or a loss of the will to live. It reflects the conditions under which people must act on love, hope, and responsibility. In the end, the deepest question is not whether people still dream of becoming parents, but how far the modern world obstructs that dream — and why have children if every path toward that choice grows harder to follow.

Read this article in Polish: Demografia w pułapce. Ucieka pytanie o sens posiadania dzieci