The future belongs to people who believe in one

The future will be different from today.

The cars will be different. The clothes will probably look worse. Our phones might still be little black bricks with touch screens, but there will be new applications and new platforms for the dissemination of information. Some cities will grow, some will shrink, new suburbs will be built, and already dying small towns will finally collapse.

There aren’t many logical reasons to have children in 2026. We don’t need them to work the farm or provide free labor at the shop.

We have a tendency to imagine the future as essentially the present but a little farther away, with some higher numbers at the end of the date.

But nothing stays the same forever.

People grow old and die. New people are born. And the people who inhabit the future won’t simply have different names from the people alive today. In some important ways, they will be different kinds of people, because they will disproportionately be the descendants of the people who chose to have children now.

The end of the something

We are, in some way, at the end of something, even though we can’t clearly see it yet.

The fertility collapse is too big, includes too much of the developed world, and is happening over too long a period of time for us to perceive the whole thing at once. The world’s population is still growing, but fertility has fallen below replacement level across much of the world, and dozens of countries have already reached their peak populations.

People aren’t having kids like they used to. Or, more precisely, certain people aren’t having kids like they used to.

In America, liberals are having fewer children than conservatives. A 2026 study using decades of General Social Survey data found a widening fertility divide by political orientation, with the difference becoming especially pronounced among more recent generations.

Another recent survey found conservatives reporting 1.40 children on average compared with 1.09 for liberals. That sounds like a small gap until you realize it amounts to nearly 30% more children — and demographic differences compound with every generation.

Running on empty

The average secular, centrist Democrat Boomer might have had two kids in 1982 because that’s just what you did. Today, his kids might have dogs.

We don’t yet see the impacts of the asymmetrical population collapse because we are still at the very tail end of secular liberals reproducing. But eventually the tail will disappear, the gas will run out, the engine will slow, and we will see a future of different people.

Sometimes I meet with older people who never had children or older secular centrist Democrats who had two kids but whose children haven’t decided to do the same. I wonder if they are able to see the self-eliminating tendencies of their general worldview or if they give any thought to why exactly their children haven’t chosen to become parents as they did and if, perhaps, in hindsight they might reflect that there were flaws in raising them the way they did.

Sometimes I find myself someplace where the average age is 64, and I wonder if the people realize what that means. It’s not that they should be lying awake at night sweating bullets because they aren’t replacing themselves. We can only do so much in this world, and some problems are bigger than us. But I do wonder if they realize that the future will be different in part due to their choices regarding procreation and child-rearing.

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Why bother?

There aren’t many logical reasons to have children in 2026. We don’t need them to work the farm or provide free labor at the shop. So we who have children today have them for deeper reasons. Sometimes they are outwardly religious ones, like the imperative to be fruitful and multiply. Sometimes they are less religious ones based loosely on culture or love of family. And sometimes it’s just hundreds of little signals that add up gradually to form a general attitude toward family life.

“We’d love to have more.”

If you are in the conservative world in any way, this is a phrase you are well acquainted with. You have heard it said too many times to count, and you have probably said it quite a few times yourself. It’s just what you say after a conversation about a baby, a new car to accommodate another kid, or any other funny story about family life.

It’s a short little sentence, but it being a sort of default thing to respond with very acutely illuminates the difference between the liberal world and the conservative one in 2026.

In the liberal world, this is not a phrase that is uttered naturally. There is no presumption that (of course!) you want more children. At best, children are viewed neutrally, and at worst, they are considered kind of a buzzkill for what could be a life of “freedom” and higher earning potential. On that side of the political world, it is simply not a cultural assumption that children are a blessing and the more the better.

Betting on the future

But that attitude is dying, literally. It doesn’t seem like it yet, I know. It’s slow. We are still over-saturated with young people born to the types that wouldn’t have kids today. We are still in the middle of that very long population bottleneck, and the ship is still coasting though the gas has just about run out.

But over time — a very long period of time — the attitudes of those who don’t care for a world of children will slowly dissipate and become less potent. They are self-eliminating, after all. That’s not opinion; it’s a cold fact of reality that we all see clearly now. The only people who will exist in the future will be people born to those who believed children are good, that the more life there is, the better, and the future should be one that is full of humans.

I’m optimistic.