Everything is a Personal Problem

I keep seeing tweets about the fertility crisis. Birth rates are down, families aren’t forming, first-world countries are supposedly headed for a demographic collapse. People frame it as a global emergency that will define the fate of the entire world. But I beg the question: Who gives a fuck?

Is anyone really concerned about the birth rate in South Korea, or whether North America hits demographic targets by 2060? The panic these commentators have isn’t really about the world. It’s about whether they’ll get to have a family. Whether they’ll be chosen. Whether they’ll leave something behind. The collapse they’re worried about is not about the world, it’s about them.

I want you to remember one thing from this piece: Everything anyone ever says, is always in relation to themselves. All critiques or opinions are projection of what they’re struggling with.

People love to talk about how society is falling apart. They open up any social media app to post takes on whatever the latest issue is. Fertility collapse. Loneliness. Social atomization. They project their personal pain onto society, and wrap it up in big ideas to hide the individual ache beneath. It’s easier to say the world is broken than to admit that it’s actually you who is hurting.

You never hear someone with a happy family talk about falling birth rates. It’s not on their radar. They’re too busy living the life others are busy theorizing about. The panic doesn’t belong to people who have what they want. It belongs to the ones who don’t. People don’t advocate for a better world in general. They advocate for a version of the world where they don’t feel left behind. They are essentially saying: fix this because it affects me.

It’s not just the fertility thing. Look at any issue people latch onto and you’ll see the same structure. They pick something abstract, pull it into a frame that sounds moral or intellectual, then talk about it like they’re diagnosing a societal-level crisis. But the urgency in their voice isn’t coming from care. It’s almost always coming from lack.

They’ll cite studies. They’ll reference trends. They’ll say “we” when they really mean “me.” They use the size of the world to mask the outline of their own shape. They’d rather claim a crisis than admit they’re in one.

I am not criticizing them. I’m just calling it what it is. Everyone does it. Everyone takes what they can’t face in their own lives and smears it across the collective society. That way it becomes something we all have to fix, instead of something they have to sit with.

The problem with this is, once you start lying to yourself like that, it gets harder to come back. You start to believe your own performance. You start thinking it really is about society. You sit online diagnosing problems that don’t belong to you, while ignoring the ones that do.

It’s not about the future of the West. It’s about whether you’ll be remembered.

It’s not about the loneliness of modern life. It’s about whether anyone would even care if you died.

It’s not about gender roles or family values or the economy. It’s about whether you still believe you have time to become someone you can live with.

All that pain people wrap in politics, in theory, in ideology, is all personal. It always was. You can hear it in the way they talk. The conviction. The repetition. The need to convince. They don’t want to understand the world. They want the world to explain why they feel the way they do.

You can only hide inside that kind of talk for so long. Eventually the story runs out. You repeat the same lines one too many times. It starts to fall flat. The crisis doesn’t arrive the way you imagined. The solution doesn’t materialize. And what’s left is the thing you were avoiding in the first place: yourself.

It would be easier if people just said what they meant. If they stopped pretending the world was the problem and admitted they’re scared. Or lonely. Or angry that their life doesn’t look the way they thought it would.

But that kind of honesty costs something. It means giving up the high ground. It means abandoning the idea that you’re speaking on behalf of anyone but yourself. It means facing the fact that what you’re really asking is: What happens to me if I never get the life I desire?

The longer people avoid that question, the louder they get. The more abstract their arguments become. They’ll talk about society decaying until they’re blue in the face. But none of it will land, because the real issue was never out there.

It was always inside them. And it still is.

Thanks for reading. Subscribe to get articles like this delivered to your inbox for free.