I’m Thankful Every Day for the Family I Don’t Have

Single and childfree in a world of 8 billion

Originally published at Medium on August 6, 2022

Last month, the United Nations issued a report projecting that Earth’s population will reach 8 billion on November 15, 2022. If you feel like the human odometer only recently rolled over, you’re right. The population hit 7 billion in 2011. 6 billion in 1999. 5 billion in 1987.

The fact that the population has grown by over 3 billion within my 38 years is one that seems custom-built to confound the human mind. We are notoriously bad at conceptualizing large numbers and long stretches of time. I know that I can’t picture 3 billion of anything. And to me, four decades feels like a long time. However, in this case what I feel and what I know are two separate matters.

What I know is that in a 13.7-billion-year-old universe sits a 4.5-billion-year-old Earth, and a few million years ago that Earth saw the emergence of the genus Homo. It took nearly that entire time for the sole surviving member of that genus, Homo sapiens, to reach a population of 1 billion, in 1804. I know this because of centuries of painstaking work by scientists around the world who dedicated their lives, at times at great personal risk, to establish the truth behind our existence.

What these mind-bending population numbers and timeframes tell us is that we are living at a truly extraordinary moment in the history of our species and our planet. In 4.5 billion years, the Earth has seen five mass extinction events. The population explosion of the past 200 years combined with the resource-use frenzy kicked off by the Industrial Revolution has placed us at the start of a sixth.

Every single bit of this often flies in the face of our ideologies, religions, and egos. In other words, some of the things that are the building blocks of making sense of life. Denial and diminishment are common results. Denial that the Earth is that old, that climate change is real, or if it is, that it’s down to natural variability and not human activity. Diminishing the idea that there’s even a problem at all, because not only are things fine now, Earth could actually support two to three times its current population with no issues.

The reality that 8 billion humans are facing due to too many people consuming too many resources will not be moved by calling it a lie, calling it irrelevant, and calling it day. And it will only get harder to deny if we persist in the belief that the road to fulfillment and happiness for all people lies in coupling up and having children.

This matter concerns one of the most significant mortal enemies of the American people: math. Our cultural “math is hard” mantra is well known around the world, and I will acknowledge that math is hard in a very specific way: it doesn’t negotiate, and it doesn’t give a shit about our happiness.

Exponential growth is the mathematical non-negotiable in this case. Wonderful things like advances in healthcare and reductions in poverty that have allowed a large part of the global population to reach reproductive age results in an exponential growth curve when most of those people, and most of their offspring, and most of their offspring, decide to procreate. This has already become wildly unsustainable over just a few generations, and continuing to send the population in this direction will cause immeasurable human suffering and environmental degradation over the next few centuries.

At this point, even a replacement birthrate that stabilizes the population at 8 to 10 billion isn’t sustainable at current rates of resource consumption. Luckily, the birthrate has fallen below replacement levels in many places around the world. At least, I say luckily. This is inducing a panic attack in others who now claim a population crash is imminent. If you insist on combining a zero-migration mindset with the belief that Western economies must maintain their current pyramid scheme, grow-at-all-cost structures, all while throwing in a twist of single-women-are-destroying-society, you worry all you want about how awful the world will be without 30 billion people.

The rest of us can work toward solutions that make life better for people alive now and for the millions of species that lay equal claim to this planet. This includes supporting people who truly do want children with polices that keep those children out of poverty and educated, proven ways to lower birthrates when those children become adults. It also includes the 800-pound gorilla of population management: robust, enforceable rights for women and the attendant cultural support that makes those rights possible.

And it includes people turning away from the traditional model of life centered on sex, marriage, and child-rearing, a phenomenon well underway in many parts of the world. While some condemn this as “the destruction of the family,” I see it as the mirror opposite: the next step in the moral evolution of humanity. We’re seeing the world being crushed under the weight of 8 billion people, and we’re adapting to that reality by looking at new ways of living fulfilling lives.

To help that process along, there is something all of us can do, right away. We can treat childfree people specifically, and single people in general not looking for a traditional life, with EXACTLY THE SAME AMOUNT of reverence we save for parents specifically and the coupled in general. No more patting us on the head, insisting that life will get better when we meet the right person. No more questioning if we know what we “really want,” even when we’ve walked this path every day for in some cases decades.

And most importantly, no more condescension masked as concern regarding “what will happen to you when you’re old.” In an effort to put this question to rest, I’ll answer just this once. When I get old, I will die. I might be older by 50 years or 50 days, but that’s the only certain thing on my horizon, as it is for us all. In between now and then, I plan to use every moment of my single, childfree life to make the mark on the world I was intended to make.

That includes talking about it without qualification or hesitation. So, while others are thankful for their partners and children, I fall to my knees before whatever Gods may exist to give thanks for the family I don’t have. What a remarkable blessing it has been.