A little more than a week ago, I attended a gathering for “young conservatives” at Lazarus, a bar on East Sixth Street in Austin. The occasion was a book talk about holidays and preserving family traditions. I arrived early, passed the build-your-own nacho station, redeemed my free drink ticket, and found a seat among roughly 30 people, mostly men in their 20s and 30s.
The author, a working astronaut, began with a question: “How many of you have children?” Just one hand went up. Once the nervous laughter faded, the conversation moved to spacesuits. But the moment captured a problem that is far larger than one room in Austin: Why are so few young people starting families?
A culture devoted to personal possibility can lose sight of the people who come after us.
The numbers are sobering. The United Nations estimates that the global fertility rate fell from 4.8 children per woman in 1970 to 2.2 in 2024. The world's population is still growing, but more countries are having fewer children than would be needed to replace one generation with the next. That shift will affect economies, communities, and how people imagine their futures.
The usual explanations are familiar. Young adults date less, marry later, struggle with housing costs, and find relationships harder to build in a screen-mediated world.
Yet economics and technology do not settle the question. In a 2024 Pew Research Center survey, 57% of adults under 50 who said they were unlikely ever to have children cited a simple reason: They don’t want to. That figure describes a particular group, not all young adults. Still, it invites a cultural question: What has changed about our understanding of a good life?
Fifty years ago, Tom Wolfe offered one answer. His 1976 essay “The ‘Me’ Decade and the Third Great Awakening” described Americans absorbed in “remaking, remodeling, elevating, and polishing” the self. He contrasted that obsession with an older sense that people belonged to a “great biological stream”: They carried forward something inherited from their ancestors and entrusted something to their descendants. Wolfe saw more Americans daring to step outside that stream.
French philosopher Jean Baudrillard later encountered a similar restlessness in America. He saw a country fascinated by speed, reinvention, and the perpetual justification of its own existence. The self was no longer merely something to be cultivated. It was a project that could be endlessly redesigned.
The older warning came from Alexis de Tocqueville. In “Democracy in America,” he described individualism as a “mature and calm feeling” that draws a person away from the wider community into a small circle of family and friends. Tocqueville's individualist still had that circle. What happens when it contracts further, until the individual becomes the central obligation?
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Individualism has given America extraordinary wealth, innovation, and freedom to pursue a life of one's choosing. Those achievements should not be dismissed. But a culture devoted to personal possibility can lose sight of the people who come after us. Children demand time, sacrifice, and commitments that resist being rearranged around our preferences. If freedom becomes simply the absence of such obligations, family formation begins to look less like a natural part of life and more like an obstacle to self-realization.
Governments have tried to make parenthood easier. Singapore subsidizes child care; Hungary offers housing and tax benefits; South Korea supports fertility treatments. These policies can relieve real burdens, especially for people who want children but cannot afford them. Yet they have not produced a reliable formula for reversing low fertility. “No government has discovered a policy that produces sustained bumps in fertility,” Texas A&M historian Trent MacNamara told Business Insider.
Long before today's demographic debate, Theodore Roosevelt worried about what he called “willful sterility.” Writing in 1911, he blamed “selfishness,” the “love of ease,” and a retreat from risk and duty. His language was severe. His underlying challenge remains recognizable: What are we willing to sacrifice for a future we will not live to see?
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Allan Bloom later worried that young people’s “primary preoccupation” was themselves, “understood in the narrowest sense.” Oswald Spengler reached for an even bleaker formulation in “The Decline of the West”: “Children do not happen,” he wrote, when people can no longer find a reason for their existence. Neither writer supplied a birth-rate policy. Both were asking what people believe their lives are for.
No tax credit or dating app can answer that question by itself. Financial help may make it possible to have children, but a society must also regard family life as something worth choosing. It must leave room for obligations that cannot be measured solely by their return to the self.
Back at the bar in Austin, one hand rose when the astronaut asked who had children. The talk moved on. The question should not. A civilization that prizes individual freedom must still decide what, and whom, it hopes will come after it.