Predictions are hard, especially about the future.
-Yogi Berra probably
Smart forecasters know that predicting is hard, and the farther in the future the harder it will be.
You have to set those intuitions aside when it comes to demography.
Among the many shockingly intelligent conversations we had at Natalcon www.natalism.org was one with More Births who made this exact point. With some caveats, we basically know what the workforce is going to look like 30 years from now. Assuming no discovery of cheap mass-produced artificial wombs that crank out fully grown humans on an accelerated timeline, which seems like a good assumption to us, since we can’t even reliably do vat-grown meat. Expect continued growth in surrogacy and maybe, possibly, the use of animal wombs with serious side effects, right about the time fusion becomes widespread.
And right about the time the last South Korean turns out the lights. The news just last week that Seoul’s birth rate had reached .7 tfr gave Natalcon an extra sense of urgency.
NatalCon was as good and even better than we hoped We would go again next year and years to come, assuming it is still going strong.
No predictions, though, and certainly not 30 year predictions. We cannot say with confidence that everyone who will attend Natalcon 20 years from now is alive now since Natalcon had a number of cute babies crawling around. Instead of staring out the window, we looked at the chubby little bundle staring out the window.
The first-day speakers hit topics on everything from chemical fertility disruptors to the crisis of masculinity. The bulk of the talks analyzed the demographic crisis and its causes. An emerging theme was the problem of bad life scripts: most people in developed countries want to get married and want to have kids, but they end up not succeeding in part because of bad information and unrealistic timelines.
We have some anecdotal experience with this ourselves. We met young people who didn’t know anything about age-related declining fertility or bog-standard courtship techniques and were grateful for the information.
The speaker quality was high.
Peachy Keenan choked up when she described all the kids she has and how every day she wishes she could have more. I choked up with her. I have seven and I feel the same. Hopefully she tells her kids that. I’m sure she does.
You could say the same about the attendees. They had high intelligence and high energy. All of the breaks were LOUD because everyone pitched right in talking. Some of us are naturally shy—no problem! This impression was reinforced even more on the second-day “unconference,” which involved a number of attendees giving spontaneous lectures or leading discussion groups. Every one of these sessions that we attended was quite good and we heard the same from others. Special recognition to the Collinses who had or extemporized an action plan about how to best make use of the unconference for their mission and executed it.
I agree "absurdly high quality" attendees. I learned something at every meal and break. It's encouraging to me, we have this level of talent attending, in person.
I also loved that the audience and speakers were so diverse. It was the most intellectually stimulating experience I’ve had since going to Jordan Peterson.
it's likely that the Natalism conference had the lowest rate of personality and psychiatric disorders of any conference I have attended.
The conference organizers did a stunning job, especially considering this was their first time.
If there’s one thing I heard from organizers and participants, it was a desire to more effectively take all the energy and insight and use it as a springboard for projects, plans, networks and missions. That said, quite a bit already came out of this one.
A few live projects we covered this time around:
* epigenetic fertility medicine
* alternative private education
* endocrine-healthy personal care & cleaning supplies
* family-oriented remote communities
* pro-natal matchmaking & dating
Expect to hear about projects that came out of Natalcon in the coming days, and see you next year.
Please let us know about the dating and all of that! Natalism is something new on my radar, but as a 43 year old woman who always wanted a family and now has none this hits close to home and yet brings hope that there are others who think like me still. I just couldn’t find my best friend who also could have the masculine qualities to protect, provide, and raise a moral, religious (large!) family with me. I didn’t think it would be that hard, but as I dated it became very clear these men were very different from the men from even a generation before. It still breaks my heart that having a big family becomes less and less of a possibility and even more so seeing how no one else is having large families or now may not be able to have them with sterility on the rise.
I was also struck by the level of normalcy and saneness at the convention. I've been to a lot of niche conventions and there's always "the military vet on disability who has nothing but time and fanaticism" (to quote a friend). But I didn't see any of that here. And yeah, the conversations were all fantastic.