Tag demographic collapse

The Silence of the Cradles

Elderly couple sitting on a park bench, watching an empty playground with a toy train and climbing structures, symbolizing declining birthrates.

In the late ’80s, everyone swore mankind was about to breed itself into oblivion. Experts preached famine, collapse, and demographic doom. I didn’t buy it. Even at 18, peeling potatoes in a barracks kitchen, I saw the opposite coming: shrinking families, empty schools, villages fading into retirement homes. The prophets were wrong. The cook was right.