Poppy

I often argue with myself about exactly what a miracle is.  I find that most definitions of the word are deficient.  Is it something that breaks the laws of nature?  No, we find phenomena that break those laws all the time- we just rewrite the laws to accommodate them.  Is it when something amazing happens, something meaningful and improbable?  Naysayers would scoff that those aren't true miracles, just coincidences.

I want to set the argument aside and proceed with a squishy, indeterminate definition of miracle.  I suppose I'll know one when I see one.  In this post I would like to tell you about one of the little miracles I've had the privilege to know.

Her name was Poppy.

I first met Poppy one evening eight years ago.  It was the first time I went to visit Breanna's house, the woman who would become my wife.  Back then we were awkward teenagers who had no inkling of the significance of our meeting or of the long journey ahead.  Poppy was Bree's little fluffy cat, friendly and cuddly.  Poppy took a liking to me, and I to her, and soon I was petting her and squeezing her and she climbed on my back.  I didn't consider myself much of a cat person until I met Poppy and she lazily strode into my heart. 

Poppy back in 2018

Over the years as my relationship with Bree grew closer and deeper, Poppy became as much a staple of life for me as Bree did.  Wherever Bree was, Poppy was our little chaperone in the background.  She was a little poofy cloud, snuggling on the couch, laying in the sun, and doing anything for treats.  She was an expert at nonverbal communication, and she wouldn't allow us to ignore or misunderstand her little requests.  Looking back, it's hard to believe she never spoke a lick of English, because she always made her thoughts known one way or another.

I grew especially close to Poppy after Bree and I finally married and moved into my grandma's basement together.  Grandma was generous enough to allow us to keep Poppy with us, and thus our little family was born.  Poppy was simultaneously like a doting mother and happy-go-lucky child.  Bree and I worked inverse schedules, and Poppy kept me company on the lonely evenings that Bree worked her late shifts at the hospital.

 

She was a small thing on the outside, but huge on the inside.  She was the best cat in the world.  She was special.  I know that all cat owners feel that way, but to me, it's true.  In the same way that the love Breanna and I share is a miracle despite there being billions of similar relationships all over the world, I know that Poppy was a miracle cat.  Sometimes the most everyday, mundane things in life are the most miraculous.  We just have a hard time seeing it.

As summer drew to a close this year, Poppy began to show signs that she was nearing the end.  She was 17 years old, which is very old for a cat.  She hardly showed any pain and she bore her age with grace, but she walked a little bit slower, lost her ravenous appetite, spent more and more time sleeping, and began losing weight.  She was as cuddly and sweet as ever, and she was still herself, but Bree and I knew that she didn't have much time left, and we were at the precipice of a very hard decision.  To be certain, we took her to the vet and she confirmed that Poppy didn't have much longer.

Poppy in her golden years

It was an impossible choice.  How could we make that decision for her?  And yet we had to.  Bree was brave, and she chose to give Poppy a peaceful passing, without pain.  She didn't want Poppy to die in some cold pet hospital, so we planned for the vet to come to us.  In the days leading up to it, we spent lots of time with Poppy, setting aside other things to give her lots of time and attention.  It still felt like it wasn't enough.

On the final day, Poppy laid outside in the sun on our little picnic blanket.  I opened the door for the vet and led her to where Poppy and Bree were laying, and my heart sank.  In that short walk to the blanket, time slowed to a crawl and I felt each heavy footstep.  The vet was kind and professional and she did everything right, but there can only be so much good in a 'good death.' 

 

Because of Bree's tough decision, Poppy passed away comfortable in the company of those who loved her, instead of cold, sick, and alone as she may have otherwise.  She couldn't have understood what had happened, but I pray that if she did, she would have forgiven us.  I hope she has moved on to new journeys and adventures, wherever they may be.

 

As I've grown older, the truth of impermanence has grown more and more real.  Everything comes into being and passes away like the constant turn of a wheel, and the longer I live, the faster the wheel spins.  The recognition of this truth has prompted me to spend more time appreciating life and those who I love, rather than anticipating whatever is coming next.  When I look back on the time I had with Poppy, my greatest regret was that I did not give her enough love or attention, and did not appreciate her for the miracle she was while I had the chance.

Thank you Poppy.  For being our best friend and for teaching us by example how to age with grace, how to love unconditionally, and how to appreciate the little things.  We'll never forget you.  Thank you for teaching me what a miracle is.

 

When the Stork Fails

In recent years, the subject of population decline has started bubbling up from the depths of our social consciousness.  The first stirrings of depopulation began quietly in the east with falling birthrates and shrinking populations in Japan, China, and Korea.  As of 2025, China's population has fallen for 3 years straight.  Japan, on the other hand, has been shrinking for 15 years, and it's been called a 'silent emergency.'  At first, this might just seem like an Asian problem, and some could write it off as a quirk of foreign cultures.

The reality is that fertility is falling all over the world, everywhere.  Western countries aren't as far along on the curve as the countries mentioned above, but it seems that we're all going to the same place.  Africa and a few other scattered places still have relatively high fertility rates, but they will soon begin to fall as well.  The global total fertility rate peaked in 1963 at 5.3 births per woman, and since then it has steadily fallen each year, down to 2.2 births per woman today.  The United States is below the global average with a rate of 1.6, which is below replacement rate: 2.1 births per woman.  Without immigration, the population of the United States would already be shrinking.

This trend has also begun to take hold in my home state of Utah, which used to be the second-most fertile state in the United States.  Despite its religious commitment to natalism, the fertility rate declined the fastest out of any state in 2023, falling to the eighth most fertile state.

Globally, it is apparent that the total human population on Earth will peak and begin to decline relatively soon, before the century's end.

Population decline generally leads to economic instability.  A shrinking population means less people are working, spending, and paying taxes.  The population begins to age as birthrates decline, and the growing elderly population becomes a greater and greater economic burden on working age people.  It may in fact cause a fertility 'tailspin,' where young people respond to hard times with less children, which leads to less workers, which leads to more economic instability, thus the cycle continues.  

Political ideologues have thought of many bad ideas to counter the fertility decline, which range from the ineffectual strategy of paying people to have kids, to stalling by importing immigrants en-masse, to authoritarian forced-procreation schemes.  I doubt any of these 'solutions' will have much success in the coming years. 

Total fertility for the globe over time.

Fertility rate by country in 2024

To understand what's going on, we need to take a brief look at history.  For most of human history, the human population grew almost imperceptibly slowly.  It was only at the beginning of the industrial revolution that population began to increase rapidly.  Medical innovations ensured that less mothers, children, and babies succumbed to disease, reducing deaths.  Industrial agriculture and the mass production of goods made the necessities of life cheaper, allowing families to support more children and increasing births.  What's changed since then?

The most commonly cited reason I hear online for the fertility decline places the blame squarely on women.  Access to birth control, abortion, education, and women's rights more generally are diagnosed as the underlying problem.  This idea is obviously useful for culture warriors but I doubt that it is the root cause.  Culture generally lies downhill from economic and material factors.  People are indeed choosing to have less children, but we should ask why they are making that choice, instead of laying the blame on the brute fact that they can make that choice.

Besides all of the celebrated technical, medical, and productive advancements of the industrial revolution, there was another, quieter shift in human society that often goes unnoticed.  For most of human history prior to the industrial revolution, the majority of the population lived in isolated farmsteads and small villages.  For the people who lived in these rural areas, the center of economic activity was not the business or corporation.  It was the household.  Each household was a small family enterprise, and there was no difference between 'work life' and 'family life.'  As a result, having a large number of children was not just emotionally fulfilling or a religious obligation.  It was also an economic advantage and a matter of survival.  In a household economy, your children are your workforce, your lovable employees.  Furthermore, before the age of steel, engines, and coal, there was a much greater need for manual labor in the home and in the economy at large.

With the industrial revolution, that relationship began to change.  As a result of factory production, economic activity began to centralize in industrial centers in cities, and the household morphed into a place for consumption, not production.  The family lost its central role in the economy, replaced with impersonal transactional relationships between employers and a faceless, replaceable mob of employees.    This change was gradual, not instant, and it was faster in some parts of society than in others.  The mechanization of agriculture took longer than other industries, so rural life managed to hold out a more family-centered mode of production for a little while longer.  But the machine was relentless, and today a vast majority of agricultural land is owned by huge agribusiness, not by family farmers.

In this new state of affairs at the height of industrialism, it is no longer economically advantageous to have lots of children.  Life is divided into the 'work life' or career, and 'family life' or home life, and often these two aspects of life operate in opposition to each other.  Another child isn't another pair of hands to work the land, it's another mouth to feed, another insurance bill to pay, another college tuition, a bigger house, a bigger car, etc.  Other factors at play include the unique circumstances of industrial life.  The peak of fertility for young couples happens to coincide with important education and career decisions, leading couples to delay childbearing until later.  

Economic pressure has driven the single-income family to the brink of extinction, making it harder for potential mothers to have time for child-rearing and for families to juggle career and familial responsibilities.  When children are a luxury rather than a necessity, people will generally choose to have fewer of them.  It's simple math, really. 

Some might object to my argument, pointing out that I am essentially arguing that industrialization is responsible for the population boom and bust simultaneously.  This is where culture comes in.  It takes a while for cultural momentum to be beat down by a new economic reality.  The children of the pre-industrial age who have just moved into a city and gained industrial employment are going to see the large families they were from as the norm, and will act accordingly.  However, over time, the culture loses force and each generation will have less and less children as they gradually adjust to industrial realities.

In short, the population boom is caused by a holdout pre-industrial culture within an industrial society.  But this must give way to an industrial culture, which then leads to the population bust.  I believe this is clearly borne out when looking at the map of fertility decline.  The countries with the highest fertility are the least industrialized, and the countries with the lowest fertility are the farthest along the curve of industrial development.  The Amish, who spurn industrial life within their insular culture, have a birthrate nearly four times the average in the United States.  Industrial civilization is not just ecologically unsustainable, it is also sociologically unsustainable.

I do not believe that there is a viable remedy to this problem on a societal scale, because the problem goes much deeper than government, politics, or culture.  Even if a natalist government were to put a blanket ban on contraceptives and abortion, people would find other ways (both legal and illegal) to prevent pregnancy as long as the incentives remained, and the birthrate would still inevitably decline.  A 'War on Contraception' would end up exactly as effective as the War on Drugs has been.  Governments are not omnipotent.  In the end, you can't force people to do anything, especially something as personal as bearing children.  In a society that had already divorced family life from economic life, the sexual revolution was an inescapable conclusion.

People often hearken back to the rosy sitcom image of the 50s family as a solution.  In my opinion, the stereotypical family of the postwar period is not the legitimate traditional family.  It is a modern invention, a re-enactment of something that is long dead.  It is preferable to the current state of affairs only in the way that a cold corpse is preferable to a rotting one.  Authentic family-centered life does not resemble the fairytale of 50s consumerism.  It is something quieter, closer, and deeper.  We should look toward the Amish, the Pioneers, the Native Americans, and the multi-generational homes of rural Latin America for inspiration.

Most importantly, the fertility collapse is the inescapable conclusion of the industrial age, and also the least terrible way that the population boom of the industrial age could end.  The population simply cannot grow forever on a finite planet, so the boom had to end sooner or later.  Not long ago during the rapid population increases of the 80s and 90s, Malthusians warned of a coming 'population bomb' which would exhaust natural resources and end in mass starvation.  Instead of this horror coming to pass, people are just quietly choosing to have less children.  I am sure that after many years of decline, the population will become stable, the industrial age will burn out, and the world will settle into a new normal where the family recovers its venerable role.

Now that I've gotten through all the doom and gloom, what's left for us to do?  

Even though I believe that there is no way to restore society at large to family-centeredness, I still think that it is possible to shift our priorities as individuals and families toward living family-centered lives.  Doing this necessarily goes against the grain of culture and mass society, and is very difficult.  Most people will simply follow the route of least resistance.  But if small, insular groups (whether religious, racial, or cultural) can find a foothold, they will have the long-term advantage.

As individuals and communities, can we reverse the general trend toward fertility decline?  No, and that's okay.  Because we can create pockets of family-centeredness, oases of meaning and tenderness in the desert of nihilism and selfishness.  And that is worth the effort.  In a future post, I will discuss some of the particulars of how this can be done.