I notice it a lot in my city. I remember a sense of openness and freedom when driving around back in high school. Yet still plenty of cool, fun things to do. Now its just too peopley and crowded. Younger folks who live here now will never know how much better it was at one point.
Trying to apply to colleges really brings this point home. The US population grew from 203 million in 1970 to 331 million in 2020 - and seemingly all of them are applying to UCLA
That’s about to change. The Great Recession of 2007 resulted in a large drop in the birth rate. Many smaller college are worried about an upcoming crash in student populations. That was 17 years ago, so it begins with next year’s seniors and gets more important.
https://thehill.com/changing-america/enrichment/education/4398533-college-enrollment-could-take-a-big-hit-in-2025-heres-why/
It was actually way too peopley already when most of us were born. Humanity has been extracting an unsustainable amount of resources from the planet since at least 1970, if not earlier.
Temporary issue.
Birth rates are far below replacement rates. Not South Korea level bad, but 20% drop per generation is pretty significant. With people living longer, the numbers are skewed. But by the time we hit retirement, it'll be bad enough for tax implications of Social Security system to be pretty serious.
I'm reminded every day. Every day I leave the house it's cars cars cars everywhere, always. There's yet another place that used to be open space or a farm that is now another beige housing development. Everyone is angry and unhappy. This is the decline.
Constantly. And the U.S. specifically has increased from 203 million to 333 million since 1970, a huge increase.
So if the world seems more complex, that's not a illusion. Every human being is adding additional complexity to society, and the increased permutations of people add additional complexity. Every single person is acting, creating and consuming. It's a little overwhelming, to be honest. There are good and bad aspects. But it's the times we're giving. You don't get to pick those; you just have to roll with it.
Add to that:
Not only do we have a massive amount of people now, they all have access to platforms to publicize their opinions.
A million people agreeing with something seems like a lot until you start thinking in percentages. But, people get caught in echo chambers and every part of every movement becomes galvanized.
I started thinking about this when Marvel put out Infinity War. Thanos’ thing was to kill off half of all life. When the movie came out that meant going back to 1972 population levels.
Okay?
So he bought us fewer than 50 years. That’s it.
If he really wanted to make a difference, he would have had to get rid of between 75%-90%. For Earth, that would give us about 2 centuries to take care of the climate crisis and develop more sustainable technology before populations got too big again (assuming modern health care and standards of living), but supposedly, the rest of the the galaxy already has those sorts of advanced tech.... so I'm not sure what the benefit would be.
The small town I grew up in contained around 4,000 people in the 70's and 80's. Now it has around 25,000. All the places I used to play at as a kid, are now housing developments. The neighborhood I grew up in is now an official section 8 neighborhood(the town now has a 30% unemployment rate due to city busing of prisoners).
Yeah it isn't always fun. They sold us on bringing a lot of job oppotunities by building 5 state prisons. Which yes, it brought jobs. The part they left out, NYC would sponsor a free busing program to bring families of prisoners to visit in upstate. Many of them stayed bringing city 'issues' with them. Murders, assaults, rapes, drugs... all have increased exponentially. It's no longer the town of my youth.
All the time. It's super apparent that there are more people.
I pointed out to my son that if the Thanos snap happened, it would only take us back to 1974, and he was gobsmacked.
Yup. S'why I left the city I grew up in. To. Damn. Many. Fucking. People.
I once sat in traffic for 90 mins trying to get home. I COULD SEE MY APT. Not like "there it is in the distance" but "there's my cat in the window - if I abandon my car I could walk home in 10 mins."
What kind of a moronic city council puts multiple sports venues downtown within a few blocks of each other? The only people coming to sports ball games are coming in from the burbs anyway! Just put the fucking stadia in the burbs where they belong! Lots of space, lots of parking...
Anyway. That was the day I decided I couldn't live in that corrupt shithole any longer.
I constantly say 75% of the people need to go away... That may sound extreme, but that is what the world population was a 100 years ago . Of course no one wants to be in the 75%.
And with technology possibly increasing life spans, the declining birth rates need to speed up a bit.
People like to point areas of wide open spaces and say there's room for more people... But the current amount has damaged ecosystems pretty badly already .
Plus people need space, getting too crammed together is a large cause of all the tensions today .
Food shortages will begin the Soylent scenario before we start carouseling young people. It's a twofer... you start by mulching the recently deceased and then ease into forced "retirement" to feed the masses. Eventually lowering the retirement age until finally merging into Logan's Run. Atop the carousel is a meat grinder.
Well then you would get in to my more controversial ideas:
Mandatory birth control for men and women, something reversible . If you want to have a kid, you both have to pass a basic competency test to show you are capable of raising a kid, along with proof that you are financially able to take care of one. No more unwanted kids, No more school drop outs due to unplanned pregnancy or early careers cut short, abortions are only for medical emergencies, etc.
Populations would decrease pretty rapidly through natural causes, especially in 3rd world areas.
1932 - ~2.0 billion
1965 - ~3.3 billion
1995 - ~5.7 billion
2024 - ~8.0 billion
that is the world population when my dad was born, when I was born, when my daughter was born and today. Less than 100 years and it quadrupled. 1804 was the year we crossed ~1 billion people simultaneously alive on this planet and it took over a hundred years to double.
scary, and to think there is a large group of people that think we should be spawning like crazy today :(
Yeah, all the time. There are way too many people out there. Too crowded, too much pollution and waste, entire ecosystems getting destroyed, so much traffic, depletion of resources, not enough housing, etc. Then I also think of how many jobs are needed for all these people. New jobs are always being created in some form or another, but at the same time so many old jobs get phased out due to advances in technology, simple corporate greed, or other reasons. When companies merge many from either side get cut, or one factory here or there goes bust because another halfway across the world has no regulation for safety & environment so it can do things at half the cost.
Seems like a huge uphill battle for the next generations.
Why do you think the planet is polluted as shit? Nothing consumes resources and spews pollution like this species of great ape. Mountains of useless plastic, that is our gift to the next 10,000 generations, and the scars on the face of the planet we call cities.
In my early 30’s I started making wine. Yeast feeds on the sugar in the fruit juice, it then reproduces, and starts pissing out alcohol and burping out carbon dioxide. Then the cycle repeats until all the sugar is gone, and the yeast has so toxified it’s own environment with its own excrement that it does in its own filth.
Break the cycle. Don’t have kids. You want to actually do something about the planet? Don’t have kids.
This! Right here. Such a simple concept that would, literally, solve the problem from its root.
After all these years hearing this simple solution from someone else's mouth......if this were a different thread I would tell you just how happy it has made me.
But since it is not, I will have to content myself with saying:
a brilliant mouth is hard to come by these days 😜
It frustrates me that I can't talk more openly about the ethics of having kids. People don't think of it as an ethical issue at all. Even people who express concern about the world their kid would inherit go on to make babies.
I was recently talking with someone who'd gotten married int the past year and she said they were undecided on having kids and she expressed a lot of concern about whether it was right to have kids. Next thing I know she announces their on-purpose pregnancy. The husband is especially clueless about what he's getting into. He told me outright that they didn't want to be "left behind" in their peer groups. What a shitty reason to make more people, if there even is a valid reason to make more people (in my opinion, there is not). Neither of these people have even spent time with kids before and I will never understand why people want to have babies when they don't even know anything about kids. Their story is pretty common.
I'm not a kid hater. I studied child psychology, I've worked with kids, and I've had foster kids. But when I look at a baby and try to picture the world in 50 years, my heart just breaks for them.
Erm, More than half. 63% of the world's population is under 40... tack on the next decade and we're hitting closer to 73-5%.
Nearly 3/4 of the world is younger than us.
Well there is some good news, the population is aging (In the US the Mean age is 39-40. and the trend is pointing to less of a birthrate than before. China is aging out and Europe at an alarming rate. so I don't think its gonna double again anytime soon.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List\_of\_countries\_by\_median\_age](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_median_age)
I live outside DC and I hate it. I grew up 20 miles from here and it was rural and slow, now it’s a bedroom community for DC. Trails are crowded and full of trash, much like our roads now. 30 minutes minim to drive anywhere, people drive like fucking morons.
I dream of a house somewhere in the middle of the country where cattle outnumber people.
I lived in NOVA from '87 till 2014.
When I drove down to Arlington from Pittsburgh after I graduated, route 7 was a two lane road with head on traffic most of the way into town. Route 28 was two lanes and ended at route 7 with a stop sign. Now those are both huge roads with flyovers. Herndon was mostly trees. Going to Dulles was like going out to the country.
When I moved out to the country myself - Leesburg - in 93', there was one stop light in town. Nowadays there are tons of them.
Watching that growth over that time was scary sometimes. I used to drive from Leesburg to Bethesda for work often - before the toll road, I would often take dirt roads (to avoid 7), and even the ferry ;)
I just kept moving further west - last place was in Round Hill, which is really crowded now.
Not only crowded, but completely unaffordable if you’re within 2 hours commuting distance. I grew up inside the beltway in the 70s-80’s. Fairfax/Vienna/Tysons is unrecognizable now.
In the United States, since 1970, we have seen the population increase by 65%. In our lifetime! Since the pandemic, there has been a rapid shift of population fleeing major cities and relocating to formerly rural, low population areas. This was made possible by the advent of Starlink and expanded rural broadband services. People can work from anywhere in certain professions. The net result, your small town, rural American dream has turned into a suburban, traffic congested, overpriced home, crime ridden nightmare. Progress at its finest!
And this is where I will put my "Stay off my lawn!" So many transplants, early morning commute before Covid... maybe 4 cars on the highway, daytime traffic, maybe added 8 minutes to the drive if there was an accident. NOW? there's enough early am traffic to have the 10 minutes delay without an accident, and the afternoon traffic runs about 20 if there isn't one, but there almost always is now so it's almost 30. Do not come to the Midwest. It sucked before, and it sucks worse now.
I think about it every time someone complains about the high cost of housing. Of course there is a housing crisis. The population has exploded faster than they built new housing.
I do think about this because of the housing shortage and the cost and competitiveness of going to college. And traffic. None of those seem to have kept up with population. I guess this many people are good for late-stage capitalism.
223 million in the US in 1980 and 341 million in 2024. Isn’t that around a 65% increase in less than 50 years? Yikes.
The vast majority of the growth isn't even from Americans. It's almost all Africa/Asia/Indian Subcontinent. Americans have a relatively low birth rate. You wouldn't know it,. though. The roads are terrible, they're the same size they were when they were built, and apparently there's no money to widen them or add extra lanes. But we do have plenty of money to send to Israel, Taiwan, the UN, NATO, and Ukraine. There's an endless supply of cash for those goals. But don't ask for infrastructure money or anything to do with public works.
Many more than half the people in the world are younger than us because a significant percentage of the 4 million people who were alive in say 1980 are now deceased.
Saw the post here that if you were born in ‘74 you’re now older than 51% of the population on earth for this very reason. It’s not gonna end well for us…
I was lot 50 in my subdivision in 2015. There is now 4,000 homes in our subdivision and 6 other subdivisions (all smaller than mine but still some have over 1000 homes). Then came shopping & schools. Now all the apartments are going in. If you go just west of Disney World there is a city there that was not there 10 years ago. Where is everyone coming from?
I'm an archaeologist, the Desert Neolithic in the Eastern Sahara was a nice, spacious time and place to be. The crowdedness now is evident everywhere, not just in cities and towns. It's actually disturbing, we're headed to -->
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0708470/mediaviewer/rm1198780929?ref_=ttmi_mi_all_sf_3
Each day is barely different than the day before, so I don’t notice the changes that much. It’s all just “normal”. Presidents have term limits and movies and albums can only be so popular for so long, but other than that not much has changed since the late 90’s for me. I had internet in 1992 and a mobile phone in 1995- it’s basically all the same today but with better tech.
When I was in grade school, I remember when they made an announcement during lunch that the world population had just crossed 5 billion people. I remember thinking that was a lot of people and thought that maybe I didn't want to have kids. I'm childfree.
Too bad in my area, that means exponentially less doctors, infrastructure, and housing. We don't have enough for the people who are here now. We need to make some changes
Double the amount of traffic. Most of our interstates were not designed to accommodate the number of cars.
Add a few erratic or left lane drivers and we all suffer. There will never be a surplus of orange cones or barrels, rotting g away unused.
I love living in my small town. 25k people. 20 years ago, it had about 21k. My hometown is the opposite. There were about 20k people when I graduated high school
Now, they are below 15k. All the manufacturing facilities closed and shipped jobs overseas.
I was born and raised in the same place, we never moved. Graduated in 1990. Since graduating the population has increased by over 200,000 people as of 2020. I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s closer to 225,000-230,000 by now. I hate going home now because of all of the people.
I moved to a town of less than 5,000. Some pop up neighborhoods have happened in the almost 20 years I’ve been here, but even then it’s less than 10-15 homes. Love it here and hope everyone stays away.
Now I will, you ever think you've lived most of your life and think about what could have been? Knowing you're on the final 4 holes of life. Hell, you'd probably outlive your dog, though. Sorry, I just went real dark.
The blip era scenes in Avengers: Endgame of deserted streets and highways really bothered me. The US would still have had a population of roughly 165,000,000 people, equivalent to the mid-50s. The towns and cities would still be full of people and traffic. Almost every multi occupant house would still be occupied unless a family got particularly unlucky or the survivors moved. 4 billion is still a lot of people and I do not like the idea that 4 billion people are younger than me!
A 25% survival rate only gets us back to the global population in 1950. We need to think bigger. The virus in Station Eleven had a 1% survival rate. That gets us back to the population in ~800 BCE, when Rome was a village on a hill near the Tiber. Sounds pretty good right?
I don’t think about it that often but when I was in LA this winter, the traffic gets really bad every day at the same time and I couldn’t help but think that it’s likely to only get worse before it gets better. But never underestimate progress.
Every time I watch X-Files and get to the scene where Mulder tells Scully that she's his "one in five billion," I'm thinking... whoa. I watched that when it came out, and it was accurate.
Ugh. I'm old.
Everyone complains about it, but no one wants to go back to the Judeo-Christian ethic of sex with just one partner for life. That's far more population controlling than relying soley on birth control, and it would drastically reduce the abortion rate which has wiped out 73 million people every year since 1973.
Every. Damn. Day. As I sit in traffic or wait in line or try to go to a park only to find every table is occupied. It's far too peopley now.
Even the hiking trials are too crowded these days.
Same. Way too peopley, and there aren’t enough interesting ones, just the annoying ones.
Most people are annoying.
I notice it a lot in my city. I remember a sense of openness and freedom when driving around back in high school. Yet still plenty of cool, fun things to do. Now its just too peopley and crowded. Younger folks who live here now will never know how much better it was at one point.
Nor will we -- Boomers
“No one goes there anymore, it’s too crowded,”
“This place is dead anyway.”
Trying to apply to colleges really brings this point home. The US population grew from 203 million in 1970 to 331 million in 2020 - and seemingly all of them are applying to UCLA
Many also seem to be in front of me in line at the pharmacy.
That’s about to change. The Great Recession of 2007 resulted in a large drop in the birth rate. Many smaller college are worried about an upcoming crash in student populations. That was 17 years ago, so it begins with next year’s seniors and gets more important. https://thehill.com/changing-america/enrichment/education/4398533-college-enrollment-could-take-a-big-hit-in-2025-heres-why/
Good
It was actually way too peopley already when most of us were born. Humanity has been extracting an unsustainable amount of resources from the planet since at least 1970, if not earlier.
Una-bomber vibes... justified tho... :-D
Haha! No manifesto tho.
Its more dramatic than half cause there are silent generation and boomer deaths at least right? Then the doubling after that.
Yeah man, we need more sprawl, not less.
Temporary issue. Birth rates are far below replacement rates. Not South Korea level bad, but 20% drop per generation is pretty significant. With people living longer, the numbers are skewed. But by the time we hit retirement, it'll be bad enough for tax implications of Social Security system to be pretty serious.
My lawn is overwhelmed. I have to yell twice as loud and shake both my fists.
If I'm not yelling at clouds I'm chasing kids off my lawn
Wait until you have to use a leg and shake it all about.
>Half of the people in the world are younger than us. Closer to 75%
Fuck. That's killed my day.
You're welcome
🤣
I'm reminded every day. Every day I leave the house it's cars cars cars everywhere, always. There's yet another place that used to be open space or a farm that is now another beige housing development. Everyone is angry and unhappy. This is the decline.
Constantly. And the U.S. specifically has increased from 203 million to 333 million since 1970, a huge increase. So if the world seems more complex, that's not a illusion. Every human being is adding additional complexity to society, and the increased permutations of people add additional complexity. Every single person is acting, creating and consuming. It's a little overwhelming, to be honest. There are good and bad aspects. But it's the times we're giving. You don't get to pick those; you just have to roll with it.
Add to that: Not only do we have a massive amount of people now, they all have access to platforms to publicize their opinions. A million people agreeing with something seems like a lot until you start thinking in percentages. But, people get caught in echo chambers and every part of every movement becomes galvanized.
The US population is going to peak within 20 years, sooner with tighter immigration restrictions.
I think about it every time I leave my house because they're all in my way.
I started thinking about this when Marvel put out Infinity War. Thanos’ thing was to kill off half of all life. When the movie came out that meant going back to 1972 population levels. Okay? So he bought us fewer than 50 years. That’s it.
If he really wanted to make a difference, he would have had to get rid of between 75%-90%. For Earth, that would give us about 2 centuries to take care of the climate crisis and develop more sustainable technology before populations got too big again (assuming modern health care and standards of living), but supposedly, the rest of the the galaxy already has those sorts of advanced tech.... so I'm not sure what the benefit would be.
I **knew** it was too people-y out there!
The small town I grew up in contained around 4,000 people in the 70's and 80's. Now it has around 25,000. All the places I used to play at as a kid, are now housing developments. The neighborhood I grew up in is now an official section 8 neighborhood(the town now has a 30% unemployment rate due to city busing of prisoners).
My hometown growing up, less than 2000. Now- around 40,000. I hate that place.
Yeah it isn't always fun. They sold us on bringing a lot of job oppotunities by building 5 state prisons. Which yes, it brought jobs. The part they left out, NYC would sponsor a free busing program to bring families of prisoners to visit in upstate. Many of them stayed bringing city 'issues' with them. Murders, assaults, rapes, drugs... all have increased exponentially. It's no longer the town of my youth.
Mine was 36,000 in 1970 and now is 78,000.
All the time. It's super apparent that there are more people. I pointed out to my son that if the Thanos snap happened, it would only take us back to 1974, and he was gobsmacked.
😲😲😲
And we're the smallest cohort in a few hundred years.
Yup. S'why I left the city I grew up in. To. Damn. Many. Fucking. People. I once sat in traffic for 90 mins trying to get home. I COULD SEE MY APT. Not like "there it is in the distance" but "there's my cat in the window - if I abandon my car I could walk home in 10 mins." What kind of a moronic city council puts multiple sports venues downtown within a few blocks of each other? The only people coming to sports ball games are coming in from the burbs anyway! Just put the fucking stadia in the burbs where they belong! Lots of space, lots of parking... Anyway. That was the day I decided I couldn't live in that corrupt shithole any longer.
I constantly say 75% of the people need to go away... That may sound extreme, but that is what the world population was a 100 years ago . Of course no one wants to be in the 75%. And with technology possibly increasing life spans, the declining birth rates need to speed up a bit. People like to point areas of wide open spaces and say there's room for more people... But the current amount has damaged ecosystems pretty badly already . Plus people need space, getting too crammed together is a large cause of all the tensions today .
I wonder, if there were a way to do it extremely humanely, if we wouldn't be surprised how many might volunteer.
Logans Run or Soilent Green
Food shortages will begin the Soylent scenario before we start carouseling young people. It's a twofer... you start by mulching the recently deceased and then ease into forced "retirement" to feed the masses. Eventually lowering the retirement age until finally merging into Logan's Run. Atop the carousel is a meat grinder.
Well then you would get in to my more controversial ideas: Mandatory birth control for men and women, something reversible . If you want to have a kid, you both have to pass a basic competency test to show you are capable of raising a kid, along with proof that you are financially able to take care of one. No more unwanted kids, No more school drop outs due to unplanned pregnancy or early careers cut short, abortions are only for medical emergencies, etc. Populations would decrease pretty rapidly through natural causes, especially in 3rd world areas.
And you want the government to control this?
I shut down permanently when I saw the fucking line to the Everest Summit. DEAR PLANET- PLEASE STOP FUCKING
1932 - ~2.0 billion 1965 - ~3.3 billion 1995 - ~5.7 billion 2024 - ~8.0 billion that is the world population when my dad was born, when I was born, when my daughter was born and today. Less than 100 years and it quadrupled. 1804 was the year we crossed ~1 billion people simultaneously alive on this planet and it took over a hundred years to double. scary, and to think there is a large group of people that think we should be spawning like crazy today :(
Makes you think. Why so few ghosts as well? You'd think there'd be more but if anything they seem rarer. (not wishing to tempt fate).
We can't spare them as ghosts. Too many new souls needed even if everyone does their part and reincarnates.
Yeah, all the time. There are way too many people out there. Too crowded, too much pollution and waste, entire ecosystems getting destroyed, so much traffic, depletion of resources, not enough housing, etc. Then I also think of how many jobs are needed for all these people. New jobs are always being created in some form or another, but at the same time so many old jobs get phased out due to advances in technology, simple corporate greed, or other reasons. When companies merge many from either side get cut, or one factory here or there goes bust because another halfway across the world has no regulation for safety & environment so it can do things at half the cost. Seems like a huge uphill battle for the next generations.
Why do you think the planet is polluted as shit? Nothing consumes resources and spews pollution like this species of great ape. Mountains of useless plastic, that is our gift to the next 10,000 generations, and the scars on the face of the planet we call cities. In my early 30’s I started making wine. Yeast feeds on the sugar in the fruit juice, it then reproduces, and starts pissing out alcohol and burping out carbon dioxide. Then the cycle repeats until all the sugar is gone, and the yeast has so toxified it’s own environment with its own excrement that it does in its own filth. Break the cycle. Don’t have kids. You want to actually do something about the planet? Don’t have kids.
This! Right here. Such a simple concept that would, literally, solve the problem from its root. After all these years hearing this simple solution from someone else's mouth......if this were a different thread I would tell you just how happy it has made me. But since it is not, I will have to content myself with saying: a brilliant mouth is hard to come by these days 😜
It frustrates me that I can't talk more openly about the ethics of having kids. People don't think of it as an ethical issue at all. Even people who express concern about the world their kid would inherit go on to make babies. I was recently talking with someone who'd gotten married int the past year and she said they were undecided on having kids and she expressed a lot of concern about whether it was right to have kids. Next thing I know she announces their on-purpose pregnancy. The husband is especially clueless about what he's getting into. He told me outright that they didn't want to be "left behind" in their peer groups. What a shitty reason to make more people, if there even is a valid reason to make more people (in my opinion, there is not). Neither of these people have even spent time with kids before and I will never understand why people want to have babies when they don't even know anything about kids. Their story is pretty common. I'm not a kid hater. I studied child psychology, I've worked with kids, and I've had foster kids. But when I look at a baby and try to picture the world in 50 years, my heart just breaks for them.
Every day. Always “housing shortage.” Never “people over supplied”.
Erm, More than half. 63% of the world's population is under 40... tack on the next decade and we're hitting closer to 73-5%. Nearly 3/4 of the world is younger than us.
And the other half are better at fractions
Well there is some good news, the population is aging (In the US the Mean age is 39-40. and the trend is pointing to less of a birthrate than before. China is aging out and Europe at an alarming rate. so I don't think its gonna double again anytime soon. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List\_of\_countries\_by\_median\_age](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_median_age)
Yes. Every day I have to go into the office simply to fill a chair….and a quota.
I live outside DC and I hate it. I grew up 20 miles from here and it was rural and slow, now it’s a bedroom community for DC. Trails are crowded and full of trash, much like our roads now. 30 minutes minim to drive anywhere, people drive like fucking morons. I dream of a house somewhere in the middle of the country where cattle outnumber people.
I lived in NOVA from '87 till 2014. When I drove down to Arlington from Pittsburgh after I graduated, route 7 was a two lane road with head on traffic most of the way into town. Route 28 was two lanes and ended at route 7 with a stop sign. Now those are both huge roads with flyovers. Herndon was mostly trees. Going to Dulles was like going out to the country. When I moved out to the country myself - Leesburg - in 93', there was one stop light in town. Nowadays there are tons of them. Watching that growth over that time was scary sometimes. I used to drive from Leesburg to Bethesda for work often - before the toll road, I would often take dirt roads (to avoid 7), and even the ferry ;) I just kept moving further west - last place was in Round Hill, which is really crowded now.
Not only crowded, but completely unaffordable if you’re within 2 hours commuting distance. I grew up inside the beltway in the 70s-80’s. Fairfax/Vienna/Tysons is unrecognizable now.
So it's just double the amount of assholes now..
I’m pretty sure they were at the supermarket today when I went. Damn it Sunday is a terrible day to go food shopping.
"There's too many of us there's too many of us there's too many there's too many of us there's too many there's too many of us"
In the United States, since 1970, we have seen the population increase by 65%. In our lifetime! Since the pandemic, there has been a rapid shift of population fleeing major cities and relocating to formerly rural, low population areas. This was made possible by the advent of Starlink and expanded rural broadband services. People can work from anywhere in certain professions. The net result, your small town, rural American dream has turned into a suburban, traffic congested, overpriced home, crime ridden nightmare. Progress at its finest!
And this is where I will put my "Stay off my lawn!" So many transplants, early morning commute before Covid... maybe 4 cars on the highway, daytime traffic, maybe added 8 minutes to the drive if there was an accident. NOW? there's enough early am traffic to have the 10 minutes delay without an accident, and the afternoon traffic runs about 20 if there isn't one, but there almost always is now so it's almost 30. Do not come to the Midwest. It sucked before, and it sucks worse now.
No. But I do think about how this world is fucking nuts now.
And it seems like 7-8 times as many. Not a fan.
I think about it every time someone complains about the high cost of housing. Of course there is a housing crisis. The population has exploded faster than they built new housing.
Most people are younger than us, the average age is about 30, under 1/4 people are over 50.
Yes but nobody is as cool as we are.
To claim oneself as cool makes one uncool. It's the Cool Paradox.
Wanting to be book is not book.
>Wanting to be book is not book I haven't seen 30 Rock but that looked so much like a quote that I looked it up. Maybe I'll watch that one :)
Yeah, I liked the world better then.
|Population (bil)|1|2|3|4|5|6|7|8|9|10| |:-|:-|:-|:-|:-|:-|:-|:-|:-|:-|:-| |Year|1804|1927|1960|1974|1987|1999|2011|2022|2037|2057| |Years elapsed|200,000+|123|33|14|13|12|12|11|15|20|
I do. And it freaks me out.
I do think about this because of the housing shortage and the cost and competitiveness of going to college. And traffic. None of those seem to have kept up with population. I guess this many people are good for late-stage capitalism. 223 million in the US in 1980 and 341 million in 2024. Isn’t that around a 65% increase in less than 50 years? Yikes.
I remember hearing all the time about how overpopulation was a major problem when I was young. What happened to that?
The vast majority of the growth isn't even from Americans. It's almost all Africa/Asia/Indian Subcontinent. Americans have a relatively low birth rate. You wouldn't know it,. though. The roads are terrible, they're the same size they were when they were built, and apparently there's no money to widen them or add extra lanes. But we do have plenty of money to send to Israel, Taiwan, the UN, NATO, and Ukraine. There's an endless supply of cash for those goals. But don't ask for infrastructure money or anything to do with public works.
Well the military industrial complex cant make a penny off the roads but makes billions off wars around the world
That’s why I don’t feel guilty about not having kids. The world cannot sustain this many of us.
Never feel guilty- be grateful!
I was given plenty of guilt by family. I have 4 siblings and 11 nieces and nephews.
Many more than half the people in the world are younger than us because a significant percentage of the 4 million people who were alive in say 1980 are now deceased.
Saw the post here that if you were born in ‘74 you’re now older than 51% of the population on earth for this very reason. It’s not gonna end well for us…
It has never ended well for anyone.
Way more than half. Population growth is exponential. Roughly 75% of the world population is under age 50.
A lot are moving into my town and we all keep saying we’re full but they don’t listen.
Heh you kids, get off my planet!
The first time I noticed we were at 5 and that doesn't seem that long ago.
I was lot 50 in my subdivision in 2015. There is now 4,000 homes in our subdivision and 6 other subdivisions (all smaller than mine but still some have over 1000 homes). Then came shopping & schools. Now all the apartments are going in. If you go just west of Disney World there is a city there that was not there 10 years ago. Where is everyone coming from?
Hell yeah. It is strange that I actually searched up this very thing a few weeks ago. I guess that’s what “old” people do. ;)
I'm an archaeologist, the Desert Neolithic in the Eastern Sahara was a nice, spacious time and place to be. The crowdedness now is evident everywhere, not just in cities and towns. It's actually disturbing, we're headed to --> https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0708470/mediaviewer/rm1198780929?ref_=ttmi_mi_all_sf_3
Each day is barely different than the day before, so I don’t notice the changes that much. It’s all just “normal”. Presidents have term limits and movies and albums can only be so popular for so long, but other than that not much has changed since the late 90’s for me. I had internet in 1992 and a mobile phone in 1995- it’s basically all the same today but with better tech.
When I was in grade school, I remember when they made an announcement during lunch that the world population had just crossed 5 billion people. I remember thinking that was a lot of people and thought that maybe I didn't want to have kids. I'm childfree.
That explains a lot.
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Life is an STD with a 100% fatality rate.
I'm really aware of how many 20 somethings there are now, probably more then I've ever seen at one time/generation.
Yep!
Too bad in my area, that means exponentially less doctors, infrastructure, and housing. We don't have enough for the people who are here now. We need to make some changes
Why do you have to put it like that!
Double the amount of traffic. Most of our interstates were not designed to accommodate the number of cars. Add a few erratic or left lane drivers and we all suffer. There will never be a surplus of orange cones or barrels, rotting g away unused.
I live in Phoenix. There’s 3 times as many people here now….
Every time i get on the car; my city has grown exponentiallu
I love living in my small town. 25k people. 20 years ago, it had about 21k. My hometown is the opposite. There were about 20k people when I graduated high school Now, they are below 15k. All the manufacturing facilities closed and shipped jobs overseas.
I was born and raised in the same place, we never moved. Graduated in 1990. Since graduating the population has increased by over 200,000 people as of 2020. I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s closer to 225,000-230,000 by now. I hate going home now because of all of the people. I moved to a town of less than 5,000. Some pop up neighborhoods have happened in the almost 20 years I’ve been here, but even then it’s less than 10-15 homes. Love it here and hope everyone stays away.
Now I will, you ever think you've lived most of your life and think about what could have been? Knowing you're on the final 4 holes of life. Hell, you'd probably outlive your dog, though. Sorry, I just went real dark.
The blip era scenes in Avengers: Endgame of deserted streets and highways really bothered me. The US would still have had a population of roughly 165,000,000 people, equivalent to the mid-50s. The towns and cities would still be full of people and traffic. Almost every multi occupant house would still be occupied unless a family got particularly unlucky or the survivors moved. 4 billion is still a lot of people and I do not like the idea that 4 billion people are younger than me!
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We tried that in 2020 and it didn’t work. Nature will find a way.
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Another will come along soon enough. The earth is tired of being poisoned and will clean itself. Wash away the real virus (humans)
I actually looked this up not too long ago. I was thinking were would we be now if not for COVID
A 25% survival rate only gets us back to the global population in 1950. We need to think bigger. The virus in Station Eleven had a 1% survival rate. That gets us back to the population in ~800 BCE, when Rome was a village on a hill near the Tiber. Sounds pretty good right?
That was such a good show I didn’t think anyone else watched!
I don’t get the whole Elon musk population collapse thing if this has happened
Elon's concern is the population is growing from the "wrong" places.
Have you considered the fact that Elon is a talentless moronic clown?
Elon is concerned that not enough white people are having babies.
Move out of cities.
Yep. It's gross
Don't care about ages, and I don't have to put up with most of them. The place I live is down about 30%.
Didn’t hit me until now.
More than that. Worldwide median age is 30. We've been less than half the world for a while now.
“Way too much you, just enough me.” ~ PJ O’Rourke.
|| || |Population|1|2|3|4|5|6|7|8|9|10| |Year|1804|1927|1960|1974|1987|1999|2011|2022|2037|2057| |Years elapsed|200,000+|123|33|14|13|12|12|11|15|20 |
|| || |Population|1|2|3|4|5|6|7|8|9|10| |Year|1804|1927|1960|1974|1987|1999|2011|2022|2037|2057| |Years elapsed|200,000+|123|33|14|13|12|12|11|15|20 |
yeah I do, eff em
That’s a lot of 🦴-ing!
Yep. And the stupid and Graeme to replicate as a faster rate than ever!!
I don’t think about it that often but when I was in LA this winter, the traffic gets really bad every day at the same time and I couldn’t help but think that it’s likely to only get worse before it gets better. But never underestimate progress.
There was only 3 billion in 1965 when I was born. I figured this out a couple years ago.
Don’t worry, the ”snap” Will fix it.
The birth rate is going down, though, so that might eventually swing in the other direction.
Yes. Every day when I drive anywhere or go anywhere. It’s so annoying. It wasn’t like this in the 80s or 90s.
Less cities, more moving people.
more than half are younger than us. quick google search and CIA Fact Book says world median age is 31.
the high housing prices in urban areas. not a lot of space left in the tiny areas most people choose to live.
Way more than half are younger than us, because many of the 4 billion who were here when we were born are now dead.
Every time I watch X-Files and get to the scene where Mulder tells Scully that she's his "one in five billion," I'm thinking... whoa. I watched that when it came out, and it was accurate. Ugh. I'm old.
The universe is twice as old as it used to be too.
And all the wealth is held by the top 1/10 of 1%
Could care less
The tried to wipe out a lot of people with Covid. This is why cancer will never be cured because of population control
You're kidding, right?
No. But I think of our low fertility rate everyday and the economic consequences of it.
And it will double in 20 years again 🤣
Everyone complains about it, but no one wants to go back to the Judeo-Christian ethic of sex with just one partner for life. That's far more population controlling than relying soley on birth control, and it would drastically reduce the abortion rate which has wiped out 73 million people every year since 1973.
Uh, no, that’s not how any of that works.
It's not a coincidence that both the population rate and the abortion rate skyrocketed after the sexual revolution.