Fear Inc.

I don’t much care for horror movies myself. Med school will ruin you to the gore. I invariably dissect the anatomical discrepancies in much the same way I might roll my eyes at the machine gun with the infinite cinematic magazine or the miraculous seven-shot movie Peacemaker. However, I don’t much enjoy visceral jump scares. I find that there’s enough scary stuff out here in the real world.

Politicians weaponize fear. This political leader is channeling his inner Hitler. That one has the backbone of a jellyfish. To hear them talk, we will either be overrun by fascists from within or be occupied by radical revolutionaries from without. It honestly gets irksome after a while. However, there are some things we really should be concerned about. Today, I’m going to do my dead level best to keep you up at night, fretting over the details.

Climate Change Doesn’t Matter

If you fall on the other side of this argument, then every word of mine you ever read going forward will make you angry. Just put your head between your knees and take a deep breath. The Earth’s climate has always cycled. Tropical plant fossils have been unearthed in Antarctica and Greenland. There was a time when the entire planet was a jungle. Stuff we dig out of the ground tells us that.

I’m not saying that burning fossil fuels isn’t contributing to that. I just don’t think there is anything we can do to stop it. The United States contributes 15.6% of the world’s carbon emissions. China produces 27.2%. About a third comes from countries more concerned with starvation than being responsible environmental stewards. No amount of first-world self-flagellation is ever going to change that.

None of that matters, however, because we are about to run out of gas. Based on current production rates and known reserves, the world is estimated to exhaust its economically accessible petroleum in about fifty years. I’m sixty years old, so that doesn’t affect me, but you young folks are just screwed. We won’t run out of fuel overnight, but it will get so expensive that we will no longer be able to squander the stuff the way we do now.

That’s the reason we need electric vehicles, not to prevent hypothetical sea level rise. While e-transport may yet get you to the local market, there is no imaginable replacement for hydrocarbons for mass air travel. That means you will still be able to zip out to pick up groceries, but that retirement trip to Europe might be off the table unless you really like sailboats.

We’ll All Be Dead Anyway

We fret about rampant international terrorism, invasive pythons in Florida, and Kim Jong Un’s nukes, but all of that pales in comparison to diabetes. We all eat crap, and we don’t get enough exercise. As a species, that is finally catching up to us.

When I finished med school in 2002, one in twelve adult Americans had diabetes. Today, that number is one in eight. By 2050, that will be one in three. Half of all African-American children born after the year 2000 will have diabetes.

We spend $413 billion each year in America managing that disease. By 2023, that will be $622 billion. That’s $1,900 for every man, woman, and child in the country. There is no way we will ever be able to pay for that.

GLP-1s like Ozempic, Mounjaro, and Wegovy will help mitigate that, to a degree. Right now, only relatively rich people can afford those drugs. However, over time, they should get cheaper. That might help stave off the inevitable for a time, but I just don’t see us going back to eating lean meat we raised ourselves after days of relentless toil behind a mule. Diabetes and heart disease are strongly driven by lifestyle, and our lifestyles are simply ghastly.

The Baby Bust

It has only been within my lifetime that oral contraceptive drugs became widely available. The first was called Enovid, and it was introduced in 1960. By 1965, 13 million women were on the pill worldwide. Today, that number has topped 150 million. Once women gained control of their reproductive capacity, birth rates plummeted. Nowadays, we are facing an astronomical baby shortage.

Some countries have it worse than others. Taiwan is the least fertile nation on Planet Earth, with a baby-to-woman ratio of around 0.8. In the US, that number is closer to 1.6. Keep in mind that this one woman has to replace both herself and her mate. A rate of 2.7 children per mother is required to prevent long-term extinction.

My wife and I had three kids, so we did our part. However, raising those rascals was the toughest thing I have ever done. I get it. Not just everybody wants to shoulder that responsibility. Nowadays, you no longer have to.

Birth rates for Niger and the Central African Republic approach six children per woman. The dirty little secret is that immigration to developed nations is the only thing that really delays the inevitable. Asian countries like Japan and South Korea are notoriously insular. They do a great job of minimizing immigration and are withering away as a result.

The real challenge is what to do with all of the old people. As Western populations age, there are not enough young people paying taxes to support all of the social programs to which we have become addicted. That’s not going to get any better, and we corn-fed Americans do not well tolerate doing without stuff.

Ruminations

So, forget It, The Exorcist, Hannibal, and Jaws. Those scary movies have nothing on real life for truly horrifying stuff. I honestly believe there isn’t a dang thing we can do to stop any of that, so I’m pretty sure we really are all doomed. We did have a great run.

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