Comments by "XSportSeeker" (@XSpImmaLion) on "How Koreans Feel About Birth Rate Crisis | Street Interview" video.

  1. See, most people do understand what the problem is. It's just that there is absolutely no hope for the changes needed to ever happen. And it's pretty similar to Japan and other nations that are facing this as a major issue that will cause major problems in the future. We can split this into parts to make it easier to think about the problem. These are my personal opinions, you don't have to agree with me. On the government level, there is a problem of lack of representation, tied to conservative thinking and maintaining the status quo. Which causes a complete disinterest in politics on the portion of the population where it matters most for this particular issue - young adults. They are the status quo that created this situation in the first place. So what you need is politicians in several levels that actually care about the issue over other topics. Not just the old dinosaurs that not only don't put this problem above the status quo worries, but also don't even know how to handle it as they are not going through it and won't be affected by it. Because while it might sound like a simple problem, solving it will only be achieved by a composite of deep changes that will require lots of time and money to do. So, to be perfectly clear - a political class composed of old male conservatives constantly trying to defend their status quo will never come up with real solutions for this. Never. On societal level, one of the interviewees summarized it best - it all comes down to the income inequality problem. Most capitalist societies these days already have reached a level where 1% of the population holds more of income and riches than the entire rest of the population. And this has become increasingly worse over the years to the point the vast majority of people don't make enough for themselves alone, or as a couple, there is no way they can hope to also sustain kids along with it. The advent of recent technologies only made this worse, because there is a substantial increase in people who live to work and nothing else. You don't have time for anything outside of work, so you don't have time to even think about family and kids. It's not even a matter of planning anymore - people are starting to not even think about it as they already have too much in their plates everyday to worry about. Which also enters the cultural level. Education is important, work is important, and lots of other factors in life are also important, but once you prioritize stuff at the cost of excluding others, this is what you get. The average person living in society can only take so much pressure. For people looking from the outside, stuff like incredible work ethics to attend costumers as best as possible, double or triple checking things to never disappoint your costumer, spending long extra hours of work to attend demand, and different other things like excellence in education, priding yourself to be part of a secure and technological nation, etc etc etc - all of those things should be sources of pride and targets to achieve. But when it is all about that, culture will deprioritize other points. With that in mind, I think raising kids and bringing up a healthy family has always been considered a fact of life of sorts. Particularly for the older generations who dominates so much of the political class. It's not something that needs to be encouraged or helped, but something that naturally happens. And this is highly problematic. This is not an issue that can be looked eye to eye to older generations, because they don't understand the perspectives people have today. The fact is that human progress changes cultures, societies, ideologies, principles, expectations, desires, outlooks on life, and thinking in general. South Korea isn't the country it was a century or so ago. It needs new thinking, new solutions, and new people in leadership, who understands that solutions for the problem will need to be compatible to how things are today. In general, the desire to form a family and have kids needs to be attended to. More people who wants this needs to have their pre-conditions fulfilled. And it needs to be prioritized properly, before it's too late. And I'll just add something else to this - trying to turn back the clock won't work, as some radical people seems to think it will. It'll only worsen the problem. I always hear arguments on why poor nations are way better at increasing population, we should take some examples from there, or regain stuff from the past that made nations grow explosively in the past. That won't work. We're not there anymore. People had tons of kids because they didn't have birth control, because they considered kids as workforce for family business, because they didn't understand health properly, because there was an expectation for high child mortality rates, because of poor family planning and ignorance, because it was a standard way of living, among several other factors. What we need to do is not to return to such conditions, but rather come up with ways of raising birth rates without all the suffering. Like the video itself shows, there are plenty of people who wants to have kids. It's not a problem to have people who don't. It's a problem when the people who wants to have kids see no way of that happening in their life because of external conditions.
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