In this modern world where highly effective birth control is cheap and straightforward, we really need to stop equating fertility rates with levels of sexual activity. You can have plenty of sex and not have a child; you can have very little sex and have a substantial number of children.

It's fascinating to me how personal choice never seems to enter into these discussions, even in relatively highly educated, first-world democracies. I actively chose to not have kids -- it was not an accidental by-product of iphones or any other proposed environmental factor.

There's a subgenre of dystopian sci-fi where the premise is that reality in general is destined to be eclipsed by matrix-like hyper-realities, and that people will vastly prefer those and cede reality to whoever's left.

I guess the way this could work itself out is that if you prefer a hyper-reality, your genes do not pass on, and someone else's do, and within some number of generations we bounce back in response to evolutionary pressure.

I learned a fun fact in a recent interview of David Reich (by Dwarkesh):

> Every mutation that can occur does occur. There are eight billion people in the world. There are maybe 30 new mutations every generation, so that’s 240 billion new point mutations every generation. There are only three billion DNA bases in the genome, so every mutation that can occur does occur about 100 times every generation. We’re not mutation-limited anymore.

https://www.dwarkesh.com/p/david-reich-2

Everything is entertainment in the modern world.

On the other hand, as William James wrote, one of definite characteristics of a religious experience is seriousness. "All is not vanity."