The captive audience.

Spending time on our phones is way more fun than having kids, or friends, or a job for that matter.

Tara Henley interviewed Tim Carney recently about his book Family Unfriendly on her substack Lean Out. Carney is looking for reasons for plummeting birth rates in the West. There are cascading reasons of course: Liberalism begets individualism begets selfishness begets laziness begets isolation begets depression… yadda, yadda, yadda.

But consider how controlled our lives are these days. Socially, politically, economically, everything is walled up. It’s a zoo in here.

Of course, we all trap ourselves in weird ways. Doris Lessing has a book of essays called Prisons We Choose to Live Inside, interestingly reviewed here.

It’s nobody’s fault of course. Nature is taking its course. But look at us.