Architects of our prisons

Life forms never require order, they live outside of it. Life by definition is a self regulating process manifested through evolution and its tools, such as: environmental linking, rhythms of evolution, adaptation through cybernetic feedback with its positive and negative rule. Life in essence thrives in chaos.

Human race is a typical example. We adore loops, in cycles we find identification. Our society and mutual interactions always lead away from order, and into chaos. When exiting turbulence we are governed by positive cybernetic feedback, developing relations, bettering society, improving living standards, refine economy etc. And at some point our relations break, and we’re governed by negative cybernetic feedback, creating turmoil around us, when we destroy what we’ve built, even ourselves.

We are entropy of reality, a surreal natural phenomenon. Our views are anthropocentric, they’re beyond logic, beyond understanding. Our narcissism is authentic and in our roots.

We show affinity for drifting, since drifting is a human concept. New experiences are understood in conformity with the old ones, we like to perceive knowable ideas and events, creating inertia not only habits, but also in thinking as well.

Our dreams for future and eternity are constructs of our past and present. All this vastness encircling from beyond, all this depth within, all these souls breathing all around; they can be overwhelming every now and then, confuse us at times.

And we go even further, we like to create illusions. Mind constructs designed to delude ourselves. We compare ourselves to perfection, since our self love is vast. We never chase it, perfection is yet another dissipation of reality. A ruin built from an ancient one.

These old habits of ours create painful addiction, so seductive by nature, so much intoxicating, oh so very destructive. A familiar entrapment, closest form of behavior.

Cages made of freedom, contradiction in terms – us.

Discoveries await

Nature exists continuously in every direction, unbroken, as a single space-time continuum. It’s a cohesion of temporal and thermodynamic events, according to what we know so far, governed by four basic forces, each of them distributed unevenly in different parts of nature. This altogether complex system is void of order and deprived of symmetry. Nature is constituted of countless processes, guided by bifurcations and evolution, causality, the uncertainty principle and the arrow of time. These processes are irreversible, and as such, they pose a serious challenge in understanding them or predicting their state of origin and their final form of evolution. As such, irreversibility and uncertainty are core attributes of nature, firmly nested into its origin (if there is any) and its evolution. They are defining our thinking and understanding of nature.

Our observation of nature extends truly far, we’ve designed technological tools which assist and complement our sight. We’ve seen objects and processes which defy our models and theories. We guess how it all started within primordial singularity, a null point consisted of dense matter with close to infinite energy. But we can’t pinpoint it in time. We think that nature is bigger than the one we see all around, but we don’t have a clue how big it is or does it have any border. We see acceleration of matter everywhere around us which we can’t fully explain, behavior which opposes the concept of growing rate of entropy. By observing gravitation we can’t fully account for the entire matter in nature, it seems that most of it is not visible at all.

From our homeworld we’re observing the totality of our reality. The further we look in the distance, the further we go in the past. We are trying to understand the big picture, trying to understand how it all started, and how it will end. Here we encounter a paradox, the Demon of Marquis de Laplace. He’s sitting outside time and space, observing the entire reality. He can rewind it into the past, and move it fast forward into the future. But he’s not part of the reality, he should be outside of it. Because of the irreversibility and uncertainty of our nature, there’s no place with divine attributes in it, from where we can observe the totality of our reality. Nor we can say with certainty how it all began, nor how will it end, if it ends. Physics and cosmology are not exact sciences, they’re evolution of thought sculpted from probabilities.

This task is so much difficult on us, since not only we have to pose the questions, we need to answer them ourselves. We are truth seekers since forever, guided by our curiosity and quest for knowledge. The calling roars within us, and we answer it.

A single tree does not make a forest

Our civilization is on a crossroad, nothing new there. Our values, even those which are foundations of our positive moral and ethical behavior, are being tested like never before.

In most of the world there are delayed milestones in lives of people. The socioeconomic circumstances are prolonging big decisions. One of them is starting a family. Most couples would like to live on their own when they want to start a family. Purchasing housing or renting one requires stable incomes, so most future parents decide to be accomplished professionals before doing that. Hence, most couples are deciding to start a family in their late 30’s or throughout their 40’s. This rather late creation of family, compared to the previous generations, is one of the reasons why couples have less children. 71% of world’s population lives in regions with fertility rates below 2.1 children per woman, which is below the replacement level.

The global average in total fertility rate is roughly 2.2 children per woman, barely above replacement level. What’s concerning is that there are serious regional disparities. The main drive in increase of population is focused in just two regions, 85% of all babies born in 2026 will come into the world in Asia (49%) and Africa (36%), mostly in underdeveloped countries. Europe, North America and Oceania will account together for only 8% of global births. Heavily industrialized and densely populated regions have some of the lowest native birth rates in the world.

The degradation of the living environment, tougher socioeconomic conditions, higher use of pesticides in food production, increase infertility in men and women alike. In up to 30% of cases, medical evaluation doesn’t reveal a definite medical cause, referred to as unexplained infertility.

The world demographics by age groups is heavily concentrated in the working age group, 65% of people account in the 15 – 64 years. Children and youth makes up for 24,5%, and the Elderly are 10,5%. The global median age is 31.1 years, which means that half of world population is under this age. These statistics echo a positive global population landscape. However, in some regions, such as Europe and East Asia the demographics are alarming, since the elderly population outnumbers the youth. These societies are aging and with it comes a heavier toll on the medical system, social services and brings pension funds into serious trouble, since the number of active working personnel per pensioner is getting lower year on year. In these countries, medical, social and pension systems need to undertake serious reforms and transformations to adapt to the new reality.

These generational changes in demographics influence socioeconomic circumstances in societies, starting from the family, which is a core part of society. Harder economic factors starting from COVID and further amplified by the Cost of living crises, mean that many parents need to work multiple jobs to cover end-to-end decent living conditions for their families. This influences the functioning and the cohesion of the family itself.

The educational system is watering down, widespread digitalization caused an opposite effect in education. There’s a serious drop in basic abilities: reading, writing, spelling, simple math calculations. Additional tutoring is expensive and can be afforded by higher earning classes. Parenting, education and safe upbringing of children has become ever so harder.

The family as the harbor of core values in a society is slowly failing. It’s importance in the society is getting marginalized. This influences not just the demographics of societies, but also their functioning as a whole. All analyses point that if the world population starts to drop, it won’t end at a certain point, it’ll continue to drop further. This will impact the entire humanity and threaten our existence.