Six of one, half dozen of the other
We currently have serious problems because there are 8 billion people on planet earth. Whether we grow our population further, which is easier for humans to deal with socially though it's having egregious environmental consequences, or cull it back, which would ease the environmental distress but comes at social costs humans historically haven't handled well, they both involve serious challenges.
It's a case of pick your poison. Neither answer is "better." The path forward is hard either way and we need to rise to the challenges entailed one way or another.
Our economic system is based on a lot of heteronormative assumptions and it fails to provide adequate quality of life for a great many people. Women, children and people of color tend to get shafted financially. Wealthy powerful men frequently get shafted in other ways.
Shrinking the population means trying to help an aging population cope with getting older some way other than relying upon being outnumbered by the upcoming youth for providing both a tax base and labor pool to take care of the elderly.
Rethinking housing and using tech to help provide support for continuing to safely live independently are two things that can help with that challenge. Some of the tech bits are already happening due to market forces.
Project SRO outlines my ideas for housing that would better serve small households of one to three people than our current nuclear family based model of housing that grew out of the birth of the modern suburbs post World War II and which now serves most Americans poorly because while our collective ideas for what constitutes good housing have converged upon a singular model of suburban detached single family homes, our population has diversified away from the nuclear family.
The reality is that the (implicitly White) nuclear family with a breadwinner father, homemaker mother and 2.5 minor children was NEVER the majority of the population of the US but it was a very influential cohort shaping housing policy at a critical juncture in history which still deeply shapes our expectations and policies for housing.
For a long list of reasons, aging seniors wanting to retain their independence as long as possible being just ONE of them, we need to change our ideas about good housing and our policies which to a large degree dictate what it's feasible to build in large numbers.
We already know what our current heteronormative culture and assumption that the economy must grow exponentially indefinitely gives us and most people aren't especially happy with it.
The primary problem with advocating for having fewer children overall is that there are inherent challenges in making society work under a new model rather than bulling ahead with what's familiar. But, hey, we have tons of computing resources etc and there's no reason we can't simply develop alternate models to entertain ourselves in place of watching the world burn while we run helplessly across the world stage screaming and flapping our arms like Kermit the frog.
Footnote
This post loosely based upon/ inspired by one originally published elsewhere on September 02, 2022. The original was a foolish and overly charitable piece about Elon Musk's idiotic claims that we need to all have large families which these days I have enormous difficulty taking seriously as a good faith argument but I'm in no position to publicly suggest motive for his shitty behavior.
See also:
1. Heteronormative Culture on Doreen Michele
2. Heteronormative Culture on Witness to Destruction
