Castel di Tusa, Sicily. It is October 24th, 2025. I look at an empty school. This is the third town in Italy I have visited this Autumn: the other two, one in the hills of Tuscany, the other near the border with Switzerland, were similarly devoid of children. They were not devoid of childish objects. Rusted swing-sets. Dusty soft play corners in Catholic churches. Faded toys in second-hand markets. Towns like these are not unusual in Italy, a country with the lowest birth-rate in Europe (1.2 per woman, 2023). Their world is our world: the world of a society going into retirement.
As you cycle through this world, nothing happens. In the countryside, the houses decay, first lone houses, then villages, then small towns. In the city where housing pressure is stronger, dilapidation is more unusual; instead, lone elderly residents – the ‘final generation’ – retreat ever deeper into their overly-large homes, waiting to die. But even in the city, dilapidation is possible. Where property rights are poorly managed, or probate is slow, empty homes can persist in prime real estate. Last time I visited Kamakura in Japan and saw the ruined luxury homes, I asked a friend ‘how could this be?’; the answer: ‘no-one knows who owns them.’ It is not laziness or a lack of acquisitive urges: the flow of property rights has merely ceased. When someone in Japan dies without a will (intestate succession), inheritance goes to branches of the family; when they are part of ‘the last generation’, these branches grow fuzzy and obscure. Finding distant relatives can be costly and time-consuming; combine this with a slow court system and nothing happens.
The same issues apply in Italy, with large quantities of real estate falling into null ownership. Empty homes are not the only vacant buildings. Without children, there is no more need for the infrastructure designed to raise them. It starts with nurseries and day-care centres closing; then primary schools; then secondaries. The first and second of these stages is already happening throughout Europe. And without schools there is no walking to school, no school-bus, and no need for children-crossings. Nor are there school concerts, sports matches, charity fundraisers, or field trips. There is no ‘last day of school’, no school-break, and no graduation. There is merely a ‘final class’ – perhaps of two or three students, and then: nothing.
My mother, who works in publishing, tells me the market for children’s books has collapsed. The remaining families who read prefer to buy classics, whilst tablets have swallowed up the rest of the ever-shrinking market. Books were a huge part of my childhood: The National Book day, book tokens, book fairs, going to see authors and getting your book signed, having authors come to read at school, adolescent reading obsessions, in the way only children can be obsessed. Without children none of this will exist in the same way. There will be no more new readers. That entire ecosystem vanishes, as it does across countless areas, from the childish rhythms of zoos, museums, and the seaside, to sports, swimming pools, and fireworks displays. And after this disappearance, it comes for the adolescent ecosystems, and teenage ecosystems, and young adults, and students, and ‘youngsters’, and poof!
For most readers, these visions exist solely in the abstract. There is a good chance you live in a city or a university town, in which case you live in an artificially youthful area. But scratch the surface a little – go out to the countryside, knock on a few suburban doors, visit the centres of rural towns – and you will discover the extent of our collective ageing. My hometown in Scotland, for instance, has a large population of young families and it feels quite alive – but a third of the population is already retired. They simply do not go out in public. I discovered these silent minority whilst knocking on doors to canvas for a local political party. Small flats, the television on, food delivered remotely. Offended at their bubble being poked. They showed up somewhere else too: in the ever-increasing social care costs on my local authority, ring-fenced and thus slowly killing council spending on other amenities, such as swimming pools or public infrastructure.
I do not have the luxury of ignoring these troubling signs. I am not wealthy enough to insulate myself from public sector collapse, nor to hide my wealth from ever-rising taxes imposed to avert it. More importantly, I want children myself, and this desire starts to change one’s picture of the future. My partner and I think five would be a good number (depending on how things go), but I often wonder what would happen to them. Is there a way, I wonder, to insulate our children from the burden of our peers’ desire to go childless? In South Korea the current birth-rate means 100 South Koreans will produce around 13 grandchildren. Imagine, amongst those 100, that five families were responsible for the 13. They see their 90 neighbours holding out their hands expecting to be looked after, those who, during their youth, were richer, had more free time, and more individualistic political views. And they start to wonder: why should my children have to bear this incredible burden?
In my fantasies, I imagine a country radically re-wilded thanks to the falling population. One without queues, or busy highways, or the other inelegancies of mass society. My partner and I live in a city surrounded by other parents, inheriting the positions and responsibilities necessary for society to function. Elsewhere, beyond the horizon, is an enormous structure. A pleasure dome-retirement home, one for each region, designed carefully for the needs of pensioners of different decades. Imagine huge, glitzy towers lined with comfortable flats, each brimming with televisions and other entertainment devices. There are casinos, cinemas, shopping malls, municipal swimming pools and gyms for self-improvement; endless sports facilities; libraries for bookish obsessions; concert halls for snobs, trendy venues for sticking it to the man. The tidy streets are interspersed with parks for yoga, jogging, chess, socialising, peaceful protests about this or that. Each dome has an associated cruise-liner and they open out to walks in a variety of natural settings. New luxuries and fashions are constantly being recycled, often in mock-authentic cultural forms. Everything is optional, nothing is mandatory. Safe, recreational drugs flow freely, as does contraception and STI testing. There are no schools, nor are there any children.
Somehow, in this fantasy, all this can be paid for by the productivity of the remaining citizens. Perhaps the flats, being heavily centralised, are cleverly designed to minimise care costs; perhaps they come equipped with state-of-the-art robot assistance. Whatever the case is, these domes do not break our backs. They are a beautiful monument. The pleasure domers, all over retirement age, are free to enter and leave. Outside, pensions and retirement care still exist, but in a much-diminished form, relying more heavily on savings and familial support. Luxury, pleasure, and leisure still exist, but are adjacent to something else. The city dwellers are expected to take on responsibilities appropriate for their age, whatever those might be given their ability and characteristics. Failing to do so is met with shame: “if you don’t like this… perhaps the dome would better for you…?” In return, those who remain are given something which cannot be found in the Pleasure-Dome-Retirement-Home: power. The power to make political decisions governing our society; more than that, the power to spend time with the generations who are to come, influencing and teaching them. They are given something very small, but precious.
Castel di Tusa, Sicily. It is October 24th, 2025. I look at an empty school. This is the third town in Italy I have visited this Autumn: the other two, one in the hills of Tuscany, the other near the border with Switzerland, were similarly devoid of children. They were not devoid of childish objects. Rusted swing-sets. Dusty soft play corners in Catholic churches. Faded toys in second-hand markets. Towns like these are not unusual in Italy, a country with the lowest birth-rate in Europe (1.2 per woman, 2023). Their world is our world: the world of a society going into retirement.
As you cycle through this world, nothing happens. In the countryside, the houses decay, first lone houses, then villages, then small towns. In the city where housing pressure is stronger, dilapidation is more unusual; instead, lone elderly residents – the ‘final generation’ – retreat ever deeper into their overly-large homes, waiting to die. But even in the city, dilapidation is possible. Where property rights are poorly managed, or probate is slow, empty homes can persist in prime real estate. Last time I visited Kamakura in Japan and saw the ruined luxury homes, I asked a friend ‘how could this be?’; the answer: ‘no-one knows who owns them.’ It is not laziness or a lack of acquisitive urges: the flow of property rights has merely ceased. When someone in Japan dies without a will (intestate succession), inheritance goes to branches of the family; when they are part of ‘the last generation’, these branches grow fuzzy and obscure. Finding distant relatives can be costly and time-consuming; combine this with a slow court system and nothing happens.
The same issues apply in Italy, with large quantities of real estate falling into null ownership. Empty homes are not the only vacant buildings. Without children, there is no more need for the infrastructure designed to raise them. It starts with nurseries and day-care centres closing; then primary schools; then secondaries. The first and second of these stages is already happening throughout Europe. And without schools there is no walking to school, no school-bus, and no need for children-crossings. Nor are there school concerts, sports matches, charity fundraisers, or field trips. There is no ‘last day of school’, no school-break, and no graduation. There is merely a ‘final class’ – perhaps of two or three students, and then: nothing.
My mother, who works in publishing, tells me the market for children’s books has collapsed. The remaining families who read prefer to buy classics, whilst tablets have swallowed up the rest of the ever-shrinking market. Books were a huge part of my childhood: The National Book day, book tokens, book fairs, going to see authors and getting your book signed, having authors come to read at school, adolescent reading obsessions, in the way only children can be obsessed. Without children none of this will exist in the same way. There will be no more new readers. That entire ecosystem vanishes, as it does across countless areas, from the childish rhythms of zoos, museums, and the seaside, to sports, swimming pools, and fireworks displays. And after this disappearance, it comes for the adolescent ecosystems, and teenage ecosystems, and young adults, and students, and ‘youngsters’, and poof!
For most readers, these visions exist solely in the abstract. There is a good chance you live in a city or a university town, in which case you live in an artificially youthful area. But scratch the surface a little – go out to the countryside, knock on a few suburban doors, visit the centres of rural towns – and you will discover the extent of our collective ageing. My hometown in Scotland, for instance, has a large population of young families and it feels quite alive – but a third of the population is already retired. They simply do not go out in public. I discovered these silent minority whilst knocking on doors to canvas for a local political party. Small flats, the television on, food delivered remotely. Offended at their bubble being poked. They showed up somewhere else too: in the ever-increasing social care costs on my local authority, ring-fenced and thus slowly killing council spending on other amenities, such as swimming pools or public infrastructure.
I do not have the luxury of ignoring these troubling signs. I am not wealthy enough to insulate myself from public sector collapse, nor to hide my wealth from ever-rising taxes imposed to avert it. More importantly, I want children myself, and this desire starts to change one’s picture of the future. My partner and I think five would be a good number (depending on how things go), but I often wonder what would happen to them. Is there a way, I wonder, to insulate our children from the burden of our peers’ desire to go childless? In South Korea the current birth-rate means 100 South Koreans will produce around 13 grandchildren. Imagine, amongst those 100, that five families were responsible for the 13. They see their 90 neighbours holding out their hands expecting to be looked after, those who, during their youth, were richer, had more free time, and more individualistic political views. And they start to wonder: why should my children have to bear this incredible burden?
In my fantasies, I imagine a country radically re-wilded thanks to the falling population. One without queues, or busy highways, or the other inelegancies of mass society. My partner and I live in a city surrounded by other parents, inheriting the positions and responsibilities necessary for society to function. Elsewhere, beyond the horizon, is an enormous structure. A pleasure dome-retirement home, one for each region, designed carefully for the needs of pensioners of different decades. Imagine huge, glitzy towers lined with comfortable flats, each brimming with televisions and other entertainment devices. There are casinos, cinemas, shopping malls, municipal swimming pools and gyms for self-improvement; endless sports facilities; libraries for bookish obsessions; concert halls for snobs, trendy venues for sticking it to the man. The tidy streets are interspersed with parks for yoga, jogging, chess, socialising, peaceful protests about this or that. Each dome has an associated cruise-liner and they open out to walks in a variety of natural settings. New luxuries and fashions are constantly being recycled, often in mock-authentic cultural forms. Everything is optional, nothing is mandatory. Safe, recreational drugs flow freely, as does contraception and STI testing. There are no schools, nor are there any children.
Somehow, in this fantasy, all this can be paid for by the productivity of the remaining citizens. Perhaps the flats, being heavily centralised, are cleverly designed to minimise care costs; perhaps they come equipped with state-of-the-art robot assistance. Whatever the case is, these domes do not break our backs. They are a beautiful monument. The pleasure domers, all over retirement age, are free to enter and leave. Outside, pensions and retirement care still exist, but in a much-diminished form, relying more heavily on savings and familial support. Luxury, pleasure, and leisure still exist, but are adjacent to something else. The city dwellers are expected to take on responsibilities appropriate for their age, whatever those might be given their ability and characteristics. Failing to do so is met with shame: “if you don’t like this… perhaps the dome would better for you…?” In return, those who remain are given something which cannot be found in the Pleasure-Dome-Retirement-Home: power. The power to make political decisions governing our society; more than that, the power to spend time with the generations who are to come, influencing and teaching them. They are given something very small, but precious.
The right to live in a town with children.