THE END

There was no announcement. No memos were sent out. It was like when multiple people create similar inventions at different ends of the globe at the same time without being aware of each other’s work. It was a planet-wide consciousness. We just stopped having kids. I don’t mean just my wife and I. I don’t mean just my circle of friends. I mean everyone. Everywhere. We just stopped. Without a stated reason or plan. There was no manifesto. We just stopped.
In a lot of places, it was like turning off a faucet. We stopped like that. For others, it was a slow trickle that finally dried up. You could try to speculate it to death: No one wanted to raise children in a society like ours. Everyone was too busy. Too scared. Too selfish. You can come up with a thousand hypotheses, but none of them could truly explain it. We just gave up as a race. Self-imposed extinction.
Not that the joy of life was lost; in fact, things seemed to get better. People had more time on their hands. There was no excuse for not pursuing your dreams. People had to read and learn to have conversations, because they weren’t able to talk about their kids. We knew we were the last of our kind, and it made every meal taste better. It made every sunset that more glorious. We were the last breath of mankind.
It wasn’t seen as a beautiful or noble thing to have children. It was selfish. It was a pipe dream for anyone to think that there was enough of the earth left to continue to provide for our population. It became taboo. People forgot how to lie to new parents. Phrases like, \"I’m glad we never had one,\" and, \"Are they always that stupid?\" and, \"What’s wrong with its head?\" made the few who still tried to have kids feel shunned by society. The last birth that I know of was 50 years ago. After about 30 years of no births, some people panicked and started a cult to repopulate. But things like pediatricians and schools just didn’t exist anymore. It didn’t matter, though. Those big deserters, those scared breeders, found that they couldn’t even conceive anymore. That scared them even more. They thought that by not reproducing, we had turned our backs on God, and now he had turned His back on us. That cult killed themselves, Jim Jones-style.
We had made a choice, and now we couldn’t turn back. The food still tastes great. The sunrises are spectacular. But they will only shine on us for a little while longer. Wave goodbye. A blown kiss, a watering eye-– goodbye.