William Costello

It's racist to say it's a problem.

It's all sorts of things.

How?

You know, apparently it's racist to say it's a problem because it's only certain demographics that are...

Yeah, so they're saying, oh, there's plenty of people being born in Africa, which I think is actually quite a racist idea because it implies, oh, the people being born in Africa, we can just import them in and they'll be our labor force.

And that seems a bit kind of icky to me, actually, from the other side of things.

But yes, it's kind of like until the problem...

is acknowledged, I can't see, I'm still stuck there, to be honest, at trying to move the needle on that front at first, get people to acknowledge in the mainstream.

And we're beginning to get there, but it's still kind of framed as this nefarious kind of idea to bang that drum.

And so, yeah, I'm still kind of there trying to move the needle towards acknowledgement first.

And it seems like a hasty move to kind of disavow this evolutionarily present meaning-making mechanism that we've had, you know, that, you know, obviously didn't work for every parent ever and always.

Every parent didn't feel a great sense of meaning, but...

Probably most did, you know, and it probably found them.

You hear lots of stories about when young parents have children, how they step up and they suddenly, men in particular, how when they're about to have a child, they can step up and really make something of themselves.

It's very motivational.

So it seems a very hasty thing to kind of disavow that culturally en masse, say, oh, no, that's no longer going to be the greatest source of meaning for young people.

Yeah, that's a scary thing to just let go of without a ready-made answer in response.

It's like, what are you going to do instead?

Have people got a good answer?

I don't know if traveling the world and, you know, that there's a real absence of that meaning making, I think.