I saw the headlines: the Swedish government is “worried” about low birth numbers and wants answers. Here’s mine, straight and unfiltered, from a blackmetalhead who builds songs out of rage and consequence. You spent decades preaching radical individualism, gamifying resentment, and turning relationships into content—and now you want a baby boom? You drenched the public square in algorithmic gasoline and handed everyone a match. Don’t act surprised that nobody wants to build a nursery in a house that keeps catching fire.
The numbers aren’t “feelings.” They’re brutal.
In 2024, Sweden recorded about 98,500 births—down again—marking the lowest annual number since the early 2000s. The total fertility rate landed at 1.43 children per woman, the lowest level ever recorded here. That’s not culture-war gossip; that’s Statistics Sweden speaking, not your favorite influencer’s hot take.
The government didn’t just notice—it launched a formal inquiry in July 2025 to figure out why births have fallen and what (if anything) could reverse it. Translation: “We set the stage. The actors followed. The plot turned bleak. Now we want a new ending.”
If this trend sticks, each new generation could be roughly a third smaller than the previous one. Fewer kids in schools. Fewer adults paying the bill when the welfare state looks at its reflection and sees more grey hair than young eyes. That’s the math haunting every press conference.
You can’t despise dependence and then demand families
For 50 years, politicians and culture architects sold a shiny utopia: be totally independent, owe no one anything, keep your calendar open for self-optimization. It sounds empowering until you meet reality: children are the opposite of “frictionless.” They require devotion, stability, sacrifice, and the kind of binding commitments that don’t fit inside a productivity tracker. If the social story says “attachments make you weak,” why would anyone add the deepest attachment of all?
And don’t twist this: I’m not blaming women. I’m indicting a narrative. When both sexes are taught to value optionality above everything, the result isn’t equality—it’s atomization. The cost of intimacy went up. The reward went down. Surprise: fewer people invest.
The ‘men are trash’ meme economy is a demographic policy—whether you admit it or not
Again—focus. I’m not attacking women. I’m attacking a profitable outrage machine that teaches people to posture instead of bond. Platforms reward maximal contempt because contempt harvests clicks. So we got an endless scroll of “men are trash,” “women are manipulative,” “relationships drain you,” and other dopamine-bait mantras. You can call it venting; the algorithm calls it retention. And retention scales. At scale, it rewires norms.
If every feed whispers that intimacy is dangerous, dependence is pathetic, and commitment is a trap, then a cradle starts to look like a coffin for your “brand.” Don’t lecture me about “pro-family policy” if your cultural engine makes vulnerability a public liability. You asked for a world of content-parasites and free-speech-wankers who confuse performance with principle. You got it. Now you want lullabies? Pour less gasoline.
But it’s not only vibes—it’s material
Housing is tight. Career paths feel like hamster wheels. People wait longer for stability because stability keeps moving the goalposts. Even in a Nordic welfare reality, the personal calculus has shifted: “Can I give a child what a child deserves?” More answer “not yet” or “not at all.” The Nordics as a whole are feeling this: record-low fertility across several countries in 2024, despite different political colors and safety nets. It’s not a single government’s fault; it’s an era’s incentive structure.
The post-pandemic hangover nobody wants to name
We came out of the pandemic with first-birth rates dipping and higher-order births steady or sliding depending on the group. A lot of people got used to smaller, tighter lives; some liked it. Others burned out so hard they’re still emotionally bankrupt. When you’re exhausted and anxious, you don’t build cathedrals—you crawl. The family is a cathedral. It’s a wild, messy, permanent project. If the public mood is perpetual triage, the project never starts.
You trained us to be consumers of feelings, not builders of bonds
Modern life sells us intimacy as a product: subscriptions, swipes, parasocial illusions. It’s frictionless, scalable—and sterile. Real intimacy is non-scalable on purpose. It’s stubborn. It interrupts. It says no to things that look shiny. It is anti-algorithmic by design. That doesn’t fit the “always available, never accountable” script. So we replaced the deep yes with a thousand cheap maybes.
The result is a culture of chronic auditioning. Everyone lives like a beta release that never ships. Babies don’t show up in betas. They arrive when you lock version 1.0 of your life with someone and accept the patch notes you can’t control.
Government pressers won’t fix what government helped normalize
Now we get committees and inquiries. Fine. Study away. But if the official line keeps praising independence as the highest good while the unofficial culture monetizes hostility between the sexes, you will keep getting empty cradles. Policy can lower costs; it can’t counteract a 24/7 ideology that makes mutual reliance feel shameful.
If you’re serious, you must stop rewarding the behaviors and narratives that punish commitment. That means less anal-tradition—those rituals of fake politeness and bureaucratic tedium that pretend to care about “families” while quietly sneering at the very constraints families require. Kill the performance. Build the conditions.
What a pro-family culture actually looks like (no, not the cosplay kind)
A pro-family culture doesn’t infantilize adults or sermonize about “returning to the 1950s.” It de-glamorizes perpetual adolescence. It honors competence, loyalty, and hard daily work—traits that look suspiciously like love when you add time. It treats men and women as allies under pressure, not enemies trading punchlines. It re-teaches the lost art of judgment: choosing a partner, choosing limits, choosing permanence. It doesn’t fear dependence; it respects interdependence.
That kind of culture is inconvenient to market. It doesn’t feed the outrage machine. It doesn’t generate comment-corpses for the algorithm to feast on. It grows people who don’t need constant novelty to feel alive. Those people build families.
“Men are the problem” vs. “women are the problem” is a swamp—walk around it
Here’s a Venomous Sin doctrine: binary blame is for cowards. The swamp is profitable because it keeps you scrolling and keeps them selling. Walk around it. If you want babies, you need a high-trust détente: men who are worth following and women who are worth trusting—and vice versa, because neither sex is morally superior. Trust follows track records, not hashtags.
I’ve seen it in us—Xavi and Lina—inside our art and outside it. We’re not “nice.” We’re not “safe.” But we build. We commit to the work. Our song “We’re Not Toxic, We’re Fucking Poison” was a scream against the fake unity that kills truth. Family requires the same rebellion: say no to the fake, say yes to the difficult real.
Platforms, you’re on the hook too
Moderation theater won’t save you. What you reward expands, and you reward performative contempt. You know exactly which clips convert: humiliation porn, gender-war bait, hot-take drive-bys. Flip the economics. If you can detect copyrighted audio in milliseconds, you can downrank content engineered to maximize sex-based hostility and up-rank content that teaches skill, communication, and long-term bonding. That would be governance with actual teeth—less PR, more results.
Practical moves that aren’t cosplay
First, stop glamorizing infinite optionality. Optionality is useful until it becomes an addiction. Second, make the concrete easier: build housing people can actually move into before 35, stabilize early-career income, and design childcare support that doesn’t force either parent to choose between presence and survival. Third, restore dignity to the words mother, father, partner by showcasing competence, not caricature. And fourth, make peace between the sexes a public goal, not a punchline. None of this requires a time machine. It requires courage.
If you want birth, reward the virtues that create it
We wrote “Poisoned Embrace” for fun and it exploded—because people are starving for messages that don’t lie. We declared war on pandas for a laugh at festivals and it worked because the crowd could feel the honesty under the absurdity. Honesty is the first nutrient of intimacy; contempt is bleach. You bleached a generation’s faith in each other. Start feeding it again.
The state can tinker with money. The culture must re-sanctify commitment. If you keep pouring fuck-you sauce over every attempt at trust, don’t cry when the cradle stays empty. That’s not politics. That’s physics.
Final riff
Sweden’s record-low birth rate is not a mystery to solve in a committee room. It’s a cultural mirror. You wanted hyper-autonomy, endless auditions, and algorithmic war-cries between the sexes. You got them. If you want babies, stop selling loneliness as sophistication and start honoring the heavy, holy work of two imperfect humans choosing each other—loudly, permanently, and without a Plan B. Otherwise, enjoy the silence.
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