The Fall of the West

Every civilization falls for a reason. Ours will fall not from famine or war, but from the reflection in the mirror.

In the West, a woman’s worth has been recast. No longer rooted in family, continuity, or even virtue, it is fixed in beauty, a beauty that is not natural but rather manufactured. Smooth skin, sculpted bodies, curated images. Beauty today costs mainly money and time, far less is left to the rare chance of genetics.

And herein lies the cause of the fall. Because to bear and nurture children is costly in precisely the same currencies, that is money and time. Motherhood depletes the very resources beauty now demands. A woman with children has less to spend on creams, lasers, fillers, hair, clothes, gyms. Less sleep, less glow, less to post.

So in a culture where belonging is achieved by being admired, and admiration comes through manufactured beauty, motherhood becomes a social suicide. Women don’t stop having children because they don’t want them. They stop because having children destroys the currency of belonging.

Rome had its bread and circuses. The West has its serums and Botox. And so our birth rates collapse under the weight of the beauty industry’s triumph.

The tragicomic solution? Free beauty treatments for all mothers. Because a society that insists on measuring women by youth and radiance must pay the price of its own metric, or perish by it.