Population Decline: A Relational Recession

What if the population decline were rooted in growing loneliness and the erosion of human relationships in the age of smartphones?

The year 2025 marks a turning point: for the first time, the number of deaths exceeded the number of births in France. Commentators then offered a flurry of speculations about the causes: housing costs, fertility issues, a declining desire to have children, rising educational attainment among women, and the widespread availability of contraception. Nevertheless, all these explanations focus on peripheral causes.

In reality, the desire to have children remains high despite the difficulties cited. In 2024, French women reported wanting an average of 2.3 children, which is above the demographic replacement rate, according to the National Institute for Demographic Studies (INED). The economic argument also falls short when comparing international situations. Countries such as Finland, which offers universal childcare and state-subsidized family housing, or Hungary, which provides lifetime tax exemptions for women with at least two children, do not, by any means, have more encouraging fertility rates.

Let’s turn, then, to the heart of the demographic problem: the relational desert. Focusing on downstream problems means refusing to see the decline at its source. Rather than looking at what couples do, let’s look at whether couples are even forming. The data is unequivocal: more than one in three households in France consists of a single person, compared to one in five in the 1960s, according to figures from the National Institute of Statistics and Economic Studies (INSEE). Similarly, the Pew Research Center reports that 63% of men aged 18 to 29 are single in 2022 in the United States, compared with fewer than 25% in the 1970s. The demographic crisis is, above all, a relational crisis: it takes two to bring life into the world, and we have never been so alone.

While the causes of this emotional void are numerous and are discussed in detail in my essay The Emotional Revolution (Albin Michel, 2026), a recent technological innovation appears to play a major role: the smartphone. The collapse of face-to-face interactions, the decline of social interaction in favor of recreational digital activities, and reduced emotional investment in relationships… Two recent studies from the University of Cincinnati, published in April and June 2026, specifically highlight the serious consequences of smartphones on our relationships and even suggest a causal link between their widespread use and the decline in fertility.

Behind the smartphone lies a world of solitude. The more connected we are, the less present we are. Yet it is through presence that relationships grow. The constant temptation our smartphones pose to our attention simply prevents us from being attentive to those around us. Otherness becomes an obstacle to our daily consumption of digital dopamine, while social media platforms allow us to maintain a vast network, giving us—for a few moments—the impression of a social circle that remains, however, perpetually unsatisfying. The confusion between relationships and connections leads to a deterioration of social interaction.

From a world of hyperconnectivity and the global village, we are sinking into one of disconnection and a global wasteland. There will be no demographic recovery without the restoration of the relational ecosystem. Let us stop using political excuses to gloss over this situation and look at reality as it is, in the spirit of Jean Jaurès, for whom «courage is seeking the truth and speaking it.».

A writer and philosopher by training, Baptiste Detombe is the founder of the Republican media outlet Gavroche. Every month, he takes a critical look at the technological and sociocultural changes of the time.

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