Making life is better than making babies || Acharya Prashant, with XLRI (2021)

Questioner: I’ve been thinking about the future in the light of the current technologies and the recent pandemic. COVID impacted the economies worldwide and also made people realize that life is precious and nature can offer us only a limited amount of resources, thus reducing consumption at least temporarily. So, what is your take on the future right now? Is there a possibility of going back to a resource-based economy at some point? What role does technology have to play in the future?

Acharya Prashant: See, in the short term consumption will probably keep rising. But since you are talking of the COVID scenario, and you are talking of probably the medium term as well, the bigger picture is that the Earth just cannot sustain the kind of consumption we are exhibiting.

So, how do I look at the future? Well, mankind will be forced to reduce its population. You cannot continue to be eight billion, ten billion, twelve billion, and then say, 'Well, in the natural course of things, we are anyway going to stabilize at twelve billion.' Even eight billion is just too much; it is just too much by many times. Twelve billion is unthinkable. And you are talking of twelve billion when all these twelve billion aspire to have a per capita consumption similar to that of the United States.

So, what are we looking at? We are looking at a scenario where nations have the population of an India and the per capita consumption of a US. Now, multiply these two, and what do you get? Utter tragedy, right? Neither are we seizing to have kids, nor are we realizing that the good life does not consist of multiplied consumption. That’s how the world is living; that’s how even the development of countries is being indexed, no?—people in which country consume how much. And you use that, you take that, and then put stuff in descending order and say, 'Well, this country is the most advanced because it produces this much stuff.' That stuff could be nuclear fissile material, or that stuff could be coal and iron and electricity and electronics; but nevertheless, you know only one way to measure development, which is production and consumption. And when it comes to production, you are not merely producing goods, you are producing babies, too, at an alarming rate. I mean, ‘alarming’ is a gross understatement; it’s a very lightweight word.