jlokom

>But if you're all that matters? If your scorecard is measures in dollars or followers or something else that dies with you?

This sounds like a strawman. Many people don't want to have kids for different kinds of reasons (personal objectives, couple style of life, they don't like kids, etc). You seem to have a very low opinion of people that don't want to have kids and, on the other hand, a very high opinion of people that do have kids.

>The western world is an exception to the general norm

I see this quoted a lot, but I don't think it's true:

+ There are plenty of places (and with a significant population) outside the western world that are quite secular and have become more secular in the past decades + There are places in the West that have become more religious. If by "Western" you mean just "Western Europe", then, yeah, that's a specially secular place but it's also a tiny place in both population and area.

China, Japan and South Korea are quite secular in many ways. A big chunk of Latin America is now quite secular too. You already have ~1.5B people fairly secular people that are non western.

On the other hand, countries like Poland or Hungary (which I'm guessing we would classify as Western) are becoming more religious.

It applies to the poorer countries, but less and less so. The more developed countries in Latin America have a birth rate that is similar or in some cases lower than the USA (Uruguay) and are definitely more secular in their culture.