Getting uncomfortably public about addiction, mental health, substance abuse, and other random stuff through unfiltered stream-of-consciousness writing [is that redundant?]. Subscribe here:
Introductory Remarks
Dear Zesters,
In Wednesday’s post, The Original Use, I provided you with an excerpt from my journal from (I think) April 9th, 2021, where I first used the phrase ‘infinite zest.’ Pretty fun! It’s also so fun to have been fairy-consistently journaling for 3 or so years now—and something I intend to continue doing until I expire! Mostly just because I love writing in cursive with a fountain pen—kind of in the same way that I love typing on my iPad—which was a big part of the initial motivation for Infinite Zest, tbh, lol. I suppose the tools of creation are vital to the act itself! Okay, don’t care anymore. Moving on!
Fertility in (South) Korea
Korea has a super low fertility rate, second only to Hong Kong (which you’ll see in the graph). I professionally interact with Korean culture quite a bit, and I’ve been adjacently exposed to the long-term negative impact of the declining fertility rates. My understanding of the situation is that women are protesting improper treatment and structural inequities—and their protests have taken the form of not having kids, which I think is actually pretty genius. Although definitely also damaging to like long-term human geography of the country.
One kind of funny thing to note, however, is that, apparently, in South Korea, despite the declining fertility rate and there being less births, stroller sales have actually gone up. Posit a guess as to why this is. Please. I inveigle you to! Okay, enough time. The answer is that people buy strollers for their dogs, so the popularity of dog-strollering has offset the decline in baby-strollering. And, like, that just goes to show you the importance of digging beneath the data in any situation to check for confounding (or other) factors. If you just used stroller sales data as a proxy for fertility rate, you might incorrectly assume that all is well and good. But, nay, the dogs have taken the place of babies!
See crazy chart! Okay and then so finally tying a bow on the whole subtitle thing around One Stringed Harp is that one of my favorite bands (really like one of my early 2010s favorite bands) Bell X1 has a song called One Stringed Harp, and there’s a line in the song that goes: “come on now ladies, they won’t fertilize themselves.” And so this graph kind of made me think of that song—and I listened to it as I composed the information above. Fun stuff!
Concluding Remarks
I’m really enjoying these getting graphic segments. They give me a perfectly legitimate reason to scroll through the depths of reddit—which can be both incredibly enjoyable and horrifying. But the ‘dataisbeautiful’ thread is generally pretty tame. Okay, have a beautiful wonderful amazing weekend!
With infinite zest for life,
Luke