Comic Strips

I made this diagram a while ago:

Basically, human labor is required to make the economy grow, but to sustain it doesn't need so much labor.

That's like when you're building a house, a lot of working hours goes into building it (10 men for 1000 hours each), but sustaining it can be done by a housewife in her spare time after she took care of children all day. (I'm deeply sorry about the gendered language but i feel it gets the point across more clearly - maintenance requires significantly less work than building something in the first place.)

This leads to the following phenomenon:

As time goes forward, we have more resources available due to better automation (consider farming robots) but at the same time there's less demand for human labor also due to automation.

This changes the way that society operates significantly. And it also makes it very displeasant for the people who only identify through the labor they produce to have children, because these children will have a difficult time finding meaningful employment.

Note that this phenomenon takes decades to roll out, but that's also the time in which children would grow up, so it matches on the timescale and that's why it's relevant.