When I say "we," I don't just mean America. A lot of the Western world is having this issue. In fact, a lot of the first world is suffering from this. Japan probably has it the worst, but I digress. 

There are a lot of things we could point to as a contributing factor. Some people would point to a decline in testosterone, some would point to modern culture, and some would point to feminism. To be sure, these don't help, but there is one thing that we consistently overlook because we've trained ourselves not to think too analytically about it. In fact, when you do, there's almost an immediate, visceral reaction to reject the idea. 

It's our work culture, and it's creating a lot more problems than you might think. We are working ourselves to death because we're replacing the importance of family and community with work. 

Before anyone gets upset and accuses me of saying we shouldn't value work, or have an anti-work mentality, that's not what I'm suggesting at all, but in various first world countries, like the United States and Japan, we've set up work as an idol of worship without knowing it. We often associate work as a virtue instead of a means to an end. Indeed, it's good to work. Work is even talked about in the Bible quite often. 

"For even when we were with you, we would give you this command: If anyone is not willing to work, let him not eat. For we hear that some among you walk in idleness, not busy at work, but busybodies. Now such persons we command and encourage in the Lord Jesus Christ to do their work quietly and to earn their own living." - 2 Thessalonians 3:10–12

There's even a verse about idle hands being "the devil's workshop," (Proverbs 16:27-29) but again, I want to emphasize that while work is good, making it an idol is bad, because it distracts from what's really important. 

For instance, when you take a step back, you can see how our work culture truly does encourage less of a familial, or community culture and hordes those needs for itself. Corporation workplaces oftentimes blatantly attempt to replace the family with motivational phrases like "here, we're all family," or in statements and press releases they refer to themselves as "the (insert corporation name here) family." 

This is to push a mindset that you should dedicate your time and even make emotional connections to the corporation. Your workplace, unless family owned, is not a family. You are a number, not a name. When hardship strikes the corporation, you'll see how fast your "family" cuts you loose and leaves you without a clue what to do next. Screw up, and you'll be shocked to see how forgiving your "family" actually is. 

Then there's the "competitive workplace," a phrase that's supposed to emphasize that you'll be working hard, reaching new heights, and working with truly motivated professionals. This creates an atmosphere of working alongside the best of the best, which means you have to step up. You have to dedicate more time and focus, and not only that, you better have the chops before you even walk in the door. 

This kind of work mentality causes a series of dominoes to fall that begin tipping over well before you're even ready to work at all. This starts when you're a kid. 

You dedicate a lot of time and effort in school to get good grades so you can go to a good college. At this college, you wrack up absurd amounts of student debt to get a degree. With your degree and your mountain of debt, you now push yourself to get into a good job with decent pay so you can dedicate all your time to maintaining your position in this workplace, dedicating even personal time to it, leaving little time to do other things. You work to pay off your debt, afford your apartment, pay your bills, and eat. You're definitely not focused on stopping to raise a family. 

Your work becomes your entire identity. 

This even breeds more of this kind of culture as people, being the pack animals we are, create a community of people in the same situation, all of whom are work-focused, not family focused. Marriage is delayed — if it happens — causing parenthood to get pushed back... if that happens.

This even causes other dominoes to fall. With no time for family and all the attention focused on work, inevitably the need for emotional fulfillment raises its ugly head, and with none of that going to family, it turns inward. How many people are always "working on themselves?" Personal fulfillment becomes its own issue, as hobbies or activities one can pick up and put down at will draw people further from the idea of dedicating all that time and effort to family, something they can't just put down on a whim. 

As you can see, this sets up an environment that actually discourages caregiving, and then we wonder why we have declining birth rates. 

Women are probably affected the worst. The most natural of the caregivers is also enslaved into a work mentality, where they're pulled away from homes that could be filled with life and into the cold environments of working for an entity that ultimately doesn't actually care about her. Many women who invested their birth-giving years in businesses and work often report high levels of regret, but even mentioning this in the modern era causes many women to become defensive. 

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"We are told, in so many different ways, that the secret to success is hard work and perseverance... but this message often excludes family. It can be like living two lives—where one will always take away from the other," said Jennifer Senior, author of All Joy and No Fun: The Paradox of Modern Parenthood.

Hard work does bring you success, but too often, in our modern culture, it only brings you one kind of success, and it's often the shallow kind. Money and comfort are luxury, financial stability and abundance is great, but there are plenty of miserable rich people, and regret often comes with not having been more family focused. 

So how do we fix it? 

For starters, the base way to do so is with a better economy. A good economy makes necessities cost less, puts more money in the pocket, and makes home buying a much better experience. This is the soil from which family-building can thrive. With Trump about to take office again, we can begin the process of improving the economy, putting us back on track. 

We also need to do something about how our country handles higher education. Universities are often the beginning of many problems, whether it's societal brainwashing that makes them anti-traditionalists, forces them to focus on working hard to work harder down the line, and drowning them in debt as they go. 

There are several ways to help this. For starters, we need to de-emphasize the importance of Universities. While a higher education is great, there are many ways to get it, but not everyone needs to graduate with a liberal arts degree that helps them go nowhere. We should, as a society, push the idea that trade schools and apprenticeships are just as, if not more, valuable than those useless degrees. We could even put more of an emphasis on employer education benefits, where businesses pick up the tab for students who prove promising, and jobs are offered at said company upon completion of the courses. 

But while these are things government can do to make it easier for families to begin, we as a culture have to realize that work is good, but too much is destructive. Working hard can be a virtue, but dedicating your heart and soul to it leads ultimately to misery and a lack of real fulfillment. 

When you die, you can't take a dime of what you earned, or a molecule of what you bought with you. The only thing that can follow you into the afterlife, in their own time, is your family. That's it. Work is good, but it's a means to support that familial end. 

If we don't turn this around, and balance out priorities, civilization will dissolve. It may be a slow disappearance, but it will diminish and fade.