Back when I was a very young kid (11 or 12?), I used to feel awful and guilty in school, hearing about overpopulation, and I was always thinking about how we all should voluntarily stop having children completely.
That was before I learned the basics of how increasing marginal costs, and diminishing marginal utilities obviously make it unlikely that we can immediately and fully exhaust any resource. Our own ability to use any scarce resource is also scarce. There are ultimate limits to everything, but they don’t figure in everyday life.
Still, hearing the tragic case of a misguided young man who died recently, I am reminded of what I once thought and that it may not have been much different. James Jay Lee, another Korean kid who lost his mind and went berserk, went down saying that babies are a form of pollution and overpopulation is killing the earth. He was not an “environmental extremist” - he didn’t want to make your life much more inconvenient with problematic solutions; he wanted you to die. It’s a poverty of spirit, rather than mere environmentalism that made him do it.
The only thing is that it made me realize how necessary knowledge of basic everyday practical economics is, so that people don’t end up making such wrong assumptions, which may aggravate an already bleak view of life.