From Blood and Soil to Contracts and Code: The Great Substitution
For almost the entirety of human existence, the primary social glue was biological and territorial. Societies cohered through extended kinship networks; clans, villages, tribes, and the literal soil that contained the bones of their ancestors.
In traditional societies across Asia, Europe, the Americas and Africa, a person rarely moved more than a day’s walk from the village of their birth.
Ancestral graves had to be swept on festival days, fields had to be inherited and defended, elders had to be fed and obeyed, and marriages were arranged to cement alliances between tribes and communities.
To abandon one’s native place was to risk becoming a ghost, cut off from ritual continuity, economic security, and social identity.
That world is effectively extinct in the developed and rapidly developing world.
Today the only relationships that still command near-universal, visceral loyalty are the direct parent-child bond and, more delicately, the spousal bond. Siblings sometimes retain real closeness; grandparents only faintly. Everything beyond that narrow circle has been quietly set aside
Cousins, aunts, uncles, childhood friends, neighbors, these are now sentimental accessories rather than structural communities.
Financial and Systemic Ties
Observe anyone’s emotional calendar and energy budget. After parents and children, the relationships that provoke the most anxiety and maintenance are business partners, bosses, coworkers, clients, suppliers, investors, landlords, and maybe tenants.
These are not relationships of affection; they are relationships of resource flow. You depend on them for money, status, housing, health care, and future options in a way that supersedes what you feel for extended kin.
When your client schedules a 7a.m. call on a Saturday, you take it. When your cousin schedules a wedding on the same day, you send a gift and an apology text.
This is not irrational; it is a structural adaptation in a modern systems based society.
The reordering began with the Industrial Revolution. Millions abandoned multi-generational farms for urban factories because the wages beat subsistence agriculture.
It accelerated after 1945 with mass education, suburbanization, the automobile, and commercial aviation. It turbocharged in the 1990s and 2000s with container shipping, the internet, and smartphone-mediated labor markets.
Each leap made geographic relocation cheaper, faster, and more financially compelling.
Today a software engineer in New Delhi can relocate to Toronto, Berlin, or Dubai in weeks for a 4X salary increase and think nothing of leaving parents, siblings, and ancestral compounds behind. The graves remain unswept; the rituals migrate to Zoom on Qingming or All Souls’ Day, if they happen at all.
We still recite the old liturgy, “family first,” “blood is thicker than water,” “no success compensates for failure in the home”, but our lived theology is unabashedly clear. When the capital market offers 30% more in another timezone, the moving trucks roll. We call this “opportunity.” We do not call it what it is: the quiet triumph of financial ties over biological community.
The Collapse of the Extended Family
For almost all of human history, the extended family was the primary economic unit, welfare system, insurance policy, nursing home, and political faction rolled into one.
Grandparents supplied free childcare, basic education, and cultural transmission. Uncles and cousins served as labor reserves, marriage markets, credit unions, and armed militias when necessary.
In famine, war, illness, or old age, the clan closed ranks and survived as a single organism.
That family/community structure has been slowly eroded over the past 150 years and methodically superseded.
State pensions, social security, and federal transfer programs have replaced children as the primary old-age insurance.
Compulsory schooling, daycare chains, and after-school programs have replaced grandparents, aunts, and nieces as the day-to-day caretakers and skill-transmitters.
Global labor markets and credentialing systems have replaced local kinship networks as the main ladder of opportunity.
Thirty-year mortgages, single-family zoning laws, and building codes have made the multi-generational home financially untenable and, in many jurisdictions, literally illegal.
The statistical evidence of this substitution is now unmistakable. Across the OECD, the most common living arrangement is no longer the multi-generational household or even the classic nuclear family with several children; it is the single-person household or the childless couple.
In the urbanizing Global South the transition is still underway, but the direction is identical: household size is collapsing, fertility is falling fastest in cities, and the one or two child family is rapidly becoming the new normal, when children are present at all.
Grandparents, when they survive, are increasingly housed in separate cities, separate counties, or purpose-built facilities funded by tax dollars or private companies.
We have neutered the traditional family unit, stripping away every function it once performed until only the barest emotional core remains: the parent-child bond and, increasingly optional, the spousal pair.
Everything beyond that, cousins, uncles, nephews, nieces, lifelong neighbors, clan elders, has been rendered ornamental, like heirlooms taken out for the holidays then locked away again.
The Fertility Question Is Not Moral; It Is Structural
A society that needs large families to function will generate every possible cultural, religious, and economic pressure for early marriage and high birth rates. A society that no longer needs them will generate none.
Modern systems do not require replacement-level fertility. They require healthy, credentialed, geographically mobile human capital.
Children are now among the most expensive “purchases” a person will ever make, in money, time, emotion, and forfeited career compounding. The traditional payoffs (labor, old-age support, status, lineage) have been either back-loaded into distant emotional fulfillment or outsourced entirely to pension funds and nursing homes.
The rational individual response is therefore delay, reduction, or abstention. We should not be shocked that fertility rates are collapsing from Sweden to South Korea, from Iran to Italy. The real mystery is why anyone still pretends to be surprised.
Young people, male and female alike, are explicitly instructed that their primary duty is better education, credential accumulation, travel, and the maximization of optionality.
Marriage and children are presented as one lifestyle choice on a very long menu, and rarely the most obviously rewarding one.
The system has no structural slot for the large, noisy, immobile household of 4 or 5. It has been optimized for the portable, debt-financed, high-earning individual or childless couple.
Contemporary society offers young couples no compelling economic reward and very little institutional support for choosing the traditional path. The private cost is enormous; the private benefit is no longer obvious. The collective benefit is clear to everyone, yet the incentives remain ruthlessly aligned with individual optimization.
The Thinning of Even Financial Ties
Just as technology dissolved the need for physical proximity to kin, it is now dissolving the need for physical proximity to coworkers and business partners.
Remote work, gig platforms, no-code tools, and AI assistants mean that even the second-strongest tier of modern relationships, financial-resource partnerships, is now becoming attenuated.
Colleagues are reduced to Slack avatars. Clients are Stripe line items and customer numbers. Suppliers are APIs. The warmest remaining business relationships are often with algorithms that never tire, never ask for raises, and never complain.
Intimacy itself is being financialized and more transactional. Dating is a global auction run by matching algorithms. Love and companionship are increasingly available on demand through digital media, subscription content and soon life like robotics.
Laboratory Reproduction and the Final Severing
Here the trajectory falls off a cliff.
If biotechnology advances to the point where healthy, genetically optimized humans can be gestated outside the womb, ectogenesis combined with CRISPR editing and artificial gametes, then even the last biological imperative collapses.
Children would no longer require nine months of a woman’s body, two committed parents, or any kinship structure at all. They could be produced on demand, in batches optimized for intelligence, appearance, disease resistance, or whatever traits the licensing authority deems socially useful.
At that point the game has morphed again.
The parent-child bond, the one remaining near-universal biological tie, becomes elective. You could still choose to carry a pregnancy the old-fashioned way, just as today you could choose to weave your own cloth or churn your own butter.
Most people will not.
The default human origin story shifts from “conceived in bonding and raised by family” to “designed by committee, decanted in a lab, and allocated to rearing facilities optimized for human-capital formation.”
Ethnic groups, regional subcultures, and multi-generational lineages risk becoming ornamental; aesthetic choices rather than birthright identity.
The concepts of “mother,” “father,” “sibling,” “ancestor,” and “descendant” lose their unambiguous biological anchoring. We become a society of atomic individuals whose only obligatory relationship is to the system that funds, monitors, educates, employs, and eventually recycles us.
What, Then, Binds Us?
Nothing warm. Nothing rooted. Nothing that asks for love or offers it back.
The legal system that enforces contracts. The financial system that routes payments in microseconds. The logistical systems that deliver calories and pharmaceuticals to your door. The algorithmic systems that match your labor to capital and your consumption to inventory. The emerging governance systems, public and private, that will decide which genetic traits are permissible and which children are licensed for production.
These systems require no love, no proximity, no shared blood, no common memory. They require only compliance and productivity. And they are good at scaling.
Government has already assumed many of the roles once held by family and kin: education, elder care, health insurance, unemployment insurance, child protection, dispute resolution. As kinship withers, the state (or state-like corporate entities) simply expands to fill the vacuum. The family is not being replaced by loneliness; it is being replaced by bureaucracy, only now the bureaucracy is global, digital, non-human, and algorithmic.
The Emotional and Spiritual Cost
We still carry the ancient firmware: we are biologically wired for tribe, touch, ritual, and continuity. As those things recede, we medicate the resulting ache with entertainment, medication, status games, and endless distraction.
The rise of antidepressant use, anxiety disorders, and “deaths of despair” in the richest societies is not a coincidence.
The danger is not that the future will feel like a dystopian novel. The danger is that it will feel like nothing at all, like the air we already breathe. Each generation acclimates to the new baseline.
Children born in 2050 may find the idea of being emotionally and financially dependent on a handful of genetically related humans as “weird”, as we find lifelong “arranged” marriages today.
We have traded the clumsy, inefficient, obligation-heavy ties of blood, soil, and memory for the impersonal, scalable precision of “systems”. The trade has delivered material abundance beyond anything imaginable two centuries ago.
Whether this new order can ever deliver meaning, identity, purpose, and love in forms that do not feel artificial and fleeting remains unresolved. So far the trend has not been encouraging.
By: Milan Ji
Assistant Editor From the Desk of Tae-Sik
December 4, 2025