Enjoy your lonely and bitter end of life as it is our relationships that define our humanity. Childlessness and birth control, such as silphium, is the mark of a civilization that has lost its animating spirit and embraced raw hedonism that ultimately leaves people empty inside and collapses society. It happened in Baghdad, Rome, and Greece.

In our own time the whole of Greece has been subjected to a low birth rate and a general decrease of the population, owing to which cities have become deserted and the land has ceased to yield fruit, although there has been neither continuous wars or epidemics... For as men had fallen into such a state of prententiousness, avarice, and indolence that they did not wish to marry, or if they married to rear the children born to them, or at most as a rule but one or two of them, so as to leave these in affluence and bring them up to waste their substance, the evil rapidly and insensibly grew.

-Polybius