Are you living through the decline of human relationships?

And in twenty years of asking why for a living, I never went looking for the cause.

Then Constanza called.

Her first reaction was not excitement. It was the reaction every researcher has when a number is too good: we broke something. She ordered the quality control checks. Fieldwork reviewed, weighting re-run, sample dispersion inspected.

Everything held. The number stayed. That is when she called me, and I have rarely been so glad to pick up a phone.

Because a word turned up in my head uninvited and would not leave.

Maybe. Maybe this is the thing that comes first.

One in four Argentines says animals or plants matter more to them than other people. Among the young that rises to 31% of them.

And when we ran the correlations, the strongest relationship in the whole set was not people to animals or people to plants. It was animals to plants, at r = 0.473, against 0.288 and 0.251 for the human pairings. Two separate emotional worlds, and only one of them is holding.

Photo diary · Argentina 2025

The respondent submitted this photo. Did they label it connection, or disconnection?

Connection Disconnection

They called it disconnection

Surrounded by people, I felt that disconnection. I felt very alone and empty, like I did not belong there. Photo diary respondent, Argentina

Most people guess connection, because there are humans in the frame. That gap between what the picture shows and what the person felt is the whole problem with reading other people's lives from the outside. It is also, more or less exactly, what we do to a birth rate chart.

The pattern across the photographs was consistent, and it was not what we expected. When people photographed connection, other people were frequently absent. What showed up instead was calm, grounding, relief. Nature. Pets. Mate. Music. Concerts, where you can belong to something without anyone asking anything of you.

Disconnection was the opposite: ordinary, immediate, crowded. Transit zones and waiting rooms and workplaces. Places where you are neither at home nor genuinely with anyone. Emotion without containment.

Connection is not frequent. It is protected.

Which is not a story about people who have stopped caring. It is a story about people who cannot currently afford it. Ask young Argentines why they do not socialise more and the top answer is not time and not money. It is lack of motivation, at 40% among 16 to 24 year olds. Relationships are not being squeezed out of the schedule. They are losing priority.

I did this honestly and I did not enjoy the result. Seven of mine go into work, and almost none of those seven go into the work itself. They go into other people: convincing, aligning, holding a direction steady while five functions pull at it, making sure the person who needs to be consulted feels consulted. That is the actual job and I chose it. Nothing gets built without it.

It is also seven coins. Which leaves three for everyone who actually matters to me. And I have the audacity to be surprised when a survey tells me other people are less important than they used to be. Of course they are. Everyone is running the same budget, everyone is being just as strategic about it, and none of us wrote it down until somebody asked.

We have not explained falling birth rates. Argentina's decline has its own well documented drivers, including a large fall in teenage pregnancies over the past decade, which is a public health success and not a symptom of anything. Anyone offering you a single cause for a national fertility curve is selling something.

I am also not claiming this is all loss. Some of what we are watching is people getting more choice about who they spend themselves on, and choosing better. That is not decline. That is a correction, and it is overdue.

And there is an honest problem sitting inside my own paper. We found that people with children are 10 points more likely to value their relationships with other people. Read one way, that supports my instinct: relationships thin out, and parenthood becomes unthinkable. Read the other way, it says the opposite: fewer children, and the human bonds that children generate go with them.

I do not know which way the arrow points. Neither does anyone else.

What I can say is that we are only measuring one end of it. The birth rate is an outcome. Outcomes are easy to count and easy to explain after the fact, which is why every country has a tidy story ready. Whether people still want each other, and what that wanting now costs them, is barely measured at all.

Though the data does lean. When young Argentines explain why they are not having children, the top reason is not the economy. It is the perceived loss of personal freedom, at 52%, ahead of instability at 30%, fear of responsibility at 26%, and the absence of a stable partner at 21% of answers. Parenthood has become a high demand emotional project, priced by people who are already overdrawn.

We are in field right now in Germany, Japan and the United States. Three countries whose birth charts get published on a loop and whose comment sections have already decided why. It went from decision to live fieldwork in three markets in days rather than months, which is the part of my job I am actually proud of. I spend most of my time building the machinery that makes a question this cheap to ask.

We are asking something simpler than fertility intentions: what a fulfilled life actually looks like to you.

Then we pull the answers apart on purpose, because the standard version of this question is useless. Family as a single option hides the whole finding, so a partner and children are separate choices now. In Japan that is not a nuance, it is the mechanism. Close relationships hides another one, so friends in daily life sit apart from the family you are tied to by default. And we cap people at three picks, because a question where everything is important returns a list where nothing is.

Our own paper makes the case for why this matters: a statement like I don't want children may be reporting a structural condition rather than a preference. If you only count the answer, you miss what produced it.

I do not know what comes back, and that is the point. If Argentina was early, the same shape turns up in Berlin, Tokyo and Chicago. If Argentina was unusual, I will have written all this about a country that turned out to be a special case. Either way it gets published.

Constanza and I present Unbonded at ESOMAR Congress in Valencia in a few days. The Best Paper award in Rio is why we get the stage. This is what I want to do with it.

Come and find me there and tell me where your ten coins go. I will tell you if mine ever got better than seven.