“Reporter: In the last 50 years we’ve doubled our population, tripled the amount of food and water we use, and we have quadrupled the use of fossil fuels. Every four days there’s a million more people on the planet. How is the world going to cope with this explosion in population?”

— What Happend to Monday

A few months ago on a flight from Istanbul to New York, I binged watch on movies. Ever since I worked at a movie theater my senior year of high school, physically going to the movies has lost its appeal to me so I try to catch up on what I missed during long flights. It helps pass the time.

One of the movies I saw was "What Happened to Monday?" The premise is that overpopulation has caused a worldwide crisis resulting in a strict, one-child policy. This means that any families with more than one child have to surrender their children to the Child Allocation Bureau. Everyone is monitored and tracked. The story revolves around the 7 daughters of Karen Settman. After dying from childbirth, the grandfather decides to raise the 7 children naming each of them the days of the week. Each child is allowed to go outside on the day that corresponds with their name. The 7 women take on the same identity of Karen Settman. The movie plays on in which all 7 sisters take turns living one life until one day, their sister Monday does not return home.

The interesting thing about this movie are some of the conversations about why they have the one child policy in place. Overpopulation has drained the Earth's resources. Food, water, fossil fuel use is being maximized. I think this is a reality that we have to start considering. The Earth has a finite set of resources, sometimes we think it's infinite and maybe for one generation or two, resources will be available and abundant, but we have to face the fact that this will not be the case.

I posed this questions on Instagram about Population Control.

Would you support population control to save the Earth's resources?

The answer was a mix. A few people were up for it, a few people were unsure, a few people offered that we absolutely have to educate and change our ways and I agree with this. I'm not there yet on supporting population control. Excess consumption will be the downfall of humanity. I know that is very harsh to say, but I believe it is the truth. We rarely use things up. We buy something new every minute of everyday and these things have a 1 minute lifespan before it gets discarded and thrown into the landfill. It's scary how much we consume and how much we waste. I'm not sure what it will take for the world population to realize and understand that without the Earth's natural resources, we will not survive. We are busy looking for life in other planets when we should be figuring out how to curb our consumption and figure out how to optimize the use of Earth's resources.

Take solar energy for example. I'm still very surprised that we don't take full advantage of it. After all, it's free. It's a fairly constant source and it's powerful. Yet, we continue to rely on fossil fuels for energy. We are fighting countries on tariffs and trade, but perhaps we also need to look at what we truly need. We need to stop measuring growth by how much we produce, but by other social factors.

A big thing too is to educate. Educate how consumption affects not only the wallet but the planet. For many of us, we live to work, spending every penny on things we don't need in the hopes of finding that happiness, but if we start looking at our waste as our wasted time and money too perhaps we won't spend and buy as much unnecessary things. This in the long run can allow us to reduce our footprint and move us away from the 9-5 cycle. Doing so may allow us move us to create new solutions to advance humanity. The correlation is there, we just have to see it. If you are interesting in taking a look at the correlation between the wallet and the planet, join #SaveMoneySaveThePlanet Program. It's FREE!

What do you think, would you support population control to save the Earth's resources?