Enough already!

On the 11th of July some of us may be bored enough to know it's World Population Day (yet another pointless day of remembering, honouring and thinking about something. You choose, if you care enough). I opt to deviate from my habitual ambivalence and will actually develop a morsel of interest in this particular day. Why? I'm glad you did(n't) ask.
Driving to work, amid the mess of traffic on a daily basis it has been frequently occurring to me of late: It doesn't matter whether you driving on the heaving asphalt that is the M1 in Johannesburg or a tumbleweed-strewn piece of tar like Poeg-en-poel Rd in Vokallfontein; there are just too many people abound these days, clogging up our lives in so many ways.
In SA we are looking at over 50-million of us, in the world there are now over 7-billion homo-sapiens scouring one of the smallest planets in the galaxy for anything and everything. Food, jobs, potential mating partners, people to talk to, people to kill, maim, bore or please, or just simply a bit of space to call their own. Many simply search for other peoples' spaces and the belongings thereon, to steal or, shall we euphemise, 'surreptiously claim' as their own. Too many of use means too many problems.
Borderline agoraphobes like me don't need a lot of space. I can do with a few square meters of anything really (to be picky in my desperate case would be absurd). I only need a corner or a square or a circle of this floundering earth to call my own, I will occupy it happily... in the absence of others around me. Dream on. The hordes of conglomerated bodies heaped up on each other in tin coffins-cum-homes in places like Diepsloot or Khayelitsha often can't choose their habitat. I can live happily by myself amid 50-million other people, many of them, in my useless opinion, equally as moronic and futile in function as I. But only if it's just that - amid - not necessarily always 'among' others. I encounter stupidity on a daily basis. Firstly, when I wake up and look in the mirror. Secondly, when I have to extract myself from my little piece of lonely heaven/hell to face the outside. I am forced - not by myself, but by necessity and circumstance - to squeeze into daily life, to find my niche in a neck of some other twat. Along with my car, in the maw that is traffic I must endure the idiocy that is a typical South African driver. I observe my fellow-humans, themselves visibly caught in the mechanical, exponential growth of society and humankind. In taxis, they are sardines, breathing, coughing and talking on each other. In the streets, pedestrians in their droves navigate through the desultory queues of non-drivers and not just on the sidewalks. They spill over into the road, partly because of a lack of space on the aforementioned pavement. The space on pavements, like the streets and roads, never enough for the ever-growing foot traffic of people, clamouring over each onward towards... well, who cares.
People, people, people, everywhere, every time, all the time. And the space? It can't grow, unless we cast our eyes skywards. Yes. That's our future - the sky - which does have a limit (as many of us are mundanely reminded by the more cheerful and optimistic among us). Unless we look to space, the Moon, maybe even Mars, where we can continue to breed, consume and behave as humans are expected to - greedily.
Those of use fortunate enough to have employment can 'escape'... not each other, unfortunately. We can take sojourns to other parts of the diminishing space we call earth for holidays where, once we arrive... we will encounter tens of thousands of other other people also vacationing away from their realities.
Speaking of jobs, maybe you have one or two to offer to the hordes of less fortunate, the 'currently and possibly forever disadvantaged', lugubriously standing sentinel at traffic light intersections, 'guarding' our vehicles, mashed into shebeens drowning their sorrows, queuing outside social welfare offices - many of them clutching little humans or bearing the signs of future denizens of the world in their bellies.
It's an unstoppable train, this population of the globe. We, every single last one of us, will be reminded until we shuffle off this mortal coil (to make way for another thousand newborns) to 'change our ways' or we will have to endure equally brain dead cliches, 'make the world a better place for all'. I get it, okay! The growing millions, tens of millions, hundreds of millions, billions and so forth pushing and shoving their way into the world since the nucleus of time have been screwing it all up for too long. But maybe, there are those among us (and I know there are many, many, many of them) who should be thinking (or trying to learn to think) twice, thrice and then a few more times thereafter, before procreating and adding to the 7-billion. I single out no nationality, no race, no culture. I address every-single-person (sad enough to be reading this) to stop with the baby-making, for just a bit, and create some space to breathe, live, to find some common sense and sustain what little of this beleaguered planet (and our sanity) that is left.