Overpopulation

It was an undeniable mathematical truth that there were too many people. The inescapable reality was that the planet had become obscenely overburdened with people, teeming to such a preposterous degree that people were actually tripping over other people on the streets and in their homes. Everywhere you looked, people were uncomfortably jostling other people, bumping into people, stepping on people's toes and elbowing people in the face just to make a little room for themselves amongst all the people.

Of course, the obvious solution was to get rid of some of the people. But therein lay the paradoxical conundrum - there were far too many people to ever get rid of all the people that needed to be gotten rid of. Every time a small number of people were successfully removed from the overpopulation problem, the overwhelming number of remaining people would simply replenish itself by multiplying into that same number of new people again in virtually no time at all.

It was a vicious, infinitely repeating cycle of too many people creating more people to become too many people again. The harder everyone tried to alleviate the overpopulation crisis, the worse the overpopulation crisis became. Drastic measures were clearly required, but any drastic measures would be instantly rendered insufficient by the unstoppable tidal wave of additional people being born every day.

The most draconian population control measures were proposed, passionately debated, and ultimately dismissed as far too insane to ever implement - until they were eventually implemented anyway, because the alternative of letting the number of people continue to increase indefinitely was even more insane. Mass sterilizations, forced abortions, outlawing human reproduction altogether - it was all on the table and being carried out in certain parts of the world.

But still, the number of people never decreased in any significant way because the people tasked with enforcing the population control measures were inevitably people themselves. And people could never be fully trusted to effectively get rid of other people when they themselves were people who could just as easily create more people.

In the end, the only solution was to somehow get rid of all the people at once. But that would require getting all the people to agree to get rid of all themselves, which was fundamentally impossible because people could never agree on anything. Especially not on getting rid of themselves, which proved to be the most controversial thing of all for people to disagree on.

So the people remained, stuck in a perpetual paradox of too many people unwilling to stop being people who constantly made more people. It was an intractable logical quandary that would never be solved, unless a certain number of people stopped being people. But agreeing on that number of people who would sacrifice their people status for the greater good of solving overpopulation was simply too much to ask of people.

And that was that - the people problem caused by there being too many people persisted precisely because there were too many people to not have a people problem at all. It was an ouroboros of people perpetually devouring itself into a vicious cycle of more people. And the people, inevitably, just had to people.