The uh...elephant in the room is increasing lack of physical health. Bmi keeps climbing.
Sex is going out of fashion?
471–480 of 692 posts
Re: Sex is going out of fashion?
#472Wonder if this is related to the lack of personal relationships in general, especially friendships. There is an epidemic of loneliness in the world. So many ways to communicate and all we can do is post memes and upvote influencers. I am happily married but have zero friends. I met my wife through my friend group in college. If I heaven forbid got a divorce tomorrow, not sure where I would meet someone new. Guess I w…
Three years ago a HN user named Dexwiz wrote something that hit me hard. I'd felt this, but I never saw it put in to words so well. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20470085 """ The Screen and the Job have displaced almost everything else is our lives. Loneliness is just a primary symptom. The Screen, whether it’s TV, computer, or phone, has supplanted almost all social interactions. This manifests itself in thin…
Great insight! Another thing I came to realise is that current "social" media is extremely de-personalized (lack of a better term): back in the 80s and 90s, I participated in many public online places (I have always been shy in person). Those places (irc channels, WBS.net, ICQ, BBSs) were actually very social in that you actually made friendships. I travelled half the country after being invited to a Linux User Group!
Nowadays must public "social" media interactions do not promote that sort of affinity. Like, I'm replying to you... but not really, I'm just replying to your comment in this page. It is very rare to establish even a loose relationship with people in today's online pages.
And it doesn't have to be super close. I still have 2 acquaintances I made in the 90s, one is a girl that we happened to stumble upon in WBS chat, we were from different countries so it was exciting to chat. We just say hi from time to time.
The second is a person in Norway with which we shared metal music joy. We met after we both signed a "guest book" , shared Live Messenger accounts and sporadically chatted.
Even a cursory view of subreddits like /suicidewatch were people are supposed to be close, you read a lot of comments like "I care for you friend" which are hollow.
I miss those sort of interactions.
Re: Sex is going out of fashion?
#473Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's a good point: it's actually a perverse incentive. If they successfully create a relationship they have lost a customer.
This is a bit too conspiratorial: I've spoken to people who work at these companies, and there's not a team of analysts trying to figure out how to minimize the number of successful relationships that come from using the app. An app that has a reputation for "I met my last partner on X, and we're getting married next week!" will get far more users and recurring revenue through word of mouth. The bigger issue is that…
> This is a bit too conspiratorial: I've spoken to people who work at these companies, and there's not a team of analysts trying to figure out how to minimize the number of successful relationships that come from using the app.
I think the effect can be true without anyone having ill intent. The dating app companies are generally trying to make as much money as they can, which will indrectly lead to decisions that optimize for serial dating.
As a parallel I don't think Facebook is full of evil people who want to increase the amount of hate and anger in the world, but it does have a lot of people who just want to make money and encouraging negative reactions happens to be an effective way of doing that, so that's what we get.
Re: Sex is going out of fashion?
#474Wonder if this is related to the lack of personal relationships in general, especially friendships. There is an epidemic of loneliness in the world. So many ways to communicate and all we can do is post memes and upvote influencers. I am happily married but have zero friends. I met my wife through my friend group in college. If I heaven forbid got a divorce tomorrow, not sure where I would meet someone new. Guess I w…
I wonder what solution autocratic centralized societies will leverage so as not to collapse? Import populations ala US, or somehow "motivate" locals to reproduce?
Singapore and Japan have been unsuccessful at getting people to voluntarily engage in producing larger families.
Re: Sex is going out of fashion?
#475Earlier quoted context omitted.
Three years ago a HN user named Dexwiz wrote something that hit me hard. I'd felt this, but I never saw it put in to words so well. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20470085 """ The Screen and the Job have displaced almost everything else is our lives. Loneliness is just a primary symptom. The Screen, whether it’s TV, computer, or phone, has supplanted almost all social interactions. This manifests itself in thin…
Well, not entirely. I moved to be able to have a family (more child-friendly & car-friendly environment) and found a better job. But then I realize I'm extremely privileged as a programmer and that most people don't have that choice (and even for me, the choices are limited, NYC > London > Zürich > Ljubljana with each step at least 2x difference in compensation)
>Ljubljana
Can I ask what Ljubljana is doing on that list? Every Slovene dev I met was driving 2h/day to work in Austria at a 50k/year job, so the local market must be really depressing if that's what they're willing to go through.
Re: Sex is going out of fashion?
#476Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't know why but there seems to be some outsized group of people that thrives on reducing social interactions to numbers. I remember seeing a lot of this in self-destructive subreddits (eg MGTOW). Maybe it's so they can write off self-improvement (you can't argue with math!)?
Isn't MGTOW a self-improvement sub?
It's just the leftovers from the incel sub, now with more Jordan Peterson quotes.
Re: Sex is going out of fashion?
#477Wonder if this is related to the lack of personal relationships in general, especially friendships. There is an epidemic of loneliness in the world. So many ways to communicate and all we can do is post memes and upvote influencers. I am happily married but have zero friends. I met my wife through my friend group in college. If I heaven forbid got a divorce tomorrow, not sure where I would meet someone new. Guess I w…
I (along with many others) have been saying it for a while; there just isn't the same infrastructure for physical community as their once was. The church, the mall, the rotary club... these were bumping hot beds of socialisation. I'm the last person to denigrate the importance of online communities, most of my closest friends don't live in my city. There is, however, a very real and important role for communities tie…
All of this so much. My problem though is that I just don't know which IRL community to join. I've tried a few, it was not for me. Our hackerspace is heavily into identity politics, which I'm not. So I end up reading books, which is fine too I guess. I'm just not really part of society.
Re: Sex is going out of fashion?
#478Earlier quoted context omitted.
There are - of course - plenty of podcasts about sex, sexuality, sex therapy topics…
Talking it ain't doing it. That you think that those topics bridge that gap is also indicative of why people aren't fucking.
I disagree to the degree that a whole lot of people in the world are walking around without a lot of knowledge about their own sexuality. They often don’t even understand what their gas and brakes really are - which is often not even directly connected to sexual function (but that’s a topic for sex therapy).
That said, my gut impression is that people are less sociable and less socialized than we used to be. I believe we simply spend less time around other people, and we are less adept at building relationships. It’s easier to remain sexually, socially, financially, and resource independent from other people - so we do and sexual relationships become less frequent.
Re: Sex is going out of fashion?
#479Earlier quoted context omitted.
Self-improvement definitely isn't at odds with pursuing healthy relationships with the opposite sex. But from what I gathered MGTOW is(was?) simply a movement that wanted to improve their lives by being comfortable without being in a relationship for various reasons. I never got a misogynistic vibe from them. But it's literally years ago I had read about them. They could very well have gone the Incel route over time.…
That's never what the MGTOW people asserted in any serious way. From the jump it was "the world is 'sexually prejudiced' against us men [or capital-M Men when they were being extra weird] and so we should separate from it entirely." It immediately leapt right into what would today be called "cope" how even if you do get married she'll just divorce you for a studly chad and take all your stuff, the fear of feminists (…
It's not "my" movement. I was triggered by someone saying it is a hate movement when this was not my impression. I just went back using the wayback machine to a random page from 2015: http://web.archive.org/web/20150813192410/https://www.reddit...
There doesn't seem to be any weird stuff there but I'm not a social scientist so I will have to take your word for it. I'm not so invested to start a heated discussion about this anyway.
Re: Sex is going out of fashion?
#480Earlier quoted context omitted.
You give good advice but I was commenting on the well documented asymmetry and inequality in outcomes that cut across gender lines which are likely magnified by these dating apps. It's not bitterness to point out objective facts that are highly relevant to the topic of conversation. "Improve yourself" is always the healthiest mindset on a personal level but that's not exactly deep analysis on the impact that these ap…
I dunno, from where I stand what you are defining as the problems of "lower ranked men" are symptoms of living in a late-capitalist society problems. It's not the app's fault that people respond to incentives; the way out, if "out" is to be defined as to find people who want to interact with you, to "not settle" or whatever, is to improve oneself. It can both suck and be the only option. Fortunately, it's a lot easie…
That is the only way out on a local, personal level, since that's all we have much control over. But how is it not the app's fault? When Twitter and Facebook create social dynamics that encourage outrage and division, I blame them (or at least I blame the incentives and systems that cause them to do this). Ditto for the impact that these dating apps are having.