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South Korea's middle aged men are dying 'lonely deaths'

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Re: South Korea's middle aged men are dying 'lonely deaths'

#151

Post by DieAgainAli »

seydor wrote: post #126
safety1st wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not irrelevant. I think the point you're missing is that there are not enough young able-bodied people to take care of the lonely old people. There is a numbers issue. Like in your solution you assume that people exist will be people who are young and have energy and have resources. These people do not exist. Not enough to take care of the massive number of old and sick people being created anyway. Here's an ill…

The point is not to take care of ailing old people, there's other venues for that. Instead it is to have some sort of semiregular contact with other peers that's beneficial both ways.

You’re missing the point. There is numbers issue, there’s not enough people for ‘a venue’ to take care of all the old people.

Re: South Korea's middle aged men are dying 'lonely deaths'

#153

Post by isthisthingon99 »

tshaddox wrote: post #32
falcolas wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And how would traditional gender roles solve the lonely death problem?

Probably depends on how “traditional” they’re talking about. Treating women as property whose marriages are arranged by their parents would probably help some otherwise lonely men. If it weren’t for the pesky progressive left to oppose that.

The number of women asking me to arrange a marriage for them is non trivial. There is a reason it was done that way and it had nothing to do with women being property.

Re: South Korea's middle aged men are dying 'lonely deaths'

#154

Post by n6koma7a »

orwin wrote: post #23
dandare wrote: post #3

As with any male-specific problem, the progressive left will blame it on patriarchy and oppose any solution.

What solution would the left oppose? More community centers? More associations ? More shared buildings? Unions? Associations reaching older people to have them house students during their studies in exchange for physical help around the house? I mean, I'm pretty sure 'the Left' don't disagree with those solutions, do you have any?

[flagged]

Re: South Korea's middle aged men are dying 'lonely deaths'

#155

Post by motohagiography »

ajmurmann wrote: post #56
seydor wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Transactional but also intentional. Nothing more or less. Men are not bad at maintaining relationships, that is a falsehood. Historically, men built all the hierarchical structures we have today. Antrhopologists used to say that men build a large and shallow network of relationships (while women prefer small but more intimate groups or pairs). It doesn't have to involve communal living, but instead regular gatherings…

I'm not sure if the shallow, mostly transactional relations men build help in the context of loneliness. Non-religious versions of "churches" seem to fail due to a lack of regular attendance. Free Masons seem to have solved this by building some kinds of pressure to attend. I genuinely wonder why they fell out of favor. Did they just become uncool?

Guys who drop out of freemasonry tend to do so because their girlfriends/wives disapprove (or would) of the social status of the other men involved. I'm in the middle of this issue now, and I can say it's because a generation of men (boomer/X) grew up depending on their girlfriends/wives to manage their social lives. There are actually guys who bring their wives/girlfriends to meet new male friends to vet the guys for approval. It's a generation of men who lack normal adult boundaries with the women in their lives. GenX men are largely codependent and needy owing to pressure to be "sensitive," being largely raised in broken homes, so their ideal relationship now resembles what is effectively sexual cannibalism elsewhere in nature. They don't identify as men because they think men are who hurt their mothers, the source of their belief in a perfect infant self. They're unweaned.

The knock on effects to millenials make forming male friendships really fraught. Add the hyper-mainstreaming of gay culture, and suddenly male friendships have all the absurdity of how badly boys cling to women and hang around as "friends" hoping for more, but now they're doing it to straight male friends, and it undermines the trust in the fabric of male social networks. Can gay men have close straight male friends without holding out hope for more? Some, not all etc, but I would say the confluence of straight men codependently outsourcing their social lives to their wives/girlfriends because once they have one of those they're somehow made, and the complexities of normalized gay culture where boys-being-boys, they're hanging on for hope has really frayed the fabric. We're all still trying to navigate a radically new (and arguably, devastated) landscape without a lot of ground rules.

Re: South Korea's middle aged men are dying 'lonely deaths'

#156

Post by safety1st »

DieAgainAli wrote: post #151
seydor wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The point is not to take care of ailing old people, there's other venues for that. Instead it is to have some sort of semiregular contact with other peers that's beneficial both ways.

You’re missing the point. There is numbers issue, there’s not enough people for ‘a venue’ to take care of all the old people.

I re-read their comment and I sort of get it now. We could bring back "gentlemen's spaces" and these single guys might be less lonely. They would still die alone, though, and it wouldn't do anything at all for the lonely women out there (who also account for 15-20% of the lonely deaths mentioned in the article).

Though I'm not really convinced that those opportunities for socializing no longer exist, I mean any medium sized city has meetup groups, pubs, and probably all sorts of other social outlets I'm not thinking of. The modern middle aged man's problem isn't meeting people, it's building relationships that have a closeness and intimacy equivalent to familial ones, which some people seem to think is easy but if it was these corpses wouldn't be rotting in apartments would they?

Re: South Korea's middle aged men are dying 'lonely deaths'

#157

Post by ajmurmann »

starkd wrote: post #101
ajmurmann wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The strength of the religious congregations is that they have a built-in forcing function that drives a regular attendance and brings families and individuals together. You must go to avoid hell, drives more attendance than going to avoid possible, future loneliness. I am an ardent atheist, but this aspect of religion makes me wish I too was delusional.

I completely understand your point. But you also have to realize that belief is also a choice, not just a factual agreement on reality. It may surprise you to learn that many of those church attendees are not 100% in agreement. They too have doubts. They choose to believe it for the community. Or the alternative is just too bleak for them.

I'm not sure I understand what you are saying, but would like to. Is there a more long-form text on the topic you'd recommend? I think I can understand it for a simple question like "is there a god?", but cannot see how this arrived at believing everything in a particular passed-down book.

Re: South Korea's middle aged men are dying 'lonely deaths'

#158

Post by nradov »

scotty79 wrote: post #6

I'm a middle aged man living alone. My plan for when I need to die is to buy top loaded freezer and prepay my electric bill to give people at least few years to find my body, keeping the process as easy, for the unfortunates who do, and as clean as possible.

I came home from a long vacation this summer to find that the circuit breaker had tripped on my top loaded freezer and all the meat had spoiled. Much of it had essentially liquefied. The smell was horrific.

Re: South Korea's middle aged men are dying 'lonely deaths'

#160

Post by throwaway290 »

bradlys wrote: post #147
throwaway290 wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Excess at-birth human males die way younger than females. From other males and higher genetic variance. It evens out and even skews the other way.

Just look at age bar charts and you’ll see this isn’t accurate for developed countries…

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/sex-ratio-by-age?time=195...

Seriously, assuming the problem of loneliness is 8% extra males born is naive to the point of harmfulness. The notions of "pairing" and "leftovers" have died decade ago, not to mention people come in and out given country. The problem in Korea is cultural, mental health stigma is strong, classism and the pressure to succeed is beyond ridiculous, your worth measured by how expensive a cat you drive, etc.

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