This is a situation that will affect too many men worldwide as they are more likely to live single / be childless. The solution is to have communities or networks of people built explitictly around the idea of caring for others.
The solution to kitten punting isn't to stop punting kittens because the kittens are clearly not strong enough to avoid being punted. This is brutal, I know, but kitten punting is unfortunately the reality of life on earth. No reason why kittens should be exempt.
The solution to thirst isn't to provide water because the thirsty are clearly not strong enough to find water. This is brutal, I know, but thirst is unfortunately the reality of life on earth. No reason why people should be exempt.
That is the way it’s always been and is currently - I highly doubt any real “solution” exists outside of home health care robots or automated wellness checks
At the very least, if you're going to propose a solution (to any problem), make sure it actually tackles the problem so that the problem is lessened or ceases to exist after the solution is applied. Otherwise what you've proposed isn't a solution at all, just a nonsensical statement. I would even go a step further and call your specific statement lacking empathy, bordering on sociopathic.
My friend, I have had to look into this abyss myself. Although I must admit that my skillset did allow me to escape, I do not believe that all man must succumb to this outcome.
I wonder how these might look. Building relationships is really hard and ultimately that's what's needed. To build relationships, you need repeated exposure and need to overcome an initial barrier of familiarity to get to the point where you can have meaningful interactions and not just smalltalk.
Given men are also bad at maintaining relationships, I wonder if something like different, more communal living arrangements would be beneficial. I am thinking something like a dorm, but more luxurious with the common areas being more of a focus.
An idea that might accelerate overcoming the initial familiarity barrier might be something like the "question to fall in love" that made their rounds a few years back. I've seen a speed-dating version of similar, increasingly intimate questions build enormous feeling of trust within ~30 minutes as an icebreaker at a T-Group.
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. Basically what traditional groups like church or brotherhoods like the freemasons did. Currently, however, there is a stigma against those things which has to be overcome
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?
You can also look at other communities that sprang up, like e.g. the gay community, who faced marginalization as well. Gatherings like pride parades are creating a sense of community which supports people
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.
It's 2023, we're adults, we can have conversations about how we relate. Given the original topic was about how men demographically have trouble forming relationships - where they did not for literally centuries, the meaningful question is what has changed.
I had direct experience with the growth issues facing a traditional fraternal organization. We can't really use the words we mean when we talk about the jargon this comment uses, but suffice it to say, among the scores of men I know socially, the people who use that jargon are punchlines.
We've lived communally for a long time and across many different cultures and ethnicities. You just have to look at the past to know how that would look.
Any barrier you might see right now is the consequence of the cultural switch to individualism, and that again is a direct consequence of the transition to market based economies.
I think it suffers from the problem that people who provide caring don’t need this, so you are stuck with the net takers and trying to build a community from them.
Right those exist, they're called families. Actually they've existed for longer than humans.
It turns out that many animals, particularly mammals and including us, have evolved this behavior where they live with their blood relatives and take care of them, it has worked pretty well for millions of years.
Now it so happens that in many modern human societies there's a declining birth rate and consequently fewer families are being formed. South Korea's one of the worst off in this regard. You end up with a lot of people being alone and dying alone (the majority are male but women are far from immune).
Why are people not starting families? Well I haven't seen Korea-specific information but I think it's the same as most countries, people typically cite medical and financial reasons.
So basically you have to address cost of living, cost of raising a kid and rising infertility to address this, among other things.
However for a number of societies including Korea's it's probably too late. Koreans can't have more families and your solution probably won't work either. The reason is that the demographic collapse is so extreme, the population is increasingly too old to produce a new generation or take care of other people. There just aren't enough young people to go around. These societies either have to accept mass immigration or collapse. The next few decades will be interesting.
that's irrelevant though. People at old age have already lost many of their peers, so they have mostly children to rely on. But people now have fewer children than ever and they are likely to be away. And i dont think parents or children want to be forced to live with each other just for this. We also shouldn't be shaming people for not living with their family. That's why we need something else (and maybe there's an entrepreneurial idea there)
Also keep in mind that , particularly for men, the nuclear family living was not the norm until the past few generations. Men used to spent most of their time in men/gentlement's spaces socializing/doing business while the wife was at home with kids. This 'loneliness' thing happens because those other spaces are gone now
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.
This is referred to as an inverted population pyramid but really it ends up looking more like a bell. The world used to have lots of young people and not many old people. The flattening of the peak which has happened in only 30 years is stunning! This will keep getting worse until the end of the century.
Korea's population pyramid looks way worse than the one I linked above by the way. From age 60 down it actually is inverted. Again, there are no young people left to do the caretaking you envision. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_South_Korea#/m...
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.
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?
You completely ignored that children move far away from their parents, following the money of rich people who concentrate in a few specific geographic areas. That is the whole shtick behind LA, the bay area and NYC after all. You go there because you get closer to the money. It is particularly paradoxical when your parents invest in stocks because then you have to follow your parent's money.
I haven't ignored that at all. Big cities are great talent pools for megacorps that owe their success to a free market while simultaneously seeking to destroy it. Those big cities also suck for decentralization of capital and power and for human society in general. Anxiety and depression are higher in big cities.
Big cities are filled with highly educated white collar serfs (sorry I mean professionals) who are great human resources.
In rural communities- the birth rate is way higher.
And that said state appointed waifu wouldn't poison them. All forcing me and my peers to be someone's wife would do is cause a drastic increase in 'accidental' deaths involving mixed household cleaners or improperly prepared food. Teehee, don't blame us, after all, you said yourselves we're too stupid to be trusted!
You'd have to go full Taliban/Gilead and cut off education/take the decades to brainwash the girls. It'd take a few generations before (most of) the women would comply, so none of the men arguing for it now would even benefit.
Which is why I'm convinced it's all an edgy LARP - the right wing version of 18 and 19 year old undergraduate anti-capitalists who can't tell you what capitalism actually IS. (I'm anti-capitalist myself but they make my side look bad...)
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.
So if we just force enough people to do your bidding without question, then your life will be easier and happier.
The reason there are lots of lonely men out there is because they self-radicalize themselves on garbage ideology like this, and it becomes impossible for them to form relationships or integrate into society.
They self-radicalize themselves on the "garbage" ideology that there are two genders? The prevailing sentiment of the rest of the world outside of a segment of western liberals hell bent on changing everyone else?
I don't particularly agree, but how would you reinstitute gender roles? The president cannot pass a decree that women should be confined to the kitchen. "Traditional" gender roles broke down once wage growth flatlined and it was impossible to support a family on a single income.
If you focus on the economic issues - especially those of inequality, it seems to me you would fix far more issues than focusing on social ones. Unfortunately, the "progressive left" is the only political sect that seems to care about these issues but the economic issues don't get nearly the same airtime as the social ones. Drag shows seem to get 1000x the coverage than unions.
You're right, but you miss a key point: much of what we call "the progressive left" is just corporate and professional managerial class value signaling. It's easy and low cost to call people names and culture war, so activism and attention gets directed (on both sides) toward drag queen story time hour instead of making sure everyone has access to a solid, stable, safe job.
>corporate and professional managerial class value signaling
This isn't true. The corporate and professional managerial class are not the same people unionizing coffeeshops and railroads. This is a elite backed misdirection in the same vein that focuses drag shows.
It's difficult to take people seriously when those same "corporate and professional managerial class" are called the "progressive left" while be simultaneously anti-union. Must of what you call "the progressive left" are also just anti-religious conservatives (or left-leaning libertarians at best).
Don't reinstitute gender roles, but recognize that while women have made lots of progress men are still strictly held to their historical gender role, and that the only way forward is to open up the roles available for men.
Homophobia leading to homosocial connections being stigmatized.
Men being objectified for their economic utility leading to them investing less in personal relationships and development.
The stereotype of men being dangerous, leading to aversion to people initiating connections with them and less receptiveness when they do attempt to initiate.
And, above all, the idea that men are hyperagents and thus always responsible for their own issues, and that society shouldn't do anything to help them.
Encourage nuclear families, marriage with children.
With that said, there seems to be some unique circumstances in Korea as it's not what I'd call a progressive culture and they have a very low birthrate.
Wouldn't it be the other way? If home ownership (and renting) became so expensive no one could possibly do it without multiple incomes people would be forced to find roommates.
> macroeconomic conditions such as soaring housing prices and intense employment pressure also come into play, forcing many people to give up trying to tie the knot
"Tying the knot" is not the same has having to find roommates. In general, one is often about supporting another as well as committing to a lifetime together. Neither of those have anything to do with finding roommates.
Progressives already support child and marriage tax benefits (and not limiting marriage benefits to different-sex couples) as well as long parental leaves, including for adoption.
Encouraging people to marry and have committed monogamous relationships. Create a stigma to encourage people to only have sex inside of committed marriage relationships so when they get older the have a lasting relationship with someone.
Also it's would help killing the sex trade as a young man will pe willing to pay for it via websites or in person, but don't form those long term relationships before it's too late.
Like I said in a sister comment, you have 108 male to 100 female at birth (correction: 105 to 100[0] in the US), so what do you do with the 'leftovers'?
And if some females don't want to play house now that they can survive on their own, do you force them to play?
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.
It sounds like you're suggesting the reason these people are struggling socially in middle age is that they were overly social as younger people. Seems unlikely to me.
“Admit” as in “enable social structures around,” not “confess to random strangers.”
As a concrete (and tiny) example: we enforce loneliness at the physical and policy levels by subsiding the construction of car-dependent suburbs: human socialization becomes defined by points of interaction (driving to the bowling alley, except you have no friends to bowl with), rather than transitory areas of interaction.
This is very different your original statement. Social structures that create loneliness are not the same as "stigmatizing" loneliness. And this doesn't explain how the supposed stigma around loneliness causes loneliness in men.
> Social structures that create loneliness are not the same as "stigmatizing" loneliness.
I didn't say that they were the same: I said that expressions of loneliness are stigmatized in men, and that we've developed social structures that create and enforce loneliness. They're separate points.
The stigma around loneliness doesn't as much cause loneliness as it ensures that the causes of loneliness can't be meaningfully ameliorated. To use a popular phrase: "the first step to recovery is admitting you have a problem."
I doubt that's the problem. It takes effort to go out and try to make friends. Even trying does not guarantee success. I'm barely thirty and I can't remember the last time I made a friend on my own. There are people in my orbit (family) who help me meet new people and stay connected. I'd be doing a really bad job without them.
My lonely friend who moved away regularly says he is lonely, but also hasn't really made any new friends where he lives. They decided to move to another state where there are more people who speak his wife's native language, but neither of them know anyone there, despite living there for a couple of years now. Knowing you are lonely and telling others you are lonely doesn't help if you don't have a support network or community.
These christian-adjacent solutions seem completely bizarre to me. They smell like solutions that have been worked backwards from ideology than actual data.
South Korea is a christian nation; forget prostitution, even pornography is banned in South Korea. South Korea, while being largely agnostic (~49%), is largely a christian nation by largest sect. If your prescriptions worked, South Korea would be a poster child for christian conservative values, but alas here we are reading about South Korean middle aged men.
I don't know what it is about the refusal acknowledge the clear economic failures happening right now and to completely ignore that those grievances of the progressive left while hyperfocusing on more feminist policies. People simply cannot afford to do anything other than work, and it's somehow shocking that people who spend all their time working don't have time to form meaningful relationships or even plan for children.
The monogamy argument is basically to force women into relationships with these men rather than using their current choice to not marry men they find undesirable.
Is there anyone you’ve ever met that you could imagine having sex with but wouldn’t want to be around for the rest of your life, linking your finances to, or raising children with? Think of how many times you’ve heard about someone changing after starting a relationship - whether that’s cheating, putting more effort into dating than they do to maintaining a relationship or, especially given the culture in question, thinking that the woman should be doing all of the domestic work and child rearing even if that means giving up career prospects?
That last part is really important to understand for these discussions: people sometimes talk about dating like a market but notice how rarely the proposed answer is helping men be better partners rather than pressuring women to accept less.
I think women benefit when they raise the standards on who they decide to sleep with. Women are pretty good at that when they want to, and men tend to benefit when women hold them to a higher standard.
> Encouraging people to marry and have committed monogamous relationships
Who told you that “the progressive left” opposes that? The major marriage-related shifts in the last century were expanding marriage benefits to everyone (interracial, homosexual) and opposition was distinctly right-wing.
Now, perhaps this was code for rolling back equal rights so more women would be pressured to enter into or remain in unsatisfactory marriages but as we saw that’s a recipe for more rather than less unhappiness.
> Who told you that “the progressive left” opposes that?
> Now, perhaps this was code for…
Yes, what they probably mean by “Encouraging people to marry and have committed monogamous relationships” is “stigmatize, vilify, and legally disincentivize or even prohibit things with don’t fall into ‘traditional’ monogamous (and presumably heterosexual) marriage.” Which many on the progressive left would indeed oppose.
It’s really interesting seeing the intersection of people who talk about marriage as both the bedrock of society and something which isn’t desirable enough to survive without massive social pressure. Having been happily married for a long time that view seems bizarre to me but I know many people who hold it.
I don't support doing that myself, but if you look at the US two of the demographics with the highest reproduction rates are Mormons and Hispanic Catholics. Both follow religious prohibitions against birth control. The progressive left firmly supports the right to an abortion as well as the right to use contraceptives so that answers your question.
From a demographic standpoint what's basically happening in the US is atheist liberals are wringing their hands and dying childless as various religious people produce the next generation that will replace them (Muslims have a very high birth rate too).
All that said, the article was about South Korea which has very different politics. In South Korea I don't think there is a big left/right divide over this and the main issue is probably that they're working themselves to death instead of having kids.
One solution that the progressive left would surely not oppose would be reducing maximum acceptable work hours, cracking down on business forcing employees to work long hours on a daily basis. It wrecks social life. It's worse now that it became unacceptable to try fulfill some social needs at work. For example, trying to date coworkers became almost automatically equated to sexual harassment or stalking.
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?
I think you should spend less time worrying about the progressive left and more time trying to ensure you don't end up sharing the fate TFA is talking about.
Just so we are clear here, are you suggesting we reinstate the patriarchy so that more women are forced into marriage with men they hate so that less lonely men will be found badly decomposed?
GP thinks we should go back to religions that teach people to have as many kids as possible and to subjugate women, as they do in conservative countries. He didn't get the memo that the fertility rate in UAE is now 1.37.
The nuclear family was already a postwar, industrial era, departure from traditional family values. Traditional societies almost universally prioritize multigenerational households.
"Multigenerational households" doesn't really describe what we're moving towards, though. We're going from larger to progressively smaller household units. Nuclear families were an unfortunate step of this atomization, and now even they are being broken down further.
Not really. Many men are just downright unpleasant to know, yet alone have relationships with. The ugly head was when women were forced into relationships with these men.
What's up with these comments that are completely detached from any aspects of South Korea? Do they look at the phrases "middle aged men" and "lonely death", and just go auto-pilot on political rants?
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 think he doesn't want the people who eventually find him to have to deal with a decayed corpse, so they'll hop into a top-loaded freezer when they feel death is near to save them the hassle.
I agree that it's geared more towards voluntary departure. So it's not a fix-all for the entirety of the problem mentioned in the article but some of the deaths the article talks about are suicides. Given that we are talking about middle aged lonely men I'd guess it might be a significant part.
They plan on taking their “long nap” in a chest freezer, with electrical bills prepaid so the freezer (hopefully) doesn’t lose power before someone finds their frozen body.
But like how would one know they are going to die and crawl in? That sounds impossible and/or extremely painful. You could die 20 years ahead of time this way. A better solution seems to be something like a Fitbit or Apple Watch with a dead man’s switch feature that calls in every day. But honestly this all seems like an absurd thing to worry about.
> But like how would one know they are going to die and crawl in?
It does not seem like a very practical idea, no.
A practical non-social solution would be like triggering a timer when the door is locked from the inside. If it is not re-triggered in three days the timer sounds a fire alarm, or something.
Hook up an apple watch or similar device to you while you live in the freezer that isn't turned on. Perhaps you just sleep in it. API call triggers if you die and it turns on, sends money to your utility provider from your bank.
Oh I definitely do not trust technology enough for that. Blue screen of death comes to mind. :)
Sometimes I wonder if the whole generation that experienced how bad Windows could be has a healthy dose of skepticism for technology. Younger people that have had phones that are much more reliable (and locked down) seem to be the ones I can imagine sleeping in a Tesla with the FSD on.
I’m pretty sure there is one reliable way to predict one’s death, and I figure that’s the insinuation here. You’d need to be sure that someone would come looking for you before the power runs out otherwise it just a delay. My plan is to take increasingly death defying risks until my number comes up, that or paddle out into the ocean with a boat full of home made explosives.
You think your demise will wait for you to step into the fridge? Rather than making these arrangements wouldn’t it be easier to connect to people in the same predicament and check on eachother from time to time?
Would it not be easier to use some method that doesn't cause a mess and to automate an email or text message to your local police department/paramedic etc with details on what you've done and how to locate your body? Sounds preferable to leaving it to chance whilst your body is in a freezer for n years.
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.
Religion has many positive benefits on society. We minister to those within our own congregation and are aware of individuals needs. A sense of community is fostered and people are concerned about more than themselves. Perhaps the pendulum will swing back to people discovering religion?
Or a volunteer. The issue with communities based on a religion is that they often tend to be exclusionary towards those who might live in the same area but not share the same beliefs. There are better ways and those don't require religion.
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.
> But you also have to realize that belief is also a choice
Depends on what you mean by "belief."
I don't think "belief" as "perceived model / understood facts about the universe" is a choice any more than you decide what you see or hear or otherwise perceive. Maybe at margins where things are unclear.
"Belief" in a way-of-being / life path like "I believe that if I live this way, I'll see these results" probably involves a fair bit of choice. This is probably why the word "faith" exists and where it's most useful and may even be why it's associated with religious communities.
(There may be also be a middle ground where one decides reading only religious worldview-affirming material and avoid worldview-eroding discussion is likely to produce best outcomes and has the epistemic boundaries of all the material they take in set accordingly, and I guess that's a 2nd-to-nth order choice about belief)
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.
Religion looks around at everything and asks ‘is this all meaningful or not?’
Religion says ‘yes’ and the doubt is bridged by faith (as is all doubt, since most of human life has necessary doubt that can’t be proven one way or the other).
Some people say that having meaning/doubt is delusional.
If only we could do it in a way that doesn't involve make-believe sky deities and cult leadership going mad with power, like the average mass religion does.
I see where you're coming from, but I hope that we'll find many and better ways of building such communities, without the need for religion. Religion can be used as a tool of inclusion or exclusion.
Don't get me wrong, I'm glad that works for you. We need to see, feel something bigger than us.
It also has many negative impacts. A sense of community does not need to be associated with any religion. When these two things are seen as one this provides a very exploitable relationship.
This is absolutely not true for every case - many religious organisations of all types do incredible work for communities. This does not imply the religion is the cause for that good though, it's normally just genuinely good people behind that org.
I'm part of a religious community, and while I agree that community and a sense of mutual care can arise from religious beliefs... the idea that it's the answer seems pretty iffy to me, especially considering that religious communities appear to have their own isolating failure modes. It's a bit like saying "capitalism is good at taking care of people's needs"; it's actually true in many cases, not super helpful in others. And religion isn't exactly hidden as a solution.
Society-wide I think revitalization of all kinds of half-forgotten communal institutions in the image of the bowling league or the fraternal organization could have some benefits. Churches too, but if the one I belong to is any indication, they could stand to help most by "first wash[ing] the inside of the cup and the dish" -- spend less time trying to remind people of church-relevance and affirming the worldview, and more time making their own community glow more brightly with the warmth/fruits the faith is supposed to produce.
Why can people only imagine building communities around religion and family? There are other options available that don't tend to be so hateful towards people they don't understand. For example, Epicurus proposed living in communes with friends and that seemed to work well.
I was going to suggest calling on people who haven't used their phone in a while, but there it was in the article.
Anyway, a better solution would be for people to have some kind of neighbourhood association so that they can interact and support each other. I don't know Koreans to assess if this would be possible.
How about middle aged women? Surely their birthrate sex ratio isn't exponentially bias to men. Also polygamy where a man having multiple wives (or mistresses) isn't a culture there.
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[ 5.2 ms ] story [ 245 ms ] threadThe solution to thirst isn't to provide water because the thirsty are clearly not strong enough to find water. This is brutal, I know, but thirst is unfortunately the reality of life on earth. No reason why people should be exempt.
That is the way it’s always been and is currently - I highly doubt any real “solution” exists outside of home health care robots or automated wellness checks
So.
Given men are also bad at maintaining relationships, I wonder if something like different, more communal living arrangements would be beneficial. I am thinking something like a dorm, but more luxurious with the common areas being more of a focus.
An idea that might accelerate overcoming the initial familiarity barrier might be something like the "question to fall in love" that made their rounds a few years back. I've seen a speed-dating version of similar, increasingly intimate questions build enormous feeling of trust within ~30 minutes as an icebreaker at a T-Group.
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. Basically what traditional groups like church or brotherhoods like the freemasons did. Currently, however, there is a stigma against those things which has to be overcome
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?
Could be it's like how younger people shied away from Facebook to Instagram, and then the even younger people hopped onto Tiktok.
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.
Stuff like:
> 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.
What?
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
I had direct experience with the growth issues facing a traditional fraternal organization. We can't really use the words we mean when we talk about the jargon this comment uses, but suffice it to say, among the scores of men I know socially, the people who use that jargon are punchlines.
Any barrier you might see right now is the consequence of the cultural switch to individualism, and that again is a direct consequence of the transition to market based economies.
The extreme focus on nuclear family is very recent, less than 200 years.
It turns out that many animals, particularly mammals and including us, have evolved this behavior where they live with their blood relatives and take care of them, it has worked pretty well for millions of years.
Now it so happens that in many modern human societies there's a declining birth rate and consequently fewer families are being formed. South Korea's one of the worst off in this regard. You end up with a lot of people being alone and dying alone (the majority are male but women are far from immune).
Why are people not starting families? Well I haven't seen Korea-specific information but I think it's the same as most countries, people typically cite medical and financial reasons.
So basically you have to address cost of living, cost of raising a kid and rising infertility to address this, among other things.
However for a number of societies including Korea's it's probably too late. Koreans can't have more families and your solution probably won't work either. The reason is that the demographic collapse is so extreme, the population is increasingly too old to produce a new generation or take care of other people. There just aren't enough young people to go around. These societies either have to accept mass immigration or collapse. The next few decades will be interesting.
Also keep in mind that , particularly for men, the nuclear family living was not the norm until the past few generations. Men used to spent most of their time in men/gentlement's spaces socializing/doing business while the wife was at home with kids. This 'loneliness' thing happens because those other spaces are gone now
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 illustration: https://ourworldindata.org/global-population-pyramid
This is referred to as an inverted population pyramid but really it ends up looking more like a bell. The world used to have lots of young people and not many old people. The flattening of the peak which has happened in only 30 years is stunning! This will keep getting worse until the end of the century.
Korea's population pyramid looks way worse than the one I linked above by the way. From age 60 down it actually is inverted. Again, there are no young people left to do the caretaking you envision. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_South_Korea#/m...
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?
Big cities are filled with highly educated white collar serfs (sorry I mean professionals) who are great human resources.
In rural communities- the birth rate is way higher.
So what are you getting at?
You'd have to go full Taliban/Gilead and cut off education/take the decades to brainwash the girls. It'd take a few generations before (most of) the women would comply, so none of the men arguing for it now would even benefit.
Which is why I'm convinced it's all an edgy LARP - the right wing version of 18 and 19 year old undergraduate anti-capitalists who can't tell you what capitalism actually IS. (I'm anti-capitalist myself but they make my side look bad...)
The reason there are lots of lonely men out there is because they self-radicalize themselves on garbage ideology like this, and it becomes impossible for them to form relationships or integrate into society.
Basically selecting themselves out of the gene pool by being fucking idiots.
If you focus on the economic issues - especially those of inequality, it seems to me you would fix far more issues than focusing on social ones. Unfortunately, the "progressive left" is the only political sect that seems to care about these issues but the economic issues don't get nearly the same airtime as the social ones. Drag shows seem to get 1000x the coverage than unions.
This isn't true. The corporate and professional managerial class are not the same people unionizing coffeeshops and railroads. This is a elite backed misdirection in the same vein that focuses drag shows.
It's difficult to take people seriously when those same "corporate and professional managerial class" are called the "progressive left" while be simultaneously anti-union. Must of what you call "the progressive left" are also just anti-religious conservatives (or left-leaning libertarians at best).
Homophobia leading to homosocial connections being stigmatized.
Men being objectified for their economic utility leading to them investing less in personal relationships and development.
The stereotype of men being dangerous, leading to aversion to people initiating connections with them and less receptiveness when they do attempt to initiate.
And, above all, the idea that men are hyperagents and thus always responsible for their own issues, and that society shouldn't do anything to help them.
With that said, there seems to be some unique circumstances in Korea as it's not what I'd call a progressive culture and they have a very low birthrate.
And do you want to force those 100 female to each marry a guy, even if they don't want to?
> macroeconomic conditions such as soaring housing prices and intense employment pressure also come into play, forcing many people to give up trying to tie the knot
https://www.scmp.com/economy/china-economy/article/3204140/y...
https://www.wsj.com/articles/inflation-driven-record-rents-m...
Also it's would help killing the sex trade as a young man will pe willing to pay for it via websites or in person, but don't form those long term relationships before it's too late.
And if some females don't want to play house now that they can survive on their own, do you force them to play?
[0] https://www.who.int/data/maternal-newborn-child-adolescent-a...
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.
Stigmatization itself is the root of the problem here: lonely people, and particular men, do not want to admit that they are lonely.
As a concrete (and tiny) example: we enforce loneliness at the physical and policy levels by subsiding the construction of car-dependent suburbs: human socialization becomes defined by points of interaction (driving to the bowling alley, except you have no friends to bowl with), rather than transitory areas of interaction.
I didn't say that they were the same: I said that expressions of loneliness are stigmatized in men, and that we've developed social structures that create and enforce loneliness. They're separate points.
The stigma around loneliness doesn't as much cause loneliness as it ensures that the causes of loneliness can't be meaningfully ameliorated. To use a popular phrase: "the first step to recovery is admitting you have a problem."
My lonely friend who moved away regularly says he is lonely, but also hasn't really made any new friends where he lives. They decided to move to another state where there are more people who speak his wife's native language, but neither of them know anyone there, despite living there for a couple of years now. Knowing you are lonely and telling others you are lonely doesn't help if you don't have a support network or community.
South Korea is a christian nation; forget prostitution, even pornography is banned in South Korea. South Korea, while being largely agnostic (~49%), is largely a christian nation by largest sect. If your prescriptions worked, South Korea would be a poster child for christian conservative values, but alas here we are reading about South Korean middle aged men.
I don't know what it is about the refusal acknowledge the clear economic failures happening right now and to completely ignore that those grievances of the progressive left while hyperfocusing on more feminist policies. People simply cannot afford to do anything other than work, and it's somehow shocking that people who spend all their time working don't have time to form meaningful relationships or even plan for children.
That last part is really important to understand for these discussions: people sometimes talk about dating like a market but notice how rarely the proposed answer is helping men be better partners rather than pressuring women to accept less.
Who told you that “the progressive left” opposes that? The major marriage-related shifts in the last century were expanding marriage benefits to everyone (interracial, homosexual) and opposition was distinctly right-wing.
Now, perhaps this was code for rolling back equal rights so more women would be pressured to enter into or remain in unsatisfactory marriages but as we saw that’s a recipe for more rather than less unhappiness.
> Now, perhaps this was code for…
Yes, what they probably mean by “Encouraging people to marry and have committed monogamous relationships” is “stigmatize, vilify, and legally disincentivize or even prohibit things with don’t fall into ‘traditional’ monogamous (and presumably heterosexual) marriage.” Which many on the progressive left would indeed oppose.
I don't support doing that myself, but if you look at the US two of the demographics with the highest reproduction rates are Mormons and Hispanic Catholics. Both follow religious prohibitions against birth control. The progressive left firmly supports the right to an abortion as well as the right to use contraceptives so that answers your question.
From a demographic standpoint what's basically happening in the US is atheist liberals are wringing their hands and dying childless as various religious people produce the next generation that will replace them (Muslims have a very high birth rate too).
All that said, the article was about South Korea which has very different politics. In South Korea I don't think there is a big left/right divide over this and the main issue is probably that they're working themselves to death instead of having kids.
LDS fertility has dropped to replacement level rates. Church membership has been dropping, as well.
https://religionnews.com/2019/06/15/the-incredible-shrinking...
Latino birth rates have been declining as well-
https://thehill.com/changing-america/well-being/longevity/58...
> Muslims have a very high birth rate too
Muslims are not a monolithic bloc.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jun/15/iran-bans-vase...
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-04-01/while-asi...
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?
It does not seem like a very practical idea, no.
A practical non-social solution would be like triggering a timer when the door is locked from the inside. If it is not re-triggered in three days the timer sounds a fire alarm, or something.
Sometimes I wonder if the whole generation that experienced how bad Windows could be has a healthy dose of skepticism for technology. Younger people that have had phones that are much more reliable (and locked down) seem to be the ones I can imagine sleeping in a Tesla with the FSD on.
But the ventilation required to live in it would mess up energy efficiency and cutting out the air on timer seems a bit risky.
Set it to minimum temperature if the timer isn't reset after 12h.
I am an ardent atheist, but this aspect of religion makes me wish I too was delusional.
Depends on what you mean by "belief."
I don't think "belief" as "perceived model / understood facts about the universe" is a choice any more than you decide what you see or hear or otherwise perceive. Maybe at margins where things are unclear.
"Belief" in a way-of-being / life path like "I believe that if I live this way, I'll see these results" probably involves a fair bit of choice. This is probably why the word "faith" exists and where it's most useful and may even be why it's associated with religious communities.
(There may be also be a middle ground where one decides reading only religious worldview-affirming material and avoid worldview-eroding discussion is likely to produce best outcomes and has the epistemic boundaries of all the material they take in set accordingly, and I guess that's a 2nd-to-nth order choice about belief)
Religion says ‘yes’ and the doubt is bridged by faith (as is all doubt, since most of human life has necessary doubt that can’t be proven one way or the other).
Some people say that having meaning/doubt is delusional.
Don't get me wrong, I'm glad that works for you. We need to see, feel something bigger than us.
This is absolutely not true for every case - many religious organisations of all types do incredible work for communities. This does not imply the religion is the cause for that good though, it's normally just genuinely good people behind that org.
Society-wide I think revitalization of all kinds of half-forgotten communal institutions in the image of the bowling league or the fraternal organization could have some benefits. Churches too, but if the one I belong to is any indication, they could stand to help most by "first wash[ing] the inside of the cup and the dish" -- spend less time trying to remind people of church-relevance and affirming the worldview, and more time making their own community glow more brightly with the warmth/fruits the faith is supposed to produce.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kg_47J6sy3A
Anyway, a better solution would be for people to have some kind of neighbourhood association so that they can interact and support each other. I don't know Koreans to assess if this would be possible.
Someone gave you the most precious gift of all: Life. It is your responsibility and duty to do the same.