Comment by willmadden | Hacker News Reader

Comment by willmadden | Hacker News Reader

I'm curious how this comment will go over ;).

The answer is not "tinder" and it's not about "sexual loneliness".

Pair bonding weakens as people age and accumulate more sexual partners. We actively encourage people to delay pair bonding - mainly by discouraging "high school sweethearts" from marrying, and instead promoting college and pursuing careers over building families. This leads to atomized, lonely individuals who realize later in life what they missed out on, but now with the odds of age stacked against them. Even if you do find your partner in college, you now have families in vastly different geographic areas with different histories and values, which weakens the support structure around that union. In the majority of cases this is not a positive thing for the couple.

Pornography is also a problem, as it misdirects individuals' sex drive away from finding suitable partners.

The pendulum needs to swing back towards more traditional values from when our societies were healthier and growing. Those values exist for a reason!

I also feel that we'd be better off as a society if we emphasized and encouraged building strong inter-personal relationships over "pursuing a career", but appealing to tradition isn't a great argument. Building a strong social sense of unity and cohesion is good enough for me. On the other hand, "those values exist for a reason" is just as convincing as "we got rid of those values for a reason". Our societies also grew a lot with the help of slavery and child labor, but I doubt you'd see that as a good reason to bring those back.

>Our societies also grew a lot with the help of slavery and child labor

I'm not advocating for slavery or child labor. I'm advocating for prioritizing healthy pair bonding and acknowledging that this is more likely to happen earlier in life. The "population crisis" in Japan and other countries in the West is self inflicted. We actively promote decisions that do not lead to healthy families for the majority of people. It's lead to a reproductive rate well below replacement levels and far, far too many single parent households. It's not a mystery.

I wasn't implying you were advocating for that, I agree with you, I was just pointing out that justifying your position by appealing to tradition is not helpful in convincing others (though it is great for virtue signaling).

On the Japan note, I actually did an internship in Japan over the summer a few years back and the work-life balance I saw there was actually depressing. Lots has been written about Japanese work culture (and I've heard Korean work culture is similar), but thankfully, I don't see the US quite getting to that point. If anything, we're pushing firmly in the opposite direction. Most people I personally know (in software engineering) hold a healthy work-life balance and are all the happier for it.

Japan's issues with reproduction seem to mostly stem from that, but the source of the problem in the US to me seems to be either overly-high expectations or over-correcting cynicism, both influenced by pop culture. On one hand, we have groups who believe fervently that "perfection" as seen in movies is realistic and are disappointed constantly by reality. On the other hand, people who have grown disillusioned with the world see everything as a chance for disappointment and avoid commitment to anything, leading to self-sabotage.

Humans emulate what they perceive to be successful as a survival mechanism.

The overwhelming majority of people do not differentiate video entertainment from reality in this regard. They "know" video entertainment is fiction, but subconsciously they still strive to attain what is presented to them as successful within video media. Every marketing person knows this, but it's far more insidious than convincing you to buy a salad spinner with free shipping.

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