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Comment by mhitza | Hacker News Reader

The potential speculations already listed in the article sound like enough reasons.

How about you corelate this with cost of living, financial independece, and decreasing socialisation? We are seeing similar trends in european countries.

When my generation was growing up, and reaching adulthood, in the late 90s early 2000s while our own teens didn't have places where to get intimate, outdoor sex was way more common than it is today!

Who in their right mind would do so today when you can't even pick your nose without being caught by some random outside camera or mobile phone.

Maybe think radically and enforce the opposit of curfews whereas old parents living with their young adults are forced to hang outside at bars/clubs from 10pm to 9am to give their youth some breathing room :))

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I don't think people have sex or not because the cost of living. Poor people have had plenty of sex in the past. I think modern society is more occupying and people just interact less in a romantic sense because they are getting attention drained, in the same way a vampire drains your blood. We relieved the hard labor from peoples life but we also replaced it with attention suction devices that occupied peoples hours at much higher rates.

If you were a peasant in 1300s you worked hard probably 8-12 hours a day but once it was dark or the winter what you did radically changed because you couldn't see. It was just hanging out with people or going to bed, or other indoor task that usually involved other people or being around a limited light source. Those were the options of which one is kind of boring after a while. You'd thus interact with people and by interacting you'd end up having sex because it was fun when compared with doing anything else. Porn also didn't really exist so that as an outlet was basically zero so I'd attribute that to part of the attention occupying culture we have today

Of course it a multi-faceted problem, and I think my comment draws similar lines because I did not draw it out as the sole reason.

Modern media, and it's addiction is also a separate corelateable aspect.

Agree. Its grand theft auto and pornhub. Easily r#sponsible dropping the average children per woman by a whole child

I’m glad you censored r*sponsible.

I don’t think it’s video games though, they tend to be intensive experiences that are only sustainable for a few hours at most - I don’t think most young adults are whiling away their lives playing GTA (although some certainly do). I think the constant dopamine microdosing from social media that’s the much larger issue - it makes everything ever so paler in comparison, especially over time. Porn is a similar kind of dopamine hit (maybe akin to a vodka shot while social media is a dripfeed of wine), so I do agree with you there.

I didnt censor it, i juat suck at typing (n a phone. I think you underestimate how much sex happens because there isnt something else eat*ng up the time, especially in a m(nogamousish relationship over age 25.

Honestly R*pon*blity is probably not the word I'd use (but i get it) because, the addiction we are describing is stocastic. The timings between notifications for activity x/y/z is engineered to break down people. And it really is X/Y/Z not just porn or games, I was trying do draw the abstract idea of attention drain specifically engineered and designed. Dopamine micro dosing definitely reinforce that behavior. I don't know the solution is.

“Planet Japan” is where we are headed it seems. Japan got there first.

All these trends are happening everywhere to varying degrees with less developed places like much of Africa simply earlier on the curve but following the same trajectory.

So where does it end? I’m skeptical of population doomerism but shrinking population, like too rapid population growth, creates economic and social problems.

On the other hand if we are about to automate tons of stuff it means we need less humans to run things, and if medicine keeps getting better longer life and health spans somewhat offset lower birth rates.

One danger of aging population that doesn't get acknowledged often is that as the population ages, so does their voting and investment behavior.

Older people take less risks and it will reflect in funding available to innovation. Of course it will fall on the younger generation to support the older, but they will have less and less say in what goes on, and will have less opportunities to prove themselves.

There is no way this will end well.

Maybe risk aversion in general, driven by ageing population, culturally feeds into less socialising and less sex too. I personally don't bye the economic explainations at all

The youth revolts in france and albania are just the beginning. It would be nice for Americans to remember the balls they had in the 70s- plenty of things they can fix. Esp now that they can leverage ai to amplify their message and fight all the noise they are being fed

- Population declines until most of the cameras are just filming empty space all day with no human activity.

- Eventually cameras break and nobody (or no bots?) replace them because there wasn't anything interesting being recorded, so why bother

- Then the few people who remain start having sex in those now un-surveilled places

Maybe make it illegal to publish a video of someone without their consent.

That will stop it surely

That doesn't work, at the very least, for two simple reasons.

First that you can't attest who filmed something without a lot of effort that law enforcement for sure won't bother with.

In many countries caught doing such activities in public spaces falls under public indecent exposure, if not something more draconian that puts you on a sex offender list. Morally people will feel obliged to report it there.

Can't attest who murdered someone or stole something or drew graffiti either, but making it illegal makes it happen a lot less, because of the chance that someone actually can attest it.

For example if you post it to Instagram or YouTube they'd know it was you, and you could go to jail.

So you go have a shag in an alley and I'll stumble upon you and your partner with my camera. How will you know I published it and where? Maybe I'll just upload it to some seedy website that you never visit.

I don't think "if you can't do it perfectly, always, you shouldn't even try" is a very good argument against nearly anything, and it certainly isn't engaging with the substance of the discussion.

It's almost like there's a spectrum of things. Some that you'll never catch and some that you will with reasonable effort. Where the above falls in this spectrum is clear, and should be thought about accordingly.

If I never find out, I care a lot less, this law just makes it your problem if it manages to impact my life.

You could find about it after 1, 2, 3 years or a decade. A person you know might find it and use it to blackmail you. Lots of potential for damage.

Fortunately, if someone is blackmailing you, that is a crime and you can use the police to send them to jail, as well as whoever posted it.

Yeah. Like if I break into you house and take two non-matching socks and leave quietly, how will you know that I did?

People steal, assault and even murder people and film themselves doing it and publish it on the internet.

And it's always very useful in their own prosecution.

But the point is that that's AFTER the crime, so doesn't stop it.

Or a civil liability for you and/or the platform. That and taxing advertising and heavily taxing anything that looks like gambling (very short term speculation) would solve a lot of problems.

> while our own teens didn't have places where to get intimate, outdoor sex was way more common than it is today!

I just dont think teen outdoor sex is the thing that should come back.

It was a funny annecdote that I felt like sharing. In principle searching for solutions in the way things where done in the past is generally not a good approach.

The lesson there is still that given people more room for privacy is a factor, hence the radical (and absurd) proposal at the end.

For a different annecdote, my country also complains about constantly decreasing natality, but never celebrates decreased teen pregnancy. In fact we have right-wing parties that consider anything related to sex education, a problem.

Why not? Access to birth control has never been better in most places, and they deserve some fun before we "adults" destroy their future and maybe their lives.

Teens having outdoor sex happen to be correlated with teens not using protection.

And conversely, teaching them about protection and sex lowers their outdoor sex and random sex tendencies. Consistently.

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