Does this weird anyone else out? Graduated HS in 1989 and it seemed like we were all fucking, even the nerds. I’m short and scrawny, still tripped and fell into pussy now and again.
There’s something really alarming about this, can’t put my finger on it. It’s certainly weird that today’s young people aren’t fucking when we were going nuts during the AIDS epidemic, risking our lives for that cookie. Sex is such a basic human need I can’t imagine what going without is doing to mental health.
It think that rather than early - really early - exposure to porn turning everyone into sex-fiends, it’s actually terrifying a lot of them. What if I don’t want to gargle cum like Adriana Chechik? What if I don’t have a 10 inch cock to stuff my stepmother with?
A more optimistic reading might be that masturbating is easier, freer, quicker, and more accepted than ever before. Rather than risk an STI, pregnancy or human relationship, just crank one out and get back to work.
Even the boys I knew in high school already had messed up ideas about sex from porn, and that was 20 years ago.
I never got into visual porn, which made for confusing experiences dating guys who knew little else, in my teens and early 20s. Aside from the obvious confusion that brought to the bedroom about what we were expecting, it was surprising how many guys had perfectly wonderful bodies yet thought they were inadequate. One guy had a 8.5" (21cm)* long dick and still thought it wasn’t big enough. I told him, “Dude, you repeatedly stab my cervix. Trust me, you’re big enough.”
It seems that dick insecurity is really common, and that no one size is immune, no matter what partners tell them.
it seemed like we were all fucking, even the nerds
Checking in as a nerd who went to high school in the 00’s. Yes, we were still fucking then. Especially the marching band nerds. Don’t get me started on what people got up to on our long bus trips…
LOL my god you band fags were THIRSTY. (Archie Bunker voice: What?! That’s what we called them people in dose days!) One of my band friends was little Miss Christian, plainly dressed, straight A kinda kid, raspy voice from an emergency tracheotomy.
One day in advanced European history, hissing at me, “Have you tried tying Debbie (my gf) up?! Steve tied me to the bed and it was awesome! Railed my brains out!” “👀 Uh, yeah, we tried that and loved it!” Next thing we’re comparing notes on knots and BDSM techniques. “Couldn’t get away, right?” Then class started. Back to business!
Still laugh my ass off at the American Pie band camp chick! Yes kids, we did that shit.
LOL, first time I got my finger wet was at a church camp retreat. They had to know what was going to happen if you throw a bunch of 14-17yo kids in sleeping bags and turn the lights off. Movie night at the church down the street was date night! Yeah, just going to throw this blanket over us. It’s cold, OK?!"
What i have found consistently so far is that in church related environments, adolescent sexuality is accepted (as long as you don’t talk about it or are queer) more than the otherwise prudish tendencies would make one expect. i wonder about why that is.
Well that’s an eye-opening thought! Yeah, we teens didn’t give two shits about religion, youth group was for meeting girls and boys. And it worked! And now you got me thinking, the adults had to know.
Maybe the idea was that we could get our hormones on without actual sex. Not like I was railing Jenny in the Methodist rumpus room. That came later.
If you’re over 40 how many times did you get laid because “One thing led to another”? Like you ever chill and vibe so hard with someone you feel the need to fuck about it?
In the tail end of my singleness I found that I was able to have more and better conversations with women online or via txt/dm because we could share things and experiences without being in the same room… But we werent in the same room, to shoot your shot you had to arrange something, give them a chance to overthink it, give yourself a chance to overthink it, sort out the scheduling issues, work out transport and then hopefully when you get into the same room still have the same magic going on.
When we were bored we hung out to not be bored, sometimes that led to fucking.
It’s certainly weird that today’s young people aren’t fucking when we were going nuts during the AIDS epidemic
I am certainly not normal enough to represent anyone else here, but while not HIV, I do fear HPV (the sexually-transmitted strains).
My parents did not get me vaccinated against it when it would have been covered by insurance, because… because.
So, some quick overview from my mind which you shouldn’t trust as a source of information: Often marketed as something to protect women from cervical cancer, thus being reduced to “the vaccine for girls”. That’s often the view of public even now that it is also recommended to boys, which wasn’t always the case. Even then, the reason often ended up being not spreading HPV onto women. People being stupid -> Either “I have a boy, so it doesn’t matter.” or “I raised my girl well, she won’t need it.”
Well anyway, for men, throat cancer, anal cancer and penile cancer sound pretty relevant.
Speaking of penile cancer, yesterday I came across photo of a man who got large cancerous growth on his trunk as a result of HPV, and had to undergone penectomy (i.e. bye dickie), plus the radiation therapy went wrong causing large burns.
All in all, basically a cancer vaccine, only effective if you didn’t come into contact with HPV, which most sexually active people do, also why it’s typically only given to kids.
So, moving on, Gardasil-9 protects against 9 high-risk strains. Doesn’t sound like a bad idea even if you had sex, likely you haven’t collected all 9 yet. But certainly best before.
So, 3 doses, 2nd after 2, 3rd after 6 months. I think they take around a month to become effective, so I guess 7 months for total vaccination. Paid by patient, almost 400 EUR for all 3 doses as far as I could find in my country.
So, not like I could get any regardless, but safer sex would cost me 7 months of waiting and almost 400 EUR while I am about to start college and make 4.70 EUR per hour. And it cannot be fully done retroactively later (after activity). It’s also good to have saved some money. If my laptop or phone breaks, I need a replacement immediately (and I sure as fuck want another convertible ThinkPad).
Paid by patient, almost 400 EUR for all 3 doses as far as I could find in my country.
Whoa. As an American who got the Gardasil vaccine for free in my 20s, this feels really weird. Paying for preventive medicine sounds like something I’d expect around here. I was in the notoriously-backwards state of Florida and had already been sexually active for several years, yet the vaccine was still covered for me.
That absolutely sucks. Though thinking about it, the vaccine had only just come out when I was already an adult. It’s possible I was “grandfathered in” because the opportunity wasn’t there when I was younger.
Yet there are so many kids with anti-vaxxer parents, it doesn’t seem right to deny the opportunity to young adults who finally have the chance to make their own health decisions. There’s no reason an 18 year old should be assumed to automatically be exposed to HPV. A lot of people are still virgins then. It’s such bullshit how much power insurance companies wield, despite them knowing far less than a patient’s own doctor knows.
So thankful that vaccine came out! Got genital warts in the 90s, had 'em burned off a couple of times, EXTREMELY painfully. Never passed 'em on, but I would happily have avoided that mess. And fuck me, we had no idea of the cancer risks. Everyone needs that shot.
Also, caught crabs, TWICE, didn’t even get laid. :( Slept in dad’s guest room after his friend was there the previous night, came back on me a month later. Now there’s talk of the little fuckers going extinct!
Still, those vaccines should be free. Your story and numbers make me sad. We could wipe that shit out in a single generation!
Check if your insurance refunds the cost. In Germany, it’s only paid directly by the insurance for kids, but many insurances refund a large portion of the cost if you get it before you’re 25-ish.
My hypothesis is the decline is caused by a multifaceted change in environment:
cost of living crisis caused by inflation, folks are making only about 1/3rd what their grandparents made for the same labor
debt crisis caused by the above, crippling debt causes anxiety
educational treadmill, folks are working harder for top jobs, so schooling takes longer and is much harder
hormonal crisis, many young women are on hormonal birth control which is well known to significantly reduce libido in a large percentage of the population
food supply crisis, cheap, poor quality highly-processed food make folks just slightly less healthy all the time, possibly can affect libido with lowered testosterone caused by preservatives
social media crisis, evolution caused us to want to be nosy about 70 members of our tribe, not hundreds of millions. Social media is causing us to have the social equivalent of Daredevil’s acute hearing, but it’s addicting so folks can’t easily shut it off (as I write on social media…)
fitness crisis, many folks just aren’t healthy enough to lift and run, so they have less testosterone which lowers libido for everyone regardless of sex/gender
reproductive fear, folks realize they have it bad with little hope of improvement, so they don’t want the same for their offspring
perfectionism causing a lack of confidence, being able to see the best in the world at any second on your phone causes acute perfectionism that prevents folks from even trying. Look up rates of musical instrument playing to see how few are even starting compared to 20 years ago. Skills in an area lead to increased confidence which makes a person more confident
protective parenting combined with extremely restrictive schooling, leads to less “free time” where folks can hang out and build social skills
hyper niche porn on demand, every person can access the porn of their choice on demand at all times. This causes unrealistic tastes and lack of confidence.
infection fears, everyone is taught from a young age to be afraid of STDs and pregnancy, so it’s a looming fear in many
entertainment quality, we’ve created the most addicting games, movies, shows, and apps. These make it more interesting to sit and zone out than socialize
anxiety/depression crisis from the above leads to a population with lower libido, SSRIs are well known to reduce libido in a large subset of the population
All in all, we’ve got a society that is nearly perfectly designed to reduce libido in the population. Those that manage to avoid or ignore these challenges find a very small dating pool compared to decades past. Those that pair off are less likely to have offspring, such that we will likely have a population collapse in the next hundred years. Hopefully by then have figured enough of this out that we build a society that makes it easy to be a human who finds joy and love in other humans and not in a screen.
I’d say 10% not fucking is pretty standard/average and your thinking you were all (100%) doing it is either clouded by your own experiences or you grew up in a very liberal community where it deviates.
Why its rising is questionable. Personally, I’d say its due to rising depression rates… well, it correlates at least.
Speculating wildly, I think it was a lot more common back then for teenagers to just disappear off for hours on end without their parents knowing where they were.
what i have come to realize is how much different people’s view on sexuality differs.
Everybody thinks their own emotions are absolute and the way that everybody sees it; though that is not true at all. A very clear example of this is how different people are attracted to different kinds of people. It’s not only about being gay or not, it’s also that there’s a huge number of people who are either asexual or rather prudish to the extent that they basically don’t have sex outside of very narrowly-defined contexts.
This has been a huge surprise for me to learn about since my own instinct is the opposite: sexuality is what keeps the society together, what facilitates the exchange of people and causes relationships. without sexuality, a lot of things wouldn’t work or work only very slowly.
i’m nowadays also convinced that it is strongly related to the weather/climate of the region. areas like italy and france have a significantly higher tendency towards sexuality than northern regions, which tend to be rather prudish, i guess.
I am appalled at the fact that some people have casual sex with people they don’t intend to marry. That’s insane! But also yeah that’s the infinity of human expression, people are just all kinds of different.
I think the far-right “manosphere” influencers are a good indication at what it does to mental health. Fascism, and extremist groups in general, seem to thrive on men not getting laid. IDK what the cause of this is though; I suppose more digital, less IRL social entertainment. They drink and do less drugs, which could be a reason too (especially drinking).
Edit: This is a self-reported statistic too. It may just be men are more comfortable reporting that their virgins instead of lying.
Not meaning to be rude with this phrasing, but uh, I am significantly younger than you, born around the time you graduated HS… and yep, I have the same, gut, “this seems weird” reaction.
I was a terribly bashful nerd in the early/mid 2000s, and even I lost my v-card as either a 16 or 17 yo.
Thats a drop from half of kids literally fucking around in HS, to just a third, in only the last 10ish years.
I dunno if such data exists going back to when you were in HS, I’d imagine it would have been closer to around 6/10 back then (though thats just a spitball guess), but yeah, the decline has been shocking to me as well.
…
IMO, the main thing that is destroying mental health is… and again, I say this as an early tech adopter, tech nerd, who had a mySpace account, who was one of the first with a Facebook account…
The cause of this is mutlifactorial, general economic decline and precarity are huge factors, but the main problem is our modern social media based digital environment, and how it trains people to act.
Brainrot is a real thing, short form video content reduces attentions spans, makes you more anxious, less confident / have lower self esteem, rapidly propagates mis and disinformation, promotes narcissism and just literally retards rhe development of functional social behaviors.
…
That, and the destruction of ‘third places’, and then the subsequent enshittificstion of dating apps.
In your day, people could afford to go take a car and hangout somewhere they had some privacy, away from their parents at least, some area where people would go and hang out and just socialize.
Those physical spaces do not exist anymore, they all have paywalls people can no longer afford.
No average kid can afford a car on a summer job anymore.
…
Then, as things digitized, realworld meetups and hangout areas began to decline, dating apps happened.
They were good for a time, but then the people running them realized that you actually make more money as a dating app by making it something you keep coming back to, hiding people you may actually jive well with behind paywalls, that what you actually want is to create a rollercoaster of ‘almost worked out but didn’t in the end’ type relstionships… as that produces your most reliable dating app customer.
These are smart data science people running these things, they know what they’re doing.
They don’t say what I just said outloud, because it would be bad for their branding and marketing.
IMO, what is going on that is destroying mental health, and again, I say this as an early tech adopter
i think you forgot a word or more in that sentence
[the internet / social media] literally retards the development of functional social behaviors
I have the same opinion, and i say that the internet takes attention away from functioning social forms of behavior. in other words, the internet feeds off people’s attention, but that reduces inter-human contact too. because human contact needs attention
Ok, sorry to double post, I’ve fixed up the original comment more, to hopefully make more sense.
But uh, yeah.
It is really weird to be in the position of having grown up as an awkward tech dork… and now like, I have uncommonly good interpersonal social skills by the standards of many Gen Z, and a lot of Gen A.
It is just a mindfuck.
I realized in about the mid 2010s that algorithmic based content platforms just were pushing the most extreme and outrageous and infuriating kinds of content, because that is the content that best results in user retention…
And when I realized this, I swore off much of it, deleted a bunch of accounts, and highly constrained and curated what was left.
Most other people did not realize this and allowed it to normalize, and now, at least in the US, the result is a largely illiterate, immature, and anti-intellectual society that is highly conspiratorial, and treats all of reality … as if it was a reality tv show.
People call me crazy, but I say that our society has been mass brainwashed, basically mentally neutered, acting increasingly neurotic and violent and irrational.
People call me crazy, but I say that our society has been mass brainwashed, basically mentally neutered, acting increasingly neurotic and violent and irrational.
No i’m not calling you crazy, i actually see it the same way. Social Media is a mass brainwashing tool.
The reason why elon musk acquired twitter is because he saw it as an “social engineering” challenge, after having already taken up classical engineering challenges (tesla). the reason is because the rich see it as exactly that: society is a system that can be manipulated and twisted into shape.
that’s why the fediverse is so important btw. sothat we can hold dominion over the information we consume and share.
I’ve just been told that by many Americans who are actively losing their minds trying to balance their car payment, insurance, recent medical disaster, loss of income, etc, all while spending 6+ hours a day on whatever particular algorithically designed and manicured for them slop content app telling them who to be angry at and what items to buy to give them the desired personality.
I very much agree the fediverse is very important…
But I think that Elon actually primarily bought Twitter out of a massive, massive sense of insecurity.
He needs to be widely loved and adored and seen as ‘a cool guy’, so he just bought the platform so that he could be in control of his own personal adulation/worship machine.
In my opinion at least, everything else is secondary to, is an outgrowth of, is a cynical tactic that may shift at any time… all to primarily prevent his own ego from collapsing.
I don’t think it’s that complicated. In 1989, your average young male hadn’t entirely given himself over to fascism. All of this manoshpere shit started right around that 2010-2012 timeframe.
Does this weird anyone else out? Graduated HS in 1989 and it seemed like we were all fucking, even the nerds. I’m short and scrawny, still tripped and fell into pussy now and again.
There’s something really alarming about this, can’t put my finger on it. It’s certainly weird that today’s young people aren’t fucking when we were going nuts during the AIDS epidemic, risking our lives for that cookie. Sex is such a basic human need I can’t imagine what going without is doing to mental health.
It think that rather than early - really early - exposure to porn turning everyone into sex-fiends, it’s actually terrifying a lot of them. What if I don’t want to gargle cum like Adriana Chechik? What if I don’t have a 10 inch cock to stuff my stepmother with?
A more optimistic reading might be that masturbating is easier, freer, quicker, and more accepted than ever before. Rather than risk an STI, pregnancy or human relationship, just crank one out and get back to work.
Even the boys I knew in high school already had messed up ideas about sex from porn, and that was 20 years ago.
I never got into visual porn, which made for confusing experiences dating guys who knew little else, in my teens and early 20s. Aside from the obvious confusion that brought to the bedroom about what we were expecting, it was surprising how many guys had perfectly wonderful bodies yet thought they were inadequate. One guy had a 8.5" (21cm)* long dick and still thought it wasn’t big enough. I told him, “Dude, you repeatedly stab my cervix. Trust me, you’re big enough.”
It seems that dick insecurity is really common, and that no one size is immune, no matter what partners tell them.
8.5 is 21cm, 47cm would he 18.5 inches. I really hope he didn’t have 18.5 inches, that would not stab my cervix but my heart.
Fixed. I must have hit an extra 1 into the converter.
There is something wrong with your unit conversion to cm there. That, or you dated a horse.
Lmao. Thank you, fixed.
Checking in as a nerd who went to high school in the 00’s. Yes, we were still fucking then. Especially the marching band nerds. Don’t get me started on what people got up to on our long bus trips…
LOL my god you band fags were THIRSTY. (Archie Bunker voice: What?! That’s what we called them people in dose days!) One of my band friends was little Miss Christian, plainly dressed, straight A kinda kid, raspy voice from an emergency tracheotomy.
One day in advanced European history, hissing at me, “Have you tried tying Debbie (my gf) up?! Steve tied me to the bed and it was awesome! Railed my brains out!” “👀 Uh, yeah, we tried that and loved it!” Next thing we’re comparing notes on knots and BDSM techniques. “Couldn’t get away, right?” Then class started. Back to business!
Still laugh my ass off at the American Pie band camp chick! Yes kids, we did that shit.
LOL, first time I got my finger wet was at a church camp retreat. They had to know what was going to happen if you throw a bunch of 14-17yo kids in sleeping bags and turn the lights off. Movie night at the church down the street was date night! Yeah, just going to throw this blanket over us. It’s cold, OK?!"
What i have found consistently so far is that in church related environments, adolescent sexuality is accepted (as long as you don’t talk about it or are queer) more than the otherwise prudish tendencies would make one expect. i wonder about why that is.
Well that’s an eye-opening thought! Yeah, we teens didn’t give two shits about religion, youth group was for meeting girls and boys. And it worked! And now you got me thinking, the adults had to know.
Maybe the idea was that we could get our hormones on without actual sex. Not like I was railing Jenny in the Methodist rumpus room. That came later.
If you’re over 40 how many times did you get laid because “One thing led to another”? Like you ever chill and vibe so hard with someone you feel the need to fuck about it?
In the tail end of my singleness I found that I was able to have more and better conversations with women online or via txt/dm because we could share things and experiences without being in the same room… But we werent in the same room, to shoot your shot you had to arrange something, give them a chance to overthink it, give yourself a chance to overthink it, sort out the scheduling issues, work out transport and then hopefully when you get into the same room still have the same magic going on.
When we were bored we hung out to not be bored, sometimes that led to fucking.
I am certainly not normal enough to represent anyone else here, but while not HIV, I do fear HPV (the sexually-transmitted strains).
My parents did not get me vaccinated against it when it would have been covered by insurance, because… because.
So, some quick overview from my mind which you shouldn’t trust as a source of information: Often marketed as something to protect women from cervical cancer, thus being reduced to “the vaccine for girls”. That’s often the view of public even now that it is also recommended to boys, which wasn’t always the case. Even then, the reason often ended up being not spreading HPV onto women. People being stupid -> Either “I have a boy, so it doesn’t matter.” or “I raised my girl well, she won’t need it.”
Well anyway, for men, throat cancer, anal cancer and penile cancer sound pretty relevant.
Speaking of penile cancer, yesterday I came across photo of a man who got large cancerous growth on his trunk as a result of HPV, and had to undergone penectomy (i.e. bye dickie), plus the radiation therapy went wrong causing large burns.
All in all, basically a cancer vaccine, only effective if you didn’t come into contact with HPV, which most sexually active people do, also why it’s typically only given to kids.
So, moving on, Gardasil-9 protects against 9 high-risk strains. Doesn’t sound like a bad idea even if you had sex, likely you haven’t collected all 9 yet. But certainly best before.
So, 3 doses, 2nd after 2, 3rd after 6 months. I think they take around a month to become effective, so I guess 7 months for total vaccination. Paid by patient, almost 400 EUR for all 3 doses as far as I could find in my country.
So, not like I could get any regardless, but safer sex would cost me 7 months of waiting and almost 400 EUR while I am about to start college and make 4.70 EUR per hour. And it cannot be fully done retroactively later (after activity). It’s also good to have saved some money. If my laptop or phone breaks, I need a replacement immediately (and I sure as fuck want another convertible ThinkPad).
Whoa. As an American who got the Gardasil vaccine for free in my 20s, this feels really weird. Paying for preventive medicine sounds like something I’d expect around here. I was in the notoriously-backwards state of Florida and had already been sexually active for several years, yet the vaccine was still covered for me.
So I checked it to be more precise.
I only found price mentioned in forum by Benu pharmacy employee from 2023, stating 123.50 EUR per dose. So 370.50 in this case.
For people aged 12 - 14, this is fully paid. 18 and up, fuck you.
15 - 17, depends on the insurance company.
But again, as an adult, no luck.
That absolutely sucks. Though thinking about it, the vaccine had only just come out when I was already an adult. It’s possible I was “grandfathered in” because the opportunity wasn’t there when I was younger.
Yet there are so many kids with anti-vaxxer parents, it doesn’t seem right to deny the opportunity to young adults who finally have the chance to make their own health decisions. There’s no reason an 18 year old should be assumed to automatically be exposed to HPV. A lot of people are still virgins then. It’s such bullshit how much power insurance companies wield, despite them knowing far less than a patient’s own doctor knows.
So thankful that vaccine came out! Got genital warts in the 90s, had 'em burned off a couple of times, EXTREMELY painfully. Never passed 'em on, but I would happily have avoided that mess. And fuck me, we had no idea of the cancer risks. Everyone needs that shot.
Also, caught crabs, TWICE, didn’t even get laid. :( Slept in dad’s guest room after his friend was there the previous night, came back on me a month later. Now there’s talk of the little fuckers going extinct!
Still, those vaccines should be free. Your story and numbers make me sad. We could wipe that shit out in a single generation!
Check if your insurance refunds the cost. In Germany, it’s only paid directly by the insurance for kids, but many insurances refund a large portion of the cost if you get it before you’re 25-ish.
My hypothesis is the decline is caused by a multifaceted change in environment:
All in all, we’ve got a society that is nearly perfectly designed to reduce libido in the population. Those that manage to avoid or ignore these challenges find a very small dating pool compared to decades past. Those that pair off are less likely to have offspring, such that we will likely have a population collapse in the next hundred years. Hopefully by then have figured enough of this out that we build a society that makes it easy to be a human who finds joy and love in other humans and not in a screen.
Lost third spaces, hanging out with other kids and helicopter parenting/stranger danger.
possibly because nobody/only very few people would attend them anyways.
Those are all great points. As a society we are likely suffering from a polycrisis and no single root cause.
“The raindrop never thinks itself responsible for the flood” or something
This post is so amazing and complete I have nothing to add but my appreciation.
Thanks!
I’d say 10% not fucking is pretty standard/average and your thinking you were all (100%) doing it is either clouded by your own experiences or you grew up in a very liberal community where it deviates.
Why its rising is questionable. Personally, I’d say its due to rising depression rates… well, it correlates at least.
1980s Oklahoma
Missed the mark on that one!
See this comment? Amazing!
https://old.lemmy.world/comment/18502562
Speculating wildly, I think it was a lot more common back then for teenagers to just disappear off for hours on end without their parents knowing where they were.
yeah when i did that, my mom went mad. that was in 2012.
what i have come to realize is how much different people’s view on sexuality differs.
Everybody thinks their own emotions are absolute and the way that everybody sees it; though that is not true at all. A very clear example of this is how different people are attracted to different kinds of people. It’s not only about being gay or not, it’s also that there’s a huge number of people who are either asexual or rather prudish to the extent that they basically don’t have sex outside of very narrowly-defined contexts.
This has been a huge surprise for me to learn about since my own instinct is the opposite: sexuality is what keeps the society together, what facilitates the exchange of people and causes relationships. without sexuality, a lot of things wouldn’t work or work only very slowly.
i’m nowadays also convinced that it is strongly related to the weather/climate of the region. areas like italy and france have a significantly higher tendency towards sexuality than northern regions, which tend to be rather prudish, i guess.
I am appalled at the fact that some people have casual sex with people they don’t intend to marry. That’s insane! But also yeah that’s the infinity of human expression, people are just all kinds of different.
I think the far-right “manosphere” influencers are a good indication at what it does to mental health. Fascism, and extremist groups in general, seem to thrive on men not getting laid. IDK what the cause of this is though; I suppose more digital, less IRL social entertainment. They drink and do less drugs, which could be a reason too (especially drinking).
Edit: This is a self-reported statistic too. It may just be men are more comfortable reporting that their virgins instead of lying.
Not meaning to be rude with this phrasing, but uh, I am significantly younger than you, born around the time you graduated HS… and yep, I have the same, gut, “this seems weird” reaction.
I was a terribly bashful nerd in the early/mid 2000s, and even I lost my v-card as either a 16 or 17 yo.
https://www.cdc.gov/yrbs/dstr/pdf/YRBS-2023-Data-Summary-Trend-Report.pdf
Thats a drop from half of kids literally fucking around in HS, to just a third, in only the last 10ish years.
I dunno if such data exists going back to when you were in HS, I’d imagine it would have been closer to around 6/10 back then (though thats just a spitball guess), but yeah, the decline has been shocking to me as well.
…
IMO, the main thing that is destroying mental health is… and again, I say this as an early tech adopter, tech nerd, who had a mySpace account, who was one of the first with a Facebook account…
The cause of this is mutlifactorial, general economic decline and precarity are huge factors, but the main problem is our modern social media based digital environment, and how it trains people to act.
Brainrot is a real thing, short form video content reduces attentions spans, makes you more anxious, less confident / have lower self esteem, rapidly propagates mis and disinformation, promotes narcissism and just literally retards rhe development of functional social behaviors.
…
That, and the destruction of ‘third places’, and then the subsequent enshittificstion of dating apps.
In your day, people could afford to go take a car and hangout somewhere they had some privacy, away from their parents at least, some area where people would go and hang out and just socialize.
Those physical spaces do not exist anymore, they all have paywalls people can no longer afford.
No average kid can afford a car on a summer job anymore.
…
Then, as things digitized, realworld meetups and hangout areas began to decline, dating apps happened.
They were good for a time, but then the people running them realized that you actually make more money as a dating app by making it something you keep coming back to, hiding people you may actually jive well with behind paywalls, that what you actually want is to create a rollercoaster of ‘almost worked out but didn’t in the end’ type relstionships… as that produces your most reliable dating app customer.
These are smart data science people running these things, they know what they’re doing.
They don’t say what I just said outloud, because it would be bad for their branding and marketing.
i think you forgot a word or more in that sentence
I have the same opinion, and i say that the internet takes attention away from functioning social forms of behavior. in other words, the internet feeds off people’s attention, but that reduces inter-human contact too. because human contact needs attention
Ok, sorry to double post, I’ve fixed up the original comment more, to hopefully make more sense.
But uh, yeah.
It is really weird to be in the position of having grown up as an awkward tech dork… and now like, I have uncommonly good interpersonal social skills by the standards of many Gen Z, and a lot of Gen A.
It is just a mindfuck.
I realized in about the mid 2010s that algorithmic based content platforms just were pushing the most extreme and outrageous and infuriating kinds of content, because that is the content that best results in user retention…
And when I realized this, I swore off much of it, deleted a bunch of accounts, and highly constrained and curated what was left.
Most other people did not realize this and allowed it to normalize, and now, at least in the US, the result is a largely illiterate, immature, and anti-intellectual society that is highly conspiratorial, and treats all of reality … as if it was a reality tv show.
People call me crazy, but I say that our society has been mass brainwashed, basically mentally neutered, acting increasingly neurotic and violent and irrational.
No i’m not calling you crazy, i actually see it the same way. Social Media is a mass brainwashing tool.
The reason why elon musk acquired twitter is because he saw it as an “social engineering” challenge, after having already taken up classical engineering challenges (tesla). the reason is because the rich see it as exactly that: society is a system that can be manipulated and twisted into shape.
that’s why the fediverse is so important btw. sothat we can hold dominion over the information we consume and share.
Oh I didn’t think you were calling me crazy.
I’ve just been told that by many Americans who are actively losing their minds trying to balance their car payment, insurance, recent medical disaster, loss of income, etc, all while spending 6+ hours a day on whatever particular algorithically designed and manicured for them slop content app telling them who to be angry at and what items to buy to give them the desired personality.
I very much agree the fediverse is very important…
But I think that Elon actually primarily bought Twitter out of a massive, massive sense of insecurity.
He needs to be widely loved and adored and seen as ‘a cool guy’, so he just bought the platform so that he could be in control of his own personal adulation/worship machine.
In my opinion at least, everything else is secondary to, is an outgrowth of, is a cynical tactic that may shift at any time… all to primarily prevent his own ego from collapsing.
Derp, I did, I am also editing and expanding more to this in realtime, hold please lol.
I don’t think it’s that complicated. In 1989, your average young male hadn’t entirely given himself over to fascism. All of this manoshpere shit started right around that 2010-2012 timeframe.
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