Are video games,birth rate, drugs, and changes irt masculinity actually a problem for the west?

I don't know if that can be the main cause, otherwise the drop would be much bigger among post-college age people, if people don't have sex anymore in HS and college (or less than before) it must be something else, those are places where boys and girls are togheter many hours every day no matter what.

Now if we saw large drops 25-35 with far smaller drops 16-24 i would agree more with the "young people have less sex because they socialize less"

I've men plenty of people who are brave and have integrity, both men and women. So I would disagree with that statement.

Not that I don't think there is evil in the world, there certainly is.

I agree, and "death of third spaces" is a very good name for it. It is enshittification at a societal level, where it seems that places and activities are only allowed to exist as a commodity. While that might be good for a short term bottom line of stakeholders / shareholders, it makes for a sad culture. We don't get to be part of something, we just get to be customers.

I think this plays a meaningful part because we don’t have as many hangouts as before, the malls, the arcades, pool halls, or casual restaurants where people used to congregate and have their in person dialogue.

But I also think social media isn’t getting enough credit for its influence here. Because when I go to restaurants, the couples sitting across from each other staring down at their phones. At the gym, everyone’s on their phone between sets. At Starbucks, people are glued to their laptops. I’ll see kids playing at the park, but the parents are all on their phones. A lot of people just prefer the alternative to in person conversation and meet ups. I mean, I went to some shitty outdoor mall about a year ago and half the people were walking, staring down at their phone.

And now, a lot of people can't even drive to that place without looking at their phone.

Like I know a number of people that are actually working on Google AI and they wouldn't make this claim. A big chunk of their current focus now is about increasing accuracy. In their own words, they think Gemini could be too "creative" when synthesizing information.

There really isn't much dispute left that the biggest driver of lower birthrates is due to the cost of child rearing and education.

Epseically among the middle and upper middle classes that greatly fear their children will fall income a lower socio-economic class.

I think the decline of "third spaces" can be attributed, in very large part, to social media and the internet.

Those spaces were never "free"; malls were there to convert foot traffic to sales; libraries were there to provide a public service taxpayers wanted; Starbucks wanted, well, to sell coffeee.

When people stopped feeling the need to socialize, shop, read, buy food in person, those places lost reasons to be.

I went to an Applebee's for the first time in probably a year on a Friday night and I might have been youngest person in the place. It felt like a Denny's. But 25 years ago, this Applebee's would have been packed with 20-year-olds.

A big issue is that while rent/income ratio is actually down across the board, its way up when you target lower income/young people - it's like 40% today compared to 30% in the early 2000s. And that is going to affect what people can afford outside of their rent and it will affect the amount of co-mingling between people.

But if you send a group to Applebee's and pay for their dinner, or drive them to the beach and tell them to congregate, they're just going to want to play Emoji Crush on their phone. And if they do have the money, they'd rather not spend that $40 for a meal with friends and instead spend it on a few days' worth of Starbucks to caffeinate themselves to regulate their state of mind because most people are depressed as a result of social media.

The biggest driver I see or hear about isn't financial but rather the workload of having more kids.

The general sentiment I hear is 1 to have a kid, 2 for the kid to have a sibling and maybe 3 for another gender. The only ones I see having more are with stay at home mothers.

Women want lives outside of the home and careers well underway when the kids leave the nest. And they know they're going to be the ones doing the brunt of the work.

by TheKnight00 m

Google AI is just as good if not better compared to CNN or Fox News. anyways all of the points listed are backed up by articles connected to the AI. I simply posted it so that way people wouldn’t have to dig through Link after link.Here you go though

https://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/3868557-most-young-men-are-single-most-young-women-are-not/amp/

The Hill

Most young men are single. Most young women are not.

... See full post

Darwinism baby!

Social media is essentially a digital skinner box. A machine that selectively distributes rewards and punishment for behavior. Being liked or causing engagement makes us happy, being disliked or ignored makes us unhappy.

I suspect (with some basis in current research) that we're using social media like addicts use drugs, and our lack of discipline is causing many to lose our brain's ability to regulate emotion. We're simply not built to take the constant drips of neurotransmitters that social media provides. Like the pigeons in Skinner's original experiment which literally pecks their own beaks to destruction when chasing random rewards, we also start engaging in behavior that is clearly destructive, just to get the next hit of dopamine or serotonin.

So, I don't think it is merely a case of "depressed as a result of social media". I think social media literally shapes our brain into working in a manner that is ill-equipped to handle the far different tempo and stimuli of real life.