Originally Posted by
Dan Druff
There are two other weird trends recently with young males, which might be related to all of this.
When I was a teenager in the 1980s, there were two things almost every high school boy wanted -- to be able to drive and get laid as soon as possible.
Today, neither is particularly important to young US males. Many are showing zero interest in driving, and the number of men between 18 and 30 who aren't having sex is at an all-time high.
The desires to drive and have sex are natural for teenage males. The appeal to driving is the idea of independence, and the appeal of having sex is natural, as the male sex drive is supposed to peak around 19-20. So why are we seeing both of these in great decline?
It would appear that young males are no longer desiring much independence, and the lack of pursuit of sex would indicate increased antisocial tendencies as a whole.
Not good.
I know about 4 early twenties kids that I’m pretty sure are virgins. They’ve certainly never had any significant relationship, and I’d bet on all 4 being virgins and think I’d scoop 3 of 4.
Three also didn’t drive until the last couple years. They went through undergrad without driving. All 4 are great kids and wonderful little overachievers.
I’ve watched their parents go from the relief you feel when your high school kid doesn’t become a nightmare and knock up some girl, or get knocked up, gets excellent grades, doesn’t do drugs. to starting to become a bit worried.
I tell them to relax. They’re all going to be successful, and likely will marry some other kid just like them eventually. These young people are just different.
These are kids from stable homes and outside their present social life, complete successes. They aren’t where the problems arise often. There are a number of kids who are like this from unstable homes.
Feel like all these school shootings and threads about purposeless young men are all the same thread. Not to just regurgitate the Unambomber manifesto, but it’s technology.
Angry young men has always been a thing. Young men are the most violent creatures of any period of time. End of story. How they are doing at any period of time is just a reflection of how the world was at that period of time and circumstance.
Purposeless young men are a relatively new phenomenon in the context of history. They didn’t exist until the late 1800s after the Industrial Age.
50000 years ago, 5000 years ago, 300 years ago, people essentially lived the same. We went from the wheel to the plow and from raping and pillaging to more peaceful, but generally men worked all day in a field or some trade to feed their 5 children that survived out of 10 births. Show me a purposeless young man, and he was the very rare son of some royal or some other rare occurrence.
It’s not a surprise all the professional sports leagues of the world were founded shortly after the Industrial Age and early technology created the concept of free time.
People started to have free time, live longer as all technology lends itself to other technology and rapid advancement occurred. It’s quite staggering to think about the last 175 years.
So it’s not altogether surprising that humans who evolved with very little free time didn’t know how to make productive use of it.
Divorce didn’t exist in 1850. It stayed under 1 per 1000 until 1920. A lot of that was that it was mostly against the law, but the notion that war has ever been a positive is nonsensical.
You can draw a straight line from Rosie the Riveter and women entering the workforce and divorce and destabilization of families. You want to see the statistical outlier of all time, check out the divorce rate from 1946. WW2 ended 9/45. Various reasons for that, many kids got married before shipping out, and then the guys left for 4 years, and a lot can happen in 4 years. It didn’t hit that number for a year again until the 70s.
But up until that period, it was certainly a mans world. Women with 4 kids and married to an ass had little options. Horrible double standard, but a double standard is better than no standard when it comes to raising children and stability.
For all the positive advancements in technology and medicine, radio>tv>internet has been horrible for the health of young people, both mentally and physically.
I don’t blame young people. I was a chubby six year old who loved early video games, and if I had I the option to sit around and play video games all day like they have now and the constant entertainment, I certainly would have sat around and became a fat nerd.
I watched too much tv, but with 3 channels young and not all that exciting outside Saturday mornings, it wasn’t hours a day.
Thankfully I was born when my friends knocked on my door every ten minutes to come play, I loved sports, wanted to be good and wanted girls, so we lived outside.
Most kids did. We also had to run the labyrinth of life. Getting beat up by older kids, playing sports against black city kids, needing to call girls from phones attached to our kitchen wall, ask girls to dance, and interact with other kids and adults in order to have a life.
All that shit is awkward and sucks the first time around, but it’s something that prepares you for your later life. You get comfortable being uncomfortable, so it isn’t a big deal when you eventually need to walk into a new school or job or whatever adversity arises.
Technology and parents allowing their children to be raised by the internet is extraordinarily damaging. That’s why these events occur. Kids go from never having a physical altercation in their life to grabbing an AR-15.
This happens for a host of reasons. People have fewer kids, so if you’re a good parent, your whole world is wrapped up in that one or two kids and when confronted by a media that has been scaring them about outliers for their entire life, they feel better when their kid is in the other room playing Call of Duty for 8 hours a day, when in reality they are doing the worst thing imaginable to prepare those kids for the real world.
The murder and pedophile rates were worse when they were kids. There was just a 100 less channels scaring them.
Most likely with good parents, the kid is just more likely to be socially awkward than a school shooter, but it’s unhealthy.
There was no real obesity 150 years ago. Little a 100 years ago. TV started it, and the internet has spread it across the world. The fat American is a real thing, but everywhere is fat now. Other industrialized nations are only a few points behind us and closing fast.
If they’re a shitty parent with problems of their own, they use technology as a babysitter and a lot of these kids are where your really mentally ill kids come from.
Humans are built to interact. It’s considered inhumane to isolate prisoners for too long, yet we allow kids, and many adults, to isolate themselves and for some reason don’t realize it’s the root of so many of our ills..
More than political ideology, more than race, if I wanted to actually identify people who act out in these mass shooting events and stop them before they do, participation in fringe internet groups would be the most common red flag. Not simply being part of one, but actually reading their words.
If it was legal to simply read, make a common sense decision on what they post online and slow them to obtain weapons, it would actually prevent shootings. Background checks are less useful because often it’s some isolated kid whose first criminal act will be mowing down kids.
But as horrific as these incidents are, our isolated populace manifesting itself in a thousand more profound ways is way more important. What it’s done to our physical and mental health is horrible.
I’ve been amazed at driving around on beautiful days for a decade now and seeing no kids playing anything. As a kid, it would take hours to find a field and every basketball court was five deep waiting to be next up. Now you’re more likely to see a middle aged guy with his wedge and a bag of golf balls in an open field than any kid. Makes me sick.
Kids that do play, it’s travel teams of suburban kids playing against other kids from like communities in a neighboring city. I knew every kid from my area growing up because I was playing against them in some field or league. We’ve ruined that also. It’s some sanitized gated community league.
We have no real sense of community because we’ve replaced actual community and true human interaction with a virtual world that’s ugly.
It’s fucked up all of us, but kids raised on it more than anyone. Social media has made it even worse. Now I think live-streaming shit seems to have made it even worse. People don’t interact. Girls are narcissists fishing for compliments online. Boys get lost in video games or fringe shit if they’re unlucky and socially awkward. They can’t make eye contact with a girl let alone get laid.
It’s only going to get worse.
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