https://www.salon.com/2022/11/06/why-are-so-many-young-people-are-having-less-and-fewer-friendships/

[F]ar-right figures [...] have painted this phenomenon as a crisis of masculinity (even though under-35 women seem to having equally little sex).

Nearly 60 years ago, C. Wright Mills encouraged that we understand this kind of aggregated social data not as the result of personal failings, but as public issues that can be explained by looking to larger historical and structural relationships. When we look at other data points like the graph below, we find that it is not merely sexual relationships that are on the decline, but also friendships. This, from a sociological standpoint, reveals that there is something larger going on here. Untangling it means we must look at the at the larger economic, cultural, and political changes.

[A] bleak outlook brought on by economic conditions, changing social norms as a result of new communications technologies, and just simply feeling as though one doesn't have enough time to invest in their personal relationships. Thus, if we really do see this as a serious issue, then we need to make changes at a variety of levels.

  • mazdak
    ·
    1 year ago

    deleted by creator

    • Frank [he/him, he/him]
      ·
      2 years ago

      In the modern world there are enough comfortably middle class and wealthy people that society can orientate itself around them entirely

      Apparently somewhere between 40-50% of all small businesses in the US were unable to pay rent last month. So I'm not sure that the middle class and the rich can even keep things running anymore.

      • bigboopballs [he/him]
        ·
        2 years ago

        somewhere between 40-50% of all small businesses in the US were unable to pay rent last month.

        source? what could the actual effects of this be? I don't see 50% of small business being closed down as we speak

    • fifthedition [none/use name]
      ·
      2 years ago

      nowdays some young men are straight up refusing to even engage with women in real life.

      That's MGTOW, not pickup artist. Pick up artists, MGTOWS, and Red Pillers and MRAs all started on the same path but took different forks in the road. They all acknowledge the societal dissonance between what society says a man should be, and what a man needs to be. Pick up artists see the dissonance and become what is really successful with women and not what society says they should be to be successful (to the extreme). MGTOWs see it and remove themselves from the equation because they don't see a way to win. Red Pillers were men that society said they should be, but got tired of never seeing the promised success that was supposed to come from that, so they work to become the ideal man that succeeds. MRAs seek to change the system so that it actually returns on its promises of equality.

      MRAs seek to change the system, Red Pillers and Pick up Artists adapt to the system in place in their own ways to succeed, and MGTOWs rage quit the whole thing.

      • mazdak
        ·
        1 year ago

        deleted by creator

        • fifthedition [none/use name]
          ·
          2 years ago

          It is PUAs who are the new phenomenon. Incels have always existed. The internet enabled all these men to get together and start exchanging ideas which led to the PUA "movement". Loser men who can't get laid have been with us since the dawn of time.

    • bigboopballs [he/him]
      ·
      2 years ago

      If young people were actually able to freely communicate about how discontent they were with life and get an ideological structure to understand the causes of that

      It's absolutely soul-destroying that capitalism has won so hard that even that is essentially an impossibility at this point. I honestly think Capitalism has won (even if that victory ensures human extinction), if young people's attention is still too captured and are unable to even imagine any counter movement at this point in time, what hope will there ever be?