Boys addicted to computer games and porn, girls addicted to social media which allow and facilitate sexism (only one way), an increasingly bleak future, economic and geopolitical uncertainty, "intelligence" organisations running rampant trying to control citizen's minds.. Yeah I wonder why our societies are going down the shitter.
I am highly skeptical that computer games and porn addictions are significant factors here. Sure they are problems that need to be solved, but I doubt it is a significant contribution to the problem.
I can see how social media might bias perception though. I guess pre-internet era you just had to compete against people in your local community when you were looking for a partner. Way harder now to standout in the world of Instagram / Tiktok where the trendiest people are likely in the top 10% of attractiveness (be it money, appearance, personality, etc).
I think op has a point. Almost every woman I know, my wife included, expresses some level of disgust at the idea of an adult man playing video games. I don't think I know many women who are alright with a man who plays video games, let alone a man who spends 1 hour or more on it per day.
A few friends of my wife REALLY complain about men playing video games (dating prospects and current partners). It's a double standard, because they themselves use social media or consume media, but that's just the way it is.
Women with double standards ? Colour me shocked :)
It's the age old: men are told that they should do better, women that they deserve better (for whatever reason)
It's sad to live during such tumultuous times. The lives of most people for the majority of time has been similar to the lives of their parents, and grandparents. Imagine the feeling of safety that this could bring. Now of course there were myriad other issues, but maybe a thousand years from now we manage to reach some kind of steadier state in a post industrial society. But right now we are cursed to live in maelstrom.
Historically people never felt safe. You're imagining an idealized period that never really existed. Read some firsthand accounts by people who actually lived during those times and you'll see they struggled with the same issues and worse.
As for men doing better, that's pretty easy considering how many men don't even bother to try.
We will never know exactly how it was for the average person, so we might as well dream that it was better. Of course it wouldn't have been heaven, but maybe a bit less complicated at least ?
Less complicated in some dimensions, more complicated in others. There's no evidence that net complexity is higher today. Navigating social hierarchies has never been simple since before our ancestors came down out of the trees.
As others have pointed out in this discussion, we exactly know that in pre-modern times the average man died childless.
I was more referring to complexity of life in general, not reproduction wise. Also you cannot extrapolate a couple thousand year fluke to the entire pre-modern times.
I think computer games and porn addictions by large exacerbate the social awkwardness epidemic, and allow an easy escape from dealing with the world. Which needs to be done, if one wants to build useful skills and become useful to the society or a prospective partner.
It's too easy to stay at home alone all day jacking off and playing games. It shouldn't be like that, we are not equipped to deal with this kind of situations.
Most men don't prefer masturbating to sex.
Porn and masturbation is the solution to the men's problem of women not wanting to have much sex with men. It's much better than both rape and celibacy.
I think we think this is unusual, but I think the idea that we have a 1-1 matching between men and women is a very recent development (last few hundred years). We are probably just regressing to a longer term average where the average male can expect to have no reproductive success at all.
"Once upon a time, 4,000 to 8,000 years after humanity invented agriculture, something very strange happened to human reproduction. Across the globe, for every 17 women who were reproducing, passing on genes that are still around today—only one man did the same."
"Another member of the research team, a biological anthropologist, hypothesizes that somehow, only a few men accumulated lots of wealth and power, leaving nothing for others. These men could then pass their wealth on to their sons, perpetuating this pattern of elitist reproductive success. Then, as more thousands of years passed, the numbers of men reproducing, compared to women, rose again. "Maybe more and more people started being successful," Wilson Sayres says. In more recent history, as a global average, about four or five women reproduced for every one man."
"Once upon a time, 4,000 to 8,000 years after humanity invented agriculture, something very strange happened to human reproduction. Across the globe, for every 17 women who were reproducing, passing on genes that are still around today—only one man did the same."
Further down: "In more recent history, as a global average, about four or five women reproduced for every one man."
The boomer generation was an anomaly because in the 1940's "everyone" (not literally) was having kids independent of ideology. Part of this was because of a vast flattening of status (the depression and shared misery of war probably had a lot to do with it).
Historically (averaging over 1000s of years) - that is abnormal; normally people are a lot more "choosy" for lack of a better word - which is what the anthropological article implies. We're moving back into a world of inequality and more intense status competition in mating - the effects of the Great Depression + World War II have worn off.
the undrafted men, and thus most likely survivors, were largely ones who failed to meet minimum physical standards of the military, so not sure on that last point
