Of course he's right. The influence of conveyor belt sushi specifically seems very dubious (isn't it just an unusual novelty?) but any social trend that has people meeting and talking to others less frequently will have people meeting potential partners less frequently. What is the advice always given to people looking for a partner? Go out and meet people. Meet as many people as you can to increase your odds. Any aspect of Japanese society that reinforces or facilitates social isolation has a share of the blame for their demographic problem.
Well, this is the defining trend of our technological progress. People getting what they want makes them unhappy in the long, multigenerational term.
We innovate because we like being comfortable. We don’t want to tend to a fire constantly to be warm. We don’t want to depend on the randomness of hunting/foraging to have a full belly. We don’t want to take days and days of travel to go a few towns over. We don’t want to have to deal with people we don’t know because that’s anxiety inducing.
So we invent all those things that means many modern humans can just stay comfy, warm and fed at home with all their basic needs met without having to go through all this discomfort.
The problem now is that we’re all unhealthy, lonely, feel purposeless
(and to top it all the planet is on fire).
> The problem now is that we’re all unhealthy, lonely, feel purposeless (and to top it all the planet is on fire).
None of that is true. You're projecting what some people struggle with onto everyone, when the data indicates people are better off today. And mental health issues aren't unique to the industrialized world. Also, the planet is warming, but it's not on fire. Total exaggeration.
But some billionaire did a TED talk where he said that the global poverty rate has been constantly declining, which is true, even if it is not meaningful if you remove it from the real-world context of purchasing power, social safety nets, support networks and shared commons, and only a positive if you think sweatshops are good because they create job opportunities.
> And what "purpose" are people looking forward to?
What, you don't find increasing shareholder value compelling?
> It's not literally burning, so it's fine?
Presumably they think the climage catastrophe is not a big deal. "On fire" is clearly hyperbole but the point is that we're on a fast track to total global economic collapse (to say nothing about the death and destruction itself) as long as the answer is to carefully do some ineffective reductions and give more money to the industry to spend on "carbon capture" technology that creates more emissions in the process of being built, maintained and operated than it could ever hope to capture, but I digress.
It's not just about exposure to other people. It's also about facilitating genuine human connections. Japan's work culture is detrimental to life outside the workplace but the cultural problems extend far beyond that. It shouldn't need saying but Japanese culture is also extremely sexist and literally patriarchic in ways that should be obvious even to those claiming "Western culture" (which as a European is a ridiculous notion given the vast differences in attitude across the continent - or even within individual countries - alone) isn't at all.
On the one hand you have overblown expectations of success and commitment to work for men, on the other you have an expectation of submissiveness, docility and youthful purity for women, but in reality most men can't be high earners, most women need to work the same grueling hours to make a living and it all just ends up making everyone unhappy and lonely because nobody can live up to the expectations both instilled in them from a young age and placed on them by their peers and failure is not an option. Not to mention that the concept of dedication to your employer has become completely detached from the previously implied reward of the company's loyalty to their lifelong committed workers, too.
The situation in "the West" (let's say the US) is comparable in some ways, certainly, but the gendered expectations are much less intense and there are at least some options to socialize outside the work environment and as bad as labor protections are, people don't literally die at work.
