South Korea's middle aged men are dying 'lonely deaths'

Re:South Korea's middle aged men are dying 'lonely deaths' by seydor on Saturday December 31, 2022 @12:08PM (#34198383)

that's irrelevant though. People at old age have already lost many of their peers, so they have mostly children to rely on. But people now have fewer children than ever and they are likely to be away. And i dont think parents or children want to be forced to live with each other just for this. We also shouldn't be shaming people for not living with their family. That's why we need something else (and maybe there's an entrepreneurial idea there)

Also keep in mind that , particularly for men, the nuclear family living was not the norm until the past few generations. Men used to spent most of their time in men/gentlement's spaces socializing/doing business while the wife was at home with kids. This 'loneliness' thing happens because those other spaces are gone now

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Re:South Korea's middle aged men are dying 'lonely deaths' by safety1st on Saturday December 31, 2022 @12:45PM (#34198744)

It's not irrelevant. I think the point you're missing is that there are not enough young able-bodied people to take care of the lonely old people. There is a numbers issue.

Like in your solution you assume that people exist will be people who are young and have energy and have resources. These people do not exist. Not enough to take care of the massive number of old and sick people being created anyway.

Here's an illustration: https://ourworldindata.org/global-population-pyramid

This is referred to as an inverted population pyramid but really it ends up looking more like a bell. The world used to have lots of young people and not many old people. The flattening of the peak which has happened in only 30 years is stunning! This will keep getting worse until the end of the century.

Korea's population pyramid looks way worse than the one I linked above by the way. From age 60 down it actually is inverted. Again, there are no young people left to do the caretaking you envision. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_South_Korea#/m...

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Re:South Korea's middle aged men are dying 'lonely deaths' by seydor on Saturday December 31, 2022 @12:52PM (#34198816)

The point is not to take care of ailing old people, there's other venues for that. Instead it is to have some sort of semiregular contact with other peers that's beneficial both ways.

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Re:South Korea's middle aged men are dying 'lonely deaths' by DieAgainAli on Saturday December 31, 2022 @06:42PM (#34201936)

You’re missing the point. There is numbers issue, there’s not enough people for ‘a venue’ to take care of all the old people.

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Re:South Korea's middle aged men are dying 'lonely deaths' by safety1st on Sunday January 01, 2023 @01:02AM (#34204040)

I re-read their comment and I sort of get it now. We could bring back "gentlemen's spaces" and these single guys might be less lonely. They would still die alone, though, and it wouldn't do anything at all for the lonely women out there (who also account for 15-20% of the lonely deaths mentioned in the article).

Though I'm not really convinced that those opportunities for socializing no longer exist, I mean any medium sized city has meetup groups, pubs, and probably all sorts of other social outlets I'm not thinking of. The modern middle aged man's problem isn't meeting people, it's building relationships that have a closeness and intimacy equivalent to familial ones, which some people seem to think is easy but if it was these corpses wouldn't be rotting in apartments would they?

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