It seems to me that we've built this horrible, alienating environment not by deliberate choice but through a larger collective and political process none of us could individually control. We've created rules (building codes and zoning laws) that entrench this dystopia in countless small ways which will take a concerted effort to undo.

That seems unlikely. Genuinely curious if there’s something I’m missing here.

https://web.stanford.edu/~mrosenfe/Rosenfeld_et_al_Disinterm...

If you're attractive and your advances are well recieved, you will not get reported to HR. Vice versa.

And one way to make it clear (to her and to yourself) is to have (social) relationships with other coworkers, with other women, and to have other women in your life. That way she knows (and you know) that she's not your sole focus, your only real chance, and she knows that you're able to maintain healthy, safe relationships with women that you aren't trying to date.

The really important thing is to make sure she understands that there's no pressure on her to say yes, and that saying no will not lead to an uncomfortable workplace dynamic. A lot of this is good advice for connecting with women you'd potentially like to date in other circumstances too - the reason there's a lot of generic, overly broad 'advice' floating around about "don't hit on women at the gym" "don't flirt with women at their place of work" "don't ask women out at school" "don't ask your friends out" "don't hit on women in hobby groups" is that a lot of men are terrible at not making women feel singled out and socially coerced. If you can convince yourself that you're in that situation for more reasons than looking for a date, and if you're able to create a broader social context, you're very unlikely to fall into that trap, and vastly less likely to get accused of behaving inappropriately; and if you somehow do anyway, it'll be much easier to defend yourself as having engaged in good faith. Since you obviously did.

> asked me out for 'drinks' before we ever had a single conversation."

can you see the problem?

Come to Denver. We have suburbs that are walkable. Or rather don't, we don't need more people ;-)

So it's like the US is primarily for corporate entities to interact in predefined contractual settings that have abstracted away anything human about them. Even families are kind of like corporate entities interacting with each other. I am not sure how it got to this point but maybe something like pursuit of income at the expense of social ties and over-litigation caused it. I'm not sure.

Is this capitalism? Is it technology (I’m not talking about computers) induced narcissism? Is it because we reduce ourselves and others to metrics and then use yardsticks to incessantly measure ourselves on a broken scale?

Whether living in an apartment building in a city or a house in the suburbs, I’m frequently surprised how many people never introduce themselves to their neighbors. And that has nothing to do with cars.

People want some external system to construct a social environment for them and often blame everything but themselves when they could easily arrange a neighborhood get together by passing out some flyers…

I think this dependence on external systems, on governments, is another symptom of the problem. When people belong to a community they don't have that expectation, they are participants. Look to the Amish, for example, and their famous barn-raisings. They don't depend on government relief or insurance policies. Everyone contributes to building a new barn when someone in the community needs one.

None of that is new in America. If anything, I'd expect that these forces were stronger 20-30 years ago, when sexual activity rates were higher.

Happy to be shown otherwise if there's data?

It’s not like there are 1.5 billion Indians because no one has sex there.

Both are true in large part there, at least in the cities.

Except Indian politics are at least 10x as crazy as current US politics on the ground, and probably 10x as potentially (violently) serious if someone ‘steps out of line’, so people are better at hiding what is going on.

The amount of sex though definitely includes hookups and a lot of sex outside of the acknowledged marital structure. A large number of those kids may well be illegitimate, I suspect no one wants to look too hard.

I also suspect what is happening in the US is a combination of defacto ‘strikes’ from both sides of the equation, combined with general confusion as to what to do or why. Essentially a ‘why would I want to engage with this mess? What’s even in it for me?’.

(Not sure if there are directly comparable surveys, but I wouldn't be surprised to discover that unmarried Americans were rather more sexually active than unmarried Indians, even with the downward trend)

Good luck doing that in India without being murdered by your parents (not joking!).

Sex ed is also something I was more universally supported. Regardless of your views on when someone should have sex, I doubt it serves anyone’s goals to have young adults getting hurt, sick, or traumatized by a natural part of growing up.

It's a surprisingly positive read, given that thesis. The idea that we should be tought (in an age approptiate way) how our bodies work and how to respect others shouldn't be controversial, and yet, here we are.

Poland in particular is the outlier here, both in fall of birth rates and lack of sex ed...

Yet it got here even angrier at about the same time.

I genuinely do not know what you are talking about heremaybe except "this person is consuming wastly different media".

Unlike facebook which recommends pornographic content and AI generated attention bait.

But the other part sounds fun, so, why wouldn't learning about that encourage you? If you've done a decent sex ed course then a whole lot of fun possibilities are showcased, even if you think some of them are gross the others seem intriguing enough that I'd expect more rather than less will be interested in trying.

I'm just saying that observationally, traditional societies and sub-societies with worse sex ed that are less "sexually enlightened" tend to have more sex and fertility. Maybe it has something to do with breaking taboo?

In a place where abortion was legal, I expect having sex ed would not significantly affect fertility rate but would decrease abortion rate.

Knowing about your body and having access to contraceptives should in my opinion promote the frequency of sex.

cut - 10 minutes about alcohol being the most deadly drug on earth - "People who drink moderately have more friendships, closer friendships and higher levels of trust in others".

Now _moderately_ is the key word here.

We need an approved better alternative. Seriously chemistry exists, we actually have pharmaceuticals that literally are the alcohol with vastly reduced side effects. Still addictive, of course.

I think one reason the trans community is so threatening to a certain ideology is that we found happiness by intentionally and deliberately discarding core components of that ideology and having done so we found something better.

I truly never imagined I could have what I have today. In finding my way through poly, transition, and finding community, I changed my life. I don’t think for everyone gender transition is the answer, but going through a serious process of contemplative evaluation and change, however difficult it may be, did so much for me.

It's like a scientific discovery, a mathematical proof or evidence of a crime. The go to strategy is to get rid of that evidence, but how do you get rid of evidence if the evidence is a person?

There are some very vocal right wing politicians in the US who say openly that trans people should be eliminated from society. Much like calls 20-30-40 years ago to eliminate gays from society, such an effort is impossible, but they could do great harm if they try.

> The kids in my community are being taught age-appropriate, consent-based sex ed, and the availability of free, high-quality sex ed is improving.

This has been the case in blue states for decades. I had proper sex-ed in the 90s.

Back on topic: You mention "people who aren't putting in any emotional labor to learning and growing as a person". But, from your first paragraph, who's got time and energy for that?

My own guess at an additional factor: Women's equality has made women who didn't need to depend on a man. As a result, they got a lot choosier about what downsides, flaws, and baggage they were willing to put up with.

This would track with how a lot of dating apps, etc are described as "the top 70% of women competing for the top 30% of men"

Time and energy don't exist for _that_ level of casual activity, let alone overpriced and time-expensive in person activities.

Abstinence only education creates teenage pregnancies, basically.

Thought reform, which is sophisticated science based techniques that impose stress and increase suggestability, almost to the point of mindlessness,are torture that have been imposed in varying ways to kids and teens. The entire process of centralized education embraces this through Paulo Freire's pedagogy which is most National Teachers Union members; like "Lying to Children", or by-rote teaching (two faces same coin).

When you succumb to torture, you adopt characteristics of the torturer that are reflected. The torturer can distort that reflection for purpose, and in general its a state of involuntary hypnosis. This same state can be induced through distorting reflected appraisal through media. Its not the type of torture you see caracicaturized in media. It leverages perceptual blindspots to induce psychological instability.

When the girls are taught that attractive qualities in men are unattractive or crazy, and the guys are taught the same thing; there is an age range where those core identity beliefs are adopted and crystallized to carry forward the rest of their lives. It takes great personal suffering to overcome any of these, let alone recognize them.

The behavior promoted is almost and mimics similar behaviors or mannerisms that occur in schizophrenics, and is one sign that a person may have been tortured. In addition to what you mention, this has been occuring for decades, and the economic consequences have only gotten worse, and the environment has only ever marched toward disadvantaged.

The world created by the aggregate of older adults today is a hellscape for their children, but most of these slothful (complacent) people have willfully blinded themselves to the reality of their actions.

For example dating websites where you are never matched up to someone that is long-term compatible, effectively being pigeonholed into a eugenics experiment since the strategy the company uses to guarantee profit is the same strategy the USDA uses to eradicate parasites through sterility.

Whenever these type of dynamics occur, chaos sustainably grows until the systems involved can no longer correct, as a positive feedback system. All the way to catastrophe.

Aside from food security, when you make social life unlivable and intolerable. When you deprive children who become adults, of lifes joy through conditioned indoctrination and torture. You have as a group stolen their future. The ones that did nothing are equally responsible as the ones that moved it towards that state.

There is a critical point where they will realize what has been done to them, because you can't fool everyone always. When that occurs, the law won't save the old. Absent a functioning rule of law (which we don't have), violence will be the only option to these people, and they will have nothing to lose.

Chickens come home to roost eventually. Evil doesn't need to know its evil to be evil. All it needs to do is be willfully blind. Thomas Paine said it best when he referred to "Dead Men Ruling."

Books:

Robert Cialdini (1990s) - Influence - Covers perceptual blindspots

Robert Lifton (1950s) - Thought Reform & Totalism - Detailed Case Studies of Torture

Joost Meerloo (1950s) - Rape of the Mind - Covers the broad topic of torture and thought reform; has some dating.

Chase Hughes - Ellipsis - The material in this domain is highly fragmented across many subfields, he aggregates most of the important parts of modern thought reform (1970s+) into NCI, including Cults, Cointelpro, Kubark, and others. Author was a professional military interrogator/behavioral modification expert (iirc).

Torture/Modern Thought Reform is recognized by its Elements, Structuring, and Clustering, and the last group is often addiction linked following lines of Narco-synthesis/analysis through dopamine triggering/conditioning.

Unfortunately, you probably won't see this post long. HN has a lot of bots, automatons, or despicable people that don't want harsh truths to see the light of day. Almost without fail within 30 minutes of linking to the reference material included, the posts get downvoted to invisibility despite being science backed and true.

Mind you nothing said here changes the reality of the dynamics. It will all happen the same regardless. The hiding is only an action that prevents a general forewarning to others as preparable time ahead of the associated collapse occurring.

There are a lot of people alive today that want to destroy everyone and everything they can.

Ivan Illyin seems to have been right with regards to his refutation of Tolstoy, and outcomes of evil.

I don't know what time machine you arrive on, but no one has been seriously promoting abstinence for decades, except in certain religious circles, and that's where people are having the most sex and the best sex. That's not a coincidence. They more like to be engaging in it the only healthy way it can be: an expression of mutual self-giving and love, and an act of bonding that reinforces the relationship that's already there. Intrinsically entailed is its openness to new life, as that is its ultimate consummation and raison d'etre. Block that and you corrupt the act. Reap the consequences.

> Of course we end up with declining sex, in a country so obsessed with individualism and sex-adverse.

Sex averse? You must be joking. We're sex-obsessed! Creepiness has been normalized. You can't watch a movie for 5 minutes without having your face rubbed in a sex scene, or a newspaper with the latest sexual fetish looking to receive society's blessing instead of its condemnation and scorn. Advertising is heavily sexualized, contributing to the commercializing of sex. Dating culture, rather that being about courtship and getting to know someone to find a spouse, is and has been for some time some kind of dystopian and aimless sex ritual. What a mind job!

And porn use? Yeah, it is a problem and a major contributor to various disorders and insecurities. The vast majority of males (especially Gen Z) are regular consumers of pornography, which has never been so ubiquitous and easily available - you're just a typo away from accidentally tripping over a porn site. Record numbers of women are dabbling in OF-style sex work. In the case of Gen Z and Gen Alpha, they practically grew up on the stuff. Pornography is also shaping sexual norms that are disturbing. For instance, there has been a rise in the frequency at which women are choked during sex. That comes from pornography, which has been only deepening mistrust, misunderstanding, disrespect, and animosity between the sexes. The crippling effect pornography has on the ability to form and have a healthy relationship cannot be understated.

The very fact that we're even talking about people not having sex as the problem is already a sign that we have a deranged relationship with sex. It's not about sex as if it were some decontextualized recreational activity that is failing to hit quotas. It has a place, and outside of its legitimate narrow confines, it becomes an act of violence, an instrument of power, and an act of exploitation and abuse. The social fallout is incalculable. Consent doesn't wave that away.

> The kids in my community are being taught age-appropriate, consent-based sex ed, and the availability of free, high-quality sex ed is improving.

Sex ed has been around for a long time, and one of its common faults is that it decontextualizes sex, and second, doesn't and can't give you "just the facts", but actively promotes and shapes unhealthy attitudes toward what is acceptable sexual behavior. Sexual ethics is reduced to mere consent, at best. To say the problem is that we don't have enough sex ed is like saying communism failed because it didn't communism hard enough.

Sex is not a toy. It's a powerful and sacred act. FAFO. That we are not horrified by the state of sexual relations and sexual disorder is a testament to the numbing effect our disorder has. For centuries, it was known to great moral teachers that one of the "daughters of lust" (where lust is not healthy sexual desire, but one not proportioned by reason) is a darkening of the mind.

So, yes, community is important, but it needs a basis, and a deep one, but the point of a community is not to supply you with sexual experiences. If your community begins operating like some kind of sex market, it will dissolve and right so, because it will have become a seedy hive of sexual perversion, coercion, and unhealthy relations.

The sexual relationship is the glue of family and through that of society. Mess with it, and prepare for hell.

The frequency of sex scenes in movies has been dropping for a while.

To the extent hookups lead to relationships, it's coming from people that are willing to settle

I think you got this one backwards.

The messaging I've seen is the opposite "Men don't deserve sex!".

The dead bedroom is particularly popular when the boyfriend in question is, in the words of the girlfriend in question, "gentle and treating his girlfriend better than any of her previous boyfriends".

Okay, but don't get surprised if men listen to you and avoid having sex.

Dead bedroom happens because people don’t solve their marital problems, generally have poor sex but are too afraid to talk about it, or to summarise communicate extremely poorly. It’s entirely unrelated to men being "too nice" whatever that’s supposed to mean.

If you are unhappy in your relationship, have some courage, talk about it, fix it or end it if it will never satisfy you. Stop playing the victim.

And to be fair, I think communication issue might be the crux of the modern lack of socialisation.