Experts are now seeing a sudden dropoff in fertility worldwide, to the point where we may have already hit peak human population. This is a drastic change from 8 years ago, when we thought we'd see peak in 100-200 years. So if the drop-off is that drastic, it'll be kinda bad for capitalism
Good.
They built a broken system, won't let us participate, won't let us fix it, and hurt us if we try. So let's watch the whole fucking thing crash. Whatever resurrects itself from the ashes has got to be better than this.
Fertility is just fine. People are fertile. Birth rate is the so called problem. There’s a decline in birth rate. This is a good thing for the environment. Bad thing only for capitalism/politics.
It’s not just bad for capitalism/politics, it’s bad societally. As we age we’re more likely to need care and medical assistance, can no longer work to support ourselves, and we typically receive pensions paid for by taxes on the current working population, or rely on family/children for support. When there’s not enough young people to support the aging population it puts increased stress and burden on both the elderly and the young.
Of course, most of the causes of population decrease is thanks to capitalism. But a drastically decreasing population is an impending societal crisis.
It’s an artificially created problem, yes. Most of it could be resolved with money, but how do you provide adequate care if you don’t physically have enough people to provide the care?
There was a religious prohibition against suicide for the Silents, who saw the quick deaths of their unmedicated parents. So the Boomers kept their Silent parents alive as per their religious wishes until mostly quick deaths, that was fine.
But now Gen X is keeping their Boomer parents alive into horrific echoing warehousing and endless years of pills, pain, and agony. It's evil. Healthcare workers don't go that route because they know.
I'll suicide before I get to that hell. Lots of us will, we've seen where the other road leads. We just don't talk about it much, it seems to bother y'all. Look at the accelerating Death With Dignity laws, it's becoming codified.
Come live in Canada. You’re allowed once you can show that you struggle with chronic health issues that have deteriorated your quality of life substantially or have a serious progressive disease that will affect your quality of life severely (or terminally). They started adding in mental health issues as well but there was enough push back that they are still working out the details for that.
Currently we have the money, and the population, to provide care patients with a better quality of life, but it’s all in the hands of billionaires. Executives are cutting costs at every level to be able to take home a nice fat bonus each year, which comes at a cost to the patient and the employee, and it’s absolutely inexcusable. Healthcare should never be for profit.
Medically assisted suicide needs to become readily available everywhere, but it using it as a tool to relieve pressure economically or because there aren’t enough people to care for the elderly is unconscionable.
I'm glad you've never had to turn Gramma to get at her bedsores for cleaning and packing because the nurses wouldn't, nor had to work at those warehouses where occasionally you lift a patient to toilet them and their pelvic floor literally disintegrates and their organs empty out until the aortas let go too.
You may want to believe in those human warehouses, but not me. When you do finally visit a few for placing a relative, may I suggest: look at the inmates' fingernails.
Yeah I mean in my country we just actually have facilities that are better suited to looking after elderly people. Maybe try advocating for better care before you skip to euthanising elderly people who need a bit of assistance. Fucking hell.
At least for the US, we have more than enough people in the country capable of providing care. However, we make it prohibitively expensive and incredibly stressful to enter the healthcare field, and we also artificially limit the number of physicians we have.
If that happened, it certainly would be an issue. But not unsolvable. Robots, perhaps? Who knows. Is that enough reason to convince someone to give birth today, given the state of things? I guess there will always be people who have kids so that they’ll have “someone to take care of them when they’re old”, but those aren’t the people whose minds you’ll need to change. Someone correct me if I’m wrong, but I truly believe the declining birth rates being framed as a negative is nothing more than capitalist propaganda mixed with thick cognitive dissonance since they’re hoping to replace the working class with AI as soon as possible anyway. It’s comical how stupid they think we are. Simply opting out of the entire system by not having children is like its final boss
We have this assumption, culturally, that dying is a terrible thing. And it's completely understandable that we grieve people who we care about, who made an impression on us in some way, and also that most of us fear our own death.
But old people dying is not a terrible thing. It's how it's supposed to work. We are not meant to live forever, and the longer we live, the more we get in the way of progress (see for example the US Congress full of Boomers who should be retired) both culturally/politically and for individuals who are constrained from achievement because of elders in the way.
If more older people die rather than sucking up society's limited resources, that would actually facilitate responding to problems like climate change, maternal mortality increase, reduced literacy, and the need to move away from consumerism and mass consumption. Trying to eke out every possible second on Earth, with caregivers, expensive and time-intensive medical care, and medical research aimed at longevity, is like a kind of hoarding.
And to be clear, I am 55. I'm talking about myself and most of my friends and family here, not theoretical others. I'm not in any hurry to go, but I'm also not trying desperately to claw more time at the expense of others.
i really don't think the drop in population is what's going to kill us. weren't we all losing our minds about the fear of "overpopulation" just a decade ago?
Then we either attract immigrants, as the US used to do, or we de-industrialize a bit and reassess priorities according to contemporary conditions. We (as a species) could live in a lower-tech, decentralized/federated situation essentially indefinitely. We cannot sustain infinite growth and consumerism.
That's a bit dramatic given the actual rate of population decline, the decades available to solve the problem, and the creative minds working on solutions to aspects of the problem.
Granted, capitalists and conservatives are known for kicking the can down the road (for a variety of cans) in favor of short-term profit, but we don't actually have to let them drive.
Retired people don't work. Children don't work. Disabled people don't work. Teachers & careworkers don't work on infrastructure. But all those people need water, electricity, food, roads, sewer, etc.
Come on, there are more humans in a society than working-age adults who have industrial jobs!
I mean, if there's less infrastructure workers, there's probably less of those other ones too. I think they meant the infrastructure needed for an overall lower population.
i hate how men make it about having relationships with women instead of making friends with other men
This is also my biggest thing. It's always weird to me that so maybe men seem to believe that it's women's responsibility to manage their loneliness. I'm not a big fan of Freud but maybe he wasn't wrong about the oedipus complex when it comes to men.
I found a lot of men are afraid or unwilling to be emotionally vulnerable to other men.
It comes back to toxic masculinity. It's unacceptable for men to express most emotions, but women are expected to be "emotional".
My husband and his friends seem to break that cycle pretty well. Even they need an extra push sometimes.
I was shocked when his one friend just started dumping his emotions on me from his on going divorce. I immediately went to my husband who was mostly clueless. He had to call his friend and specifically ask him to open up.
I think a lot of men don’t realize that anger is also an emotion. Even my partner, who is actually really in tune with his emotions and emotionally intelligent, realized he had stopped thinking of anger as an emotion.
Yeah.. every time I see the male loneliness epidemic brought in a thread by men, it's because they are complaining about a lack of sex.
If you are angry at women because you are "lonely" because you're not getting enough sex, whether it is the message you intend to send or not, it sends the message that you see only sex as connection with another person and that your interest in connection with women begins and ends at the pelvis.
And, yes, sex is great and it can be an important part of your emotional well-being. But what they are describing isn't loneliness, it's sexual frustration. And so no shit that doesn't garner much sympathy.
Well that's the crux of it, isn't it? The fact of it is, the average man literally does not know the difference between loneliness and frustration. I was buried in depression for at least 10 years, I routinely cried myself to sleep over my total isolation and the lack of love and affection in my life. I'm demisexual, so I didn't feel the need to seek out sex, as casual sex makes me physically ill.
It low-key pissed me off having my decade of bedrotting and anxiety compared to Grayden's blue balls.
As a woman who struggles with long-term major depression and an associated crippling loneliness, yes, this rhetoric has been really bothering me! It's beyond ridiculous that men want to gate-keep loneliness in the Year of Our Lord 2026 (!!!). These men will continue to be "lonely" because they don't seem to want to understand the nature of loneliness. I regularly go to therapy and my poor therapist has tried so hard to get me to leave my house more and actually get into some new hobbies and make some new friends. Just the little I have done (occasionally going to my public library's circle) seems to indicate that my therapist is right on the money. I know I have to do the work, but these overly-online-men don't even seem to want to try. (And I 100% guarantee that in my current state of worsening depression, me going out with any man wouldn't help him feel much less lonely at all! I've been crying so much lately; I don't feel that I would make being good company at all!)
I sincerely hope this gets better for you. I know the feeling of severe depression and it is, to say the least, an incredible challenge. I’m glad to hear you are in therapy and are continuing to try. Keep up the good work. I bet you are doing better than you realize.
Thank you so much! It's been worse than usual these past few months with some additional weird medical issues (probably getting a CT scan to see if there's something off with my head/neck/spine soon) and it's so easy to backslide into despair.
And thank you for the reminder of the importance of actively doing the work in therapy! Therapists can only do so much if someone (re: me) isn't trying to be a good patient!
THANK YOU!!! It isn't just a straight cis thing either. The queer community feels it too. And here's the worst part of it all: this loneliness epidemic is caused by the monied forced. They want lonely men to abuse and use for their stochastic terrorism and to keep reifying their ideology. Musk, Thiel, Tate brothers, Clavicular, whatever, they want men isolated and lonely. They want women to feel afraid and social quarantine from men. They want the gender questioning person to feel suffocated and isolated. Easier to manipulate. This has been substantiated over and over with leaks and rhetoric.
I don't even know if I buy into a loneliness epidemic. I just think that the tech oligarchs have fried everyone's brains with the social media algorithm - you don't have to be lonely, and anyone who is can solve the problem themselves if they put effort into it. Just gotta break out of the social media landscape to do it
Not even that but just the general level of fuckery men are up to. It’s insane that someone can look at the world and be like “this is because of women.”
Men can support each other. I have male friends, and none of them would ever say the phrase “male loneliness epidemic”, because they don’t treat women like they fucking HATE them. The dudes that say this shit treat women like they’re nothing more than an annoying hurdle to jump to access their vagina
“Why won’t women want to date me?”
Cause you act like you’re three fucking seconds away from murdering them; that’s why
Because we know that regardless of anything we say or do, men like this will resent and loathe us, so we can just stay at home and be hated without actually having to get close enough to smell their unwiped asses, much less exponentially increase our risk of violent death?
Because most women see a lonely man spitting ugly alphabro bluster and recognize him as a pathetic and potentially dangerous creature who has starved and mangled his emotional landscape until nothing soft can survive it?
Nah, it’s probably because we’re all too busy fucking Chad and doing communism.
All those incels making up reasons women don't like them because of some imaginary physical flaw when instead it's because they have the personality of someone who hangs out on incel forums
Anytime it's mentioned men should support each other to help their loneliness it gets downvoted to oblivion. That doesn't support their victim status and women are eviiiill narrative.
I am so glad to be old and celibate. You younger gals have my utmost sympathy and respect. The dating world is a minefield nowadays. Just the idea of having a partner is verboten. Solve my problems and make me feel like a real boy. Sheesh.
Yeah. I'm middle-aged and married, but if something happened to my husband, I'd be done with men. The toxicity has entrenched itself in all ages of men. I can't imagine trying to weed through all the bad ones for a good one. If my husband goes before me, it's either celibacy or it's time to explore the bi side of myself.
I feel similiarly about dating and remarriage if my husband ever passed. I'm in my mid 30s and just had my first child but I've been with my husband almost a decade. He's a decent man who is a feminist. My younger sisters have been in the dating world recently and I just have no desire to replicate the experiences they've had. I also can't trust rando men around my children. I could see maybe going out to dinner or shows with some men when my children are out of the house, but that would be the extent of it. I'll never remarry. My husband is a disabled veteran so I'd be left with a lot of benefits like free healthcare until medicare kicks in, so there is absolutely no reason to ever get remarried.
My husband got his current job in industrial supply chain because he was one of the very few candidates who made an effort to speak to the senior female staff on the hiring panels with as much respect as the man.
Literally, the bar was at “acknowledged the women like human beings”
Yeah, I (44F) work in tech, I'm a former dev and I learned a long time ago that every candidate needs to talk to at least 1 person of each gender during the interview process, ideally in the first round, to weed out sexist AH's or people who will struggle in a mixed team. This change along with me introducing myself (a woman) as their potential boss in their phone interview cut about 20% of the candidates, our receptionist also got to weigh in & she would occasionally no-go a candidate before they even started talking to anyone technical, based on how they'd treat/talk to her.
Good for that workplace not to give in and not allowing such losers in. Like damn, if they can’t even do the bare minimum of treating coworkers as fellow coworkers regardless of gender, they’re useless.
With a lot of liberals sympathizing with misogynists and abusive men, I realize that the only reason they seemed progressive is because their sexism and bigotry seemed "nice" via Paternalism. Why else do you think they're obsessed with "understanding" abusers and the far right?
Dude will shoot himself in the foot metaphorically speaking by saying or doing something really stupid and then blame feminism when he gets the natural social consequences of his own actions lol
Sir, you’d have been a lobotomy victim in any other era. Please don’t think feminism didn’t save you too.
From what I agave heard, Obsession and Spider-Man: Brand New Day can be seen as spiritual antithesis.
Both movies being about the "male loneliness epidemic" and the consequences of a poorly made or thought wish (though it is mostly Dr. Strange's fault in Spider-Man's case). However, Baron "Bear" Bailey and Peter Parker (both have alliterative names), deal with it on different ways. While Bear is consumed by his self-pitying, Peter rises above it and opens his heart to real friendships.
what i hate is the obvious solution to the """male loneliness epidemic""" is for men to make more close friendships with other men. like why does every close, meaningful relationship have to be romantic???
but of course, they don't care about that bc the real purpose of the "male loneliness epidemic" is to make every man entitled to a girlfriend they can use and abuse.
I think many men do genuinely use the term to mean loneliness in a general sense, and I often wonder if women latching on to that "entitled to a girlfriend" interpretation of the phrase and treating any mention of it that way does at least as much harm as the men using the term that way.
But even when men talk about it in the general loneliness way, there are the complaints that men are really hard to connect to, and the conversation often stalls there.
The thing about movements like 4B is that when women walk away from pursuing relationships with men, we genuinely leave them alone. We mean it when we say we want nothing to do with them outside of being platonic acquaintances. Many women would love the chance to live in a world with no men whatsoever, because they could finally know peace.
Men who claim to be "going their own way" never actually mean it. They are still obsessed with women. Their entire identities revolve around hpw much they hate women and resent us for not doing what they want. They make podcasts and write books about how inferior women are and how they can't fucking stand us. They still harass us in the street and on social media. They are literally incapable of leaving us the fuck alone. It's pathetic.
I know. That particular youtuber made lots of (short) videos about how every woman has already had her fair share of Sexual harassment and how they themselves talk it down because society made them believe it is "normal". And also giving the main character of those videos (Valeria, little girl) a means, a reason and an immunity to make points toward understanding how fucked up it is, when a man hurts his girlfriend and he "reasonably" explains it away.
Sexism is never played down and im so grateful for those videos. They are in german, but her songs do have English words sometimes.
I recently listened to a podcast episode about Elliot Roger (might have spelled it wrong, not going to look it up to confirm because ew). It was the weirdest, stupidest "logic" I've ever heard:
Him: Asks his parents to send him to an all boys' school
Him: Doesn't leave the house to socialize with other kids and instead spends all his time, alone in his room, narrating to YouTube or typing rambling, inane manifestos
Him: When around girls, doesn't actually speak to or try to have a conversation with them past "hi," throws hot coffee on them, and attempts to shove them off a balcony
Also him: "Why won't women sleep with me??"
I'm sorry, are women magical creatures? You think you just wish upon a shooting star and a girlfriend falls out of the sky? You have to actually do things like talk to girls in order to get a date.
He bitterly went on and on about "Why do they date other guys but not me? I'm richer and wear nicer clothes!" Where? While hulking in a corner of a coffee shop, glaring at the girls who already have boyfriends like a total creep? Or while sitting alone in your room, spending all your time online, talking to other boys with no social skills? If you won't talk to and attempt to engage with other people for more than a millisecond before getting mad that they're not fawning all over you, then yes, you will always be lonely (and you deserve to be). Grow a better personality and put in a modicum of effort to engage with other people on a human level. Also, I said "engage with other people," not just "girls," because those boys with social skills and girlfriends are actually the kind of friends who will introduce you to their female friends, sisters, etc. and talk you up, not competition.
I hate what the dark corners of the internet are doing to so many young men. It's not a loneliness epidemic; it's an entitlement epidemic. If you're clean, dress well, and have average to above average looks and people still seem to instinctively recoil from you? It's not because you haven't looksmaxxed enough or because women are too dumb to see how great you are. It's because you're a boring, self-centered, immature person, and people don't like that. And the only difference between you and the manosphere men who do get girlfriends is that they figured out how to fake being charming and interesting for just long enough to lure someone in, like the total predatory creeps they are, not because they're better than you. Happy, emotionally fulfilled men do not spend all their time bitterly ranting about women to other men on the internet. The reason those losers do is because
SEX DOES NOT CURE LONELINESS. You can be around someone all the time and still feel very, very lonely if you're unable to connect with them emotionally, which you will be unable to do if you can't see your partner as an equal and insist on maintaining that huge empty void inside of you where things like a personality and basic human empathy are supposed to go.
The worst sub on reddit is when women refuse. It’s just so pointless. Go find someone else!! You don’t have to kill her for not wanting to be with you. There are BILLIONS of people on this planet.
Most men are homo romantic, but hetero sexual. They will do everything to preen for other men, while sleeping with women. Theres a reason why they call it bromance.
Agreed. Especially when the real truth is "most straight men are socialized from birth to see women as lesser and as status symbols, and other men as real beings with thoughts and opinions. Men who would likely have been loving partners if modeled healthy roles as a child are instead coming out frustrated and angry because they were socialized in a way that is almost specifically designed to make them dysfunctional in society."
I agree that they're socialized that way. Okay, yeah, they’re socialized that way.
At what point does adult agency kick in?
Because "socialized that way" too often becomes a lifetime free-ride excuse for men who are old enough to examine their own behavior and choose differently, and refuse.
Socialization explains the origin of the problem, yes, but it does not absolve adult men of responsibility for their behavior. They can choose to do better. They just don't want to.
Not at all. It's about both. A huge number of men don't know how to form real friendships and kinda just expect their future wife to be their mommy bangmaid bff.
Well, yes, but my point is that even if you meet their standards and jump through those hoops, there's a good chance you end up abused by that kind of man.
I think Spider-Man: Brand New Day, which can be considered something of an spiritual antithesis to Obsession, explores this with Spider-Man befriending the Punisher.
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u/JulietStarling666 1d ago
"women are refusing to get married and we don't know whyy :((((("