Right now there is a loneliness epidemic throughout the world. More and more people aren’t entering relationships. Gen Z men are having significant trouble dating while there are some economic factors in the mix. From my own view and experiences combined with what I’ve read most Gen Z men are lack the social and communication skills to even enter a relationship. This has and in the future will lead to extreme issues. There’s already been a marked rise in hostility towards women by young men (think Andrew Tate and his ilk) that’s likely born out of this frustration. I would definitely say there’s been a rise in gender hostility ever since the pandemic.
Back in the 50s there was arranged marriages. All a person had to do was just show but now that’s gone because it was an unequal system and I think society missed its chance to establish something much healthier and better in its wake. Now we have people that are unable to connect with each other. We just toss people blindly into the mess that is human interaction and relationships and no one knows what to do anymore. We could be have the most fulfilling relationships humans have ever had. Think of the amount of people who would of never have entered abusive relationships had there been someone around them that showed them what love exactly is.
The way we teach is so heavily focused on teaching people how to be worker drones that we forget the human part of the person. This is why a lot of people who do extreme well in school and college fare so poorly in relationships and have higher rates of depression. We are the most educated and advanced in human history, we know psychology, we can teach this shit rather than tossing people blindly into the meat grinder.
This isn’t a gen Z issue. In fact, gen Z men behave significantly better. The generation of men before gen Z behaves in a way which got me telling everyone whenever its brought up: men would fuck more if they learnt to behave.
Could you elaborate what you mean with “behave better”?
You should include what country you are talking about. I know nobody in the USA who had an arranged marriage in the 1950s. They met partners at school, church, and neighborhood/extended family picnics and parties for the most part. They met in stores, libraries, and cafes. We have to maintain public casual community spaces. To paraprhase a Sociology professor I once had: you can’t marry someone you never meet. It requires talking to other humans to make even casual friends.
I think people focus way too much on romantic relationships. And many seem to see them as their lazy ticket out of loneliness.
If you want to improve social skills and alleviate loneliness people have to start and grow healthy communities, friendships and family bonds.
Capitalist thinking has reached interpersonal relationships. Instead of seeking community, people focus on how to optimise their dating market strategies and such. That’s pretty fucked up.
I think that’s also the reason why people lack interpersonal bonds. Investing into communities, friendships, relationships doesn’t fit into a world that is focused on linear progress and material gain. Applying this type of thinking (success, optimization, comparison, …) seems to lead mostly to resentment.
But community is not something you can teach, I think. You can facilitate it by providing opportunities for community building. Like the so called third place and enough time for people to get together casually.
Ultimately it’s something we inherit from generations before, though. And we only stray ever further from it. It’s in our hands now to do it in our lifes, online and in our neighborhoods etc.
Back in the day someone’s father would teach their son’s how to court a woman. I had no real father figure growing up but I was lucky to have met my wife in highschool. I recently asked my grandmother how my grandfather courtes her and it was actually so simple.
Nowadays men and women have unrealistic expectations of each other and what relationship should be. Social media is also put a divide between us and how we communicate with each other from a very young age.
On top of this men have become afraid of failure when it comes to talking to women. This a long with social media saying you are a creep for taking a shot men have been crippled in their confidence.
I believe that social media should not be available to kids and young adults until adulthood. I believe that social media prevents people from socializing properly. Face to face communication with both sexs is crucial for humans.
Relationships are discouraged through school, in favor of competition, so we can be more effectively exploited by the elites (and all hierarchical societies). That is by design. Healthy individuals with good relationships are harder to sell to and to exploit. It’s relatively hard to convince someone who is satisfied with their life and image to buy something. It’s a lot easier to convince them to instead seek emotional satisfaction through excessive buying (escapism). Each new item (or service) you get can temporarily fill the emotional void and provide a fleeting sense of excitement or comfort.
I think that you’re giving them way too much credit. I’d call it a favorable coincidence (for them) but not by design.
That tends to be how things develop when you’re talking about systems. There’s not a cackling Bad Guy engineering these things, but a system of socioeconomic carrots and sticks that, right now, favor exploitation. Schools and education happen within that incentive structure so its natural that they would take on it’s characteristics.
Yeah, you’re probably right to some degree. It may not have been fully intentional on the part of the designer.
However, since the elites of the time controlled the government, the government would tend to favor institutions that elites think will benefit from.
I would like to see people educated how to argue without getting personal. And how to communicate that you aren’t in a mood to argue right now, because you’re angry and wouldn’t listen.
A good start for sure would be to learn to listen and understand, not listen to answer.
Arguing is a path to understanding. We don’t argue just to create pain, it’s got a purpose to it.
The part about gen Z men has been true for every generation’s men.
most Gen Z men are lack the social and communication skills to even enter a relationship
Interesting choice of words. I’d say it borders misandry.
I don’t think that decrease in social skills of the younger generation influenced solely boys.
That being said it’s definitely a greater issue for them, since they are expected to initiate and organize almost everything in the initial phase of relationship. Maybe that’s what you meant.
What I’ve seen (in admittably limited experience) is a decrease of skills all over the board combined with lack of patience and will to improve together.
We do, that’s what socializing at school is for.
It’s what recess is for, but we decided to just keep cutting that down because it’s hard to measure progress when kids aren’t sitting at desks filling in scantron ovals.
Socializing in school is only really allowed in the ~20% of time not made up of lectures / homework. E.g. Recess/Lunch/In-between classes. The other 80% is largely made up of lectures and homework. Ideally those percentages should be flipped. 80% learning via social learning(socialization) / 20% lecture.
Call me crazy, but I think humans learn best socially(conversationally) not by lecture via teacher. Talking and socializing should be integrated in how we learn and teach. The learning should largely be social between the students so that they actually learn material instead of just learning to temporarily remember the information for the next test.
The teacher should drift between the groups of students and clear up any misconceptions or disagreements that occur.
This community is so strange some times
Does anyone else remember school as 13 years of being told not to socialize?
What
From kindergarten onwards “No talking. Everyone quiet.”
Were you the weird quiet kid at school?
No, I was the kid that hung out with that kid.
This had nothing to do with teachers saying things like “Single file line, no talking class!”
Yeah, that’s not how school worked…
A lot of blind courage is also missing. People used to answer to a lot of blind requests in a way that demanded a leap of faith and an effort to establish their own character. It also had a healthy dose of just wait and see. These days people can weasel out of uninformed situations quite a lot. So, we lean to shallow decision models with fewer good intentions accordingly.
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“But I love Kristy, and nothing will change that”. It’s not a rational, teachable topic. Which is why we teach contraception instead of abstinence. Tack on teaching financial well-being if you wanna improve odds of healthy relationships.
As you are talking a lot about men, I would say we need to talk about toxic masculinity. Which means basically antisocial, competetive, emotion-suppressing, “talk about things instead of feelings” traits.
Which also is a huge thing capitalism feeds. Noone gets admired for having a healthy relationship with their parents or a few very good friends, but for damn shoes or minicomputers with glass, cameras and sensors everywhere, nobody knew they needed a few decades ago.
So capitalism with ads everywhere and consumerism instead of real values is a huge factor.
If you dont have your own TV, you have to share. No own books, you need to go to the library. No own car, you share it with others.
This is so “uncomfortable”, while it would make people meet lots of new friends. I always make nice accquaintances in the train.
Which also is a huge thing capitalism feeds
And you were off to such a good start, too. If only this didn’t predate capitalism by several thousand years :(
It turns out even in a perfectly egalitarian society people will still compete for mates, and where teaching malea how to compete for mates gets filtered through idiocy, you end up with toxic masculinity.
Hell, if you’re being totally reductionist (and if you get to be, everyone gets to be), then you’re likely to experience more support for toxic traits in both men and women in an egalitarian society, because social differentiation becomes even more important.
They are not being reductionist, not to the degree you are claiming. It’s true it’s more complicated than “capitalism bad!” but you are talking on the other extreme of the spectrum and you are also wrong. Capitalism absolutely encourages and instills messages of “having things and showing disposable income means you are higher class”.
Capitalism absolutely encourages and instills messages of “having things and showing disposable income means you are higher class”
This is not by any means unique to capitalism.
There will always be markers of social standing, even in a completely post-scarcity Trek-communist utopia.
Blaming an aspect of human nature on an economic system is silly.
Capitalism needs companies to grow. But there is no need for any products most produce. So they use ads and all other toxic methods, abusing the antisocial group dynamics etc. with being bullied for damn shoes… just to sell products.
Capitalism bad.
But there is no need for any products most produce
How do you expect anyone to take you seriously lol
?
Lucky you, to live where there is a passenger train.
You are unfairly holding the entire world to your personal myopic standards. Romantic relationships don’t hold the same importance for everyone (they aren’t even held as positive by many orthodox communities of the world), and the fact that more people have started to avoid having them just out of convention in the West may even be a good thing. Who are you to denounce every single man as someone sick or deficient? Why does the existence of a relationship have to be tied to a person’s social skills or standing?
Read generously, OP’s point can be taken to refer to relationships generally, i.e. social skills. A lack of engagement with dating in and of itself doesn’t point to someone being sick or deficient, it could indicate any number of things. I don’t think there’s anything implied about judging individuals here.
A societal trend of young people having fewer healthy interpersonal relationships at all is troubling. We’re a social species living in a world that requires a certain amount of cooperation both for societal function and individual wellbeing.
Social isolation is a killer, both in terms of its effects on the person isolated and to society at large via the actions of (a statistically higher proportion of) those who are socially isolated.
A call for ameliorative measures against such a trend is not a personal attack on anyone.
Both of you are absolutely right - I think that the OP’s emphasis on romantic relations is actually a symptom of the fact that an excessive amount of emphasis is put on forming romantic relationships over platonic ones
I agree. People are unhappy because they’ve been conditioned to think they lack something vital if they don’t have romance. When really, a lot of times we’re better off without all that drama.
But what about all those life coaches and self-help book sellers? Won’t somebody please think of their profits???
