this post was submitted on 28 Jul 2025
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Does this weird anyone else out? Graduated HS in 1989 and it seemed like we were all fucking, even the nerds. I'm short and scrawny, still tripped and fell into pussy now and again.
There's something really alarming about this, can't put my finger on it. It's certainly weird that today's young people aren't fucking when we were going nuts during the AIDS epidemic, risking our lives for that cookie. Sex is such a basic human need I can't imagine what going without is doing to mental health.
Not meaning to be rude with this phrasing, but uh, I am significantly younger than you, born around the time you graduated HS... and yep, I have the same, gut, "this seems weird" reaction.
I was a terribly bashful nerd in the early/mid 2000s, and even I lost my v-card as either a 16 or 17 yo.
https://www.cdc.gov/yrbs/dstr/pdf/YRBS-2023-Data-Summary-Trend-Report.pdf
Thats a drop from half of kids literally fucking around in HS, to just a third, in only the last 10ish years.
I dunno if such data exists going back to when you were in HS, I'd imagine it would have been closer to around 6/10 back then (though thats just a spitball guess), but yeah, the decline has been shocking to me as well.
...
IMO, the main thing that is destroying mental health is... and again, I say this as an early tech adopter, tech nerd, who had a mySpace account, who was one of the first with a Facebook account...
The cause of this is mutlifactorial, general economic decline and precarity are huge factors, but the main problem is our modern social media based digital environment, and how it trains people to act.
Brainrot is a real thing, short form video content reduces attentions spans, makes you more anxious, less confident / have lower self esteem, rapidly propagates mis and disinformation, promotes narcissism and just literally retards rhe development of functional social behaviors.
...
That, and the destruction of 'third places', and then the subsequent enshittificstion of dating apps.
In your day, people could afford to go take a car and hangout somewhere they had some privacy, away from their parents at least, some area where people would go and hang out and just socialize.
Those physical spaces do not exist anymore, they all have paywalls people can no longer afford.
No average kid can afford a car on a summer job anymore.
...
Then, as things digitized, realworld meetups and hangout areas began to decline, dating apps happened.
They were good for a time, but then the people running them realized that you actually make more money as a dating app by making it something you keep coming back to, hiding people you may actually jive well with behind paywalls, that what you actually want is to create a rollercoaster of 'almost worked out but didn't in the end' type relstionships... as that produces your most reliable dating app customer.
These are smart data science people running these things, they know what they're doing.
They don't say what I just said outloud, because it would be bad for their branding and marketing.
i think you forgot a word or more in that sentence
I have the same opinion, and i say that the internet takes attention away from functioning social forms of behavior. in other words, the internet feeds off people's attention, but that reduces inter-human contact too. because human contact needs attention
Derp, I did, I am also editing and expanding more to this in realtime, hold please lol.