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Comment by pixl97 | Hacker News Reader

There are a pile of different answers to these questions (not question), ones that should be asked separately.

For example, excluding factors that affect all the questions, putting off drinking is likely a combination of consumer education and the difficulty in getting alcohol pre-21. Fewer adults want to provide their younger peers alcohol because of legal risks.

Driving is the combination of increasing expense to drive a car you own, mandatory insurance, services like uber, and the need not to travel that modern technology presents.

Sex probably includes factors of better sexual education. Higher pregnancy rates are seen in populations with no or bad sexual education. Also, you are 'held to the fire' by the state if you get someone pregnant.

But some of the largest ones are teens aren't getting out in the workforce at younger ages. This means less money to spend on sex, drugs, and rock and roll, along with different social implications for the people you do meet.

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Sex probably includes factors of better sexual education.

I knew a guy older than me who came of age in the hippie era. He had slept with a lot more people than me. He once said "TV channels stopped broadcasting at 9pm. There wasn't anything else to do after 9 o'clock at night besides sex and drugs."

You can now get TV and internet 24/7 and even in small towns you can sometimes find stores and eateries open at all hours. Also, I think historically people turned to sex to get certain emotional needs met that can now be met a variety of ways.

As one flippant example: These days, you can post selfies to get adoration from many internet strangers telling you how gorgeous you are. You don't necessarily need a sex life to get that kind of feedback. Back in the day, an ordinary person who was not a celebrity could not get something like that any way but from a sexual relationship.

In my marriage, we spent thousands of dollars on furniture because it was one of the few things we agreed on and, outside of sex, furniture shopping was about the only time I had his undivided attention. We could have saved scads of money if he had just been willing to have more of a goddamn relationship with his goddamn wife.

For that and other reasons, I have spent a lot of years thinking long and hard about the myriad different reasons people do things. And we just have a lot more options these days for getting some need met without sex that, at one time, we would have had sex to try to meet.

I don't think that's a bad thing.

I agree that it's not a bad thing necessarily, but I think the increase in mental health issues and loneliness (which often go together) might in part be caused by this ability to get some of our needs met in ways that at best provide a surrogate for other or perhaps deeper needs.

Looking at myself, for example, I can safely say that I'm a bit of a loner. But the truth is that I get a fairly decent amount of social interaction through the internet. In some ways this meets my needs better than real life: I can't think of any real-world 'community' quite like this one, for example.

But in other ways it's become very clear to me, usually when I am forced to get out and be around people and suddenly realize how much I needed that kind of interaction, that my online communities are lacking in fundamental ways. I suppose porn is an even more concrete example of this. Another example would be the ridiculous amount of 'quality' shows/movies that offer a surrogate for experiencing relationships and places and events.

The convenience I have of being able to stay at home and 'interact' with others in particular way, on my own terms, has the disadvantage that it requires me to know what is good for me and actively manage that, in the same way that the convenience of porn makes it easy for me to not bother 'grooming my feathers', so to speak, and heading out to meet potential mates.

That's not to say any of these things are inherently bad, of course.

I was much lonelier in my marriage than I have been since my divorce. This has been very eye opening.

Being alone and being lonely are not the same thing and not necessarily even related. Loneliness is an unmet emotional hunger that is not automatically met by being around other people.

Being lonely while not alone is a kind of hell that simply being alone does not begin to match. While married, I really thought I could never tolerate being single. But it turns out my marriage was emotionally vampiric and actively draining me of any ability to experience contentment.

My post divorce experience has not gone remotely like I expected. It has been wonderfully better than the dystopian nightmare I had envisioned for so very long.

Which is not a rebuttal of your remarks. Just some late night thoughts on the topic that hopefully add something to the conversation.

Looking back with hindsight, were there any signs he would not have been a good husband before getting married? Did any of your friends tried to warn you against getting married to him?

Looking back, I made the best choice available to me in an imperfect world. He wasn't a bad husband, though I would have been happier if he had been more attentive.

Why? Did she/him held you back from something you are doing now you didn't do before?

So your ex preferred sex over social contact with you, as the poster above mentions the use of pornography over social contact; and between the lines, you prefer a free social life over the dominance of sex (apart from other issues your marriage might have had).

Sounds like a familiar source of contention...

Without wanting to generalise individual needs, I wonder if men and women are having trouble bridging their differences now there is less pressure of being a married couple. I imagine that's a large factor in young people trying to stay independent for longer.

So your ex preferred sex over social contact with you...you prefer a free social life over the dominance of sex

No. And your inaccurate inference is obnoxious.

I wonder if men and women are having trouble bridging their differences now there is less pressure of being a married couple.

This is heteronormative. I see no reason to believe that it is only heterosexuals who are putting off sex.

It wasn't all that long ago that people who were not heterosexual felt enormous social pressure to appear to be heterosexual. As one example: A friend of the family dated women for some years before embracing the fact that he was gay and establishing a committed long term relationship with another man.

These days, people have more latitude for arranging their lives where they don't have to put on such appearances while figuring themselves out. Being able to meet potential dates online goes a long way towards reducing or eliminating certain social elements from the process that can be insidious if you can't avoid them.

So I assumed wrong. I assume my own life experiences filtered through then – my apologies.

Of course any discussion about popularity of and reasons for marriage over the last century or so is "heteronormative", for obvious reasons. Still I think men and women experience sex differently, even beyond individual needs. I have several gay friends, but I can't really tell whether any differences they have in sexual needs would be amplified if they were a different gender, potentially influenced by different biological needs.

The title of the piece is Why are today's teens putting off driving, dating and drinking? So, the discussion here is not about popularity of and reasons for marriage over the last century.

So people, faced with more options, will have to do more experimenting and observing to figure out what's best for them, as you're doing. By the end of it, presumably the best set of options that they find will be at least as good as what it would have been if they had fewer options, and for some people it'll probably be considerably better.

I, for one, think that anything that helps nerds (defined as those who pursue their intellectual interests while neglecting their social lives, often not developing social skills as a result) ease their social pain while they focus on their intellectual interests is a very good thing.

> But in other ways it's become very clear to me, usually when I am forced to get out and be around people and suddenly realize how much I needed that kind of interaction, that my online communities are lacking in fundamental ways.

I'm glad I'm not the only one who's realized this. I may not particularly like getting out at the time I decide I should, but I never regret it. I've been attempting to do it a little more often.

My prior is like yours: There are likely different answers to the various points listed above.

Regarding this one:

> Sex probably includes factors of better sexual education. Higher pregnancy rates are seen in populations with no or bad sexual education. Also, you are 'held to the fire' by the state if you get someone pregnant.

It's possible that the easy availability of porn has a lot more to do with this than just fear of pregnancy, which is probably why this is seen across the board (urban, rural, ethnicities, etc) and despite apps like Tinder.

I'd also lean towards your hypothesis since there are many, many contraceptive and anti-STD choices -more than used to be available to other gens.

What? Condoms have been around for a long time. Nothing else is really very effective for STDs.

easily available and much less social stigma

> It's possible that the easy availability of porn has a lot more to do with this than just fear of pregnancy

I'd guess it's a combination of this and the overweight/obesity rate climbing, the venn diagrams between "people who want to sleep with you" and "people you want to sleep with" are probably diverging for many.

> I'd guess it's a combination of this and the overweight/obesity rate climbing

I agree, but for a different reason. Excess fat is an endocrine disruptor: adipose tissue makes Aromatase [1], which converts testosterone -> estrogen.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aromatase

  Adipose tissue is the greatest peripheral 
  source of aromatase in both males and 
  females,[citation needed] contributing 
  to the production of estradiol.

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adipose_tissue#Physiology (middle

Normal Testosterone levels -> normal libido.

Excess estrogen causes problems for both male & female bodies.

I wonder if obesity is the cause for the multi-generational decline of testosterone levels.

It's probably a factor that can't be denied, just like reduction in fitness levels (e.g. exercise), less physical labor, masculinity shaming, etc.

>> Less sex

When I was in high school, I had no idea of what STDs looked like. We learned about it in sex-ed but none of us knew tangibly. There were rumors it was like the flu. Now, google "Genital Warts" and you get an up close view in no time. That alone drives far more caution than what I exercised 25yrs ago.

When I was in high school in the 1990s, the web was in its infancy and I did not use it to look up pictures of STDs, but I knew what they were. I got a basic overview in school describing the cause, symptoms, prognosis, treatment and prevention of the most common ones.

My takeaway from that wasn't that sex was too scary to do, but that condoms were a really good idea.

Porn was readily available on the magazine racks at gas stations and less-than-family-oriented bookstores back in the day. Easy enough to get if you wanted it.

No, that is not 'easy enough'. Many people would find that an insurmountable barrier, actually. (I certainly have no desire to walk up to a stranger in public and ask for the means of sexual gratification in exchange for money.)

Sure but only if you didn't mind people knowing you brought porn. Also what you get now is compilations of just the scenes you like, rather than having to fast forward to just the few sections with the milf.

I would add Tinder as another reason for less sex. You have thousands of posible candidates on your finger prints, why wouldn't you get the perfect one? So people skip most people and only small percent succeed. Before you were in the bar with few less options, darker and with more alcohol, so you were more likely to match someone more real and normal.

I sounds unlikely to me that an app for casual encounters is the reason people have less sex...

I think the parent is suggesting that there is the same or more sex, just for fewer people. If you can access a thousand people in your league there is no reason to look outside of it (we're all min-maxing) whereas before you were limited by vicinity.

I understand tinder has become more of a dating app than a quick hook up one these days anyway. At least that's what friends tell me, I prefer getting drunk in a bar the old fashioned way.

The numbers show that 80% of the girls only date the top 20% of the guys. They rate 80% of the guys below average. So an average boy find hard to find a date there. Think this way, before you could have a few opportunities to get a date in a bar, now you have thousands of them before even getting out of the toilet. You think your value is higher than it really is and decide to wait for something that has he same value of you. As this is not possible you end up waiting more for sex. In small towns pre-internet there were more relationships than in cities as they know the pool of candidates is small and fixed. If they waited for the perfect one they would have wait forever.

Sounds like an interesting study, have the source?

If you search in Google you would see people getting those results on tinder, but here I put the study done by okcupid, which probably is more accurate:

https://theblog.okcupid.com/your-looks-and-your-inbox-8715c0...

Yes, I was also thinking porn. Porn and gaming. Gaming and porn. Who needs to drive? Or bother with actual humans?

Humans are by-and-large terrible creatures anyways.

> less money to spend on sex

This one doesn't need money ;) I would suspect other things being equal, hanging about with little to do would that costs money would encourage socialisation and sex.

Anecdotally, I feel kids are more mature in many ways than my generation (I'm late 30's). They have total access to information and I suspect this helps them learn to see the world faster.

As for less drinking/drugs, I wonder if smartphones have a big impact. In my youth we'd underage drink with friends and get a bit loose. Now days that behaviour would get uploaded fast and probably stop us doing it.

I am not sure about your claim that sex doesn’t require money. At least the male side courtship seems to be rather expensive both in terms of time and money. Granted that depends on what side of the pareto distribution you fall under. I agree with your point that having the breadth of human knowledge at your fingertips helps you make better decisions especially with how inforgiving the internet’s memory is. It does come with a different set of pathologies though. I find that socializing with real people requires a lot more work than it would if I didn’t have an amalgamation of internet people to talk to.

From the female side, safer sex and pregnancy prevention can also get pretty expensive in terms of time and money. Getting on the pill requires multiple doctor's appointments, and the pill itself can cost upwards of $50 a month.

Just that could be a reason young women who have received comprehensive sex ed can't be bothered to try PIV sex.

From an insurance perspective, contraception is muuuch cheaper than pregnancy. Every time I hear $religious_group complaining about paying for contraceptive coverage, I lol because it's actually a cost saving measure, like vaccination.

Of course, contraceptives can still be expensive to individuals in the US because insurance incentives aren't aligned with covering the whole society, but that's a long topic for another day.

> the pill itself can cost upwards of $50 a month

Wow! In Europe, at least in my part of it, it's like $3 to $5 per month.

Welcome to America, my friend.

Dude 15-18 year olds having sex aren't meeting on Tinder and then going to an SF bar to get $14 cocktails. Sex in high school is about as cheap as it gets.

I think you are failing to take into account compounded interest and opportunity cost. Efforts you make when you’re young get compounded during the rest of your life time and the time you spend learning the intricacies of human mating is time that you could spend doing so many other things. Especially today when you can’t just start working at a factory at 18 and expect lifetime employment. Not just that, human mating has also gotten a lot more complicated with the advent of the Pill. You probably won’t be marrying your highschool sweetheart either. With the right incentives and a wealth of information I am not surprised to see the population follow a less greedy strategy when it comes to dating and drugs.

Do you think these thoughts are going through the minds of most 17 year olds?

Humans do post-hoc rationalisation for whatever acts they perform and emotional states they experience; I expect Kids These Days have biases in those directions that they may ultimately justify in ways like that, even if the real reason is, say, a general expectation in the last year of highschol that you have three to four more years to go before being an adult instead of just zero to one.

I suspect the expensive side goes to the type of women your after and expectations you place on yourself. In my long past single days (and friends) you'd spend time with girls at parties, beaches, picnics, go to a museum, gallery, hike or home cooked meal.

While opinion only here I feel these are the best places to spend time vs the expensive restaurant/bar type deal. For the latter you sit still hoping the converstation is smooth vs doing something that keeps things relaxed and flowing. And the invariable dinner is finishing do we take it further moments vs having more easy access to take a moment when it feels right. So i dont get that dating has to be expensive unless you want it to be.

...I know this is very anecdotale.

I know it's easy to side with confirmation bias, but just for a second consider this.

If a teen doesn't leave his/her home much at all (reason cited - stuck to their bed staring into smartphone), there doesn't arise much opportunity to -buy alcohol (they're at home) -drive to places (they're at home) -not have sex (they're all at home)

There's strong correlations as well. Less working likely means less money. Less money means less alcohol. Less alcohol means less sex.

I find it rather amusing that people assume teens have to drink in order to have sex. In my experience as a teen, drinking was something I did with other guys mostly and the relationships I had were more about curiosity and alcohol wasn't all that involved.

Is it just me or do kids in general seem more complacent these days?

> Driving is the combination of increasing expense to drive a car you own, mandatory insurance, services like uber, and the need not to travel that modern technology presents.

Another reason is that the car is on decline as a status symbol. Tech gadgets such as iPhones are taking this place now.

Plus that iphones / smartphones are a lot cheaper and yet offer a lot more than cars do. Don't need to drive to the mall to catch up with friends anymore. People complain about the iphone x being $1000 (and previous iphones being $600, etc), but they forget that cars cost a multiple of that, both in purchase and maintenance / fuel / etc. And they don't have as much apps or knobs or screens as smartphones.

>putting off drinking is likely a combination of consumer education and the difficulty in getting alcohol pre-21

Not quite.. the US is one of the few countries with the highest drinking age in the world. The majority of countries allow teenagers to drink, and you still see the same patterns.

my guesses:

- no driving b/c no car b/c less income

- no sex b/c porn

- no booze b/c ... well, is that even true?

- no booze because legalized weed, which is more fun for less hangover?

Are they putting off sex, or just dating?

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