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Comment by lithocarpus | Hacker News Reader

Humans generally don't interact in person as much with other humans anymore and technology is I think one of the big drivers of this change.

From the article:

"When it comes to sexlessness (“no sex in the last year”) among young adults, the biggest change comes post-2010."

"Between 2010 and 2019, the average time young adults spent with friends in a given week fell by nearly 50%, from 12.8 hours to just 6.5 hours."

No doubt there are other factors too, and all of the factors are entangled together as in any complex system, but I think internet and smartphones is one of the biggest aspects to point to.

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They should call it "the social recession".

Just in the past couple of weeks we've met some neighbors with toddlers that enjoy our toddler. It's been SUPER nice being able to hanf out with the adults while the kids entertain each other.

Smart phones and the ubiquity of internet and video games is really it I think. You never have to be bored anymore, and therefore don’t have to meetup in person to be entertained.

The timeline does not match. Both were widely available in oughts.

So there was something smooth that hit a phase transition. Likely enployment or housing prices, forcing people to engage survival mode. People in this mode do not feel secure enough to have sex or especially start families.

The first smartphone — iphone — came out in 2007? Adoption definitely started ramping up in 2010.

Video games were available pre-2010, but they weren’t nearly as ubiquitous, and honestly the people playing lots of video games pre-2010 weren’t having lots of sex either.

Video games have been responsible since their inception for everything the bigots don't like. That doesn’t make it true.

Video games have been present for a shit ton of time in the form on game consoles. Social media, on the other hand, is a recent phenomena

Most people say video games were better pre 2010 and we already had smartphones at that point, just not iPhones. So it's not either of those.

Video games weren't as widespread, personalized, or diverse than they are now. That people who played video games in 2010 said that those were better is immaterial. This graph goes up through 2022: https://i.redd.it/tnrs4wl1ibkb1.png

Same with smartphones. Smartphone apps existed but weren't as personalized and didn't serve nearly as diverse of content as they do now. It's night and day. Surely I don't need to pull up a graph of smartphone usage per day.

Find the graph for "hours spent on social media" and I bet you will have found your culprit.

The data shows the big drop in sex happened in the 2010's. Your graph shows the big spike in gaming happened 2021 & 2022. That's during the pandemic. Of course gaming rose during the pandemic when people were forced to stay home.

No one means a BlackBerry when they say smartphones. It implies a large screen that can consume content easily, and with a large data plan, neither of which existed until The iPhone. I never saw someone watch 2 hours of YouTube on a blackberry.

When I say “smarphone” I mean iphone and later.

Please, this is HN. Don't make moot points. Smartphones existed before 2010, but few people had them.

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