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- Married adults have markedly more sex than their unmarried peers, but the sex recession is also making inroads among married couples.
- 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.
Source: Institute for Family Studies.
Depression, sure. Medication - when taken regularly as prescribed - helps make it easier to choose to move on from depressive thoughts (without the meds it’s much harder to escape the “death spiral” of worsening thoughts & feelings), but it doesn’t stop them - you still have to choose to move on from them. As such, I don’t think they’re contributing to a problem that’d be there regardless.
Depression over how impossible to get ahead life has become, how the power-hungry control freaks are squeezing everybody in every way possible - and then replacing them with machines, how the future of the world we live on becomes even more bleak by the day, how there’s so many things demanding our attention that we have very little time left for ourselves, let alone to socialize in person, etc. Seems perfectly predictable that increasing the number of people with little to no hope left for their lives would react in such a manner.
I didn’t mean anything negative toward antidepressants other than that lowered sex drive is often a side effect of many of the most commonly prescribed medications. And yes, there are many real reasons we see a consistent plague of depression in modern society.
I would argue though that we are in one of the most food secure times in all of history. And are actually positively positioned for meeting our energy and resource needs.
Our problem has more to do with management and greed than with actual reality of our situation as a species. If we were making better choices collectively we could reduce a tremendous amount of the harm we associate with population sizes and lifestyle. But many old systems would have to die, we have to let go of a lot of what we just assume to be ‘facts of life’ and start evaluating the intrinsic value of things differently. Meaning measuring success with a new set of rules.
But it’s very hard to even consider when most of us are just trying to get from one day to the next. We feel trapped in someone else’s fabricated cage. Hence, the depression and hopelessness that’s universally felt. But all in all, I think we’re going to make it to be honest. We have to, or we will indeed fail as a species. The cage looks small but it’s not real. That’s what I remind myself anyway.
The medication often affects libido.
I’m not saying that to diminish everything else you’re saying. Just adding a little info.