Japan needs babies.

[Riedquat]

We know what to do to make men happier. Improve the economy, and BAM - happier men. Women are...more complicated.

I don't think I agree with that. Maybe we're more easily fobbed off into being satisfied, although I suspect there's also an awful lot of cultural pressure towards "yay, success" even if it's tearing people up inside. I think men are just as complicated but won't admit it, even to ourselves sometimes.

[clearspira]

I dislike the modern world just as much, though for probably completely different reasons - though in the same spirit. And as for myself, I meant alone in the "romantic/intimate" sense. Ever see that Drew Barrymore movie Never Been Kissed? Yeah, that's me. Google in the words "30-year-old virgin," and here's something rather discouraging. The results you'll get... are all slanted towards a primarily female point of view, how hard it is for them to be a 30-year-old virgin, or how they don't mind. To get it from a male perspective, you need to add "30-year-old male virgin" to your Google search. What the hell does that say about us as a society, about our values?

I was thinking about this not long ago. Given how it is the man's job to ask out the woman, I maintain that any woman who is alone wants to be alone whereas any man who is alone has had it thrust upon him. Because for a woman it really is as simple as just batting your eyelids for a while at a single guy you like for him to get the hint.

[clearspira]

We know what to do to make men happier. Improve the economy, and BAM - happier men. Women are...more complicated.

I don't think I agree with that. Maybe we're more easily fobbed off into being satisfied, although I suspect there's also an awful lot of cultural pressure towards "yay, success" even if it's tearing people up inside. I think men are just as complicated but won't admit it, even to ourselves sometimes.

The older i get, the more incredibly important I find my free time to be. Playing videogames is more fulfilling to me than the 9 to 5 slog for someone who only thinks of me as a pair of hands. As long as I have enough money to live i'm happy.

[LittleRaven]

One big difference between the US and UK is that if you DO want to move into the open, you have lots and lots of it. Britain is aprox the same size as Michigan for reference. We are the third most populated island in the world behind Java and Honshu.

Certainly. And yet I cannot help but notice that while the population of the UK has grown 10% since the turn of the century, the population of UK cities has almost doubled. People in the UK are trying to move to where OTHER PEOPLE ARE, just as they are doing here in the US.

The why is because it is still human nature to want babies. Humans are not rational animals in general; we think emotionally, we think instinctively, we think based on drives, only occasionally are we logical.

Humans may WANT them, but here in the US and in the UK, they increasingly aren't having them. Fertility rates are crashing across the developed world, and this has a lot of policy makers very worried. Presumably for good reason.

[Riedquat]

The older i get, the more incredibly important I find my free time to be. Playing videogames is more fulfilling to me than the 9 to 5 slog for someone who only thinks of me as a pair of hands. As long as I have enough money to live i'm happy.

The 9 to 5 slog is where it all starts getting complicated for me. Yes, I find it an impersonal slog, but I'd also hate to have a life of idle luxury where I'm of no bloody use. But go back to where I could be of more hands-on use than I generally like now and I'd hate the pay, hours, and conditions. Those downsides have (to a large degree) gone, to be replaced by soulessness, part of the machine that they want to get rid of.

I think there's a lot of positive satisfication to be gained by having a genuine, real, hands-on input into your immediate society. We're killing that off. When it was the norm for most though it came with too many downsides. The current approach we're taking is a complete failure though, we trump the removal of the physical hardships and ignore the mental and emotional ones we've introduced. They may be the lesser evil but surely if there's any progress in the true meaning of the word we can do better?

Or maybe I just shouldn't waffle on after a few beers.

[Riedquat]

Certainly. And yet I cannot help but notice that while the population of the UK has grown 10% since the turn of the century, the population of UK cities has almost doubled. People in the UK are trying to move to where OTHER PEOPLE ARE, just as they are doing here in the US.

Simply doing whatever they need to do to survive I think. Ever-increasing centralisation will do that (and the pressures of population growth on the ease of transport exacerbate it). I really doubt that it indicates an increasing desire to live in such crowded conditions, more a reflection of the practical realities of trying to get by in 21st century Britain.

[Yukaphile]

Keep in mind these are all broad generalizations. You can't boil down billions of people to something that complex. And cultural factors play a role too. And I'm really against broad generalizations.

[Riedquat]

Broad generalisations are often what explains the lion's share of the picture. Dismiss them and you can't see the wood for the trees (never look beyond them and you're forgetting that the wood is made of trees).

[LittleRaven]

I think men are just as complicated but won't admit it, even to ourselves sometimes.

Well maybe, but if so we're really, REALLY good at hiding it. So damn good at it in fact that no studies that I'm aware of have been able to tease it out of us, and we've had some impressively large studies.

[LittleRaven]

I was thinking about this not long ago. Given how it is the man's job to ask out the woman, I maintain that any woman who is alone wants to be alone whereas any man who is alone has had it thrust upon him.

You're forgetting about standards. We all have them, and studies have shown that women, on average, have higher (or at least different) standards than men.

Both sexes are pretty picky about looks, of course - a certain spark is generally required to get a relationship off the ground. Women generally want them tall, men generally want them thin....but after that, things divide pretty sharply.

Women, on average, want a partner with the same or higher level of education that they have. Men generally do not care about their partner's education level. This is a big problem now that women graduate college at considerably higher rates than men do.

Women, on average, want a man who earns as much or more than they do. Men generally do not care all that much about their partner's earning potential. But since earnings tend to follow education in our modern economy, and since women are rapidly becoming the more educated sex, the numbers often do not favor them.

So there are lots of lonely women out there who would very much like to be in a relationship with the right man, but who cannot find him.

To quote an unmarried woman from Singapore in a recent article - "All the good men are taken."