I'll be transparent here and say that I was inspired by the "What's wrong with Modern Women" thread, but given the nature of the male userbase on this particular sub, and the fact that all kinds of people run into this problem I don't think it'd be fair to single women out. I think I just notice the problem more with them because that's who I try to get out of this mindset most.

I didn't want to make the thread a debate. We really shouldn't be fighting. At all. But the mods demand it.

I'm going to try to write this in a digestible form, but if you don't like to read here you go:

TLDR: As society becomes more isolated, we stop sharing goals and priorities. And the lack of a shared outlook incentivizes people to look inward for motivation. And purely internal motivation leads to selfish actions.

People that are self-involved will not suffer the discomfort of considering another person's motivations or needs and seek to balance them with their own. Which is the foundation of all mutually beneficial relationships.

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Part of the problems between men and women is just that with the loss of shared values and less shared participation in certain institutions (like churches, but also certain kinds of jobs, schools, community associations) there's very little left to bring us all together.

That's alienation and it literally makes us more and more strange to each other and you can see the worst effects of this in the under 30 crowd. 66% of young men single, more than 40% haven't even approached a woman in the past year.

There's less relationships, less friends, less sex, less kids, less, less, less.

And there's more suicides, more deaths of despair, more poverty, more isolation, more depression, more stochastic terrorism.

The social dysfunction is pervasive and as time goes on it's effecting more and more things. That should be more than concerning for everyone.

But it isn't.

Even if your life is fine, if you're happy, you're getting laid, you've got kids and money and a home and all the nice things. This will come back on you. You don't need to be directly involved now to be directly involved later.

I've seen it plenty here, I've seen ambivalence to any number of issues outside of this place and I don't think it's just about issues of "men and women", it's more general than that, but this is a gender sub so I'm focused there.

And I think it's like this because we've become a society of subjective observers. Because subjectivity is all that's left for the majority of people, and for those who have more than that, they still have to live in a society where that has become normal.

So, everything we see and experience and learn is understood as a reflection of ourselves and how we individually feel about it.

So, if you don't care. It's not important.

If it's not happening to you. It's not important.

If it's not close to you. It's not important.

If it's not interesting to you. It's not important.

And scariest to me, if you don't understand why it's important, it's not important.

All roads lead to apathy and dismissal, but that last one is going to kill us.

It's the ignorance of the drawbacks of thinking like this that locks people into a loop where they don't care about things because they don't care about not caring. That kind of willful ignorance begets more terminal social dysfunction, because it disempowers people from making the necessary self-corrections to salvage the relationships they do manage to form.

Worse, it make conflict inevitable and unresolvable. And you can see that with the kinds of cyclical arguments that people get into over relationships and sex as if the only possible outcomes are submission or to disengage.

Mutual love and affection, that both parties can trust in, becomes impossible when people only care and acknowledge their own concerns.

It's almost like the patterns of behavior that narcissists fall into, where they take and they take and when they can't take anymore they lash out at what they can no longer use. The only form a relationship can take is parasitic.

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For relationships to work, people need to trust each other.

For people to trust each other, they need to be consistent in what they do and say over time.

For that to happen, people have to be willing to endure discomfort and inconvenience for the benefit of others. And shared values and principles allow people to find others who are willing to do the same for them.

Trusting, working relationships cannot exist in a society where people are solely out for themselves and can't think beyond their own individual concerns.

That mindset will lead them to making decisions that harm others, because it benefits the self, or decisions to use others for their benefit without giving back.

It leads also to them making assumptions of others that aren't based in any expressed value system but are based in a crude assumption of what others want out of them. Which further fuels the ruthless opportunism of this sort of behavior because pushes people to pre-empt their own exploitation by being the first to draw blood.

It's a nasty cycle and it will leave us broken, bitter, paranoid people.

And I'll leave it there.