This is a situation that will affect too many men worldwide as they are more likely to live single / be childless. The solution is to have communities or networks of people built explitictly around the idea of caring for others.
Right those exist, they're called families. Actually they've existed for longer than humans.
It turns out that many animals, particularly mammals and including us, have evolved this behavior where they live with their blood relatives and take care of them, it has worked pretty well for millions of years.
Now it so happens that in many modern human societies there's a declining birth rate and consequently fewer families are being formed. South Korea's one of the worst off in this regard. You end up with a lot of people being alone and dying alone (the majority are male but women are far from immune).
Why are people not starting families? Well I haven't seen Korea-specific information but I think it's the same as most countries, people typically cite medical and financial reasons.
So basically you have to address cost of living, cost of raising a kid and rising infertility to address this, among other things.
However for a number of societies including Korea's it's probably too late. Koreans can't have more families and your solution probably won't work either. The reason is that the demographic collapse is so extreme, the population is increasingly too old to produce a new generation or take care of other people. There just aren't enough young people to go around. These societies either have to accept mass immigration or collapse. The next few decades will be interesting.
You completely ignored that children move far away from their parents, following the money of rich people who concentrate in a few specific geographic areas. That is the whole shtick behind LA, the bay area and NYC after all. You go there because you get closer to the money. It is particularly paradoxical when your parents invest in stocks because then you have to follow your parent's money.
I haven't ignored that at all. Big cities are great talent pools for megacorps that owe their success to a free market while simultaneously seeking to destroy it. Those big cities also suck for decentralization of capital and power and for human society in general. Anxiety and depression are higher in big cities.
Big cities are filled with highly educated white collar serfs (sorry I mean professionals) who are great human resources.
In rural communities- the birth rate is way higher.
that's irrelevant though. People at old age have already lost many of their peers, so they have mostly children to rely on. But people now have fewer children than ever and they are likely to be away. And i dont think parents or children want to be forced to live with each other just for this. We also shouldn't be shaming people for not living with their family. That's why we need something else (and maybe there's an entrepreneurial idea there)
Also keep in mind that , particularly for men, the nuclear family living was not the norm until the past few generations. Men used to spent most of their time in men/gentlement's spaces socializing/doing business while the wife was at home with kids. This 'loneliness' thing happens because those other spaces are gone now
It's not irrelevant. I think the point you're missing is that there are not enough young able-bodied people to take care of the lonely old people. There is a numbers issue.
Like in your solution you assume that people exist will be people who are young and have energy and have resources. These people do not exist. Not enough to take care of the massive number of old and sick people being created anyway.
This is referred to as an inverted population pyramid but really it ends up looking more like a bell. The world used to have lots of young people and not many old people. The flattening of the peak which has happened in only 30 years is stunning! This will keep getting worse until the end of the century.
Korea's population pyramid looks way worse than the one I linked above by the way. From age 60 down it actually is inverted. Again, there are no young people left to do the caretaking you envision. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_South_Korea#/m...
The point is not to take care of ailing old people, there's other venues for that. Instead it is to have some sort of semiregular contact with other peers that's beneficial both ways.
I re-read their comment and I sort of get it now. We could bring back "gentlemen's spaces" and these single guys might be less lonely. They would still die alone, though, and it wouldn't do anything at all for the lonely women out there (who also account for 15-20% of the lonely deaths mentioned in the article).
Though I'm not really convinced that those opportunities for socializing no longer exist, I mean any medium sized city has meetup groups, pubs, and probably all sorts of other social outlets I'm not thinking of. The modern middle aged man's problem isn't meeting people, it's building relationships that have a closeness and intimacy equivalent to familial ones, which some people seem to think is easy but if it was these corpses wouldn't be rotting in apartments would they?
I wonder how these might look. Building relationships is really hard and ultimately that's what's needed. To build relationships, you need repeated exposure and need to overcome an initial barrier of familiarity to get to the point where you can have meaningful interactions and not just smalltalk.
Given men are also bad at maintaining relationships, I wonder if something like different, more communal living arrangements would be beneficial. I am thinking something like a dorm, but more luxurious with the common areas being more of a focus.
An idea that might accelerate overcoming the initial familiarity barrier might be something like the "question to fall in love" that made their rounds a few years back. I've seen a speed-dating version of similar, increasingly intimate questions build enormous feeling of trust within ~30 minutes as an icebreaker at a T-Group.
Transactional but also intentional. Nothing more or less.
Men are not bad at maintaining relationships, that is a falsehood. Historically, men built all the hierarchical structures we have today. Antrhopologists used to say that men build a large and shallow network of relationships (while women prefer small but more intimate groups or pairs).
It doesn't have to involve communal living, but instead regular gatherings. Basically what traditional groups like church or brotherhoods like the freemasons did. Currently, however, there is a stigma against those things which has to be overcome
I'm not sure if the shallow, mostly transactional relations men build help in the context of loneliness.
Non-religious versions of "churches" seem to fail due to a lack of regular attendance. Free Masons seem to have solved this by building some kinds of pressure to attend. I genuinely wonder why they fell out of favor. Did they just become uncool?
Guys who drop out of freemasonry tend to do so because their girlfriends/wives disapprove (or would) of the social status of the other men involved. I'm in the middle of this issue now, and I can say it's because a generation of men (boomer/X) grew up depending on their girlfriends/wives to manage their social lives. There are actually guys who bring their wives/girlfriends to meet new male friends to vet the guys for approval. It's a generation of men who lack normal adult boundaries with the women in their lives. GenX men are largely codependent and needy owing to pressure to be "sensitive," being largely raised in broken homes, so their ideal relationship now resembles what is effectively sexual cannibalism elsewhere in nature. They don't identify as men because they think men are who hurt their mothers, the source of their belief in a perfect infant self. They're unweaned.
The knock on effects to millenials make forming male friendships really fraught. Add the hyper-mainstreaming of gay culture, and suddenly male friendships have all the absurdity of how badly boys cling to women and hang around as "friends" hoping for more, but now they're doing it to straight male friends, and it undermines the trust in the fabric of male social networks. Can gay men have close straight male friends without holding out hope for more? Some, not all etc, but I would say the confluence of straight men codependently outsourcing their social lives to their wives/girlfriends because once they have one of those they're somehow made, and the complexities of normalized gay culture where boys-being-boys, they're hanging on for hope has really frayed the fabric. We're all still trying to navigate a radically new (and arguably, devastated) landscape without a lot of ground rules.
It's 2023, we're adults, we can have conversations about how we relate. Given the original topic was about how men demographically have trouble forming relationships - where they did not for literally centuries, the meaningful question is what has changed.
I had direct experience with the growth issues facing a traditional fraternal organization. We can't really use the words we mean when we talk about the jargon this comment uses, but suffice it to say, among the scores of men I know socially, the people who use that jargon are punchlines.
You can also look at other communities that sprang up, like e.g. the gay community, who faced marginalization as well. Gatherings like pride parades are creating a sense of community which supports people
We've lived communally for a long time and across many different cultures and ethnicities. You just have to look at the past to know how that would look.
Any barrier you might see right now is the consequence of the cultural switch to individualism, and that again is a direct consequence of the transition to market based economies.
I think it suffers from the problem that people who provide caring don’t need this, so you are stuck with the net takers and trying to build a community from them.
The solution to kitten punting isn't to stop punting kittens because the kittens are clearly not strong enough to avoid being punted. This is brutal, I know, but kitten punting is unfortunately the reality of life on earth. No reason why kittens should be exempt.
The solution to thirst isn't to provide water because the thirsty are clearly not strong enough to find water. This is brutal, I know, but thirst is unfortunately the reality of life on earth. No reason why people should be exempt.
That is the way it’s always been and is currently - I highly doubt any real “solution” exists outside of home health care robots or automated wellness checks
At the very least, if you're going to propose a solution (to any problem), make sure it actually tackles the problem so that the problem is lessened or ceases to exist after the solution is applied. Otherwise what you've proposed isn't a solution at all, just a nonsensical statement. I would even go a step further and call your specific statement lacking empathy, bordering on sociopathic.
My friend, I have had to look into this abyss myself. Although I must admit that my skillset did allow me to escape, I do not believe that all man must succumb to this outcome.
