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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 nu

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. Here's an illustration: https://ourworldindata.org/global-population-pyramid https://ourworldindata.org/global-population-pyramid 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#/media/File:South_Korea_Population_Pyramid.svg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_South_Korea#/m...

seydor 4y ago
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.
- DieAgainAli 4y ago
  You’re missing the point. There is numbers issue, there’s not enough people for ‘a venue’ to take care of all the old people.
  - safety1st 4y ago
    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?

seydor 4y ago

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.

DieAgainAli 4y ago
You’re missing the point. There is numbers issue, there’s not enough people for ‘a venue’ to take care of all the old people.
- safety1st 4y ago
  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?