6 ms·

The Toxic Reality of a Post-Familial Society

45 points by dinoleif 3y ago

nostrademons 3y ago
The article makes an interesting case for the possibility that South Korea's military dictatorship intentionally created low-fertility policies that can't be reversed. But reading the description of what's going on, I can't help be reminded of John B. Calhoun's work on the "behavioral sink" [1], where he basically created a utopia where rats had everything they needed for survival, they multiplied exponentially, but once they reached a certain critical population density, they ceased to be interested in reproduction and instead exhibited a bunch of socially pathological behaviors. Within 3 generations, no further rats were born. South Korea is a densely populated country, as is Japan (another country often cited as having an aging, low-fertility population). And people tend to move out of dense metropolises like Manhattan or SF to have children. Maybe there's something inborn to humans that causes us to seek space and resources, and if those are not available, to not have kids? [1] https://vocal.media/geeks/the-true-history-behind-the-secret-of-nimh https://vocal.media/geeks/the-true-history-behind-the-secret...
- djtango 3y ago
  Lack a source but for many this will be the first generation in a long time where today's new parents will be unable to provide an equal or better quality of life to their children - especially in big urban centers which have seen the full effects of stratification. Space and resources are big weights in a "QoL" function.
  - Teknoman117 3y ago
    It's nutty. I make more than my dad did when he retired, yet, if I were to have kids today I could not provide the lifestyle to them that I had as a kid. And he certainly didn't make what he did at retirement when I was a child. If I had a dual income household, there would be the money to do it, but the kids would lose out on something that I considered a crucial part of my upbringing - a full time parent. But, the perspective here is that I (and many of the people on this site) work in one of the few remaining well paying professions, whereas my dad was in a "well paying" but not "top paying" field. It just can't be sustainable...
- pm90 3y ago
  I don’t believe its density as much as costs and impact on lifestyle. Make daycare, child health services and great schools universally available and cheap/free. Make it feasible and safe to get kids around dense cities quickly (excellent transit options). I suspect under these circumstances more people would be open to the idea of children. As it stands today, having children places an unbearably high social and financial strain on people. Suburbs have been just one solution to the problem but there are others.
  - dmm 3y ago
    > Make daycare, child health services and great schools universally available and cheap/free. That is probably a good idea but there are places where daycare is free and there's no evidence it makes a difference.
    - ElevenLathe 3y ago
      The childcare is free, but what about the rent?
      - deleted 3y ago
        [deleted]
  - ertian 3y ago
    This might be affecting the number of children a couple has (probably is, in fact), but I doubt people factor it in to their decision to have a kid or not. I had absolutely no idea what day care or diapers cost before I had a kid. It's hard for me to picture a young couple approaching it that way.
  - bluGill 3y ago
    > As it stands today, having children places an unbearably high social and financial strain on people. Suburbs have been just one solution to the problem but there are others. Yet Suburbs are the only ones I see that work. If you are thinking about having kids in the US move to the suburbs soon. Cities are not setup for you. Schools in the city are considered bad for a reason. Even if you can afford private schools, the parks are more sculpre gardens instead of swing sets. Everyone talks about the theator scene in the cities, but most of the shows wouldn't interest a child (most are not X rated). Many cities lack cheap places to eat - $40/person isn't too bad for one person, but when you have a few kids with you that price is not affordable often. How many places don't allow kids at all - not many in the suburbs, but somewhat common in the city. In the suburb you just buy a bigger car and everyone gets around - the big car won't fit in the city well, and your other options is paying a lot more on public transit because odds are there isn't a family pass, so the big car is probably cheaper. The above is US specific (probably Canada too). I know there are a number of people from not US reading this who will tell me how it works in their city. I hope city residents read those replies and make changes before they need them.
- gilmore606 3y ago
  Calhoun's rat paradise experiment doesn't replicate, as Gwern helpfully discovered for us: https://www.gwern.net/Mouse-Utopia https://www.gwern.net/Mouse-Utopia
- Euphorbium 3y ago
  Stop quoting behavioral sink, it has been thoroughly debunked. https://gwern.net/mouse-utopia https://gwern.net/mouse-utopia
droptablemain 3y ago
Perhaps the issue is related to the devaluation of "non-productive" aspects of the family associated with late Western-style capitalism.
- jacooper 3y ago
  Exactly, family warmth isnt very profitable yet very important, and I suspect its a big part of the "mental health epidemic".
pphysch 3y ago
I'm surprised the article doesn't mention North Korea more. The DPRK is probably the most collectivist (least individualistic) large society on the planet, so much so that it terrifies bona fide liberals. I'm sure the intense political polarization of the divided Peninsula has contributed to hyper-charging individualism in the South. You don't want to be like the enemy. FWIW, DPRK birth rate is about 1.9, still below replacement but more than double the ROK, and much higher than PRC or Japan.
- ericmay 3y ago
  Just for future readers being "liberal" does not necessarily mean that one is "collectivist". The OP, like many others, confuses governmental, economic, and philosophical ideals so that they can make a political point - one that does not contain much in the way of substance. In the way of examples, neoliberalism [1] comes to mind. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neoliberalism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neoliberalism
  - pphysch 3y ago
    I mean philosophically liberal in the original meaning of the term. In that sense, it is tightly linked with individualism. This has nothing to do with current American politics.
    - ericmay 3y ago
      Then this comment doesn't make any sense > > The DPRK is probably the most collectivist (least individualistic) large society on the planet, so much so that it terrifies bleeding heart liberals.
      - pphysch 3y ago
        I'll break it down for you. Liberals are individualists. It's at the foundation of their worldview and philosophy. This is basic stuff. DPRK is highly illiberal, un-individualistic. Engaging with DPRK culture in good faith means questioning the universality of the Western, liberal worldview. For most people, this is a non-starter (just look at this thread).
tptacek 3y ago
This is a take from a gender-essentialist who ardently believes fixed roles for men and women are established by the bible. Their other publication: https://americanreformer.org/ https://americanreformer.org/
- branweb 3y ago
  In light of this fact, I'd guess "their" preferred pronouns are he/him/his.
  - tptacek 3y ago
    https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?cat=27 https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?cat=27
- Zetice 3y ago
  I try not to partake in tinfoil hattery, but this getting the upvotes that it did, in the time that it did, given the content, and compared to the demographic of the platform, might alarm some folks who care about the integrity of submissions on HN. Maybe that's nobody, maybe I'm paranoid, maybe I'm not following HN guidelines. IDK.
  - DogTweezers 3y ago
    [flagged]
  - the_third_wave 3y ago
    No tinfoil hat needed to see that certain users attract a larger share of upvotes for a given statement while other users attract a larger share of downvotes for other given statements. The same is true for certain subjects but that is just a reflection of the ideological makeup of the site's population. It is also noticeable that downvotes often come in clusters where a given post suddenly gets downvoted several times within a short time frame where there otherwise has not been any activity around that post. Whether this is caused by a bunch of ideologically-aligned users having some downtime - Compiling - or something more nefarious like sock-puppet accounts being used as ideology amplifiers is not clear and can only be investigated by Dang et al. The up/downvoting system is one of the less successful aspects of HN, especially where it concerns downvotes. A meta-moderation system like the one used by Slashdot of old could be of help here but I suspect the site owners prefer the simplicity of the current system over one which, while more 'fair' does have the tendency to keep growing with the meta-moderators being moderated by meta-meta-moderators until it is moderators all the way down.
badloginagain 3y ago
Peter Zeihan's take is that urbanization leads to less children because there's less space, you don't need the free labor kids provides on the farm, and children are very expensive in the city. This is coupled with the speed of urbanization for countries that industrialized after the second world war- the later you industrialize, the faster that industrialization happens, the more stark the transition to a childless economy. As mentioned in the article, there is a demographic boon for that industrialized generation. Less money needed for schools, etc, more time your prime working age adults can contribute to the economy. Except all those countries industrialized around the same generation. That generation is aging out of the workforce and there's nothing to replace them. Zeihan posits this leads to demographic collapse, and that these countries just simply "go away" because there isn't enough children to keep the country functioning. I'm not sure how much I believe that, but I do know that nobody has a clue how to fix it. Japan has been front and center for this problem and still haven't found a way to reverse the trend.
- wing-_-nuts 3y ago
  Zeihan is a smart guy, but he tends to take his limited expertise and expand it into areas where he doesn't have a strong foundation. I think his ideas on demographics are a bit too deterministic. Demographics don't enter a state where they 'can't' recover. Behavior responds to incentives. The reason why birth rates are plummeting in the developed world is that costs to have kids are soaring. If there was real investment in child care (think, what france and sweden have done, but on steroids), and if higher ed and other costs were mostly covered, people would feel able to have more kids. Now how do we pay for all that? Dunno. That question is above my pay grade, but I think we'd undoubtedly have to cut spending on other priorities and raise taxes. I think that'd probably be worth it to claw out of a demographic decline.
- unethical_ban 3y ago
  >there isn't enough children to keep the country functioning I wonder if some kind of mandatory civil service will become necessary. I feel in the US that many people are disengaged from the rest of their communities for numerous reasons, and it would be both a direct public service and a benefit to societal cohesion for all people to experience being a servant to their cities via public works.
MilStdJunkie 3y ago
Whew, boy. There's a ton of loaded phrases in this piece . . which, well, I'll let others do the googling. Anyway. Ideologies (Evangelicals, Feminists, Transsexuals, Insert-Your-Evil-Genius-Here) don't shunt people's life decisions around willy nilly like this. Money does. People don't have kids in industrialized countries because children rapidly transform from a net investment to a net burden. Thus, ideal industrialized states have political policy to skim improved industrial productivity into incentives for childbirth[1]. This typically doesn't happen, so kids don't happen either. This isn't a new phenomenon; urban areas eat birthrates, and you can see it in records from as long ago as the 14th century. Industrialization turns urbanization up to 11. [1] Or a rational immigration / naturalization policy, but that's another subject, and it's not really tenable for some cultures.
- wing-_-nuts 3y ago
  Yep, people's behavior respond to incentives, and in most developed economies, each kid represents a major sacrifice instead of the 'investment' they used to be. If you want more kids, you have to make the cost of having them lower. This means building more housing, subsidizing childcare like france and sweden, but stronger, and making higher ed affordable. Now all that costs a lot of money. To do that, we'd need to cut spending on other things, and raise taxes. I don't buy the assertion from Zeihan and others that it's impossible though.
- medvezhenok 3y ago
  It's also highly correlated to declines in religiosity (though that might itself correlate with urbanization / increased wealth). Fertility rates were dropping in France in the 18th century because of a secularization push (observed by counting the frequency of religious references in people's wills correlated to family size).
DogTweezers 3y ago
[flagged]
jbm 3y ago
The hostility towards children is a real thing you can see today. I saw it first hand in Japan; parks had signs with dozens of prohibitions, while news stories about this phenomena inevitably had an 80 year old complaining that there were children outside at 8 and politicans saying that it was a "complex problem". These are not new parks mind you; just there are silver-haired "main character syndrome" types who consider public spaces as public spaces for their own personal pursuits. As the proportion of the elderly (and mentally ill elderly) increase, creating age restrictions on elderly voting may be necessary if we want to prevent these selfish behaviors from damaging the long-term viability of our own democracies.
- jacquesm 3y ago
  And age restrictions on running for public office and term limits for all elected officials.
BigCryo 3y ago
Any hope that we can replace the traditional family-based society with some sort of urban community thing has been dashed already by the ultra partisan libs versus cons divide and conquer tactics of the elites and their tools in the media
friend_and_foe 3y ago
I think it's obvious where this goes. The cited "war" between childless and people who start families is creating a tradcon counterculture in the youth, of people who want lots of kids, to raise them themselves instead of delegating to the state, and thus will be able to instill deeply from an early age the importance of family. They will necessarily win in a couple of generations. The shift back to a stable society centered around the family will return, and it will not be as easy as the shift to childless consumerism for short term economic paper gains. It's simple, ideology is passed to future generations when people raise their own kids, and those with the opposing ideology have removed themselves from the gene pool. Off topic question, I've been using a different HN aggregation tool that isn't the front page, and I've found that some of the more interesting topics get flagged, why is that?
- mensetmanusman 3y ago
  If you mention hot button topics it usually gets flagged.
droptablemain 3y ago
Curious that this was flagged.
1letterunixname 3y ago
Ban Netflix, Steam, and Instagram. People will be forced to go outside and socialize. Problem solved. ;-)
1letterunixname 3y ago
South Korea has another problem: shunning the elderly, elder poverty, and elder suicide. EDIT: I recall a documentary about certain bridges requiring security cameras due to elderly people jumping from them. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mapo_Bridge https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mapo_Bridge

45 points by dinoleif 3y ago

The article makes an interesting case for the possibility that South Korea's military dictatorship intentionally created low-fertility policies that can't be reversed. But reading the description of what's going on, I can't help be reminded of John B. Calhoun's work on the "behavioral sink" [1], where he basically created a utopia where rats had everything they needed for survival, they multiplied exponentially, but once they reached a certain critical population density, they ceased to be interested in reproduction and instead exhibited a bunch of socially pathological behaviors. Within 3 generations, no further rats were born. South Korea is a densely populated country, as is Japan (another country often cited as having an aging, low-fertility population). And people tend to move out of dense metropolises like Manhattan or SF to have children. Maybe there's something inborn to humans that causes us to seek space and resources, and if those are not available, to not have kids? [1] https://vocal.media/geeks/the-true-history-behind-the-secret-of-nimh https://vocal.media/geeks/the-true-history-behind-the-secret...

djtango 3y ago
Lack a source but for many this will be the first generation in a long time where today's new parents will be unable to provide an equal or better quality of life to their children - especially in big urban centers which have seen the full effects of stratification. Space and resources are big weights in a "QoL" function.
- Teknoman117 3y ago
  It's nutty. I make more than my dad did when he retired, yet, if I were to have kids today I could not provide the lifestyle to them that I had as a kid. And he certainly didn't make what he did at retirement when I was a child. If I had a dual income household, there would be the money to do it, but the kids would lose out on something that I considered a crucial part of my upbringing - a full time parent. But, the perspective here is that I (and many of the people on this site) work in one of the few remaining well paying professions, whereas my dad was in a "well paying" but not "top paying" field. It just can't be sustainable...
pm90 3y ago
I don’t believe its density as much as costs and impact on lifestyle. Make daycare, child health services and great schools universally available and cheap/free. Make it feasible and safe to get kids around dense cities quickly (excellent transit options). I suspect under these circumstances more people would be open to the idea of children. As it stands today, having children places an unbearably high social and financial strain on people. Suburbs have been just one solution to the problem but there are others.
- dmm 3y ago
  > Make daycare, child health services and great schools universally available and cheap/free. That is probably a good idea but there are places where daycare is free and there's no evidence it makes a difference.
  - ElevenLathe 3y ago
    The childcare is free, but what about the rent?
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
- ertian 3y ago
  This might be affecting the number of children a couple has (probably is, in fact), but I doubt people factor it in to their decision to have a kid or not. I had absolutely no idea what day care or diapers cost before I had a kid. It's hard for me to picture a young couple approaching it that way.
- bluGill 3y ago
  > As it stands today, having children places an unbearably high social and financial strain on people. Suburbs have been just one solution to the problem but there are others. Yet Suburbs are the only ones I see that work. If you are thinking about having kids in the US move to the suburbs soon. Cities are not setup for you. Schools in the city are considered bad for a reason. Even if you can afford private schools, the parks are more sculpre gardens instead of swing sets. Everyone talks about the theator scene in the cities, but most of the shows wouldn't interest a child (most are not X rated). Many cities lack cheap places to eat - $40/person isn't too bad for one person, but when you have a few kids with you that price is not affordable often. How many places don't allow kids at all - not many in the suburbs, but somewhat common in the city. In the suburb you just buy a bigger car and everyone gets around - the big car won't fit in the city well, and your other options is paying a lot more on public transit because odds are there isn't a family pass, so the big car is probably cheaper. The above is US specific (probably Canada too). I know there are a number of people from not US reading this who will tell me how it works in their city. I hope city residents read those replies and make changes before they need them.
gilmore606 3y ago
Calhoun's rat paradise experiment doesn't replicate, as Gwern helpfully discovered for us: https://www.gwern.net/Mouse-Utopia https://www.gwern.net/Mouse-Utopia
Euphorbium 3y ago
Stop quoting behavioral sink, it has been thoroughly debunked. https://gwern.net/mouse-utopia https://gwern.net/mouse-utopia

droptablemain 3y ago

Perhaps the issue is related to the devaluation of "non-productive" aspects of the family associated with late Western-style capitalism.

jacooper 3y ago
Exactly, family warmth isnt very profitable yet very important, and I suspect its a big part of the "mental health epidemic".

pphysch 3y ago

I'm surprised the article doesn't mention North Korea more. The DPRK is probably the most collectivist (least individualistic) large society on the planet, so much so that it terrifies bona fide liberals. I'm sure the intense political polarization of the divided Peninsula has contributed to hyper-charging individualism in the South. You don't want to be like the enemy. FWIW, DPRK birth rate is about 1.9, still below replacement but more than double the ROK, and much higher than PRC or Japan.

ericmay 3y ago
Just for future readers being "liberal" does not necessarily mean that one is "collectivist". The OP, like many others, confuses governmental, economic, and philosophical ideals so that they can make a political point - one that does not contain much in the way of substance. In the way of examples, neoliberalism [1] comes to mind. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neoliberalism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neoliberalism
- pphysch 3y ago
  I mean philosophically liberal in the original meaning of the term. In that sense, it is tightly linked with individualism. This has nothing to do with current American politics.
  - ericmay 3y ago
    Then this comment doesn't make any sense > > The DPRK is probably the most collectivist (least individualistic) large society on the planet, so much so that it terrifies bleeding heart liberals.
    - pphysch 3y ago
      I'll break it down for you. Liberals are individualists. It's at the foundation of their worldview and philosophy. This is basic stuff. DPRK is highly illiberal, un-individualistic. Engaging with DPRK culture in good faith means questioning the universality of the Western, liberal worldview. For most people, this is a non-starter (just look at this thread).

tptacek 3y ago

This is a take from a gender-essentialist who ardently believes fixed roles for men and women are established by the bible. Their other publication: https://americanreformer.org/ https://americanreformer.org/

branweb 3y ago
In light of this fact, I'd guess "their" preferred pronouns are he/him/his.
- tptacek 3y ago
  https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?cat=27 https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?cat=27
Zetice 3y ago
I try not to partake in tinfoil hattery, but this getting the upvotes that it did, in the time that it did, given the content, and compared to the demographic of the platform, might alarm some folks who care about the integrity of submissions on HN. Maybe that's nobody, maybe I'm paranoid, maybe I'm not following HN guidelines. IDK.
- DogTweezers 3y ago
  [flagged]
- the_third_wave 3y ago
  No tinfoil hat needed to see that certain users attract a larger share of upvotes for a given statement while other users attract a larger share of downvotes for other given statements. The same is true for certain subjects but that is just a reflection of the ideological makeup of the site's population. It is also noticeable that downvotes often come in clusters where a given post suddenly gets downvoted several times within a short time frame where there otherwise has not been any activity around that post. Whether this is caused by a bunch of ideologically-aligned users having some downtime - Compiling - or something more nefarious like sock-puppet accounts being used as ideology amplifiers is not clear and can only be investigated by Dang et al. The up/downvoting system is one of the less successful aspects of HN, especially where it concerns downvotes. A meta-moderation system like the one used by Slashdot of old could be of help here but I suspect the site owners prefer the simplicity of the current system over one which, while more 'fair' does have the tendency to keep growing with the meta-moderators being moderated by meta-meta-moderators until it is moderators all the way down.

badloginagain 3y ago

Peter Zeihan's take is that urbanization leads to less children because there's less space, you don't need the free labor kids provides on the farm, and children are very expensive in the city. This is coupled with the speed of urbanization for countries that industrialized after the second world war- the later you industrialize, the faster that industrialization happens, the more stark the transition to a childless economy. As mentioned in the article, there is a demographic boon for that industrialized generation. Less money needed for schools, etc, more time your prime working age adults can contribute to the economy. Except all those countries industrialized around the same generation. That generation is aging out of the workforce and there's nothing to replace them. Zeihan posits this leads to demographic collapse, and that these countries just simply "go away" because there isn't enough children to keep the country functioning. I'm not sure how much I believe that, but I do know that nobody has a clue how to fix it. Japan has been front and center for this problem and still haven't found a way to reverse the trend.

wing-_-nuts 3y ago
Zeihan is a smart guy, but he tends to take his limited expertise and expand it into areas where he doesn't have a strong foundation. I think his ideas on demographics are a bit too deterministic. Demographics don't enter a state where they 'can't' recover. Behavior responds to incentives. The reason why birth rates are plummeting in the developed world is that costs to have kids are soaring. If there was real investment in child care (think, what france and sweden have done, but on steroids), and if higher ed and other costs were mostly covered, people would feel able to have more kids. Now how do we pay for all that? Dunno. That question is above my pay grade, but I think we'd undoubtedly have to cut spending on other priorities and raise taxes. I think that'd probably be worth it to claw out of a demographic decline.
unethical_ban 3y ago
>there isn't enough children to keep the country functioning I wonder if some kind of mandatory civil service will become necessary. I feel in the US that many people are disengaged from the rest of their communities for numerous reasons, and it would be both a direct public service and a benefit to societal cohesion for all people to experience being a servant to their cities via public works.

MilStdJunkie 3y ago

Whew, boy. There's a ton of loaded phrases in this piece . . which, well, I'll let others do the googling. Anyway. Ideologies (Evangelicals, Feminists, Transsexuals, Insert-Your-Evil-Genius-Here) don't shunt people's life decisions around willy nilly like this. Money does. People don't have kids in industrialized countries because children rapidly transform from a net investment to a net burden. Thus, ideal industrialized states have political policy to skim improved industrial productivity into incentives for childbirth[1]. This typically doesn't happen, so kids don't happen either. This isn't a new phenomenon; urban areas eat birthrates, and you can see it in records from as long ago as the 14th century. Industrialization turns urbanization up to 11. [1] Or a rational immigration / naturalization policy, but that's another subject, and it's not really tenable for some cultures.

wing-_-nuts 3y ago
Yep, people's behavior respond to incentives, and in most developed economies, each kid represents a major sacrifice instead of the 'investment' they used to be. If you want more kids, you have to make the cost of having them lower. This means building more housing, subsidizing childcare like france and sweden, but stronger, and making higher ed affordable. Now all that costs a lot of money. To do that, we'd need to cut spending on other things, and raise taxes. I don't buy the assertion from Zeihan and others that it's impossible though.
medvezhenok 3y ago
It's also highly correlated to declines in religiosity (though that might itself correlate with urbanization / increased wealth). Fertility rates were dropping in France in the 18th century because of a secularization push (observed by counting the frequency of religious references in people's wills correlated to family size).

DogTweezers 3y ago

[flagged]

jbm 3y ago

The hostility towards children is a real thing you can see today. I saw it first hand in Japan; parks had signs with dozens of prohibitions, while news stories about this phenomena inevitably had an 80 year old complaining that there were children outside at 8 and politicans saying that it was a "complex problem". These are not new parks mind you; just there are silver-haired "main character syndrome" types who consider public spaces as public spaces for their own personal pursuits. As the proportion of the elderly (and mentally ill elderly) increase, creating age restrictions on elderly voting may be necessary if we want to prevent these selfish behaviors from damaging the long-term viability of our own democracies.

jacquesm 3y ago
And age restrictions on running for public office and term limits for all elected officials.

BigCryo 3y ago

Any hope that we can replace the traditional family-based society with some sort of urban community thing has been dashed already by the ultra partisan libs versus cons divide and conquer tactics of the elites and their tools in the media

friend_and_foe 3y ago

I think it's obvious where this goes. The cited "war" between childless and people who start families is creating a tradcon counterculture in the youth, of people who want lots of kids, to raise them themselves instead of delegating to the state, and thus will be able to instill deeply from an early age the importance of family. They will necessarily win in a couple of generations. The shift back to a stable society centered around the family will return, and it will not be as easy as the shift to childless consumerism for short term economic paper gains. It's simple, ideology is passed to future generations when people raise their own kids, and those with the opposing ideology have removed themselves from the gene pool. Off topic question, I've been using a different HN aggregation tool that isn't the front page, and I've found that some of the more interesting topics get flagged, why is that?

mensetmanusman 3y ago
If you mention hot button topics it usually gets flagged.

droptablemain 3y ago

Curious that this was flagged.

1letterunixname 3y ago

Ban Netflix, Steam, and Instagram. People will be forced to go outside and socialize. Problem solved. ;-)

1letterunixname 3y ago

South Korea has another problem: shunning the elderly, elder poverty, and elder suicide. EDIT: I recall a documentary about certain bridges requiring security cameras due to elderly people jumping from them. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mapo_Bridge https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mapo_Bridge