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I fell like much of the current discourse around social trends, such as birth rates & loneliness, need to do a better job at taking the current environmental constraints into consideration. My favorite video surrounding this topic of how environments produce cultural outcomes comes from the now defunct 1791L. (Honestly it sums up my views of current society)
So, what might help if people are beginning to engage in actions that (I personally would consider to be) bad. Is finding a way to effect environmental structures. If one is a conservative , who values marriage & children and general human connections, you'll probably want to do this. I've talked about some solution previously. But not really targeting the environmental variables enough. I've also taken various other past critiques into consideration.
First
There needs to be a massive reconsideration of the current technological advancements. Here is a women falling in love with an AI. In Japan, this is notably worse - people paying for companion ship, and marrying dolls. Im gonna sound authoritarian here, but this shit needs to straight up be banned. There is no social positive for computers and humans to emotionally intermingle in this way. Its only emotionally harmful, for basically all involved. Same deal with "Only Fans" and any other technology that seeks to make an easy way out of human face to face interaction.
Second
Get men, especially those without a degree, into a decent paying job. I've been on the market, I Have a degree, Its fucking brutal. Ive only been able to secure a Network Engineer Internship (Paid with benefits) and a 21 an Hr job with no benefits, after about 7-8 interviews. I havent gotten an full time job with benefits offers yet. Its not fun. I can't imagine what the men who lack my experience & degree are going through. There are two sub problems with this one, mainly:
Actually getting an interview to begin with
Getting a good, well paying job after that
Both of these can be discussed at length. But im gonna give what I think is a good course of action. Make more vocational schools cheaper, and perhaps even free. Many states have done this. There also needs to be a cultural push to get men & boys to actually stay in these programs, and ensure an internship or entry level job after training is complete. I've been made aware of legislation to increase these jobs, Id like to see more of it.
Third
I think a lot of past discussions I've had miss an important piece by not really examining how incentives are affecting women differently.
There’s been some talk about shifting incentives away from women’s education:
Unfortunately, that framing skips over a few structural realities:
Housing has become a much higher barrier to entry. Access to good housing in good neighborhoods is significantly more expensive than it used to be. That raises the threshold for economic stability. In this environment, the college wage premium matters more, not less—it’s one of the most reliable ways to clear that bar. This also makes single-income households harder to sustain, regardless of preferences.
Women have fewer viable non-degree paths to stability. As the economy has shifted away from industrial and physical labor toward knowledge and service work, many of the historically male-dominated “no degree required” paths (e.g., trades, manufacturing) haven’t translated as easily for women at scale. That makes higher education a more central route to security.
The modern economy rewards the traits women are, on average, better positioned to leverage. The college wage premium exists for a reason: today’s economy places a high value on a mix of cognitive ability and social/interpersonal skills. As demand has shifted in that direction, women—who on average tend to score higher on certain social skill dimensions—are relatively well-positioned to benefit.
It’s not that education is arbitrarily driving behavior. The causality runs the other way—economic and environmental changes have increased the returns to education, and women, given the available pathways and comparative advantages, are responding rationally to those incentives.
The easiest way around 1 is to just, well (clears throat): BUILD MORE FUCKING HOUSES. Yes, politically difficult, but If I had it my way, I'd adopt a similar housing policy on the state level, like Japan does.
I'd love for someone to add Ideas for how to deal with points 2 & 3. I'm not a well versed economists, so solutions are lost on me. Feel free to add your own thoughts, please!
Nobody wants this. The old pro-growthers already have their houses; they are the Boomers that the Millennials and Zoomers hate. They tend to be NIMBY (though they are not BANANA - build absolutely nothing anywhere near anyone). The Millennials are pro-urban, environmentalist and anti-sprawl, and don't see how this keeps them from getting houses; at best they want to build dense multiplexes for other people to move into so they can get a house. Many ARE BANANA, in effect. The Zoomers just see what the Boomers have and want it right now, especially if it means sending great-grandma to a home.
If you try to build, the Millennials will scream about corrupt developers and also demand "affordable housing" instead. Nobody wants to develop this and the old Boomers don't want affordable housing anywhere near them.
(Gen X, as usual, doesn't count)
Apartments are houses!
Around the world, people live in apartments, have children in them, and sustain rich communities inside of them. I fail to understand why apartments are antithetical to housing ? Its a uniquely American (anglo) obsession. I grew up in a residential apartment building in India, and it was great ! A neighborhood must have narrow-enough (safe) streets, few cars and enough parks. That's all you need to make it friendly towards children. Suburban Culs-de-sac achieve this by limiting car entry and making everyone have their own park in their own house. But nothing about dense apartments stops a community from achieving the same things.
In the US, NIMBYs have made it difficult to build apartments. So apartments can only be built in undesirable places (eg:highways) or loud places for singles (city downtowns). In their working years, Americans are forced to live in either shitty or lifeless apartments. Inevitably, they hate apartments, and move into houses as soon as they can afford it. Once they buy houses, they become NIMBYs, keeping apartments shitty and lifeless. It's a self fulfilling prophecy.
I randomly chose a bunch of suburbs and residential neighborhoods of peer cities to the US. Random Paris suburb, Geneva, Istanbul ourskirts, Mumbai, Bangkok outskirts. What about these places is hostile to families ?
Even in the US itself. Brooklyn, Queens, SF or Seattle have great example of apartment-dominant residential neighborhoods that are still desirable for families and accessible from public transportation.
Yes, some millenials have gotten radicalized into doomerist (managed decline) and communist (subsidize demand) beliefs. They're loud, but very much a minority. The majority just want to live in a nice apartment in a neighborhood they like.
No, apartments are pods, in the "live in the pod and eat the bugs" sense. With a few exceptions for the ultra-rich, they're small, dark, cramped, noisy spaces that you can only enter and leave by passing by multiple other neighbors, at which point you are not in your outdoor space (which you don't have) but out on the street.
And why aren't you still there?
Get a bigger apartment.
Try windows and/or electrical lights, as well as building apartment blocks that are naturally lit.
Get a bigger apartment.
Build apartment blocks where walls aren't made of cardboard, and/or police noise.
As mentioned by someone else, hating to see neighbors was historically not terribly common. If it's the quality of neighbors that's your concern, that's the problem of loose policing and selection effects cramming all the bad neighbors (correlating with poor) into cheap apartments because the cheap apartments and the ultra-expensive ones are the only ones that exist.
I must agree with the poster above, the American apartment hate is entirely a unique cultural thing, probably born of the abundance of land. Well, it doesn't seem that desirable land is abundant now, judging from all the complaints about lack of affordable housing.
Unless you're ultra-rich and can afford a NYC duplex or something, apartments are almost all smaller than modest houses.
Because apartments are attached to other apartments, you get only one or maybe two walls with windows, and no skylights unless you're on the top floor of a luxury building. And because of the built environment apartments are in, even those windows are often shadowed by adjacent buildings. Artificial light is inferior.
Policing noise means micromanaging people's activity within their own space, which is another bad thing about apartments. Floors of thick concrete work, but are (except a few buildings for the ultra-rich) generally not economically feasible. Lesser soundproofing tends to be inadequate.
I suspect most people live in apartments for part of their lives, and learn to hate them there. Fights over noise from neighbors above, music, babies crying, etc. The abundance of land makes these failings seem like a problem with apartments rather than simply a fact of life... and that's true.
Again, most of those complaints sound like America just doesn't know how to build apartments. How come my country can build apartment blocks that don't shadow each other, and have soundproofing, and aren't dystopian pods 1 step across that you see in movies about South Korea or China, and can be afforded not just to rent, but to buy for many of the middle class?
One thing I'll give you is size of houses compared to apartments, but then again at some point I just don't see the value of having more space other than getting off on 'Murican gregariousness of life... and that point falls flat when in the same paragraph you're complaining that you can't afford a house. You got a family of 10 kids? Then sure, it makes sense to have a big house. How many families have 10 kids again?
I could possibly count on one hand the number of times where I've experienced something that could be fixed by having my own house in the 'burbs. Many things would be made worse. I'd need to drive to buy groceries, or to go to the gym, or do mostly anything that is done outside my own home. There'd be more shit to maintain. You can still have bad neighbors.
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Have lived in apartments all my life, in the UK and Japan. With one exception, have never been troubled by noise from neighbours.
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