as alive as you need me to be
Fellow autist here, though I don't think I have adhd:
I was once where you are now.
It can be done.
Entirely unironically:
Believe in yourself, don't be too stubborn or proud, but also don't let the haters get you down, ... and as Johnny Cash once said, "know when to walk away, know when to run."
Probably has something to do with more and more things like this happening:
https://cybernews.com/news/france-lyon-microsoft-office-tech-adoption/
Literally a dangerous psycopath.
This is basically 'tortured kittens to death as a kid' level shit.
If you made a TV show or Movie where a character did this, people would say it was heavy handed and lacked subtlely, it is too over the top, it isn't a well written bad guy (gal) character, it's schlocky.
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Sorry for not replying to this for a while, been busy/distracted.
Basically: Ah, I have misunderstood you somewhat, thank you for the corrections, and well basically I agree completely.
Only possibly thing I could add is that uh... yeah, Ender's version of 'against self interest'... is itself potentially genocidal to humanity, it is very extreme, so... yeah that aspect of it is pretty rare in fiction, its usually nowhere near that grand...
So yeah I agree, Ender probably is not the best example of a more 'normal' version of that.
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I am being somewhat loose with terms because I am talking about a whole bunch of statistical data broadly, more specifically, the GSS survey data from the comment I am replying to, and also the other 3 studies that can be found either at or by following through the other links I've provided.
But uh sure, in terms of the GSS study, what is being looked at is currently more precisely defined as'female sex partners,' more specifically, since you've become 18 yo.
https://gssdataexplorer.norc.org/variables/5060/vshow
So uh anyway, I thought that was fairly clearly obvious if you'd actually read even the first few paragraphs of the link in the comment I am replying to, that explains the methodology used to generate that graph.
I was trying to just summarize it for those less well versed in statistics.
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Either way, my main critique is still valid.
The comment I am replying to seems to imply that because of the error bars on this particular way of presenting GSS data, that the whole idea of more and more males having less and less sex is somehow not credible...
... and this is not the case, there are many, many other studies, far more than just the 3 I've linked, that show that just broadly, young people are having less and less sex.
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If you can actually find the actual, precise phrasing of what the GSS survey asked in 2018, heck I'd appreciate it, but uh yeah, it does seem to be the case that the GSS survey in 2018 does not expliclity and directly ask whether or not a respondent has had sex with how many people in the last whatever time period...
The whole problem here is that the questionairre itself is changing over time, and thus the methods of calculating whatever graph out of reverse engineering these changing questions is frought with complexity and error.
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https://nuancepill.substack.com/p/2024-update-to-the-gss-sexlessness-graph
This is the same dataset, the GSS, being again teased in similar ways, with 2024 data.
Apparently we are now up to roughly 27% of 18-29 yo men and 20% of 18-29 yo women having had no sex in the past year, and apparently, the actual wording of the question in the 2024 survey was:
'About how often did you have sex during the last 12 months?’.
So that would be all inclusive, but also:
In 2012, PARTNERS was used (a variable excluded from the most recent survey), as SEXFREQ was only asked to people who had had one or more sexual partners on this year.
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This is the kind of shit that makes using this GSS survey to look at this issue less statistically valid... you're not actually looking at the same answer to the same question, calculated 8n the same way, over the whole time period that is displayed in these meme graphs.
This is what is meant by "lies, damned lies, and statistics."
Again, the whole point of my comment is that yes, the original graph here is a dumb graph because of how it in particular is constructed, but that it is also dumb to then conclude this whole concept of young people having less sex is bullshit.
There are other, better, more statstically valid studies, graphs and datasets that exist which do a better job of showing the trend/issue people are talking about, and do show that it is a real thing that is happening.
This is what spammers, scammers, identity thieves, 'pig-butcherers', credit collections do.
It absolutely works.
Corporations lie blatantly all the fucking time.
Its just that they lie in ways that usually are not able to be legally defined as some kind of a legally actionable version of a lie.
They are usually more worried with ever having outwardly admitting something that they could be sued over, than they are with any kind of human to human sense of accountability or believability.
Every, single, thing they are mass releasing or designing as an official stance has gone through some kind of legal team, or a team under a legal team that follow's guidelines from a legal team.
This is just how megacorps work.
They are not people, they are a sociopathic machine, operated by people who very much tend to be sociopaths.
Here's the summarized version:
Be Polite.
Act as if you only understand 'the effects', have a nebulous notion of 'the cause'.
Act like you know little other than this, and insist they explain it to you like you are a five year old.
Waste as much of their time as possible, without becoming hotheaded, instead become sad-confused.
"I'm not so much angry, as I am disappointed" type of vibe / energy.
And if possible, be genuinely kind to the low level, actual people you talk to, they literally do not make the rules.
Yep.
It boils down to:
Reality is actually magic (ie, fundamentally incomprehensible and inconsistent), and our magic guide book, and my interpretation of said magic guide book, is more correct than any other book or person, because this book says it is, and says it is the bestest magical book, and I am the bestest knower of the magic book.
It is magical thinking, a worldview based on a psuedo reality derived from psuedo logic (where psuedo means 'fake', 'impostor', 'sham'), which is a key component of many cults and also severe psychological disorders.
Replace 'electricity' with 'wind' and/or 'moving air' and/or 'breath', and now you understand what Proto-Judaic Canaanites circa 800 BCE thought 'spirit' was.
Yep, the answer to many of these problems is I2P.
TOR was invented by the US Navy, roughly 1/3 of major entry/exit nodes are estimated to be comprimised / run as honeypots by various LE / Intel agencies, and said LE and Intel agencies also know how to, and have deanonimyed various people and groups on TOR that they really wanted to go after.
TOR ain't it.
I2P is a lot closer to 'it'.
The other part of the answer is:
Well, now it turns out data hoarders were not just paranoid weirdos, they actually had foresight.
If you can host your own at least several terabyte mini/curated backup of the Internet Archive, and plug that into I2P, then congrats, you now are the backup plan for when, not if, they get massively purged of even more of their content than has already been taken out in the last ~2 years.
The old cyberpunk line holds true in another sense of meaning:
The future is already here, it just isn't evenly distributed.
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Oh I didn't think you were calling me crazy.
I've just been told that by many Americans who are actively losing their minds trying to balance their car payment, insurance, recent medical disaster, loss of income, etc, all while spending 6+ hours a day on whatever particular algorithically designed and manicured for them slop content app telling them who to be angry at and what items to buy to give them the desired personality.
I very much agree the fediverse is very important...
But I think that Elon actually primarily bought Twitter out of a massive, massive sense of insecurity.
He needs to be widely loved and adored and seen as 'a cool guy', so he just bought the platform so that he could be in control of his own personal adulation/worship machine.
In my opinion at least, everything else is secondary to, is an outgrowth of, is a cynical tactic that may shift at any time... all to primarily prevent his own ego from collapsing.
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Ok, sorry to double post, I've fixed up the original comment more, to hopefully make more sense.
But uh, yeah.
It is really weird to be in the position of having grown up as an awkward tech dork... and now like, I have uncommonly good interpersonal social skills by the standards of many Gen Z, and a lot of Gen A.
It is just a mindfuck.
I realized in about the mid 2010s that algorithmic based content platforms just were pushing the most extreme and outrageous and infuriating kinds of content, because that is the content that best results in user retention...
And when I realized this, I swore off much of it, deleted a bunch of accounts, and highly constrained and curated what was left.
Most other people did not realize this and allowed it to normalize, and now, at least in the US, the result is a largely illiterate, immature, and anti-intellectual society that is highly conspiratorial, and treats all of reality ... as if it was a reality tv show.
People call me crazy, but I say that our society has been mass brainwashed, basically mentally neutered, acting increasingly neurotic and violent and irrational.
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Derp, I did, I am also editing and expanding more to this in realtime, hold please lol.
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Not meaning to be rude with this phrasing, but uh, I am significantly younger than you, born around the time you graduated HS... and yep, I have the same, gut, "this seems weird" reaction.
I was a terribly bashful nerd in the early/mid 2000s, and even I lost my v-card as either a 16 or 17 yo.
https://www.cdc.gov/yrbs/dstr/pdf/YRBS-2023-Data-Summary-Trend-Report.pdf
Thats a drop from half of kids literally fucking around in HS, to just a third, in only the last 10ish years.
I dunno if such data exists going back to when you were in HS, I'd imagine it would have been closer to around 6/10 back then (though thats just a spitball guess), but yeah, the decline has been shocking to me as well.
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IMO, the main thing that is destroying mental health is... and again, I say this as an early tech adopter, tech nerd, who had a mySpace account, who was one of the first with a Facebook account...
The cause of this is mutlifactorial, general economic decline and precarity are huge factors, but the main problem is our modern social media based digital environment, and how it trains people to act.
Brainrot is a real thing, short form video content reduces attentions spans, makes you more anxious, less confident / have lower self esteem, rapidly propagates mis and disinformation, promotes narcissism and just literally retards rhe development of functional social behaviors.
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That, and the destruction of 'third places', and then the subsequent enshittificstion of dating apps.
In your day, people could afford to go take a car and hangout somewhere they had some privacy, away from their parents at least, some area where people would go and hang out and just socialize.
Those physical spaces do not exist anymore, they all have paywalls people can no longer afford.
No average kid can afford a car on a summer job anymore.
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Then, as things digitized, realworld meetups and hangout areas began to decline, dating apps happened.
They were good for a time, but then the people running them realized that you actually make more money as a dating app by making it something you keep coming back to, hiding people you may actually jive well with behind paywalls, that what you actually want is to create a rollercoaster of 'almost worked out but didn't in the end' type relstionships... as that produces your most reliable dating app customer.
These are smart data science people running these things, they know what they're doing.
They don't say what I just said outloud, because it would be bad for their branding and marketing.
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I mean, from your own link, those error bars come from:
The data being a clustered sample set,
That study wasn't specifically asking whether or not respondents were virgins, ie, had 0 sex partners.
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The error bars there are large because the actual question was 'how many sex partners have you had in the past however many years?', and then your linked post explains how this particular dataset/survey/study was then presented to try to show the answer to a question that wasn't explicitly asked.
That can have a lot more variance than a survey/study that flatly asks binary question of 'have you ever had sex before?', and then goes on to define what does and doesn't count as 'having sex'.
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And indeed when you actually do that kind of approach, there are many other graphs from many other studies showing it being increasingly for both young men and young women to be virgins, have had 0 sex partners.
https://news.iu.edu/live/news/26924-nearly-1-in-3-young-men-in-the-us-report-having-no
https://www.cdc.gov/yrbs/dstr/index.html
All of these show a marked decline in the number of both young men and young women who have ever had sex, that more people remain sexless for longer, to an older age.
(Though this started earlier among men and is more pronounced, women are now catching up as well)
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Also worth noting:
Compared to adult participants in the 2009 survey, adults in the 2018 group were significantly more likely to report no penile-vaginal intercourse in the prior year, the researchers found. Study participants were also significantly less likely to report engaging in any other sexual behaviors examined in the study, such as oral sex or anal sex. All modes of past-year partnered sex were reported by fewer people in the 2018 cohort.
Yeah, contrary to the implication of OP's image... no, young men are not having more of some other kind of sex than male/female p/v, but still having some other kind of sex.
They're just not having sex with a partner. At all.
Bros are not en masse becoming gay or bi or pan or trans, and then having 'non-traditional' sex that would make them not virgins in a 'non-traditional' way, not in the numbers you'd need to make that a statistically viable explanation for lack of m/f p/v sex.
This is funny haha meme joke, but its not based in reality, its based in whimsy.
You can check that against male self-id rates as LGBTQ and see that there has been a slow, gradual rise, from about 3% up to about 5% for men right now... but nothing like an 8% to 28% rise in roughly the same time period.
This one particular graph having error bars does not mean this is not a real thing that is happening.
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And in case its relevant, I am a queer guy who has had varying kinds of sex and intimacy with both men and women, trans-inclusive.
After shitting in the duck pond and fleeing, he returns to his tiny home:
A fuck-off huge, old wine barrel.