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I work with quite a few young men. They generally have girlfriends. The older ones (let's say 30+ years old) generally have wives and own a home. A few even have children.
There's some subset of sad incels. I somehow don't personally know them. The median young man I know seems to have little despair.
You're not the first one to make a comment like this on this topic, and I think it's pretty clear that this type of anecdotal analysis just doesn't work for something like this due to the availability bias. How many young men do you socialize with that are so isolated and lonely that they never socialize with anyone? How many do you work with who don't even go out of their home to work at a job? Obviously, definitionally zero. The types of people being discussed here are specifically the types of people who you wouldn't notice in everyday life.
Yeah, it's like the "I don't know anyone who voted for Nixon" sentiment back in the days (I know the quote isn't technically real, but anyway). This isn't meant as a dig at the original commenter; this is a simple facet of social life anywere. I'd also add that despairing men have all the reasons in the world to hide their despair in meatspace. Of course we see little of it. Also, the stats prove that the ratio of single, unattached men is growing.
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It's hard to get a good grip on statistics in so manipulated an epistemic setting as ours, but given what does get reported, I'm going to go on a limb and say that the median young man you know isn't the median young man. Otherwise those reported rates of celibacy are either impossible or men are mysteriously under-reporting relationships.
To say nothing of home ownership rates.
The median young man I know is struggling to get by and largely celibate. But then again he's also highly likely to be a homosexual and have a specific set of religious beliefs and hobbies, because nobody's friend circle is representative of the population at large.
Besides, friendless people have literally p = 0 to be your friend by definition.
Considering that the numbers that initiated the "sex recession talk" were still at sexlessness for young people (ie. sex less often than monthly - even that would include many people that would not be "true incels") being around 30 % among young people, it would imply that the median young man is indeed having at least some sex and the median young man you know not being as representative as the median young men /u/TIRM knows (or, indeed, the median young men that I know).
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Broadly agreed. At this point in my life the people I know are largely other parents that I meet through some school or child event or my coworkers. And we are mostly a cabal of tech workers.
So selecting for employed engineers, they date around in their 20s and settle down early to mid 30s. Broadly speaking. I know some these people recently bought properties with their spouses or fiances, etc. Multiple coworkers have in the past few months aged into the "get married and buy a place" stage of life. No kids yet from this group, incidentally. Good thing my Chinese coworkers are picking up the slack in the having children department.
The couple of hopeless dweebs I know (no offense, decent guys and coworkers, but being realistic here) are Indian immigrants. They both got wifes with a little help (coercion? hard boot on the ass?) from their families.
If we made some horribly unrepresentative polling of just my experiences, I'd say young people do nothing but work and date and eventually marry. And I would list off examples to support that.
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