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Notes -
As someone who is somewhat socially conservative it does bother me that the youth seem uninterested in vice. It is one thing to want but push a vice off until it becomes virtue (eg having sex in the right situation isn’t vice but virtue; that is many vices are not inherently immoral but become vices based on context in which the action occurs).
So I would celebrate young people having less sex if it was because they controlled their desires when the context was wrong. But it’s troubling to me they don’t seem to even have desire!
This is actually something most people tend to heavily under-rate (parents tend to actively foster a lack of desire and independence because it makes their jobs easier, the young confuse a lack of desire and independence as virtue, and some of them are slowly noticing there's something wrong but only once it's too late).
It might be the fact we broke the need to physically work for a living, it might be something unique to Boomer parenting styles (n > 10), it might be that there's a law against everything fun or anything encouraging independence in any way, and it might just be something wrong with the kids. Every teenager I know (most of them having parents of advanced age themselves) is about as interested in having sex as pandas are, something that is common to my generation as well, and that concerns me just as deeply as the concept of 12 year olds having sex concerns some commenters downthread, for the same reasons.
But the fact remains that we have failed to teach kids the concept of want. I get that living under Psalm 23 conditions is the ideal end state of a Christian society- if you're literally living in the garden of Eden, the amount of sin you can come up with is limited- but there's no growth potential there, and to that end, no defense against bad actors who will inevitably ruin it all by taxing all remaining desire right into the ground.
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