Here’s an incomplete list of things I think are causes.
Overwork, burnout, and anxiety.
Housing prices. Hard to be sexy when you live in your parent’s basement.
Porn, hookup culture, and sex everywhere actually drains sex of its allure and paradoxically makes it less appealing.
A downstream effect of the friendship recession / loneliness epidemic, a trend that itself has many causes and goes back at least as far as the 1990s.
Doom scrolling, addiction to social media and gaming.
Men being propagandized with “manosphere” content that makes them repellent to women, and women absorbing “femcel” content that does the same. This in turn is downstream of doom scrolling and social media since this kind of content is pushed by algorithms.
Death of in person socialization, which was a trend already in place before COVID but which COVID made a lot worse.
Some people shifting toward more conservative views, partly as a reaction against the aforementioned hookup culture and porn everywhere stuff.
I’m sure there are more.
Fear of HR violations in the workplace.
A good portion of people are morbidly obese. That hinders attraction and expression.
The modern inability to escape your past, leading to timid behaviour (in many endeavors).
The modern ability to find previous lovers of your partner, leading to jealousy and other emotions.
People may call it unhealthy, but these days when I have the time and urge I typically hop on VRC, find someone else, connect some “devices” to the PC, and have some fun with them. It’s not the real thing, but it’s good enough to satisfy me 95% of the time.
