> it seems to be a problem for many of these young people, according to these young people themselves.

There are a couple of problems here:

- the plural of anecdote is not data, and I don't see any evidence that the specific unhappy people being interviewed need a widespread societal change rather than, say, therapy.

- the article is light on any compelling evidence that the levels of happiness being expressed are abnormal or atypical from previous generations. This is really just a general problem with the article, it throws out stats and fails to connect them to the overall narrative or to contextualize them, it just kind of assumes they are connected.

And again, just really sloppy data journalism here. From the article:

> In reporting this story, I spoke and corresponded with dozens of 20- and early-30-somethings in hopes of better understanding the sex recession. I can’t know that they were representative, though I did seek out people with a range of experiences.

Oh, you found a couple dozen teenagers that are unhappy and willing to talk to you? Color me super-impressed, that's definitely something I should take seriously. /s

> Or are you claiming the authors just plain made up all those quotes from interviewees?

I'm claiming that the author should be better at understanding how data works and how causal relationships work, especially since the article itself calls out how anecdotal interviews led to moral panics over largely non-existent issues like college orgies. To borrow the exact same terminology as this article: I feel like people should have learned something from those earlier moral panics about treating "I feel" statements as fact.

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> WTF is wrong with that paragraph? It's just (a pop-sci resume of) simple fact.

The pop-sci part. Humans aren't the only animals that masturbate or mate for fun. Humans also aren't the only animals to practice monogamy, and we're not the only animals to exhibit homosexual behavior. It's a "pop-sci" fact in the sense that it's just flat out wrong, our sexuality is not that special.

It's also pop-sci in the sense that it ignores a huge number of much larger differences between us and most animals in order to (with no evidence) assert that this is a fundamental difference that needs to be treated with a huge amount of reverence. It's just silly to say that sexuality is a bigger separator between us and apes than, just as one example, cooking.

But people have been living emotionally satisfying lives without sex since early human history. It's not just bad science, it's just flat out illogical to anyone who's ever looked at animals, or read a Bible/Other-religious-text, or studied any ancient history, or looked around them at the world. You don't have to be asexual for this, there have been celibate people for a long time.

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> [A bunch of nonsense about how "stunted" should be used in the broadest possible neutral sense whenever the word is questioned, and then used in its more common negative form whenever we evaluate the patterns of the youth].

:) I don't often get attacked this way nowadays, so it's in some ways kind of interesting to see. If we take your assertion at face value that "stunted" literally just means I experience fewer categories of emotion, then by extension, it's not clear why that's bad or why we need to be particularly worried about whether young people are boning.

On top of that, this displays a lack of understanding about what sex drive is, and what the differences are between romantic and sexual attraction are. It's very odd to me to see someone categorize specifically sexual attraction as an emotion, if someone had a large appetite and ate a lot of food, we wouldn't say that was an emotion. Sexual expression is often connected to romantic feeling and sexual expression often enhances romantic feeling, but it is not itself inherently romantic. And it's kind of silly to argue that it is, because the whole debate about pornography and hookup culture is based around the fact that sex can be separated from romance.

This article doesn't really seem to understand that point.

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The TLDR of all of this is that the article doesn't offer evidence of anything, it doesn't even offer evidence that this is a problem. It interviews a bunch of book offers and some professors, and it interviews some younger people who are frustrated with romance/sex right now.

Well, congrats, people have been frustrated about romance/sex forever, it's not new. And it's an unscientific, unsubstantiated jump to say that just because younger people are having less sex that the "dozens" of people interviewed must therefore be representative of the entire demographic.

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> Sounds like wild projection caused by over-sensitivity.

To be clear, I'm not the person writing articles in a major newspaper complaining that millennials are killing Toys 'R Us.