It reminds me of an interesting hypothesis I've read about the other day that the concept marriage plays a significant role in the success of our culture as it counteracts this difference. It allows more men to reach a social status at which they are motivated to be productive members of society. So we are possibly actively destroying a pillar of our culture as we are devaluing marriage.
For example in the course of people saying that marriage limits their freedom, that the years of fun are over after it etc. Especially in progressive circles it seems to be frowned upon and it's regarded as boring and unprogressive if people marry early. It's probably also losing value as people become more secular and the concept isn't tied to their world views as tightly anymore.
On a more general note, I have the feeling that we are losing other useful cultural mechanisms over the course of secularization as well, and we are right at the transition where both spiritual and scientific explanations are regarded as unacceptable. I'm however still hopeful that the work by philosophers like Sam Harris and Daniel Dennett can help us building a value system based on naturalism.
As someone raised in an environment that was centered around religion (commune-style, basically), I often worry about how our secular environment will develop as the religious underpinnings of our culture fade away. Our approach to long-term relationships is one thing that sometimes worries me, as is our approach to community-forming.
But as an optimist and a fan of change - change in general, even if it's sometimes bad - I'm really excited to be living in a time where we are free to rediscover and rebuild our world. I hope we can figure out how to keep the things that worked, and find replacements for the things that didn't.
> they are motivated to be productive members of society
The converse has also been proposed; to wit, that societies which systematically disenfranchise young men from the opportunity to reproduce suffer greater social instability. This thesis has been presented as a possible explanation for the willingness of young men in some parts of the world to become suicide bombers.
I know very little about this subject, but my gut feeling is that the systematic disenfranchisement of young men you are referring to has probably little in common with the kind of marriage we find in Western cultures. Regardless of that, I'm also failing to find evidence of this being a prevalent motive among suicide attackers on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suicide_attack#Profile_of_atta...
It's YouTube. Whether you get no ad, an ad skippable after 5 seconds, an un-skippable 15 second ad, or an un-skippable longer ad varies. I'm currently getting a skippable after 5 seconds ad.
This may also depend on what ad blocker you are using. At least one popular ad blocker [1] sometimes fails to block the "skippable after 5 second" ads but DOES block the "skip this ad" overlay. To make that even more annoying, I think that the "skippable after 5 second" ads are often long ads so the result is people without an ad blocker get 5 seconds of the ad, and people with that ad blocker get get the full thing!
[1] I'm not naming it because I was trying out different ad blockers on different machines to see which met my needs best, and I don't recall for sure which one it was.
It reminds me of an interesting hypothesis I've read about the other day that the concept marriage plays a significant role in the success of our culture as it counteracts this difference. It allows more men to reach a social status at which they are motivated to be productive members of society. So we are possibly actively destroying a pillar of our culture as we are devaluing marriage.
By the way, Veritasium has a great episode on why women are stripey: http://youtube.com/watch?v=BD6h-wDj7bw