"Kids these days give up on love just because things are a bit hard." Older generations often cluck their tongues when they hear this. To those who possess the historical memory of having raised children and loved even amidst the smoke of war, or in eras when there was no rice for tomorrow, today’s surrender looks like mere weakness or a spoiled complaint. As observed, we are currently living in an era with the lowest difficulty of physical survival in human history. In this age of abundance where starving to death is no longer a concern, why do people constantly claim they cannot love because it is "too hard"?
The true identity of the hardship they speak of is not physical fatigue. It is a "psychological deprivation" and the "bankruptcy of emotional capital" meticulously manufactured by the system.
A Hellscape of Comparison Born from the Loss of Absolute Standards
Physical scarcity ends once it is filled. If you are hungry, you eat; if you are cold, you put on clothes. However, the hardship of modern individuals stems from an unfillable "relative deprivation."
With a mere flick of a finger, the lifestyles of the top 1% on Instagram and YouTube are pierced directly into our retinas in real-time. Ultra-luxury hotels, flawless couple vacations, apartments overlooking the Han River. Within this infinite loop of comparison, one’s ordinary daily life is constantly relegated to something "shabby" and "failed." This psychological treadmill—where one must daily scan the room and stack credentials just to hoist their single life into the "normal category" defined by society—exhausts a human being to the extreme. Consequently, no emotional margin (emotional capital) is left to genuinely welcome and love another person.
A Brain Addicted to Cost-Effectiveness Rejects Inefficiency
Under the capitalist system, modern individuals have internalized the logic of cost-effectiveness—"minimum input, maximum output"—to their very bones.
"Love," however, is the ultimate inefficient act, where this cost-benefit formula absolutely fails to apply. To understand another person, you must waste precious time; you must share the sovereignty of your own emotions; and you must inevitably accept defective goods (emotional exhaustion) called misunderstandings and conflicts. Conversely, ordering delivery food while watching short-form videos or playing games in the corner of your room offers an immediate, certain, and completely risk-free "high-efficiency dopamine." With the brain entirely addicted to efficient pleasures, the incentive to choose the grueling labor called love simply evaporates.
The Hypertrophy of the Religion of "Ego" and the Deferral of Qualification
In the past, the massive pillars of family, community, and religion sustained the individual. However, as all those supports dismantled in modern society, only the solitary god called "Me (the Ego)" remains. It has become a "religion of self-actualization," where I must salvage my own life and I must prove my own worth.
Society circulates the premise, "You must love yourself first before you can love someone else," as if it were a biblical verse. The problem is that the criteria for the "perfect me" or the "prepared me" demanded by this society have become excessively high. Muttering, "Because I haven’t settled down yet," or "Because I can’t even take care of myself," people endlessly defer their qualification to love. In the process of worshiping and whipping the god of the ego, a closed universe is completed—one that cannot spare even a single room for an "other" to step in.
Conclusion: They Are Not Starved; They Are Depleted
Ultimately, the reason people give up on love is not because their stomachs are empty or their bodies are weary.
It is because they are too busy defending their shabby egos amidst ceaseless comparison, loath to shatter their own perfectly controlled comfort (cost-effectiveness), and utterly depleted of the emotional energy required to invest in the inefficient adventure of love. It is, in essence, the most highly sophisticated tragedy birthed by modern civilization: suffering from psychological poverty and dread right in the middle of physical affluence.
Let us not ask those who have abandoned love, "Why have you lost your romance?" For they have not forgotten romance; rather, they have been stripped of the bare minimum of emotional stamina needed to step up and fight in the ring, and are merely catching their breath in the safest sanctuary available: the corner of their own rooms.
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