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The story
A thread titled “Single men past a certain age go crazy without exception” went up on 5ch’s “Nandemo Jikkyo” (Live News) board, sparking a wide-ranging debate over the link between being unmarried and happiness or suicide rates. Against claims that unmarried men have higher suicide rates and lower happiness, women pushed back one after another, arguing that unmarried women are actually happier — and claims flew back and forth that it’s having children, not marriage itself, that determines someone’s mental state. The thread ended up laying bare a stark gender divide over the value of marriage and childbirth.
What people said
It's always the way — crazy people end up blaming everyone but themselves.
And it's always the way that people assume the majority must be right with zero evidence to back it up 🥴
Crazy people end up alone, and the loneliness makes them even crazier.
That's the correct answer.
This.
They're single because they were crazy to begin with.
I might seriously die.
The reason singles go crazy is mostly biological stress from being an evolutionary dead end — unable to pass on their genes.
If you had a kid at some point and then got divorced or widowed, you usually don't go crazy.
My divorced dad: "Everything's worth experiencing."
Which one's right?
Your mom is basically saying she regrets giving birth to you.
It's not even about being married or not.
Biologically speaking, no children = genetic loser.
Exactly.
Even married couples go crazy if they're childless ("konashi," a pun on "no kids").
And even singles don't go crazy if they managed to have a kid somewhere along the way.
So that's how it's actually turning out.
It's over.
A kid who was never loved by their parents obviously can't love other people either.
Most lone-wolf "uncles" and "aunties" (slang for lifelong bachelors/bachelorettes) grew up in dysfunctional households.
Single women report high happiness, so maybe it's actually the opposite — daughters who were loved enough by their parents to build the independence and responsibility to live on their own are the ones more likely to end up unmarried.
Japan's single men, meanwhile, are by far the unhappiest in the developed world, with high suicide rates and shorter lifespans — so it sounds more like sons from dysfunctional, impaired households are the ones who end up single.
Single women also have about 3 times the suicide rate of married women.
The lowest suicide rate in Japan belongs to stay-at-home moms with kids.
Say what you want, but the reality is that old-fashioned women who get to stay home and focus on raising kids and housework end up the happiest.
And yet unmarried Japanese women report higher happiness and live longer than married women.
That'll cure whatever's wrong with you.
Especially for crazy single men — forget being loved, they don't even look like someone worth saving, so it's hopeless.
They're spoiled brats who haven't even put in the effort to be saved or loved by anyone.
That's wrong.
There's no need to be loved by anyone at all.
Oxytocin only gets released when YOU love someone — not the other way around.
Being loved doesn't mean anything.
If unmarried women have a higher suicide rate than married women, there's no way they're actually happier.
Self-reported happiness surveys let you front as much as you want.
And honestly, a woman who's never married or raised a kid at her age has no standing to talk in women's social circles anyway.
Unmarried men have overwhelmingly lower happiness and higher suicide rates, by the way.
So you admit the reality that women are happier once they're married.
Unfortunately, Japanese women are the one exception — unmarried ones are happier.
Unmarried Japanese women are happier — case closed.
If you want to argue otherwise, show actual data proving a causal link between suicide rate and happiness.
"High suicide rate means unhappy!" is just your gut feeling with zero evidence behind it. Are you stupid?
You're an unmarried woman, aren't you?
Sounds like you're just reassuring yourself by pointing at single men as beneath you, but the fact remains that unmarried women have a higher suicide rate than married women.
That's the real happiness gap right there.
Skip the lecture and just show me data proving the causation.
Your feelings statement means nothing.
Background and Key Points of This Debate
This kind of “singles go crazy” argument is a recurring theme on 5ch, rooted in the fact that Japan’s lifetime unmarried rate has been climbing for decades. Government projections expect that rate to stay high going forward, and the future figures cited in the thread are simply an extension of that same trend. That said, the suicide rate and happiness statistics quoted in the thread come with no cited source, and it’s worth noting that neither side actually backed up their claims with real data as the argument unfolded. The split came down to a basic disagreement: is being unmarried itself the cause of unhappiness, or is having children the real underlying factor? Both sides ended up dismissing the other’s claims as mere “feelings.” And as some posters in the thread themselves pointed out, jumping straight from “higher suicide rate” to “proof of unhappiness” doesn’t actually establish causation.
*This article is excerpted and summarized from the 5ch (Nandemo Jikkyo) thread “[Sad News] Single men past a certain age go crazy without exception.”
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