Sex displaces shared laughter as dominant social value

The replacement of laughter and relaxed interaction with sens as a central value is not anecdotal: it responds to a digital market offering immediate gratification and a growing difficulty in sublimating desire. The result is an erosion of social bonds that also carries an economic cost.

There is a scene repeated in bars, offices, and after meals: someone cracks a joke and silence trinc. It is not that the joke is bad. It is that laughing at others has become suspicious, as if showing pleasure towards another person were a concession. Shared laughter, once passed from parents to children with the warning "don't laugh so much, people have died laughing," is stifled. In its place, according to everyday conversations, emerges a single value that colonizes everything: sens.

## Laughter as a relational good that fades

Laughter is not just an emotion. It is a relational good, a social lubricant that reduces friction in interactions and lowers the cost of cooperation. When it fades, relationships become more expensive: each encounter requires more calculation, more defense, less spontaneity. Some interpret any gesture of pleasure as weakness, as if social life were a battle where not yielding to the other gives an advantage. This reading turns relaxation into risk.

The phenomenon is not new, but it has intensified. Laughter has become a scarce resource in an ecosystem that rewards confrontation and posing. Humor that once united is now read as a threat. Meanwhile, sens occupies the space left by laughter: it goes viral on the internet, becoming the vehicle for a diffuse competition where no one knows exactly what is gained, but everyone seems to participate.

## Internet and immediate sensual gratification

Never in human history has it been so easy for a man to reach ecstasy in minutes. The internet offers infinite, free resources available at any hour. This accessibility has a clear economic consequence: sensual desire has become a market of immediate gratification, with unlimited supply and almost zero marginal cost. The problem is that desire does not work like a tap. It is ignited so often that it becomes impossible to express it every time it appears.

Here enters a concept that **Freud** put on the table: sublimation. Every sensual impulse that finds no expression tends to be channeled into something else, whether work, art, or any socially accepted activity. Sensual, after Freud, has found itself in total expansion. But sublimation requires an effort that the average young man, exposed to instant gratification, rarely makes. Desire accumulates without outlet, and impotence, real or induced, ceases to matter.

## The cost of a directionless competition

A phrase repeats in conversations on the topic: "get there as soon as possible." As if sens were a battle to win and the other, a rival to defeat. But what battle? What competition? No one knows. The rumor of the breeze brings songs in another language, much more obscene, talking about the same thing. Young people stifle a mocking smile at those who claim iron-horse virility. Pose replaces fact.

The result is an economy of desire without direction. The internet fills everything, including what was previously resolved on the street. And while sens becomes the only visible value, shared laughter, that relational good that made coexistence cheaper, remains without a market. It is not a tragedy. It is a change of model. But it is worth knowing what is gained and what is lost when desire displaces connection.