“Have sex, read books, take walks. That is enough for a good life. If you are healthy, all three are basically free.”
The appeal is obvious.
Books can be borrowed from a library. Walking costs almost nothing. And yes, a healthy body is an enormous asset.
But once those three activities are placed on the same shelf, one of them looks suspicious.
Where exactly is the sex coming from?
Reading and walking can be started by one person alone. Sex requires another human being, and that human being has preferences, timing, boundaries, and the right to say no.
What sounds like a statement about money quietly hides a massive prerequisite: another person, mutual interest, consent, and coordination.
1. Books and walks are solo decisions; sex is a joint decision
If all three are called “cheap pleasures,” an important structural difference disappears.
To read a book, you can go to a library, borrow one, and start reading.
To take a walk, you put on shoes and go outside.
Your own decision is enough to begin.
Sex is different.
There has to be another person. They have to want it too. The timing has to work. Consent has to be mutual. There needs to be an appropriate private setting. Depending on the situation, contraception and STI prevention also need to be discussed.
So sex is not a free feature that unlocks automatically when your body is healthy.
It is a joint activity with two decision-makers.
A book never says, “I do not feel like being read today.”
A person can.
That changes everything.
2. “Costs no money” is not the same as “costs nothing”
The original claim is actually quite reasonable if we look only at cash.
Consensual sex with a partner does not normally come with a per-use service fee.
But zero yen does not mean zero cost.
Finding a new partner may involve meeting people, talking, mutual attraction, dates, trust, rejection risk, emotional effort, time, and coordination.
Those costs are not necessarily financial, but they are real.
In simple terms:
cash price ≠ total cost
A library card can get you a book.
Opening the front door can start a walk.
A library card cannot check out a partner.
That is the expensive part.
3. If you already have a steady partner, the original claim suddenly makes sense
Now change the starting conditions.
Suppose two people already like each other, feel safe together, and can talk comfortably about sex.
Then the search cost has already been paid.
You can read. You can walk together. You can stay home. And when both people want sex, you can have sex.
None of this necessarily requires large additional spending.
From that position, “you do not need much money to have a satisfying life” makes perfect sense.
A more precise version of the claim would be:
“If you are healthy, already have a compatible partner, and enjoy books and walking, you can build a very satisfying life at relatively low monetary cost.”
That is much more defensible.
It also reveals how much the shorter version was hiding.
4. The statistics do not support “of course everyone has a partner”
Japan’s 17th National Fertility Survey was conducted in June 2025 by the National Institute of Population and Social Security Research. The survey of unmarried people received 6,756 valid responses.[1]
One section asks unmarried respondents about experience of heterosexual intercourse.[2]
A 2026 summary of the newly released graph data reports that the share of unmarried women answering that they had no such experience was:
| Age | No heterosexual intercourse experience |
|---|---|
| 20–24 | 55.1% |
| 25–29 | 42.1% |
| 30–34 | 39.7% |
Among unmarried men, the share was above 40% in both the 25–29 and 30–34 age groups.[3]
The same 2025 survey also reported that 74.0% of unmarried men and 65.4% of unmarried women had no opposite-sex dating partner.[3]
So “young and healthy” does not translate into “of course they have a partner and are having sex.”
A very large group of ordinary unmarried adults does not fit that assumption.
If “healthy people can basically do this for free” is taken literally, an absurd number of people suddenly lose their “healthy person” membership.
Health is not the issue.
5. Never drop the denominator
These numbers are interesting precisely because they are large, but they are easy to misuse.
The relevant National Fertility Survey figures are for unmarried respondents, and the question is specifically about heterosexual intercourse.[1][2]
So they do not mean that 40% of all men aged 25–29 have never had sex.
They also do not mean that 42.1% of all women aged 25–29 have had no sexual experience under every possible definition.
Same-sex experience is not counted by that particular question. Married people are not part of the unmarried-person statistic.
That is why it is better not to casually relabel the figure as a universal “virginity rate.”
The denominator and the wording of the question are part of the result.
For context, the 2021 survey found heterosexual intercourse experience among unmarried people aged 25–29 at 63.6% for men and 61.2% for women.[4]
Even then, the idea that “almost everyone in their late twenties has done it” was already wrong.
6. Another survey shows how varied sexual lives are
A separate 2022 online survey of 8,000 adults aged 20–49 in Japan used weighting for age, marital status, and region.[5]
In that survey, 19.8% of men and 15.3% of women reported never having had a partner for vaginal, anal, or oral sex.[5]
The share reporting no sexual partner in the past year was 44.5% for men and 45.3% for women. Among men aged 20–29, it was 55.1%.[5]
These numbers should not be directly combined with the National Fertility Survey because the populations and definitions are different.
But they point to the same simple lesson:
sexual history and current sexual activity are far less uniform than casual observation suggests.
7. The funniest part is that you cannot tell by looking
This is where the statistics become genuinely interesting.
You can walk past a 25-year-old stranger and learn almost nothing about their sexual history.
They may dress well. They may have a normal job. They may be socially confident. They may look “experienced.”
None of that tells you whether they have ever had sex.
The reverse is also true.
Sexual history is private and mostly invisible. Unless someone tells you, you usually cannot observe it in daily life.
That is why a statistic around 40% can feel shocking.
“Are there really that many?”
Yes.
You just cannot see the category.
A city street is not a sexual-history spreadsheet.
When a large attribute is invisible, everyday intuition can be badly calibrated by the few stories people actually hear.
8. “If you are healthy” is doing far too much work
The original line wanted to praise health as the most valuable asset.
Fair enough.
Health helps with walking, reading, energy, sleep, and daily life.
But once sex is included, the sentence silently turns this chain—
healthy → meet someone → mutual attraction → mutual consent → workable timing → sexual relationship
—into one variable called “health.”
Those are not the same thing.
Health can matter.
It does not generate a partner.
So:
“if you are healthy, you can read and walk” — yes.
“if you are healthy, you can have sex” — with whom?
A good medical checkup does not trigger next-day partner delivery.
Conclusion: one item in the low-cost trio requires another person
Books, walking, and sex can all be inexpensive in monetary terms.
But their execution conditions are completely different.
- Books: you can start alone.
- Walking: you can start alone.
- Sex: another person must independently want it too.
And the statistics show that having a partner or heterosexual intercourse experience is not universal among young unmarried adults.
If you already have a steady partner, the “simple pleasures are enough” philosophy makes sense.
Before that point, however, one question remains unavoidable:
Where did the first item come from?
References (5)
- National Institute of Population and Social Security Research, 17th Japanese National Fertility Survey (2025) ipss.go.jp
- NIIPSSR, graph data for the 17th survey summary ipss.go.jp
- nippon.com, 2026-09-28, summary of the 2025 survey data nippon.com
- NIIPSSR, 16th National Fertility Survey summary ipss.go.jp
- Ghaznavi et al., “Sexual Behaviors among Individuals Aged 20-49 in Japan,” Journal of Sex Research, 2023 pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
