Live data from Hacker News

The decline of the family has unleashed an epidemic of loneliness

city-journal.org

61–70 of 1001 posts

Re: The decline of the family has unleashed an epidemic of loneliness

#61
post #33

I would argue that the decline of the family is directly linked to feminism, or better stated, the liberation of women from the home and from conservative sexual values. The two forces behind that are birth control and women entering the work force. These two are magnified by online dating and social media. I am not saying at all that these are bad things, just that we have yet to see the true effects of feminism on…

> the liberation of women from the home and from conservative sexual values. Everyone is unhappy, married people on average are happier than unmarried, religious people are on average happier than unreligious people. The sexual and feminist revolution got some 'splainin to do. Of course, my view, the answer isn't "liberating women from the bonds of motherhood and family" but empowering women and supporting them in ar…

Feminism was motivated by the minority of women that wanted a job in 1950, and their legitimate frustration with how the system was trying to stop them from doing that. Somehow that got switched around into a society where almost every woman is required to have an income. It's like we went from oppressing half of all women to oppressing the other half of all women.

Re: The decline of the family has unleashed an epidemic of loneliness

#62

I felt loneliness acutely this week. I live alone, spend most evenings alone, and on top, work's coding and research has been slow for 2 weeks. Collaborators are at conferences and on vacation, so I had much less work and much less face-to-face contact than usual. Given that I code on my own, distribute analyses via email, and occasionally meet if people are around, I barely talked to people some days this week. Goin…

I had the same situation. A non sustainable life. With her all changed. I go to the gym so she does not have a skinny boyfriend. When I find something good at netflix I wait until she is home and we can watch it together. When I find a nice place, I remmember it so I can show her the nice bench under that tree in my hometown. I always have flashback about the time I moved to another city without family bondings. Then…

Then when she develops more serious health or mental problems, and you have nobody to help look after your children, relationship therapy has burned through a couple therapists, and you're telling each other how lonely you each are but avoid real conversations because they inevitably lead to more loneliness, then you will again have a new perspective. Good luck.

Re: The decline of the family has unleashed an epidemic of loneliness

#63
post #55
post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah the people pushing all these different ideologies basically engineered a culture to be like this. With various ideologies replacing religion (which are themselves really modern religions) that don't really work out the implications of their ideas in any sort of consistent system... instead down with this and down with that, and sure individually those things might be bad but they form some sort of coherent syste…

My experience was that established religions got hungry for tithing and thus optimized their messages with new ideas that ignore tolerance and abuse pluralism. Former adherents are more than excused to dissociate with groups that lack transparency, foster cultures of abuse, or otherwise require rigid in-/out-group splits. The new world views you refer to that former religious adherents adopt aren't usually terribly r…

> My experience was that established religions got hungry for tithing and thus optimized their messages with new ideas that ignore tolerance and abuse pluralism.

Monotheism is against pluralism where polytheism was not. That was there from the monotheist revolution.

> it's a thought-terminating pitfall to call them religions

No it's not. Just go listen to what Harari says in his book Sapiens. Ideologies like Feminism, Liberalism, Conservatism, Humanism, etc, are all parts of a modern syncretic religion and their adherents are syncretic believers that mix and match different ideologies to fit their tastes. It's just a bald faced lie that these things are so much different from the stuff they replaced. Buddhism has no necessary Gods as don't some forms of Hinduism.

https://www.ynharari.com/topic/science-and-religion/

Re: The decline of the family has unleashed an epidemic of loneliness

#65
The number of people I know who advocate that “blood is thicker than water” and then spend most of our outings at a bar complaining about one or another of those blood relatives...

For years I’ve felt like I’m supposed to report in to my family (my mother in particular) because otherwise I’m assumed dead. It was never reasonable, I was always safe and happy (and not engaged in anything crazy like CIA wetwork, just traveling around the US by myself), but I finally had to do away with it and issue an ultimatum.

For me it was not family vs loneliness. It was family vs lonerness (and happiness). They were “stuck in the mud” and expected me to be the same... when I wasn’t it was out of their comfort zone and they didn’t know how to handle that.

Several months in now I’m happier than I’ve ever been... purely because I don’t have to worry about anyone’s happiness except my own and the people I actually choose to be with.

Re: The decline of the family has unleashed an epidemic of loneliness

#66
post #53
post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the liberation of women from the home and from conservative sexual values. Everyone is unhappy, married people on average are happier than unmarried, religious people are on average happier than unreligious people. The sexual and feminist revolution got some 'splainin to do. Of course, my view, the answer isn't "liberating women from the bonds of motherhood and family" but empowering women and supporting them in ar…

Seems a bit circular to me. If the most important thing a human can do is bring life, then that life also has as its most important mission to bring some more life into the mix and so on. You end up with an endless chain of causation and no real answer as to what makes the entire thing worthwhile.

You broke the first rule of fight club.

Re: The decline of the family has unleashed an epidemic of loneliness

#67
post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had the same situation. A non sustainable life. With her all changed. I go to the gym so she does not have a skinny boyfriend. When I find something good at netflix I wait until she is home and we can watch it together. When I find a nice place, I remmember it so I can show her the nice bench under that tree in my hometown. I always have flashback about the time I moved to another city without family bondings. Then…

Then when she develops more serious health or mental problems, and you have nobody to help look after your children, relationship therapy has burned through a couple therapists, and you're telling each other how lonely you each are but avoid real conversations because they inevitably lead to more loneliness, then you will again have a new perspective. Good luck.

Please don't. You're welcome to share your own experience, if that's what you're alluding to here, but not to rhetorically put it onto someone else.

Re: The decline of the family has unleashed an epidemic of loneliness

#68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By the way, this might seem revolutionary, but there are plenty of societies ( in history) that didn't have rule by Men and an awakening of feminism. The studies I'm familiar with didn't mention loneliness, but rather the social responsibility.

please name a few - i am curious to read about these

If you're referring to societies that aren't ruled by men, The Mosuo people are a matriarchy that you may be interested in.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mosuo

Re: The decline of the family has unleashed an epidemic of loneliness

#69
post #53
post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the liberation of women from the home and from conservative sexual values. Everyone is unhappy, married people on average are happier than unmarried, religious people are on average happier than unreligious people. The sexual and feminist revolution got some 'splainin to do. Of course, my view, the answer isn't "liberating women from the bonds of motherhood and family" but empowering women and supporting them in ar…

Seems a bit circular to me. If the most important thing a human can do is bring life, then that life also has as its most important mission to bring some more life into the mix and so on. You end up with an endless chain of causation and no real answer as to what makes the entire thing worthwhile.

"An endless chain of causation" isn't circular, that's more or less the definition of life. What's the alternative, a task that a species must complete so that it can then go extinct?

Re: The decline of the family has unleashed an epidemic of loneliness

#70

I would argue that the decline of the family is directly linked to feminism, or better stated, the liberation of women from the home and from conservative sexual values. The two forces behind that are birth control and women entering the work force. These two are magnified by online dating and social media. I am not saying at all that these are bad things, just that we have yet to see the true effects of feminism on…

There's imo a stronger argument that economic/financial factors are far more significant than "feminism." The closing in the employment gap in the 1980s was driven by hyperinflation and consumer debt - everyone had to work to pay the bills. Similarly, contraceptives aren't the reason people have fewer children. It's the fact we can't afford childcare and housing for a family.

Well, doubling the labor supply made wages go down so women HAD to work. They no longer had the freedom to choose.
Post reply on HN