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The decline of the family has unleashed an epidemic of loneliness

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171–180 of 1001 posts

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

#171

I’ve been feeling a pretty intense sort of depression and loneliness for the last month or so. The feelings of “you’re a white male and you work in tech and you are wealthy you are a SATAN” is just becoming too much :(. I volunteer a tremendous amount in education, where I’m the only male I generally even see in my field, and I constantly have to listen to my coworkers gleefully talk about how excited they are at how…

Just a piece of advice: try to take a step back and listen more carefully to the complaints you're hearing. When people talk about dismantling the patriarchy, or about racial privilege, they are not actually talking about any one particular person. You are fully able to be white, male, privileged, and still be an ally to those who do not benefit as much from the power structures in our society. Instead of feeling per…

Thank you pastor, I feel this confessional has been powerfully beneficial to my moral soul. I didn't realize I had lost touch with Justice due to my lack of prayer. I will lower my head and continue my labors, as morality demands. How many "fuck white men"s does Justice require to purify myself of this black mark?

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

#172

I’ve been feeling a pretty intense sort of depression and loneliness for the last month or so. The feelings of “you’re a white male and you work in tech and you are wealthy you are a SATAN” is just becoming too much :(. I volunteer a tremendous amount in education, where I’m the only male I generally even see in my field, and I constantly have to listen to my coworkers gleefully talk about how excited they are at how…

Where do you live that has this attitude? Perhaps you could relocate to someplace more friendly. I live in the southern U.S., volunteered in a majority womens group and never heard comments approaching anything like what you described. Everyone was very welcoming and nice. Try a different industry or location. You don’t have any obligation to put up with being insulted.

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

#174
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.

I'm pretty sure reproduction/biological success is considered the prime biological directive of any species. There's no romantic explanation for it be worthwhile.

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

#175
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…

Humans, not thinking abut the ramifications of their actions since, well, forever. Could these changes and fractures be compared to past religious reformation movements? Reformers always like denouncing things. Luckily for future generations humans are fairly adaptable and I'm sure the rich will be just fine.

I don't think it's a very good analogy. Martin Luther didn't blame early Christians that medieval Catholicism failed to look sufficiently like early Christianity; however, that's roughly what we see today--third-wave feminism wants something that looks very alike chivalry (esp with regard to sexual purity, women as inherently moral and men as inherently immoral, deference to women, etc) and blames traditionalists (not first-wave feminists) that we live in a less chivalrous world. I'm sure this observation will be unpopular; hopefully it at least sparks some interesting debate.

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

#176
Is it any wonder with the rise of no-fault divorces, feminism attempting to dismantle the patriarchy, women entering the workforce without wages adjusting in proportion to the increase of workers, and the general attitude that women seem to have toward men now?

How can someone look at the situation of how men are under attack from essentially every direction, yet they are expected to still marry women who have been with an unknown number of partners and have kids when the rate of divorce has skyrocketed.

It's really confusing how anyone could be confused about how people are more lonely now, marriages and childbirth is down, and how society feels to be unraveling.

This is what dismantling the patriarchy looks like, it's dismantling the family unit, thus forcing people to look to government for assistance and support, thus getting the next generation to be for more government and more government control.

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

#178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I can't wait to hit the phase of life with a partner and/or family living with me. You're in a phase of life where you could live with others, although there's no guarantee of there actually being a good opportunity near by. I spent a chunk of my 20s living in a student housing cooperative in Ann Arbor, MI, and for the most part it was a great experience. It was big enough, and enough of the population was grad stu…

As someone in the same area, I'm curious if you did this post-grad-school? I can't imagine the co-ops in e.g. Kerrytown are very welcoming of non-students, but I don't know.

Being a non-student, I needed approval from the house. Being student age and working on campus, it was easy to get - but it's sometimes granted to people for whom neither of those is the case.

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

#179

I have been lucky enough to be able to work and live in several countries around the world. One thing in common I noticed in all these places is that guys and girls don't have time and don't want to commit to a stable long relation. They invest pretty much themselves and their time in their career, traveling , parties, dogs, cats and bitcoins :) ! The mantra is to get rich and retire at 40 years old! Travel the world…

Mm, a radical idea these days! :) Lately I have come to realise that searching for the “cultured, polished being” and the “ideal life” actually made me feel even more insecure and trapping myself to my comfort zone. Oh yes doing a marathon is really stretching me. So is trying out new food. Watching a horrific war drama ... from a sofa. They’re all things that _I_ want, that _I_ control. When I get thrown into something totally random, especially when it’s stupid — like why is that kid crying? It’s just a sticker! — it distresses me a lot. Which is silly! Life is meant to be full of all sorts of randomness and silliness! So bizarrely, I am trying to do more normal things now. Like cleaning the house manually, talking to the old man next door, falling in love. All feels uncomfortable, but I feel more alive too!

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

#180
post #82

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…

It seems a stretch to blame feminism when economics has thinned most workers wages to the point that multi income households are a requirement to eke out a life.

Feminism can't avoid taking some of the blame for the economics.

If some households are multi-income, then they can pay more for housing.

This bids up the cost of housing. More households decide to become multi-income in order to pay for housing. This of course makes the housing price go up even more.

It's an arms race.

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