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The decline of the family has unleashed an epidemic of loneliness

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

#601

Post by scott_s »

bitexploder wrote: post #190
WhompingWindows wrote: post #2

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 recommend social hobbies. Mine are BJJ and Magic the Gathering. BJJ is great because it can be highly technical but you will meet people way outside of nerd circles. My kids do it and love it as well. It is a hard thing, too, so it keeps the ego in check. You have no choice but to be extremely, intimately close with other humans. The friends I am making are great. There are plenty of other hobbies, but start there.…

Seconded. I've been training Brazilian jiu jitsu for 15 years. For most of that time, friends from jiu jitsu has been half of my social life. When I graduated and moved to a new area by myself for a job, jiu jitsu is how I met people.

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

#602

Post by tracker1 »

jniedrauer wrote: post #189
residentfoam wrote: post #106

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…

Bringing a child into the world to increase my own personal happiness, when nothing else I could do has such a direct and massive climate impact, is not something I can justify personally. Not to mention, my child would have to live to see the impacts of climate change. There is coming a point (it has already passed, in my opinion), where we can no longer justify our purpose for existence as "creating more humans."

That is the single most negative comment I've seen in a while... I'm glad you aren't spreading your view to a new generation.

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

#603

Post by kelnos »

daemonk wrote: post #94
codingslave wrote: post #7

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…

Perhaps the more interesting question is whether the traditional nuclear family is the "optimal" mode of human society? Is the unhappiness that we may be observing with the decline of family a product of this transition period from traditional family structure to individualism? Is our current society just not well equipped yet to handle this mode of living? Maybe in 50 years, this will become the norm and people who…

It's interesting that you consider the nuclear family as "traditional", while it's actually a fairly recent phenomenon. And in many places in the world it's still common for a family to consist of multiple generations and often aunts/uncles/cousins/etc. living in the same household.

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

#604

Post by SiVal »

blfr wrote: post #549
sakopov wrote: post #514

Man, the older I get the more I realize that life is always a balancing act. I immigrated from a 3rd world country (probably a 2nd world now) 20 years ago with my parents. Both of my parents were engineers and both were paid about once a year by their employer because nobody had any money. So we were broke and poor my entire childhood. And yet we always had friends visiting us. There were always celebrations. Seemed…

You, too, can strike up a conversation with a total stranger at a bus station and it doesn't have to feel weird. It is, however, likely to be short because people are so unused to it in the atomized west that, if you don't carry the whole conversation, they simply won't know what to say.

In much of "flyover country", Americans routinely greet, chat with, and interact with strangers in public. Ironically, it's one of the American traits often criticized by Europeans. "How rude, how intrusive, to invade my private bubble."

But then, the UK has a similar phenomenon, with sophisticated Londoners making the same complaints about England's own flyover country, "the North" [1]

[1]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PT0ay9u1gg4

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

#605

Post by JohnBooty »

hughes wrote: post #46
Aaronstotle wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Attend some meetups in your area/start going to the gym regularly if you aren't already, I find the gym is a good way to meet people.

Are they? I usually feel like the last thing I'd ever do at a gym is talk to someone, and someone talking to me would be really surprising...

Depends on the gym. If it's just a place where you spend 15 bucks a month and there's a bunch of machines you can use, probably not a meeting place. Would perhaps even be creepy and/or rude to talk to others.

But when you're taking classes with people, or it's a crossfit kinda gym that's totally built around a team concept, great place to meet people.

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

#606

Post by toby- »

DowsingSpoon wrote: post #541

The term “third world” does not mean something like “third rate.” The first world is the Western bloc, under the influence of the USA. The second world is the Eastern bloc, under the influence of the USSR. The third world is everyone else. I think we should stop using these terms.

No, this is no longer what these terms mean in common parlance.

(There is no arbiter of language; words are imbued with meaning through usage. People use "first world" and "third world" quite differently now than during the Cold War.)

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

#607

Post by HBKXNCUO »

SketchySeaBeast wrote: post #523
HBKXNCUO wrote: post #502

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not as far as fertility is concerned. 25 means only a couple of years left at peak fertility.

What is "Peak fertility"? That's at least 10 more years for women before they even become higher risk.

The period during a woman's life when she is most likely to have the least difficulty conceiving a child. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Age_and_female_fertility

I'm not sure what you mean by "higher risk". The risk of a woman being unable to conceive increases each year after ~27-30, depending on the study.

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

#608

Post by kelnos »

plainOldText wrote: post #266
daemonk wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps the more interesting question is whether the traditional nuclear family is the "optimal" mode of human society? Is the unhappiness that we may be observing with the decline of family a product of this transition period from traditional family structure to individualism? Is our current society just not well equipped yet to handle this mode of living? Maybe in 50 years, this will become the norm and people who…

I don’t know if it’s optimal, but it sure is intimate and stable. Your spouse will never move to another city for a new job w/o you. Your kids won’t leave the nucleus, at least not until they’re college ready. Unlike family, different kinds of arrangements between people result in relationships that are less committed and less durable. So maybe if you take stability and intimacy into account, it might as well be opti…

Given the divorce rate and the number of single-parent families in the US (and much of the West?), I don't think I'd call the nuclear family "stable".

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

#610

Post by souprock »

impendia wrote: post #532
merpnderp wrote: post #304

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm still in awe that starting off your life with massive student loans is a thing. This is almost always a very poor decision as there are tons of cheap regional schools where a part time job can mostly get you through school with very little debt. And yet we've got a generation of new adults starting life under crushing debt that purchased them something of dubious value (an expensive degree versus a cheap one). My…

> tons of cheap regional schools Where? I teach at the University of South Carolina, where tuition and fees are over $10K a year. To my knowledge, the same is true of all the other four-year colleges in the state (Clemson, College of Charleston, Lander, USC Upstate, The Citadel etc.) Not as outrageous as private school tuition, but it's still a very substantial burden, especially when you factor in food and housing a…

I was charged more than that for a public university in the 1990s. In a few years I paid for that, my wife's similar loans, and a new car. I also got married and had my first two kids.

So it looks cheap to me, assuming the housing isn't insane. I think there is a reasonable assumption that a person gets loans, chooses a sensible major, and actually graduates.

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