I’m a grad student. I work in an empty lab. I’m lucky if somebody else is there 4 hours a week. I go home to an empty house. Once a week, I have beers with a friend. Count that up. I’m alone (168-8)/168 hours a week. Cry me a fucking river.
Older Americans are alone half their waking hours, on average
231–240 of 250 posts
Re: Older Americans are alone half their waking hours, on average
#232Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is also why a lot of spouses pass soon after the other. They lose hope and the reason to get out of bed each morning. I keep assuming that as jobs are automated away that we are going to have more people who can do work like visiting elderly people. It also can more than pay for itself by keeping people on their medication regimens and preventing costly hospital visits.
Men are at greater risk than women of dying soon after their spouse. My opinion: This is partly because women do most of "the women's work" of buying groceries, cooking and cleaning. In many older couples, the wife is the one who keeps track of everyone's dietary restrictions. Older men often don't really know how to feed themselves properly. It's not their responsibility to keep track of the myriad types of info inv…
Re: Older Americans are alone half their waking hours, on average
#233Earlier quoted context omitted.
Men are at greater risk than women of dying soon after their spouse. My opinion: This is partly because women do most of "the women's work" of buying groceries, cooking and cleaning. In many older couples, the wife is the one who keeps track of everyone's dietary restrictions. Older men often don't really know how to feed themselves properly. It's not their responsibility to keep track of the myriad types of info inv…
Men have lower life expectacies and also generally older than their spouses. Imo that would be a better explanation
Your stats are an excellent explanation for that statistic. But I can't see how it relates to a gender-based percentage difference in outcomes for the "widowhood effect."
Re: Older Americans are alone half their waking hours, on average
#234Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is also why a lot of spouses pass soon after the other. They lose hope and the reason to get out of bed each morning. I keep assuming that as jobs are automated away that we are going to have more people who can do work like visiting elderly people. It also can more than pay for itself by keeping people on their medication regimens and preventing costly hospital visits.
> I keep assuming that as jobs are automated away that we are going to have more people who can do work like visiting elderly people. You are much more optimistic than I am. On the contrary, I see the shift towards much more automation and "task outsourcing" as a huge factor when it comes to increasing social isolation. We no longer have to lean on our friends, neighbors and even random social acquaintances for help…
But you have to value social connections, they don’t come naturally.
Re: Older Americans are alone half their waking hours, on average
#235Earlier quoted context omitted.
UBI will create the conditions for more suicides. Work can create purpose. UBI alone would strengthen the family unit and reduce external relationships.
It's not hard to find purpose in life that doesn't revolve around sitting at a desk doing fuck all and pretending to work for 40 hours a week. People will still work. Whether it's to get a leg up from the baseline or because it's something their passionate about, nothing will stop people from banding together to solve common goals. The current state of work is just a really shitty abstraction over that. I would have…
If you look at the wealthiest innovation is not what they do with there freetime either.
Innovation requires motivation. Innovation requires resources.
Re: Older Americans are alone half their waking hours, on average
#236As an anecdote, I've lived the majority of my life in America (born and raised middle class on the east coast in a wealthy area) and if I was tasked with writing an account of my time here it would be focused around one thing: alienation. American life is atomized and consistently getting more so. For anyone who sits around and thinks about why people are the way they are here I highly encourage you to consider that…
They're even alone as babies. Americans have this weird obsession with putting babies to sleep in separate rooms as soon as possible, including newborns, as if this develops some rugged independence. All the research (and common sense) shows they need to sleep as close to the mother as safely possible. Yet this mentality persists. And then the move to kick them out of the house at 18, why?
https://edition-m.cnn.com/2016/05/24/health/cry-it-out-sleep...
Re: Older Americans are alone half their waking hours, on average
#237Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is also why a lot of spouses pass soon after the other. They lose hope and the reason to get out of bed each morning. I keep assuming that as jobs are automated away that we are going to have more people who can do work like visiting elderly people. It also can more than pay for itself by keeping people on their medication regimens and preventing costly hospital visits.
A big hope of the UBI movement is that it will "pay" people to take care of one another in a way that our usual monetary transfer for services rendered simply can't handle well. That is, someone taking care of their parent is not going to be paid for that service in our economy, but with a UBI, it allows one to get that economic support without it being a usual "job". The work of maintaining genuine social relationsh…
Re: Older Americans are alone half their waking hours, on average
#238Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is also why a lot of spouses pass soon after the other. They lose hope and the reason to get out of bed each morning. I keep assuming that as jobs are automated away that we are going to have more people who can do work like visiting elderly people. It also can more than pay for itself by keeping people on their medication regimens and preventing costly hospital visits.
Men are at greater risk than women of dying soon after their spouse. My opinion: This is partly because women do most of "the women's work" of buying groceries, cooking and cleaning. In many older couples, the wife is the one who keeps track of everyone's dietary restrictions. Older men often don't really know how to feed themselves properly. It's not their responsibility to keep track of the myriad types of info inv…
"Often, it’s unrelated to any accident or cardiovascular incident, but sometimes it is related. That can be part of the stress reaction to grief."
"It’s just the difference between men and women and how we’re socialized,” she said. “Connection helps us negotiate old age. Independence does not do us well.”
Social relations, social support network, social contact, all of it is connected with stress management. Traditional gender roles where men prioritize work over their social live is correlated with smaller social network. If the goal is to live a long life with as little stress as possible then prioritizing time with children and spending time building social connections is much better than being at work.
However not being at work puts men at the lower end of the social ladder which also correlate to a smaller social network and increase stress. Social status is one of the bigger factors when predicting stress in both humans and animals alike.
Re: Older Americans are alone half their waking hours, on average
#239Earlier quoted context omitted.
Men are at greater risk than women of dying soon after their spouse. My opinion: This is partly because women do most of "the women's work" of buying groceries, cooking and cleaning. In many older couples, the wife is the one who keeps track of everyone's dietary restrictions. Older men often don't really know how to feed themselves properly. It's not their responsibility to keep track of the myriad types of info inv…
The story is about a man who died 48hrs after his wife at age 101. There are not that much "buying groceries, cooking and cleaning" in 48hrs, and not many 101 years old in the grocery store. "Often, it’s unrelated to any accident or cardiovascular incident, but sometimes it is related. That can be part of the stress reaction to grief." "It’s just the difference between men and women and how we’re socialized,” she sai…
Re: Older Americans are alone half their waking hours, on average
#240Earlier quoted context omitted.
The story is about a man who died 48hrs after his wife at age 101. There are not that much "buying groceries, cooking and cleaning" in 48hrs, and not many 101 years old in the grocery store. "Often, it’s unrelated to any accident or cardiovascular incident, but sometimes it is related. That can be part of the stress reaction to grief." "It’s just the difference between men and women and how we’re socialized,” she sai…
I included the link for the opening statistic that more men than women die shortly after their spouse, not for the story.
Stress management, and not some concept of "women work", is the likely culprit for why men are at greater risk than women of dying soon after the spouse. The link support it and so do also research which ask why some people live a long life and others don't, popular called successful aging in most of the research. As one researcher described it, stress is about margins. A stressful event occur and the body reacts and the older a person gets the smaller the margins becomes. Meaningful social connections reduces the stress response and thus a person can handle events which otherwise would kill them.
This is one of the insights why Sweden changed the elder care policy of moving old people into care homes. Moving a old person away from a trusted and safe environments induces stress, which has a very deadly result. As far as it possible it is much better to perform elderly care within the environment which results in the lowest amount of stress for the patient, ie the own homes.
In addition, buying groceries, cooking and cleaning is already guarantied through the social safety net provided by the state. By the time this kind of statistics is relevant the state is already taking care of all the so called "women work". It did not change the statistics that more men than women die shortly after their spouse.