Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Family instability fuels rising nihilism among young men

city-journal.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 137 posts

Re: Family instability fuels rising nihilism among young men

#31

Post by hindsightbias »

tyrust wrote: post #8

A lackluster opinion piece that is attempting to disguise as an essay. The thesis of the article [0] is unsupported by any of its content. Statistics for the number of friends people have are adjacent to statistics about suicides, implying a causal connection, but no statistics about the number of friends that suicide victims have are presented. [0] - >The lack of stable families has contributed to the widespread mis…

Same author waxes how his adoptive parents made him conservative:

https://www.tampabay.com/opinion/columns/Column-Why-being-a-...

I guess this was in-between the baseball bat wielding wildings...

Re: Family instability fuels rising nihilism among young men

#32

Post by toomuchtodo »

frenchy wrote: post #26
dx87 wrote: post #9

This post resonates with me, but I definitely don't think it's hopeless. I'm in my early 30s, and have "no friends". There are people I would consider my friends, but as we grew up, we got adult responsiblities like jobs and family, most moved to different states for work, so I haven't actually been able to see them for years. Recently I've been working to improve my life, so I've been going out for walks around my n…

I think this experience is surprisingly common. Modern society affords us a lot of mobility, but I don't think we realise how much it costs us in terms of stable friendships. I have a young kid, and he's still too young to really have "friends" (when you're young enough, any stranger is a friend), but eventually we'll either have to decide to live in the same place for a long time, or he's going to have get used to c…

Maybe we don’t need the mobility with the concept of remote working normalizing. Community is underrated.

Re: Family instability fuels rising nihilism among young men

#33

Post by phobosanomaly »

All of the stats he cites outside of the suicide stuff don't differentiate between men and women. They indicate that everyone (men and women) feels like trash these days.

Unless every Ken Burns doc I've ever watched was a deepfake, the overwhelming majority of cannon fodder in major conflict in recent human history has been young men, so maybe there is something to the young men break stuff idea. However, there are plenty of women toting AK-47s in the YPG, so I'm not sure the degree to which this is a cultural thing.

As for the suicide stats, I believe that men tend to use guns, and guns are one of the gold standards for this sort of thing. Men are exposed to guns more as a cultural thing, and may feel more confident/comfortable in their ability to commit suicide with one.

Characteristics of adult male and female firearm suicide decedents: findings from the National Violent Death Reporting System - BMJ Injury Prevention

http://dx.doi.org/10.1136/ip.2008.021162 ^^ DOI for the SciHub folks

Here are some graphs this nonprofit made from CDC data that help build the idea that women try to kill themselves more than men, but men are more successful at it.

https://www.sprc.org/scope/attempts

Re: Family instability fuels rising nihilism among young men

#35

Post by nl »

> Still, we had food and cheap cell phones and cheap beer—and we had one another, unlike today’s friendless millennials.

What the hell kind of judgemental piece of bullshit is this?

> The lack of stable families has contributed to the widespread mistrust of others and lack of social relationships among young people.

The whole piece is like this - quote some unrelated stats ("suicides up" - even though they are less than the late 90's, and "out of wedlock births are up" - even though the 40% for "now" means those kids are zero years old so unlikely to be rioting) and then use them to support some blanket social statement unrelated to the "evidence" other than "oh this sounds bad"

Re: Family instability fuels rising nihilism among young men

#36

Post by motohagiography »

As a man in my late 30s, I began to see older male relatives of my own and of friends dying of the usual things like cancer and some even of opioids, but the thing that struck me was how many of them depended on hiring the funeral home staff as fill-in pallbearers. I made it a priority to be sure that however things go, I'd like to be able to convene a party of six. One of the things I did was get involved with a fraternal organization, as weird and anachronistic as that sounds, it has been very rewarding, and you get to see what a mixed bag other guys at different ages really are and how you are both similar and different. Another was setting better personal boundaries and committing to owning and prioritizing my own social life in romantic relationships, and made a commitment to a set of long term hobbies that I should be able to do until I am completely incapacitated.

I heartily recommend all three things to anyone who felt the original article resonated.

Re: Family instability fuels rising nihilism among young men

#37

Post by boomboomsubban »

This entire thing is based off the ridiculous premise that the "family life" used to be some universal great bedrock. Have you ever talked to your parents generation about their family life? It often seems pretty shitty too, even if the accident of their birth forced a marriage.

Re: Family instability fuels rising nihilism among young men

#38

Post by freddie_mercury »

dx87 wrote: post #9

This post resonates with me, but I definitely don't think it's hopeless. I'm in my early 30s, and have "no friends". There are people I would consider my friends, but as we grew up, we got adult responsiblities like jobs and family, most moved to different states for work, so I haven't actually been able to see them for years. Recently I've been working to improve my life, so I've been going out for walks around my n…

> I really believe that the "loneliness epidemic" is a product of a generation that socializes almost completely online, and has no connection with their community.

I agree about "connection with their community" but I'm less sure that socializing online is the root cause, though I agree it almost certainly a contributing factor at this point.

I live in a developing country which has substantially more street life, community, know your neighbors, etc than most places US/Australia/Europe. And a lot of it is simply due to the quality of housing.

When you've got 6 family members living in a house that might only be 300 square feet and there's no air conditioning...there's little surprise that in the evening so many people are sitting outside where natural interactions happen.

I can't find a reference now but I saw an academic article showing the same effect in the US South. There used to be a "porch culture" where in the evenings people would sit outside on their porches. This made it much easier for neighbors to interact. Then with the rise of air conditioning, suddenly being inside was noticeably more comfortable than being outside.

And it isn't just air conditioning. Consider all of the other changes in the past -- I dunno, 30 years? -- that have made "being inside" much more comfortable.

When I was a kid it was pretty common for kids to share bedrooms, for a house to have only a single television, there were only three TV stations anyway, definitely no handheld gaming/video watching/etc...all of those things were factors that would push you to go outside.

Re: Family instability fuels rising nihilism among young men

#39

Post by dguaraglia »

ideals wrote: post #25
lotsofpulp wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My point was those examples weren’t mischief. Waking up their friend with firecrackers is mischief. Shooting people with airsoft guns and driving blackout drunk easily putting them in harms way is not mischief, at least not in the “kids will be kids” way.

Maybe it's a difference in location, that quote was all stuff myself and my shitty friends did growing up, and most other people I went to school with. Also in a large midwest city. It's interesting to read these bad hot takes on why while plugging your ears

That's not the 'why' though. Plenty of people across the world grow up in similar situations as kids in the Midwest and they don't go around destroying other people's property.

I honestly think there's something really messed up about American culture. I believe you can draw a direct correlation between what I think it is - people being indoctrinated into selfishness from an early age - and behavior like that.

For context, my wife grew up in a small town in the Midwest. She used to tell me horror stories about high school and I used to dismiss them as maybe be it just being her experience and nobody else's. I changed my mind when one day we went to the wedding of a high school friend and we were sat on the same table with some people who were 'popular' in high school. Their recollection of those years were as bad as my wife's. One woman, when asked about her experience literally told me 'honestly, I try not to think about that time'.

These people grew up in a location that was by far better than my own upbringing in every possible metric: affluent town, very low crime, infinite resources when compared with my developing country schools, access to studying abroad, etc... And they fucking hated high school. That blew my mind.

Re: Family instability fuels rising nihilism among young men

#40

Post by courtf »

I expected some level of hand-wringing here in response to this article. Maybe it's something in the water in rural America, but none of this is unusual or extreme, and if this behavior is foreign to you, then you and I grew up in different circumstances.

Getting together with the boys and breaking the law, pushing each other to go a little further each time, is a rite of passage all over the world. Maybe it's practice for the kinds of risks adults sometimes have to take to survive. A life without these formative experiences sounds dull and sterile to me. I sometimes wonder whether the outrage and histrionics people sometimes get into over seemingly trivial stimuli aren't caused by a lack of exposure to games with real stakes.

Post reply on HN