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

Fewer young men are in the labor force, more are living at home

bloomberg.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 1001 posts

Re: Fewer young men are in the labor force, more are living at home

#71

Post by motogpjimbo »

andrewmcwatters wrote: post #51
willcipriano wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Take me on an adventure" was always a instant no for me. In the modern world a spouse is supposed to be a equal partner, I'm glad I found my wife who feels the same way. I don't want someone I have to drag somewhere like a suitcase.

I think this also gets to the heart of it. My general feeling was that women wanted equality but didn't want to put in any effort whatsoever, and so a lot of women I came across just seemed like bums. I'm not saying that is what you're saying. It just made me recall my experiences.

It's a terrible thing to say, but many young women today, if judged by the same standards as men, would be considered losers. They have nothing going on in their own lives, yet have sky-high expectations of what men are supposed to provide them. And for the most part, modern dating culture lets them get away with it.

Re: Fewer young men are in the labor force, more are living at home

#72

Post by silicon2401 »

AndrewUnmuted wrote: post #34
futureshock wrote: post #22

This seems like a kind rational economic choice. If there are not enough good jobs that can support independent living, providing for a spouse, buying a home or raising a family, then staying home with the easy accomplishment of video games makes sense. Most people never live outside their home states and can't afford to leave the support network of their family and close friends. If you grew up in a medium or high c…

Until this year, I lived in the same place I grew up, one of the highest cost-of-living places on the planet: NYC. Until the pandemic, the goal of owning a home did seem totally out of reach for me, even with my remote SV tech job salary. Then I moved to an unincorporated community in TN, because NYC's lockdowns, mask mandates, and general cultural decay was too much for me to bear - financially, emotionally, and eve…

You gotta keep hyping up the big cities: talk about the usual cliches like the food, the movie scenes, the 'culture'. Keep cities popular so everybody stays there and leaves land in the countryside for the rest of us.

Re: Fewer young men are in the labor force, more are living at home

#73

Post by ryandrake »

olivierestsage wrote: post #44
AndrewUnmuted wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Until this year, I lived in the same place I grew up, one of the highest cost-of-living places on the planet: NYC. Until the pandemic, the goal of owning a home did seem totally out of reach for me, even with my remote SV tech job salary. Then I moved to an unincorporated community in TN, because NYC's lockdowns, mask mandates, and general cultural decay was too much for me to bear - financially, emotionally, and eve…

Unsure why you're getting downvoted for this -- it makes good sense, and many could benefit from this kind of thing. I have a friend who moved from NYC to Ohio recently. He was bellyaching about it a lot (the move was for work), since he thought he would be so sad to leave the cultural opportunities of NYC, etc. Instead he has found that a) Ohio wasn't so bad after all, b) his stress-related conditions have evaporate…

> Unsure why you're getting downvoted for this

Any hint that dense urban living is not the optimal lifestyle for everyone gets downvoted here. For example, here's my super-controversial anecdote from yesterday, that people took time out of their day to try to bury: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27450896

Re: Fewer young men are in the labor force, more are living at home

#74

Post by michaelt »

andrewmcwatters wrote: post #24
kogepathic wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> another friend of mine basically refuses to date anymore because he thinks the sort of culture of Tinder dating is a waste of time that favors women disproportionately. My female friends (I'm male) with online dating profiles have shown me their matches and conversations, and it's bleak. They all mostly have an average profile and still receive thousands of likes/hearts/swipes and messages, but the mean amount of e…

What does effort mean in this context? I recall friends of mine, young women, who were having the hardest time finding a significant other were just demanding things of men that would have them selecting from a socioeconomic pool of the top 20% of the population, when they themselves were in the bottom 20%. It was my experience that young women in general were asking for too much when I was in my early 20s. They want…

> What does effort mean in this context?

One school of thought says there are men on dating websites who copy-paste a message saying "hey how you doing?" to every woman they see; and that women are beset by hundreds of copy-pasted messages from men who haven't even read their profile.

This school of thought says, in order to stand out, men should carefully compose a different clever, charming message for each woman they contact, based on things the recipient mentions in their profile and suchlike.

Of course, a man sending 100 copy-pasted messages and a man sending 5 high-quality messages might be expending the same amount of effort in total but the latter is demonstrating greater effort per woman

In this context, kogepathic means more men should adopt the strategy of carefully composing messages.

Re: Fewer young men are in the labor force, more are living at home

#75

Post by BitwiseFool »

michaelt wrote: post #74
andrewmcwatters wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What does effort mean in this context? I recall friends of mine, young women, who were having the hardest time finding a significant other were just demanding things of men that would have them selecting from a socioeconomic pool of the top 20% of the population, when they themselves were in the bottom 20%. It was my experience that young women in general were asking for too much when I was in my early 20s. They want…

> What does effort mean in this context? One school of thought says there are men on dating websites who copy-paste a message saying "hey how you doing?" to every woman they see; and that women are beset by hundreds of copy-pasted messages from men who haven't even read their profile. This school of thought says, in order to stand out, men should carefully compose a different clever, charming message for each woman t…

You also have the problem of writing dozens and dozens of seemingly engaging and individualized messages only to get no response back. So eventually, you start putting less and less effort into each message and even start to repeat old ones. It's a sad fact of life.

Re: Fewer young men are in the labor force, more are living at home

#76

Post by anthonygd »

bena wrote: post #60
kogepathic wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> another friend of mine basically refuses to date anymore because he thinks the sort of culture of Tinder dating is a waste of time that favors women disproportionately. My female friends (I'm male) with online dating profiles have shown me their matches and conversations, and it's bleak. They all mostly have an average profile and still receive thousands of likes/hearts/swipes and messages, but the mean amount of e…

Bumble has its own issues. It turns out "making the first move" is anxiety inducing in everyone. What women have done on Bumble is to basically treat the "first move" as an "invitation to treat", a second shot at selecting a guy. Most of those "first moves" are exactly what they say they don't want from guys: simple "Hey"s and "Hello"s. And then they say in their profile that once they say "Hey", you're supposed to r…

I think you're right about dating apps not really favoring either gender. Hiring is the first thing I think of when reading about dating apps. There's just a very strong natural imbalance.

Dating apps are especially good at making people not have to face their shortcomings, i.e. I don't have to fix my shortcomings, because with a large enough pool there's going to be someone broken in the right way to accommodate me. Maybe that's rational, or maybe it's not, it really depends on expectations.

Counter intuitively, accepting that we're just stupid hairless apes makes me believe we're rational. We're not failing to find anything meaningful; we're not interested or looking.

Re: Fewer young men are in the labor force, more are living at home

#77

Post by BeFlatXIII »

blakesterz wrote: post #40
zitterbewegung wrote: post #19

What is strange is this has been going on since the 1950s and it is even invariant in relation to economic cycles. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS11300001 I am also an exception to this rule (I am employed but I live at home). Currently I'm saving for a down payment to a Condo / House.

That's quite an interesting graph. I wonder if it is also influenced by things to do with average age or age of retirement, time spent in school, or something like that. Just looking at it makes me wonder about demographics/education/etc. That's about a 20% drop over the years, I would assume caused by a number of factors.

My speculation is that it’s like the argument that minimum wages increase the skill floor for employment. However, it’s that a combination of automation and cost optimization eliminated all the marginal jobs, rather than the wage floor. Automation allows a salary employee to pick up what previously would have been a full-time minimum wage position under “other duties as assigned” without overworking them. Cost optimization meant that companies realized that they do not need their floors to be that sparkling clean, further reducing the number of low-wage/low-skill positions.

Re: Fewer young men are in the labor force, more are living at home

#78

Post by _fat_santa »

wolfretcrap wrote: post #50
futureshock wrote: post #22

This seems like a kind rational economic choice. If there are not enough good jobs that can support independent living, providing for a spouse, buying a home or raising a family, then staying home with the easy accomplishment of video games makes sense. Most people never live outside their home states and can't afford to leave the support network of their family and close friends. If you grew up in a medium or high c…

It's less about not having good jobs more about: 1. Most want to start business and become rich, not work for someone else. Starting business is difficult, needs lots of work, even if you are smart and hardworking, have capital to start, still you need social skills which present generation didn't develop, so getting along with others and leading others is still difficult which limits the success. 2. Anything you'll…

I agree with your first two points. Starting a business is hard, you'll probably fail (statistically) and there is likely someone else doing it better than you already. But part of starting a business is looking at that adversity and doing it anyways.

Your third point about dating, I couldn't disagree more. If you go on social media you will see arguments very similar to the one you made, basically if you aren't an athlete/millionaire/etc, don't even bother. I think these arguments come from a bitter place and as a result generalize women in general. I'm an average looking dude, certainly not a millionaire, but I go on dates pretty much every week with different women. I found that it's all about just putting yourself out there.

Re: Fewer young men are in the labor force, more are living at home

#79

Post by marcellus23 »

k-mcgrady wrote: post #38
marcellus23 wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's certainly believable that women don't enjoy dating apps, but I think it's difficult to make the case that it's equally hard for them (in terms of successfully getting a date) when they have thousands of matches and many men I know have none.

Thousands of matches isn’t a good thing. If you ever have the opportunity ask a female friend to show you the kind of messages they get on dating apps. They’re pretty appalling. It genuinely worries me that there are so many creeps out there. The men you know may not be getting many matches but at least the ones they get are more than likely from relatively normal people. If I had to sort through the garbage women do…

But surely you can see how hopeless dating feels for many men when they swipe right on hundreds of women and get 0 matches? I'm not saying they aren't getting many — they're getting none (I know you just have my word on this, but trust me when I say they are not ugly or fat or anything, just nonwhite and without high paying jobs, but otherwise average-looking guys who have dated successfully in the past).

The situation isn't great on either side, but plenty of statistics show it's mostly women having sex off these apps, so clearly there is an actual imbalance.

And you can't write off the sheer hopelessness and isolation that the thought "there's not a single woman out there who would date me" induces in young men. I'm sure it's not fun for women but it is absolutely __brutal__ for many men.

Re: Fewer young men are in the labor force, more are living at home

#80

Post by r00fus »

bena wrote: post #65
AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have an idea I've been toying with for a dating tool (I refuse to call it an app) based on the premise that all dating "apps" and "sites" are horrible because their incentives are aligned toward wanting people to actually use them. You pretty much have ad-driven and subscription models and both have perverse incentives. Further, the whole "wink", "like" and "swipe" nonsense increases the "meat market" commoditizati…

And I will make X profiles from X emails, filling out the questionnaire in several ways to maximize the number of hits I get. The profile will be some good ol PT Barnum style pablum that appeals to just about all of us. I will also add pictures that are either extremely flattering of me, or of someone else. It doesn't really matter. Then I just agree to every date that gets sent to my email. Ideally this could be aut…

If we're not aiming for mass market, this service could use mobile device WebAuth as it's only authentication vehicle limiting it to one per device.

How do you spam/exploit that?

Post reply on HN