Fewer young men are in the labor force, more are living at home • Hacker News Board

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

#221

Post by atweiden » Fri, Jun 11, 2021, 9:16 PM UTC

CydeWeys wrote: post #36

Part of this problem is our societal failure to build enough housing to keep up with the increasing number of people, with a resulting increase in housing costs that has significantly outpaced the median wage. If you can't afford to live on your own, and can't afford housing where the jobs are located, then you're more likely to live with your parents and be unemployed.

> Part of this problem is our societal failure to build enough housing to keep up with the increasing number of people.

The issue is human overpopulation, not our society’s “failure” to destroy the fabric of closely knit communities.

Humans are by far the least efficient life form on this planet, and what little enjoyment most humans get out of life mostly comes down to the integrity of their local communities: their safety, their health, their prosperity. Yet we’ve become so hyperfocused on economic growth that we’ve turned our larger society into a malignant tumor unto Earth, while ironically an increasingly high proportion of humans lead unhappy, unfulfilled lives.

Why do so many people just accept the answer is more growth? Until we can master interstellar travel, we have to contend with finite physical resources.

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

#222

Post by gnicholas » Fri, Jun 11, 2021, 9:16 PM UTC

Spooky23 wrote: post #154

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…

It’s a viscous cycle for women. You don’t want to put too much of yourself out there, because crazy people, but not doing so ends up selling your body, which tends to attract a wider variety of men that don’t line up with your vision. So the two extremes are basically having sex with rando internet people and getting ultra-picky.

There may be some aspects of online dating that are properly described as "viscous", but I think the cycle you're referring to is vicious :)

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

#223

Post by hardwaregeek » Fri, Jun 11, 2021, 9:17 PM UTC

Video game addiction is a real problem. I spent my freshman year of college rooming with man-children who played video games non-stop. They didn't explore the city, they didn't meet new people, they just played video games in the dark, screaming into their headsets and eating their takeout at their desk. People can certainly have a healthy, fruitful relationship to video games but since then I haven't felt the need to touch a game.

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

#224

Post by dvt » Fri, Jun 11, 2021, 9:18 PM UTC

d_burfoot wrote: post #216

UncleOxidant wrote: post #113

I've got two nephews aged 34 and 32 who still live at home and play video games all the time and rarely leave their rooms. Neither has ever had a job that lasted more than a month or so. Neither ever learned to drive even though they live in a town with little or no public transit. They haven't had any education beyond high school. They seem wholly unprepared to navigate life without their parents. It's a slow motion…

> It's a slow motion tragedy. From an environmental perspective, this kind of minimalist lifestyle actually seems quite healthy. They don't drive, and I assume they don't fly or buy a lot of stuff, so their carbon and other resource footprint is small. They don't take up much extra space, so they reduce suburban sprawl and land required for housing. They probably won't have kids, which further reduces their environme…

> Maybe we should encourage more people to live this way.

Sounds like an episode of Black Mirror. Life is meant to be lived; the purpose of life is at least eudaimonia, not slowly rotting away in front of a computer.

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

#225

Post by AngryData » Fri, Jun 11, 2021, 9:18 PM UTC

ameister14 wrote: post #6

dijit wrote: post #2

If the goal is gender equality: what's wrong with this? The idea that every able bodied person has to work is not supposed to be the way our society functions; at least not in the last 100,000 years.

>The idea that every able bodied person has to work is not supposed to be the way our society functions; at least not in the last 100,000 years. What? I was under the impression that particularly in agrarian societies, everyone who was able to work, worked. Are you saying that surpluses allowed for a large class of people to just not work at all?

Agrarian societies had cyclic work. Some societies could be especially arduous, but the most successful and populated areas weren't. For large chunks at a time throughout the year the farming population didn't have more than daily chores and personal projects. But of course during planting and harvesting they would work their asses off. A lot of the rest of the time was personal preference. You could make your house bigger, or you could make beer to drink, you could make crafts for fun and sell a couple, or you could just dick around.

You can see the large amount of extra time available in old religious and cultural holidays which were both numerous and often spanned many days or a week or more at a time. Huge chunks of time of the year that many modern workers wouldn't be allowed leave from work nor afford if they could.

You can also see Egyptian pyramid construction which is now thought to have been mostly (but certainly not exclusively) volunteer farm workers in the off season in exchange for booze and "luxury" services like studied dentistry services that otherwise didn't exist in most of the rest of the world yet. If they wanted they could just live off their own share of crops and dick around most of the year though. Working on the pyramids was a bonus, not a requirement, and their scale proves how many free man hours they had to "waste" on stuff like building giant stone mounds and carvings and art and other religious practices. Their success is marked by how many excess man hours people had to dick around with.

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

#226

Post by spoonjim » Fri, Jun 11, 2021, 9:18 PM UTC

paulddraper wrote: post #205

UncleOxidant wrote: post #113

I've got two nephews aged 34 and 32 who still live at home and play video games all the time and rarely leave their rooms. Neither has ever had a job that lasted more than a month or so. Neither ever learned to drive even though they live in a town with little or no public transit. They haven't had any education beyond high school. They seem wholly unprepared to navigate life without their parents. It's a slow motion…

In Tacoma, I lived nextdoor to a guy who "hurt his back" when he was 22. As far as I can tell, he'll sit on his couch collecting disability until 65, at which point he'll switch to retirement.

There’s a movement towards curtailing disability fraud so he might have a problem in between.

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

#227

Post by paulddraper » Fri, Jun 11, 2021, 9:18 PM UTC

UncleOxidant wrote: post #219

paulddraper wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In Tacoma, I lived nextdoor to a guy who "hurt his back" when he was 22. As far as I can tell, he'll sit on his couch collecting disability until 65, at which point he'll switch to retirement.

Not going to get much of a retirement if he never paid into social security.

Yeah, IDK. I won't be there see it.

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

#228

Post by vkou » Fri, Jun 11, 2021, 9:19 PM UTC

tetranomiga wrote: post #218

bektok2 wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Time for some tough love and kick them out. Not doing them any favors enabling their laziness.

He said, in a time of record unemployment and low wages that are impossible to live off of. Almost like there are other factors at play here than just men being lazy. HN loves to forget that not everybody can be a FAANG employee or has the desire to sit in front of a computer writing code their whole lives.

Unemployment is actually at a ten-year average at the moment, and entry-level wages are growing.

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

#229

Post by WalterBright » Fri, Jun 11, 2021, 9:19 PM UTC

vecter wrote: post #214

JPKab wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you think that video game addiction contributes to this kind of thing, or is the video game addiction a coping mechanism? I think video game addiction is an incredibly underreported and highly destructive phenomenon. I encounter (and had to fire a few days ago) lots of young men who don't appear to ever sleep, and are highly unproductive, unmotivated, and constantly distracted. The kid I had to fire (I call him ki…

I think video game addiction definitely contributes. I used to spend a fair amount of time playing first person shooters in my childhood 15-20 years ago. I haven't played much nowadays but these games provide a sense of "progress" and "accomplishment", which people would probably normally seek outside. Even in the past 5 years, I've caught myself having a reflex to open a game like Apex Legends or Valorant whenever I…

I worked as a video game tester briefly while working my way through college (Mattel Intellivision).

It permanently destroyed my interest in video games, along with the fake rewards it offers.

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

#230

Post by gonehome » Fri, Jun 11, 2021, 9:19 PM UTC

tomp wrote: post #207

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…

This complaint should be taken about as seriously as a rich person complaining how hard it is to be rich. Every woman can put herself in a man's position of no matches - just delete Tinder. Every rich person can become poor - just give away all their money. Yet they don't. It's called revealed preferences . Because having options, no matter how bad, is better than not having options.

There's also an obvious selection bias - the matches may be sending low quality messages, but if women are largely selecting only the top 2% of good looking men they're skewing these results themselves. The 'better' men never get to the messaging stage at all.

I'm happy to be out of the game, but online dating is bleak for 98% of men.

Okcupid used to have great data on this before they sold out, a lot of it ended up in this book:https://www.amazon.com/Dataclysm-Identity-What-Online-Offlin...

The data in that book corroborates a lot of this. We're not that different from gorillas - sexual selection is tough and most of the discussion around it ranges from wrong to dishonest.