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

#381

Post by nradov » Fri, Jun 11, 2021, 10:39 PM UTC

tristor wrote: post #305

This thread is full of people talking about cultural, societal, and economic factors that may influence this outcome. I've yet to see anyone mention the factor that I wish we more thoroughly investigated: health. This has been discussed in some articles at length, but we still haven't identified primary causes, but testosterone levels are falling in men (at a given age) at a pretty steady pace year over year. This is…

Phthalate chemicals used as plastic softeners are also suspected to reduce testosterone levels.

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

#382

Post by paulpauper » Fri, Jun 11, 2021, 10:41 PM UTC

I don't think it's a tragedy. The overly dramatic media and pundits get this all wrong in labeling it such.

Young people are simply responding to incentives to live at home longer. Living expenses keep going up relative to inflation and wages, such as home prices, rent, insurance, etc. Living at home is a good way save money, even for the employed. Family formation is expensive and fraught with risks such as divorce and having to pay child support.

In having to choose between playing video games at home, versus a low-paying job and commuting, video games may be the rational choice depending on one's individual preferences. So someone who values leisure over money, would stay at home. Someone who has a higher preference for money than leisure would go to work even if the pay sucks. I don't see anything wrong with people voluntarily choosing leisure over work, because there will always be some people who will choose work over leisure. Someone who makes a lot of money may be more inclined to work, not because they are less lazy than someone who plays games at home, but that earning $100+/hour and no video games is more enticing of proposition than $11/hour and not playing video games; if you give the $11/hour guy $100/hour, then playing video games at home becomes a less attractive proposition.

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

#383

Post by username90 » Fri, Jun 11, 2021, 10:41 PM UTC

echelon wrote: post #286

hardwaregeek wrote: post #223

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 t…

I know people are different and I'm not wired the same way, but I have trouble understanding how people can play games for more than a few hours a week. Games like Pac Man and Tetris are algorithmic workloads. It's not much different than driving a semi or forklift, except you're not paid by a company for the work you do. It puts human brains closer to acting and performing as algorithmic worker bee agents. Modern AA…

Work and games are the same activities. The only difference is whether someone cares about the end result, and hence will complain if you don't do it properly, take your time or go explore different areas.

Having a casual conversation is fun. Being forced to have casual conversations with people all that long is work. And so on etc.

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

#384

Post by Mediterraneo10 » Fri, Jun 11, 2021, 10:41 PM UTC

username90 wrote: post #377

Mediterraneo10 wrote: post #357

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Degrees don't make you marriage material. This gets said so much on fora with men who regard themselves as “redpilled”, but it makes no sense to me personally. As a bookish and arts-inclined person, so much of my worldview, the things that occupy my thoughts during the day, has been formed by the canon of literature, music, films. No woman would seem dating and marriage material to me if she weren’t similarly erudi…

You studying social subjects that almost only women study is the exception, you can afford to be picky about this. Lots of guys would love to have a woman who shares their interest, but since so few women study technical topics they have to settle with women they have little in common with. And at that point whether they studied some social topic or no topic and did other stuff isn't high up on the list.

Thanks, that is some insight into why men who are primarily concerned with technical subjects would be unsatisfied with the dating market. However, I wouldn't claim that "almost only women" are concerned with the humanities subjects I mentioned above. Film criticism and scholarship on many branches of literature and music are still fields that draw either predominantly men, or have a pretty even gender balance.

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

#385

Post by rufus_foreman » Fri, Jun 11, 2021, 10:43 PM UTC

bozzcl wrote: post #284

mynameisash wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When my wife and I bought our house (Seattle area) six years ago, I was uneasy about spending $300k, and my family in the Midwest was aghast that we paid asking price. Anyone in this area would now laugh at my previous situation; I certainly do. We briefly considered buying a slightly larger house in the area, but everything is going for about $800k now. If I were just entering the job and housing market today here i…

I've been wanting to buy a house around Seattle for a while, but the asking prices are so ridiculous for what you get... it's just not worth it. Personally, I'm gonna continue renting for a while to see if the remote work situation opens new opportunities or brings prices down. That being said, I learned recently that for the same prices you would pay here you can get a castle in Europe... so I made that my retiremen…

It's hard enough to get contractors to work on my house as it is lately, I would hate to try to find someone to put a new roof on a castle.

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

#386

Post by whiskyant » Fri, Jun 11, 2021, 10:44 PM UTC

notJim wrote: post #258

whiskyant wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But at least they would be working, probably know how to drive a car, and may consider furthering their education/career when they realize how little they make for their time.

This is maybe a ridiculous question, but why is that so much better? If someone is able to live cheaply, why is it better for them to work in some menial, low-wage job versus being supported by a relative? I think something you have to consider is that if you have low social standing and are poorly educated, your options in life are not necessarily super appealing.

Who's to say that they'd remain in low-wage job? They may be wildly wealthy in the future. It's hard to know, since their potential is being squandered by the parents enabling this behavior.

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

#387

Post by Mirioron » Fri, Jun 11, 2021, 10:44 PM UTC

irowe wrote: post #364

pcbro141 wrote: post #331

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On a related note, on mainstream TV/articles about declining marriage/birthrates in the West, it's common to see criticisms about modern Western men. How women can't find life partners because men aren't masculine enough anymore, don't want to grow up, don't get educated etc. But very rarely do you see any criticism or even questioning about modern Western women and what men want in a woman. Only what women want. The…

I think what you said is a very unforgiving and slightly misogynistic way of describing what has been spelled out many other places before: women are increasingly opting for more education or career advancement in lieu of becoming homemakers. They don’t make those decisions for the benefit of men. They don’t have to. This has little to do with observed femininity or the “attractiveness” of getting a degree.

>They don’t make those decisions for the benefit of men. They don’t have to.

But isn't that the parent poster's point? They don't make decisions that make them more attractive for marriage, therefore they're less likely to end up married.

The same argument applies to men too. Men don't have to do things that make them more attractive to women, but they shouldn't be all that surprised when they end up not being attractive to women.

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

#388

Post by majormajor » Fri, Jun 11, 2021, 10:44 PM UTC

pcbro141 wrote: post #331

belorn wrote: post #269

What are the things that motivates them, and what do they themselves want to do in life? I ask this because much of the undertone in the article and in this thread is about the failure of meeting the gender role expectations that are put on young men. Do they have a job and a car? Have they studied hard so they can get a good job in order to support a wife and kid? Culture in the last several decades have hammered do…

On a related note, on mainstream TV/articles about declining marriage/birthrates in the West, it's common to see criticisms about modern Western men. How women can't find life partners because men aren't masculine enough anymore, don't want to grow up, don't get educated etc. But very rarely do you see any criticism or even questioning about modern Western women and what men want in a woman. Only what women want. The…

What is what you believe men want in a woman, that's being unfulfilled for these men?

The common male complaint I see isn't "all these women I date are simply not going to fulfill what I need," it's "no women will date me at all" which points at a breakdown in the process way before the point of "what are these men looking for." Hard to imagine these men even have any idea of what they're actually looking for in a relationship, with that lack of experience. You only find out one way...

And for that situation, a woman complaining "so few of these men I see have their shit together" and a man complaining "so few of these women are willing to date me at all" are two sides of the same coin. I think at a societal level, though, you'd be hard pressed to push the view "everyone should simply give up on contributing to society in traditional ways" so the coverage is going to look negatively at the "freeloaders" in the same way it disapproved of someone like Paris Hilton. You see it through a lens of sexism, I see it through a lens of it being hard to sympathize with someone drifting through life chatting meaninglessly on the internet and playing games. BATNA comes into play, too - the person with no options at all seems to be the one with the incentive to make changes. (While for the women here, and the men they are currently dating while ignoring these stay-at-home-and-do-nothing men, there's other, plenty-well-trod advice about compromise being necessary, etc, that's been repeated to death in media of all sorts.)

Maybe we should encourage these men to go become nannies for a few years, to both give them a job and boost their dating profile that way AND to prepare them for being a full-time homemaker if traditional employment simply isn't what they want! I certainly think that should be an option for both genders.

> Given that the vast majority breakups are initiated by women

Citation please? I would LOVE to know if your number here also includes stuff like "he slept with me and then ghosted me," too.

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

#389

Post by MeinBlutIstBlau » Fri, Jun 11, 2021, 10:46 PM UTC

>The parental home can be a refuge, but also a trap that keeps young men from launching their careers.

This took me a while to realize in my own experience, but certainly opened my eyes to how my own parents enabled me in this trap. "Stay at home to save money!" was constantly said to me, only for me to eventually realize, it is in fact stunting me. My dad would occasionally say "go out and do something," but meanwhile, I'd be interrogated for doing said thing so they can know every detail about it. It's why I tended toward videogames and the computers in general. They were things I could do by myself without an inquisition into my own life seeing as I barely was able to do anything privately.

While I personally was only a NEET for a few months at a time for about a year, I never was fully committed to the lifestyle. Ultimately for myself I had massive reality check in how the world worked and I could at least have a modicum of success in it. Partly also to blame is heavy religion not coinciding with the culture as well as not teaching a kid how to adapt to society so I always felt like an outcast. Eventually I became atheist and eventually determining what it would take for me to give up, I finally broke free. It was very much like in Office Space where you just don't care anymore. You don't care if you make a faux pas, don't care if you couldn't meet that deadline, don't care if you disappointed someone.

It snapped me out of it, but also made me into a very bitter on the inside. Knowing my parents didn't exactly want me staying at their house led to further feelings of being resented for existing. So I ended up being pretty sociopathic knowing I can't tell people my true intentions for doing things. I realize it's messed up and wrong, but much like the story of the scorpion and the frog, it's in my nature. I at least am cognizant that it's wrong, but I refuse to change because I've been able to find success in it.

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

#390

Post by irowe » Fri, Jun 11, 2021, 10:47 PM UTC

jeofken wrote: post #365

irowe wrote: post #364

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think what you said is a very unforgiving and slightly misogynistic way of describing what has been spelled out many other places before: women are increasingly opting for more education or career advancement in lieu of becoming homemakers. They don’t make those decisions for the benefit of men. They don’t have to. This has little to do with observed femininity or the “attractiveness” of getting a degree.

“Unforgiving” and “misogynistic” are words unrelated to whether something is true or false - just something to keep in mind

You’re absolutely correct, which is why I chose to phrase my post to say that the parent was taking a truth (women are increasingly choosing career over kids) and expressing it in what I consider to be bad faith. I don’t think that’s acceptable.

I also seriously doubt that the claims about women not living up to some standard of attractiveness or femininity are true, misogynistic or not.