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

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

#401

Post by voldacar »

cjohnson318 wrote: post #321
thepasswordis wrote: post #291

Is anybody advocating for them or encouraging them in any way? I can’t think of a single group which aims to highlight men, uplift men, and encourage masculine behavior. These guys grew up in a school system of almost entirely women teachers, and popular media tells them that if they are successful in any way, it is due to oppression. It’s no wonder why they’re not succeeding. We spent the last 15 years telling them…

Oh please. There's nothing wrong with the way female teachers teach.

I don't think you get it. Young men today grow up almost entirely in female-dominated spaces. That is not normal historically. In fact it would be strange if it didn't lead to any pathologies.

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

#403

Post by toomuchtodo »

rayiner wrote: post #400
paulpauper wrote: post #382

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…

But who raises the next generation under that scenario? Immigrants, of course, but what does that say about what American society has become? This is not a “replacement” screed, by the way, but quite the opposite. If your culture requires constant immigration to survive, that means it’s unsustainable in the steady state. Like, it would be bad if everyone adopted your culture. Your culture is the panda of cultures.

> But who raises the next generation under that scenario? Immigrants, of course, but what does that say about what American society has become?

https://www.brookings.edu/blog/up-front/2021/05/24/will-birt... (Will births in the US rebound? Probably not.)

People respond to incentives. Living and having children in the US is expensive, so the results are what you’d expect.

Maybe we don’t need replacement rate, except for the part of an economic system that requires unending growth. I’d like to submit a bug report.

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

#404

Post by gowld »

teawrecks wrote: post #355
yibg wrote: post #314

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you might be the odd one out here. I don't have stats for it, but looking at myself and people around me, most didn't really know what they want to do for a career after school. School typically doesn't really prepare you well for figuring out what you want to do, especially secondary and prior.

Oh I totally agree, the US education system doesn't put any emphasis on helping kids figure out what they want to do after school. If a kid asks "when am I ever going to use this?", it's a sign you need to back up and lay some more groundwork. I don't know why it was different for me, but looking back I think it was important.

The vast majority of employed people are not doing "what they wanted to do when they grow up", and quite many are doing jobs they didn't even know existed.

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

#405

Post by MeinBlutIstBlau »

monksy wrote: post #310
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…

> If instead he's referring to apps like Bumble where the woman has to make the first move, see above for why some apps choose to operate with that model. Under that model.. it's common for the first message to be "hi" or ".". Not much has changed.

What a lot of ignorant men don't realize is that's the woman saying "you start the convo." Not everything is meant to be interpreted literally in dating and relationships. If you believe that, you're doing it wrong.

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

#406

Post by mechagodzilla »

whiskyant wrote: post #346
avs733 wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I deal with a lot of 18-19 year olds as my primary job is teaching first year engineering students. I will tell you it is a LOT more complicated than this. This type of single point simplification and pronouncement about 'coddling' is decidedly unhelpful. For starters, if you grow up in two working parent household, both parents can easily come home completely exhausted and unable to provide the extended engagement n…

If the parents don't provide for them, what do you think would happen to the nephews? Do you think they would be homeless? I certainly don't. The fact that the parents are providing a roof over their head and paying for their food/water/electricity/internet/clothes/games/etc is why they haven't had a job nor any desire for one well into their 30s. Honestly, because the parents keep providing for them, there's no impe…

The parents certainly can be enabling, but I think you're ignoring that there are plenty of people that are homeless, that do wind up with dependencies on alcohol, drugs like meth, etc, and your implication that anyone (especially people in their 30s with no real work history) can get full-time, minimum wage work doesn't seem realistic. Many of those jobs are both minimum wage and few enough hours per week (to avoid having to give you benefits, of course) that it would be extremely difficult to live independently, while still requiring a schedule that makes it nearly impossible to take on other jobs.

I'm in my 30s and have now seen several high school classmates with similarly poor prospects eventually succumb to drug overdoses.

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

#407

Post by nodejs_rulez_1 »

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…

It will go mainstream soon enough.

Alternative talk shows like Kevin Samuels are gaining traction.

The queen is naked.

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

#408

Post by gonehome »

wearywanderer wrote: post #399
gonehome wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Videogames provide fake achievement and an easy thing to do to occupy you - I think some people are more vulnerable to this kind of thing than others. For me, the fake achievement feels fake and I don't get much satisfaction out of it - but for others I think it mimics real achievement enough that they can pour hours into it. Online dating sucks for most men - if you're not in the top 2% of attractiveness for men it…

I think some kinds of video games provide this more than others, at least for some definitions of achievement. If somebody spends their free time painting happy trees but never sells any paintings, I personally would not say achievements are fake. The painter sets their own objective and judge success by their own personal standards, but that doesn't make their achievements fake , right? And if they decide to depict…

Yeah - I didn't mean to generalize the entire medium.

I love story based games, indie games, etc. I think creative games like Minecraft are similarly worthwhile too.

Things like:

- Gone Home

- Life is Strange

- Firewatch

- Tacoma

- Elsinore

- Untitled Goose Game

There's lots of great stuff out there that isn't just a slot machine. Unfortunately slot machines make a lot of money so you also get WoW, and GTA ruined by GTA Online, in-app purchase corrupting content into Zynga style everything.

Kudos to Apple for trying to combat this with Apple Arcade.

This blogger reviews an interesting game, he also writes a lot about fake achievement: https://pixelpoppers.com/2018/05/close-reading-of-qube-direc...

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

#409

Post by majormajor »

Mirioron wrote: post #387
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.

> 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 attra…

There's a group missing here. We're discussing stories talking about a demographic of women that are unhappy with the men they date, and also about a demographic of men that aren't dating at all.

The men unable to get a date at all clearly have some work to do - even when there's so many unhappy women, there is something they're still doing or not doing that makes them even less appealing.

The unhappy women and the men they're currently dating are a more curious situation. Are the men unsatisfied with them in particular, and so these women have work to do to convince a man they're "marriage material"? Or are the men simply not looking for anything that serious at all?

The general position of the media coverage is that it's the latter: the women can't "make themselves good enough for marriage" because the men just want the casual merry-go-round to continue. And there are certainly men quoted in articles about this who feel exactly that, but I can't say for certain that we're missing another group who just finds these women lacking.

My personal view is that we've shifted a bit, so the "growing up" that would've normally happened for these men in their early 20s is now ten years behind or so, but I see it happening in my cohort now as everyone is in their mid-30s. So I'm not too concerned for that side of things.

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