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

#691

Post by nooyurrsdey » Sat, Jun 12, 2021, 3:48 AM UTC

cjohnson318 wrote: post #681

flippinburgers wrote: post #511

Men are not doing as well as women in school. If you look in the wrong places on the internet, media, or daily life, all you see is negativity towards masculinity. In addition, there doesn't appear to be any broad social system that is geared towards supporting men. The fact that men don't tend to be a socially adept doesn't help. This all feels like the perfect storm and there are plenty of people who act like "men…

> In addition, there doesn't appear to be any broad social system that is geared towards supporting men. What planet are you on? The whole social system is geared towards supporting men. 70% of the U.S. government is men. Most companies are owned by men. Most of the C-suite of most companies are men. Most engineers, doctors, lawyers, investors, and all other desirable, high-paying jobs are dominated by men. Just look…

I'm betting OP is talking about supporting men emotionally, or generally supporting mens' well being.

Everything you listed is correct, but I think both of your statements can be true. Men aren't in need of societal advantages, but they are in need of some societal support. And that doesn't have to compete with very real things women require either.

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

#692

Post by fb13 » Sat, Jun 12, 2021, 3:51 AM UTC

seattle_spring wrote: post #682

yaitsyaboi wrote: post #447

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The article actually addresses this in the final sentence: “Nearly half of prime age men who are not in the labor force take pain medication on any given day; and in nearly two-thirds of these cases, they take prescription pain medication.” I think more prominent than the soybeans/BPA/microplastics kind of causes is just plain old opioid dependence.

... or they suffer from chronic pain, something that is dismissed as "drug seeking" far too often nowadays.

As a healthy person who hasn't had a painkiller in ten years, I don't understand this at all.

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

#693

Post by cjohnson318 » Sat, Jun 12, 2021, 3:52 AM UTC

nooyurrsdey wrote: post #691

cjohnson318 wrote: post #681

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In addition, there doesn't appear to be any broad social system that is geared towards supporting men. What planet are you on? The whole social system is geared towards supporting men. 70% of the U.S. government is men. Most companies are owned by men. Most of the C-suite of most companies are men. Most engineers, doctors, lawyers, investors, and all other desirable, high-paying jobs are dominated by men. Just look…

I'm betting OP is talking about supporting men emotionally, or generally supporting mens' well being. Everything you listed is correct, but I think both of your statements can be true. Men aren't in need of societal advantages, but they are in need of some societal support. And that doesn't have to compete with very real things women require either.

If OP is talking about a broad social system to support men emotionally, then no, that doesn't exist in America. Nor does it exist for women, or minorities, or anyone else.

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

#694

Post by seattle_spring » Sat, Jun 12, 2021, 3:52 AM UTC

samatman wrote: post #671

motohagiography wrote: post #631

> Improvements in video-game technology help account for young men’s detachment from the labor force, according to a 2017 paper by economists from Princeton, the University of Chicago, and the University of Rochester. It found that an increase in the playing of video games by men 21-30 accounted for somewhere between 38% and 79% of the differential in the decline in their time spent on paid work vs. the smaller decli…

Couple things to consider: The "not your Daddy's ditch weed" line is basically fake. Cannabis users take enough to get where they want to be and stop, more potent weed just means they smoke less. It's also a partial agonist, so past a point smoking extra is just wasting drugs. Second point is that cannabis use isn't increasing, if anything it's decreasing: 20-somethings reported higher rates of use in the 90s than th…

> Cannabis users take enough to get where they want to be and stop, more potent weed just means they smoke less

This is just wildly incorrect, and anyone who has smoked weed more than a few times would know that. No amount of crap weed will ever rival the high of higher quality "chronic."

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

#695

Post by fb13 » Sat, Jun 12, 2021, 3:52 AM UTC

alert0 wrote: post #552

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…

75% of the US is overweight. Losing weight can increase testosterone levels. [1] 1. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25982085/

Wow, this needs to be brought up more often.

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

#696

Post by [deleted] » Sat, Jun 12, 2021, 3:53 AM UTC

deadite wrote: post #520

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…

Yeah, TV and related is a pretty big psyop and always has been. I'm going to invoke Godwin's Law but even the Nazis knew how to use movies back then to brainwash people into doing their bidding. The audience here is (wrongly) responding to you by thinking that you're somehow targeting women in your questioning, but I get what you're trying to say - you see a strange imbalance of personalities being portrayed in popul…

[deleted]

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

#697

Post by Mirioron » Sat, Jun 12, 2021, 3:53 AM UTC

runawaybottle wrote: post #62

AlwaysRock wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've got a buddy in a similar situation. We all came from somewhat similar backgrounds and all majored in the same, useless, thing. We lived together and while we all played a lot of video games one of the three never really moved on from that. He's still working at a low wage job behind a counter and playing video games a lot. I think it's less that he doesnt know different but more that he never got a break in the…

It’s also a form of perfectionism. I deal with exactly what you are describing with a family member of mine. A part of his problem is that, I shit you not, I sincerely believe he thinks he is too good for a labor/service job, or community college, or coursera, or the gym, dating someone not perfect, etc. It didn’t go his way for so long, but the ego is still there. And what is the ego exactly if not an intense defens…

The issue with these timelines is: "is it worth the effort?"

The more effort you have to put in the more desirable it has to be. Perhaps the 5+ year timeline means that what they want falls into the "it's not worth the effort" category.

I'd like to know Mandarin, but I don't think it would be worth the effort to learn the language. Maybe if I already knew the symbols I would feel otherwise.

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

#698

Post by sinsterizme » Sat, Jun 12, 2021, 3:54 AM UTC

achillesheels wrote: post #592

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…

What is the rate of metabolic affordances created by women in relation to men? Isn’t this biologically necessarily male due to its sexual dimorphic traits in the biological life kingdom? What are the compounding utilization rates of income from women who elect not to marry and create life in relation to men which have evolutionary selective pressures to bring home the bacon and therefore become more active investors,…

I honestly can’t tell if I’m too stupid to decipher this comment or if this is incredibly poorly written

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

#699

Post by fb13 » Sat, Jun 12, 2021, 3:56 AM UTC

lifeformed wrote: post #679

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…

I don't understand the soy argument. Do Asians have increased rates of hormone problems since they eat so much soy?

Problems may not exist, or be less obvious at least, if their bodies adapted to eating soy over generations. Even differences in gut biome can explain this.

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

#700

Post by dillondoyle » Sat, Jun 12, 2021, 3:57 AM UTC

ravenstine wrote: post #478

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…

> Often the man claiming that men don’t care about a woman’s education, goes on to say that what matters is that the woman knows, for example, how to cook. That, too, has never made sense to me. I live in a country where for the childless, eating out good healthy food is not appreciably more expensive than cooking at home, and a woman who chooses to take advantage of that and use her valuable time for other pursuits,…

this is outrageous?! and I feel totally on the outside of like 80% of these comments in a bad way for saying that.

I started copying and pasting lines and responding to them but on edit it seems pointless.

I would just say that good relationships work in both directions, 1+1=3 idiom, and come in vastly many forms.

Intimacy doesn't fade in a good relationship it grows stronger.

For sure the type of women you seem to be looking for exist and enjoy that type of relationship.

But a lot of people, of all genders and orientations, find the things you don't seem to think are good qualities, are in fact the things 'that they can get along with.'

And I would maybe suggest instead looking more at the 'programming' of gender and roles.

Women aren't simply a transaction or variable in your equation of an ideal relationship.