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A shift in American family values is fueling estrangement

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Re: A shift in American family values is fueling estrangement

#351

Post by only_as_i_fall »

samatman wrote: post #181
hackeraccount wrote: post #139

We're all living that Asian family joke. Parents spend their whole lives waiting for their kids to thank you. Kids spend their whole lives waiting for their parent to say "I'm sorry." That said I've never felt that way about my Mom and Dad. I've faults and problems a plenty but I wouldn't ascribe any of that on them; indeed the best things about me seem to clearly come from them and the worst are just as clearly thin…

Yes, but for many of us in the West, without the tradition common to East and South Asians of reciprocal obligation. This used to be nigh unto a human universal: your parents raise you up from a helpless infant to adulthood, and this obliges you to love and care for them for the rest of their lives. I'm as deracinated Westerner as it comes, and yet I'm fairly traditional in this regard. I can think of three acceptabl…

This view seems predicated on the idea that people who estrange their parents do so because of past actions. I'd argue that in my personal experience and my experience with other such adult children the reasoning is more often about the current behavior of the parent or parents than past behaviors.

People who abuse or neglect their children are often doing so because of their own mental illness or emotional instability and those issues are unlikely to resolve without outside help.

Re: A shift in American family values is fueling estrangement

#352

Post by ceilingcorner »

gBszkp6V wrote: post #350
ceilingcorner wrote: post #340

Earlier quoted context omitted.

None of those things would result in the complete extinction of human beings. The Black Death was pretty horrible and yet European society still exists.

Why did you just shift the goalposts from societal collapse to complete human extinction?

Because the comment used the word extinction?

Re: A shift in American family values is fueling estrangement

#353

Post by redisman »

jgilias wrote: post #285

When I was around twenty my Mom used to call me every other day or so just to have a chat. One day, after she asked me how my day was, I shot back something along the lines of: "I don't have anything to tell you, really. You're calling so often that nothing new manages to happen in between the calls." So, she stopped calling. I would go home every other week as usual and everything seemed fine. It was only much later…

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EUNZMiYo_4s

Re: A shift in American family values is fueling estrangement

#354

Post by jasonbourne1901 »

jgilias wrote: post #285

When I was around twenty my Mom used to call me every other day or so just to have a chat. One day, after she asked me how my day was, I shot back something along the lines of: "I don't have anything to tell you, really. You're calling so often that nothing new manages to happen in between the calls." So, she stopped calling. I would go home every other week as usual and everything seemed fine. It was only much later…

I relate to your story, I definitely got to be that self-centered twenty-something for a good long time. Would love to be able to call my dad right now.

Re: A shift in American family values is fueling estrangement

#355

Post by CapitalistCartr »

jgilias wrote: post #285

When I was around twenty my Mom used to call me every other day or so just to have a chat. One day, after she asked me how my day was, I shot back something along the lines of: "I don't have anything to tell you, really. You're calling so often that nothing new manages to happen in between the calls." So, she stopped calling. I would go home every other week as usual and everything seemed fine. It was only much later…

I still think of calling my sister once in a while, "Oh, I should tell her that", and it's been ten years. And it still hurts.

Re: A shift in American family values is fueling estrangement

#356

Post by VirusNewbie »

taddevries wrote: post #332
ClumsyPilot wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "Lots of people are massively fucked up and still have kids anyway, either accidentally or otherwise. And then their kids are put at a massive disadvantage in life and in human relationships." This is an interesting one, and in direct contradiction to the adage: "Hard times create strong men, strong men create good times, good times create weak men, and weak men create hard times.” My life experience agrees, tough…

Maybe this is more accurate. "Hard times create weak men, weak men create hard times" I've never believed that adversity creates strength, at least that has not been my experience in life.

>I've never believed that adversity creates strength, at least that has not been my experience in life.

Except this is true in the most literal sense.

Re: A shift in American family values is fueling estrangement

#357

Post by bseidensticker »

teddyh wrote: post #265
GavinMcG wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Toxic" is just a catchier-sounding synonym for "harmful." It doesn't imply intent — in fact, that's one of its strengths, and one of the major components in the shift in the way we collectively talk about things over the past couple decades. Part of the conversation around race, for example, has been an awareness by more and more people that unintentional harms are far more prevalent than intentional ones, and in to…

> "Toxic" is just a catchier-sounding synonym for "harmful." It’s more subtle than that. “Toxic” is used as a synonym for “ irredeemably harmful”, and that very distinction makes all the difference. If a person is labeled a “jerk”, they are potentially redeemable and able to be reformed, but if someone is labeled as “toxic”, the label itself declares that there is no helping them. The label itself prescribes ostracis…

I don't think "toxic" means "irredeemably harmful". It just means harmful and makes no judgement on intent.

Re: A shift in American family values is fueling estrangement

#358

Post by queuebert »

marcosdumay wrote: post #272
polka_haunts_us wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For a politics shifted perspective of this, sometime late last year before prayer before meal, my mom was talking happily about how she hoped Jeff Bezos got the guillotine. Just before "Bless us O Lord and these thy gifts...", "Boy wouldn't it be funny if a mob necked Bezos". Her main news sources are Salon and Twitter threads of various left (Bernie or more) wing writers. I remember referencing the incident a couple…

> I swear the last 4 years drove the vast majority of everyone insane, in a very literal sense. Our current situation reminds me of the brain-eating computer on the book Diamond Age that somebody created to crack passwords. It's like a lot of people are simply gone, and some superconciousness too over their bodies, and it's on the controls 24/7. I still hope this reverses once the simplistic ideas get hit again and a…

What an amazing analogy. I doubt there is a solution short of severe changes in how most people use the internet and media. Attention stealing apps and their consequent dopamine addictions seem to have killed rational thinking, so much that people will refuse to believe facts and evidence. It feels better to be part of a group that believes a thing than to process a conflict and adapt your worldview. Hmm, what else does that sound like? :-)

Re: A shift in American family values is fueling estrangement

#359

Post by ponow »

oxymoran wrote: post #308
morpheos137 wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>did sacrifice. On the one hand I agree children and young adults can be overly entitled or have too high expectations for their human parents on the other I think that framing raising children as a sacrifice is wrong. It is kind of the core point of biological life. In past times children were seen as a blessing now some times in the west they are seen as a burden. This inversion is part of the larger narcissism epi…

I agree. My parents held their “sacrifice” over our head and I don’t think I really got over it and I think it’s why I never wanted kids until fairly recently. I used to respond to that by saying that I never asked them conceive me in the first place which made me feel like poo. Now being a parent myself, I can see why parents would feel like they made a sacrifice, but I am never going to hold that “sacrifice” over m…

Whether or not it made you feel like "poo" doesn't change that responsibility for a physical action lies with the people initiating it.

Re: A shift in American family values is fueling estrangement

#360

Post by michaelmrose »

ceilingcorner wrote: post #349
msbarnett wrote: post #346

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m not going to bother arguing about it, but suffice to say I don’t share your sunny optimism vis-a-vis nuclear holocaust.

Many scholars have posited that a global thermonuclear war with Cold War-era stockpiles, or even with the current smaller stockpiles, may lead to human extinction. This position was bolstered when nuclear winter was first conceptualized and modelled in 1983. However, models from the past decade consider total extinction very unlikely, and suggest parts of the world would remain habitable.[25] Technically the risk may…

We might live but we wouldn't live well and our long term prospects would be dim.
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