A shift in American family values is fueling estrangement • Hacker News Board

Re: A shift in American family values is fueling estrangement

#561

Post by Havoc » Thu, Jul 15, 2021, 12:35 AM UTC

>American values

Much like the notion that freedom is something the US has and well the other ~193 countries by implication don't I suspect this is missing the larger picture quite dramatically.

There seems to be a global shift at play here.

something certainly appears to be tearing away the core.

Personally it's not the deteriorating situation that is freaking me out, but rather the fact that I can't pinpoint what is behind this shift. To put it into crude term: It feels like someone is fucking with me and I can't tell who/why

That inherently leads to a mistrust of all social order

Re: A shift in American family values is fueling estrangement

#562

Post by jkhdigital » Thu, Jul 15, 2021, 12:40 AM UTC

moate wrote: post #489

LordHumungous wrote: post #342

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah it does seem like many of the "no contact" people are themselves childless. I doubt this is a coincidence.

Which do you think is the causal effect: not having children causes it easier to break from the parents, or having terrible parents that cause estrangement makes people less inclined to have their own children?

Why not both? It is much easier to make a case for causation with the former though; an overwhelmingly common experience among new parents is to reconsider past resentments now that they know what their own parents actually went through.

Re: A shift in American family values is fueling estrangement

#563

Post by Diederich » Thu, Jul 15, 2021, 12:41 AM UTC

pjc50 wrote: post #430

im_down_w_otp wrote: post #424

24/7 bombardment with conspiracy theories and partisan political nonsense through television and the internet has turned the relationships and bonds in my extended family into weird factions of outrage addicts that are basically impossible to interact with for any extended amount of time unless you similarly develop a fondness for their flavor of outrage or for their passive aggression for when you don't. It's exhaus…

There's a lot of "Fox News robbed me of my parents" stories out there. https://www.salon.com/2014/02/27/i_lost_my_dad_to_fox_news_h... (2014, situation has generally got worse!) https://captainawkward.com/2020/12/09/1304-fox-news-stole-my...

Heartbreaking stuff: https://old.reddit.com/r/QAnonCasualties/

Re: A shift in American family values is fueling estrangement

#564

Post by sudosysgen » Thu, Jul 15, 2021, 12:42 AM UTC

ceilingcorner wrote: post #340

msbarnett wrote: post #318

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Precisely none of “climate change, nuclear war, biological warfare” constitute a natural disaster, nor has this quasi-neo-confucian conception of societal cohesion via filial piety historically triumphed over anything worse than any of these modern extinction scenarios.

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.

Nuclear war could definitely kill literally every human. Even more if you get bio weapons and omnicidal nuclear strikes at once.

The Black Plague is not even a cold compared to what we can engineer.

Re: A shift in American family values is fueling estrangement

#565

Post by sudosysgen » Thu, Jul 15, 2021, 12:44 AM UTC

oblio wrote: post #399

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.

We're incredibly resilient. We can eat anything and we have technology that can be used in some of the worst environments on the planet and that allow us to get shelter and food. We'd be 10 thousand not 10 billion and life would suck but we would survive. And the fallout would clear within a few decades or centuries.

No, we wouldn't. The fallout could feasibly kill everyone without WMD protection within a few years.

10 000 people is not nearly enough for a modern division of labour - we'd be reverted back to prehistoric technology levels within a generation, with a bonus of fallout and absolute climate dysfunction. Given a sufficiently destructive nuclear exchange literally every single human could die.

Re: A shift in American family values is fueling estrangement

#566

Post by sudosysgen » Thu, Jul 15, 2021, 12:46 AM UTC

ceilingcorner wrote: post #339

not_jd_salinger wrote: post #320

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you please list some of this "far worse situations" than nuclear war and climate change as we are currently facing? "Societal cohesion" doesn't do too much to help us survive crop failures and wet bulb temperatures over 35C. Aside from that, I think you might misunderstand your causal arrows a bit. It is fair more likely that massive industrialization and late state capitalism led to a society that valued the ind…

Black Death and Mongol Invasions were probably worse on a per-person basis for those affected than even a realistic nuclear war would be.

Absolutely not, not even close. 99.9% of the population dying within a few years is not comparable to a disease that killed ~10% of the population and a series of invasions that killed at most a single percent.

Re: A shift in American family values is fueling estrangement

#567

Post by Cullinet » Thu, Jul 15, 2021, 12:47 AM UTC

hedberg10 wrote: post #334

Angostura wrote: post #303

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I went to university, my parents simply asked me to call them once a week on Sunday at around 10am, which I did pretyt much every week and carried on doing for the rest of their lives until they died a couple of years ago in their 90s. The calls were pretty consequential and really not verty long, quite often just 20 minutes but over the years they morphed from the being worried about me, to me being worried abo…

Do it. All the anxieties "Should I call?", "Am I a nuissance", "Am I a burden?" matter not. I am genuinely curious why "memento mori" never seems to stick. Maybe thats part of it's power.

I'm beginning to think that mobile phones and technology for young people is a horrible experience of being answerable without notice to unlimited opportunities for more powerful people to impose themselves on still incredibly experienced just lately still minors.

because simultaneously adults have been inundated with the news of the world and it isn't good, and as a result we're probably genuinely more anxious about our kids than for several generations (my father would be 114 this year, if he could be alive, and his stories of growing up pre Depression in London still make my hair stand on end and thank god for the mercies we do have. Age has made me sentimental and actually interested in what religion is about. But I also recognised both developments as being a deliberate blurring without any definite refocus, of all the accumulated worries into a indefinite emotional haze. If this is necessary for forbearance when my grandchildren err stupidly yet repairably, I'll take it, religion and all. But I don't remember my father in his nineties getting any fuzzier, only sharper. So I hope to overcome the apparent overload.

Still, whatever the reasons, I think we're letting our children's intelligence become too thinly spread across distractions when we are suffering from similar confusion, and I believe it's our job to clear more of the post modern clutter.

Re: A shift in American family values is fueling estrangement

#568

Post by jkhdigital » Thu, Jul 15, 2021, 12:47 AM UTC

loudtieblahblah wrote: post #327

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…

My parents...are a mixed bag. They weren't or aren't abusive. At least, not physically or sexually or anything like that. Emotionally...that depends on how you want to interpret events and what your perspective is. But.... there's a gigantic cultural (rural vs suburban), generational (Xenial/Milennial vs Boomer), political (die hard Republicans vs Greenwald-esque progressives) and religious (baptist vs atheist) divid…

It's the contract between generations. I make sure my son hugs his grandmother when he visits her, because my wife is owed a lot of hugs from her grandchildren one day and I'm going to make damn sure she gets them.

Re: A shift in American family values is fueling estrangement

#569

Post by 6f8986c3 » Thu, Jul 15, 2021, 12:47 AM UTC

laurent92 wrote: post #526

avidiax wrote: post #374

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's definitely not a coincidence, but it is certainly complicated. Damaged kids become damaged adults, and if they realize it, they may decide that they wouldn't be good parents and rightly opt-out of it. Children that didn't have the right opportunities, whether that's their parent's fault or not may not have enough achievement as an adult to take on the burden of being a parent. One can argue whether it is harder…

Long story short, I don’t call my parents precisely because I’m childless. Failing my love life has everything to do with them. It’s not like I were divorced. I’m precisely never married, never had a long girlfriend, despite not being ugly nor totally stupid, and my loneliness drove me crazy (in the literal sense – since Covid I’ve honestly snapped a few neurons, so it’s quite over for me). But before that, I used to…

At some point, we have to stop looking to our parents, and take responsibility for our own lives.

Until we can do that, we aren't really adults. That's what sets adults and children apart: responsibility. Children are not responsible for their own lives; rather, they live under the guardianship of adults.

Adults are responsible.

And it is a hate crime that we have probably two generations in the West that have been raised to be actively irresponsible: to reject the mantle of responsibility, and instead spend their time loudly blaming... everybody but themselves.

It doesn't matter how well-deserved that blame might be! Blame itself is toxic.

Look, I get it. My parents did a number on me, too. But I also recognize that they too were broken in many ways, and that they did the best they could with what they had.

Yes, that means they gave me a lot of shitty advice. But it was good advice to their younger selves.

That's why I'm not angry with them anymore. Not for the cheating, or the divorce, or any of the rest. Because I am adult enough to take ownership over my own life.

Re: A shift in American family values is fueling estrangement

#570

Post by Cullinet » Thu, Jul 15, 2021, 12:55 AM UTC

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…

possibly the typical reaction of the mothers I know to their son reacting defensively to their calling, would be petrified what horrors are going on bad enough to make their precious child and light of their lives not want their mother to hear.

I know that it's never anything like that, but I have really toned down my vignette of a maternal reaction. You just never know how important you are - you said this yourself I only can't emphasise it enough. Emotional telepresence as once advertising had it, belongs to a boomer utopia, in my opinion.