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No one expects young men to do anything and they are responding by doing nothing

robkhenderson.substack.com

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Re: No one expects young men to do anything and they are responding by doing nothing

#681

Post by camgunz »

nitrogen wrote: post #513
camgunz wrote: post #375

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the post fails to make the case that male behavior (or the culture that induces male behavior) is the root cause of divorce rates. - The rise in imprisonment is basically entirely a result of the War on Drugs, aka carceral slavery. - The problems with employment are that unions have disappeared, jobs are hyperexploitative (a better measure than the unemployment rate here is the Social Security Disability rate…

Many of us have lost a sense of community and place we once had. I don't know what about our culture has done this, but it's bad. The marketing, political, religious, and cultural industries that divide and conquer us into ever finer slices of demographic identities to sell us things have convinced everyone that they can only be themselves by emphasizing their irreconcilable differences with others. In doing so they…

I agree retrenching pluralism is necessary, but it's a long road to hoe. I've been reflecting lately on my day to day, how even before the pandemic I never knew my neighbors or anyone in my neighborhood, had a low-key resentment towards any forced or incidental social interaction where I'm not 100% in control of my experience, sometimes I load up HN and high-road people for an hour or two or some online dating app, blah.

It's like, no wonder things are depressing, and I'm super privileged. Mostly what I'm running up against is existential and abstract. It's hard for me to even imagine working gig jobs or being back in tech support.

Maybe this is just rehashing what you're saying, but I find modern life intensely dehumanizing. There's so much space between us--on purpose--that we're just adrift.

My brother and I were talking with an older guy a couple years ago, and he pinned the blame for this on garages. Time was you parked in your driveway and had a neighbor interaction, but with the garage, you just slipped in and no interaction. Was it always an awesome neighbor interaction? Definitely not, but it had a cohering effect. I think he's wrong in the micro, but it does to me ring true in the macro, where we have so much more control over our interactions that we just don't get the incidental mixing. Then again lots of people in our society have tons of unwanted interactions (e.g. women) so dunno if this is at all right.

IDK this was weirdly personal and whiny, but I don't know how else to really get at what I've been thinking for a while.

Re: No one expects young men to do anything and they are responding by doing nothing

#682

Post by paulryanrogers »

DeathArrow wrote: post #205

>Norms were loosened around being an absentee father. So more men took the option. I'm afraid that the author got it wrong. All social norms were destroyed between 1950's and now. If society desires hard working, law abiding, family loving young men, it should rebuild what it destroyed. The only interesting point in the story was about that "expert" which publicly behaves how society coerces her now to behave but sec…

Religion destroyed plenty of people and continues to right now. In the 19-20th centuries of the USA it wasn't such a pleasant life for non-WASP or women.

Re: No one expects young men to do anything and they are responding by doing nothing

#683

Post by fwip »

the_solenoid wrote: post #410
jcstk wrote: post #132

I can appreciate this perspective because I used to have it. I even wrote a similar blog post 10 years ago - it was on the top of HN and the comment section was a beautiful shitshow. For me, this perspective was a good story to tell myself - it justified why I was only investing my time in “work”, and validated me for having “come so far”. Over time, I have reflected and shifted this perspective. That reflection cent…

I agree - and will take it one step further: he misses the root causes of "instability", and I bet it tracks directly with the gutting of the middle class starting in the 70's, and/or the same flat-lining of wages (not keeping up with inflation etc) despite huge increases in productivity in about the same time period. Money is a huge stressor in relationships. Misogyny is still a huge thing (to my utter surprise hone…

It's absolutely wild to me that Rob quotes:

> Lack of money is certainly a contributing cause, as we will see, but rarely the only factor. It is usually the young father’s criminal behavior, the spells of incarceration that so often follow, a pattern of intimate violence, his chronic infidelity, and an inability to leave drugs and alcohol alone that cause relationships to falter and die.

Without seeming to make any sort of connection that poverty is a causative factor in every single one of these. Poor people are more likely to commit crimes of desperation. Poor people are over-policed when compared to middle-or-upper class people. Poverty makes it more difficult to escape domestic abuse. (Idk about the infidelity one). Drugs & alcohol are maladaptive coping methods that many people use to escape the reality of their daily lives - which are much worse when you're poor.

But y'know, that doesn't fit into his worldview that the dissolution of "family values" is the root cause of all this.

Re: No one expects young men to do anything and they are responding by doing nothing

#684

Post by rajin444 »

nyolfen wrote: post #332
mediumiqsad wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Probably because single motherhood is generally not a choice made willingly. There isn't any hypocrisy here, they don't endorse single motherhood because it's fashionable they "endorse" it because the alternative is worse.

they endorse it in order to reduce stigma; but reduced stigma leads to greater prevalence

Changing the meaning of words (i.e, reducing stigma) never works. It's a practice used by authoritarians to get what they want fast because it's cheap and relatively easy.

I'm curious what the GP was told that makes them think the alternative to endorsing single motherhood is worse. The alternative to reducing stigma would be fixing the underlying issues that cause the stigma...in this case the lack of ability for a single parent to provide. We have plenty of resources to fix this, but they're disproportionately distributed in favor of those at the top. Funny enough, both the left and right at the top have solutions different than what I described. The left wants to destigmatize, and the right wants to shame (another cheap and relatively easy tactic used by authoritarians).

Re: No one expects young men to do anything and they are responding by doing nothing

#685

Post by iratewizard »

PaulHoule wrote: post #11

A counter is that other countries (Japan, Korea, Italy, ...) that enforce traditional values have had a collapse in the birth rate. Having children out of wedlock is a safety valve for broken institutions that keeps the birth rate higher in the US than comparable countries; that plus relatively open integration helps us maintain our economy, welfare state, pensions, etc. If we turned the screws on women and men to di…

Japan and Korea are still high trust societies. I strongly encourage spending a month in either place if social structure interests you.

Low birth rates are overstated as a problem when you accept that prosperity has natural ebs and flows. It it becomes a truly critical problem, fewer women will go into higher education and their society will course correct. While they're doing that, we'll be demonstrating to them how failed our theory of liberal society is.

Re: No one expects young men to do anything and they are responding by doing nothing

#686

Post by WalterBright »

lkey wrote: post #277
rayiner wrote: post #3

This is an important read, especially this part. > This highly educated and affluent person prioritized stability for her own children. But refused to publicly endorse this value so that less fortunate children could also benefit from family stability. I’m from a rigidly socially conservative immigrant family that professes fashionably liberal values in public—imposing a double standard between “us” and “Americans.”…

> Watching and hearing about the family instability in these communities is heartbreaking. Half or more of everyone’s parents are divorced. The kids float around seeking stability and the adults can’t provide it. You seem to be attributing the cause of this to 'Telling men and boys it's cool and fine to divorce' and not attributing to say... declining material and social capitol in the lower four quintiles of wealth…

> declining material and social capitol in the lower four quintiles of wealth that have created pressure that exacerbates marriage instability and numerous other social ills.

The article disputes that:

"Most social scientists who study poor families assume financial troubles are the cause of these breakups. After all, these young people grow up in a context of extreme disadvantage, at least by American standards, and they come of age with little education, few skills, and not many future prospects. Lack of money is certainly a contributing cause, as we will see, but rarely the only factor. It is usually the young father’s criminal behavior, the spells of incarceration that so often follow, a pattern of intimate violence, his chronic infidelity, and an inability to leave drugs and alcohol alone that cause relationships to falter and die."

Re: No one expects young men to do anything and they are responding by doing nothing

#687

Post by solenoidalslide »

ratww wrote: post #322
blinkingled wrote: post #48

> basic general principle that men will do whatever is required in order to obtain sex, and perhaps not a great deal more. (One of us characterized this in a previous work as, ‘If women would stop sleeping with jerks, men would stop being jerks.’) This makes it sound like it is just men who need sex and have to do things to get it. One would think that everybody needs sex and thus women need it too. And it would stan…

What does "less fortunate women" mean specifically? Looks? Desirability? That assumption would mean that the group of "more fortunate" women don't really have problem with jerks, which I don't really see as being true.

No post body was provided.

Re: No one expects young men to do anything and they are responding by doing nothing

#688

Post by fzeroracer »

VLM wrote: post #490
giantg2 wrote: post #401

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even if you have expectations, many opportunities may be gone. Just look at the lack of non-college work in the US that pays a living wage. Now try to get one of those jobs if you're competing against others who have no criminal history if you have a minor one. I have a job as a dev and even I'm tired of this treadmill. Taxes, COL, healthcare, etc. No time/money to do the things I want. No real career, just a job. Li…

> Just look at the lack of non-college work in the US that pays a living wage. A problem that doesn't exist. Plenty of that work out there. Try to get a custom 3-phase power line run in the datacenter. Average age of electricians is about 55 around here. Nobody goes into the trades because the trades will "destroy your body before you're 35" yet all the thin healthy tradesmen around here are mid-50s boomers. Hmm. The…

> Nobody goes into the trades because the trades will "destroy your body before you're 35" yet all the thin healthy tradesmen around here are mid-50s boomers.

I just wanted to point out that this is quite literally textbook survivorship bias. Instead of looking around and talking to the people that made it that far, you should try talking to those that didn't.

Re: No one expects young men to do anything and they are responding by doing nothing

#689

Post by iratewizard »

AvocadoPanic wrote: post #330
toomuchtodo wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this is a reasonable course of action, of course, but also respect the DINKs who look at having kids and go “no thanks” and continue jetting off to the Alps, Turks and Caicos, or whatever. Having kids is an opportunity cost, and there’s a lot of life enjoyment to be had if you don’t have them. Kids were previously an asset a century ago, now they’re a luxury good.

Sure r/childfree has lots of this sort. They often seem a bit too into being childfree to me, I probably wouldn't like their shitty kids anyway. There's an opportunity cost for most life decisions. Sometimes they're obscured. It's often not presented this way but for a cohort of women university and work, displaces marriage and children.

Children born from Reddit addicts are the over-socialized version of crack babies.

Re: No one expects young men to do anything and they are responding by doing nothing

#690

Post by zmgsabst »

dijit wrote: post #261
walkhour wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the husband beating his wife behind closed doors without repercussions Families were much bigger back then. The extended family was always around. Communities were much tighter and actually existed. I think you don't have a good understanding of those times if you think women could be beaten around without repercussions, and honestly, thinking women are so helpless smells of sexism.

> I think you don't have a good understanding of those times if you think women could be beaten around without repercussions Or, you don’t. It is definitely true that domestic violence was in the realm of “basically normal”, I’d guesstimate 20% of households had an abusive person in them: and if you were married and your partner was not physically violent it was considered that they were a “good person”. This swings…

> domestic violence was in the realm of “basically normal”, I’d guesstimate 20% of households had an abusive person

Can you cite this — or is it a made up fact to support your pre-existing beliefs?

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