Charles Murray was on the ball for this as it was happening. He has very clear thoughts on it.
No one expects young men to do anything and they are responding by doing nothing
841–850 of 1001 posts
Re: No one expects young men to do anything and they are responding by doing nothing
#842Earlier quoted context omitted.
Except that the US will look and operate more and more like wherever these people came from.
In 100 years or less, whites will be the minority in the US.
Ehh, I doubt you could distinguish the difference between a majority of 2nd generation Hispanic-Americans and "white" European ancestry people, by worldviews or looks (because the Hispanics have European ancestry too). Just look at the leading politicians in Texas, Ted Cruz and Beto Orourke and tell me which one is Hispanic and how it makes any difference. And this indistinguishability will only increase over time, where there will still be a "white" majority including most Hispanics, as the census currently does.
Re: No one expects young men to do anything and they are responding by doing nothing
#843Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well said. The glaring piece missing from this analysis is the psychology of the young men themselves. Raising two young men myself, I’m blown away by how powerful cultivating intrinsic motivation is. My eldest just went from constant gaming/sleeping/hiding in his room to working a full-time job, launching a side hustle, and enrolling in classes. Yes, my modeling & encouragement mattered. But the fulcrum was him acce…
father of a 4 years old boy. please help me! How do you cultivate intrinsic motivation ? any good strategy or book?
I've got two kids in college. Perhaps one thing is to avoid being consumed by your own fear of them failing. For a lot of the tasks they're given, if they're halfway intelligent, then the only hurdles will be attention and motivation. So, of you are the one supplying them with those things, then you're the one doing the work. "I'm not going to do your homework, but I'm going to make you do it," is doing their homework.
With that said, the tasks are going to come on hot and heavy sooner than you expect. I didn't have homework in grade school. At all. My kids had mountains of homework. Giving them too much to manage on their own, while telling you not to manage it for them, would seem like a cruel joke, but I don't know any other answer.
Also, you could be more disciplined than I was about my own chores. I didn't need to clean the bathrooms every week at the same time, but maybe had I set up a schedule like that, it might have modeled better habits in my kids. Or maybe not. ;-)
Re: No one expects young men to do anything and they are responding by doing nothing
#844Earlier quoted context omitted.
"the stupidity and moral ineptitude of lower-class people who avowedly hate elites" I have never encountered an individual who claims to hate the "elite". And I for one will not complain if someone hates a person who holds your classist views. And what do you mean by "elite" anyways? If people dislike those in the position of authority, especially politicians, they generally have very good reasons for that. To quote…
I haven't encountered these individuals either, but they certainly exist. Class barriers are often considered in the abstract, but when it comes to physical manifestations of these differences, it can be raw and visceral. One photograph that stuck with me was the "eat the rich" [0] spray painted in Beverly Hills park during the early Covid protests. [0]: https://i.dailymail.co.uk/1s/2020/06/15/16/29633080-8422685-...
I'm not arguing about their existence. After all, there are very strange people in the world.
The "eat the rich" mantra is a manifestation (although not really physical) of the incredible and widening gap between the middle class and the rich. Generally the life of the lower and the middle class has become more precarious while the top 0.x% have become obscenely more wealthy.
Re: No one expects young men to do anything and they are responding by doing nothing
#845I 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…
Well said. The glaring piece missing from this analysis is the psychology of the young men themselves. Raising two young men myself, I’m blown away by how powerful cultivating intrinsic motivation is. My eldest just went from constant gaming/sleeping/hiding in his room to working a full-time job, launching a side hustle, and enrolling in classes. Yes, my modeling & encouragement mattered. But the fulcrum was him acce…
> The author has clearly identified that young man lack a goal worthy of their efforts.
For me it felt like the title would reflect reality better if it was rephrased to "Society has nothing to offer to young men and they respond by not pursuing anything."
Re: No one expects young men to do anything and they are responding by doing nothing
#846The article cites an anecdote about a young father who sat around the house arguing, fighting and drinking. He ends up getting kicked out of the house. The 1960s version of this story instead ends with the husband beating his wife behind closed doors without repercussions. Which is preferable?
I agree this is something I've wondered about as society has changed, and it seems a dichotomy between individual freedoms and broken relationships, vs social stricture and maintained family units.
There should be some better ways, or perhaps the best we can hope for is a middle ground, because the current social state around relationships is in my opinion as much responsible for the decline in first world childbirth rate as education is.
The current system encourages easy relationship dissolution, which is fine as long as children and alimony would recognize that.
However the child support laws are stacked to extract a mans livelihood to support the woman and children, while largely denying the man of the respect as a provider and satisfaction of his emotional and sexual needs in the family. This is a major problem that seems the other side of the coin to the old ways which kept relationships stuck together after love has gone or with abusive partners.
It's still a major problem, and it's in my opinion a root cause for the decline in the rate of families forming and having children.
Re: No one expects young men to do anything and they are responding by doing nothing
#847Earlier quoted context omitted.
Totally agree. I don't understand what the mechanism of values "trickling down" is meant to be. In my experience, none of the people "downstream" care or are even at all aware of what the "upstream" elites think. Like, is the claim really that the deadbeat dad in his 30s mentioned in the OP got his values from an academic seminar on family formation? It's incoherent...
The people downstream watch hours of TV shows and internet media every day, most of which is created by people with elite-aspirational values. They also receive the clear message that these values are elite values. This is how values trickle down.
So the claim is that popular TV shows reflect this particular strain of (supposed) elite values? Can you point me to some examples?
> They also receive the clear message that these values are elite values.
How do they receive that message, exactly?
Re: No one expects young men to do anything and they are responding by doing nothing
#848Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 s…
Did you grow poor or have friends from poor backgrounds? I saw lots of drug use, stealing, petty vandalism and violence, and little if any of it had to do with their trying to survive in a material sense. There are different norms around which behaviors grant status, and this is the primary driver behind this kind of behavior in my experience.
It's about survival in mental sense which lack of material means makes extremely hard.
People don't need money, but they desperately need sense of agency and entertainment and lack of money makes fulfilling those core needs in legal and moral manner super hard.
Re: No one expects young men to do anything and they are responding by doing nothing
#849Earlier quoted context omitted.
This didn't happen overnight. When I was in my early teens in the 90s I already had a sense, from listening to the news, that employers were out for their own self-interest first and foremost. Massive layoffs, shrinking benefits, and the concept of public companies being primarily responsible to their shareholders all send the same message: "At the end of the day, you are disposable. Loyalty will not be reciprocated.…
But isn't it doomed to be a self fulfilling prophecy if you approach every new company with these beliefs? Google is a great example of one that started out very differently, but unfortunately became much like the companies they strived to set themselves apart from. Many startups still foster that culture Google originally had.
I think the gps point is that, in the median, it's the case regardless of how you approach it.
Of course individual situations and be quite different, but you are really bucking the trend in expecting the average company to show loyalty instead of respond to financial incentives.
Re: No one expects young men to do anything and they are responding by doing nothing
#850Earlier quoted context omitted.
It’s a guesstimate. As stated. The normalisation of domestic violence 30-50 years ago is going to be hard to find statistically, as things like that are not going to be in crime statistics, obviously. Everything I said was anecdotal, from the midlands in England- but it matches other experiences from southern Scotland and East Coast US. I guesstimate 20% because it “felt” like 1 in 5 families had someone abusive in t…
Okay — but that’s just you making up facts. The only cited number is 1.3%… and entire order of magnitude lower, and it’s since dropped to 0.5%. That is, the only documented instances are an entire order of magnitude lower. I think you “guesstimated” a fake number to pretend your personal views are more objective than they actually are.
No, I’m sorry, I’m not going to drop that point.
I stated clearly it was a guesstimate, I explained that it could be coloured by my socio-economic class.
But it is my experience that 1 in 5 families at a minimum has an abusive guardian class person at home. (In the 80s-90s)
That official statistics are off by an order of magnitude really means nothing, when the point being made is that it was so normal as to not be reported.
Additionally you’re citing individual victimisations per 1000 people as a metric, when a family can consist of 2-10 people (averaging on about 4.4, “2.4 children” being the average in the 80’s). I’m stating households, you’re citing individuals. Individuals consist of single people, children, old people and so on. It’s not what I’m claiming.
If nothing else, female on male violence is extremely underreported to this day.
I’m not saying I’m right, But your argument is entirely unconvincing.