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The window for great-grandmothers is closing

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451–460 of 494 posts

Re: The window for great-grandmothers is closing

#451
post #409

If you ever sit down and really think about it, it is absolutely wild how profoundly the invention of the birth control pill has changed the course of human history, our cultures, and human society. It's gotta be up there with, like, writing and fire, in terms of shaping the destiny of our species.

Farming machines changed it more so than birth control. Also farming practices like using fertilizer.

The Green Revolution is top five, definitely.

But farming is an incredibly long series of incremental improvements since prehistoric times: agriculture, selective breeding, crop rotation, etc.

The pill was like a technological and societal step function.

Re: The window for great-grandmothers is closing

#452
post #438

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And I know a lot of parents that want their kids to have kids but the kids aren't ready. ... The next generation would happen earlier, the first generation would have their grand kids and the second generation would have time to "wait" for whatever reason. I mean, putting aside the other good comments this has received, why are the kids not ready? Because if I look around at myself and my peers, I see a lot of peop…

> micro-wars That's an interesting choice of worlds, I'd just call them wars, maybe proxy wars. Some of them look like candidates for what future historians might call the early conflicts of WW3. There's also lot of noise about declaring war on China too, which honestly sounds like a bad idea, and the grievances I've seen range from fake to you're-doing-the-same-thing and what's left is not really worth fighting a wa…

Yeah I couldn't really settle on the term. The Ukraine-Russia conflict is kind of half-proxy war, since one of the entities is Russia itself but then the other side is basically NATO plus or minus, but (to my knowledge) no NATO nations have been in direct conflict with Russia yet, they're just supplying the Ukraine. And then you have the Israel Palestine shit which isn't really a proxy war at all so much as a regular war that happens to be small in scale (compared to the world, not compared to it's combatants of course).

But yeah, this feels distinctly like the period of history right before maps get covered in flags and arrows and it's not a good vibe.

Re: The window for great-grandmothers is closing

#453

I've always had this weird thought - that doesn't really pass the ethics test, but here it is anyway. I was raised by my grandmother - let's just say my parents were not ready. And I know a lot of parents that want their kids to have kids but the kids aren't ready. What if it would become the norm for Grandparents to raise the children? That way the second generation can focus on their careers, etc and the first gene…

Anthropologically, I think that this isn't super far from what has already happened for humans. Grandmothers specifically had a lot of repsonsibilities and importance and I believe that's why they generally live longer than grandfathers. Instead of being about career development, it's been about specializing in hunter/gatherer stuff while still able bodied. https://www.discovermagazine.com/the-sciences/grandmothers-a…

> I believe that's why they generally live longer than grandfathers.

Iirc that's at least partly due to estrogen & other female hormones. They have I think anti-infection or anti-cancer properties. (Though if your comment was from an evolutionary perspective that would make sense.)

Re: The window for great-grandmothers is closing

#454

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is financial dependence, not independence. Do you really think that somebody who owns their own house and has supplementary income is less independent than somebody who works full time and owns nothing? The first has the option to stop working, the second will be out on the streets if they do. > Nonsense. I imagine it is pretty insulting for a woman to read that they could only be capable of wanting control of…

We are simply living in different realities. In mine, women only (relatively) recently obtained the right to vote, and have legal systems that try to prevent discrimination against them in the labor market. And this is not even worldwide. In the world I live in, many or most women are still contending with uneven workloads in the home: https://pulitzercenter.org/stories/real-reason-south-koreans... >and grueling work…

I think we are living in different realities yes. And also, none of us are living in the past to really know how things were. We can not rely too much on the testimony from the elderly generation, because they are known liars and cheats.

But what we can do is try to look at things today in the most logical way possible. Why should young men and women work hard and be highly productive at their careers? For financial independence and freedom says you and others, and that makes it worth foregoing having families. But the fact is that young people are more broke than ever. They are working hard and are highly productive, but all their productivity is eaten by taxes, profits and land rent (either outright rent or a mortgage). They didn't get the financial independence they were promised. So they've sacrificed everything and become erased from history and from the genome in exchange for almost nothing. To the benefit of other people who are reaping all their productivity, not least the elderly generation.

Why would somebody do that voluntarily to themselves? What sane person would forego taking care of their own family, people who love them, to instead sacrifice their life to take care of shareholders, political rulers and unrelated beneficiaries of their labour. All of them who are at best completely indifferent to the welfare of young workers who are supporting them.

It takes some indoctrination for that, most importantly schooling, which indoctrinates children to stay locked in a place for 8 hours a day, five days a week, and put obedience to authority as the most important thing in life.

> Either in laws own it

Those in-laws didn't live forever, and I think this is something crucial to the whole issue that the article brings up.

> or they were expected to do all the housework.

If you limit the definition of "housework" to anything the woman is expected to do and nothing the man is expected to do, I guess.

Re: The window for great-grandmothers is closing

#455

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The (lack of) social prestige for pregnancy and motherhood among UMC women is a bigger factor. Women have been indoctrinated to place career first and only. Try saying "soccer mom" with an admiring tone instead of a sneer if you want to understand this.

Is it possible women could want financial independence without being indoctrinated? Or are they incapable of desiring power over their own lives, perhaps unlike men?

It is possible to live well enough to raise children with "a job", requiring high school or maybe two-year technical college training, instead of a four year college degree and postgraduate degree as is required for "a career". A job with flexible hours.

Women have been indoctrinated (as have men) to see "a career" as preferable.

Re: The window for great-grandmothers is closing

#456
post #366

> this source for example claims global life expectancy jumped from around 47 to 72 from 1950 to 2022 I believe this is because of reductions in child mortality more than increases in adult lifespan. So it doesn't affect the number of great grandmothers that much. Having kids older is definitely a big change for society and individual families, though. Every day as a parent I wish I was 15 years younger and my parent…

"Every day as a parent I wish I was 15 years younger and my parents were too." All people over 30 with they were 15 years younger. Age, miles, diseases and injuries gradually makes the body worser.

Of course everyone wishes they could stay young longer. The point is that some people over 30 already have 10 year old kids, while others are just starting with newborns even at 40.

Re: The window for great-grandmothers is closing

#457
post #381

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It weirds me out a lot when people talk about parenting and family planning like this. Like, having kids should be planned around strategically based on factors like "are my parents young enough to be supplemental child care" over "do I have the mental and financial readiness to be responsible for raising a human being? And do I even want to do that?" If people want earlier parenting, then create a society that suppo…

Creating a society that supports it is an intractable problem. Instead, the problem that we are faced with (as organisms) is how can we raise as many successful children as possible? This problem is workable, and hopefully involves support from ones grandparents. I’m curious how many children you have.

I refuse the idea that I need to solve the problem of raising as many successful children as possible. If a person chooses to have children, then raising them successfully is a problem they need to face. I totally refuse the idea that having children is mandatory, necessary, or even desirable for a lot of people. The world would be a happier place if we stopped placing that expectation on everyone.

I have two step-children. Having children of my own (biologically) was never something I wanted to do for a lot of reasons. Without getting into TMI territory, I'll just say it was apparent (no pun intended) that one of my parents never wanted the responsibility + resented it, and the other wanted to "be a parent" without actually doing the work. So I did not have the desire or background that lends itself to being a good parent early on -- whether I've made a good showing or a mess of it later in life is something that my kids would have to answer...

Re: The window for great-grandmothers is closing

#458
post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 2100 Too bad hundreds of thousands of species are going to have gone extinct by then. Hope we don't kill the wrong ones. Just a sidenote, I know.

question for you: how many species have already gone extinct without us really noticing because the impact on humanity was too small to measure? 100,000? 1,000,000? 10,000,000?

It is unknowable by definition, how many undocumented species have gone extinct.

All I know is they're never coming back. If that doesn't hurt you as a fellow living organism in this, as far as we can measure, dead universe, there's nothing left to say.

Enjoy your meal while it's still plentiful. Just recently they found a thousand starved birds (1) near the North Sea, who couldn't find food because their hunting grounds are overfished.

(1) these guys: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_murre and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Razorbill

Re: The window for great-grandmothers is closing

#459
post #443

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wait the people that raised the kids that then had kids have no experience raising kids?

No, you misunderstood completely. Under the OP’s proposal, you have people raising their grandkids, not their kids.

So if I understand: Starting today, a pair of 20-somethings has kids, hands them off to their parents to raise - OK, their parents had experience now they are doing double-duty, but they know what they're doing raising kids.

Now... 20 years later, those children have kids and hand them off to their biological parents who ... have no experience raising children. Also, which grandparents? Mom's or dad's?

Re: The window for great-grandmothers is closing

#460
post #433

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because the two aren't connected. They do want to design school curricula... "to make it better". But they're neither smart enough nor quite so self-aware that it's designed to deliberately lower fertility rates. One might say they're doing it subconsciously, but that seems more like mumbo jumbo to me.

> But they're neither smart enough nor quite so self-aware that it's designed to deliberately lower fertility rates So who's doing this deliberation? Again, you're pointing to a conspiracy but also denying its existence in the same breath.

No, you've confused my words. Happens in threads that stretch past a few hours.

There is a desire that humanity go extinct. But this isn't a goal for them, more like a fantasy. They're not actively working towards it, and they don't like to say it out loud.

They do design curricula (they're in positions where that's a responsibility, quite often). But they aren't conspiring. They're bumbling towards a doomsday, instinctively. They merely want to change the curricula to discourage the Star Trek future. In some vague hand-wavy way, this "makes it better". They're not sure why, and if you were to ask one hundred of them, you'd get 100 answers. And then if you asked months later, you'd get 100 different answers. It's just not purposeful, and there is no actual conspiracy.

If only there were one. Conspirators can be found out, rounded up, the evil plot exposed. But this microbe-like quorum sensing, where none need feel guilty, but simple coordination can take place, they're all innocent. There's no secret documents, no secret plan, no sinister mastermind.

Even you, you're part of it, and you don't even know it. People like you come by, mistake it for some conspiracy theory, and stir up shit as a sort of invisibility cloak. Unless of course, you were doing it deliberately. like when you quote a statement where I said "neither/nor [...] deliberately" with the very direct and simple negation of that idea.

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