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Fewer young men are in the labor force, more are living at home

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Re: Fewer young men are in the labor force, more are living at home

#151

Post by grogenaut »

I'm trying to get my son and his girlfriend to live at home for a few years post graduation. He wants to move out into a place in seattle. She's a bit more about saving money. The math is that they'd have all loans paid off and a 200k down payment about 4 years out of college if they live with us, and they'd have loans paid off if in 4 years and Important side note: they're both major home bodies so they wouldn't take advantage of living in a cool neighborhood.

To me it makes such massive sense to just bum it in their seperate upstairs 800sqft apartment and cheap food/rent/etc to bootstrap their lives instead of moving out. But it's a fight.

Luckily so far she's moved him from being very much in the NEET camp to actually looking for a job. But covid completely nerfed my ability to push him to have a job last summer (his pre-junior summer).

Re: Fewer young men are in the labor force, more are living at home

#152

Post by nunez »

nunez wrote: post #94
michaelt wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What does effort mean in this context? One school of thought says there are men on dating websites who copy-paste a message saying "hey how you doing?" to every woman they see; and that women are beset by hundreds of copy-pasted messages from men who haven't even read their profile. This school of thought says, in order to stand out, men should carefully compose a different clever, charming message for each woman t…

Bespoke messages based on the profile you're reading is always a winning strategy. My response rate went way up when I started doing this. The trick is to make a message that's curated enough to tell the person that you've read their profile while being short enough to not require a lot of effort to read (because their inbox is flooded)

Another thing I did that helped was hide the photos of people I was looking at while browsing.

Towards the end of my time on OkCupid (where I met my wife!), I wanted to only compose five messages per day. I did this to reduce my time on the platform. (Online dating services are masters of dark patterns and addicting behaviors.) However, even though those messages were short, since they were bespoke to the profiles I was looking at, those messages took time to write.

I found myself in this predicament where I burned too much time looking at profiles of attractive women with bland (to me) profiles. So, I thought "what if I hid the photos and focused on profiles I thought were interesting?"

Three things happened when I did that:

1. Writing short, but targeted, messages became a LOT easier because I was focusing on connecting with people I probably wanted to spend more time with,

2. Since I never "saw" who I was messaging when I wrote those messages, me never getting a response from them hurt way less (since I never met them to begin with!), and

3. When I un-hid the photos of the women who responded to me, _they were still attractive!_ As it happens, I learned that I'm attracted to smart, pretty women with personalities.

I suppose this won't work for people who want to do the nasty with as many hot people as they can find. There were, like men, smart, attractive women who didn't know how to craft an online dating profile and got filtered out from this approach.

What I do know is that my response and date rate went WAY up after hiding photos and responding to interesting profiles, and my mental health towards online dating improved significantly.

Re: Fewer young men are in the labor force, more are living at home

#154

Post by Spooky23 »

andrewmcwatters wrote: post #24
kogepathic wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> another friend of mine basically refuses to date anymore because he thinks the sort of culture of Tinder dating is a waste of time that favors women disproportionately. My female friends (I'm male) with online dating profiles have shown me their matches and conversations, and it's bleak. They all mostly have an average profile and still receive thousands of likes/hearts/swipes and messages, but the mean amount of e…

What does effort mean in this context? I recall friends of mine, young women, who were having the hardest time finding a significant other were just demanding things of men that would have them selecting from a socioeconomic pool of the top 20% of the population, when they themselves were in the bottom 20%. It was my experience that young women in general were asking for too much when I was in my early 20s. They want…

It’s a viscous cycle for women. You don’t want to put too much of yourself out there, because crazy people, but not doing so ends up selling your body, which tends to attract a wider variety of men that don’t line up with your vision.

So the two extremes are basically having sex with rando internet people and getting ultra-picky.

Re: Fewer young men are in the labor force, more are living at home

#155

Post by cecilpl2 »

commandlinefan wrote: post #129
kogepathic wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> another friend of mine basically refuses to date anymore because he thinks the sort of culture of Tinder dating is a waste of time that favors women disproportionately. My female friends (I'm male) with online dating profiles have shown me their matches and conversations, and it's bleak. They all mostly have an average profile and still receive thousands of likes/hearts/swipes and messages, but the mean amount of e…

> sorting through an inbox of ... copy pasta pickup artist lines So as a computer programmer with a LinkedIn profile, I can at least empathize a bit: I get an average of 3 job offers a week, even though I haven't really expressed any interest in changing jobs. A lot of these offers would be a major step down for me, and that's pretty clear from my profile. I still feel obligated to take the time to politely decline b…

I respond to these canned messages with a canned reply:

1) Do you offer permanent remote work?

2) What's the salary range for this position?

Twice now I have been very pleasantly surprised by the answer, and one of those resulted in me making an unplanned job move for a 50% increase in TC.

I've also had some success just throwing out a huge number as my expectation for comp. There is pretty much no downside to doing this.

Re: Fewer young men are in the labor force, more are living at home

#156

Post by watwut »

jokethrowaway wrote: post #119
cashewchoo wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know this is bait, but I want to provide my experience as counter-example. I went to a STEM college where anyone who graduates could quite reasonably expect to be able to build themselves a middle-class career, live comfortably, and perhaps even have some economic mobility (moving from middle-class to upper-middle, mainly...). There weren't a lot of women there, and you would expect that what women were there would…

I think you and the parent don't disagree too much, but parent was trying to be funny. I loved that feminism gave a choice and legitimised working women - but it also broke down the family structure (+divorces and unstable families - which statistically raise less successful people) and having twice the workforce heavily depressed wages' purchasing power so that now families need two working parents to survive. I thi…

I would point out that non trivial amount of those dicorces were genuinly abusive relationships - physically and mentally. Or partnership where one of them despised and looked really down on each other.

It is absurd that divorce is seen as that big familly failure, but staying in violent or abusive relationship is treated as "succesfull familly".

Re: Fewer young men are in the labor force, more are living at home

#157

Post by shimonabi »

I had a pretty rough time between the years 2004 and 2016. I dropped out of college for a career track I dreamt about since childhood and I didn't know what to do with my life. I had no job experience and the recession hit also.

If you live in a small country, where everyone is related on average 2.5 degrees away to a random person, it's pretty hard to get a job if you don't have any family connections. After several years I managed to get a warehouse and courier job through a crazy family connection with some boss of a firm. I enrolled in college again in 2010 and then went to work abroad to gain some credibility in my field. The job abroad was paid well, but soul-crushing, so a few months ago I found a job in my field at home for half the salary.

I never played any videogames.

Re: Fewer young men are in the labor force, more are living at home

#158

Post by dominojab »

UncleOxidant wrote: post #130
izend wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What will happen once their parents are gone?

I suppose they'll inherit the house if it's paid off by then and continue to live as they are for a time. They seem fond of instant ramen, so I guess maybe they're partially prepared. But then again, when the property tax comes due they'll likely not be able to pay it and eventually become homeless after the house proceeds run out. The future seems pretty bleak for them.

According to IMF you'll own nothing and be happy™

Re: Fewer young men are in the labor force, more are living at home

#159

Post by anoraca »

1-6 wrote: post #150
UncleOxidant wrote: post #113

I've got two nephews aged 34 and 32 who still live at home and play video games all the time and rarely leave their rooms. Neither has ever had a job that lasted more than a month or so. Neither ever learned to drive even though they live in a town with little or no public transit. They haven't had any education beyond high school. They seem wholly unprepared to navigate life without their parents. It's a slow motion…

Let's not forget that the Social Security is not getting funded so it's probably going to dry out sooner.

It's constantly funded with taxes... why would you want a bunch of money sitting around losing value to inflation?

Re: Fewer young men are in the labor force, more are living at home

#160

Post by troupe »

shimonabi wrote: post #157

I had a pretty rough time between the years 2004 and 2016. I dropped out of college for a career track I dreamt about since childhood and I didn't know what to do with my life. I had no job experience and the recession hit also. If you live in a small country, where everyone is related on average 2.5 degrees away to a random person, it's pretty hard to get a job if you don't have any family connections. After several…

Are you in a field where you need to work onsite or can you work remotely?
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