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The decline of the family has unleashed an epidemic of loneliness

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Re: The decline of the family has unleashed an epidemic of loneliness

#221
post #60

My mother, dad, aunts, etc. all immigrated to the US in a period of about 5 years. They all settled in Brooklyn and a few even lived in the same apartment complex. Growing up the extended family was HUGE and someone new was over every Sunday. The next generation has become geographically spread out, I moved to the West Coast, a few of my cousins are in college out of state.. about half of this generation is likely to…

I never had a lot of family around while I was growing up. It was just my parents and sister, one set of grandparents (until my early teens), and a few other non-family people that my parents treated like family.

I similarly moved to the west coast. My parents have passed away, and my sister (and her family) still lives on the east coast. I've made myself a family of sorts out of a group of very close friends, but I do feel the lack of family sometimes, especially when I see how close some friends are with their (local) extended family members.

It's something I never expected to have, especially given the small nature of my family while growing up, and yet I still feel like I'm missing out on something.

Re: The decline of the family has unleashed an epidemic of loneliness

#222

I have been lucky enough to be able to work and live in several countries around the world. One thing in common I noticed in all these places is that guys and girls don't have time and don't want to commit to a stable long relation. They invest pretty much themselves and their time in their career, traveling , parties, dogs, cats and bitcoins :) ! The mantra is to get rich and retire at 40 years old! Travel the world…

Pope Francis talks a lot about this in Amoris Laetitia[1] on the topic of Love in the Family. I've only finished the first two chapters but so far he has talked a lot about the same points you mentioned, and brought a lot of insights. My memory is failing me right now on specifics, but it's a very useful and insightful read for anyone who has a family, even if you're not Catholic.

http://w2.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/apost_exhortations...

Re: The decline of the family has unleashed an epidemic of loneliness

#223

I have been lucky enough to be able to work and live in several countries around the world. One thing in common I noticed in all these places is that guys and girls don't have time and don't want to commit to a stable long relation. They invest pretty much themselves and their time in their career, traveling , parties, dogs, cats and bitcoins :) ! The mantra is to get rich and retire at 40 years old! Travel the world…

> I have noticed that people have been more and more intolerant to family flying with kids.

This alone would encourage me to fly with my kids as often as possible.

Re: The decline of the family has unleashed an epidemic of loneliness

#224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just a piece of advice: try to take a step back and listen more carefully to the complaints you're hearing. When people talk about dismantling the patriarchy, or about racial privilege, they are not actually talking about any one particular person. You are fully able to be white, male, privileged, and still be an ally to those who do not benefit as much from the power structures in our society. Instead of feeling per…

Take for example a comment from this very thread: "Feminism has brought about a lot of changes, but I don't think we can lay this one at the feet of women trying to escape their compulsory reliance on unreliable, selfish, and inconsiderate men." How should we take a step back and listen more carefully to this? How are we to interpret that other than as an attack on all men?

IMO complaints like this, and modern feminism aren’t about “men are bad” they’re about s lack of power that women have relative to men in the existing system, which leads to an inability to determine their futures and live free.

Re: The decline of the family has unleashed an epidemic of loneliness

#225

I’ve been feeling a pretty intense sort of depression and loneliness for the last month or so. The feelings of “you’re a white male and you work in tech and you are wealthy you are a SATAN” is just becoming too much :(. I volunteer a tremendous amount in education, where I’m the only male I generally even see in my field, and I constantly have to listen to my coworkers gleefully talk about how excited they are at how…

Everyone has to deal with the particular voices in their head. Women, men, genderqueer, whatever color; the voices in our head tailor themselves to attack our own particular worries, because they're part of us.

You have a part of you that is aware of the random lucky breaks you've gotten in life, which might not have been lucky in other times or places. That's a fine thing -- it's useful. But then you've got a part of you that takes that further and makes you feel undeserving, or makes you pick up and amplify on comments that resonate with that feeling of attack. Why?

To go back to the article, etc., do you have countervailing messages in your life, from family for instance?

I'm someone currently organizing a bunch of STEM outreach events for the summer, and I truly value my white dude allies who are volunteering, connecting me with speakers using their networks, asking their corporate overlords to fund us, and so on.

There is a ton of negativity in the world, as you alluded to, and we all pick up on the messages that are designed to hit us. This is a human problem, and you're not alone.

Re: The decline of the family has unleashed an epidemic of loneliness

#226

I have been lucky enough to be able to work and live in several countries around the world. One thing in common I noticed in all these places is that guys and girls don't have time and don't want to commit to a stable long relation. They invest pretty much themselves and their time in their career, traveling , parties, dogs, cats and bitcoins :) ! The mantra is to get rich and retire at 40 years old! Travel the world…

A lot of people have kids _for themselves_. There are a lot of other endeavours one can pursue that will bring happiness. I think where we fail as a society, is in teaching ourselves how to find those pursuits, surround ourselves with friends, and avoid loneliness.

> The mantra is to get rich and retire at 40

Hrm, I question the circle of people you're surrounded by. Many millennials are struggling to afford the basics, let alone travel or have a family!

This is a contentious and potentially unpopular opinion, but I posit that having children borders on unethical at this point in history. We've wrecked the planet and have growing anti-intellectual culture.

I'm happy you're happy though.

Re: The decline of the family has unleashed an epidemic of loneliness

#227

Is it any wonder with the rise of no-fault divorces, feminism attempting to dismantle the patriarchy, women entering the workforce without wages adjusting in proportion to the increase of workers, and the general attitude that women seem to have toward men now? How can someone look at the situation of how men are under attack from essentially every direction, yet they are expected to still marry women who have been w…

> yet they are expected to still marry women who have been with an unknown number of partners

Why does this matter?

Re: The decline of the family has unleashed an epidemic of loneliness

#228

I have been lucky enough to be able to work and live in several countries around the world. One thing in common I noticed in all these places is that guys and girls don't have time and don't want to commit to a stable long relation. They invest pretty much themselves and their time in their career, traveling , parties, dogs, cats and bitcoins :) ! The mantra is to get rich and retire at 40 years old! Travel the world…

I think having kids is scientifically proven to make you unhappy and greatly increase your stress levels. It’s no wonder people just put off having kids until they can, or pass on having them altogether.

I have less than five kids, but more than one kid.

My kids cause me a lot of stress. The burden of knowing I have to deal with them and their energetic, ridiculous antics every day when I get home really drains me. I don't really have time to exercise anymore because from sun-up to sundown I am dealing with them, so I'm slightly overweight and out of shape in a way I was not before I had kids. My diet isn't as diverse as it was before I had kids either because I can't go to the same places I used to or take the time to prepare what I used to prepare. I've stayed in the job I have now for longer than I should just because I worry about keeping a steady salary, paying my bills, and caring for my kids more than I ever worried about those things before. I don't spend a lot of money on self-care or personal enjoyment anymore because I need to save it in case something goes wrong and I need to spend the money on them.

Am I less happy? YES. I am less happy than before.

But if I was given the choice to go back, I wouldn't. I wouldn't even consider it. Not even for a millisecond. I don't know why and I really don't need to know why, but having kids is just better than being happy. I don't want to be happy, I want to be a good dad. It's true that being a parent makes you less happy, but it also makes happiness irrelevant (for the most part). It probably has something to do with evolution.

Re: The decline of the family has unleashed an epidemic of loneliness

#229
As convert of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day saints I can attest to this.

'Mormon' families do everything together, I'm amazed weekly at this 14ish years in.

Take dinner. Dinner for me growing up, until my father died just before I turned 13, would be my mother in one room - me in another - my father in a third eating dinner while we did our own things.

In jr and sr high school most Fridays it was "here's pizza money, I'll be back Sunday afternoon" (I'm not faulting my mother here, she'd call and check and was 10-15 minutes away in traffic, I was fine with her being gone so my friends and I didn't have to censor ourselves not that we'd be home other than to sleep anyway once one of us had a license) yet even back then you'd have never seen something like that with an LDS family. You'd have them eating most or all of their meals together, studying scripture together, doing activities together.

Even when kids grow up and marry they still, unless they move quite far away, often do things with their parents and siblings and it isn't uncommon to see those that have moved a state or two away to regularly drive home for long weekends, holidays, vacations etc.

These types are generally extremely happy and pleasant and will bend over backwards to help even strangers. Sure there is depression in the community but if you take them as a whole it's Ned Flanders and a bunch of my generation that doesn't have a strong family bond are an army of Eeyores.

Even if you just look at social media, for most it is "look at me, look at what I did, look at how cool I want you to think I am, give me your approval, give me your likes, give me your commons, comment and click to subscribe!" but with most LDS it is "here are a few family photos, I'm so proud of my distant relation/friend for doing thing/everyone congratulate THEM, we got a new used couch would anyone like our old one, it'd be great for a young couple?, we will be at so and so park playing a pickup game if anyone would like to bring their families and come join us".

They stress family, and appear genuinely happy more oft than not.

For me and my friends, family were people you were related to my blood and had to tolerate until you could go out on your own. A lot of my friends have unhealthy relationships and regularly seek therapy, I and my friends carefully curate our online presences to try and show our best not our normal, we sit around staring at Netflix or Hulu thinking "man, this sucks, I'm lonely, is it time to die yet, ugh I want to go get food but I don't want to eat alone... forget it I'll just order in".

When a family invites me over for FHE or dinner or to an activity, I genuinely don't want to go because it feels so foreign and I'm afraid I'll seem like more of a freak than I am. I'm so lonely that I'm afraid of being in social settings because I simply don't know what normal family dynamic is like and it just feels so alien. People have inside jokes with family members, they have fun stories and memories, they talk to their family...

My father's father was in the hospital on life support and no one told us, I found out when a friend that worked there noticed I hadn't visited and violated law by even talking to me about it and without them I'd have not even known. After his funeral a few weeks later I asked his brother some genealogy questions... he didn't even know his mother's maiden name or either of his grandmothers first names despite having known them for decades until their deaths... a few years later he died and neither of his adult children told us, I tried calling him one day to catch up and the number was disconnected and I found his obit. He lived 3~ miles from me. After my father's death, his father would only come to visit at Christmas despite living about 15 BLOCKS away and one of my father's brothers lived even closer and never came at all, I've seen him exactly twice since my father's funeral 21 years ago... worse, he had a diabetic episode a few years ago and laid on his floor for several days until a co-worker went to his house concerned that he hadn't come to work and his daughter had no idea he was even flippin' diabetic! It is no surprise to me most of my family, on both sides, had substance abuse problems and varying levels of depression, now they're nearly all dead.

My mother's mother went on life support and my mother's sisters took her off and never even told my mom she went on. This happened over a couple of days. My mother started receiving facebook messages from cousins and second cousins "so sorry for your loss"... this is how she found out her mother was dead... AFTER the funeral. Then in the same calendar year they repeated it when her father passed! Can you imagine that, you're in your 60's and your parents die and your sisters try and hide it from you, two different times mom barely got out of bed for weeks each time. Crying, depressed, feeling wholly abandoned. All because her side of the family was as dysfunctional as my father's.

When I tell this to my fellow members of the Church the look at me in horror, like I'm an alien that just landed on their lawn and ate one of their children and asked for a coke to wash them down because they value family and while they also have bad moments in life they are on average far far happier than me and my non-member friends.

Re: The decline of the family has unleashed an epidemic of loneliness

#230
post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I recommend social hobbies. Mine are BJJ and Magic the Gathering. BJJ is great because it can be highly technical but you will meet people way outside of nerd circles. My kids do it and love it as well. It is a hard thing, too, so it keeps the ego in check. You have no choice but to be extremely, intimately close with other humans. The friends I am making are great. There are plenty of other hobbies, but start there.…

Don't we all know what BJJ is.

It seems to be Brazilian Ju-Jitsu, judging by the lack of any other expansions of the acronym in the first page of DuckDuckGo's results.
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