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This Is Your Life in the Midwest

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Re: This Is Your Life in the Midwest

#31

Post by Grishnakh »

ArkyBeagle wrote: post #19
QuarterReptile wrote: post #4

I think I must miss the point of articles like this. Is this author trying to warn us of downward spirals he's seen? Impart his priorities upon us? There are a lot of articles here that try to isolate and analyze pivotal traits or habits. This is the opposite, throwing everything you can imagine into one big, confused soup of "what caused what?". It could also be that this is a common mindset, but I just haven't met…

I really read the article like a "Trouble Brewing" "Far Side" cartoon. Guy thinks "going into management" will mean the skies will open up; guy is overleveraged and one layoff away from bankruptcy, maybe divorce, who knows? Guy is clearly not "management material" in the eyes of his employer, which is a dwindling enterprise with probably an end date. The main thing he: he depends on credit vendors for establishing li…

>I've lived in 'burbs all my life, and most people are pretty happy with it. I mean it's nice to have a forced exercise program with "walkability" but it's hardly critical

Given the obesity epidemic in America this days, I think you're wrong here about the criticality of walkability. Go to Manhattan sometime and see if you can find any fat people. Now go to suburban Atlanta and see how many people are so fat they need motorized carts just to shop at Walmart.

Re: This Is Your Life in the Midwest

#32

Post by Grishnakh »

Delmania wrote: post #21
ArkyBeagle wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's easy to get in a rut. It's especially easy when you have a lot of distractions. Kids are a big distraction. One of the magical things about my wife is that she handles a lot of distractions for me. Most women just won't. It's slightly unfair to her, but she's a Professional Mom and extremely good at it. As has been noted in literature, it's all but impossible to price this. The downside is - one stream of income…

> Kids are a big distraction. I understand the sentiment, but this lines has always bothered me. I try to find ways to incorporate my children into the things I enjoy and want to do...

There's only so much you can do with this. When children are really young, you just can't bring them a lot of places, such as nice restaurants, because they're too disruptive, so that means that for the first 5-7 years, you have to hire a babysitter if you want to do anything "adult".

I like to go hiking and road biking on weekends. You can't do this with kids; they just can't keep up. A 6-year-old isn't going to be able to do a 10-mile hike or a rock scramble with you, nor will she be able to ride 40 miles. You can do really easy hikes or bike rides, but those are pretty boring and do little for physical fitness (which is the other reason I do them, so I don't have to spend hours a week at the gym to avoid health problems). When the kids get to be teenagers they can probably handle that stuff, but that means there's 12+ years where you either don't do that stuff at all and get fat, or you hire a babysitter.

If you have other interests like listening to classical music concerts, or rock concerts, you can't bring kids to that stuff either; at one they'll be a disruption and at the other they'll be miserable. Again, when they become teenagers, they may be interested in those things (maybe, doubtful though because you're interested in them), but again that's a long time to wait, and now they're almost in college!

Honestly, having kids would be fun if it weren't such a huge time-sink, and you actually had help doing it instead of having to do it all by yourself (as with most parents I see these days), or if you're really lucky, with one partner who's also really busy with work.

It's no wonder the birthrate is so low these days in developed nations. I really think society needs to rethink its social norms and customs if it wants to reverse this, unless they can figure out how to greatly increase lifespans so it becomes normal and feasible to have kids at ~50-75 years old after you've established yourself financially and can afford to take off 5 years or more and only work part-time or not at all without ruining your future career. Also, polyamory would be a lot more sensible for raising kids; having adult time is easier when there's, say, 4 adult people in a household so one of them could volunteer to be babysitter for the group's kids, and there's more hands to share chores, and more incomes to share among the family.

Re: This Is Your Life in the Midwest

#33

Post by Grishnakh »

Delmania wrote: post #20
swalsh wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sometimes changing your life doesn't mean putting in extra effort, but taking extra risks. If you have a family and a mortgage taking those risks might not be palatable.

You can still find risks that are palatable. The person described in this article mentions a desire to work for a Silicon Valley startup. That's not possible, but why not look for local startups? Or ones that offer remote positions? I did just that.

Because startups are inherently risky to work at, and when you have a big mortgage and credit card bills and you're not saving anything (as with many Americans in suburbs), you can't afford the risk of a temporary loss of work.

Also, startups are infamous for demanding very long hours, in exchange for the vague promise of your stock becoming valuable. Parents don't have that much extra time.

Re: This Is Your Life in the Midwest

#34

Post by Grishnakh »

typedef_struct wrote: post #12

Damn, this is even more depressing than the other one. Apparently the secret to happiness is not having kids. And not spending more than you make. Actually that last one is true.

Both are true. Having kids basically dooms you for 20 years; raising kids as a single parent is a miserable task. And before you say anything about married couples raising kids, remember that 50% of first marriages end in divorce, so the odds are not good. And that number doesn't include people who just stick together in unhappy marriages. If you can find someone really great for you and you can find a situation where you can have kids without it ruining your life, then you're really lucky. Most parents I've seen have a miserable time of it.

Not spending more than you make is a big, big factor too, that many Americans seem to have a big problem with. From what I can tell, they simply do not understand the concept, at all. They basically seem to think they "deserve" a certain lifestyle and level of spending, and just do that, regardless of how much actual money is coming in, and simply refuse to look at ways to economize or maximize the value they get for their spending (such as by not eating out all the time because they're too lazy to cook).

Re: This Is Your Life in the Midwest

#35

Post by ArkyBeagle »

Grishnakh wrote: post #31
ArkyBeagle wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really read the article like a "Trouble Brewing" "Far Side" cartoon. Guy thinks "going into management" will mean the skies will open up; guy is overleveraged and one layoff away from bankruptcy, maybe divorce, who knows? Guy is clearly not "management material" in the eyes of his employer, which is a dwindling enterprise with probably an end date. The main thing he: he depends on credit vendors for establishing li…

>I've lived in 'burbs all my life, and most people are pretty happy with it. I mean it's nice to have a forced exercise program with "walkability" but it's hardly critical Given the obesity epidemic in America this days, I think you're wrong here about the criticality of walkability. Go to Manhattan sometime and see if you can find any fat people. Now go to suburban Atlanta and see how many people are so fat they nee…

Bluntly, I don't think we understand the obesity problem.

Re: This Is Your Life in the Midwest

#36

Post by Grishnakh »

ArkyBeagle wrote: post #35
Grishnakh wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I've lived in 'burbs all my life, and most people are pretty happy with it. I mean it's nice to have a forced exercise program with "walkability" but it's hardly critical Given the obesity epidemic in America this days, I think you're wrong here about the criticality of walkability. Go to Manhattan sometime and see if you can find any fat people. Now go to suburban Atlanta and see how many people are so fat they nee…

Bluntly, I don't think we understand the obesity problem.

I think a lot of it is fairly obvious: diet and exercise. My evidence is pretty simple: look at cultures (including local cultures) where everyone drives everywhere, versus cultures where everyone walks everywhere. You just don't see morbidly obese people in cultures where they're forced to walk a lot; it's mainly an American and Western phenomenon (it's worst in America and Mexico). Diet is probably another big factor: in obese cultures, calories are cheap, but the food quality is generally very poor.

Re: This Is Your Life in the Midwest

#37

Post by QuarterReptile »

ArkyBeagle wrote: post #30
QuarterReptile wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The constraint isn't the amount of raw land, but rather the necessity of productive density if we are to afford the level of public services that most of us are accustomed to. I have nothing against people living in sparsely populated areas, but the people living there now are mostly not seeing true costs of their lifestyles. If they weren't so heavily subsidized, they would probably have a lot more wells, septic tan…

So eat while you drive, man :) ( I too hate driving, but live suburban and have been extremely lucky in being able to keep commute times to a minimum - like on the order of five minutes ). Productive density is constrained by things like how accounting works, how we can't get out of our own way, by other things that are like public choice economics. At each job I've had, I've seen people walk away from millions of do…

Lol, I meant that I need the energy consumption of walking to support my carb-eating habit. I can handle the time commitment of eating mostly.

As to the policy questions, I admit that I don't know how to solve that one. I know a start would be to clean up the mess made by FHA standards. And I think a lot of places have moved, or are starting to move, away from Euclidean zoning, which is a step in the right direction, if not a very large one.

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