Move to another city. Leave your small-town life. Chase your dream. Live alone. Pay more per capita to landlords. Pay more per capita for basic services, for staple foods. Pay businesses to do the household chores that you can't handle alone when you're also working a full-time job, and don't have a family to spread them out among. Buy more stuff to fill that emotional hole. Consume. Live in an apartment. Never see y…
The decline of the family has unleashed an epidemic of loneliness
331–340 of 1001 posts
Re: The decline of the family has unleashed an epidemic of loneliness
#332Earlier quoted context omitted.
It seems a stretch to blame feminism when economics has thinned most workers wages to the point that multi income households are a requirement to eke out a life.
Feminism can't avoid taking some of the blame for the economics. If some households are multi-income, then they can pay more for housing. This bids up the cost of housing. More households decide to become multi-income in order to pay for housing. This of course makes the housing price go up even more. It's an arms race.
Hint - look at the austin real estate market.
Re: The decline of the family has unleashed an epidemic of loneliness
#333Move to another city. Leave your small-town life. Chase your dream. Live alone. Pay more per capita to landlords. Pay more per capita for basic services, for staple foods. Pay businesses to do the household chores that you can't handle alone when you're also working a full-time job, and don't have a family to spread them out among. Buy more stuff to fill that emotional hole. Consume. Live in an apartment. Never see y…
If you run the numbers, no one should want to be a landlord. Atrocious ROI. Homes are horrific investments if you live in them and still terrible even if you rent them out. I would encourage anyone who thinks otherwise to model this out for any major city/region to convince themselves.
Renting is a great deal. You pay less, get better ROI on what would have been the downpayment by investing it elsewhere, and there's someone contractually obligated to deal with most things that can go wrong. And if you're in California, chances are you benefit from a lot of regulations that protect tenants as well.
Re: The decline of the family has unleashed an epidemic of loneliness
#334Move to another city. Leave your small-town life. Chase your dream. Live alone. Pay more per capita to landlords. Pay more per capita for basic services, for staple foods. Pay businesses to do the household chores that you can't handle alone when you're also working a full-time job, and don't have a family to spread them out among. Buy more stuff to fill that emotional hole. Consume. Live in an apartment. Never see y…
Make some friends. Go to your friends' funerals when they die from opioid overdoses. Make some new friends. Go to the local bar with them, listen to the same songs. Every weekend.
Your parents die anyway.
It's the American dream.
(I don't think either of these depictions are helpful or accurate).
Re: The decline of the family has unleashed an epidemic of loneliness
#335I would argue that the decline of the family is directly linked to feminism, or better stated, the liberation of women from the home and from conservative sexual values. The two forces behind that are birth control and women entering the work force. These two are magnified by online dating and social media. I am not saying at all that these are bad things, just that we have yet to see the true effects of feminism on…
At the risk of wading into deeply controversal territory, I'll add some personal observations. One of the harsh realities I have seen is that it's very difficult for women to "have it all" meaning a fulfilling personal, family, and professional life, especially in the most competitive fields. Yet for many years this idea has persisted in a mythical sense as broadly achievable. I am now in my late 30s. I've watched my…
Ignoring the endgames that come after the cessation of traditional human existence - either robotics replacing organics completely or mastery of genetics leading to the engineering of super-intelligent custom lifeforms to replace us - we are almost always either going to go extinct or refine our genetics to optimized templates. Eventually, we will be manufacturing humans with mathematically weighed balances between genetic diversity for disease resistance and optimized traits and features to make people live longer, stronger, and smarter. Probably going to be codified to be obedient to authority and not deviate from the social order as well, because that just honestly seems borderline unavoidable.
These humans will eventually be manufactured in artificial wombs in automated facilities meant to produce the population because in practice its severely debilitating and economically inefficient to take the females out of operation for so long to reproduce with such high biological risks associated. Cloned gametes from engineered templates grown in factories. The children would probably be mentally implanted with knowledge via brain-computer interfaces and taught everything virtually. Their biology would accelerate their development as much as is possible within our genetic profile. Years of research would have gone into optimizing their environments, interactions (if necessary, organic ones), and development to yield the most potential.
When you start stepping back from there, the closest bridge to that reality is going to be the institutionalization of child rearing. Before we have automated facilities breeding engineered templates we will almost certainly have public institutions dedicated to population replacement - in the optimistic scenario, women would simply "major" in parenting and live their careers as mothers. We will probably already be using engineered gametes by then because the technology is already mostly available, so these women would just have children and raise them as their full time career. Given current understanding of developmental psychology there would probably also be men assigned to play paternal roles in upbringing in full employment at such facilities as well.
I don't think at all this evolution in child rearing would ever happen overnight and its very likely in the same way you can still ride a horse today over owning a car or in the future how some will still drive manual cars in the age of autonomous vehicles some couples will do it "the old fashioned way" because they can. But it will probably, almost certainly, happen a lot less often.
And honestly from my perspective its for the best. Historically raising children is an absolutely full time job. Living on a farm, despite "working" in the fields at all hours of the day, still lets you keep the children at hand and raise them. You are never separated and the family is always together. That seems to be, barring abusive relationships, the optimal way human children develop. We have constructed employment institutions that make that impossible and try to both put pressure on laborers to reproduce but then also to somehow "do the job" of parenting at their own expense and economic disadvantage. It costs tremendous amounts of time to raise children, even more to actually do it well, and its never priced into the economy.
For now, this isn't a problem, and it likely won't be for a long time. We just get the collateral damage of mentally and physically harmed children from parental negligence that society pushes them towards. Eventually the economic pressure not to reproduce drives enough people not to that replacement becomes impossible and then such professional parenting institutions need to start being taken seriously. When it happens, its likely to be a very good thing - children raised by people paid to raise them, whose job is to be the best parent possible, and who will have comprehensive education in the hugely complex fields surrounding human development will be a substantial boon to the first children raised under it. Its just the cost of basically privatizing reproduction has to justify the investment, both culturally and economically, to make it happen.
For now the best thing to do would be to reduce the economic burden of life on adults to let them be more recreational and social and thus less lonely. Trying to force people back into a mold that was already broken to begin with is a violation of liberty with no real corresponding benefit - we aren't going to go back that way ever again, because truthfully we can do much better. We just have to choose to.
Re: The decline of the family has unleashed an epidemic of loneliness
#336I would argue that the decline of the family is directly linked to feminism, or better stated, the liberation of women from the home and from conservative sexual values. The two forces behind that are birth control and women entering the work force. These two are magnified by online dating and social media. I am not saying at all that these are bad things, just that we have yet to see the true effects of feminism on…
Could you be reversing the roles? It could just as well be the case that it's the "liberation of men from the home and from conservative sexual values" that is the explanation. There's not a lot of real data on what people actually want in terms of relationships. But some attitudes have been quite stable over the last 50 years. For example, women's ideal number of kids has been stable at about 2.5 since the 1970s: ht…
Now that I think about it, I'm not sure if I'm agreeing with you or not :) The paradox is that people have the ideals of the past but react in a way that produces the opposite result ("I want to be conservative, but I can't do it so I'll enjoy myself in the meantime").
Re: The decline of the family has unleashed an epidemic of loneliness
#337I 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…
Bringing a child into the world to increase my own personal happiness, when nothing else I could do has such a direct and massive climate impact, is not something I can justify personally. Not to mention, my child would have to live to see the impacts of climate change. There is coming a point (it has already passed, in my opinion), where we can no longer justify our purpose for existence as "creating more humans."