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No one expects young men to do anything and they respond by doing nothing (2022)

robkhenderson.com

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Re: No one expects young men to do anything and they respond by doing nothing (2022)

#491

Post by galdosdi »

big-green-man wrote: post #478
Doches wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Being emotionally available, participating in chores, providing a comfortable lifestyle while not working all the time, being reasonably well-read and good conversationalist, etc. I...honestly cannot tell if this is meant ironically. Those things seem like table stakes for being an adult. It's not "expecting more of them" to simply expect people to...grow up, and help care for the other people in their lives. You w…

Being the perfect adult is table stakes ? This description is the ideal middle class man. If that's table stakes to you, either you've got one hell of a catch or you've got a few more years left before you settle. Most adults, full grown adults, men and women, don't meet all those requirements. I do, most don't.

There's actually plenty of people like that out there, but probably not where you live.

Re: No one expects young men to do anything and they respond by doing nothing (2022)

#492

Post by [deleted] »

RandomThoughts3 wrote: post #348
jjk166 wrote: post #322

This whole article is talking about absentee fathers, but every example is listing why the mother left or kicked out the father. Nowhere in the article is mentioned the obvious common denominator - women are no longer utterly dependent on their husbands. People didn't stay together more often in the 50s because the couples were better, or because people were held to higher standards, it was because getting out of a t…

> This whole article is talking about absentee fathers, but every example is listing why the mother left or kicked out the father. Because the article takes the very rational and supported by the article side that these mothers were actually founded in kicking them out. > The article also simply takes for granted that it's a bad thing that these nuclear families do not stay together. No, the article goes much further…

[deleted]

Re: No one expects young men to do anything and they respond by doing nothing (2022)

#493

Post by mikhael28 »

dsign wrote: post #424
Doches wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Being emotionally available, participating in chores, providing a comfortable lifestyle while not working all the time, being reasonably well-read and good conversationalist, etc. I...honestly cannot tell if this is meant ironically. Those things seem like table stakes for being an adult. It's not "expecting more of them" to simply expect people to...grow up, and help care for the other people in their lives. You w…

> Being emotionally available My dad taught me boys do the opposite. My schoolmates told me that emotions were not for boys. I'm pretty sure I'm not a unique snowflake. > participating in chores Dad said that boys don't do domestic chores. If a couple lives inside an apartment, all chores are domestic. > providing a comfortable lifestyle while not working all the time Jesus, this is not exactly trivial for most of us…

Well, I guess don’t move to the big city and try to settle down with an IG baddie?

I appreciate the fact that people like this exist, everywhere, in large quantities. But that means that the dating market, in some places, have decided there is no product market fit. Very HN statement.

Now, the options are - rebrand, or move to new market, or government regulation to provide ‘protectionist’ tariffs and trade barriers to promote ‘homegrown industries’.

I prefer the free market, but I can understand why the West Virginia coal miners want the government to bail them out. I’m not sure what to do about this state of events at all.

Re: No one expects young men to do anything and they respond by doing nothing (2022)

#494

Post by mikhael28 »

fulladder wrote: post #170
jasperry wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's true, but more and more products are moving away from dependence on the physical resources. Kids don't buy toys much anymore, they play digital video games. You can see a doctor on Zoom instead of driving to their office. I'm not saying that's better, but it's happening. The real problem I see is when people use wealth generated from intangibles to put the squeeze on physical resources, such as buying up land…

Maybe in the future it will be possible to live in a purely digital environment, thus solving the housing shortage.

lol Ready Player One springs to mind immediately.

Re: No one expects young men to do anything and they respond by doing nothing (2022)

#495

Post by philwelch »

neilv wrote: post #361
philwelch wrote: post #327

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a better analogy. It’s the analogy of a guy who got up every morning to plant apple trees in his orchard. When the time came for harvest, he picked all of the apples and sold them to market. With his proceeds, he bought some more land from his neighbor and planted even more apple trees. The next year there were too many apples for him to pick by himself so he hired a few people to help out, and used the procee…

As you adapt my quote, for contrast, you substitute "envy" for "greed", which seems meaningful. So is the gist of your analogy that, in reality , the problem of what might appear to be greed , is actually strictly envy , by the people who don't merit the wealth? And when you made the envious people outright psychotically homicidal, was that for a bit of levity? Or do you feel that strongly that irrational envy underl…

> And when you made the envious people outright psychotically homicidal, was that for a bit of levity?

More like realism. Read a history book sometime.

The main difference between your parable and mine is that yours assumes a zero-sum world in which there is a fixed number of apples that are grown and the only question is how to divide them. In reality, that’s not how it works. In reality, wealth can be created. A greedy person is a problem if he takes things away from other people, but if he does productive work that creates more wealth for the world, even we allow him to keep much of that wealth for himself, the rest of us are still better off with him around than without. Conversely, if we destroy him or his ability to create wealth out of a shortsighted envy because we falsely believe in a zero-sum world, we also ultimately impoverish ourselves out of spite.

Even your own parable ends up proving my point. Your parable is essentially the “tragedy of the commons”, and the point of the tragedy of the commons is that when productive assets (like apple trees) are commonly owned, the individual incentives go against the common good and also the stewardship of the asset. Conversely, if the orchard is private property, the owner’s incentives instead favor both of these things. This is why virtually all productive agricultural land is privately owned and worked for profit, and if you look back at those same history books I mentioned earlier, most attempts to abolish private ownership of farmlands—most of which were ideologically motivated by various rationalizations for envy—have resulted in lower food production and often outright famine.

Re: No one expects young men to do anything and they respond by doing nothing (2022)

#496

Post by mikhael28 »

jmholla wrote: post #212
keiferski wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A hundred years ago, the average person had little free time, little spending money, and little to actually spend that money on, if they had any. Human attention is absolutely not a finite resource. Or at least companies haven’t come close to monetizing all of it.

I think you need to take your comparison further back. As I understand it, before the Industrial Revolution, people had plenty of free time. For instance, looking at the Middle Ages, many spent the morning tending to their fields and then the rest of the day was theirs.

Yeah, but they were all illiterate and politically powerless, not to mention spiritually oppressed, so what were the actual, tangible options for things they could do with ‘their day’? They didn’t even own their own land.

Re: No one expects young men to do anything and they respond by doing nothing (2022)

#497

Post by afpx »

brodouevencode wrote: post #62

The author makes good points, but there is no mention of the demise of religion or the social factors leading to the dismantling of the nuclear family as causes.

Me and the vast majority of my friends haven't experienced religion, and yet we're all in stable nuclear families. I didn't know we were anomalies.

Re: No one expects young men to do anything and they respond by doing nothing (2022)

#498

Post by buzzert »

thrwwyfrobvrsns wrote: post #353

Something that intend to write on someday that I'll excerpt here: the phenomenon of "young men with nothing to do" is driven by a society-wide misallocation of capital that is itself driven by wealth inequality - specifically, old people and elites who command too large a proportion of wealth. This concentration of wealth in the hands of a cohort that is less diverse, and has less diverse interests, than the general…

I'm curious if you could expand—what exactly are these fields that rich old people only care about?

Looking at a broad picture of the economy, I'm really not sure this tracks. Lots of capital is being invested into software and AI, for example, which doesn't seem like something "old people" necessarily care about or even understand. In addition, the marijuana industry is now larger than the airline industry.

Re: No one expects young men to do anything and they respond by doing nothing (2022)

#499

Post by em-bee »

southernplaces7 wrote: post #462
JoeMerchant wrote: post #400

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whether the boyfriend in question was the father was not explicitly stated. Further, I'd argue that if you want to date a lady, her kids come with that as a complete package. My two cents.

No, dating a lady does not obligate you to support her children from other men. What a ridiculous take. Accepting their presence and being good to them, sure, but those aren't the same as being made to support them. If I started dating a woman and quickly asked her to fork over money to support my aging parents or my own family responsibilities, it would be rightly viewed as an unfair and manipulative emotional/finan…

that's the kind of attitude that forces women to reject her own children just so that she can find a new partner. sure, as long as dating only involves paying for the shared dinner whenever you spend time together, that doesn't create an obligation to do more, but as soon as you start supporting your partner beyond that, you have to accept that some of that support goes to the children.

Re: No one expects young men to do anything and they respond by doing nothing (2022)

#500

Post by squigz »

leereeves wrote: post #476
9dev wrote: post #422

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When dating someone with children, but you don’t want to go all-in with that person, please just leave: you’re not only making the life of your partner miserable, but also destroy their child’s or children’s. You will invariably end up walking away at some point, and the children will witness all of the ensuing mess. If, however, you have an intention to stay, there is no reason to make a distinction between their mo…

He's made his expectations in the relationship clear. It's entirely up to her whether she accepts that or leaves. There's nothing "sexist" about that. The only sexism here is expecting a man to pay for dating by supporting her kids.

> He's made his expectations in the relationship clear. It's entirely up to her whether she accepts that or leaves.

Pretty sure she did that.

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