This thread got over 1100 comments, many of which are based in personal experience and are thoughtful. Others, alas, are flamewar dreck, but I hope everyone reading a forum like this knows how to step over stuff like that.
HN threads are still paginated, so if you want to read them all you'll need to click More at the bottom of the page, or like this:
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 tragedy.
My 45 year old sister is that way now and to a lesser extent my older brother was too. I lost _decades_ of sleep over their situation.
Ultimately I didn't know anything when I left home at 18 and I figured it out. Other people can too. How long does it take to learn how to drive, open a checking account, cook, pay bill, etc. after all ? You can learn these things privately over the Internet so there's no longer a social stigma holding you back. To digress, I eventually taught my older brother responsibility, job skills (he worked at my business), how to file taxes, basic math, etc. He became even more bitter and resentful and then one day broke down and admitted how painful it is to know nothing useful and most of what he does know he had to learn from his little brother. But eventually he started just Googling instead of calling me when he had a question he should know the answer to.
I truly feel sorry for these lost souls and if I hadn't been naturally good at math, I'd likely be one of them.
I want to comment on your brother’s reflection that he was in pain, bitter, and resentful that he did not have useful knowledge/skills and needed your help.
There is an incredible amount of shame and self-directed anger and fear in men who have found themselves in this position.
All of those feelings are heavy to carry, but they can be shoved aside and ignored by constant entertainment (video games, tv binges etc). Shoved aside they don’t hurt as bad.
But those feelings don’t go away. They get bigger as each year goes on & they flare up when confronted with having to do something they aren’t capable of doing (or think they aren’t capable) like moving out, getting a job, getting a better job, having an adult relationship etc.
Those feelings of inadequacy have to be taken on and grace & forgiveness has to be granted to oneself in order for them to spread their wings / leave the nest and not come back.
For me, the question is how do you get someone so deep into a dark emotional morass to take on the emotional dragons they’ve been hiding from?
You're not wrong generally, but this one costs about $1000 where I live, which is close to average national monthly salary and approximately twice the minimum salary.
Not pocket change for someone who has trouble finding work (and many jobs require driver's license).
Just to add to the story. My sister claimed for 10+ years she had the DMV book and just needed to study it before getting her permit. She said this repeatedly to my father and brother and no one questioned her. For 10+ years.
Then a year ago I just called a driving school near my parents house on her behalf. I offered to pay for everything including study time and taxi rides to and from the school. Whatever it took. She said she still needed more time to read the book, but I said the school would help her. So when the time finally came to schedule a pickup time, she texted me and just said that she isn't interested in learning to drive.
So that basically ended our relationship since this lie was too much. Now the only lever I have left is shunning her for her irresponsible life-style choices that put a burden on others. It has had no effect on her but at least I sleep better.
Is someone enabling this behavior in her life? My sister is the same way. My parents enabled her for a decade. Now she is 34 and has minimal life skills and no real job skills to speak of. She just works at a day care. It is a tragedy, but my parents bail her out every time and they barely have many resources themselves. My sister can at least drive and has mostly had a job for a few years now... but that is a recent development.
It sounds to me like none of your family does a very good job of understanding her. The behavior you describe sounds much less like someone who is uninterested in driving and more like someone who has significant anxiety around that activity that they are surpressing.
So at no point did anyone figure that she was experiencing pathological amounts of anxiety around learning to drive, and most likely other ordinary activities? That sounds to me like an issue mental healthcare professionals help address.
Yeah I agree with the poster that said she is scared of driving. I'm guessing the excuse that she needed to read the book was either her using an excuse to self deceptively avoid facing her fear or just an attempt to save face by not saying how fearful she was.
I've worked a bunch of jobs over the years where i've ended up being in the homes of a lot of middle class - upper class people, not that it doesn't happen with working class people too, but anyway a common thing i would see was young men my own age or older living at home with their parents, not employed.
I remember one lady in particular tried desperately to see if we could get her son a job. He'd taken a crane operator course but was scared of heights. He wouldn't even come in the room or speak with us.
The thing is, this guy didn't even seem to help at home. His mom had went out and mowed the entire very large, very sloped front yard before she came in to ask us about a job for her son. He sat in the basement the whole time.
Or the time on a weekday afternoon, dude comes out in his jimjams yelling at his mom to make breakfast while she's trying to deal with us in her kitchen which was mostly not usable.
Then there was all the people in that age range i worked with who would last less than a week. People who'd show on their first day and immediately ask when break time was or people who'd just walk out half way through the day or people who'd just straight up say they don't care and they'd rather be at home smoking weed.
Anyway, this got a bit ranty, i've got plenty more stories from over the years. Suffice to say, this is a trend i've seen a lot over the years first hand.
Our neighbors kid doesn't work, in early twenties, lives with mother. I was trying to sell my house and needed tons of lawn work. I was able to get a quote for $650 which seemed high.
So I did what I would have wanted. I walked over to the neighbor kid and asked "Would you take $550 to fix up our lawn?". He looked at me like I was an alien. He said one word, "no", then awkwardly walked away.
I would have killed to get a job offer like that in my early twenties, probably two days of work for $550! Would have grabbed a friend, six pack of beer and finished it -- that day -- and used the money for books!
It seems like an excessive pay, so maybe he thought it would be a lot of work. Have you had interactions with him before? He might have just not wanted to engage with you
As a person who is in this age range and in essentially the opposite position--my disabled mother and college age sister live with me in coastal California--the kind of thing you're describing with the guy who wouldn't come out of the room is bonkers. I know this kind of person exists as an archetype but between your anecdote and the article I'm just baffled at the apparent prevalence.
I guess part of it is the fact that my circumstances didn't even make that lifestyle an option. By my late teen years it was increasingly obvious that I had to go in the kind of direction I did if I wanted my family to have a decent life. If I had a middle class nuclear family, is it likely that I would've tore through CS classes and leetcode as much as I did? I kinda doubt it.
I felt bad writing that seemingly picking on the middle-upper class, because as much as I've seen that there...the worst example I know of is not that.
A family member of mine has not ever had a job. Everyone has tried to help him. I've given him two jobs at two different companies personally. His mom works at a dollar store and a cheap clothing store just to pay rent. She begs him to work. He spends all his time playing Xbox. She's gotten to the point where she's going to kick him out and move in with her other son. He's responded by drinking and hanging out with homeless junkies. Thank fuck as far as i know he hasn't started doing the strange purple heroin they do nowadays apparently and shit. But it's really terrible watching this. He's almost 30. There's no reason this should be happening.
I had the same life till my 26th. I then stopped watching television, threw all games away and started studying computer science. I am so happy about that move. I am 40 now. Own multiple IT businesses and have a happy family.
Game/TV addiction is really dangerous. You don't have to be a depressed person to fall into it.
For some people (myself included) Game/TV addiction is a real problem and can have drastic affects on ones life. (It did for me throughout my 20s/30s). For others it doesn't seem to have negative side effects.
My life was held back by time spent gaming for so long and later in life I realized TV was doing the same. Moderation in all things right? For me it is easier to cut them out period.
I'm happier and have a far more productive life as a result. I'm now in my 40s and have productive life and career but this didn't start until my mid 30s.
Addiction is fascinating because the distribution of outcomes is so broad across users. Damn near anything can be life-debilitatingly addictive to some segment of people while others can consume it with absolutely no problems.
Psychology obviously can't always be simplified, but I think a key component underlying when consumption goes in a bad direction is why someone is using.
If you're playing videogames because your life is otherwise fine and you want to sprinkle some leisure on top, it's fine. Hell, you can play for hours a day and it's not really a problem if you're content with the time spent.
But if you're playing videogames as an avoidance strategy for underlying psychological problems, then you're setting yourself up for addiction. Because avoidance tends to cause those problems to grow. You aren't working on them, and seeing yourself avoid them subconsciously sends a signal that the problem is too big for you to handle. So the whole time you're avoiding, you're building it up bigger and bigger.
Just want to add, you can be addicted to any number of other things to suit your avoidance needs.
I have hope for people who are addicted to video games though, because I know they have obtained the knowledge/capability to figure out the underlying metagames and redeploy those skills to other areas of their life. And judging by the anecdotes on this thread it looks promising.
Now imagine if they're addicted to drugs; They'll be having another health problem to resolve. If you have a choice of being addicted to something at least let it be video games.
I'm in my mid 30s and I am going through this addiction of reddit/youtube and other distractions for the past 10 years. I've always known how harmful it is and I want to change. Do you have any tips for someone like me? I was still able to become an engineer, but I feel like I can be better. Like everyone else my motivation and drive was so much higher when I was younger. I might be using these distractions as a form of escapism for my depression.
Speaking as a lifelong addict (started with likely an addiction to breastfeeding), if you're anything like me from a mental predisposition standpoint, all you have to do is stay an addict! It's that simple. There's nothing wrong with addiction, and I would argue, it's likely a survival mechanism. The trick is, form "healthy" addictions, along with the vices, assuming you need to keep some vices kicking around to stay sane. It took me until I had kids and could watch them develop, to realize I've been an addict like everyone else in my family, my whole life. It happened to be addictions to things like playing basketball, doing martial arts, exercising, making music, learning UNIX and systems internals, raising and growing food, wood milling and working, growing and smoking weed, reading everything I could, etc. etc. etc. I've been flipping from one addiction to another since 1-2 years old, and learning all along the way, often with outstanding end products produced due to my obsessive nature. Embrace it, and learn when it's time to move on. It will take time, and flipping to a new addiction is always a bit anxiety-inducing (but so is learning anything new!).
Humans inevitably become more creative and/or social to escape boredom. See what you're drawn to when you cut out media consumption. You can always go back to reddit after a few months if you've just been bored the entire time.
It's not easy for sure. In my case I found a girlfriend and started living somewhere else. So another change in life helps a lot.
Maybe you could search for something like that. Go live in another city albeit for a temporary period.
A pet programming job might also help. You might be still behind the pc. But at least it is not wasted with just gaming, movies etc. You could also try to search for a coach/psychologist who can support you going to the change process. Go for it. You will be rewarded.
I personally new almost a dozen people who flunked out of college due to playing MMO games. Probably at least partly my nerdy cohort, but it was more than the total of depression and/or substance abuse combined.
Do you think that video game addiction contributes to this kind of thing, or is the video game addiction a coping mechanism?
I think video game addiction is an incredibly underreported and highly destructive phenomenon. I encounter (and had to fire a few days ago) lots of young men who don't appear to ever sleep, and are highly unproductive, unmotivated, and constantly distracted. The kid I had to fire (I call him kid, but he was 28 and incredibly immature) reminded me of a former colleague in the construction industry who relapsed on his crack/cocaine addiction. Distracted, listless, kind of just there for the ride.
Edit:
Apparently ASKING about video game addiction merits downvotes with zero responses explaining why.
I think video game addiction definitely contributes. I used to spend a fair amount of time playing first person shooters in my childhood 15-20 years ago. I haven't played much nowadays but these games provide a sense of "progress" and "accomplishment", which people would probably normally seek outside. Even in the past 5 years, I've caught myself having a reflex to open a game like Apex Legends or Valorant whenever I had a free moment instead of going for a run outside, playing piano, or cooking dinner. The problem is they're really fun also, which exacerbates the problem since it's easy to follow the "greedy optimization" algorithm in life and do things that are fun and rewarding as opposed to doing challenging but longer-term actually rewarding things.
This is not to say that you should never play video games. I've found that they've been great for staying in touch with friends I would've otherwise lost touch with. A few hours a week isn't bad at all. It's just that it can snowball very quickly if you're not mindful about how you spend your time.
I luckily never really became addicted to any video games, but I'm concerned for my future children who will undoubtedly encounter video games in the future some day.
The brief synopsis of video game tester I remember reading somewhere is that it's actually incredibly boring, because it involves finding and exhaustively reproducing bugs, not actually playing a game. Is that accurate?
Incredibly boring, yes. What you do is exhaustively go through every option at every point in play, and verify it does the expected thing. Then you get a new version with fixes/improvements, and do it all over again. You learn to hate every moment doing this.
The dorm in college had a pinball machine, the old mechanical contraptions before LEDs took over. I was fascinated by them, but had no money, so playing them was a rare treat (10 cents a game, 25 for 3 games). One day, the coin op broke, and free games galore. Yay!
After playing that continuously for hours, something broke in me, and I just couldn't stand playing pinball anymore.
I honestly cannot fathom people managing to spend their lives playing video games.
The same thing happened to me with fireworks. I grew up fascinated by fireworks, and would blow every penny on them on the 4th. One day, in college, I had enough cash to buy all I wanted. I bought a lot. Went out to a field, and started lighting and throwing the black cats one by one. Bang, bang, bang. Some hours went by, again something broke. I haven't bought fireworks since. I have no interest in firework displays. The needle doesn't even move.
Go figure.
Never lost my interest in muscle cars, though :-) I grin like an idiot when I drive mine.
Video game addiction (overuse) is a coping mechanism in the face of increased anxiety in the modern world.
I don’t think it directly causes issues as much as it enables or locks in certain behaviorally patterns such as being a NEET or similar. It’s really more of a symptom of a lack of support system in a person’s life, the same way social media overuse or drug abuse comes about.
Real addictions have severe physical consequences like chemical withdrawals that can lead to death.
I find that Self-Determination Theory is a good model to look at this with. Modern school and work life provide little autonomy, little relatedness, and little (desirable/appreciated) skill for the vast majority of people whereas video games do the opposite by providing essentially an ideal playground.
> Video game addiction (overuse) is a coping mechanism in the face of increased anxiety in the modern world.
You are stating this in absolute terms, which indicates to me that you have a solid source, or are an expert in the field. If so, can you please detail?
From my background working in psychiatry (in-patient) for six years, it is certainly not that clear.
> Real addictions have severe physical consequences like chemical withdrawals that can lead to death.
So the sex addicts I treated didn't have a "real" addiction?
The gambling addicts I treated didn't either?
Or the extreme adrenaline addicts?
Also, many experts in the field seem to disagree with you. See the proposed internet gaming disorder [1].
I'm glad you responded because the person you were responded to exhibits typical thought patterns on addiction that I'm sure you are as frustrated by as I am.
People don't seem to understand that drugs like cocaine flood the brain with dopamine and that's exactly what these video games are designed to do by the psychologists the game companies hire. I don't get why people don't seem to understand that it's alarming when video game companies are hiring people from the gambling industry in Vegas.
Genuinely curious: Is video game addiction different in kind to anorexia? My understanding is the latter is often a symptom of wanting control over something. I see getting stuck on video games the same way.
I would say they're different, because it's possible to remove a lot of the triggers associated with video games, gambling, alcohol, and drugs (by not having them easily accessible, for example) but it's not possible to do that with food.
Looks like you're being downvoted for suggesting video game addiction, but I think it's a huge part of it. I refer to it as 'digital drugs'. They're definitely addicted. Even on rare occasions when they show up to family gatherings they've got their face glued to their portable games and rarely speak.
Of course, the parents played a part in enabling this. Their mom (my sis) will often suggest I buy them video games for their birthday/Christmas but I refuse to do that. What they need is a kick in the ass to get them outside.
> Even on rare occasions when they show up to family gatherings they've got their face glued to their portable games and rarely speak.
That's not video games though, that's the general digital addiction going on. And honestly, as a teenager I used to avoid everyone with books and I doubt anyone would have described me as addicted to a paper drug.
Stomping out my son's fortnite and overwatch addiction was obnoxiously difficult probably because of the stupid loot box and skin phenomenon.
He was failing out of school and had lost interest in sports. I put all of his Xbox controllers in a safe and if he wants to play games he has to maintain a straight a average and be playing at least one sport or have a after-school job.
Within about 2 weeks he was back on track at school and is now a straight a student again.
Obviously this is just an anecdote but I don't think he was suffering from any form of anxiety or anything like that. He got hooked on the games and then his brain was just unable to be excited by other things for a long time.
Very few things in the real world are as optimized as the playing experience and overwatch or the social aspects of fortnite.
I think "is it a cause or a symptom?" is a valid question and deserves serious thought. Upvoted.
I worried about my own son playing video games incessantly through his teens and twenties, but now at 28 he has been holding down a stable job for a year and I have got good reports from his employer. He's still a loner IRL though.
Would I worry so much if he were a gym rat or ultramarathoner-- an "exercise addict"? Good question.
I am also a father and I had to stomp out my son's video game addiction.
Frankly I don't think it's a major victory for a 28-year-old to have been gainfully employed for a year and still be a loner.
Being an introvert is one thing but not having a social network around you especially in your twenties is a very bad sign.
Too often people think that because their kid is introverted they shouldn't be alarmed by them not having a social network of any kind. The reality is that there are many many very healthy introverts who still have strong friendships with other people. I'm only saying this because I've seen too often people write off their children's bad lifestyle choices as simply being introverted.
I don't think I got so freaked out by video game addiction until working at my last company where we hired a bunch of people from the gaming industry. They were the ones who told me about how many top-notch behavioral psychologist are employed in the gaming industry to maximize the addictive potential of video games.
We can say what we will about exercise addicts but at least they are getting very healthy bodies and the highly positive mental health benefits of exercise. Plus when you're in a gym or if you are running trail marathons you are going to be doing so with other people who don't sit in there darkened rooms for days on end.
I'm trying to stomp out my son's video game addiction right now. The trouble is that online classes require a web browser, and there are lots of web games.
You should worry about anyone with a sedentary lifestyle, regardless of whether they play video games or not. This has serious health consequences later in life.
But competing in a lot of ultramarathons isn't necessarily healthy for the long term either. In extreme cases athletes end up with heart muscle scarring and calcification. Somewhat shorter distances might be better. Everything in moderation.
I don't think video games have anything to do with it. Humans are naturally lazy, and if all your needs are being taken care of for you, then you'll naturally seek entertainment for your boredom.
They could do all sorts of things in their spare time, from watching tv shows, movies, youtube, anime, browsing reddit/twitter/instagram/tiktok, etc.
I know someone who used to fit that description quite well and then apparently made it out at some point between 35 and 40. Seems like there is always room for a surprise improvement left.
It’s like drug or alcohol addiction. People can become somewhat “born again” usually after some kind of catastrophe and/or “rock bottom” moment. Parents allowing this from their adult children are akin to addict enablers.
Hey, stop doxxing me! Just kidding, but this post accurately describes my 20s and early 30s.
I’ve been ‘born again’ twice, once after opiate addiction and once after alcohol. I had an adult parent enabling me throughout as well. Two rock bottom moments, after the first I decided to disregard the advice I was given, and it didn’t take. The second time, I was humbled and did the work by heeding the advice I was given again. Sober house and outpatient after the inpatient stay, getting a job after outpatient, going to meetings for a year, and staying sober.
Almost 6 years later, I went from making $10/hr part time to a salaried position making low six figures in total compensation. I have a much healthier relationship with my adult enabler parent and have paid back a substantial amount of the money I guilted them out of over the years. My relationships with family have never been better, I have a great partner, and a job I enjoy. It is possible to escape, but sometimes does require a rock bottom moment.
I also spent a considerable amount of time escaping into games and TV shows, there’s a lot of overlap there with drug addiction, escapism, gambling/day trading, etc.
> ’ve been ‘born again’ twice, once after opiate addiction and once after alcohol. I had an adult parent enabling me throughout as well
As a parent of 4 kids who for various reasons are all at elevated risk for substance abuse, what can I do if/when this happens to one of my kids to not enable them?
Yeah, well, maybe. But currently they don't seem to have any motivation which is a prerequisite to improvement. I think their parents should provide that motivation by being a good bit tougher on them. They sometimes try this, but then go soft on them again after not very long.
If I may be so bold, I would encourage you to have a frank discussion around estate planning with their parents to best insulate them from pain in the future. I would recommend the home be put into a trust, a trustee appointed for the trust after parents’ deaths, and enough investments set aside to cover property taxes and maintenance on the property with investment income until death of the children. What happens to the estate after that is a family discussion.
I have seen the results of not doing this. Don’t pass the pain down. You want your children to succeed, but you also don’t want them to suffer needlessly. Being homeless is an incredibly difficult gravity well to escape, more so without appreciable skills.
(not an attorney or financial planner, not your attorney or financial planner, please consult one of each, educational purposes only)
From an environmental perspective, this kind of minimalist lifestyle actually seems quite healthy. They don't drive, and I assume they don't fly or buy a lot of stuff, so their carbon and other resource footprint is small. They don't take up much extra space, so they reduce suburban sprawl and land required for housing. They probably won't have kids, which further reduces their environmental impact. Maybe we should encourage more people to live this way.
In the future, it may even be more efficient to hook them up to a large computer that is able to use them as a power source, too. We could offer them a virtual reality completely indistinguishable from reality.
The problem is it's hard to get right. I saw a documentary where people broke out of the dream and it caused all sorts of issues, they were able break out other people using pills and teach them to fly and other unrealistic things.
> Maybe we should encourage more people to live this way.
Sounds like an episode of Black Mirror. Life is meant to be lived; the purpose of life is at least eudaimonia, not slowly rotting away in front of a computer.
You can write books, compose music, build software, debate opinions all in front of a computer. It’s not the sitting in front of the computer that’s the problem.
That usage of "lived" is a romanticization. It's the grandparent telling the starry-eyed children about the good old times, glossing over the decades of toil and hardship.
Many video games similarly skip time to focus on heroic moments. You don't role-play the 10,000 hours studying tomes at Hogwarts to become a 1st level wizard; instead you start the adventure at graduation, or at most do a training montage.
> That usage of "lived" is a romanticization. It's the grandparent telling the starry-eyed children about the good old times, glossing over the decades of toil and hardship.
Nah, the grandparent knows exactly well the good old times were the decades of toil and hardship. The kids won't get it if the grandparent tells these core truths anyways, until they live it.
Not everything would agree. Most of the life on the planet's only hope is to be around long enough to reproduce and then be consumed in one way or the other. Humanity puts a lot of pressure on itself to flourish.
Well, perhaps they find the virtual life more compelling than the real one...
The problem is sustainability.
A virtual life cannot sustain itself indefinitely, and is not very robust. If money runs out or a tragedy occurs, it will be a scramble to get a job and interact in the real world. A virtual life does not contribute to society (if we mean a purely passive virtual life), and if people start adopting it en masse we'd be in trouble.
As far as I can see, we could simply try create a virtual life (or any kind of activity) that both is sustainable, and gives an interesting, engrossing life experience.
Would your tune be any different if they were 34, staying at home all day playing video games, but somehow earning half a million dollars a year doing some "gamer" Twitch/Patreon/YouTube/influencer streaming schtick? Or, better yet, playing video games all day, but magically manage to make obscene amounts of money "trading cryptocoins" . Would their lifestyles suddenly become acceptable to you, simply because they are "making money" off of their sedentary lifestyle ?
I think this would somewhat validate his “prepared for life” argument because if they have a lot of money they can provide for themselves (food and transport is pretty easy with the gig economy).
(The previous comment used to include something about people wanting to quit their jobs and just play games all day)
For your point about playing games all day — there’s definitely some aspect of “having a purpose” that makes some hold down a job even if they are already rich. So for some it’s definitely their life dream to sit in their room all day, and for some having something that you can point to saying “I contributed this” is an invaluable part of their lives
Being an influencer is an enormous amount of work. Sure, one could build a brand around games, but maintaining that brand is constant effort, even though the audience rarely sees it.
The people you talk about work awful lot and burn out. Attracting and keeping audience is hard, just playing wont make people watch it regularly. You are entertainer there. And you constantly deal with harassement and bs.
I think if they were working from home it would, obviously, be a different story. They could stash some cash away and be able to care for their aging parents in the future.
I obviously don't know this person at all, but from what I know of how Social Security disability works, 22 is a really unlikely age to qualify. Are you sure it wasn't slightly earlier or later?
To be eligible in your own right, you have to have paid into Social Security for a total of 40 quarters before becoming disabled. Given child labor laws, it's rare that you could accumulate enough quarters before age 26 or so.
The other way is to be eligible on a parent's social security, as a "disabled child", which is defined as someone who became disabled before age 22. If you suffered a permanent disability at age 21, and have a parent who paid enough into SS to be eligible, you can receive "child" benefits from their account even as an adult: https://www.ssa.gov/benefits/disability/qualify.html#anchor7
This leaves an unfortunate gap for people who genuinely become permanently disabled due to an accident or medical condition that happens around age 22-25, because they can't qualify through either route.
>> To be eligible in your own right, you have to have paid into Social Security for a total of 40 quarters before becoming disabled
Looks like there are different rules for disability for young workers:
"To be eligible for disability benefits, you must meet a recent work test and a duration work test.
The number of credits necessary to meet the recent work test depends on your age. The rules are as follows:
Before age 24 - You may qualify if you have 6 credits earned in the 3-year period ending when your disability starts.
Age 24 to 31 – In general, you may qualify if you have credit for working half the time between age 21 and the time you become disabled. As a general example, if you become disabled at age 27, you would need 3 years of work (12 credits) out of the past 6 years (between ages 21 and 27).
Age 31 or older - In general, you must have at least 20 credits in the 10-year period immediately before you become disabled."
I find it so odd how society gets obsessed with boogeyman examples of people taking advantage of the system. There will always be some people who take advantage of the system. Accept that, keep it reasonable, but optimize the system for those who will improve it.
The flip side is this person is hurting society significantly less than some committing crimes - even worse crimes that are sentenced to jail time (which is very expensive).
I don’t know this dude, and if you know he’s just scamming the system I’ll take your word for it, but when I’ve experienced serious physical pain I’ve found video games much more helpful than OTC painkillers.
Well maybe they're smart enough to know that, in a world where most things have either been automated or offshored, the only purpose most jobs serve in the grand scheme of things is to increase the velocity of capital. If you had a choice between the fake purpose offered by an office job where you get to be a peon, versus the fake purpose offered by a video game where you get to be a hero: which would you choose?
I may be projecting here but your nephews, if they are like some of my relatives, may not be neurotypical (for example they may have Aspergers disorder). If this is the case their behavior may be better understood in that context that a social one.
My friend's brother is like this. It's pretty obvious upon talking to him that he has some kind of atypical neurology but his parents completely refuse this, and thus keep him trapped in his little bubble without getting any help.
It's the parents fault for coddling them. If they kicked them out at 18, the nephews would definitely need to work and may realize the importance of having a better job/career.
I deal with a lot of 18-19 year olds as my primary job is teaching first year engineering students.
I will tell you it is a LOT more complicated than this. This type of single point simplification and pronouncement about 'coddling' is decidedly unhelpful.
For starters, if you grow up in two working parent household, both parents can easily come home completely exhausted and unable to provide the extended engagement necessary to help a child develop. Add in the social pressures of school where EVERYONE has an iphone and games where it is socially isolating not to do these things - which carries its own set of risks. Add in a public education system that doesn't focus on development and instead focuses on learning material. Add in an economy designed to optimize extraction of capital from individuals through psychological programming and ads and more stuff to buy.
None of this has to have a single source of blame, much of its realistically structural and cultural. It isn't one bad actor or one failed thing...it is a large number of individuals, groups, and organizations individually performing Goodhart's law and the result is some get cast aside.
If the parents don't provide for them, what do you think would happen to the nephews? Do you think they would be homeless? I certainly don't.
The fact that the parents are providing a roof over their head and paying for their food/water/electricity/internet/clothes/games/etc is why they haven't had a job nor any desire for one well into their 30s.
Honestly, because the parents keep providing for them, there's no impetus for them to change, so they may as well do this into their 40s or 50s.
Minimum wage is enough to survive, and almost anyone that's not severely mentally/physically disabled can do most minimum wage work. In this case, it's not a matter of lack of ability, but lack of willingness.
That said, I have nothing against parents willing to provide housing/support if the child is working, still furthering their education, or need some help getting their feet back on the ground. But at this point, this is none of that, and just enabling their behavior.
The parents certainly can be enabling, but I think you're ignoring that there are plenty of people that are homeless, that do wind up with dependencies on alcohol, drugs like meth, etc, and your implication that anyone (especially people in their 30s with no real work history) can get full-time, minimum wage work doesn't seem realistic. Many of those jobs are both minimum wage and few enough hours per week (to avoid having to give you benefits, of course) that it would be extremely difficult to live independently, while still requiring a schedule that makes it nearly impossible to take on other jobs.
I'm in my 30s and have now seen several high school classmates with similarly poor prospects eventually succumb to drug overdoses.
Spiked rich kids are spoiled. If they weren't spoiled rich kids the parents would be risking homelessness by supporting a layabout who isn't paying rent.
Fully agree with this for 18-19 year olds, but at some point (25? 30?) it really does seem like coddling, or enabling at least. At some point you have to move out and support yourself.
"Pamper, pander to". Perhaps it's a loaded word but as a parent who may some day be facing this situation (from the parent point of view) I feel like I'm justified in my judgement.
FWIW I do have friends that were forced out of the house at 18. At the time I was the same age and I thought it was harsh. Many years later though, I can see that it worked out just fine.
I think the term 'coddling ' is not the best. I grew up during the 90's in a hyper-controled environment by a macho dad and a passive mom. I was told to not become an artist, to not travel when I am young (waste of time), to learn how to drive a car, to get a job, get a degree, all that jazz. The thing is, at 32, I still have no sense of purpose in life.
When all the goals are chosen for you, it does not matter if you were over-protected or not. You cannot build true self esteem and confidence if you don't succeed and/or fail at a dream of your choice. There is no point learning to drive a car if you do not know where you want to go, to earn money if you don't know what you want to buy, and to get into a career if you have no sense of purpose.
Videogames are addictive not only because they are fun, they provide you with a goal and 'achievements'. In my humble opinion, sex for the sake of sex (real or porn), promotions for the sake of promotions or else are all caused by the same emotional male problem ; the inability to feel emotions and learn from them what is truly important for yourself. The % of young men in the labour force is just a symptom of that.
I was told that ''fiding your passion is stupid'', and that ''its better to become an unhappy physician than a happy artist''. Since I've hit the job market I've spent thousands of $ in therapy and many weekends in various spiritual activities to reorient my life. And I still my first burnout at 30.
My opinion now is that sense of purpose AND being able to support yourself are essential; you have cash balance to keep in check with the tribe, and an emotional balance to keep in check with yourself. An adult should be able to do both. I think that people who do the former without doing the later may succeed economically, but on the long run they drain everybody and subconsciously expect others to take care of their own emotions. My father was like that, and his own children don't call him 'daddy'.
I also think its a very male difficulty, because boys learn to suppress emotions at a young age. It makes it harder to find meaningful careers, but also to sustain relationships and to evolve in your spirituality. Men drop out of school, do not enter the workforce, and lament that tinder is unfair. In my humble opinion, it is a purpose problem, not a ''how do I clean my room'' problem.
I agree with your sentiment except for the « men unable to feel » thing. Emotions and sentiments are a fundamentally human thing and men feel too. However there is a social pressure on men to not show emotions and sentiments.
We fight patriarchy so that women are less pressured into being fragile and pretty housewives but we should also fight it so that men are less pressured to be emotionless hardworking robots who have to provide for their family.
At the same time, I see people leave home in their teens or 20s and work a series of crappy minimum wage jobs and never get a decent one with benefits, because they're busy surviving or don't see a better option.
An ideal situation requires pressure to succeed, while also providing resources and guidance to be successful.
Yep, I dropped out of school my sophomore year because I was working a job and I was prioritizing a social life I didn’t have in high school. 7 years later and I’m too busy surviving crappy jobs to go back to school, or I think that I would be too busy working to succeed in my coursework.
Doesn't always work, video games are probably the cheapest addicting entertainment out there. Doesn't take much income to just survive and play video games all day long.
I highly doubt that video games are solely to blame.
I was quite addicted to video games until my early 20s, but I eventually understood that gaming falls down the priority list as you take on more responsibilities in life. My friends were the same.
Definitely a symptom and not a cause. Like people that drink heavily in university then don't later once they have obligations.
My university roommate played video games nonstop. Then he graduated, got a job (as a video game developer) and has a wife and three kids. It's like any addiction, its filling a void, but the object of abuse is not what's to blame.
But at least they would be working, probably know how to drive a car, and may consider furthering their education/career when they realize how little they make for their time.
This is maybe a ridiculous question, but why is that so much better? If someone is able to live cheaply, why is it better for them to work in some menial, low-wage job versus being supported by a relative? I think something you have to consider is that if you have low social standing and are poorly educated, your options in life are not necessarily super appealing.
Who's to say that they'd remain in low-wage job? They may be wildly wealthy in the future. It's hard to know, since their potential is being squandered by the parents enabling this behavior.
What avenues would they have to realize their potential? College is obscenely expensive, a degree from a community college is afaik useless, rent prices are bonkers, and the job market for those without a degree is wage slavery.
I am suspecting that because of the lack of full employment a degree is just a hack to get first in line for the jobs that the economy is resentfully providing. If companies couldn't find enough workers they'd lower standards and offer training. It's precisely because they can find all the workers they could hope for that we have put the burden of training onto workers.
Yeah, one of my fears is we simply have too many people and too few jobs in this kind of economy. The lower birth rates are a gaia consciousness response to overpopulation in this respect
It's interesting that you don't mention trade schools and then apprenticeship. That's where I'd look, personally, and my impression is that people in the trades can make bank, especially if they eventually set up their own business.
not really, there's only so many tradesmen an area can support, and only union members get any real standard of living. Plus, there's the whole "destroying your body" thing; it's not computer scientists behind the opioid crisis, for example. Its drudgery, extremely hard work, and with a side order of ill health for the rest of your life.
Consider that the limited resource may be mental, not temporal.
We don't expect everyone to be able to run a 10-minute mile, even though most people can. Likewise we shouldn't expect everyone to be able to hold down a 40+ hour-a-week job and "functional adult" life, even though most people can.
James Dobson once said about a similar scenario, "your son doesn't have a problem, _you_ have problem." Meaning providing lodging and meals for someone who refuses to work is actually enabling on the part of the parents.
I agree with this. I think it has something to do with my sister (their mom) being a single mom from the time they were 6, 8 years old till she remarried when they were teenagers and their stepfather not wanting to interfere too much in the parenting department.
As you noted, it is likely that something went seriously wrong with raising them (coddling, over-helping, etc.). But you don’t need to be “kicked out” to start working on building your life and your career.
I meant being kicked out if the parents clearly see 0 desire from the child to further their education or get a job. I don't think there's anything wrong with people living with their parents if they're going to school or working.
But there is definitely something wrong with paying gaming computer for son who is old enough to work and dont. Or son who is old enough to clean and never does.
None of these stories have issue that started at 24. They all have parents enabling the kid ever since kid was 6.
I appreciate the frustration, and why this got shared, but realistically...this is the current observation and gives so little data about how we got here that I worry about the comments attributing blame to your post.
Two distant family members of mine fit this description fairly well...One was raised in an unstable, low income household, with mentally ill parents, is on the autism spectrum, and both parents worked multiple jobs that included overnight shifts. There was no ability, energy, or understanding to seek assistance and intervention early enough to make a difference. The other family member comes from effectively the complete opposite end of each one of those variables.
I don't even understand how this happens. I was kicked out of home at 16. Neither of my parents would have allowed me to stay at home until my thirties.
Then again, I'm a father now and I can't imagine ever asking my daughter to leave home. But I would definitely expect her to have a job and contribute to household expenses well before her 30's.
I want to put some blame on people's focus on university education here. Every guy I've met in this type of situation is someone that isn't stupid, but they don't excel in academia either. Their family treats them like crap because they didn't go to university or dropped after they got there. They become depressed because they compare themselves to their "smarter" peers who appear to have everything worked out are doing great in life. Constantly pushing someone towards university when it's maybe not the best idea for them, then calling them a loser when they bomb out just engenders learned helplessness in the individual. Then people why these individuals stop trying.
This is the trap of social media and why many people would be healthier and happier if they were able to live & be present in the moment without their phone.
Plenty of people will read this comment and think that is not them but if there is not a point in your day when your phone is not on you, out of sights and out of reach for at least an hour you're not as "present" as you think.
Not after they were around 6 and 8. Their mom remarried when they were in their teens. So yeah, probably that's part of the problem. But their biological father was also quite lazy and never had a job for very long (part of the reason she left him, that and he did a good bit of gaslighting) so it's not like he was a great example for them to follow (In fact, last I heard he was living with his parents and he's well into his 50s).
I’m not keen on giving a pass that easily. The US education system is decent, and if they can read and write, and have access to internet and a stable home, it’s on them at some point to take it initiative.
Well as prospective adoptive father... In some ways... Yes. That was part of our adoption training. To learn that many adoptees want to know their biological mom and dad and suffer greatly if they're not able. An adoptive father can provide all the emotional support in the world and the day to day fathering, but he can't provide the biology, whereas a biological one can provide both the day to day fathering and the bio connection.
It's not a popular sentiment... But it was required as part of our certification in california. When separated from mom and dad, they call it the primal wound, but our society accepts separating children from one parent without any of the guilting they require adoptive parents to go through.
From a purely empirical standpoint, in aggregate, biological father's are the least likely to hurt or kill their children. Both adoptive father's and step father's are more likely to. Says nothing about individuals, but as a society it would behoove the powers that be to ensure most kids are raised by bio parents. And by far most states adopt this approach, even to the point of absurdity.
My twin brother and I grew up without a biological father, were very independent at an early age, and both have high-paying jobs in faang. Both well-adjusted, multiple relationships, successful, etc.
I see a lot of Jordan Peterson-esque BS professing these “no biological father == neet” rules, and I’m not saying that’s the point you’re leading with your question, but am jumping at any opportunity to dispel it, just in case.
and someone can successfully complete high end raids in world of warcraft despite being a paraplegic. Doesn't mean everyone should be able to do so or its too easy to raid. Don't view outliers and your own experience as standard; high achievers do this way too often and end up discounting the real difficulty and struggles in accomplishing such a thing.
Right, but the point I’m making is being raised without a father is not the (to take your example) paraplegic-level setback some in the red pill camp seem to think it is.
It’s not even an outlier experience, either. Even among high achievers. Consider that ~50% of African American NBA players and ~20% of white NBA players come from a single parent household. [0]
Curious, do you think the parent poster was saying that fatherless households actually give rise to paraplegics somehow? If not, why not respond to the actual argument with relevant data, rather than responding to strawmen arguments with NBA participation rates? Just seems like a very odd piece of data to bring up unless you can provide evidence that NBA participation rates are representative of overall well-being for the metrics under discussion.
An irony that is not lost on me is that high achievers often have their own problems that they would know about if they and society wasn’t so keen to dismiss the problems of others. I was told I was lazy when I couldn’t keep up with the other kids physically (just exercise more), and I thought they were lazy when other kids couldn’t keep up with me mentally (just study more). Turns out it was hEDS. It would have been nice to have figured that out 25 years earlier, the damn thing near ruined my life.
That's absolutely wild. As far as I knew the most you owe anyone staying in your house is 24 hours to remove their things after which you can call the sheriff to arrest them as a trespasser. I can't believe they had to go to court over that.
Most states require all kinds of hoops to evict a resident. Even without a a lease. You can’t just lock them out. Sometimes the penalties for a wrongful eviction can be severe. And, in some states, there are criminal penalties.
(As a practical matter, it rarely comes to this as a couch-surfer will go find another couch instead of wasting money on attorneys and the like. But, typically, the owner of the property can’t just unilaterally decide a resident is a trespasser and kick them out.)
Depends on the state. New York requires an ejectment hearing since he's family but in most states he doesn't have any more rights than a regular guest, since by his own admission he has never been asked to pay rent or contribute to expenses. Outside of certain cities with local protection laws, you can just change the locks when they leave.
I see this a good bit. And it is hard to get into the psychology of the individuals. I would work any job I could get if I was unemployed. I have taken retail jobs when I was unemployed or we could use extra income. My wife has done the same.
A few people I know come to mind that reminds me of your nephews and I simply cannot understand it. Right now there are hiring signs up in almost every business in my town. I would rather work (if I could) than take unemployment even if it would be a pay cut.
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.
It's interesting how few (I haven't actually seen any) of the comment replies are addressing the parents. I'd probably put equal onus on the parents to have better parented their children into adulthood.
He said, in a time of record unemployment and low wages that are impossible to live off of. Almost like there are other factors at play here than just men being lazy.
HN loves to forget that not everybody can be a FAANG employee or has the desire to sit in front of a computer writing code their whole lives.
I'm a male FAANG employee in my 30's living with my parents.
It's nice. My dad makes us lunches, my mom cooks dinners, and I do yardwork. My girlfriend lives a few miles away with her parents, who are great. We regularly eat with one family or the other, and we often sleep together at one house or the other. We use the family cars.
Except for the job, we'd be considered failures for this nice life.
It seems like you're not really starting adult life, and you're running out of years to do so. I started my 30's with 3 kids already, and ended my 30's with 9 kids. I bought a house. That house is my responsibility, without even an HOA. I don't have to ask mom for anything. I don't need parental permission. I got to pick the car I wanted to buy. If I feel like painting the house cyan or parking my car on the lawn, I can do so.
Bullshit. Oklahoma has a 4% unemployment rate and a very low cost of living. Some other states are similar. Anyone who's willing to show up and work hard can survive there.
You have to consider that deciding to stay unemployed is one of the few remaining ways workers can strike nowadays. Most of them have zero power on the negotiating table but they still have some power by choosing to not work at all.
Colorado is expensive as anything to live in and is only getting more expensive. $18/hour is NOT a livable wage in Boulder. $35/hour is only 72k a year at full employment (unlikely as a contractor employee) and probably will not receive benefits. That is also not enough to live in Denver or Boulder with a family.
The jobs are out there AND DO NOT PAY ENOUGH TO LIVE IN THE AREAS THEY ARE IN.
And before some genius comes in and says "Well don't live in those expensive cities then", those expensive cities still want burgers and stocked store shelves and everything else, they just don't want to pay people enough to live off of.
From what I understand, the problem is not minimum wages, but unstable employment. You may be getting paid an acceptable amount but at the drop of a hat your employer will say that you aren't working next week which is much harder to cope with than earning less but knowing you will have x in the bank every week.
Big cities still need people to do the jobs that only pay minimum wage. There was a whole thing last year about how important those minimum wage workers are, but you've probably forgotten already.
I’m 35 and burnt out by working almost nonstop since I was 14… I have something to show for it, but I don’t care anymore and would rather live like your nephews.
I was able to move out after 5 years working as a software developer and my bf also getting a full time developer job. But I recognize I am in the top few % at my age and would not blame anyone for staying with their parents for longer. Especially if they were building up savings to help them in life.
Let’s not derail the thread. Social security is underfunded, but will continue to provide benefits at a reduced level (~76%) when the trust fund runs dry in 2034 (which is just accounting in the gov budget). A variety of small measures can be implemented to ensure ongoing solvency, and likely will take place, even if extreme measures like a contribution from the general fund is needed. The US does not default on its obligations, and as long as there is economic activity, there will be contributions to social security.
What are the things that motivates them, and what do they themselves want to do in life?
I ask this because much of the undertone in the article and in this thread is about the failure of meeting the gender role expectations that are put on young men. Do they have a job and a car? Have they studied hard so they can get a good job in order to support a wife and kid?
Culture in the last several decades have hammered down on the negative aspects of stereotyping. A person who is 35 has gone through a life time of TV, movie and politics that on repeat has talked about the negative of gender roles for women, while the expectations on men has remained fairly unchanged. I do not find it strange at all if an increasing portion of men under this culture has rejected the role put on them.
Which goes back to the original question I started with. What motivates them and what do they want to do with their life? If we want to avoid the slow motion tragedy, maybe the way forward is to help them answer those question in the absent of imposed gender roles.
On a related note, on mainstream TV/articles about declining marriage/birthrates in the West, it's common to see criticisms about modern Western men. How women can't find life partners because men aren't masculine enough anymore, don't want to grow up, don't get educated etc.
But very rarely do you see any criticism or even questioning about modern Western women and what men want in a woman. Only what women want. The journalists never seem interested in asking whether modern Western women are marriage material? Degrees don't make you marriage material. Are men still attracted to feminine women, and are there enough feminine women? Are there potential reasons why Western men find it risky to commit to Western women? Do Western women have realistic standards? Do Western women need to be less picky about superficial characteristics? Given that the vast majority breakups are initiated by women, could women in a lot of instances be ending relationships and wrecking their own homes over trivial matters?
The mainstream coverage of this topic is usually very one sided/gynocentric. Women questioning the value of modern men is acceptable, while men questioning the value of modern women will often get you labeled a misogynist/woman hating incel.
This imbalance/lack of discussing what men want in women/lack of criticism of some aspects of modern women really hurts marriage minded women as well, because a lot of women are growing up without hearing what men want in a woman to marry.
> Given that the vast majority breakups are initiated by women
Hey, there's actually a study [1] about this!
> The author uses a new longitudinal study of relationships in the US, the How Couples Meet and Stay Together surveys, to examine the gender of who wanted the breakup for both marital and nonmarital heterosexual relationships for the first time. The results show that only in marriages are the majority of breakups wanted by the female partner. Men and women in nonmarital heterosexual relationships in the US are equally likely to want to break up. Furthermore, wives report lower relationship quality than husbands, while men and women in nonmarital relationships report more similar relationship quality.
> The results show that only in marriages are the majority of breakups wanted by the female partner. Men and women in nonmarital heterosexual relationships in the US are equally likely to want to break up.
Incidentally, the courts generally don't get involved in the later sort of breakup. If a for-profit industry were made for nonmarital breakups as divorce attorneys have made for marital breakups, I bet this discrepancy would narrow.
This gets said so much on fora with men who regard themselves as “redpilled”, but it makes no sense to me personally. As a bookish and arts-inclined person, so much of my worldview, the things that occupy my thoughts during the day, has been formed by the canon of literature, music, films. No woman would seem dating and marriage material to me if she weren’t similarly erudite and we would have some common ground in that respect. It has been the number-one factor driving all my relationships over my life.
Often the man claiming that men don’t care about a woman’s education, goes on to say that what matters is that the woman knows, for example, how to cook. That, too, has never made sense to me. I live in a country where for the childless, eating out good healthy food is not appreciably more expensive than cooking at home, and a woman who chooses to take advantage of that and use her valuable time for other pursuits, would seem more attractive.
> Often the man claiming that men don’t care about a woman’s education, goes on to say that what matters is that the woman knows, for example, how to cook. That, too, has never made sense to me. I live in a country where for the childless, eating out good healthy food is not appreciably more expensive than cooking at home, and a woman who chooses to take advantage of that and use her valuable time for other pursuits, would seem more attractive.
If a woman is basically the mirror image of a man (degree, high paying job, spends most of the day at an office), then what exactly is a man buying into with a relationship with said woman? Maybe intimacy, but that feeling will wear off after a few years. A vagina? Well, that's kind of depressing on its own. Expecting men to love and accept women who serve the exact same role they do in life is like wondering why companies aren't run entirely by managers, or entirely by assembly line workers. Men can already make a bunch of money and find intellectual stimulation from other men, and a woman has to compete with that. So what does a woman necessarily provide a man in that case?
Related to that, an intellectual woman probably isn't going to have a lot of time for anything outside of a few hours of eating food, watching Netflix, and maybe sex. That's all fine and good, except there's a kind of relationship that already fulfills those things, and it's called friends with benefits. Why make a contract with the state that gives half your possessions to the opposite party if things go wrong when you can get the benefits without any of that baggage?
No offense, but it can be really astounding how people simply can't understand that the programming they received about college degrees can be wrong. Man spent millions of years mating with women who didn't have a college degree (and vise versa!). A woman with a college degree does little more than what the man already can do with his own college degree.
It's just like the field of software engineering. No one really wants to work with a jerk with credentials. They want someone with good qualities that they can get along with.
Sure, one can get intellectual stimulation from other men, but having an intellectual partner means one can have intellectual stimulation around the clock – if you think of something interesting at any hour of the day, you have someone to share it and discuss it with. I value my male friends, but you can't reasonably expect to see them more than a few hours a week, and many gradually fall away as they e.g. get bogged down in childrearing that no longer leaves them time for the intellectual things that once bound us together. Your feeling that the woman won't have time to provide companionship doesn’t necessary hold in this day and age when more and more people doing knowledge work are working remotely, so you might be sitting together most of the day.
Also, if one's particular interesting in learning extends to longterm travels, immersing oneself in foreign countries to study the languages or aspects of culture there, your male friends are probably not going to accompany you for more than a brief time. When people go on longterm travels, it is their partners that they rely on for companionship. (That holds, of course, for non-intellectual people traveling, too, as anyone in the bikepacking or overlanding scenes can tell you.)
For a bookish person, being in a relationship with a partner who merely has "good qualities", but who doesn't share that basic context, can mean feeling like one is not truly understood and there is a barrier between you. There is nothing worse than being in a relationship yet feeling alone.
I agree with most of you're saying, but I don't believe this requires a woman needs a college degree or hold down a "job" to be a good companion or that a college degree likely helps her at all in that context. I would even argue the same for men. The thing I'm arguing for is that it shouldn't be surprising that most men are indifferent to women's college education. Yes, some men on the edge of the bell curve are going to require a woman of a university background. The rest of the time, it doesn't add anything to a man's experience with a woman and can even potentially detract from it.
A college degree is not at all mandatory (or always sufficient) to be educated. However, people, regardless of gender, that aren't educated just don't tend be that interesting. Do you really want to spend your life with someone your found uninteresting?
I personally think that the more educated people a society has, the more interesting people there are to meet.
Of course there are dull people out there but do you think that most people without college degrees are dull?
While you were in college all the non-dull non-college people were out there having different life experiences than you-- learning things you don't know about.
In many ways education makes us more homogeneous. To an extent this can help make each other seem more interesting because it gives us common language and intellectual frameworks to have discussions, it dispenses with some boring preliminaries. But beyond that point, I think sharing common education makes people actually less interesting, not more.
There is a huge social stigma to non college educated folks. Many feel ostracized and inadequate their while lives even when monetarily they are as or more successful than most college folks.
If this is something you, or anyone else reading this, feels like you're suffering: I can offer that you won't necessarily feel this way forever.
Particularly, that kind of feeling inadequate in spite of success is a likely a form of imposter syndrome. Many other people experience it, including people with degrees (there is always someone else with more or more illustrious degrees). Many people feel better just knowing that other, even obviously super-accomplished people, have felt that way and many people seem to more or less age out of it.
While I can't refute the existence of that social stigma, at least I found that there isn't much of that in actuality... but that doesn't prevent it from existing in your head. Of course, there are people who always find something to be snooty about. If it's not the pedigree of your academic credentials it'll be about the brand of your sneakers. Surrounding yourself with thoughtful and emotionally healthy people can help.
At least that is what I experienced and heard from others.
You are very presumptuous and should consider changing your rhetorical style as it is very off-putting.
> Of course there are dull people out there but do you think that most people without college degrees are dull
I meant precisely what I said. I don't intend to make a broad statistical statement based on my limited personal annecdotes.
> While you were in college all the non-dull non-college people were out there having different life experiences than you-- learning things you don't know about.
I don't have a college degree. There are many thing I don't know about, which is why I like talking to educated people.
> In many ways education makes us more homogeneous.
I strongly disagree. ”Education” only creates homogeneity to the degree to which educational institutions focus on indoctrination over education.
I strongly support enouraging education for people of all genders, ethnicities, intelligences and socio-economic backgrounds because I think it will make the world a more interesting (and better) place.
> if a woman is basically the mirror image of a man (degree, high paying job, spends most of the day at an office),
I have to be perfectly honest, but to me, this is entrepreneurialism, not intellectualism. Someone might go to college and get some massive degrees to become i.e a lawyer or a senior dev, or a doctor, but ... those are trade skills. There's a fair amount of overlap, but to me, intellectualism is something distinct.
For many of us, intellectualism is the "philo" part of "philosophy"; the love of knowledge. Not knowledge as a means to an end; as a means to a high-powered, eat-your whole-day career. But rather; knowledge for its own sake - knowledge that exists as a sort of purpose for life (whether secular or spiritual, it's practically the pursuit of curiosity and knowledge-seeking as a sort of borderline religious calling).
Guys like that are looking for a woman (or man, if they're so inclined) they can have fulfilling conversations with, every day, for the rest of their life. And it's not something you can do with your "pals"; there are some of these conversations you can only have with a soul mate. Hell, there are some of them you can only have with your lover - not a friend-with-benefits (which, sadly, includes a lot of spouses), but someone you've been willing to be truly vulnerable with and expose the depths of your soul to.
But yeah; for a lot of us, they have to have the same deep love of knowledge, curiosity, and sense of wonder about life - or there can't be love, there.
The basic flaw in your argument is someone with a degree, high paying job, who spends most of the day at an office doesn't necessarily have the same personality as me so isn't necessarily a mirror image.
I chuckled a little at your comment because you are sort of the anti Henry Higgins, the character who sings "Why can't a woman be more like a man?" in the famous play set in 1917
>then what exactly is a man buying into with a relationship with said woman?
Jack Donovan has a great corollary to this in "The Way Of Men" where he says that society is nowadays trying to "fix" men as if they are "imperfect women."
this is outrageous?! and I feel totally on the outside of like 80% of these comments in a bad way for saying that.
I started copying and pasting lines and responding to them but on edit it seems pointless.
I would just say that good relationships work in both directions, 1+1=3 idiom, and come in vastly many forms.
Intimacy doesn't fade in a good relationship it grows stronger.
For sure the type of women you seem to be looking for exist and enjoy that type of relationship.
But a lot of people, of all genders and orientations, find the things you don't seem to think are good qualities, are in fact the things 'that they can get along with.'
And I would maybe suggest instead looking more at the 'programming' of gender and roles.
Women aren't simply a transaction or variable in your equation of an ideal relationship.
$15/hr * 40 hrs/week * 4 weeks/mo = $2,400/mo and that's only during working hours. Which, chances are you're going to pay more than that, as that doesn't include that person's healthcare, that's pre-tax, and more.
Sure one can pay for a child care center, but that's not covering the whole cleaning and doing the chores around the house. Its also only 8 hours a day, 5 days a week.
An at-home caregiver (note: I didn't say wife either spouse can do) can provide an immense amount of value.
Yeah 2400 probably sounds right though come a bit differently. That buys you 10 hrs of shared child care and a cleaner every month. Totally worth it if you both make decent money
If that's what someone is looking for in another person, then yes. But the concept of "better" is purely contextual. What seems to be better for marriages, or any team of people, is when the participants bring fulfill different roles that serve the shared mission. Two people doing fundamentally the same thing isn't necessarily helpful, although some people may thrive together that way.
That kind of labor is ultra expensive these days. You need 500K or more for this to be realistic to have done for you at anywhere approaching 24/7 levels
Would a 21 year old woman with a high school education who is extremely attractive be more sought after by more men than a 40 year old woman of average attractiveness who has a PhD? I'd guess yes, and I don't think it'd be a close contest. I'd guess about 90 percent of men would go with the former if they had a real choice between the two.
It's not that the PhD doesn't add to the attractiveness. It's just not the most important variable for most men. You might differ, but unusually intellectually curious men on HN aren't really representative. Most people have very little intellectual curiosity.
You studying social subjects that almost only women study is the exception, you can afford to be picky about this. Lots of guys would love to have a woman who shares their interest, but since so few women study technical topics they have to settle with women they have little in common with. And at that point whether they studied some social topic or no topic and did other stuff isn't high up on the list.
I don't even know what to say to this. Is [picks from list] speech pathologist, dental hygienist, nurse, payroll clerk or hairdresser NOT a job that involves a fair amount of knowledge, training, and skill?
Just because it's not EE or CS doesn't mean there isn't a wealth of technical and scientific understanding (or even just an understanding of the legal environment) going on behind the scenes of a profession.
So you're probably not going to find a girl who has exactly the same job as you and wants to date you -- but if you ask them to explain their profession to you, you might just learn there's a lot going on under the hood.
"they have to settle with women they have little in common with"
Again, this is just a lack of imagination. I studied a bit of chemistry, my wife studied a lot of chemistry, we appreciate that chemistry is cool. Just because I went with computers and she went with medicine doesn't mean we have "little in common"; we just find other topics to geek-out about.
"Everyone you will ever meet knows something you don't."
― Bill Nye
Thanks, that is some insight into why men who are primarily concerned with technical subjects would be unsatisfied with the dating market. However, I wouldn't claim that "almost only women" are concerned with the humanities subjects I mentioned above. Film criticism and scholarship on many branches of literature and music are still fields that draw either predominantly men, or have a pretty even gender balance.
If you take the subject and the adjacent subjects you get mostly women though, even if specific courses are more balanced. It is the same in technical courses, some of them like chemistry and biology have more even balance but overall there aren't a lot of women.
You seem to have this assumption that the only expression and development of interests comes through taking courses. I have a degree in CS, yet care much more that my partner shares my non-technical interests than my technical ones, cause I can talk shop all day long at work already...
I didn’t actually argue that. The erudition I have always sought in dating or marriage material does not depend on the degree I have, and in fact my own degree is in a field different than the canon of art to which I mentioned above. But sure, having a degree of some sort does greatly boost the chances that one will have had access to an academic library (or awareness of alternatives like LibGen), and potentially made use of it for subjects beyond one’s own degree programme.
The proportion of women with degrees differs from country to country, and often isn’t “the average woman” at all. And sure, having a degree is certainly no guarantee of erudition, but in most countries, women without a degree are even less likely to possess the kind of erudition I was talking about. To the point where a degree does function as a basic prerequisite.
My point is that when degrees are so easy to get that an average person has one then they don't have any meaning as a filter. There are plenty of reasons not to get one that aren't "I don't like learning" so it doesn't work as a filter in the other direction either.
Well, no, they said "No woman would seem dating and marriage material to me if she weren’t similarly erudite and we would have some common ground in that respect" but being erudite in no way requires or is the same as having a degree. That's just one way of many to get exposed to things.
I knew a few women who went to college specifically for the purpose of finding a man to marry, with their goal being a stay at home mother and wife to a lawyer or doctor or something wealthy sounding.
They were as physically attractive as they were emotionally shallow. There is much much more to a person than an education.
What is what you believe men want in a woman, that's being unfulfilled for these men?
The common male complaint I see isn't "all these women I date are simply not going to fulfill what I need," it's "no women will date me at all" which points at a breakdown in the process way before the point of "what are these men looking for." Hard to imagine these men even have any idea of what they're actually looking for in a relationship, with that lack of experience. You only find out one way...
And for that situation, a woman complaining "so few of these men I see have their shit together" and a man complaining "so few of these women are willing to date me at all" are two sides of the same coin. I think at a societal level, though, you'd be hard pressed to push the view "everyone should simply give up on contributing to society in traditional ways" so the coverage is going to look negatively at the "freeloaders" in the same way it disapproved of someone like Paris Hilton. You see it through a lens of sexism, I see it through a lens of it being hard to sympathize with someone drifting through life chatting meaninglessly on the internet and playing games. BATNA comes into play, too - the person with no options at all seems to be the one with the incentive to make changes. (While for the women here, and the men they are currently dating while ignoring these stay-at-home-and-do-nothing men, there's other, plenty-well-trod advice about compromise being necessary, etc, that's been repeated to death in media of all sorts.)
Maybe we should encourage these men to go become nannies for a few years, to both give them a job and boost their dating profile that way AND to prepare them for being a full-time homemaker if traditional employment simply isn't what they want! I certainly think that should be an option for both genders.
> Given that the vast majority breakups are initiated by women
Citation please? I would LOVE to know if your number here also includes stuff like "he slept with me and then ghosted me," too.
> Given that the vast majority breakups are initiated by women
I suspect what the poster meant to write was that most divorces are initiated by women. Which is a different statistic but still somewhat relevant. It's actually true, it's around 69% that are initiated by women. Here's the study i quickly found for it which seems credible https://www.asanet.org/press-center/press-releases/women-mor...
Interestingly it explicitly states that there's no large difference for non-marital relationships. So the poster is incorrect about breakups in general.
Speaking anecdotally from my own experience, there is a pervasive fear of marriage and raising children amongst men. Most believe that if you get divorced you'll be left destroyed financially and denied access to your children regardless of the circumstances and that getting divorced is extremely likely. Whether that's actually true or not, I don't actually know, but it's still widely believed and influencing men's behavior/plans all the same. I suspect that's a big factor in the frequency of men who don't seem to care about having their shit together. From my own observation of divorces within my extended family and those of my close friends, it does seem to be true to me. Many divorces I've been privy to, seem to almost always end with the man living a much lower standard of living by himself with restricted access to children, while the mother lives in the family home with a higher standard of living that the ex-husband pays for. Totally anecdotal of course, but it certainly makes me extremely cautious when considering marriage and it wouldn't surprise me if a lot of young men don't even consider it.
> Whether that's actually true or not, I don't actually know, but it's still widely believed and influencing men's behavior/plans all the same.
On average I think it's probably not true. Most men probably stay married, and most divorces probably aren't ruinous. I say "most", but I don't mean a comfortable majority. The ruinous divorces happen a lot. I've seen it destroy more men I know/knew than alcohol or any drug. Even if it only happens one in six times, that's Russian Roulette odds. Those are bad odds.
Statistically, men do better financially after divorce and women do worst. Men are more lonely, depressive and more unhappy. Women are more happy after divorce. Men find new partner sooner after divorce.
Where men ask for custody, they tend to get it. But they are less likely to ask.
Also, alimony for adult women are more of rare. Where they exist they are time limited and awarded only if she stayed at home for multiple years. As in, in double income situation they wont happen.
I think what you said is a very unforgiving and slightly misogynistic way of describing what has been spelled out many other places before: women are increasingly opting for more education or career advancement in lieu of becoming homemakers. They don’t make those decisions for the benefit of men. They don’t have to. This has little to do with observed femininity or the “attractiveness” of getting a degree.
>They don’t make those decisions for the benefit of men. They don’t have to.
But isn't that the parent poster's point? They don't make decisions that make them more attractive for marriage, therefore they're less likely to end up married.
The same argument applies to men too. Men don't have to do things that make them more attractive to women, but they shouldn't be all that surprised when they end up not being attractive to women.
There's a group missing here. We're discussing stories talking about a demographic of women that are unhappy with the men they date, and also about a demographic of men that aren't dating at all.
The men unable to get a date at all clearly have some work to do - even when there's so many unhappy women, there is something they're still doing or not doing that makes them even less appealing.
The unhappy women and the men they're currently dating are a more curious situation. Are the men unsatisfied with them in particular, and so these women have work to do to convince a man they're "marriage material"? Or are the men simply not looking for anything that serious at all?
The general position of the media coverage is that it's the latter: the women can't "make themselves good enough for marriage" because the men just want the casual merry-go-round to continue. And there are certainly men quoted in articles about this who feel exactly that, but I can't say for certain that we're missing another group who just finds these women lacking.
My personal view is that we've shifted a bit, so the "growing up" that would've normally happened for these men in their early 20s is now ten years behind or so, but I see it happening in my cohort now as everyone is in their mid-30s. So I'm not too concerned for that side of things.
When you have 4 women who wants to date 1 man then they will feel fierce competition and that everything just gets handed to guys. Similarly the 3 men those women refuse to date will feel that dating is a woman's game.
So your belief is that these guys are just in constant relationships, jumping from one to the next with so many options that they never take those relationships to the next stage? The parent poster claimed that the vast majority of breakups are initiated by women, though! So there's a curious adjacency between the idea that everything just gets handed to them and the idea that women disapprove of them and find them wanting. Their standards are simultaneously too high and too low? Do we just believe women are stupid? "I need to give this man whatever he wants because there's only 1 of him for every 4 women, but then I'm gonna dump him the first time I get annoyed!"?? Really? None of these ideas really fits anyone I personally know, either.
The idea that only some small fraction of men get any dates at all flies in the face of everything I've seen. Is there any solid demographic data suppporting this idea that only 1 in 4, or 1 in 10, or whatever, men is actively dating or in a relationship? Not message data from a dating app, because there's a LONG process between "sent a message on a dating app" and "in a relationship" but actual data on relationships. In the world as its being described here, you'd have a huge perpetually-single population...
I believe the actual "can't find a date to save my life" crowd is much smaller and less representative than it thinks it is. The internet is very perspective-distorting here. These are all surface-level-plausible claims that don't seem to hold up to any real scrutiny.
Those men doesn't even enter relationships, which is what women complains about. They feel those guys have way too high standards, and they destroy themselves trying to live up to them.
And ultimately women have to settle, as you say the math doesn't work out and in the end they want a relationship. But that doesn't help the young men who aren't old enough to be in the strike zone of more mature women. And since the women felt they settled when they went with this man of course it is they who initiate divorce and end the relationship since they always felt that they could do better.
Aha, so it's men that you have a low opinion of! "All they care about is sex so they never commit so these women sleep with them in hopes that they'll have a real relationship but then the men never let it go anywhere, and all the women are competing over this small pool of sex-obsessed assholes." In which case a narrative blaming men is bang-on accurate, but IMO this is nothing like the majority of relationships, especially as you get further from age 20 or so...
"Live, try things out, settle down when you're ready to" sounds fine to me, since again, these groups of unhappy women and undateable men tend to be loud but I see no evidence that they're demographically dominant percentages. Way too many ... not-the-most-attractive... dudes out there getting married for the math to add up...
You could just as easily say it’s women’s fault for finding only very highly desirable men attractive. But ultimately this is about biology, there’s no one to blame but Mother Nature. The sooner we can automate away the infrastructure that supports society and disappear into a virtual reality of our design the better - just like every other sentient species that has ever existed.
28% of men and 18% of women between the ages of 18 and 30 report having had no sex in the past year. So, that would be 1 in 4 men, approximately. That's as of 2018, with a trendline going very distinctly up.
> There's a group missing here. We're discussing stories talking about a demographic of women that are unhappy with the men they date, and also about a demographic of men that aren't dating at all
We are not doing that. There is a lot of discussion about men who cant find partners. The common assumption in those is that women are never single if they dont want it. There is occasional pearl clutching about women who dont seek stable long term partner.
On HN, there is basically no discussion about what women think or want. And where such discussion is, what women say is ignored and instead male guesses are taken as gospel - even if man making those guesses interacts exclusively with males and dont know any woman close enough for her to tell him what she thinks.
You’re absolutely correct, which is why I chose to phrase my post to say that the parent was taking a truth (women are increasingly choosing career over kids) and expressing it in what I consider to be bad faith. I don’t think that’s acceptable.
I also seriously doubt that the claims about women not living up to some standard of attractiveness or femininity are true, misogynistic or not.
Why is it ok to blame men but not women though? Either we blame both or none. I'd say blame none. Ultimately on a population level you don't have lazy or cold, just politics with policies, incentives etc, so it doesn't make sense to blame anyone in particular. Instead of blaming just look at what policies would be more impactful for fixing the problems.
Kevin samuels is a trip. I mean I intuitively understood a lot of what he says but to see all these women claim to be 9s and 10s when they are 3s and 4s and expecting men to make 500k+ is unreal. Women today are seriously delusional
What is the rate of metabolic affordances created by women in relation to men? Isn’t this biologically necessarily male due to its sexual dimorphic traits in the biological life kingdom? What are the compounding utilization rates of income from women who elect not to marry and create life in relation to men which have evolutionary selective pressures to bring home the bacon and therefore become more active investors, ie entrepreneurial, by necessity?
The displacement of men from the labor markets has created a lack of stable patrimonial family formation, which is consistent with the Marxian doctrine’s intellectually revolutionary advocacy and its propagation into the American educational institutions over the last century in time. See the top cited references in the last century in the Western World for corroboration.
[For those unaware, Marx was violently opposed to family creation as necessarily female enslavement (see the second chapter of the Communist Manifesto).]
Patrimony has natural merit for creating principled savings and investments demonstrative in civilized record. Yet most American children are educated by the Nanny State and lack the proper tools to learn how to survive and thrive at being human - a universally patrilineal hereditary trait known as culture.
This form of culture is distinct from one which is unnaturally formed, such as by profit-motivations or ultimately temporal, metabolic functions rather than spiritual contemplation. This is seen consistent with decline in the American population’s affirmation of a transcendental existence conferred by the rise of an Atheistic population. What quantity of atheists were raised not simply with a spiritual life, but a natural one, existing outside of the metabolic motivations of federally legislated education? How does this correspond with the growth of Marxian publications in Academia compared to British Enlightenment literature including the great works of the Occident, such as Aristotle? We ought to be able to compare catalogs over time of the shift and denial of Western Patrimony as good. And I believe the shift exists, demonstrating a disintegrated sexually dimorphic society with transsexual cultural phenomenon as manufactured. Viz, unnaturally formed and therefore biologically morbid. See the overweight phenomenon as further evidence of the morbid nature of the civil authorities.
Yeah, TV and related is a pretty big psyop and always has been. I'm going to invoke Godwin's Law but even the Nazis knew how to use movies back then to brainwash people into doing their bidding.
The audience here is (wrongly) responding to you by thinking that you're somehow targeting women in your questioning, but I get what you're trying to say - you see a strange imbalance of personalities being portrayed in popular media and it's setting off alarms in your head, like someone is trying to sell you something or they're trying to push an agenda on you that you don't quite buy into. They are, but you're resisting. Keep doing this. Eventually, find out who the owners are of all these channels and products that are being pushed on you. What do they have in common, and what would they stand to gain from this. Follow the money.
When I was probably 18 I asked a friend/coworker who was going to community college what they wanted to do after college and they just didn't know. I couldn't wrap my head around that. As far back as I can remember, I always had an answer when an adult asked me "what I want to be when I grow up". It wasn't always a coherent answer, but I always knew what stuff I found interesting.
I don't know why it's different for some people, but it is. I have to think it's something we just don't put emphasis on in our education system or by parents. So pop culture does it for us. When I was a kid everyone wanted to be someone famous; a singer, an athlete, an actor, etc. Today is no different, everyone wants to be an influencer, a streamer, etc.
I think we need to make it a point for kids to understand from a young age that not everyone can be the famous person, neither should everyone want to be. There are so many other options, they only want fame because they don't know anything else.
As an adult, one of the main observations about education is how little it showed me about what jobs are out there.
People pick degrees based on the advice of counselors who seem to know of 8 kinds of job, and half of them are not something you can advise a kid in a striving high school to follow (binman, factory worker, etc) .
It's actually nuts how people will do an internship and then decide this is the thing they want to do. Or they get a visit from someone at school and now they're gonna be an author.
If there's one thing we need in society, it's experiential information about jobs.
For instance I've known many people who went into management consulting. None of them think it has any value. If I was a kid I'd want to know that.
Accountants come across many types of business and are employable in many types of firms. The job is closer to a lawyer than many people expect, esp irl to tax. Your math degree is minimally useful.
Recruiters talk to people all day and are paid in proportion to the salary of the placed person.
Anyway those are just jobs that I don't do, and I know a tiny bit about them through contact with real world people.
It's a natural phenomenon. Potential for anything turns into realization that hard work and passion need to also be coupled with capability. It's debilitating in some ways but a coming of age for others. Those who can cross this chasm succeed and pivot accordingly.
I think you might be the odd one out here. I don't have stats for it, but looking at myself and people around me, most didn't really know what they want to do for a career after school. School typically doesn't really prepare you well for figuring out what you want to do, especially secondary and prior.
Oh I totally agree, the US education system doesn't put any emphasis on helping kids figure out what they want to do after school. If a kid asks "when am I ever going to use this?", it's a sign you need to back up and lay some more groundwork. I don't know why it was different for me, but looking back I think it was important.
The vast majority of employed people are not doing "what they wanted to do when they grow up", and quite many are doing jobs they didn't even know existed.
I wanted to be a Ninja Turtle for quite some time when I was growing up, so I really don't know how much emphasis we should be placing on "what do you want to be when you grow up" anyways.
In case anyone is wondering, I didn't become a Ninja Turtle.
> What are the things that motivates them, and what do they themselves want to do in life?
I suspect quite a few people are looking at the odds of achieving various goals, and simply changing the goals. Such as owning a home in desirable areas, or having kids if you cannot afford a food school district or a job that allows you to be home for dinner.
Or if you have experienced income instability, and you do not feel comfortable bringing children into the world. I probably would not have if I did not find a spouse with income in the top two quintiles. Not that there’s nothing wrong with the alternative, but different people have different risk tolerances and higher (perceived) volatility can be a cause for change in some population wide changed we are seeing.
That’s about how I ended up at having zero interest in raising children. Back when I was still with an ex, I was ambivalent about children. They were in the “probably will happen but I have no concrete plans to change my life to accommodate them just yet” bucket. Said ex had a sudden shift in heart and realized she wanted to be a stay-at-home mom after all while we were discussing whether to get married or not. She was also one of my many classmates who should have said “college is a waste of your time and your dime” when calculating how many student loans would be necessary. It was then that my feelings on children clarified that I would only consider them if I could have a reasonable guarantee of granting them at least the numerous leg-ups I had as a child and that would be infeasible if we were that busy paying off mommy’s student loans. After we broke up, my feelings drifted toward just not interested at all: put flippantly, “spread ideas, not genes”.
> Or if you have experienced income instability, and you do not feel comfortable bringing children into the world.
Yet poorer developing nations have higher birth rates than developed nations. Is it because they have lower expectations for what their children need to live a "good" life, that they just have more hope that things will work out somehow, or that they somehow don't care about these concerns?
They're largely subsistence farmers with high infant mortality and little to no automation which accounts for about 2 billion people. They need children to work the fields and it makes sense to have a lot of children when the labor turn around time is five years and up to a third of them will be dead by then.
The adults pay the "fixed costs" to keep the farm running so each additional child produces more in labor than they consume in resources. They're too poor to hire other adults for labor because they have their own "fixed costs" that are much higher than a child in the family.
> Is it because they have lower expectations for what their children need to live a "good" life
Yes, I think the minimally acceptable quality of life is certainly relative.
> that they just have more hope that things will work out somehow
Possibly, if everyone around you is on an upward trajectory, I can see that changing people’s calculus.
> or that they somehow don't care about these concerns?
I think a big factor is how (financially) independent women are and what kind of access to birth control (especially IUDs) they have. I suspect many of the women who have or had 3+ children would not have if they had similar options to those in developed countries today.
Imagine you are a farmer - you don't have trouble finding space for your kids to play or where to house them, like a person living in a modern megacity might. You probably live with or near extended family, and they can often take care of the kids while you are busy, whereas we now have expensive daycare and carehomes, etc.
> You probably live with or near extended family, and they can often take care of the kids while you are busy
You have to reciprocate which is completelt ignored on HN. They do help you with kids and you have to help them with kids, elder care, sick care house fixing amd what not. You also dont get to make that many individualistic decisions either and many people have to accept their decisions made for them.
It's reductive to say that developed countries aren't having kids because of condom availability, while ignoring all the underlying social factors that don't go away even if condoms weren't available.
In developing countries, more likely than not. But there's also the factors that make people choose to use condoms when they become available. Condom availability has no effect without the whole marketing/education/social pressure around why people should use condoms.
> It's reductive to say that developed countries aren't having kids because of condom availability, while ignoring all the underlying social factors that don't go away even if condoms weren't available.
I didn't say that. Many, many other things affect the reproductive rate. However the availability of contraception (and other tools for family planning) has a significant and obvious impact on the size of those effects.
Education about familly planning and availability of contraception do in fact influence fertility in developing countries. Also, spcifically education for women does a lot too.
As in, when people are able to reliably plan children, they have less of them.
I don't think a lot of people know what motivates them or what they want to do in life.
If you could play video games all day and have fun or force yourself to study or work at a hard job all day, what would you choose?
Wouldn't most people prefer the easier and fun option?
Do you have a solution to this? (I've been thinking about it for a while and I don't know)
In part the solution I would point to is the same that is often said by parents in how one get well adapted children. Provide social support and introduce hobbies. They are not a silver bullet for everyone, but it catches a significant larger portion than stereotypical gender roles.
We can also draw inspiration from the cultural change that we have seen for women. How often do you see in movie a person say to a woman "Are you happy? Is this really what you want...". Lifting personal motivation as an actually question is a early good step towards making people think about it.
There seems to also be a possible error in how people perceive the problem. In the absent of video games you would not suddenly get motivation. Even if you would throw them out on the street with no money, food or shelter, the result would not be a sudden aspiration to become what society expect men to be.
Finding what motivate oneself can either be done through the help by others, or alone. It not as much of a question about what is easier as all hobbies are more work than no hobby at all.
I don't think many people are motivated to do much of anything, and so by consequence they prefer the easier, "fun" option of wasting their time. A motivated person doesn't have to force themselves to work hard, it's the default. That's how I see it.
I wonder if it's more inherent than just culture. Women are more, for lack of a better word, desirable to men than vice versa. A man can value a woman who does nothing but exist. But a man needs something extra to provide some value to the partnership. (The previous sentences are, obviously, meant as an statistical tendency, not a universal truth.) Thus, while the negative constrains on women were mostly baseless in a modern society (with violence and manual labor being increasingly devalued), the negative expectations on men are not as baseless. Of course, in so far as monogamy and the roughly 50% sex ratio mandate some kind of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol%27s_cost_disease, these cultural expectations will lower over time, but I fear that the tradeoffs of the male sex will continue to become more and more out of touch with what is needed to prosper.
I don't think it's a tragedy. The overly dramatic media and pundits get this all wrong in labeling it such.
Young people are simply responding to incentives to live at home longer. Living expenses keep going up relative to inflation and wages, such as home prices, rent, insurance, etc. Living at home is a good way save money, even for the employed. Family formation is expensive and fraught with risks such as divorce and having to pay child support.
In having to choose between playing video games at home, versus a low-paying job and commuting, video games may be the rational choice depending on one's individual preferences. So someone who values leisure over money, would stay at home. Someone who has a higher preference for money than leisure would go to work even if the pay sucks. I don't see anything wrong with people voluntarily choosing leisure over work, because there will always be some people who will choose work over leisure. Someone who makes a lot of money may be more inclined to work, not because they are less lazy than someone who plays games at home, but that earning $100+/hour and no video games is more enticing of proposition than $11/hour and not playing video games; if you give the $11/hour guy $100/hour, then playing video games at home becomes a less attractive proposition.
I completely reject everything that you are saying. A grown man (or woman) who is dependent on their parents at that level has very serious problems because they are the equivalents of obese domestic dogs in a world full of wolves. Left to their own devices, they would have nothing.
A person who does nothing with their life when they could be doing something is really a narcissist. They take it for granted that others will support them even though they contribute nothing and they don't understand that there could be any reason to work hard other than their own immediate pleasure. Ironically, these people often complain that the reason for their situation is because others aren't doing enough to help them. In their minds, it's not really their fault that they are failures and they go to great lengths to convince other people of these lies.
> A person who does nothing with their life when they could be doing something is really a narcissist
Nah, lots of people just tend to follow the path of least resistance at the moment. They don't assume that others will support them forever, they just aren't thinking about it since it is bothersome. If they were forced to do other things then they will do other things, since the force changed what path has the least resistance.
I agree with you, it might not necessarily be narcissism that causes someone to always do the bare minimum in life. What it really comes down to is lack of discipline.
I know a kid that is a bit at risk of this. The issue i see isn’t lack of discipline as much as it is lack of passion or motivation for anything. If you explore their desire for the future it is a complete blank. Nothing is interesting to them, the future just seems dark and grim, they are resolute about not having children and it feels like, to them, the world is committing slow-motion suicide and there’s no sense in getting emotionally invested in any particular outcome.
I've mostly done the bare minimum in life, at things that I didn't want to do. I agree I'm undisciplined. It took a long time to find my own path, and something to strive for.
I think your labels are part of the problem. They're not narcissists. They're people. And you look down on them just for being people.
If you want to help them, perhaps treat them as equals and listen to them rather than thinking of ways to change them.
I wish I knew their gamer tags so that I could play a few rounds of halo with them, or whatever they like to play. They seem chill.
What it often (of course not always) comes down to is that they have experienced some trauma or unfairness that ruins their trust in the delayed reward systems that the survivor contingent happily takes advantage of. It's a much greater emotional load to maintain discipline when you experience setbacks that are out of your control, even partly. If 100 people break the law and 10 get the book thrown at them and 90 get away free, those 10 made a bad choice but they also were unlucky. The bad luck part will tend to weaken the cognitive biases that help people stay motivated, i.e. the just world fallacy, and move their locus of control outward. Risks become less appealing. Satiating immediate wants and needs over investing in long term ones may seem rational.
How do you address this issue? I think it's cheaper and better for everyone to address unfairness than to try to fix people after they come to feel abused by the world. It would also be better than the status quo of Social Darwinism with a sprinkle of charity and busted social programs.
Dear downvoter, I'd be interested in reading why I deserved it.
> How do you address this issue? I think it's cheaper and better for everyone to address unfairness than to try to fix people after they come to feel abused by the world.
Yes, but somehow forward thinking isn't a common phenomenon in our society.
> Dear downvoter, I'd be interested in reading why I deserved it.
Undoubtedly you didn't "deserve" it. The voting system is just a way for the prevailing cliques to signify who's present. This thread is ripe with the hateful and helpless young men referred to in the article, evident by many of the comments. The worse part is that growing trend in this direction on HN. I'd say HN is currently experiencing max Q and I'm not sure it will make it to the other side without succumbing to the pressure(ie decent people leaving the site for good).
The experience here is worse than before, but still better than elsewhere. I think that means HN is ripe for innovation!
I was wondering that too and think it is this aerospace term[0] as metaphor. Q can describe the sharpness/resonance of a signal filter, too, which was my first thought, but makes less sense, although they seem like related terms[1].
>A person who does nothing with their life when they could be doing something is really a narcissist.
I spent a mere year after college living with my parents, a very long and sad year, wondering if this was going to be the rest of my life. My next real job came somewhat out of sheer luck and I'm thankful for it because I could totally see myself having given up, still back there to this day, still having no idea how to take my first step in a direction that actually motivated me beyond the baseline survival mode of wage-slavery. Not for one second during that time did I want to live like that, but it could have very well been the case anyway. Narcissism is far from the truth
Made a throwaway for obvious reasons. I'm in the middle of that year right now. I was doing well - transferred from community college to a top university studying engineering. Perfect grades, several prestigious summer internships. Then I had a depressive episode. Grades went down the toilet, had to leave school. Spent a year getting my life back together, but the depression never really went away. I went back to school part time and was slowly finishing my degree, though never achieving at the same level as before. Things were kind of working. Then covid happened and the lockdown was basically a perfect storm that destroyed all of the fragile systems I had created to get by. Got kicked out of school this time. Now I'm in my late 20's, with no degree and no relevant job experience, sitting in my old bedroom and trying to figure out what the hell to do with my life. From where I am now it really does feel like this is going to be the rest of my life. I can't speak for anyone else, but playing video games or watching youtube all day is the absolute last thing I want, but it feels like just about the only thing I can do right now, and at least it's a distraction from all of the opportunities that are now out of reach.
The only advice I can provide: build things. It does not matter what: social, digital, or physical. Affect the world that surrounds you, don't be its effect. Good luck. You've got it in you. It's hard, but you'll pull though.
Check yourself medically; you might have hEDS, or some other hormonal problem. It’s much more prevalent than people think. Check T3 thyroid for sub clinical, check your Testosterone (female and males). Check for post exertion fatigue by exercising to exhaustion and trying to repeat in a few days. You could do a FMa test. The official diagnosis for hEDS is crap, so go through the comobidities and see if there are other weird things about yourself that it could explain. I spent years thinking I was lazy before finally figuring it out.
I don't know you at all so I don't know how much this can mean, but I just want to say that your situation sounds extremely tragic to me and I feel for you, and your repeated attempts to better yourself and your situation give me hope that you can pull yourself out of this
You're speaking in past tense about baggage you carry. No one is keeping score but yourself. The only way your life will improve is tackling your issues instead of making excuses for them. I say this with kindness, you need to get over it. If playing video games or watching YouTube all day is really the "absolute last thing" you want then act like it. You make your own opportunities, outside of that it's simply luck.
Consider enlisting in the Air Force: lots of opportunities for interesting technical education, well-paid global travel, far less physical risk than the other military branches, just enough discipline and structure to give you some direction.
I am talking about people who are orders of magnitude less motivated than you and do nothing to improve their situation. These people probably never went to college or dropped out just to stay home and play video games. In your case, working a low paying job as a college graduate is actually highly virtuous. Some college grads would rather do nothing because they think they are hot shit.
>working a low paying job as a college graduate is actually highly virtuous.
I disagree. In principle I don't think anyone should work a low paying job, and I think opting out if you can afford it is the right thing to do.
Why should we have a race to the bottom on labor? I'd rather we have more blogs and interesting reading on the internet than cheap Starbucks thanks to full employment and high labor-force participation.
Work for the sake of being busy is silly, I believe industriousness like you profess is unsustainable for our planet, at least in our current social order.
I mean, how much of motivation comes from one's environment/upbringing... I have a strong sense that the vast majority of them thought they just didnt have opportunities to begin with, leading later to the deduction that "the game is rigged" and were destined to wage-slavery anyway. Thus no reason to motivate themselves to contribute
"they don't understand that there could be any reason to work hard"
The cultural pedestal of "working hard" is tragically misplaced. Market promotes those that work smart or gable at the right opportunity, corporate politics promotes the well connected, people that support their family or community the most deserve respect, but the poor folks stocking amazon warehouses 12 hours a day get screwed.
"In their minds, it's not really their fault that they are failures and they go to great lengths to convince other people of these lies."
sometimes it is really not their fault, but one day their parents will not be able to provide for them, and that's when the real tragedy will begin.
Not everyone can do "something." A lot of jobs aren't meaningful or even necessary, and given the increased tendency to require 4 year degrees on top of internships, connections, and more for many jobs makes it harder to obtain them.
Also, a lot of jobs that would employee these men are disappearing. Retail in particular is the employer of last resort, but physical shops are slowly dwindling in numbers. People are a lot more aware of how bad the military is to be in, too; there is much less glamour around it culturally.
Not leading a meaningful life inevitably leads to depression.
That's not to say that a very small few people may somehow find meaning exclusively playing video games. However most people will eventually suffer from lack of self-esteam, low status and shame.
Exactly what is a meaningful life anymore, especially in America?
If you are looking for self-esteem through your job--for most of us those days are gone.
(I know way to many former Programers who aged out of the industry way to early, and gave up. Way to many are homeless. My point is don't expect too much psychological satisfaction from a job that barely covers the rent, has no real pension, and lousy medical. My father lived for work. He loved being an electrician. He didn't develop friendships, or hobbies. He died of liver cancer a few months into retirement. One of our last conversations was when he was dying. He got a letter from the union stating they will now cover his medical expenses 100%.)
These are my principles. I want to be honest and fair to others. I don't care what people say about me at my funeral. Perfectly ok with an anonymous death.
1. Do you mean a meaningful life from the gamers perspective or from the perspective of outsiders?
2. If the issue is lack of self-esteem etc. Wouldn't it be better to focus on mental health instead of employment? Once again, I was interested in talking about gamers who are happy with their situation.
Meaningful to one's self and principles. In the sense that Viktor Frankl wrote about in "Man's Search for Meaning." Wherein he describes the survivors of the nazi concentration camps were the prisoners who had something personally meaningful to live for. People thrive if they have meaning in their lives.
If you can derive meaning from your career, that's great. Otherwise, family or contributing to society or whatever you think makes a difference in the world and is worth working toward.
Like everything, gaming is great in moderation, but the gamer who does nothing with their life but game is probably going to have some regrets on their deathbed.
If the gamer is happy spending his time with his parents and games, it might well be that his principles are aligned around this social connection and activity. It is difficult for me to judge from a distance. Moreover, he might not have any particular principle for his life. I know plenty of folks like that.
You have also used another word - meaning. Is that a synonym for principle?
I am sure the gamer interacts with his parents. I couldn't find anything in the medical literature about excessive gaming either. It is quite possible that he may have regrets on his deathbed like most people. However optimizing your life for the thoughts you will have in your deathbed might not be a great tradeoff if it means doing work that makes you miserable for most of your life.
More succinctly, why work when we have nothing to work for?
Anecdotally, I just graduated from university and am gainfully employed. I'm really happy to be employed, yet I quickly realized that I have no idea what I want to do with all this money. I'm never going to be able to buy a house. I'm not particularly enthusiastic about having kids, and don't think I can afford children in the first place. I have no major life milestones to look forward to other than retirement. So why am I working? What do I do with all this money, other than dumping it in investments and generally hoarding the wealth? I've yet to find an answer.
Who knows, maybe I'll end up retiring before my 40th birthday.
>Why do you say that you're never going to be able to buy a house, but maybe will end up retiring before you're 40?
It's not necessarily about being able to afford a house, but rather about whether home ownership is the best option financially when compared to other options. 20 years ago, homes were so cheap that I'd be willing to buy a home just for the sake of being a homeowner and enjoying the security that entailed. However, nowadays with sky high housing prices, home ownership would need to provide concrete financial benefits when compared to other investments.
Admittedly I'd likely be more motivated to look into buying a house if I wanted children.
>Sounds like, in lieu of anything else, you should try and buy a rental property or two. Start slow, eventually FIRE, that whole thing.
Yes this is the path I am most likely to go down. Buying some rental properties and retiring relatively young is an attractive option.
In a market with rapidly escalating home prices, assuming you're interested in living in the same area for a long time (>5 years probably, depends) buying a house can be a good bit of a hedge against real estate inflation. Home prices going up (usually) drive up apartment prices. My mortgage won't change, maintenance costs won't change, property taxes might. But if my property taxes go up, you can bet rent prices are going to go up by at least that much, probably more. How many apartment complexes rent 5 year leases?
In my country people living with the minimum wage will never be able to go "FIRE" or even retire. They earn about 10 usd a day or about 260 a month have to commute for about 2 hours each way and have one day off each two weeks.
Even I a young tech worker know I will never get a pension and I will never own a "proper house" the closest I will get to that will be more like a caged house in Taiwan.
I had a long conversation with my brother, who never wanted to retire ever, and his reason was basically "what would I even do with all the time I have". My inability to answer that haunts me every day. I still don't know.
I don't think both of those combined would fill my time from when I'm 40 until I die. I'd have to find something that really occupies me (like maybe I start a big open source project or something) but at that point I'm just finding work that I don't get paid for.
You are asking the great question of what the purpose of life is. Wealth? Knowledge? Family and friends? If you were to ask Goethe it is the struggle, the striving and toiling that gives life meaning. Essentially it is the journey not the destination because ultimately we all end up in the same place. Enjoy the moments of life.
As for what to do with the money. Invest it, retire early if you want and if nothing else give yourself the freedom to make work whatever you want it to be.
You can retire before 40 but cant afford a house? That doesn't add up.
Also do you realize that billions of people on this planet have a far worse life than you? You have the luxury of having problems like these. However purpose and meaning don't just appear out of nowhere, you have to actively go find them.
Heh, I have enough income to retire in my 30s, but not enough to buy a house in the neighborhood I rent in where home prices have gone up 500% in the last 10 years.
>I'm never going to be able to buy a house. I'm not particularly enthusiastic about having kids, and don't think I can afford children in the first place
>Who knows, maybe I'll end up retiring before my 40th birthday.
Entirely the rent, and the rent seeking, and the complete lack of housing, sheer greed that drives all the problems.
Hidden deeply on another page someone references a site with numbers from 50 years ago, 1971. (#1) I don't really care what the agenda of that site happens to be; but the numbers. Compare the numbers to today:
Everyone is FAR worse off today and in my generation.
US nationally (today 2021) about 85K is equivalent to the cited 25K 1971 numbers. :: ~10X cost of living (edited, I unconsciously compared to the wrong number.)
Seattle is far more distorted, with housing beyond out of control (I don't know what kind of house was being looked at for the 1971 numbers, but it really doesn't matter, there's almost nothing even remotely near the national price within the region).
Seattle's rent is completely out of control; beyond any rational measure. No wonder neither I nor my generation can make any savings; it's all being consumed by rent seeking land owners.
Income 10600 %Income71
House 25200 237.736
Car 3600 33.962
RentYear 1800 16.981
UniYear 2600 24.528
Gas5000mi 100 0.943
Mail500invite 40 0.377
-
USA 2021 Equiv71
House 269000 113151
Car 30500 89806
RentYear 14400 84800
UniYear 26100 106408
Gas5000mi 483.33 51233
Mail500invite 290 76850
-
Seattle 2021 Equiv71
House 750000 315476
Car 30500 89806
RentYear 36000 212000
UniYear 31200 127200
Gas5000mi 533.33 56533
Mail500invite 290 76850
Millions of jobs were lost due to Covid, many permanently. This was on top of jobs lost in 2008-2010. Each wave permanently removes a bunch of people from the workforce. Pre-2008 it was easier for the unemployed to rebound and find work even without advanced degrees or advanced skills. Not anymore. So there are a lot of people not contributing, either on disability , living with friends or parents, or on some form of welfare. Yet, in validation of MMT, as evidenced by low inflation, low treasury bonds yields, and the strong dollar, supporting these people is not as economically prohibitive as originally believed. The US economy has surpassed the rest of the world since Covid and since 2008 in spite of a lot of people not contributing. A single Bezos or Musk in terms of econ productivity is equal to millions of low-contributing people. In an ideal world, maybe everyone would contribute, but that is not the world we live in.
We ran a huge deficit this year supporting the economy during covid. We are also seeing a spike in short term inflation and a weaker dollar. Treasury bond yields remain low but there is increasing speculation that decades of low rates could soon reverse.
Also are you attributing all value generated by Bezos's or Musk's companies to only them? What about all of the great people they employ?
Short term inflation is rising, but this has more to due with supply and outputs being constrained due to Covid and inflation rising from an abnormally low base. Many pundits and experts underestimated how quickly things would come back, even with the help of stimulus. I think having rising inflation and a booming economy is preferable to a weak economy and low inflation.
They won't be entering the labor force at 40+. Without some kind of disability benefit that keeps them housed and fed, they'll end up living out of a car or a tent, playing games on a phone they charge by running the engine on the camp Winnebago. Bloomberg will run articles about how cars, tents and gasoline are holding them back from participating in the economy.
Or they'll be fine, marry loving partners, get into doing something lax like flipping cars or real estate, spend more than they probably should on entertainment, have a kid or two, pay off their $100k home by retirement age, and live like most of the bottom 40% of the US.
Not everywhere has money. I'm from a place where mortgages (with PMI) plus property tax are under $600/mo, families mostly own one vehicle (a van or truck), and people outside of regular blue collar either work six months out of the year trucking, at one of two local corporate offices, or hold multiple jobs part time (30-32 hours per so they don't ever get benefits).
That's how a lot of America lives, and that's who Medicare4All, free higher ed, and federal funding for K12 helps the most, which would do a lot to build and reinforce our lower middle class.
it doesn't work this way. My experiences/watching is that the men at 40 live with their parents or relatives, take care of them some, and stay single for the rest of their lives in a pretty low standard of living. Essentially those men are the new spinsters, and definitely do not have decent jobs or kids.
But who raises the next generation under that scenario? Immigrants, of course, but what does that say about what American society has become?
This is not a “replacement” screed, by the way, but quite the opposite. If your culture requires constant immigration to survive, that means it’s unsustainable in the steady state. Like, it would be bad if everyone adopted your culture. Your culture is the panda of cultures.
except for the part of an economic system that requires unending growth
This is such a tired phrase. Like if we had socialism or communism or some other -ism it wouldn't matter.
But that's just not true. The issue is math and the fact that prime age working people (25-55ish) are the ones that, for the most part, make stuff. If you have a shrinking population then the % of the population that makes stuff gets a lot smaller so everyone has to be poorer. No "economic system" can change that.
If you have a shrinking population then the % of the population that makes stuff gets a lot smaller so everyone has to be poorer. No "economic system" can change that.
sure, but if people are too exhausted to make the time to have a family (a.k.a nookie) then its maybe worth examining [0] if "constant growth" is societally sustainable
I don't think we even need to settle for reduction. The US economy as measured by GDP and other metrics has surpassed countries with higher pop growth rates, especially since Covid. It does not matter if the % who makes stuff shrinks if productivity goes up.
Productivity grown in the service sector (2/3 of the economy) has been just 0.9% annually since 1947: https://aneconomicsense.org/tag/productivity/. It’s pretty much stopped growing over the last couple of decades.
You would still need a fair system that distributes a base amount of resources fairly. If we had that system the current form of capitalism could last much longer (another 80 years).
What about the scifi trope of robots making things? After all the productivity of a single human has been skyrocketing for more than a century now. I do not which -ism that is. Somewhere between socialism and startrekism I guess.
Wait. I’m not sure I understand what that chart is supposed to show. Are you suggesting because the GDP is only linearly growing productivity is not increasing?
No, look at the “services and construction” line. That measures output per worker in that sector (2/3 of the economy) since 1947. That’s a measure of productivity per worker. It’s grown at only 0.9% over that time. A big chunk of even that tepid growth is in a handful of areas like finance. In vast swaths of the economy, workers aren’t any more productive today than in 1947. Everything from building houses to caring for kids and old people to serving diners at restaurants, etc. We can make iPhones with fewer workers than ever but the post-scarcity economy is very far away.
I don’t have much of an opinion on the scarcity economy but I think you could read that chart differently. The industries that have listed the longest, agriculture, manufacturing etc have seen explosive productivity growth. So you might predict services are next.
Actually it's estimated gradually redistributing wealth from billionaires and Silicon Valley companies via taxes and stimulus checks to the American people could afford us up to 4 to 5 years of prosperity. So clearly you're wrong, we can change living conditions of mostly everyone through a better economic system.
Historically, only a % of the population ever reproduced. About the same as do today.
The difference is that the couples that do have children, have much fewer children. 2, instead of 4.
We need to look at the costs faced by couples with a lot of children. For example, you can accommodate 2 children in a standard 3 bedroom house, but 4 or 5 children are going to need a much larger and more expensive dwelling. Same thing with cars.
The USA seems to be doing alright with this, where housing is relatively affordable, and child tax credits and the ability to combine you income with your spouse. (The situation is much more dire in Central/Eastern Europe)
One way to improve this is to increase land value taxes, but offer a credit for each child of the owners under 18 living there. This would give families a formal tax advantage against baby boomers and investors.
> We need to look at the costs faced by couples with a lot of children. For example, you can accommodate 2 children in a standard 3 bedroom house, but 4 or 5 children are going to need a much larger and more expensive dwelling. Same thing with cars.
Per modern standards. A whole bedroom per child is still today only an amenity that relatively richer people have, especially in desirable areas.
I also wonder how many women chose to have 4 kids. It might have just been an unfortunate byproduct of sex, but now it’s completely controllable. And after seeing what my wife went through in 2 completely normal pregnancies with no complications, you would have to offer me some serious cash if I was a woman to go through that.
> I also wonder how many women chose to have 4 kids.
I guess it depends how far back you go. Prior to child labor laws, having more children resulted in more family income. They could work on the farm or in factories, etc. In those times, childhood mortality was also high. So you may have had 8 kids but not that many would make it to adulthood.
Those women had significantly less ability to not have one more kid. First , there was no child control, only way to not have sex at all. Second, husband was head of familly with huge power and there was no way to escale if he decided the celibacy is not a way to go.
"Historically, only a % of the population ever reproduced. About the same as do today"
What is "historically"? Is that in a society of cavemen where most men died before reaching maturity? Is that a polygamous tribal society?
Is it ancient Rome where peasants had families and had loads of kids to help with farm work? Are we talking post-renaissance, where vast majority of people had families and contraception was non existent, so basically everyone had kids?
When we lived in the US, we only had a single child and said No More. That single child nearly bankrupted us in medical bills. You’d have to be irrational to have a child in the US, be very rich, very poor, or have great health insurance.
Since moving to the EU, when we explain to people how much our child costs, their jaw drops. If the US wants more children, they really need to solve the medical costs problem.
Those old people should have invested in kids. Or be content with their fate.
I hope I can muster up the will to take myself out before someone else has to take care of me. Or maybe there will not even be anyone to take care of me, so it will be a moot point.
There is also a question of who exactly is doing this. I am willfully ignorant of conditions in the lowest 20% of society by wealth and status.
It isn't self-evident that life in the real world at the bottom of society is better than a videogame. Imaginary worlds are a lot more fun than reality. Throw in a minimum wage freezing out very low skill jobs, parental willingness to support, no particular prospect of a girlfriend and maybe a bit of access to some welfare programs. Then maybe the real world just doesn't offer very much.
Those very low-skill jobs that the minimum wage eliminated may not be worth the commute. For that matter, the company may add a bastardized version of those jobs to “other duties as assigned” to a higher-payed employee with a different primary role.
The thing is, to put oneself in a position where they're able to get $100/hr takes a lot of early sacrifice. So it's a false equivalence to say they'd be happy to work for 100/hr rather than 11 - but because 100 isn't offered straight away, purely leisure becomes a reasonable choice. Regardless of how the media portrays it, I'd say it is a rather tragic situation for an able person to live in such a way, only through the support of others.
I think the tragedy is that they would, deep in their hearts, rather not be playing games all day, ie they themselves would like to do something different but they can't find the bridge between what the world offers them and what they can offer the world.
If playing games all day was really their desire then yeah I'd agree with you.
I see this on the fringes of those within my circle of friends. I know one man in this age cohort who doesn't seem to have a job, just plays video games all the time, and I don't get it. But one thing I think about is what he has been exposed to: this is what he knows. I don't think this individual I'm speaking of was raised with anything differently.
In this same light, as I believe the two concepts are directly related: 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.
I suspect all of this is primarily cultural first, and not related specifically to work, the economy, pricing of good or services like buying a home and starting a family, which would come second.
That being said, if we were just talking about young single men, well, of course they're staying at home. It makes no economic sense to move out and get an apartment. The cost of living in major metros makes renting nearly equivalent to paying a mortgage. Except no one is building affordable homes.
> 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 effort from men messaging them is zero to none.
Maybe your friend considers the situation of having fewer women on dating apps as somehow "favoring" their gender, but from what I've seen and heard, sorting through an inbox of unsolicited genital photos and copy pasta pickup artist lines is not something most women would say they enjoy spending their time doing.
If instead he's referring to apps like Bumble where the woman has to make the first move, see above for why some apps choose to operate with that model.
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 wanted someone who had it "all together," and that's just not where most people are in their early 20s. There doesn't seem to be any appreciation anymore for the fact that young couples grow up together. Instead, people seem to think that you grow up first and establish who you are independently, then find someone else to bring into your life. But realistically, you don't finish growing before dating, and in life who you become is based on the interactions not just with your significant other, but your friends and family, too.
Lastly, all of my dating experiences online lead me to women who wanted to be "entertained." And not in the sort of "wined and dined" sense which seems obvious to me, but rather most women I came across didn't want to get to know men, they just wanted entertainment value out of the experience of dating. This was a sharp contrast from interactions with young women in real life. The dating world for both young men and women online seems to create some strange scenarios that don't play out well for anyone involved. I see this manifest the most in online dating where most men are naturally led to play pickup artist lines. I personally find it extremely off-putting. I'm not a jester.
"Take me on an adventure" was always a instant no for me. In the modern world a spouse is supposed to be a equal partner, I'm glad I found my wife who feels the same way. I don't want someone I have to drag somewhere like a suitcase.
I think this also gets to the heart of it. My general feeling was that women wanted equality but didn't want to put in any effort whatsoever, and so a lot of women I came across just seemed like bums.
I'm not saying that is what you're saying. It just made me recall my experiences.
It's a terrible thing to say, but many young women today, if judged by the same standards as men, would be considered losers. They have nothing going on in their own lives, yet have sky-high expectations of what men are supposed to provide them. And for the most part, modern dating culture lets them get away with it.
I might get flack for saying this, but a large number of women's dating profiles just consist of "dog mom", "loves watching The Office", and something about "Jesus". It's shockingly consistent and bland, with very little to engage in conversation about.
Now I will say it's not really anyone's fault. Women looking for men probably don't see what the other women on the site's profiles look like. Likewise my profile might be a trope as well. But men do have to go out of their way to stand out to get a decent chance at a connection.
I would put forward that there is probably an interesting person behind most of those dog mom, office watcher profiles. Most people just aren't good at marketing themselves and mass media culture has made people scared or less capable of sharing how they are different from the herd (i.e. interesting).
> mass media culture has made people scared or less capable of sharing how they are different from the herd
You're right. Everyone is interesting once they open up a little.
The goal though isn't to show how you're different from the herd, it's to show that you're better than the herd, for whichever sub-herd you're signaling membership. That strategy preserves maximum choice.
I agree, I absolutely despise dating apps which seem to do well at making most people look overbearingly boring. I've heard from acquaintances that are woman that a lot of profiles of men also tend dot be very formulaic .
Something interesting I've noticed, is that trying to break that mold is considered negative. If you look at subreddits that tend to give out advice (typically to men) on dating profiles, they advise people to do things that make their profiles more generic.
I personally avoid dating apps, because I'm not attractive enough (or at least, not photogenic enough, somehow cameras almost always manage to clown me) and I'm not outwardly interesting enough to attract people by reducing myself down to a few pictures and text snippets.
Young men reading this, don't let it get you down or make you hate women, that path leads to ruin. In my experience once you become the sort of man who chooses not to participate when someone expects more from you then they are willing to give, the sort of women who is willing to be a equal partner comes out of the woodwork. They don't want to be with a loser either.
If a young main in his 20s is dissatisfied with the dating culture and prospects, it makes some sense to just forget about dating until early 30s and instead use all of that time and freedom to focus on establishing yourself. If you can focus and put in the work to become the type of person you want to be, then you'll pick your head up at the age of 32-35 and (seemingly) suddenly a lot of those women in their 20s will want to date you. Speaking from personal experience and assuming you aren't the type who wants to start a family in your 20s.
As a happily married man in his late 20s, I really stress not doing this. You skip an entire small lifetime of not finding someone and growing up through your young adulthood, waiting for things to improve for you as a man (read: for women to finally come around because of divorce, settling, or their biological clock ticking) and I'd argue things at that point would be more difficult.
Because you then have established so much of who you are independent of the interactions between yourself and a who-would-be spouse, there's a greater chance that you'll have even more to disagree over.
You're only creating more difficulties for yourself. Beyond the intricacies of a crystallized person, there's a smaller dating pool, it's more difficult to get pregnant, you have a greater difficulty acquiring assets not having another person you're working together through life with.
Yes, those women in their 20s will want to date you, but if you're in your 30s, you're effectively dating a kid. They absolutely do not have the same experiences you will have at that point in time unless you did no personal growth for a decade.
I agree with you that this route probably isn't best for _most_ men, which is why I said that it makes "some" sense, but I should have clarified that it's not broadly advisable (even by someone like myself who took this route). If you aren't very comfortable with who you are by yourself, and happy with yourself, and also very focused and determined to do something quite ambitious professionally, then yes I think finding a partner to grow with and lean on is the best route.
And also as I mentioned below but just to make sure it's clear: if you aren't comfortable dating, then you should date as often as you can because it can be genuinely fun and fulfilling and lead to very positive outcomes. If you _are_ comfortable dating and do well with the opposite sex of your preference, but just aren't satisfied with what's out there or it feels forced and unenjoyable, then you _might_ benefit from focusing more on developing yourself rather than focusing on the partner search. It's a cliche but once you're truly in a good place with yourself, you tend to attract to the right people into your life.
One alternative is that they just become jaded by their failures by the time they're in their 30s. At that point it would be fairly trivial for them to give up on all of it.
> If a young main in his 20s is dissatisfied with the dating culture and prospects, it makes some sense to just forget about dating until early 30s and instead use all of that time and freedom to focus on establishing yourself.
This needs to be hugely caveated. If you skip dating for five to ten years, you're gonna jump back in fresh and probably fuck things up terribly the first few times. Too eager, too indifferent, too clingy, too distant, etc... you're gonna be terribly out of practice at it all.
It's a skill, like anything else it takes practice. There's altogether too much BS out there about people being "meant to be" versus people putting in the work on both sides to create something real.
> It's a skill, like anything else it takes practice.
That’s why you should never stop dating, even after you’ve met someone. You never know when you’ll break up and have to find someone else. Best to stay sharp.
"Too eager, too indifferent, too clingy, too distant, etc... you're gonna be terribly out of practice at it all."
These are generally personality traits of someone who is not well adjusted. If you are the type of person who can become professionally and personally (think friendships and any other non-sexual relationship) successful, then you'll probably be fine jumping back into the dating pool even if you've only dabbled casually for a pretty long period of time.
How you're perceived isn't always going to be the same as how you are, and people make judgements quickly. Actions only come naturally through repeated practice, barring a naturally lucky few, and dating requires a whole different set of actions than in other relationships.
You might also quite reasonably be confident in your professional and personal-friend lives, but be lacking some of that confidence in dating, since you haven't done it for years. These aren't transferable domains for a lot of people.
I was on dating sites and apps for several years before I started having any luck finding much, much less something serious, and every moment of it was valuable practice in an area that didn't come naturally to me at all. My career situation also improved throughout those years, sometimes faster than my dating skills, and I quickly learned that having a nicer car did me 0 favors while I was still uncomfortable on a date in the first place. None of that professional practice applied - was I going to talk about load balancers and HA strategies on the date?
I don't disagree and I think I should have clarified that if you're the type of young man who has trouble dating (in the sense that you find yourself to be awkward, or have mostly bad dates), and can't seem to connect with women, then do NOT do what I have suggested here. Get out there and take a lot of swings.
I've had a long string of failures after starting dating (Post covid vaccine) and just felt so incapable of being next to another person.
It's like all this time quarantined as put my dating skills back to zero (not that they were ever good). I feel so broken, like shards of glass that cuts anyone who tries to touch me.
But you have inspired to to once again glue all my broken shards together and try and try again.
Another caveat: they still might not want to date you. Making real human connections is just significantly more difficult for some people than it is for others, but on the plus side you are much more the person you want to be, so you can feel good about that anyway.
If a young man is dissatisfied with the dating culture and prospects he should pickup and learn an instrument, find some other musicians and invites peoples to watch them practice/jam.
P.s. I've learn just enough bass to meet my wife !
> instead use all of that time and freedom to focus on establishing yourself. If you can focus and put in the work to become the type of person you want to be...
I go out socialising/partying less now, and am on the PC more (games, projects, etc - most of my interests are on PC). Your advice creates the people in the article!
Nothing is perfect 100% of the time and it can take a few tries to sort out what you need or want in a relationship, along with what you are or aren't willing to tolerate.
> It's a terrible thing to say, but many young women today, if judged by the same standards as men, would be considered losers. They have nothing going on in their own lives, yet have sky-high expectations of what men are supposed to provide them. And for the most part, modern dating culture lets them get away with it.
"Today" is an interesting word choice. This seems like a lingering problem originating in the past, when women were entirely expected to depend on a man to provide, and were NOT expected to have stuff going on in their own life beyond being fertile and useful around the house and of good family background...?
What's the line? "Feminism is for men too"?
Men who just want hookups can keep such women's calendar filled for a while but aren't going to be really doing that providing in the long run.
But in general, the obsession with not being a loser is dangerous for everyone: not everyone will be in the top 10%, and not everyone will attract someone in the top 10%, by simple math, and yet people of both gender's are convinced that it's the other group that has the unreasonable standards...
Gaining empowerment doesn’t mean you expect less from a provider, it means you stack the two together for an even better life. At least that’s a major philosophy out there. “What’s mine is hers, what’s hers is hers.”
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 they contact, based on things the recipient mentions in their profile and suchlike.
Of course, a man sending 100 copy-pasted messages and a man sending 5 high-quality messages might be expending the same amount of effort in total but the latter is demonstrating greater effort per woman
In this context, kogepathic means more men should adopt the strategy of carefully composing messages.
You also have the problem of writing dozens and dozens of seemingly engaging and individualized messages only to get no response back. So eventually, you start putting less and less effort into each message and even start to repeat old ones. It's a sad fact of life.
When I was dating I was fortunate to have a large enough match pool to experiment with this. The result: a stupid copy-pasted throwaway line or emoji had roughly the same results as a message I put some thought into. The second category got a few more responses but in terms of conversion to an actual date there wasn't an appreciable difference.
The takeaway for me is profile pictures, physical appearance and class/status signifiers (vacations, hobbies, nice things in/around the picture) were all that mattered and if someone was sold on that all you really had to do was not get in your own way by saying something stupid.
> You also have the problem of writing dozens and dozens of seemingly engaging and individualized messages only to get no response back.
To use a property analogy: if I am not the highest offer on a house, I probably won't get it. Doesn't matter if I have a trust fund or work for minimum wage (effort put into the offer) my offer wasn't accepted.
Similarly if I'm the seller, I can decide "No, actually I don't want to sell my house to BlackRock, I'd rather sell it to this young family" and that's entirely my choice. This choice might leave money on the table, but at least I get the warm fuzzy feels inside for doing what I think is best.
What you describe sounds like you want some kind of "thank you for putting in some effort" but you decide the amount of effort to invest, the other party owes you nothing.
You're right, the ideal solution is to keep putting in the effort to be sincere and engaging. I certainly don't believe I am entitled to a response. I'm just trying to convey how demoralizing it can be to put your best foot forward so many times only for nothing to come from it. I think it's human nature to be tempted to slack when your big efforts have had so little payoff.
I assure you, women feel the same way. It's incredibly demoralizing to receive hundreds of swipes, of which the vast majority produce only a copypaste first message. Or worse, "DTF?", of which they'll see plenty.
It's hard to say which is worse: the messages that say that they haven't put any thought into you at all, or the messages that say they have exactly one thought about you -- and everybody else.
Everybody gets poor payoff percentages. You play if you think the game is worth the candle.
All day can say is I never had any problems finding a woman to talk to. It wasn't hard. There are lots of fish in that sea. All I had to do was be thoughtful, polite, and interesting.
I'm told it's different in other places but I suspect that has more to do with the men than the women.
I never found it hard to get a reply. I don't really know what I was doing right that everyone else seems to be doing wrong. I'm neither excessively handsome nor wealthy.
My suspicion is that I worked to make myself interesting, and worth conversing with. And I see a lot of comments here that betray a deep distrust of women, with a ton of stereotyping and lack of empathy. I hear tons of complaints from women about men's profiles, and it never has to do with looks or money.
I've sometimes thought of opening a dating profile consultancy. I may be completely off base, but I believe that in a lot of cases, men can do better without changing jobs or their appearance. And my first piece of free advice is that if you're blaming women, women aren't going to like you.
> My suspicion is that I worked to make myself interesting, and worth conversing with.
In what sort of ways are you “ interesting”? Genuinely curious. FWIW most advice I’ve seen regarding advice for dating profiles (particularly for guys) involves removing anything that might signify personality and to make it as formulaic as possible. Your pictures all have to be the right things, the profile description can’t be too short or too long, and can only say certain things, etc. I think on these sort of apps it’s almost seen as positive to be as basic as possible. Even I find myself suspicious of profiles that say to much or try to stand out now.
The other piece of advice I see almost always has to do with quality of pictures, which is understandable, but let’s be real, if I had the kind of life where I was happy all the time, doing cool things and taking pictures with friends, I probably wouldn’t need to be on this app ;)
I'm sure there are some women who want blank slates for men, but not the type of women I like. I like to post vacation and activity pictures, and use the text to suggest that I've got stories to share on our first date.
So many women I've met complain that they start the date with "so tell me about yourself" and get, "uh I dunno. I like to play video games." (Not that there's anything wrong with video games but at least have some stories to tell. Maybe she'll also play. Jackpot. Unless you start telling her she's not a real games.)
I do lots of things. I act, i juggle, i run marathons. The tricky part is phrasing it in a way that doesn't come off as "I'm too cool an expect you to shut up and listen."
That is of course just what works for me, and for the kind of women I like. (Talking about dating sites is a really easy topic of conversation on a first date, so I hear a lot.)
If they're telling you to be dull, maybe that works for other men with other women. But to me it sounds like a recipe for a boring date.
I try to go in with the attitude that if we do nothing more than spend a few minutes chatting nicely over coffee, it will have been fun and worth my time. That kind of attitude seems best for making myself seem worthwhile and fun, so that she wants more.
Sure, I wasn’t commenting on the preferences of women, but more of the culture of dating apps, which seem to reduce people to some photos and a few snippets of text. From what I hear women have their own crap to put up with on those platforms.
I think you're being a bit unfair. The parent comment describes a hardship, investing time, effort, and some sense of self-worth and seeing it vanish into nothing, and your response makes the parent seem entitled. "Like you want some kind of 'thank you for putting in some effort.'
If someone told you they were having a hard time buying a house and all their offers were silently rejected replying "The sellers owe you nothing" might be true, but it is beside the point.
No, that's an aberration perpetrated by software. The same problem has manifested in interviewing. Maybe you're thinking of "nobody owes you sex" instead?
If you greet a person in real life or over a call and they intentionally ignore you, they are being rude. Obviously, if you're being rude first, that's different. They can say "hey" back, or "sorry, I'm not interested" or "kind of busy right now, can we pick this up later?" There are plenty of options.
I understand that the way these apps are set up, responding like this isn't a winning strategy. Despite what the Internet would have you believe, there is a minimum social bar when there's a human on the other end of a comm channel.
Putting too much effort into those messages is a trap I fell into in the past when looking for relationships on dating apps. You've seen a few pics and read a couple sentences of text they typed - you shouldn't read too much into it for your own sake, and you also don't want to look like you're too eager to jump into something way too fast.
(Looking for hookups on apps is, I imagine, an entirely different ballgame, and I have no idea what works or doesn't work there.)
I doubt this is true. I almost always have send out personalised messages if possible (E.g. comment on something in their profile, something noteworthy in their fotos or something else). They just almost never respond(I would say <<5% even respond), and if they respond it's not much beyond an: "haha thank you" or something empty like that, with no follow up of any kind. It was impossible to keep any kind of conversation going no matter what I tried.
Now? I just gave up. I have better things to do then spend hundreds of hours without a single conversation going anywhere. Online dating is a useless black hole.
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.
This strategy won't work anymore, because old OKCupid style "long form" profiles are gone. Modern dating profiles have the equivalent of a twitter bio worth of stuff on them now.
I'd wager a big part of the reason for the increased success was that you were messaging people who you were genuinely interested in, and the interest came across in your messages.
This is why tinder was created, having both parties express some level of interest eliminates the need and most of the benefits of mass spamming. Granted one party could spam likes, but ranking algorithms probably take into account this behavior.
This is talking about two different things, I think.
The "I want the total package" unrealistic-expectations person is prominent in both genders, even if "no fat chicks" t-shirts aren't as popular as they once were. The slob-with-hot-wife TV trope probably hasn't helped men's expectations here.
The "I'm gonna send a thousand dick pics and see who is down for a hookup" behavior, on the other hand, seems predominantly male-dominated. Even the women looking for hookups don't operate like that (you could debate chicken-and-egg here, around how they don't ever have to with all the dudes throwing themselves at them, but I'm not too interested in that). Those men result in a worse experience for BOTH women and men, but in a more acute fashion for the women on the receiving end of the creepiness than for the men who just have to try harder to manage to stand out above the background bullshit level.
> Those men result in a worse experience for BOTH women and men
Someone at Match Group must have worked out that having these users boosts the bottom line more than it reduces engagement and retention. Maybe these are the guys paying for Premium Platinum with extra InMails each day. (Oops wrong platform.)
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.
I'm sorry, but your comment cracked me up - viscous means a thick, sticky consistency, so a viscous cycle for women, well; you meant vicious circle, I assume
> 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 because I do have some sympathy for the recruiters who are just doing their best, but it's also clear they're just blasting out offers to anybody who meets a basic set of requirements.
That said - I'm much happier being in the position I'm in of too much interest than at the other end of the spectrum.
Getting off topic here, but not sure why you feel obligated to reply to the recruiters. You're just an input into their automation system 99% of the time. I find it amusing when they send an email at like 8pm on a Saturday.
Bumble has its own issues. It turns out "making the first move" is anxiety inducing in everyone. What women have done on Bumble is to basically treat the "first move" as an "invitation to treat", a second shot at selecting a guy. Most of those "first moves" are exactly what they say they don't want from guys: simple "Hey"s and "Hello"s. And then they say in their profile that once they say "Hey", you're supposed to respond back with something substantial and entertaining.
I don't think dating apps/sites favor either sex more so than dating in general does. Women, in general, don't really have to try to get solicitations. Their issue is in trying to weed through all of the solicitations to find those worth responding to. It's basically the hiring problem. But there's no Hackerrank for compatibility.
And then there's the issue that even those that feel the system is tilted against them in general don't understand that it's just them. They're not successful because they aren't as kind, nice, or desirable as they think they are. Or they keep making the same bad choices in romantic pursuits and wonder why they keep getting the same outcome.
The problem with all of these apps and gimmicks and what not and certain segments of tech in general is that it assumes that deep down, people are making rational choices. We aren't.
I did appreciate on Bumble that women got to realize that writing that first message wasn't easy. I always carefully crafted my first message on any site, and it is disheartening to get no reply to that.
(Some of it, I think, is Tinder et al showing me profiles that it knew perfectly well were defunct. They're hoping to attract the person back, but it's a very dark pattern.)
I did find that the vast majority of women on Bumble wrote tolerable first messages. Some were better than "hi" but nonetheless didn't say much, which I interpreted as "OK, you can go ahead and write the first message." That rarely turned out well, but at least I knew the account wasn't dead and not a bot (at least, probably not).
I met a lot of great women on both Bumble and Tinder, leading to relationships everywhere from one-night stands to decade-long romances. I don't think it's easy for either men or women, albeit in different ways. It's very easy to make the mistake that thinking that if X is hard for me then X must be the only important thing, and that leads to a lot of ill will.
> Women, in general, don't really have to try to get solicitations.
Women put in high effort up front and lower effort per solicitation. Men put in lower effort up front and more effort per solicitation. Women's approach scales better, though they also bear the safety risks.
> those that feel the system is tilted against them in general don't understand that it's just them
Absolutely. Imagine if dating apps showed users their rating!
> At Tinder headquarters, I ask them if the data they’re about to show me will scar my ego. The beauty of Tinder, after all, is that rejection has been removed entirely from the process. Now, in an instant, I’d learn exactly how I ranked on Tinder. Then Solli-Nowlan revealed my score. “It’s 946,” he said. What does that mean? “It’s on the upper end of average.” It’s a vague number to process, but I knew I didn’t like hearing it. Something about “upper end of average” didn’t exactly do wonders for my ego. https://www.fastcompany.com/3054871/whats-your-tinder-score-...
On the other hand, showing your rating could be good IF coupled with actionable ways to improve it. Credit Karma but for Tinder anyone?
> I don't think dating apps/sites favor either sex more so than dating in general does.
It's a force multiplier and the dynamics that are already present in dating in general get reinforced. So you end up with 99% of the women competing for the top 1% males and the remaining 99% males competing for nothing at all because all their advances get ignored.
It's just the result of our reproductive strategies exerting an incredible influence on our behavior, more so than we personally realize.
I think you're right about dating apps not really favoring either gender. Hiring is the first thing I think of when reading about dating apps. There's just a very strong natural imbalance.
Dating apps are especially good at making people not have to face their shortcomings, i.e. I don't have to fix my shortcomings, because with a large enough pool there's going to be someone broken in the right way to accommodate me. Maybe that's rational, or maybe it's not, it really depends on expectations.
Counter intuitively, accepting that we're just stupid hairless apes makes me believe we're rational. We're not failing to find anything meaningful; we're not interested or looking.
We have our moments. But relying on rationality is an assumption that will bite you in the ass every time. Just look at markets, even when there's a clearly superior option, there's been plenty of times the inferior product wins.
Often because that inferior product manages to exploit our irrational selves either intentionally or unintentionally.
> Hiring is the first thing I think of when reading about dating apps
I agree for a different reason. The circus show about hiring is mostly bullshit. You could probably randomly select qualified candidates and turn out just fine.
Likewise with dating, ordering up another human like a sandwich creates a weird dynamic designed to keep you shopping — you stop paying when you meet someone.
If you paired 10 pairs of average people at random and had them doing some task that took them a couple of weeks, half would be “together” at some level by the end.
Doing things together in groups, which leads to almost by definition having to build relationships, including romantic, seems like the best way, and that's how things were before Internet. Some commenters above hit kind of the same notes, and I wonder, maybe an app that builds a mixed group of men and women to do some activity together offline, would result in better outcomes. Of course this will be gamed in no time by the bad intentioned. I think the truth is, that finding a mate has always been a crapshot, and largely random, through out history of life itself. Internet does not seem very successful as a mating platform, I have never been a user of dating apps so what would I know, but maybe on average it's just a little better than randomly stumbling on potential life partners. Still, going out and meeting people instead of staring in screens feels more natural to me.
This complaint should be taken about as seriously as a rich person complaining how hard it is to be rich.
Every woman can put herself in a man's position of no matches - just delete Tinder. Every rich person can become poor - just give away all their money.
Yet they don't. It's called revealed preferences. Because having options, no matter how bad, is better than not having options.
There's also an obvious selection bias - the matches may be sending low quality messages, but if women are largely selecting only the top 2% of good looking men they're skewing these results themselves. The 'better' men never get to the messaging stage at all.
I'm happy to be out of the game, but online dating is bleak for 98% of men.
The data in that book corroborates a lot of this. We're not that different from gorillas - sexual selection is tough and most of the discussion around it ranges from wrong to dishonest.
It's certainly believable that women don't enjoy dating apps, but I think it's difficult to make the case that it's equally hard for them (in terms of successfully getting a date) when they have thousands of matches and many men I know have none.
Women are paying a high price in the online dating world. It’s preying on their weakness the same way porn does for men.
Most women don’t want to sleep around and have a large number of partners. But tinder leads them to believe that they can find an unrealistic partner. And they get hurt by the small percentage of men that play the online dating game well.
Women need a lot more data and time to evaluate a potential partner before initiating contact.
I think a solution would be to limit the number of matches one could have at a time. This forces the user to sacrifice something (the opportunity cost of matching with someone else) to remain in contact with their match.
My experience with Tinder was that all the women I met turned out to be more interested in hooking up than anything else. Is there an app for people who don't even really want to sleep with each other, but would prefer to just hang out and talk? I want to use that one.
I have to comment that I think women who want to date go to tinder as a very last resort and don’t expect a long term relationship there.
For serious relationships we tend to go to okcupid and bumble as they are wayyy less creepy apps.
At least where I live tinder is known as the one night stand app.
Date as in quick one night stand and even then claim is pushing it. It is not the first choice place of meeting guys, especially if you look for something more long term.
Anyway, the disbalance between amount of men and women there is quite large.
Thousands of matches isn’t a good thing. If you ever have the opportunity ask a female friend to show you the kind of messages they get on dating apps. They’re pretty appalling. It genuinely worries me that there are so many creeps out there. The men you know may not be getting many matches but at least the ones they get are more than likely from relatively normal people. If I had to sort through the garbage women do on dating apps I wouldn’t be on them.
But surely you can see how hopeless dating feels for many men when they swipe right on hundreds of women and get 0 matches? I'm not saying they aren't getting many — they're getting none (I know you just have my word on this, but trust me when I say they are not ugly or fat or anything, just nonwhite and without high paying jobs, but otherwise average-looking guys who have dated successfully in the past).
The situation isn't great on either side, but plenty of statistics show it's mostly women having sex off these apps, so clearly there is an actual imbalance.
And you can't write off the sheer hopelessness and isolation that the thought "there's not a single woman out there who would date me" induces in young men. I'm sure it's not fun for women but it is absolutely __brutal__ for many men.
Oh certainly. Their experience is that there’s a huge racial factor in how many matches they get (e.g. having an Indian name seems to be a death sentence) — I was just reporting their experience and didn’t mean to imply anything else!
He didn't say it was, he said it was preferable to having no matches.
I recall seeing the OkCupid stats once (okstats?). The numbers pretty much said that although women were getting most of the messages, they were all only responding to the same 10% of males, while most men were sending messages to almost all the women.
You've pretty much got 80% of the women competing for the top 10% of the males.
That 80% number might give a false hope to readers. In fact it's 100%, but the bottom 20% give up without trying because they correctly assess their chances.
If thousands of matches are not a good thing, why keep swiping? They could choose instead to talk to the matches they already have. The matches they have are already the ones they've screened for.
It's just numbers game. If you're interested in quick sex and you can send messages to dozens on women with very little effort, you do it. If just one percent signals interest, you already have a win.
Why invest more time and energy than absolutely necessary?
> If instead he's referring to apps like Bumble where the woman has to make the first move, see above for why some apps choose to operate with that model.
Under that model.. it's common for the first message to be "hi" or ".". Not much has changed.
Isn't that the exact lack of effort you complain about? The real problem is that wtf are you supposed to say to someone you don't know? Whatever that comes out is meaningless because you have 0 to go on. That's the point. It's a starting point.
What a lot of ignorant men don't realize is that's the woman saying "you start the convo." Not everything is meant to be interpreted literally in dating and relationships. If you believe that, you're doing it wrong.
I have an idea I've been toying with for a dating tool (I refuse to call it an app) based on the premise that all dating "apps" and "sites" are horrible because their incentives are aligned toward wanting people to actually use them. You pretty much have ad-driven and subscription models and both have perverse incentives. Further, the whole "wink", "like" and "swipe" nonsense increases the "meat market" commoditization and dehumanization of the whole thing.
So my idea is to put all the incentives the other way. The tool is designed to operate on a budget of ~$0. I would accept donations, but otherwise have no monetization and therefore no desire to increase "engagement" of any kind. My incentive is such that I actually don't want you to interact with the tool, because that will cost me bandwidth and processing time. I will allow you to have a profile of text and one single image of restricted size, because I don't want to have to host anything else. You will fill out a multiple choice questionnaire with as few questions as I feel I can get away with to ensure at least some level of basic compatibility, and then you do nothing.
Periodically, a cron job will run and see if anyone matches, then it will send you both each others profiles (through good old-fashion email) and ask if you'd like to go on a date. If you've both agreed, there will be a sequence of messages from the system proposing date ideas, locations, and times until consensus is reached. Then it's all up to you. This is designed to ensure that you make a real human connection to the person in a real life interaction before any contact information is ever exchanged.
It probably sounds as though this sort of thing would have a hard time attracting users. I consider that a feature, because it means it'll cost less to run and it will avoid attracting ego-inflation seekers, low effort numbers gamers, and other ungenuine people.
As envisioned, I would expect this sort of thing could cover a moderately sized state on a raspberry pi.
I've thought about ways to improve dating networks, and I think the best solution is to throw them out and just get young people to go out in groups and do activities together. Romance would be a secondary output (as would friendships, professional networking, and plain old perspective broadening).
Rationale is that a lot of women, and to a lesser degree men, do not feel comfortable going out 1x1 with a stranger (and potential predator/rapist/catfish). Not to mention the pressure of finding common interests and cultivating a date experience. The group dynamic offers safety, and the hobby-focused nature of the activity offers entertainment without pressure.
For what it's worth, I came to the same conclusion. You cannot fix online dating, but the real problem is that the younger generations used to have a lot of face to face hangout time due to how the world worked pre-internet, and all that is gone now.
Now you have to plan every hangout and it happens once a week instead of once a day.
I think this is probably the best solution. But what activities do you recommend? Compared to a couple generations ago it seems like it's harder to find good casual activities that appeal to both sexes as a default meeting ground.
There is a dating service called Events and Adventures which operates that way. A friend of mine worked there but I never used it and don't know whether it's effective.
And I will make X profiles from X emails, filling out the questionnaire in several ways to maximize the number of hits I get. The profile will be some good ol PT Barnum style pablum that appeals to just about all of us. I will also add pictures that are either extremely flattering of me, or of someone else. It doesn't really matter.
Then I just agree to every date that gets sent to my email. Ideally this could be automated so that I could run it on a raspberry pi.
Then you... what? Don't show up to dates? Do show up but get no contact information anyway because you aren't who you said you were? That's a lot of effort to put in for essentially nothing.
You could, but I don't really see the incentive in it. At least, I don't really see how it is any easier than doing basically the same thing on any other dating platform, except those platforms put you in contact with the person before you actually have to meet them.
This is an excellent way to have a LOT of just bad, bad dates. Good luck! I hope you change, for your sake, and for the sake of the people you'll drag through dates.
Dating is a numbers game. The more dates you go on, the higher odds you have of finding someone compatible.
Sure you could be more picky and spend the same effort to go on less dates and maybe end up in the same boat at the end, you'll just get laid less often. And honestly, I learned so much about myself, about women, and about people in general by going on a bunch of average or below average dates.
It's always been that way with online dating. Men, on average, putting zero effort on the profile (including photos). Women put slightly more than zero effort into their profiles but get inundated with messages from mostly-terrible choices anyway because men like women.
Men spray low-effort messages at lots of women hoping for a bite. Women don't message because they have options.
Quality men trying to find any sort of extra have to work extra hard on selling themselves. Women looking for quality men have to work extra hard on creating a profile that deters the poor options they get (hard) _and_ deal with more subpar dates.
What would they do if every man spent 30 min writing a super long message that is drowned out by the other 1000 messages? They wouldn't spend the 2000 minutes it would take to skim all of them. I certainly would give up after 10 messages.
We seem to live in an age of such abundance and freedom that it's now possible to live in all manner of ways which seems to exacerbate these extremes.
In the past if you were a man and wanted to eat and have a home you had to work. We also relied far more on children to look after us in our old age than we do today.
Today welfare and the affordability of essentials like food make it possible for people not to work and not worry about the implications of growing old without family.
I agree it's cultural, but it's a cultural trend being fuelled by the abundance of modern day living. Whether that's good or bad, I don't know. I guess it's nice people can choose to play video games all day and not worry about working or having a family, but I worry about the impact this will have on our mental health. I also wonder what this means for economic inequality and the stability of society in general. I'm a big believer that people only care to preserve societies they have a stake in and if a large enough percentage of the population own nothing and offer no value it's very easy to see this causing a division. Should I as someone who works, pays tax, pays for his own home and pays for his own food be happy with someone who chooses not to work and have everything paid for them by people who work like me? And if you don't work and don't pay tax wouldn't you naturally want to see higher taxes and more government welfare?
Where is this socialist paradise that you speak of where you can have a home without working? There is nowhere like what you are saying.
It is the exact opposite of what you are claiming. Affordability of essentials has become so much worse that many people can't afford to live a decent life with their own home even if they are working the jobs that they can actually acquire.
These people aren't privileged because they "choose not to work and have everything paid for them by people who work like me", it is generally emotionally devastating to be stuck living with your family while your youth evaporates. Further, the money to do this is coming from the family (for those lucky enough to have a family wealthy enough). You're not paying for it with your taxes.
> Where is this socialist paradise that you speak of where you can have a home without working?
Finland, for example. "Home", of course means a simple flat in a housing block and there might be a waiting list, but housing every single one of its people regardless of employment has been something that the state has sought for a long time.
I live there and personally know people that are unwell but pushed to work because there are so many requirements, always going to doctors and filling out forms. You can't just say you don't want to work.
> It is the exact opposite of what you are claiming. Affordability of essentials has become so much worse that many people can't afford to live a decent life with their own home even if they are working the jobs that they can actually acquire.
Where do you live? Most people I know are literally given homes to live in by the government. Admittedly I'm a working class guy in the UK and I'm not that familiar with the US welfare system so perhaps its quite different there. But for example, my girlfriend's mum has never worked a day in her life but lives in a £600,000 5 bed house. When she went to the job centre last year she was advised not to take part time work because she'd lose out on the benefits.
If these people were starving or homeless, don't you think they would get a job? Today we have a generation of people who have parents rich enough to let them live in their homes rent-free without demanding they get a job while the government is there for you if you decide not to. Is it any surprise some people decide a 9-5 isn't for them?
To your point though, I do accept it's harder to own your own home, but it's certainly not harder to live without a job today. At least not here in the UK.
This story is just a lie. As others have said, council houses and benefits in the UK are not a pleasant experience, or easy to get without jumping through means testing hoops constantly
> For certainly your desire for peace, and prosperity, and plenty is not prompted by any purpose of using these blessings honestly, that is to say, with moderation, sobriety, temperance, and piety; for your purpose rather is to run riot in an endless variety of sottish pleasures, and thus to generate from your prosperity a moral pestilence which will prove a thousandfold more disastrous than the fiercest enemies. It was such a calamity as this that Scipio, your chief pontiff, your best man in the judgment of the whole senate, feared when he refused to agree to the destruction of Carthage, Rome's rival and opposed Cato, who advised its destruction. He feared security, that enemy of weak minds, and he perceived that a wholesome fear would be a fit guardian for the citizens. And he was not mistaken; the event proved how wisely he had spoken. For when Carthage was destroyed, and the Roman republic delivered from its great cause of anxiety, a crowd of disastrous evils immediately resulted from the prosperous condition of things.
> I'm a big believer that people only care to preserve societies they have a stake in and if a large enough percentage of the population own nothing and offer no value it's very easy to see this causing a division
Wouldn't someone that is able to spend most of their time playing video games (instead of e.g. farming) want society to continue as it exists today? Without that society, wouldn't they be forced to fight/work for sustenance?
I was a whole lot more spiteful when I was playing video games 24/7 and felt like there was nowhere else to go. I would've been far happier seeing an end to everything then, when everything seemed impossible, versus now that I have some experience, some skin in the game.
I've got a buddy in a similar situation. We all came from somewhat similar backgrounds and all majored in the same, useless, thing. We lived together and while we all played a lot of video games one of the three never really moved on from that. He's still working at a low wage job behind a counter and playing video games a lot.
I think it's less that he doesnt know different but more that he never got a break in the right direction. I stumbled into a career. Our other buddy stumbled into a career. He didn't. I'm not saying he never will but I can look back and point to a few key moments that led me to where I am today. Without those I'd probably be living in my parents house playing video games too.
It’s also a form of perfectionism. I deal with exactly what you are describing with a family member of mine. A part of his problem is that, I shit you not, I sincerely believe he thinks he is too good for a labor/service job, or community college, or coursera, or the gym, dating someone not perfect, etc. It didn’t go his way for so long, but the ego is still there. And what is the ego exactly if not an intense defense mechanism. They have lost all ability to slowly chip away at a problem.
No, you probably won’t get an office job in the next 5 years. Maybe in the next 10. No, you won’t have enough money to move out the next 5 years, but maybe in 10. Nope, you aren’t get laid anytime soon. Few people can accept the timeline and the sheer effort it will take, and the sheer time. That’s the crux of the problem, that they are truly behind and cannot deal with the time investment required.
Enough with the lies, and start from zero. The effort it takes to be just mediocre in this world is understated.
The issue with these timelines is: "is it worth the effort?"
The more effort you have to put in the more desirable it has to be. Perhaps the 5+ year timeline means that what they want falls into the "it's not worth the effort" category.
I'd like to know Mandarin, but I don't think it would be worth the effort to learn the language. Maybe if I already knew the symbols I would feel otherwise.
If it’s not worth the effort, then you must shed the entitlement factor. If it’s not worth the effort, how can you still feel you deserve those things? We’re all human, and we all know having a career, an education, a life partner, and a family are worth it. So, who are we kidding?
For sure. I have met a few people who have these weird expectations around who they are and what they expect from life. As far as I'm concerned I'm playing with house money. I got lucky.
Risk aversion and a lack of opportunity (luck) seem to have a large impact on this phenomenon, if you will.I know everyone is quick to jump on "helicopter parenting"from the 90's (?) on, but I think (from the limited speakers I've seen on the topic - which are few) really have made a generation of risk averse peoples. Add to that an economic downturn, where a lack of opportunity makes for less situations where luck might happen where you can take those risks... and here you are. Young men in basements getting a dopamine fix in a plasticine bubble with a virtual body.
Sure. Maybe. His parents were both doctors and he had four siblings and an adopted sibling that all see to have done fine. But There certainly could be something I'm missing.
Dating isn't fun. At least it isn't for me as a middle aged divorce.
I get matches, I meet interesting people and go on dates and the process is just emotionally exhausting.
I would rather put in time into my job, or my friends, or my hobbies. If I can meet someone who wants to be part of my life, fantastic. If not, I will live until I don't.
As a 26 year old finishing up a Comp Sci degree, I'm in a similar camp. I mean I'd rate myself as a 5-6 straight up average. I get matches and have gone on several dates. What I've noticed is most men don't do profiles right at all. They show themselves off in what they do, not what's attractive. Also nobody every acknowledges that selfies are bad. I mean these are just little tips I've learned honing a profile over the course of a couple years.
But, thinking of dating like a resume, as well as making dates feel like interviews has made relationships nothing but a chore nowadays. It feels wholly like a business relationship without any contractual guarantees between the parties.
The other commenter was somewhat spot on. While it's cool that you went on a saltwater fishing trip, it's just a picture of you holding a fish. Or likewise killed a deer. A lot of women do not find that attractive on a dating profile. They will be fine with it if you mention that you do it on a date though. That's the key difference. It's not attractive whatsoever.
Now, the difference between doing it for fun once and a while and being a pro at something is completely different. You do a sport fishing league, own your own boat, and are die hard into it, it changes the context similar to what you're saying. Women would possibly find that attractive because you're not some schmuck. You've got clout somewhere and are an authority in it. That's the major difference that sets them apart. It's the exact reason why you see some SWE guys with attractive women even though they may not be attractive or seem autistic on the social specturm. They've achieved something and continually work at it. It's a subtle vetting process that states "I don't give up at the first sign of weakness and I am extremely motivated."
Basically once I moved my old profile toward doing cool things that I know interest women, my matches skyrocketed basically. It really made me understand why guys don't get swipes. It's literally a resume and you gotta make yourself the best candidate.
> Basically once I moved my old profile toward doing cool things that I know interest women, my matches skyrocketed basically. It really made me understand why guys don't get swipes. It's literally a resume and you gotta make yourself the best candidate.
What are those things? From what I've heard, the best pics are somewhat bland. Are you good looking, good fitting clothes and have a great smile? Just have this as profile. Then something with friends having fun, one shirtless (if well muscle-toned) and one with a dog. Oh and one doing sports, if that isn't the shirtless pic.
Never heard, that the activity in the background really matters.
We'll, I take pictures. If I'm out doing something, I'll take a picture or make an instagram post. I do pottery. Women universally love pottery. I play guitar. Not as universally liked but women still have an interest in it. How I dress, all my clothing is fitting and I have my own style. Even something as lame as an outdoor walk with a fanny pack. My smile is alright? Idk cause that's not what matters. Women want to see a few things and you as a guy need to know where you fit. They want to see friends, clout, hobbies, and well taken pics. Knock those out and just like a job, it never gets brought up again.
I mean I'm not amazing, had 0 friends to help me, and I still got likes (Tinder, Bumble, and Hinge). So how did I solve the "friends in a picture" issue if I had 0 friends? Go to bars. Hang out and chat with people. Somehow organically bring it up and take a pic. Boom, looks like you have friends haha. I've done it numerous times and it works flawlessly for that. Bars are also a great place to meet new friends. But at worst, you make them feel a tad uncomfortable but still make an attempt to have fun, while simultaneously benefiting you.
Take this for what you will, but if you're really struggling with dating, I highly recommend listening to the mating grounds podcast with Tucker Max. Say what you want about him, but his reasoning and extraordinarily sound. They have a "helping joe" series where they help this average dude date. Also with some other PhD guy whom I can't remember and another frat like dude. Just don't walk in with prejudices about who they are. They know their stuff hence why the topic of dating isn't difficult for them.
…but physical attractiveness is required to be curious if they have compatible interests and life goals in the first place. To continue the dating as job interview metaphor, it’s often the case that the skills you need on the job and the skills you need to get hired are often disjoint sets.
This has a lot of parallels to "opt-out" syndrome in Japan.
Given the concurrent rise of VanLife and FIRE cultural phenomena it's worth considering why many individuals in developed economies ideal life is to not work.
I'd hypothesize that the rising costs both economic, and mental associated with what many consider a basic standard of living independently probably has alot to do with it.
Why work when 60 hours per week leaves you just barely scraping by and exhausted? Why not be just barely scraping by and not exhausted.
The result of this work ethic is to remove one’s self from the workforce. It’s a reasonable question as to why a lifetimes ambition for these hard workers is to be able to do nothing.
Most people who fire do the opposite of nothing though. For example Mr money mustache, one of the early fire bloggers, doesn't work in corporate but runs his own co working space.
I'd say most firees are risk averse entrepreneurs.
> I suspect all of this is primarily cultural first, and not related specifically to work, the economy, pricing of good or services like buying a home and starting a family, which would come second.
Hmmm I think you're wrong. It sounds like you've got survivorship bias, big time.
Most people want to contribute, but the economic system fucks them and makes them dependent. Examples include: the intellectual property regime and monopolistic parasitism of the knowledge commons [1], neoliberal philanthrocapitalism [2] and the completely disgusting and neocolonial division of labour under global capitalism [3].
Can you really look at the Blackrock disaster [4] (Wall Street slumlordism), or the IRS papers or the Panama Papers and tell me that the system doesn't harm people?
> Can you really look at the Blackrock disaster [4] (Wall Street slumlordism) and tell me the system doesn't harm people?
Yeah, someone could do that for any system. "A horrible thing happened somewhere" or even "this part of the market is totally screwed up" are facts about every plausible alternative. So though they may be facts about the current system, they don't tell us how to improve the situation.
You can make an argument that the problem is systemic, but having one example of a problem doesn't do anything except score rhetorical points in a game where evidence and argument don't really matter.
Curious: what effect do you think culture has? The economic plays a big role, but there’s a tendency nowadays to call the root problem for everything economic and act like cultural effects are just “holidays and religion” or other marginal effects.
The culture has changed dramatically since the 50s when these trends started. For the men, their role has gone from default “protector, provider, head of the home, in charge, theist, conservative, married young” to “equal bread winner, often oppressive, too often toxic, without innate greater purpose or role, etc”.
Obviously these are broad generalizations, but we would probably agree that men get a worse wrap now than then (even if that came at the expense of others). Does that large cultural shift have a large effect? Are men lacking purpose now and how much of the current problem men face is because of that cultural shift? The economic is important, but the cultural factors are huge too
> The economic plays a big role, but there’s a tendency nowadays to call the root problem for everything economic
As with everything on the internet (it sadly seems), there is a necessity for nuanced position. Perhaps, economic and cultural factors are playing a self-reinforcing and thus compounding effect on our society?
There are also the non-cultural and non-economic factors such as declining testosterone levels. This could have profound emergent economic and cultural implications that we have not even begun to calculate.
> Most people want to contribute, but the economic system [...] makes them dependent.
The people being discussed here are people without jobs who have a place to live rent free. There is not an economic system holding them back from being able to find a way to contribute because their expenses are very close to $0. For all practical purposes, they have the equivalent of universal basic income. If they would like to write poetry instead of playing video games they could. If they would prefer to paint or write code, they could.
> the economic system [. . .] makes them dependent
The emotion of dependency seems less likely to be developed by an economic system than of culture. One might claim that it is difficult to separate one from the other. Taking a cultural or an economic point of view I can see how a hierarchical culture would see participation as zero-sum but not an economic system. An economic system by itself, capitalist pig, pinko commie, feudal manorialism, whatever, is enhanced by participation and a sense of interdependency.
> Most people want to contribute, but the economic system fucks them and makes them dependent. Examples include: the intellectual property regime and monopolistic parasitism of the knowledge commons [1], neoliberal philanthrocapitalism [2] and the completely disgusting and neocolonial division of labour under global capitalism [3].
This line of thinking in my opinion is the problem. Before I start, I will admit I have survivorship bias.
The points you mentioned are problems, but in my opinion that's not an excuse. One of your points you mentioned that it's now harder than ever to buy a home because Blackrock is scooping all of them up. While I agree that it certainly makes getting a home harder. I think if anyone truly wants a home and is willing to do whatever they need to in order to get it, they can get it. Same goes for just about everything else, if you want something, and you're willing to do whatever it takes to get it, you can do it.
All the problems you mentioned are roadblocks, not showstoppers. I think these days it's easier to just make the excuse that there are all these things standing in our way thus making it impossible for us to do the things our parents did.
> I think if anyone truly wants a home and is willing to do whatever they need to in order to get it, they can get it. Same goes for just about everything else, if you want something, and you're willing to do whatever it takes to get it, you can do it.
You may be right, but people come in a normal distribution, with most being just average. To "do whatever it takes" implies a person on the extreme right of the distribution, and most people aren't there. So while it may be possible to buy a home, if it takes extreme effort to do it, most people won't.
Whereas, when I grew up in the 60's, my dad worked as a bag boy at Kroger, then a meatcutter. We had a small 3br house, 2 kids, a car, a motorcycle, a boat, insurance on all this stuff, and mom worked out of the house doing babysitting and ironing. They were still in their early 20's and got married right out of high school. We eventually had 2 cars while still in this house, around '65. Nothing even remotely like this would be possible today.
New House: $25,200.00
Average Income: $10,622.00 per year
New Car: $3,560.00
Average Rent: $150.00 per month
Tuition to Harvard University: $2,600.00 per year
Movie Ticket: $1.50 each
Gasoline: 40¢ per gallon
United States Postage Stamp: 8¢ each
Whether due to currency debasement, globalization, or overpopulation, the disparity in cost of living between the two eras is staggering.
Similar (?) items based on near top results of google searches today:
The greatest takeaway for me is that everyone is FAR worse off today and in my generation.
US nationally (today 2021) about 85K is equivalent to the cited 25K 1971 numbers. :: ~10X cost of living (edited, I unconsciously compared to the wrong number.)
Seattle is far more distorted, with housing beyond out of control (I don't know what kind of house was being looked at for the 1971 numbers, but it really doesn't matter, there's almost nothing even remotely near the national price within the region). ::
Seattle's rent is completely out of control; beyond any rational measure. No wonder neither I nor my generation can make any savings; it's all being consumed by rent seeking land owners.
Income 10600 %Income71
House 25200 237.736
Car 3600 33.962
RentYear 1800 16.981
UniYear 2600 24.528
Gas5000mi 100 0.943
Mail500invite 40 0.377
-
USA 2021 Equiv71
House 269000 113151
Car 30500 89806
RentYear 14400 84800
UniYear 26100 106408
Gas5000mi 483.33 51233
Mail500invite 290 76850
-
Seattle 2021 Equiv71
House 750000 315476
Car 30500 89806
RentYear 36000 212000
UniYear 31200 127200
Gas5000mi 533.33 56533
Mail500invite 290 76850
Well, I cannot speak for Tinder, but you have probably seen the stats from the now-deleted OKCupid blogs. I worked in a dating service pre-Intarwebs and the dynamics are almost exactly the same, just lacking only the "instant" factor of the Internet, plus the rather expanded pool. As someone who entered people's "preferences" versus their "must-haves," certain trends emerged. To be politic about it, those trends did not favor men.
As someone who's been exposed to the stats more than most of us (I assume, pre-web dating service), do you have any particular insights? Have you thought about what one could do to address this mismatch since? I was fortunate to find my s.o. on a language exchange site, but if I felt my best options were something from the Match Group... it looks grim
No solutions, I am afraid, that do not involve large-scale genetic engineering.
In the parlance of our times, dudes are generally "thirstier." On top of it, you can call it genetics or you can call it culture, but ... men make the approach, typically. (Okay, I am done with generally and typically and trends for now) This leads to guys spamming some entirely-too-fussy gals and the usual dynamics emerging.
You've read the grim confessions of women who remorselessly admit to "dating for dinner." You've seen the baiting performed using the photo of a male model who can say simply the most awful and outrageous things. The Heightism user might have been banned on Twitter but others have emerged like the heads of hydras, reposting the casually cruel dismissal of men under six foot.
It's only the basic thirstiness that drives men to even continue, and I suspect that a lot of young men opt out, because that's just step one. They're looking at their often-divorced parents and remembering who got the house, then wondering if the game is worth the candle. I suspect the men at the intersection of easily disheartened and generally aware have been most put off, leaving the field to the exuberant and the blessed.
And remember, we are currently in a culture that doesn't seem to like men very much. Just for a giggle, go to Google, type "men are" and see what the autocomplete suggests, then do "women are." That has to add to more of the disenchantment.
Regarding heightism: the market finds the price. The average woman is 5 inches shorter than the average man. If a woman or even an employer is willing to give up iq points for height, it’s their loss. Markets don’t care for prejudice.
Videogames provide fake achievement and an easy thing to do to occupy you - I think some people are more vulnerable to this kind of thing than others. For me, the fake achievement feels fake and I don't get much satisfaction out of it - but for others I think it mimics real achievement enough that they can pour hours into it.
Online dating sucks for most men - if you're not in the top 2% of attractiveness for men it is a waste of your time (especially in skewed markets like the bay area), you're better off going places to meet people in person and working on your social skills that way (I think your friend is right).
The bay area is BRUTAL for dating; especially if you aren't' a white. conventionally attractive millionaire. I'm not saying this based onm tinder but from actually putting myself out there at bars and parties.
7 years working in startups -> long dry spells between a few one night stands. Eventually I gave up trying to form a connection with anyone. I had plenty of cash but life just felt empty and lonely.
One day I had enough and picked up a remote job and started traveling. The dating pool gets a lot better when you leave the united states. I had met a great girlfriend within a month of staying in Colombia.
Bay area -> make your money and get out as soon as you have the connections. its not worth staying.
I think some kinds of video games provide this more than others, at least for some definitions of achievement. If somebody spends their free time painting happy trees but never sells any paintings, I personally would not say achievements are fake. The painter sets their own objective and judge success by their own personal standards, but that doesn't make their achievements fake, right? And if they decide to depict things using lego instead of paint, is that fundamentally different? It's a different form of craft, but I don't consider building sculptures out of lego to be faker than doing the same from clay.
Some video games are essentially the same as that. For instance, creative-mode minecraft seems to be arts and crafts as much as it is a game.
Yeah - I didn't mean to generalize the entire medium.
I love story based games, indie games, etc. I think creative games like Minecraft are similarly worthwhile too.
Things like:
- Gone Home
- Life is Strange
- Firewatch
- Tacoma
- Elsinore
- Untitled Goose Game
There's lots of great stuff out there that isn't just a slot machine. Unfortunately slot machines make a lot of money so you also get WoW, and GTA ruined by GTA Online, in-app purchase corrupting content into Zynga style everything.
Kudos to Apple for trying to combat this with Apple Arcade.
Highly recommend the game Pathologic then. A Russian subversion of video games as a medium (the vast majority of players don't finish it despite it being very short)
I see this too. One thing that has struck me lately, is the similarity between the addictive nature of gambling and video games. Going to a casino once in a while or playing some video games with friends is fine. But the amount of time some people spend on video games really mimics a gambling addiction, except it's less frowned upon because they're mostly losing time instead of money. But if you consider the opportunity cost, they're losing a lot of money too.
In American culture money and materialism is dominant. Labor, quality of life, and time are devalued. People complain that a plumber “didn’t do anything” and then billed $170. Or an ER physician didn’t do anything yet they still got a $$$$ bill. Expertise, attention, and simply showing up to get the job done doesn’t seem to have fundamental value in common culture. But if they received a prescription, or an MRI was used, or some parts were installed there’s more appreciation.
Have been going to conferences in Vegas for 30+ years. For a long time it was just incredibly depressing walking through the floors and seeing all the elder generation playing slots at all hours. Quite the motivator to never stop working, IMO.
Now that Vegas is more young-focused, it's all age groups on the slots. Then I think, multiply those giant floors by 1000X and that's the gaming population.
To be fair, your friend has the right idea about online dating: the juice isn’t worth the squeeze. It’s like playing the lottery: life-changing good if you win but a negative expectation value.
> It makes no economic sense to move out and get an apartment. The cost of living in major metros makes renting nearly equivalent to paying a mortgage.
That might account for them living at home, but not for not pursuing a job.
> 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.
Tinder is a waste of time for women too; if you’re at all attractive you get dozens of messages a day and half of them are scams. The best I’ve ever gotten out of Tinder has been mediocre, meaningless sex; it’s far too much work if you’re looking for anything more.
You have to go do things you enjoy and be a more interesting person. If that’s just your daily life, you’ll meet people who enjoy the same things you do and you can potentially date them (or their friends).
But yeah, I agree with you. Just because Tinder sucks doesn’t mean you shouldn’t date; just that you shouldn’t look to an app to find a partner.
> know one man in this age cohort who doesn't seem to have a job, just plays video games all the time, and I don't get it.
this provides some context for why some women immediately balk when they see my playstation controller and vr headset on the west elm media cabinet
"[oh god] are you ... a gamer ??"
I feel like a lot of people can't differentiate between potential partners that own a console versus whatever gamer addict they're afraid of. thinking about it, that's a decent heuristic given how many gamers bring toxic ideas with them, even if they aren't neglecting other responsibilities for games
It’s sort of like when women entered the work force and built careers. They started to get married later and having kids later.
Men are now reverting to the mean a little bit. This could be a natural normalization of a situation where men were exalted as industrious, and women were literally left at home. Both extremes are bad.
One day we’ll just have two 30 year old stay-at-homes get married and not think twice about it. No expectations or judgement on ones job and aspirations, or gender specific duties. Just two genuine deadbeats.
What’s so distasteful about it? Truly nothing, but yet, why doesn’t it feel right?
Men are not doing as well as women in school. If you look in the wrong places on the internet, media, or daily life, all you see is negativity towards masculinity. In addition, there doesn't appear to be any broad social system that is geared towards supporting men. The fact that men don't tend to be a socially adept doesn't help. This all feels like the perfect storm and there are plenty of people who act like "men have had it coming and deserve any ensuing suffering". I don't know how to fix this but I am sure glad I am no longer a young man.
Yup. I've had many conversations about this topic with my son (and on occasion some of his friends -- both male and female), since he was in middle school (a decade ago). They're well aware of how men are portrayed versus women.
We've transitioned from "A women's place is in the home (barefoot, pregnant, and cooking a delicious meal for her husband)" to "A woman's place is whatever she wants, and men are the reason for everything that's wrong with the world today". Whether it's world war or a bad relationship or choosing the right car.
It's not a binary decision, people. We don't need to decide which gender/sex is "better" or "more right".
Moving discourse to social media and click bait has destroyed so much nuance in all discussions. Everything is black and white now, every issue is just a war between 2 sides and you're either "with us or against us".
Social media makes its money on outrage so that's what they're optimizing for. Ban or regulate advertising (which will make it less profitable) and other, less toxic business models will come up.
Yes, this is group psychology. Only individuals can really be rational. Once individuals form a psychological group, individuality is lost, rationality is lost with it and everything is controlled by the emotions of the group.
The group has no room for anything really but for the extreme emotional reactions of in-group/out-group psychology and you see this playing out in our society because of social media.
There is literally no room for nuanced discourse between individuals with the way our social media platforms are structured. Individuals will not drive engagement the way groups do.
I think its mostly groups on social media. Some groups can be rational, like a jury, or a committee full of intelligent people. But for them to be rational, there has to be the correct incentives and culture of discussion (i.e. no social media algorithms, or divisive politics).
Well, decades ago, men did run the world, to all intents and purposes. They're still in most positions of power (politics ceos etc), most things are designed by men, etc. This doesn't mean that it's the fault of every single man, any more than as a Brit who benefits from a legacy of empire that I'm personally responsible for whatever massacres. You can be aware of it without taking the blame.
There is a subtle difference between "men did run the world" and "women didn't run the world". The first one skips over all the men that also didn't run the world.
The point is more that men were the assumed default. Ambition was seen as healthy and positive in men and negative in women (the word “bossy” comes to mind). Large parts of the world and some parts of western societies still see it that way, as a sort of natural imperative.
So the average man certainly had more of an advantage. But there are lots of other factors of course, then and now. Class, race, disability status…
I often wish the public face of feminism was more intersectional. Unfortunately we get undifferentiated pop/choice feminism instead. I’m as tired of it as the next person, considering it usually ignores trans issues (beyond maybe some lip service) all together.
Also I feel like this entire thread seems to ignore the economic component of this discussion. Women are stagnant too. Our system is crumbling, and young people without access to generational wealth are suffering, there is no good path into the middle class anymore, so why bother at all? That is the main takeaway.
I do feel like some of the terf tropes come from people building straw men because they don't like the idea to start. "Maybe we should all be nicer to each other, by the way this group has these problems" doesn't really make news, whereas "politician says all men are rapists" immediately gets outrage shares.
Absolutely. Through all the stats and pronouncements that make it seem as if women are all powerful and are gaining economic and moral power, it's true only on the scale that is dwarfed by the patriarchal capitalism
that is taking everything. For all of us who work hard and take home so little compared to those who hoard so much, we take the bait that the conflict is between us and ourselves, not us and them. Orwell write SO well about this in Animal Farm.
So punish them instead of the young! Drain their bank accounts and fire the CEOs. Why is the focus on blaming the young and the innocent?
Punishing the most vulnerable individuals of a group because of the collective sins of that group, we may as well feed males lead until they're out of the game, it's only really one step further than subjecting them to systemic discrimination. JUSTICE!
An interesting part of this conversation is that there are strong subtexts that often have more weight than the actual words in driving how people actually answer.
Scott Alexander as a nice rationaliization of this dynamic
If you genuinely hold these views, I strongly suggest leaving London for a week, heading to an industrial town in the North and asking them how privileged they feel to be a white British male.
This isn’t about taking the poorest white folks in society, looking at their lack of economic empowerment and calling white privilege a flawed concept. IMHO theres more to it than that, and white privilege does exist.
For example, there have been a number of studies that show having a non-white sounding name during a cv screening process leads to far less callbacks, even if the remainder of the CV is identical. Is this not white privilege?
What about how the media treats different crimes. Take a look at the Daily Mail website, arguably the most popular UK tabloid and tell me it’s not designed to paint migrants and minorities in a negative light. For example, when there are acts of violence perpetrated in the name of islam, terrorism as a phrase is used frequently in the headlines. However when white nationalists do the same thing, the phrasing is completely different. Another example would be the coverage of the royals ie Kate vs Meghan.
Acknowledging white privilege doesn’t mean that those poor white folks in post industrial towns have it easy. It means that there are certain areas of society where being white does afford a privilege. It comes down to the tribal mentality at the end of the day. People still seem to like to favour people similar to them.
I'll admit I could have been more informative and less pithy, but the idea of white privilege being a foreign concept in economically underprivileged communities is more complex than "white people can experience poverty too".
I've lived in working class neighbourhoods for the majority of my adult life, and there are so many observations that fly in the face of white privilege as a theory.
Most of the poorest people I would encounter were white. The people most likely to be long-term unemployed were white. The people whose children were least likely to get an education and escape poverty were white. Almost all of the junkies were white. Every single homeless person was white, no exceptions.
Whether or not HR staff hiring for a white collar job prefer white names is irrelevant when you and the people you are competing against didn't complete high school.
What the Daily Mail think about Meghan Markle or Islam is less important that what the Vietnamese fruit shop owner thinks of you because you share phenotypal characteristics with the homeless ice addict that sleeps three doors down and scares away customers.
This doesn't even start to cover ethnic tensions (Serb vs. Croat, Indian vs. Pakistani atc.) which exist with no regard for the typical sociological black/white/asian racial boundaries and can cause real violence and discrimination.
I will admit that there are racial groups that have it rough simply because of their skin (black people in America, Aboriginals in Australia, Gypsies in Europe), but the idea that being white grants you privileges over and above all other racial groups ignores the lives and experiences of an enormous segment of the population.
(Just to clarify, I do accept that John Smith has an unfair advantage over Rajesh Kumar when applying for a software job at a FAANG. I also admit that this has worked out well for me. This doesn't extrapolate to the whole population, though; many white people will experience little to no privilege because of their race.)
I would agree with most of what you say above, in my life I have seen the disadvantages you highlight for the white working class (many kids I went to high school fell in this category).
To be clear, I am not claiming disadvantaged white folks don’t have it rough. However, my point is when we take folks from a similar socioeconomic background, being white does confer an advantages in a lot of cases (in western, white majority countries). I would say the majority of the disadvantages for working class whites is not due to their race. Whereas on the other hand, certain ethnicities do have disadvantages due to their precisely their race. Both are disadvantaged but for different reasons imho.
Personally if it were up to me, I would exclude poor working class whites from any notion of privilege as they clearly aren’t. I also think they need more representation in the work place (ie being included in diversity targets rather than excluded).
IMO we need a better term that’s more nuanced and can capture the disadvantages of these groups, but I dont know what that term would be.
>However, my point is when we take folks from a similar socioeconomic background, being white does confer an advantages
This is exactly the point I'm refuting. In all of the working class neighbourhoods I've lived in, poverty seemed to have a greater adverse affect on white people than other racial groups.
Being poor while Indian, for example, doesn't seem to be so closely associated with family breakdown/fatherlessness, drug abuse, malnutrition/bad diet, chronic unemployment, trouble with authority and just this constantly bleak outlook on life in an unbreakable spiral of poverty.
I'm not trying to say that they have it easy. They work bloody hard for what they've got and are an integral part of society. Still, despite their life being tough there's at least light at the end of the tunnel in the form of hope for the next generation. I would much rather be poor and brown than poor and white.
I think UK is a little "special" because of our messed up class system. I think we should include class into diversity definitions.
Being white is also a massive privilege in at least several majority black country that I know of.
> I do accept that John Smith has an unfair advantage over Rajesh Kumar when applying for a software job at a FAANG.
Don’t know about UK, but in the US the advantage quite decisively goes the other way: people of Indian descent are significantly over represented in FAANG relative to their share of population, and people of Anglo descent are significantly underrepresented.
Most indians working in FAANG in USA tend to be immigrants. So comparing them to their share of population is ridiculous. Even if you limit yourselves to second generation indian American, they are not the same socio-economic background. I guess having rich and education focussed parents is now considered unfair brown privilege.
Some areas that apply also to working class types: most products are made by men and tested on men. For example cars: there is 1 female sized car crash dummy in the whole of Europe, which means cars are safer for men in a crash. Medicines are routinely tested only on men, since "hormones interfere with the studies". This means men have better medical outcomes.
Nobody is saying that white privilige means that if you're white, you always have it better than when you're not white.
e.g. if you're white and poor, of course you don't have it better than if you're non-white and rich.
The point is, that ceteris paribus, you have it better being white. And that is what we call privilege.
And this shows in countless studies which correct for all non-ethnic factors such as income, neighbourhood, parents' education etc. You'll find worse outcomes for non-whites in ceteris-paribus studies inn jobs/hiring, healthcare, safety, education, political empowerment etc.
So I'm glad you admit that people have it rough simply because of their skin, that's what white privilege means, you not having it rough because of your skin but because of other reasons which affect everyone else too. That doesn't mean you can't have it rough, it just means it's not related to your skin color, and that's a privilege.
Nobody is saying that white privilige means that if you're white, you always have it better than when you're not white.
Bollocks. Lots of people are saying that, or at the very least saying things that directly imply this with arguments to historical injustices which, though real and serious, have no causal bearing on the specific case being discussed.
"Ceteris paribus" is a wonderful average at which no one lives. Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos are white. That has zero impact on the earning power of a West Virginia coal miner whose job is never coming back and had gotten hooked on Oxy.
> Bollocks. Lots of people are saying that, or at the very least saying things that directly imply this with arguments to historical injustices which, though real and serious, have no causal bearing on the specific case being discussed.
Lots of people say vaccines cause autism or that the earth is flat. Just because some people are wrong, doesn't mean I am. Just look up the definition of white privilege, read a book about it. It's been an academic concept for decades, just because a bunch of kids on twitter use it in a wrong way doesn't change the concept.
> "Ceteris paribus" is a wonderful average at which no one lives. Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos are white. That has zero impact on the earning power of a West Virginia coal miner whose job is never coming back and had gotten hooked on Oxy.
I've got no clue what you're talking about. The point isn't to say that all white people have the same lives, it's an absolutely ridiculous claim. It's to say that it's, all else being equal, easier to be white than black. This has been shown in countless studies, which correct for differences and look to isolate the effect of e.g. skin color or ethnic background, but you choose to ignore it.
For example, tons of studies show if you apply for jobs with a black-sounding name, you get fewer responses than with a white sounding name, even if the resume is the same. That's a privilege which you refuse to acknowledge. It doesn't mean you can't be a poor drug addicted ex-coal miner.
I'm not sure why you assumed the poster was male (I would guess otherwise). But it doesn't sound like they're refusing to acknowledge it. Also, what does acknowledging it do? You can't exactly stop being a white British male.
Ding ding we have a winner, though I hope it wouldn't be relevant what gender I am.
This was kind of my point - you can't be penalised for taking the advantages you have in life. But if you are aware of issues facing others you can give them a hand up and we end up with a fairer and more equal society.
Is your argument that you should not acknowledge something you know to be true (for the sake of the argument)?
A possibly trivial example, but I've found that I tended to be ignored in meetings. I'd suggest something, it would be ignored, and 5 minutes later someone else would say it and everyone would say "yeah that's a great idea". So you could call that out (I did but it looked really petty imo) or draw attention to colleagues who area struggling to be heard.
I've heard someone dismiss the idea of employing a woman for a post because the team was all male. For such a situation, a rebuttal would probably be heard more if it came from a man.
These are gender related because I'm white but you would doubtless find equivalents for other groups if you asked. Being aware is important I think
Yeah it's what I find wrong with the way we fix / correct social issues like this. I m a white male european who emigrated to an asian former colony, and while I never heard or supported racism, misogyny, colonisation, white supremacy, nazism and all these things, I'm often associated with them :D
It's fair I guess so I apologize for what I represent to all these people who had oppressed ancestors, but I'm not sure they're actually resolving much of what people who looked like me did to them: poverty, lack of empowerement, inability to operate in a modern world etc, they can spend their time making me acknowledge my associated responsibility but I wish they'd just let me help instead :D
I remember telling a "philipino" (culturally/parents born there) born in the country that I was an immigrant here, he could not even compute it. He felt HE was, while obviously he was born here and a full right citizen, while my associated identity made him believe I was a sort of powerful lord instead of the scraping by immigrant I am, who has mostly the right to shut up and be useful... in HIS country. It's just weird.
“Hey, society and the media and politicians, institutions have all decided your nature is a problem and that you are assumed guilty, to be viewed with suspicion at all times. Oh and for some reason, you should still want to support this structure with your hard work and taxes, and shut up and never mention it.”
Honestly - I don’t know why I would tell him he should accept this society, why he shouldn’t move to another country and why he should stick around. It isn’t showing any signs of changing.
It sickens me, I don’t believe in my own country anymore.
Whoever you are and whatever you do, there's always going to be some group that doesn't like you or "your kind". Running away doesn't teach your kids how to face this; it just changes where they'll face it.
It's the chicken egg problem. Woman birthed man. Who's to blame?
In all seriousness, if we are to succeed as a society, then ignorantly maintaining what are mostly over generalizations and stereotypes related to gender is a failing proposition. And that involves anything that existed pre-the-whole-world-is-now-connected.
That means
> It's not a binary decision, people. We don't need to decide which gender/sex is "better" or "more right".
But, for most of our parents it was binary and decision was obvious.
People fantasize about going back to that. Even the young kids, Gen Z, which is most concerning. Something alarming is that this comes from a feeling of helplessness. That and similar feelings explains the increase in massacres, hatred, and even why terrorists traditionally came from countries in turmoil. The kids need to be feeling hopeful not helpless.
The time series in your link end in 2019, when the trend of falling violence has ended. There has been a huge, unprecedented spike in violence in 2020, and this new normal has wiped decade or two of previous gains.
No, because if you look at data, there has been clear inflection point around Memorial Day last year that shifted us to new regime of higher violence that seems to persist instead of subsiding.
In commercial and entertainment media, it’s the woman in the kitchen, buying the groceries, raising the children, and holding down a 80 hour week job at her law firm. The man is playing ball in the yard, or is doing business in a suit. He definitely expects dinner to be on the table when he gets home from his 1950’s day job.
Then there’s other people. Women get asked “when are you having a baby” and “why is your husband so thin don’t you feed him”, and men get “so what do you do?”.
Women are now in the position where they are expected to do all of the things a woman would traditionally do, and hold down a career. The expectation of men has barely shifted - I know precious few guys who do all the cooking and cleaning and child rearing.
Today, today it's culturally acceptable to ridicule, scorn, and otherwise attack men and manhood; to portray men as arrogant, abusive, and controlling. The word 'masculine' is now a derogatory term that means the same thing as 'toxic'. "Men are trash".
The message is that to be a man is to be lesser, or irrelevant, or harmful to society. That there's something shameful about being a man.
"There's nothing wrong with taking men down a peg or two; after all, they rule pretty much everything". Yeah, now what about the overwhelmingly vast percentage of men who will never have a management position or hold office? Whose life is just mediocre? Is it also okay to tell him he's toxic trash?
And sure, the proper response is "don't listen to the garbage". Doesn't mean it's okay to spew garbage.
As for entertainment media, it's a shit-show on both sides -- women and men are both horribly stereotyped.
> The word 'masculine' is now a derogatory term that means the same thing as 'toxic'.
This whole comment was BS, but I’ll focus on one example. This is the exact opposite of the truth, “toxic masculinity” is a common phrase because “toxic” is an adjective that is seen as *adding significant information to the description which is not already present in ‘masculinity’”.
If masculinity were viewed as inherently toxic, “toxic masculinity” wouldn’t be a needed phrase.
"When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. 'That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3' can be shortened to '1 + 1 is 2, not 3."
That is a load of bullshit. The phrase is used to shit on all things that make men, men. If it was really a technical term to describe the bad components of masculinity, then there would be an equivalent in terms of femininity, since there are aspects of femininity that can be construed as toxic. I would go out and a lim, and suggest that being overly passive, passive aggressive, and backstabbing are all aspects of femininity that could be considered toxic. You could also consider the perverse side effects of the women are wonderful effect to be toxic femininity
It is dressed up in academic language to mask its misandry.
> The phrase is used to shit on all things that make men, men.
No, its not, and if you think the things it targets “all the thing that make men men”, you have a very sick idea of what being a man is.
> If it was really a technical term to describe the bad components of masculinity, then there would be an equivalent in terms of femininity, since there are aspects of femininity that can be construed as toxic.
The equivalent is, as one might expect, “toxic femininity”. While it gets less attention, the attention it does get is from the exact same people who care the mosf about toxic masculinity.
Please don't do flamewar like this on HN. You normally do an excellent job of avoiding that, even on difficult and divisive topics, so I'm dismayed to see the lapse and I hope it's not a sign of any development in that direction.
You broke the site guidelines here. I understand that the topic is provocative and people have good reasons for their strong feelings, on all sides; that makes it more important, not less, to follow the site guidelines. If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules, we'd be grateful. Note these:
"Please don't fulminate."
"When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. 'That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3' can be shortened to '1 + 1 is 2, not 3."
"Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive."
Especially a problem because for almost all men a career and supporting family (maybe the hardest thing to figure out in life) is non optional, whereas half the female friends I have from college have abandoned careers to saddle up to a breadwinner ... I mean I kind of want that option but men don't really have it. Does anyone ever really discuss this social reality that makes it different for men v women in real world?
For those lambasting the parent comment, ignore the phrasing and let us go by stats. Count how many women with successful careers you know that are married to unemployed men (to stick to the point the parent makes, let us skip cases where both husband/wife are working). Now do the same count with genders switched. Observe the differential - for the record, it is clear that there are complex reasons behind this difference (children being a big one) but we can't ignore the fact that this choice is much more "socially normal/acceptable" for a woman compared to a married man being unemployed by choice.
What would surprise a person more in today's context in US: hearing that child's parent is divorced/single parent (which by your stats is 60% for young parents, so pretty common) OR hearing about a successful woman with a husband who has chosen to be unemployed? You can keep twisting things but we are talking about what is "typical".
I’ve attempted this discussion all over the internet. It does not go well would be a tame statement. There seems to be a pervasive belief that men do have this option equally available to them.
Only half? My exp is more like 80% shack up with a breadwinner. Even with half of women that means max 25% of men get this option.
My comment was strongly upvoted (50+) so I believe the HN community understands this dynamic.
I mean if you go outside Western bubbles e.g. all of Asia Latam etc. 99% of women seek to marry a breadwinner over having their own career, closer to how it was 50 years ago here in the US, a dynamic that's hard to miss.
The 50% I mentioned is from a competitive ivy league school where you get a major career leg up. If 50% of female friends who went to an ivy have tapped out from career making, yes, it's easy to imagine how it's still the widespread norm even in US
Probably because HN is something like 95%+ male demographic and career focused. The rest of the internet does not seem to agree based on my testing the water. Women (self identified of course) seem especially interested in pushing that men could simply stay at home if they wanted.
I mean if you are calling it "shacking up" that might explain why it doesn't go well.
I don't think most would say men have it equally available but I'd certainly say it's more available than it was in the past just like women having jobs that can allow them to be the primary breadwinner are much more prevalent in 2021 than it was in 1981.
I do know some male stay at home dads but not as many.
Yeah, I proposed the idea to my wife and she called me a lazy loser if I do that. It's interesting how I somewhat agree, but would never call her that if she floated the idea to stop working to raise our daughter.
And she's paid more than me, and has a PhD. She still consider me a breadwinner who must win and herself a disempowered victim who need support :D
What about the breadwinners half the women are saddling up to?
We have never had symmetry as humans in this area. Low status males don't get to fuck as much. That has always been the case for all human history. This is nothing new.
There absolutely is an option to skip career and family. It is 2021, social reality is that women can be breadwinners too. And it will be more and more difficult for women to find a breadwinner.
> Especially a problem because for almost all men a career and supporting family (maybe the hardest thing to figure out in life) is non optional
If you are going to let yourself be hammed in by such a traditionalist view of family and your inability (or maybe: lack of initiative) to get a footing in life, sounds like your setting yourself up as a victim.
I live and work across Europe, and I have never encountered men or women being held back like that. Couples I know stick together because they want to, not because of economic reasons or outdated economic views on family. Hell I've been holding down the fort while my wife was working. And vice versa. I mean, its 2021, our parents were hippies! My dad was out of work for half of his life but my mom not a single day.
My real world seems utterly unrelated to what these men seem to think. Perhaps they just need to get out there a bit more?
> Especially a problem because for almost all men a career and supporting family (maybe the hardest thing to figure out in life) is non optional...
What do you mean? Of course those are optional. If you don't want a career, you're not going to have one. If you don't want to get married and support a family, then you don't have to.
I mean, "saddle up to a breadwinner" is an extremely demeaning thing to say about a whole class of people. The reality is that men dominate all desirable, successful professions, so the probability of a man "saddling up" to a woman that makes significantly more than him is very small.
Without a career or at least some sort of good job, most men are extremely unattractive as long term partners for women. They can't just find a wife to support them while they look after the kids. So they'll end up without a career and without a family, which can be a very sad existence. For women, families are easier to come by regardless of career status.
Ride bicycles and/or motorcycles. Travel. Hike. Read. Learn things. Volunteer. Cooking is fun. Gardening as well.
I'm at a loss for how people can get bored and I don't even game or watch much in the way of movies or television. I think for some people they get attuned to work so much that they don't remember what life is like without it.
Totally agree. I don’t think I’ve been bored since I was a teenager. Every day I think to myself, all the things I could do with extra time in the day, if I didn’t have to work for a living. I am counting down the days until I retire! My nightmare actually is I die the day after I retire, just as I’m getting ready to start living my life!
Have you actually experienced a long period (year or more) with no obligations like work or school? It's much easier to be motivated when you're busy than when there's no real need for your effort or deadline for anything. I know some people manage great and have very active retirements but some just fade into passivity. Keep an eye out for the danger warned by John Mellencamp - "Life goes on long after the thrill of living is gone".
>Have you actually experienced a long period (year or more) with no obligations like work or school?
I have. And have had no problems filling it with the above activities. My folks are retired and don't seem to be having much trouble finding creative projects and enjoyable things to do, like hiking and discovering new things.
Honestly I thought my dad would be a prime candidate for the type who gets so used to chasing the rabbit that they have no idea what to do once they retire. I'm glad to see that isn't the case.
Potentially demeaning nomenclature aside, do men and women have a differential opportunity to [better phrase], and if not, is this fair?
And while it might be nice for the men who dominate all desirable, successful professions, does this help the median man? They're all individuals, after all.
Based on my experience, I do not believe women have a better or easier "differential opportunity" when it comes to finding a partner and starting a family than men. I think "everything is easier for women because they're sexy" is an old trope that should be put to rest. Women on the whole do not want to "be sexy" any more, or less, than men do. I think women want to be taken seriously, and on their own terms, just like men.
> And while it might be nice for the men who dominate all desirable, successful professions, does this help the median man? They're all individuals, after all.
No, it doesn't. The fact that Jeff Bezos is a man or a woman does not affect my life at all. But, as a man, I have an easier time networking and working with other men in my field.
>think "everything is easier for women because they're sexy" is an old trope
Pretending that this is a trope is harmful to discussion. Women can easily make it to 30yo without ever personally having to deal with solving any problems they have if they are pretty.
This does not however mean women don't have legit
problems. However the gap of assistance options men have vs women is incredibly vast.
Men are not even helped if they are hot. My wife will often not acknowledge the physical qualities of men she thinks little of. As if they are not hot just because they are assholes. Women are strange like that often. Men might decide a woman is not as hot as she is crazy but they will not simply pretend she is not hot.
Newsflash: the majority of women are not pretty, the same way most men are not attractive, this is why attractive people stand out in society, and we put them on billboards and in movies.
What gap of assistance options are you talking about? What class of women are benefiting from this? Seriously, a lot of women on Bourbon Street would like to know.
This is not true for women under 30yo. Men overwhelming rate women as attractive for the under 30yo demographic. Upwards of 80% of women are "attractive" to men. Look up the okcupid studies or others if you are really curious.
Here's an excerpt from the first hit on Google for "percentage of fortune 500 companies run by women".
> During the first quarter of 2021, 41 women will lead Fortune 500 companies. That’s just 8.2 percent, but an improvement from the 33 companies in 2019 and 24 in 2018. Going back 20 years, there were just two companies on the list that were run by women, according to Fortune.
There's more women doctors, but that percentage hovers around 35%, which is about the same as the number of women in leadership positions in U.S. federal and state government.
That's purely a US figure. In western Europe, 60% of medical graduate are women (It's almost 66% in my country). Then more women drop out of this carrer path because they can, not because they are forced out.
If I take a personal example, when studying at my university (in the top 15 QS global ranking), I had 6 girl friends that studied different fields, from physics to material science. Only one of them is still an engineer today. All by choice are now, yoga teachers, home consultant, mom at home, school teacher, etc. For my male friends maybe one decided to do something completely unrelated. I'm getting more and more suspicious about this world (at least in Europe) is unequal because of men. Women are making choice too.
One day we'll wake up and realize we've been groomed into an oppressed position by women while being shamed and accused of this very same crime hehehe.
That'd be funny in 2000 years to see the woke crowd fight for men's equal right to be trophy husband and yoga teachers too.
Did you really just call out the parent comment for being demeaning when you yourself are sitting here saying that women, as a group, choose undesirable and unsuccessful professions? Please stop.
I did not say that "women, as a group, choose undesirable and unsuccessful professions". I would say that as a group, women are doing the best they can, it is just that men tend to have greater opportunities than women, even though the capabilities of women and men are comparable. I believe that women have a harder, longer road to professional success in our society, and that this is plainly evident.
Yes. And there were comments [1] in this thread [2] where some parents shared similar concern. There were at least two other threads on the subject in the past two years. ( Which I should have bookmarked but as usual bookmarks in general is quite useless and I cant find it )
This view isn't even mainstream yet. We are already seeing lots of parents worrying much more about their son than their daughters. It will likely take another 10 years until everything is seriously fucked up before it hit mainstream media and widespread concern, another 10 years for some ( or not ) discussions, then another 10 years before something is done. Basically a whole generation of Male.
And I will probably get downvoted for mentioning it, but I do think Jordan Peterson has a point about young male lacking motivation in modern Society.
Interestingly I have a daughter and I really have 0 fear: she'll be raised like a boy as far as we make choices, at best she'll have a meaningful empowering career at worst she'll have a husband and kids and we'll help her if she needs.
I'd be weirdly worried about a boy feeling like crap without a big career or needing our help. I know a daughter would be much less humiliated at the prospect.
At a recent scholarship awards ceremony I attended the woman gathered much more scholarships than the men. Of course they probably very well deserved it. However there were many women-only scholarships that I am assuming were setup to increase college admissions of women. Which is of course also perfectly okay. However, there is a huge growing gender gap [1] in college admissions that favors women.
If an equality program is so successful that it creates an equality imbalance in the other direction what do we do?
We could cancel the programs and call it's goal completed, but this seems wrong.
We could create new programs that target raising admissions of men, but that also seems wrong, at least in the current climate.
Maybe it's just the case that men don't prefer college as much or perhaps it's too expensive when you can't get scholarships because your not the right identity.
Aren't women-only projects and things inherently discriminatory, since it disallows participation or use based on gender?
I know that whenever I've seen women only projects I did feel a sting in my heart, because what if I wanted to participate?
The only way to be able to participate would be to abandon manhood and transition into womanhood...
Where as there are no 'men-only' projects and things. Not that there should be. We all should have the freedom to whatever we desire (as long as it's not hurting others of course).
Having doors closed to me just because of the factors over which I have no control is very painful and maybe I've been exposed to that more due to having stunted growth and being born with cleft lip. Luckily I can speak without any troubles which is quite uncommon. But because my mustache does grow around where the stitching is, it's still somewhat noticeable and due to the nose also being affected I've also received my share of beating and being called a goblin in schools.
I've been without a goal for most of my life, and have thus tried to take my life multiple times, but after reading about finance I've decided to work and invest as much as I can, so that I can reach a point where I can live from the passive income so that I'll finally have peace (and in a way be able to reduce my interactions with the society to the bare minimum).
((Please don't tell me that my goal isn't achievable because I already get enough of that from my father and pretty much anyone I talk to about finances, and it's really disheartening...))
Interestingly enough, elder people were always the most kind to me, maybe because they judge less by the looks or because many mistook me for a woman. (Or maybe they just don't see as well and thought that I was a kid)
Unrelated to your larger point, your financial goal is a good one. The FI/RE community is an odd one, but very welcoming and supportive overall. I'm currently on a similar path, and as I've started to near the end I've found that I needed non-financial goals to get me sanely through the journey. Planning for a life where you don't have to work is wonderful, but the reality is that it leads to a lot of free time - if you find the void hard to fill now it'll be miserable then.
I say this because you said that being without a life goal was so difficult that you attempted to take your own life. Just setting an (often achievable) financial goal is kicking that can down the road. It's something I fear for myself quite a bit, so I've been picking up lots of hobbies to plant the seeds for when I have an abundance of free time. For me, this is a combination of travel, camping, guitar, surfing, reading (hopefully one day writing), and most recently geocaching. Each hobby has its own set of goals that I hope can occupy me indefinitely.
From what I've seen, minority targeted scholarships tend to be created by minorities rather than the college itself. For example, the Women in Computing group will organize and fundraise for a scholarship towards their school. A successful black man may donate money back to the school with the stipulation that it goes towards helping other black kids like him. The school itself is happy to look progressive and point to all its targeted scholarships, but I'm curious how many of them are explicitly created by the school itself.
It changes the narrative around financial aid when you view it as communities putting in the work to ease the burdens of folks who are like them. Maybe it says something about how difficult it is to "make it" for them that they're disproportionately more willing to donate back to their community.
The gender gap in education is observed all around the world, including in virtually all countries in Europe where university is free or subsidised to the point of being free-ish and there's no real scholarship culture to speak of.
your link brings up an interesting statistic that I wasn't aware of. However, you can tell by the language that the author of the article is very clearly biased and I wonder what the actual reality of the situation is. Some questions that might help with revealing the full picture:
1. What would be the ratio of male vs. female degrees if everyone had the access to higher education? Maybe by their own volition men would choose to get a higher education less often than woman? The writer seems to think 50/50 is "fair" but I don't think he would agree that equality of outcome is a metric we should strive for.
2. How much of the shift in the ratio has been due to Woman's Centers? There are a huge number of relevant societal/economic/logistical factors that have changed in the last 40 years that would have an impact on woman having the means/desire/permission to attend college.
3. How many woman are there that previously did not go to college (for the reasons above) that are now making that choice? Could these woman's centers still be relevant for assisting woman in "making up for lost time"?
I don't claim to have the answers to these questions but I think anyone who isn't considering them is probably missing something from the larger picture - this is a complex issue after all.
> If an equality program is so successful that it creates an equality imbalance in the other direction what do we do?
Equality of outcome is not possible or even desirable. That is the problem. The more people try to force some completely unnatural result, the more terrible things they'll have to do (e.g., discrimination on the basis of body attributes, as if there is some good way to do it) and the worse things will get.
Schools are not performing as well for men as they do for women.
I'm not just playing with words; it is really important to frame the share of responsibility correctly.
It is the school's job to educate the kid, not kid's job to compensate for the dysfunctions of an education system. I'll generalize because I don't have any detailed data; anyone from the front-line educator to the curriculum designer to the budget maker is potentially responsible for this failure. On this particular issue, they are the ones not doing well, not the kids.
> Schools are not performing as well for men as they do for women.
Maybe men are just not inherently less suited to academic success, which is being made more clear now that systematic discrimination in their favor isn’t preventing equal-terms comparisons with women in that domain.
Equality of opportunity doesn't mean equality of outcomes, after all.
> Maybe men are just not inherently less suited to academic success
Maybe. A strong essentialist proposition requires an equally strong evidence, though. Have you got any?
> systematic discrimination in their favor isn’t preventing equal-terms comparisons with women in that domain
What positive systemic discrimination do boys receive in education? Since we are not observing a sudden drop after K-12 but a longitudinal effect, please explain starting from K, if any.
If that were true then why wouldn’t you want to change academia so that it works well for both men and women? Wouldn’t that be the obvious ethical path to take?
I agree with you that changing academia so it works well for both men and women is the right thing to do. Find ways to help men improve reading and writing skills so they aren't left behind, and help women improve math and computer skills so they aren't left behind. The purpose of education is to uplift. Sometimes we get too caught up in it as a competition.
Men run most governments. Men own most companies. Men dominate the higher levels of corporations. Most engineers, doctors, lawyers, investors, and other highly paid professionals are men. Men simply own more capital than women, by a huge margin.
It looks like schools are performing better for men than women.
Allow me to correct the two logical distortions in your proposition.
Distortion 1) You can't take the outliers of a flatter distribution and generalize that to the entire population. You can't even compare the averages of two separate distributions without qualifiers.
It is true, most of the people who run governments are men. Most of the people who own companies are men. Most of the people who dominate C levels are men. Most highly paid professionals are mostly held by men. Most of the top outliers of capital ownership are men.
But it is also true most men don't run governments. Most men are not even remotely close to running companies. Most men are not C level execs. Most men don't have high paying jobs. Most men don't have any capital (if not negative).
Distortion 2) Even if it was true that it was exclusively powerful men's fault that boys are failing, it is completely irrelevant to bring it up when talking about men as victims, unless one would also suggest that boys somehow deserve to suffer educational disadvantages because of those men have a lot of capital, or there is some hidden variable that connects the two events.
So, what is your take on this? Do we ignore the fact that the top of our society is dominated by men and only focus on the men in the 40th to 60th percentile of income? Even then, you would see a similar pattern between the earning potential between men and women. I just fail to see where men are getting a raw deal here.
Why is there no push for women to be equally represented in the jobs that SUCK? Where are the feminists advocating for 50% of coal miners and loggers to be female? Nowhere to be found....because they want to secure the benefits that accrue to a small fraction of men, produced by the whole civilization (C-level positions, etc.) without sharing the bone-crushing burdens endured by the larger swathe of the male population that actually enables it.
100% of the males who get naturally pregnant. Ask a silly question, get a silly answer. It's almost like there are biological differences between men and women, and that these organisms are largely optimized for distinct roles in the human system.
>>>Men have a choice to take dangerous jobs.
If men flat-out refused to do dangerous work....our entire industrialized economy would collapse, because at the end of the day all of it is built on top of natural resource extraction. Are you suggesting that all those men digging rare earth metals out of the ground should just #learntocode?
>>>Women don’t have a choice to have medical complications during labour.
But they DO have choice to not get pregnant at all, right? If men are accountable for their choice of profession and the inherent risks, are women not accountable for their reproductive choices and inherent risks? If reducing (obviously gender-skewed) labor complications is a valid societal concern, than shouldn't reducing (also gender-skewed) workplace fatalities also be a valid societal concern? I'm not really sure what you are arguing here with the pregnancy angle.
My take is that we ought to be careful about framing biases. I don't think "men" is the most useful variable to formulate every problem with. Unless we have evidence that there is an essence to every man that manifests itself in every one of these instances, we can't reduce solving these problems to "solving men".
> Do we ignore the fact that the top of our society is dominated by men and only focus on the men in the 40th to 60th percentile of income?
Like I said, we have to be careful not to treat them as joint issues. Unless proven otherwise, problems regarding a lack diversity of representation at executive classes is not related to economic problems of lower income percentiles, or educational prospects of young boys for that matter.
The other framing bias is to treat as if can only fix one problem and we can only focus on that. It is actually a blessing that these are disjoint issues and we can multitask as a society and make incremental progress.
> I just fail to see where men are getting a raw deal here.
I think again this is because of attaching too much valence to category "men". You sound like a compassionate person and I think you wouldn't disagree if we formulated the problem as "any individual who is suffering raw deals should be treated fairly", even if those individuals happened to be low-income men or undereducated boys. I think true justice can only happen if no one is left behind. And treating men as a monolithic category will have the consequence of leaving some behind that shouldn't have been.
Today there are more women graduating medical and law school than men. Given the trends the current imbalance (of sheer numbers) will be a thing of the past in a decade or two.
> It looks like schools are performing better for men than women.
Or school isn't the only factor? Schools could be failing boys, and society could be failing women in other ways.
I think it starts early and the little things compound throughout most domains in childhood development which leads to these men feeling completely lost and unable to navigate the current society that doesn't really care about them unless they are the antagonist to some narrative. Outside of family, nobody really cares when they are falling through the cracks, and nobody really cares to try and pick them up afterwards.
Just look at the behaviors of people who are participating in society, why are they on average getting married less, later in life, having less kids, and buying homes later if ever, when these are all supposed to be important stepping stones of adulthood. The incentives that used to be there are harder to reach for people that actually have it together, and getting further out of reach for average people. When life sucks, might as well drop out.
Masculinity can create its own suffering. Men and boys have been brutally mocked for showing emotion or wearing pink. Men have an insecurity about buying products or services that are too femininely branded, so an asthetic procedure is called a detail or an oil change or some garbage. My dad would only give me manly hugs with a forceful pat because kissing your son goodnight on the head just isn’t right. I’ve found forum threads where men agonize about wearing a women’s sized version of their favorite running shoe, and even the ones willing to do so may only do it if the colorway exactly matches the men’s version.
I know women who have little choice but to say they have a boyfriend when they want to turn someone down at a bar, because saying ‘sorry no thanks’ gets them insulted, harassed, covered in beer or assaulted. Women that turn a guy down on a dating app will be called names and told they were actually unattractive the whole time.
Yes, women are not immune to being violent, petty, deceitful and cruel, but men are terrifying on an entirely different level. If you consider yourself a nice guy, you might be somewhat oblivious to how pervasive it is.
> If you look in the wrong places on the internet, media, or daily life, all you see is negativity towards masculinity.
This line surprised me, because I find it _far_ easier to stumble over mysogyny, casual or not. In the latter case, comitted by some of the men discussed here.
Ultimately, I think a lot of this is, on both 'sides', is people mistaking their toxic little corner of the internet for the real world. It is important not to be dragged into their worldview, because it is utterly incorrect. (Men are not any less supported than women, also, men do not have anything coming. In fact, men are not a singular group! So stop identifying with 'men', where we imagine some lucky billionaire as exemplar of men.)
When I've spoken to people about this i get a "that's because they dont try as hard" (anecdote not data).
Which has always struck me as odd. When women didn't do well it was because the institutions weren't designed to accommodate them or their educational needs.
I think for young people in school a solution could be some evaluation on how that student learns and put them into a class that caters to that style. One size fits all education doesn't work. It didn't work for young women in the past and it doesnt work young men today.
I do agree that there are a lot of internet and media headlines that portray men in a negative light. Yes, writers generate Internet/media content with provocative headlines declaring "The End of Men". But in real life I see plenty of men getting good jobs, having families, winning awards, changing the world. Everywhere I look there are positive examples of men killing it: in business, sports, politics. So I feel like you would have to ignore all of the male political leaders, sports super stars, highly regarded thinkers and scientists, business leaders, entrepreneurs, religious clergy, and just focus only on stupid things people on the internet said to feel like the world is bleak for men. Yes, women are getting higher grades in school and graduating in higher numbers than men. I don't think that one metric by itself spells a doom and gloom future for men. Men don't have to be better than women in every metric to have a bright future.
Men do 90% of everything. Start world wars, end world wars, save people’s lives, murder people, invent lifesaving technologies, invent murderous technologies. Women seem to want a world where they are 50% of the CEOs but not 50% of the prisoners and that’s not how “maleness” works.
Yeah, I can appreciate certain complaints about the way men are portrayed in media and popular discourse, but it seems like a leap from there to phenomenon in question. We criticize men for telling women to smile, or whatever ... and somehow the end result is that they give up on their career ambitions?
I think you're right that the real issues are economic. In fact I'd say that this is part of a larger, more general tendency to use cultural conflict to distract from class conflict.
I've had numerous conversations about this with my son, starting when he told me he didn't want to grow up to be a "man". Because of what he had absorbed from culture/society.
Today, men are told that we are disposable; Neanderthals; a legacy of the last century and the cause of everything that's wrong in the country/world; that we're patriarchal oppressors; that we're unnecessary and obsolete. The word "masculine" is at best a negative connotation, and usually meant as an attack.
So, yeah, I have first-hand experience with this. On the flip side, from talking with a couple of my son's female friends, they feel the pressure of being told that they can do and be everything. All at the same time. That's not great either.
The best response is to disengage from media and just be yourself. Easier said than done sometimes, for sure, but that's the longterm win.
So the internet is confusing and your son has some questions. It seems like a big jump to explain why men aren't getting jobs. Do men want to live with their parents simply because they don't feel as manly? Or is it because rent growth outpaces wages?
I think this is incomplete by itself. Taking a couple of points from the article:
- Women are less likely than men to live at home with their parents.
- The increase in men living at home with their parents is primarily driven by those without college degrees (15->25% among those without college degrees over the last 25 years, 10->13% among those with college degrees).
Per [0], in 2019, there was a 8 point gender gap among young adults (25-29) for college degrees (associate's and above).
A guess at a fuller explanation might then be that wage growth for jobs that don't require a college degree haven't kept up with rent growth, and the gender gap here is driven by the gender gap in educational attainment.
One other thing that I observed:
If you look at the labor force participation graph in the article, it slowly trended downwards from the 60s, and then suddenly jumped down around 2008-2011, and since then stayed mostly flat until last year.
Meanwhile, the fraction of young men living at home rose steadily from the 60s until the mid-90s, dropped for a few years, and then resumed climbing after 2000 (with no such jumps around 2009 or 2020).
On one hand, we have these economic shocks (Great Recession, pandemic) that force a bunch of men out of the labor market, but at the same time, more men are living at home even as labor force participation remained largely constant throughout most of the 2010s. That reads to me like it refutes the article's central claim of correlation between these two variables.
The education system has turned into the equivalent of those kindergarten karate classes where if you show up and do the fake moves and pay the money; they give you an ever increasing number of belts (degrees).
For whatever reason, women will go into debt or be allowed to go into debt to get useless degrees and there is no countervailing force to say: “uh marine biology is cool but…$500,000?”
This has lead to a situation where women have gotten 13 million more colleges degrees than men over the last few decades.
> If you look in the wrong places on the internet, media, or daily life, all you see is negativity towards masculinity.
In my eyes it is just that masculinity that often is the problem. The problem is not that kids live in an environment that doesn't like it if they e.g. resort to violent and/or foreceful behaviour to assure themselves of their masculinity — the problem is, that the kids think their worth as a human being depends on fulfilling these outdated male ideals. And who can blame them? It is all a matter of having the right role models in your life.
Having worked with teens from troubled social backgrounds I can assure you that the behaviour and expectations of the parents feed into this in a powerful (and often very destructive!) way.
Your task as a parent is to prepare your kids for the world they will live in. If the world changed and males are expected to be more empathetic, less aggressive, etc. then don't scold your boy for crying, playing with puppets or other things you perceive as "unmanly". Be critical about the way you as a parent deal with your own feelings of sadness, anger, etc in front of your kids.
I had the luck to have had a very caring father, and I never had the feeling that my masculinity was endangered. If anything I felt sorry for all the guys in my surrounding who tried so hard to hide their feelings that they started to forget they had any.
So in short: the problem with masculinity is that many boys learn from their surroundings that the self worth of a man is connected how masculine he acts and can be reduced if he acts feminine. This is utter bullshit. Your kid should be allwoed to explore their feelings without constant judgment about them.
>"men have had it coming and deserve any ensuing suffering"
I find the irony to all this is the sons are getting punished for the sins of the father. Every "equity" program I can name, every single one primarily punishes the young while leaving the old, who presumably would have been the ones who setup a rigged game, alone. People lose their chances to enter the labour market, they don't lose their existing jobs. I mostly see the innocent getting punished because they were born guilty.
Regarding school, men mature more slowly than women and do worse in certain intellectual enterprises like memory and seem to get a third of a grade point lower grades when their tests are scored unblinded. If you really wanted to make men and women score equally you could by blinding tests and tilting them more to skills men tend to do better on and not expecting equality between their age cohorts until they hit at least their late teens. There is simply no interest in doing such a thing and instead I hear outrage that men are the majority in any academic discipline even if on the aggregate they're behind.
I think it’s easy to conflate the two since news articles tend to not make a clear distinction unfortunately. Try searching “men buzzfeed” and then “women buzzfeed”. Go to news section on Google. One search will result in positive/uplifting for one gender and quite the opposite for the other
Toxic masculinity in the media has now come to encompass any quality in a person they don’t like. A weight lifter is an asshole? It’s because of a toxic masculinity problem in weight lifting. Positive traits in men as a broad population are regularly cast to toxic masculinity in individuals by lazy writers.
> In addition, there doesn't appear to be any broad social system that is geared towards supporting men.
What planet are you on? The whole social system is geared towards supporting men. 70% of the U.S. government is men. Most companies are owned by men. Most of the C-suite of most companies are men. Most engineers, doctors, lawyers, investors, and all other desirable, high-paying jobs are dominated by men. Just look around.
I'm betting OP is talking about supporting men emotionally, or generally supporting mens' well being.
Everything you listed is correct, but I think both of your statements can be true. Men aren't in need of societal advantages, but they are in need of some societal support. And that doesn't have to compete with very real things women require either.
If OP is talking about a broad social system to support men emotionally, then no, that doesn't exist in America. Nor does it exist for women, or minorities, or anyone else.
That’s not a social system, that’s a rat race of men fiercely competing against each other. There’s opportunity there, but not much psychological support.
This thread is full of people talking about cultural, societal, and economic factors that may influence this outcome. I've yet to see anyone mention the factor that I wish we more thoroughly investigated: health.
This has been discussed in some articles at length, but we still haven't identified primary causes, but testosterone levels are falling in men (at a given age) at a pretty steady pace year over year. This is likely associated to the prevalence of endocrine disrupting chemicals in our food and water supply, such as BPA in plastics and PCBs in common food-oriented coatings (Teflon). Adding on to that, there are also phytoestrogens from soy lecithin in many food products, and we also had periods where growth hormones were commonplace in dairy products. There is a growing body of evidence, not yet fully interconnected causally, that seems to indicate that the introduction of these sorts of hormones and endocrine disruptors into our food and water supply has had marked effects on health, everything from the increasing epidemic of obesity and obesity-related illnesses like diabetes, to earlier ages of menarche in young girls, and increasing prevalence of gynecomastia in young boys.
I, for various reasons, know numerous people who fall soundly into the NEET stereotype here in the US, still living at home (or in extreme poverty) playing video games and doing menial labor well into their 40s, despite having marketable and useful skillsets that would provide them gainful employment. Without exception, every person I know like this suffers from mental health issues, predominantly anxiety, all are obese, and all consume and have consumed throughout their life heavy amounts of processed food and take-out fast-food, which both increase exposure to chemicals like Teflon (often used to line take-out containers). Their generally unhealthy diet and lifestyle throughout childhood and into adulthood is likely a key factor in the outcome of their life, clearly affects their general health as adults, and is likely a contributor to their mental health issues and defeatist attitudes.
The absence of any serious public health movement to improve the food and water supply of all Americans makes it unsurprising to me that we now find ourselves in the position we are in. Compounding this with the absence of universal mental healthcare and the comorbidity between depression, anxiety, and obesity, makes it unsurprising as well.
The article actually addresses this in the final sentence:
“Nearly half of prime age men who are not in the labor force take pain medication on any given day; and in nearly two-thirds of these cases, they take prescription pain medication.”
I think more prominent than the soybeans/BPA/microplastics kind of causes is just plain old opioid dependence.
The next generations are going to look at us like the Romans drinking from lead pipes. I think it's the weirdest time, chemically, when it comes to life on earth.
For anyone struggling with their health, check if hormone tests could fit in your budget. It may point to a problem or hint to look in a different direction.
> despite having marketable and useful skillsets that would provide them gainful employment. Without exception, every person I know like this suffers from mental health issues, predominantly anxiety
Alternate hypothesis to low T: it’s the rituals of job interviews that keep them unemployable. As you said, these guys have skills to do the work: the problem is in connecting these men to the jobs in the first place.
This is it. This is the answer. It's shameful that nobody else here gets it.
Many of these people are autistic and/or ADHD. Autism, ADHD, and job interviews do not mix. The prejudice against these groups that's baked into the process (for no real gain) is unbelievable.
Could be. But lack of exercise would also lead to low T, and I'm quite confident that middle aged man without a job who lives with parents aren't exactly staying fit.
I think there's still a lot of research to be done in this area, but most of what I've read shows that exercise has minimal impact on this (and on obesity) and for both, diet is a far larger contributing factor. That said, it's not even conclusive that diet has been the cause of lower T levels over the years. That's part of why it's so disturbing... we have this huge change in a core part of the biological basis of masculinity at the same time as we're seeing social shifts that seem affected by it (both positive and negative) and minimal research funding seems directed at these questions (although there's been enough research over the years that the preponderance of evidence really strongly points to plastics critically messing with our hormone balances as humans).
> In cross-sectional analyses, aerobic exercisers have lower basal total and free testosterone compared to the sedentary. Anaerobic exercisers also have lower testosterone compared to the sedentary but a slight increase in basal testosterone with resistance training over time.
Anecdatum: during a years long period where I was not exercising at all, I had some blood tests done and total testosterone came out healthy and high.
Problems may not exist, or be less obvious at least, if their bodies adapted to eating soy over generations. Even differences in gut biome can explain this.
You’re correct that there are no PCBs in Teflon. I was using the term for brevity, but I’m really referring to as a class all of the Persistent Organic Pollutants or “forever chemicals”, several of which are specifically used in the production of Teflon, primarily PFOA and PFOS. Which also aren’t technically /in/ Teflon, but are used during manufacturing and can be released under some conditions afterwards.
Is anybody advocating for them or encouraging them in any way?
I can’t think of a single group which aims to highlight men, uplift men, and encourage masculine behavior.
These guys grew up in a school system of almost entirely women teachers, and popular media tells them that if they are successful in any way, it is due to oppression.
It’s no wonder why they’re not succeeding. We spent the last 15 years telling them that their success is evil. Who are their role models supposed to be exactly?
I have a good friend who is working in HR. She used to be in hiring, now she is in the talent and development stream. We are not in the same company.
A few weeks ago I was speaking about my impression that my company is forcing women into promotions and positions just for the sake of reaching targets. I said that it felt unfair towards male colleagues.
Her reply was something like this: Men had the advantage for thousands of years, now it is OK if they suffer and that women receive the advantage. This will balance it out.
I disagreed because the peers that those girls are competing against were not part of the "bad white old man" system. She disagreed and said that some "eye for eye is necassary".
In theory such companies should end up imploding from valuing genital configuration over talent which is why there's so much pressure on the various levels of government to enshrine this type of behavior into law so all competitors will likewise be as hobbled by it.
In the shale boom of the mid 2000's, Halliburton hired a lot of women engineers right out of college. My understanding (from male colleagues) was that if they had the minimum requirements and had no red flags, then they were rubber stamped.
The result was that they were all tough as nails and ran a rig as well as any man. There was literally no difference between them and their male counterparts. As others have observed, capability is uniformly distributed, opportunity is not.
Your argument reads like Palahniuk's satircal message in Fight Club.
These concepts of masculinity our culture pines for are destructive and unproductive. A woman is no less qualified to raise a man than a man.
No one has told them their success is evil. You're conflating women being told their success is success with men being shunned. There's a perception that women and minority groups have somehow gained an advantage in the last 30 years. What they've gained is some measure of equality with white males who still earn more, are more likely to get jobs and aren't stigmatized for their existence. If you believe white males are stigmatized for their existence, consider the stereotypes, lack of representation, and abuse women and minority groups face on a daily basis.
If a man can only find a role model in a man with x testosterone level, we are in dire shape as a society.
>A woman is no less qualified to raise a man than a man.
It's not that women aren't qualified, it's that children need father figures as much as they need mother figures:
>72% of juvenile murderers, and 60% of rapists came from single mother homes. Chuck Colson, “How Shall We Live?” Tyndale House , 2004, p.323
>“The strongest predictor of whether a person will end up in prison, is that they were raised by a single parent”. C.C. Harper and S.S. McLanahan, “Father Absence and Youth Incarceration”, Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Sociological Assoc., San Francisco, CA, 1998
>“After controlling for single motherhood, the difference between black and white crime rates disappeared.” Progressive Policy Institute, 1990, quoted by David Blankenhorn, “Fatherless America: Confronting Our Most Urgent Social Problem,” New York, Harper Perennial, 1996, p.31
I recall but can't find a meta-analysis which found that over 80% of children in single mother households read into stats with no critical thought.
Poverty is a more convincing factor in the way people raised by single parents turn out than that they didn't have a father figure (traditionally the financial provider btw).
There seem to be any number of outlets promoting men and encouraging masculine behavior. (however that may be precisely defined)
* Joe Rogan is the highest paid podcaster of all time, and has 190 million downloads a month
* Ben Shapiro has the number 6 most-listened to podcast in the US
* Fox News is the highest rated news program in the US
To your point that most women teachers are women: That's true because women are often channeled into careers that are lower paid and lower status. This is even true within careers. For example, women are 50% of assistant professors, but only 34% of full time professors.
So who could young men look up to as role models? Well, the obvious answer would be anyone who is successful and doing good in the world, regardless of gender. But even if they are only capable of having male role models, they could look up to the 66% of full professors who are men; the 100% of US presidents who are men; the professional athletes who are most celebrated, which is overwhelmingly men -- all 10 of the top 10 best paid athletes are men.
It's easy for people who feel like losers to blame the "other." It's very easy for men who feel like losers to blame all their problems on women. But by any objective standard, there are plenty of individuals and groups that support and promote men. Whatever the underlying cause is for this phenomenon, it's unlikely to be women.
This study did not study male and female teachers independently, so this does support the claim that female teachers are any different (or worse) than male teachers.
Furthermore, it is notoriously difficult to get to causation from correlation. If you'd like to read more about this, check out Judea Pearl's work.
I don't think you get it. Young men today grow up almost entirely in female-dominated spaces. That is not normal historically. In fact it would be strange if it didn't lead to any pathologies.
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.
Albeit not exactly helpful, I just wanted to thank you for sharing this. Also not American, and I'm too in a pretty dark place right now. I gave up the opportunity of attending a undergrad program I dreamed of at a uni I dreamed of for years, and am sorta lost now. I have a degree in computer science so will be able to get some job (although I never really liked the industry) once my savings run out eventually. But this is really not where I hoped I would be just 2-3 years ago. I also don't play video games (but don't judge people who do of course)
The boss at my firm doesn't understand the concept of remote work. I did the job interview with my mask on and when there were hard restrictions on moving between cities in my country, so I had to have a signed document with me if the policed stopped me. I got my second shot 2 weeks ago and I'm working as usual.
And a similarly insane number of applicants. Anecdata, but I recently hired for an entry level position at my company and received far more applications than when hiring for the same role a year and a half prior. Lots of applicants who graduated a year ago and have yet to find work.
I'm in the labor force, but live at home. I can absolutely afford to purchase a home.
Why don't I?
Because I'm not spending $250,000+ on 1400sq ft. These types of articles make it seem like some huge mystery as to why society is the way it is today. It's no mystery. Houses cost to much and employers don't pay enough.
When my wife and I bought our house (Seattle area) six years ago, I was uneasy about spending $300k, and my family in the Midwest was aghast that we paid asking price.
Anyone in this area would now laugh at my previous situation; I certainly do. We briefly considered buying a slightly larger house in the area, but everything is going for about $800k now.
If I were just entering the job and housing market today here in the PNW, I would absolutely stay with my parents if I could. And I rather expect that my kids won't move out at 18.
I've been wanting to buy a house around Seattle for a while, but the asking prices are so ridiculous for what you get... it's just not worth it. Personally, I'm gonna continue renting for a while to see if the remote work situation opens new opportunities or brings prices down.
That being said, I learned recently that for the same prices you would pay here you can get a castle in Europe... so I made that my retirement goal.
Not to mention, a lot of older housing which ends up being cheaper, has just a myriad of problems with it. They become massive money pits or take well beyond 10+ years to even make a dent beyond the interest paid. Plus you need to fix them constantly or put up with a subpar experience. Over time, I guarantee you save more time renting than you ever will buying a home. People forget to factor that moving the law, blowing snow, paying property taxes and insurance all factor in as additional costs to maintaining property. That amounts to time lost. Unlike money, you can never get that back.
I try to tell this to kids having FOMO right now with the housing market going crazy(same feeling people had in '06, even if the causes were different).
I bought a house young(26) and spent a good part of the next 16 years working on it. Sure, I enjoyed some of it, but much of it I did not. I did make money with the appreciation, but I also spent a lot on repairs and improvements. If I had focused on my career and my hobbies, I'd be richer and happier now. That all said, I didn't have kids. Maybe if I did I'd think it was worth it. Society puts a high value on having a home though, and much of that is bullshit. The world wants you to think owning a home will complete your life and signify your success but it is much more complicated than that.
Homes tie you down. They're fairly illiquid assets. Transactional costs are huge. Neighborhood issues can significantly affect your quality of life and net worth while remaining nearly completely outside your control.
This is experience that nobody is told when they buy a house for the first time. Not to mention being tied down. Plus like you mentioned with your career and hobbies. They're just a shackle if your not committed to the lifestyle. Hopefully things worked out in the end.
For myself, I actually worked in the mortgage industry for a few years and nothing jaded me about homeownership more. It's a monumental scam unless you're a DINK family and maybe live in a condo. That's a bit smarter but the most expensive option out of all types of living usually.
>> These types of articles make it seem like some huge mystery as to why society is the way it is today. It's no mystery. Houses cost to much and employers don't pay enough.
This is so true. I'd take it further -- for many (not for most of us developers/engineers) but for many others, the choice to move out is a very risky one because you're constantly on a thin line between paying student loans, mortgage/rent, and other costs of employment and wages may not grow while costs continue to grow. I've seen people just give up and enjoy what they have -- a parent's home at the cost of employment. Remember that it costs money to earn money if you need to move to a metro area and that cost can exceed the actual income, especially if it is a job without wage growth.
I think semi-permanent WFH changes the equation quite a bit -- one can now live with parents, earn, and save up money to hopefully cross the chasm into the world of sustainable ownership.
>I think semi-permanent WFH changes the equation quite a bit -- one can now live with parents, earn, and save up money to hopefully cross the chasm into the world of sustainable ownership.
This is what I'm doing I'm a software dev in my early 30's. A couple of years ago I moved back in with my parents for some health related reasons after being on my own for a decade or so, and ended up staying with them for another health reason.
Then COVID happened and the job I started 6 months earlier went full time remote. Previously I intended to move back to the city because my commute sucked. They've since terminated office leases and seem to be intending to go full time remote for another significant period of time if not permanently. I am saving an insane amount of money and I intend to stay with my parents as long as is feasible.
In a strange way, COVID is the best thing to ever happen to me financially. Home ownership in a dream location is looking to be a feat within reach in less than a decade.
I also can't compete with Blackrock and other professionally managed funds buying up swaths of homes tens of thousands of dollars over asking price because they want to rent them out later.
It's beyond my technical ability, but I always wished I was able to create an app where contractors could sign up to build a town "at cost" with everyone contributing their specialty. Each finished town would have an electrician/HVAC/etc for repairs or to other business with.
Maybe that would be something to pivot towards. Start with volunteer work. "Let's clean up the beach 6/10". People could earn karma/upvotes from the others who also contributed that's worthless like here, or to spend on stuff donated.
right now, I can reasonably afford a $1.3 million mortgage. i could do more if i was willing to lose the ability to save/invest, and also rent out multiple rooms to strangers
there is nothing at that price point (or below) that i would consider worth the current cost, in any of the cities that I actually want to live in. and even if I found something, it's so unfair that my property tax rate would be so much higher compared to others (california)
i'm just going to save money, invest in things that arent real estate, and emigrate at some point. i think the only exception is if I married someone who was given a house by their family. not too unlikely in the bay area or in southern california, but it's still not something i can bank on. i wouldn't even want to if it was.
The pay is probably higher where you are, and in smaller markets (OP) people that are from your market are moving in driving up prices so that natives can't afford anything. That is my current situation as well, in the Nashville market. Homes that were only $300K a few years ago have shot up to $600-700K in just 3 years. A 2 bedroom condo 10 years ago that was $200K is now closer to a million.
Part of this problem is our societal failure to build enough housing to keep up with the increasing number of people, with a resulting increase in housing costs that has significantly outpaced the median wage. If you can't afford to live on your own, and can't afford housing where the jobs are located, then you're more likely to live with your parents and be unemployed.
Adding to this, we've also abandoned the idea of building out in the middle of nowhere and linking it to a city center with a rail line. I'd gladly buy a cheap home in the boonies if I could take a train into work instead of driving.
I personally believe this will be more common in the future, but I’m less convinced of a rail connection. I think with the increasing popularity of working from home, availability of utilities (satellite internet, solar power) in more rural places and the relative cost of rural land, people will start settling a few hours outside larger cities without having to sacrifice much in terms of quality of life.
We do need density at the end of that rail line - dense towns connected to a dense metropolitan hub via a fast rail line. For example Ann Arbor to Detroit, Davis to Sacramento (neither of which have fast rail lines to connect them).
What we've built instead for more than half a century is continuous radiating sprawl.
There is no way the tax base of the boonies can support the initial and operating costs of a rail line. Therefore it is not an option, and why you do not see it anywhere.
Even suburbs cannot afford all of their ongoing infrastructure obligations, and why you see many dilapidated areas.
This is all becoming apparent now because birthrates have plummeted hence what used to be masked by economic growth due to sheer population growth no longer has the ability to be papered over with increased tax collections due to increased population.
Its going to be significantly more realistic to retrofit existing roads and highways with machine-readable signage and traffic lights (for example, why do cars have to read traffic lights with cameras, why can't the lights broadcast the status locally?)
Then we can run autonomous vehicles (private and corporate) over the same infrastructure.
> Part of this problem is our societal failure to build enough housing to keep up with the increasing number of people.
The issue is human overpopulation, not our society’s “failure” to destroy the fabric of closely knit communities.
Humans are by far the least efficient life form on this planet, and what little enjoyment most humans get out of life mostly comes down to the integrity of their local communities: their safety, their health, their prosperity. Yet we’ve become so hyperfocused on economic growth that we’ve turned our larger society into a malignant tumor unto Earth, while ironically an increasingly high proportion of humans lead unhappy, unfulfilled lives.
Why do so many people just accept the answer is more growth? Until we can master interstellar travel, we have to contend with finite physical resources.
Without economic growth we’d still be hunter gatherers. Growing crops allowed people to have excess food and support classes of people whose occupation was non-food related. The industrial revolution not only allowed for mass production but the Haber process by which fossil fuels are turned into fertilizer. Without it we would only be able to feed half the world.
Technological advancement and human overpopulation are orthogonal concepts. It’s perfectly reasonable to believe the planet is heavily overpopulated with humans and also that technological advancement is desireable.
There is very much not a direct relationship between absolute number of humans, and technological advancement. This is increasingly true as we inch closer to AGI.
> There is very much not a direct relationship between absolute number of humans, and technological advancement.
There very much absolutely is a direct and bidirectional link between the two. Technological advancement (esp fetilizers) has been crucial to the increase in the absolute number of humans to its current level.
There is also good reason to think that there are direct effects in the opposite direction. There seems likely to be a minimum population that can support the degree of specialization needed for a given level of technological advancement.
But while there absolutely is a direct relationship, I don't think that your core point is necessarily wrong. The minimum population required to maintain our current level of technology might well be one or more magnitudes less than our current population. Our current population may well be sufficient to achieve the level of technology required to become a space habitating species.
Despite claiming “a direct and (emphasis added) bidirectional link” exists, you’ve only argued for a link between technological advancement and population size, and not vice versa. So it would seem we actually agree?
(E.g. you don’t seem to be arguing increasing the human population by X% leads to X% technological advancement.)
Current human population levels are ecologically unsustainable without several major shifts taking place — Sir David Attenborough counts regulating the human population size among them [1].
> Despite claiming “a direct and (emphasis added) bidirectional link” exists, you’ve only argued for a link between technological advancement and population size, and not vice versa.
That is not correct. I laid out the effects in both directions.
In that case, could you please expound upon why increasing the human population by X% increases our technological advancement by X%? I must’ve missed where you supported that assertion with facts or evidence.
> There seems likely to be a minimum population that can support the degree of specialization needed for a given level of technological advancement.
50 people can support much smaller degree of specialization than 50 million people can. This should be fairly obvious, so I am not sure why it needs to be restated.
Granted, having X number of living humans could conceivably be necessary to facilitate the specialization required to bootstrap technological advancement. But even a highly generous take on this would reveal it’s “necessary but not sufficient”. Fundamentally, X number of humans does not equal X level of technology. If an X% increase in population really did in fact lead to an X% increase in technological advancement, then we could e.g. achieve AGI merely by multiplying the number of living humans by some constant.
I have a very multicultural background, but the dominant cultural view, at least when it comes to money, is Chinese.
For us, living at home is not failure. Moving out without planning to start a family if you live in the same city as your parents is considered wasting money. You instead use it as an opportunity to save a pile of money and invest.
How much of this is just cultural change? It isn't failure to launch. It is wanting to launch with a larger rocket with more fuel.
I grew up in a school district with median household income >$100k. Several schools had blue ribbon awards from the federal department of education. There were still families where kids were given 30 days notice to move out upon turning 18. Some families were under so much financial pressure the parents wanted the kids to drop out of high school at 16 and work.
Caucasian, US born male here. IMO, Western culture is less suited to many of the challenges of the modern world. I don't want to imply that Asian culture is somehow flawless, but there is quite a bit the west can learn if it wants to be efficient and stable in the near future.
My half-baked thought is that you can look at world population growth over time(https://ourworldindata.org/world-population-growth) and note that East and SE Asian population density has been higher for much longer than in the west. It stands to reason that either some aspects of culture have adapted to this, or that the population density somewhat results from a conducive cultural factor. Obviously it's much more complicated than that, but I hope I've made my point.
That said, I think there are forces at work which are putting special pressure on young people today. Whether it is related to declining testosterone, cultural shifts against traditional masculinity and success, negative information overload, cheap and ubiquitous entertainment and distractions, economic forces... I don't know. I think it's good to note that living at home isn't necessarily a bad thing, but there does seem to be something more insidious affecting our youth today.
> Caucasian, US born male here. IMO, Western culture is less suited to many of the challenges of the modern world. I don't want to imply that Asian culture is somehow flawless, but there is quite a bit the west can learn if it wants to be efficient and stable in the near future.
Especially to the economic situation of middle and lower class individuals. For most young people, it is simply __impossible__ to replicate even the family situations their parent generation had with a stay at home wife rearing the children and a breadwinning father -- simply because the real wage stagnation has made it impossible to finance a family without at least two 'good' incomes. Staying in the family home during university perhaps until marriage at age 30, this amounts to 10 years of more efficient spending on rent/mortgage, bills and other shared appliances. Having an extra $100k saved up at age 30 this way can make and break a family project.
Upper middle with >$500k household income at age 30-50 and above likely are in a better economic spot than they have ever been in and not really comparable to the plight of the commons.
Idk, playing video games all day without any responsibilities seems like they’ve straight-up won life. Most of us have to work for that privilege or be born with a trust fund in our name. Only losing side to this path is a lack of romance or intimacy.
No one’s likely gonna remember you anyway, for better or worse. Might as well enjoy your time on Earth with some of the most immersive storytelling humanity has invented.
In my experience[0] that's not really true. This comment[1] is pretty on the money. Being a NEET is not a vacation, and playing video games all day is often a means of avoiding confronting the realization that you're a waste of oxygen. Many have substance co-dependencies that function similarly. It's the sort of life that sounds cool as an overworked wagie but gets stale rather quickly, plus a massive helping of sunk-cost behavior justification once one realizes how hard it can be to get back in the saddle.
The people in this situation I've personally known who have been in the best mental state were those who went beyond just playing games all day to do something more productive though still probably non-commercial: forum mod, fan translator, guild webmaster type of thing. Again, at least in my experience, pretty much everyone has a desire to be useful to others in some way. Wallowing in purely consumption-based activities can help at first but doesn't hold off the demons forever.
---
[0] 30k hours of runescape gets one a lot of NEET acquaintances
Sorry, I didn't mean to imply that. Like I said, there are plenty of fulfilling non-commercial NEET-friendly outlets. I just see the game/tv spiral as almost uniquely destructive of self-esteem.
And now after reading more of the comments, I think there are two aspects to the situation. The first is doing nothing but playing video games all day, and the second is freeloading off of others to enable this lifestyle.
I don’t think we should judge the first as a flaw of character, but definitely the second IMO is deplorable.
I think the “productive member of society” trope needs to die. Many jobs across all pay levels serve purposes that are bad for humanity and the individual, and more power to those who’d rather opt out of all of that, as long as they’re sustaining themselves.
I mean, there's people who barely do any work while pulling down a decent salary, so I'm not sure who's really the bigger waste of oxygen compared to someone who sits around all day on games. (personally, I disagree with the 'waste of oxygen' viewpoint - life has innate value especially since we're the only intelligent species we know of, even if they aren't valuable in a capitalistic sense).
But it's weird we prefer others being at a bullshit job over just enjoying themselves and not having to work. We'd like to think that everyone who's employed is doing some small part in helping out humanity, but that's definitely not true.
>once one realizes how hard it can be to get back in the saddle.
Is it really that hard though? It can be uncomfortable, sure, but if you can get past that, you're very similar to other people who decide on a later career change, start over in a new place, or are dealing with personal problems later on. The only real struggle is with yourself and being able to admit you're dealing with a problem. Once you do that, most of the stigma falls away except from the harshest critics. The idea that you're 'behind' is very outdated. You can do nothing with your life by working as well.
> life has innate value especially since we're the only intelligent species we know of, even if they aren't valuable in a capitalistic sense
I personally agree with you in general, but I'm talking about a self-image formed through extensive socialization to the idea that work == value. Even if in some abstract sense all intelligent life is a gift, the "waste of oxygen" label starts feeling appropriate as your cohort materially advances without you. I guess I was unclear in that I wasn't going for lifestyle judgmentalism; more trying to explain the negative self-image that's easily developed given capitalist socialization and a lack of capitalist success.
> It can be uncomfortable, sure, but if you can get past that...
Again, I agree in general, and there's obviously a spectrum of how impacted any particular individual is going to be, but I think you're underestimating the degree of psychological scarring that can be built up over a long time in the pit. That step of admitting that you're the problem is one many fight against for years, which happens to be linked to self-deception around how fun/fulfilling the consumption-only life is. I guess I'm glad that you've got as hopeful of an outlook on this as you do, but I want to temper that a little with the understanding that "well, just go get a job lol" is akin to "well, just stop being sad lol" - in both cases there's probably a lot going on that simple willpower alone isn't going to fix.
Yes, you have to ask how many people don't realize their critiquing has an unconscious jealousy behind it. I used to be a student bum and lived in a van which prompted a guy from a house in the street to come out and berate me, at first he said I was scaring his kids but we kept talking because he seemed to want mostly to reconcile in his mind how I lived like this. He had several "but don't you.. but don't you want". To my "No, no no, I'm just happy... " Eventually I admitted something along the lines of "But I'VE had to work so hard [to get the things that I require for happiness]" (it's not fair)
There certainly is something enviable in someone who can be completely happy, content, and satisfied as a bum living in a van. But I don't think the average young adult man living at home is doing so because they have reached Enlightenment.
They're winning until they're 45 and their enabling family members finally pass on leaving them nothing as they've extracted all their wealth over the decades enabling such a lifestyle. Then suddenly find themselves with nothing and no skills other than being in the top 500 of Call of Duty 25.
Millions? The number of men who died shitting themselves with a government issued piece of iron gripped in their hands and zero choice about being there is probably in the billions not millions. (98 billion dead humans, presumably 49 billion of them men). The lions share of the rest of those billions toiling in fields would no doubt have joined those others in living a life of air conditioned immersive competition/story telling and considered themselves having won at life.
Maybe 1B total over all of history. The number of humans who have ever lived is estimated at 100B. So, what, 1% have died in war? Back of the envelope.
I really wish this stigma against living "at home" would go away. Multigenerational homes has been the standard for thousands of years, and still is in large portions of the world.
People use 'living at home' as a stand-in for a set of properties: unemployed or lowly employed, low ambition, single, excess time on entertainment, etc.
Of course they aren't always true individually (I know some of my facebook colleagues lived at home) but from a rough demographic perspective, it's true.
We do this a lot: consider that teen pregnancy is understood to be unwanted, thwarting educational opportunities, etc. but in some religious communities a 17 year-old might be married and ready to bear children. It's just that's a very small proportion, and doesn't diminish that teen pregnancy is generally considered a problem.
I have a very multicultural background, but the dominant cultural view, at least when it comes to money, is Chinese.
For us, living at home is not failure. Moving out without planning to start a family if you live in the same city as your parents is considered wasting money.
On one hand, there shouldn't be anything shameful about living "at home", especially if it's purposeful. (looking back, it probably would have made sense to stay with my folks even longer than I did in order to save more money)
Yet living at home and not building anything into late adulthood tends not to be a good way to generate intergenerational wealth. Until the international economic paradigm changes, I can't see how it's a good thing for people to have nothing to pass on to their children.
The title of the article says that they aren't pursuing employment. The fact they are living at home is explaining how they do that. At least in the article I read it as being stigma against people just staying at their parents homes and playing video games--not against multigenerational homes where young men were working.
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 < 15k savings if they moved to a smaller condo.
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).
PERSONAL RANT YOU DON'T NEED TO READ, BUT I NEED TO WRITE:
I will add something to your son's point: being independent from my family was more important to me than saving money, especially if their loans are only 4 years away from being paid off. In fact, it bootstrapped all kinds of good behaviors around how to socialize with others, make friends, find a job, fix my own toilet, do laundry, pay taxes, find a new hair stylist, shop for clothes, etc etc etc.
It gave me the independence to move even further, and find work paid literally 10x more in a few years. No amount of saving would make up for that.
I can't imagine how much more stagnate my life would be if I had done the "smart thing" and put my life on pause instead of doing what I wanted from the get go. Death is much less stressful to think about when you're living aligned with your goals and values.
As someone in a similar situation as OP's son (although undergrad) and looking to move out...
Independence and personal space MATTER, please consider how your son may feel about living close to you. It may hurt, but it's important to understand the mindset behind the decision.
agreed. I moved out as soon as I could support myself. it wasn't because I hated my parents; they're pretty good as far as parents go. I feel like it's hard to actually be an adult when you live with your parents.
as an example, my dad used to always ask when he could expect me home when I went out. not being nosy, he just had a certain "night lock up" routine for the house. it wasn't an unreasonable question to get from a man who was paying for my housing and food, but it was a question I no longer wanted to answer at that point in my life.
Yeah I'm trying to figure out where I'm essentially asking the same things of him and putting pressure on him. But I've also been in completely hands off mode for the entire pandemic.
This is my two cents, living at home with my parents full-time since the pandemic started.
Living near them 24/7 made me reflect much about my behavior around them and my desire for independence. Living together can become rough when trying to get privacy and even small differences in opinion/lifestyle can turn into intoxicating moments.
e.g. during breakfast my parents discuss their political opinions and I honestly disagree with all of them. I stay quiet to prevent controversy, but it’s one of those moments that ruin your morning.
They’ve been very hands off as well, but some micro interactions can get grating over long periods of time. It’s just parenting stuff.
TLDR: I’m extremely grateful for my parents and their unwavering support during the pandemic. We’ve grown closer together as a family and I wouldn’t trade that for anything. However, this experience reinforced my desire to move and forge my own path, away from them or their judgement.
Yeah $200k of savings in 4 years is maybe $40k/yr of savings, plus optimistic investment returns for the first 3 years. But GP also mentioned all loans paid off, so that adds another $10-20k/yr, depending on what their loans look like.
It's not impossible to save that much money straight out of school, but if you're making that much then you could still save a decent chunk even if you're paying $2k/mo for an apartment (which comes to $100k over 4 years).
Several of my young amazon coworkers had 500-800k at 4 years out of college with the stock going up. One basically retired (he is very frugal and allergic to everything and never goes outside) at 4.5 years.
It's quite easy. He's a creative writing major. His girlfriend however has a good shot as a FAANG job. Running an Amazon / Microsoft / etc Seattle SDE1 job with no raises, at $120k a year, 27k in loans and $9k / year in room/board at our house == ~275k. Of which over 4 years, 90k is a lot to spend over the top for 2 kids who don't leave the house and only want pc upgrades.
Versus them spending about $4k/month on living expenses out of house, 48k/year.
That's also assuming she has a FAANG job, not say, the same expenses but $58k/year starting data eng job.
$185k/48 = $3.85k in monthly costs saved by not living independently. I can see it as being possible in Seattle, but on the high end. I would assume comparable abodes to sharing your parents house would be cheaper.
I also would not have wanted to stay with my parents in my 20s though, at least not with my specific parents.
Sounds like it was only the man who wasn't inclined to work, and that the woman has been changing that tendency, as well as presumably having a decent income of her own that's being considered here. So something north of 50K after tax per year for a two-income couple isn't too ridiculous by any means.
185K delta between the two scenarios feels wrong, though - that's almost 4k a month, an astonishing high rent bill for a couple just out of college. The "find an apartment on their own for 1-2K, maybe even with roommates, but ideally just in a cheaper area" option should be seriously considered compared to living at home. Get a bunch more savings AND some very valuable life experience!
One end is living at home with a faang job. The other is them living on cap hill with around 3800 / month expenses and the 58k income you mentioned. The 3800 is her estimate which checks out.
There are obviously many more options in the decision matrix but this is a HN post :)
many parents contribute to their children's first downpayment, if you can't or aren't interested then just leave the discussion.
they don't have consensus on wanting to live with you while you believe they have the skillsets to save $200,000 in 4 years. who gives af if there is a theoretical savings optimization possible, that's not your problem stop acting like it is.
you are going to have an empty nest, you'd be better off admitting thats what you are avoiding instead of acting like your concern is their savings potential, which is just coincidence. sure, I could be way off, but the constant is that you already gave them the support system to integrate into society, this seems largely successful so don't worry about those choices.
let the homebody go have the option of trying IPAs at all the microbreweries in walking distance. not your problem.
This conversation is about college aged 22-28 year olds who have been under the care and advisement of their parents far far after their 18th birthday.
They should be able to find a nice 1br in Seattle for 20-25k/yr. Even in the most expensive neighborhoods it shouldn’t be more than 30k. Your numbers are higher than I’d expect
We ran out of frontier, and are rapidly running out of the sort of high-risk, high-reward opportunities that get young men excited. We need a new gold rush.
No one wants to sit in a cubicle for 35 years, grinding out pennies while having all your value extracted by a cadre of semi-literate, power-tripping middle managers who punish anyone that displays talent. Not only have a series of crashes in 2008 and 2020 firmly demonstrated just how rigged the game is, but everyone can see what everyone else is doing on social media. There's little opportunity to trick these men into believing they should work hard when they can clearly see so many people skating through life without any effort, and watch laborers have their livelihoods stripped from them during crashes while billionaire fortunes double. Bloomberg has lost the plot completely, they don't yet realize that the jig is up.
Want to get people excited about work? Bring back drinking and loud music at the office. Let people be themselves without having to put on a deliriously upbeat, false persona while sitting through endless, pointless meetings about nothing. Stop asking them to constantly fellate the worthless middle management caste. Pay them well.
Maybe is has to do with women entering the labor force?
Here I plotted the labor force participation rate of women and men plus the sum of both. While the rate for men declines, the one for women increases.
Update: here is a new graph without the assumption that there are equally many men and women (participation rates for each are now multiplied by the population size of each and normalized to total population). The interesting part is that the total labor participation rate is moving very little, just between ~59-67%.
// OLD:
The sum of both moves between 120 and 135% (assumption here is that there are roughly as many men as there are women which should be approximately correct): https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=EFEs
Obviously, the percentage of women in the workforce shot up after anti-discrimination laws were applied to sex, but since the turn of the century, that trend has leveled off and reversed. If you just look at the last 20 years, the percentage of men and women in the work force have both been going down.
Using your own, new chart (EFG8), which I used DoL statistics to verify [1], the overall labor force participation rate dropped from 67 in 2000 to 63 right before the pandemic hit, almost monotonically. What happened 20 years ago?
I'd suspect this has a lot of to with women being in the workforce meaning men are less required to work relentlessly. More recently, it's the aging population. The chart for just prime age males is less dramatic:
Also, a topic that has been surprisingly quiet is that employment-population rate absolutely cratered to a near 50-year low during the pandemic. We had a positive report in the UNRATE last week, but participation is still digging out of an historic hole.
The people guiding our economy won't risk the "wrong sorts" of people getting too many rights, having an income, and thinking they deserve to be able to own a home, start a family, and build any generational wealth. Now all the rest of us are feeling the fallout from it too. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS11300006
That's quite an interesting graph. I wonder if it is also influenced by things to do with average age or age of retirement, time spent in school, or something like that. Just looking at it makes me wonder about demographics/education/etc. That's about a 20% drop over the years, I would assume caused by a number of factors.
My speculation is that it’s like the argument that minimum wages increase the skill floor for employment. However, it’s that a combination of automation and cost optimization eliminated all the marginal jobs, rather than the wage floor. Automation allows a salary employee to pick up what previously would have been a full-time minimum wage position under “other duties as assigned” without overworking them. Cost optimization meant that companies realized that they do not need their floors to be that sparkling clean, further reducing the number of low-wage/low-skill positions.
Video game addiction is a real problem. I spent my freshman year of college rooming with man-children who played video games non-stop. They didn't explore the city, they didn't meet new people, they just played video games in the dark, screaming into their headsets and eating their takeout at their desk. People can certainly have a healthy, fruitful relationship to video games but since then I haven't felt the need to touch a game.
Not a psychologist, but I would guess that playing games at all times is more a symptom than a cause. A symptom of depression? A coping mechanism for chronic anxiety? A happy well adjusted person does not try so hard to escape reality or responsibilities.
Demeaning them by calling them man-children is not going to help them in the slightest.
As someone who has chronic anxiety and depression, for me it goes both ways. I do it as a coping mechanism, but doing it too much also worsens it. When I do things like go outside or make an effort to see people it goes down.
Completely agree calling someone a man-child does not help. We would condemn that kind of language said about woman.
Depression is often characterised by a struggle in finding the motivation / desire to do something you love: if they love video games and can play them 12 hours a day, it's very possible they simply... don't care about the outside world. A job, family, exploring the world, these are all things some people just don't like. They don't have to have mental illness in order to spend their lives doing one thing!
Depression also manifests with addictions though through self medication like alcohol, drugs, and even video games. It gets trickier with comorbidities like ADHD where one has addictive tendencies resulting in what appears to be simple lack of motivation and laziness at a surface level.
I disagree, it's an mental illness if it interferes in your desired pursuit. For example, there is nothing wrong with playing games ur whole life.. except if you decide you want to get a girlfriend and can't. Now you're dealing with a mental illness.
Also if it interferes with your health, and a few other things. If playing video games takes precedence over, say, taking regular showers, or even basic exercise? I'd call that a mental illness too.
But I agree with the main point: “person wants to live in a way I don't like” is not mental illness.
Tell that to the vast majority of humans throughout history who not only did 1 thing their whole life, but did the same thing their parents did before them. In some cultures to this day, trying to do anything other than what your family has already established as the family business is viewed as disrespectful and an insult to your lineage.
And a virtual world can be every bit as varied. You see someone sitting at a computer playing the same video game all the time. They see farming, running dungeons with guild mates, forming relationships, crafting things, fighting wars and so on.
Defining a metal illness is non trivial, but for starters, their mental state needs to cause them or someone else harm or discomfort. But it's also possible that the discomfort isn't caused by their mental state, but the society they are in who rejects them.
In 1000 years no one will remember what that person in their virtual world did any more than you know what a random person 1000 years ago did, but if they feel every bit as accomplished and emotionally fulfilled, then what's the difference?
Now if their involvement in their virtual world means they are unable to sustain themselves in the physical world (not showing up to work, health problems, etc) then we have a problem that needs addressing. But living in a virtual world, in and of itself, is perfectly valid.
Except none of those things is actually happening. Its like saying playing Monopoly is the same as being a real estate magnate. It just isn't, and emotionally the people using the video game as a crutch know it.
I understand that addiction is borne out of mental illness, feelings of inadequacy, etc., but it’s really hard for me to be sympathetic when I had to go to sleep to them pathetically screaming like little children into their headsets for a year
I had a period of time where I was pretty hooked, to the detriment of my studies. I don't think I was coping or escaping; at nineteen they were very intricate yet offered a clear progression to mastery. As a young adult, you haven't had the chance to develop mastery yet (which everyone hungers for) and nobody has given you the keys to something really complex before.
Biggest reason I moved on, I think, was quite simply that my horizons rapidly broadened. So, before passing judgement, I'd want to see what became of these young men in a few years time first.
One young man in my boy's cohort got addicted. Sat and drank beer and played video games until exhausted; then slept on the couch and repeat the next day. Two years later, died of liver failure.
I know people are different and I'm not wired the same way, but I have trouble understanding how people can play games for more than a few hours a week.
Games like Pac Man and Tetris are algorithmic workloads. It's not much different than driving a semi or forklift, except you're not paid by a company for the work you do. It puts human brains closer to acting and performing as algorithmic worker bee agents.
Modern AAA titles are the same thing, just with more degrees of freedom.
I understand that there are dopamine triggers, but game engines subject players to the same repetitive thing over and over until the game ends. Kill this thing, collect 12 pelts, etc. There aren't very many variations on this theme, either. I can't grapple with how this squares with the limited time we have in life.
I think the best argument from my perspective is that Animal Crossing has you literally working to pay off a fake mortgage to buy digital items you don't need. You shouldn't stress out over a game.
I've enjoyed games for their mood, setting, music, and narrative, but gameplay itself is work. I'd rather just have a movie or narrative story. I already work too much.
That’s your problem. Repetition, mindlessness, boredom, flow are different facets of the same phenomenon. When your ancestors needed to build a shelter, they spent hours and hours chopping, hewing, digging, etc etc. Birds have nests, bees have hives, beavers have dams; the list goes on and on. It’s perfectly normal to find some amount of busywork soothing.
You hit your cap at work; others don’t. There are also those with real addictions where it inhibits their ability to accomplish other goals, but that’s true of tons of habits that scratch the same itch.
Not to mention, many jobs actively encourage this busywork grind, giving out more money for more grinding. So you get trained to chase the rabbit, but then you lose your job or something happens that makes it harder for you to get employed and you are left satisfying these ingrained habits any way you can, just so you don't go nuts. Video games can fill that need for grinding and give a feeling of virtual progress, but they aren't necessarily the source for that drive in humans. I blame school and work for training us to be this way, like a Skinner box. I don't blame young men for getting hooked on video games, even though it can become an unhealthy coping mechanism.
I think since most online games have chat rooms or other such social aspects, and also the game is there to provide an inherent icebreaker activity when speaking with others, online games tended replaced older hangout-style social activities for some people.
The game being work, but not hard work, provides a number of things beneficial to easy social interaction: a reason to be there, typically an easy way to add value (within the game) and therefore have a reason to approach groups you aren't a member of and potentially join or meet, and an overall good background for chat/conversation without necessarily coming off as desperate or creepy.
I kinda agree with you. as I get older, more games feel like repetitive work than fun. I think I finish some games more because I want to feel like I got my money's worth than because I actually enjoyed them.
still, some multiplayer games get me absolutely hooked for a while. a well-designed multiplayer game can be a never-ending stream of novel situations. open-ended puzzle games like factorio are always fun (for me) with a couple good friends. for some reason it never feels like work, even though it's fairly close to what I just did from 9-5.
Work and games are the same activities. The only difference is whether someone cares about the end result, and hence will complain if you don't do it properly, take your time or go explore different areas.
Having a casual conversation is fun. Being forced to have casual conversations with people all that long is work. And so on etc.
I think the point is you actually have to do stuff (often menial collect n of thing tasks) to advance the plot. once the suspension of disbelief is broken, you are no longer a valiant hero saving the kingdom. you are pushing buttons to complete arbitrary tasks that trigger the next cutscene. if you don't enjoy the core gameplay, why not just cut out the tedium and watch tv or a movie?
> why not just cut out the tedium and watch tv or a movie?
Well, I would dispute it is tedium (particularly compared with watching a modern Hollywood production, and particularly watching TV) - I like exploring and finding new and strange areas of the world.
All of the necessities are less and less attainable day by day.
House prices are rising out of control.
College education is extremely expensive, and jobs require more and more degrees and credentials.
Dating apps are heavily biased towards women.
But entertainment at home is more attainable than ever! Cheap high speed internet, a plethora of fun games to play, tons of people online to socialize with.
what do these young men have to look forward to in life? home ownership and having a family probably seem so financially out of reach that kids are not even trying.
I'd suggest this represents the dividing line between Millennials and Generation Z.
Millennials (at least those who graduated before the 2008 financial crisis) had legitimate aspirations of home ownership, starting a family, and achieving the typical American Dream milestones. Many of them have not given up those dreams, despite numerous setbacks. On the other hand, Generation Z never had those aspirations in the first place. They don't expect to ever own a home. They understand the nuclear family is financially unreachable. Life milestones after university graduation by and large do not exist for Gen Z kids.
The nuclear family was a stupid idea anyway, putting the necessity of income over the necessity of an (extended) family. Children are not supposed to be raised by a single pair of mother and father, that's not how humans have evolved to grow up. Humans have always been raised by the extended family and only in the last two-hundred years we've invented this crazy concept of a 'nuclear family'.
Definitely a good list, but I'd add a few more that just aren't around as much anymore. Things like spear-hunting mega fauna, traveling with the great herds and just enjoying the endless bounty of nature. The world was once much wilder and more abundant with major species. Lions in Europe etc. But yeah, we had so much fun chasing those critters around, we drove a lot of them to extinction and now must satisfy ourselves with video games to sublimate some of our hunter-gatherers instincts.
We moved to a suburb built around 1992, and our street had most of the original first residents. Out of say ten houses of original residents, three houses had sons in their 30's that still lived at home. (One guy was a welder and has since moved out, so I believe he was just saving money for a downpayment somewhere.)
Snide comments about "kids these days" aside, housing is much more expensive than it used to be, compared to median household earnings.
[Edit] I'm totally guilty of snide comments about "kids these days"; I wasn't directing that at anyone.
From anecdotal experience my father abandoned us I used to be a NEET in my late teen years. (but I also used to and still live in a very dangerous place, where I could regularly see people being killed or botched, something that could have contributed to me staying home)
What saved me was that I had a big interest on computers and learned at the time to do basic stuff like toying around with php (when it used to be big) and html.
One day on going through the neighborhood park I met a guy who told me he was a software developer and his company was looking for inexperienced people in exchange for the minimum wage and so my story as a developer (although I'm a very SUBPAR one) started
for whatever it's worth, my bio dad has been super hard on me, but it did push me to into going all out in terms of starting a career albeit at much psychological pain. was it worth it? i dont know maybe few years of pain for life long career.
Reading a lot of comments on this thread, I see many that are oblivious and out of touch at best, and disingenuous at worst. I'm 22 and I've been living with my parents my entire life; I have an Ok salary living in London, the reason I haven't taken the next step of moving out is because financially it doesn't make sense. I could get a place tomorrow and have that independence, but I won't be saving anything, and I'll never be able to a mortgage, I'll be renting for the rest of my life. I'm going to have to live with other people anyway (house/flat mates), so why not stay with family instead? I save on rent, its a good deal? Many of my friends and cohorts are in a similar position, in a large major city like London living with parents until 24-25 is completely the norm.
Our generation has it the worst. Entry level jobs are harder to get, entry level pay is peanuts compared to living costs, accommodation costs are through the roof, and for many of us the dream of owning a home is just that, a dream. So colour me less than surprised to see young men living at home when an entire generation has been disenfranchised by a society that doesn't give a rats ass about young people.
I admit that your generation didn't have a golden spoon shoved in your mouths like the generations from 1950 to 1970, but your generation is far from having it worst.
I do however think that you are on to something when you say that a generation of young men has been disenfranchised. There are no social media campaigns telling young men that they are OK the way you are, no preferential treatment for college or university admission, to preferential treatment in hiring for men, no men-exclusive training courses, ...
This is problematic because it alienates a lot of people and drives them away from a fruitful interaction with society.
This seems like a kind rational economic choice. If there are not enough good jobs that can support independent living, providing for a spouse, buying a home or raising a family, then staying home with the easy accomplishment of video games makes sense. Most people never live outside their home states and can't afford to leave the support network of their family and close friends. If you grew up in a medium or high cost of living area, then you're sort of stuck. I work in tech and still, owning a home seems pretty distant, so I can't imagine how it must be for someone without job skills.
I'm just now middle aged and even when I was a twenty-something I never felt as ambitious or as risk embracing as I was supposed to be. My father and grandfather got into way more trouble than I ever did, with just about every facet of their life. My stories are absolutely tame in comparison.
It turns out the steady dopamine faucet is a stronger motivator than going out and trying to flirt, date, make friends, network, or hustle. Just spending time on the PC isn't even particularly fun, but as soon as someone proposes plans I suddenly feel like backing out and retreating back into my own world. I definitely sense this isn't "normal" for men and it's probably a consequence of modernity.
This is a troubling trend that I see in my sons and that I battle in myself.
Why go out and compete for money, success and sex when those things are at your fingertips. I really think it’s as simple as “turn off the TV”. The problem is that the world is a hard place, and games/porn offer a “good enough” alternative that offsets the trouble of putting yourself out there.
Sorry for making this thread weird by bringing porn in.
No, it's absolutely part of the equation. The internet has been an absolute game changer for how the human libido is satisfied. Pornography went from something rarely seen and socially awkward to acquire to something that is now ubiquitous, instant access, and even individualized. In fact, you have to go out of your way to avoid seeing sexual content on the internet.
Or brains and reward-systems have evolved for an existence as semi-nomadic subsidence hunter-gatherers. We're not equipped to deal with "temptations" modern society has to offer.
While porn might be a particularly good example, there's plenty of other traps as well. Social media, games, gambling, ...
All that is geared towards maximized 'engagement', e.g. to make us as addicted as possible in as little time as possible. It plays into our worst tendencies.
1. Most want to start business and become rich, not work for someone else. Starting business is difficult, needs lots of work, even if you are smart and hardworking, have capital to start, still you need social skills which present generation didn't develop, so getting along with others and leading others is still difficult which limits the success.
2. Anything you'll come up, there are guys who are already doing it better.
3. Work hard for what!? Beyond basic needs, even in dating women demand millionaires, average Joes are treated like disposable good for nothing who women say are creeps because they don't have money to build their IG brand and devour women with lavish gifts.
At the end of day, most people simply will not be motivated to take part in such system now that internet makes it possible for you to remotely live any life you dream of living even if it's only through some YouTube. A lot of things now seem less enticing.
Even guys who society might say are successful can't afford real estate at today's price, only way to afford considerable land is to move away from cities but moving away from cities also takes away your income source.
All these reasons are why I don't hustle hard anymore. I just try to make enough to coast in life and explore my hobbies, not working hard to get rich or any such goal. Because I don't really see how more money will change my life.
This is a very pessimistic and distorted take on things.
1. From what I have seen most people want a job that pays for their lifestyle and isn't soul destroying. Sure people fantasize about becoming a successful entrepreneur, but certainly not most and not enough to give up on work in general.
3. This is frankly ridiculous and such a blatantly false view of what women want that it borders on incel philosophy. It appears entirely based on the extremely exaggerated and polarized views seen on social media rather than the far more moderate and balanced views the average person you come across will have. Most women do not demand millionaires. This is readily apparent if you talk to real women instead of only watching TikTok and Instagram models.
>> Even in dating women demand millionaires, average Joes are treated like disposable good for nothing who women say are creeps because they don't have money to build their IG brand and devour women with lavish gifts.
This is a ridiculous caricature of women. Most women aren't spending their time building IG brands, counting lavish gifts, and petulantly demanding millionaires. This sounds like a cartoon villain or something from a reality TV show.
Most women are trying to find their place in the world, figure out their goals, establish a career with reasonable prospects, work on hobbies, create a support network of friends, and hopefully find a partner to start a family.
If your attitude towards women is that they are money-hungry, delusionally entitled, and over-demanding then I'm not surprised they don't waste their time trying to convince you otherwise. They are busy spending time with people and looking for partners who don't treat them like delusional, spoiled children.
>This is a ridiculous caricature of women. Most women aren't spending their time building IG brands, counting lavish gifts, and petulantly demanding millionaires. This sounds like a cartoon villain or something from a reality TV show.
yes but this accurate in describing what the last couple women I was with were like. they were both women who approached me first, whatever that might tell you.
I agree with your first two points. Starting a business is hard, you'll probably fail (statistically) and there is likely someone else doing it better than you already. But part of starting a business is looking at that adversity and doing it anyways.
Your third point about dating, I couldn't disagree more. If you go on social media you will see arguments very similar to the one you made, basically if you aren't an athlete/millionaire/etc, don't even bother. I think these arguments come from a bitter place and as a result generalize women in general. I'm an average looking dude, certainly not a millionaire, but I go on dates pretty much every week with different women. I found that it's all about just putting yourself out there.
Where do you live? This has not been my experience on the west coast.
You might be underselling yourself. In any major city, being average isn’t sufficient. You’re just swiped over for the next guy who is above average. (They always exist on the apps, nearly infinite amount)
On dating apps, there are to most people an endless amount. You can just keep swiping. Very few people will swipe through the 200k+ dating profiles available in their area. Thus, endless…
Regardless of how women feel men are acting towards them, the stats don’t lie, women receive far more swipes than men. Something like 36x more.
I live over on the East Coast. I'd say that I look average, but its also about the profile and how you sell yourself.
(This is pure speculation based on my experiences) Out here I've noticed that Tinder and Bumble are just terrible to use, Hinge though seems to be the sweet spot. The problem I see with Tinder and Hinge is with the swiping, it turns it into a game of sorts where you're playing whose post attractive based on the number of points (matches) you get. With how Hinge is setup, I get fewer matches, but of those matches, I end up going on first dates much more often.
I also found that it's about playing the algorithm a bit and making sure your profile is setup right, think of it in terms conversion rate (from being in the "This person liked you" section to matching with someone). Before I started having success I went through probably 10+ iterations and tweaks to my profile to see what worked and what didn't. I also found that sometimes the algorithm just said F you and pushed me down to the bottom of the stack. In that case delete your profile and recreate it, I've had to do this once.
Go outside. Stop using apps. Unless youre incredibly attractive you always will get beaten by the person who makes a move in the real world. Hetero dating is gendered and apps remove the steps that a hetero man has to take, theres not much incentive for a woman who is already hit on regularly to use a dating app.
I wouldn’t say that’s really universally true. I’ve found many people who met their long term partner online and had a plethora of people coming up to them. I’d say sometimes online is better for particular interests. (Depends on the app)
Outside is quite overrated. Unless you’re in a particular niche where forced interaction is a thing or you’re exposed to an endless amount of people who are interested in partnering, you’re going to have a bad time. (Even compared to online dating, the real world sucks a lot more these days for the average man - as you’re always competing with both even if you opt out of one) Add on the typical issues we have in our culture and well - it’s practically taboo to approach people these days out of the blue outside an app.
I’ve got a lot of experience with online and offline (“outside”) and both are quite horrific for the average man. Hell, I’m exceptional in some areas and I have had a hell of a hard time anyway. People really want their niche - whatever that is.
I’ve been fortunate to find someone and mostly fit their niche but it was a long road. A lot of people who wanted everything and expected to give nothing.
There is big difference between going on dates every week and finding a woman that will treat you as a potential life partner and father for her children...
I think this is a huge distinction. Stable career prospects are a huge factor in choosing a partner. And the HN poster you are replying to probably has better career prospects than most. The millionaire talking point seems like a distraction. The point is that many men have zero career prospects, and probably have a pretty terrible dating pool as a result. This all hangs together, no job, no partner, no kids, no home.
Until this year, I lived in the same place I grew up, one of the highest cost-of-living places on the planet: NYC. Until the pandemic, the goal of owning a home did seem totally out of reach for me, even with my remote SV tech job salary.
Then I moved to an unincorporated community in TN, because NYC's lockdowns, mask mandates, and general cultural decay was too much for me to bear - financially, emotionally, and even ethically.
I now own 15 acres of land with two houses on it. The median income in this part is <40k/yr and yet it's safer, friendlier, healthier, and best of all, much freer. High cost of living is a true killer of communities and the more expensive your area is, it's quite likely it's also a lot less free.
If you can leave the major cities in the US, it's possible for life to become a whole lot nicer.
Unsure why you're getting downvoted for this -- it makes good sense, and many could benefit from this kind of thing. I have a friend who moved from NYC to Ohio recently. He was bellyaching about it a lot (the move was for work), since he thought he would be so sad to leave the cultural opportunities of NYC, etc. Instead he has found that a) Ohio wasn't so bad after all, b) his stress-related conditions have evaporated, and c) he has more time to pursue what he loves doing in that environment.
Any hint that dense urban living is not the optimal lifestyle for everyone gets downvoted here. For example, here's my super-controversial anecdote from yesterday, that people took time out of their day to try to bury: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27450896
Well there's also the angle of people moving from the big city into a small rural community and gentrifying it. A good friend of mine had to deal with this trend in Bozeman and was ultimately pretty much forced out by it.
There's definitely a tension between bringing money and people into communities that need them and bringing a lot of money and people and different preferences into communities in a way that makes them less good for the people already there.
You gotta keep hyping up the big cities: talk about the usual cliches like the food, the movie scenes, the 'culture'. Keep cities popular so everybody stays there and leaves land in the countryside for the rest of us.
I plan to do the same in a couple years, my hometown is unaffordable, with tech like Starlink coming online and the pandemic making remote work more common I can foresee a subset of tech workers choosing this path if they feel alienated in the larger tech cities.
Has there been any culture shock for you? As someone who grew up in NJ, I'm always interested in hearing how other tri-state area people deal with moving from an urban to a rural environment.
"If there are not enough good jobs that can support independent living, providing for a spouse, buying a home or raising a family,"
This seems to be an issue across the board, at least in degrees, but that's because we live in an extractive oligarchy. This can't last forever. I just hope it doesn't lead to either revolution or socialism. We need to rethink our economic principles. Capitalism as state-sponsored usury or as consumerist decadence is not viable, just, or good.
Recall that in the 1950s, the single income of a working father sufficed to support a wife and their many children (since birth rates were much higher then). You can't do that anymore. That seems like a massive regression. We may have more flavors of ice cream, but who cares if that comes at the price of the important stuff. I say this without idealizing those decades. Those are the decades, after all, that led us to where we are today.
"then staying home with the easy accomplishment of video games makes sense."
Well, it doesn't make sense from the perspective of human flourishing. There are other things that a person in that position can be doing rather than pissing his life away in masturbatory activities like video games. This speaks to a deeper demoralization in our society, and in this case, that of men, and not just those who are unemployed or living at home. Our culture sucks.
The 1950's were an anomaly. Europe was in the doldrums, Asia was yet to develop. America had little competition for the resources it needed. I doubt those days are coming back any time soon. If anything its going to get worse as the rest of the world catches up and the dwindling resources people need are stretched between ever more people.
It doesn't say where the cross over it, we can assume that -some- are living and home and don't participate at all, but that's not how the stats are calculated. They are calculated separately, but the article is saying there is a connection (duh) but it's not the only factor for people living at home.
Isn't this the logical outcome of giving women preference for college admission, scholarships, and employment opportunities? Does this not indicate policy success?
29 here, living at home. I do have somewhat of a career though.
I Honestly don't know when I'll leave. I have the skills to live alone, but my self-esteem is so low and my social life so limited that it gets really scary to leave.
I lived with my parents on and off until I was 31, that was when I managed to marry and move out hopefully permanently this time.
It is Anedacta... but I think I know what is going on.
1. The labor market is a mess, for example today I got another rejection letter from a job I sent my resume, thing is, I am literally perfect for the job, my resume (that I didn't tailor for it) matched perfectly what they asked, even the "additional" things, including the fact they wanted someone that made Hidden Object games before (I had a whole company to make those with millions of downloads).
I have a strong impression hiring is just screwed, people often don't even read resumes, for example I had a company invite me to do a job I don't know how to do, only for the interviewer of the company realize they are wasting time (a company asked me to do ML work, I never listed ML anywhere in my resume).
Also I am 33 now, and never had a job registered legally in my country, I only had contracts and "contracts".
Also here having internship is mandatory to graduate, a lot of my friends failed to graduate beause they didn't found any internship even for free, to graduate myself I actually created a company and hired myself (it is legal to do that O.o).
Now relationshipwise: I looked for relationships very hard, and kept finding only people wnating flings, including one person that scammed me (she claimed she would marry me and whatnot to convince me to have sex with her, since I wanted to marry virgin, after she got bored with me she declared that all she wanted was my body and kicked me out).
Only reason I managed to marry at all, is that I went to a church, found a childhood friend there that also wanted to marry and was having similar issues, and I asked her right off the bat if she wanted to marry me then, and she said yes. (we are very happy, for those wondering...)
If it wasn't for a lucky coincincidence (in case you don't believe in God or something... I only went to that church because my car broke that day when I was going elsewhere and going that church was in the situation at the time the logical option) I probably would still be alone.
Same thing applies to a lot of my friends, many, many of them are single, and jobless, after a while some of them just give up on living properly and settle for videogames... videogames are not the culprit, they are the escape, they are a solution to have a life, even if virtual, after your real life becomes seemly impossible to live.
EDIT: by the way, student debt doesn't help, for example I did got "legal" job offers, but to earn mininum wage (for example supermarket cashier), thing is, my student debt monthly payments was roughly twice the mininum wage, so accepting a mininum wage legal job would put me in further debt. Thankfully my Startup Kidoteca was a reasonable success and I paid my debts with it.
I had a whole company to make those with millions of downloads
After my first startup failed I was rejected for developer jobs, and a few places said it was because they thought I'd want to quit and start a new company rather than stay there for the long haul. More anecdata obviously, but some employers see someone's previous independence as a forewarning of that person looking for independence again in the near future.
I got this too. Even with a strong interest in the business area and multiple hours of interviews going well: “You’d be a great fit here”, “You were technically strong”, … , “We don’t think you really want this job”.
I really wanted that job. That’s only the most recent, but I have had an overwhelming number of these experiences. I know my own worth, but to convince someone to actually let you work for them - impossible.
Male participation in the economy peaked in the 1950s. It began to decline as the USA automated agriculture.
Millions of years of evolution gave us some men who are very strong, but very stupid. There used to be an abundance of jobs for such men. Agriculture, in particular, provided endless jobs for such people.
Some of these jobs paid surprisingly well.
When I was very young, I spent 6 summer/winter cycles working at Mack's Apples:
They paid piece rate. You got $1.25 per bucket of apple's that you picked. You could make $14 an hour, then; adjusting for inflation that's about $24 an hour now.
I'm not especially strong, nor especially stupid, but I was able to make decent money, back before I got started in tech. It was the best paying job available to me, back then. Those jobs no longer exist. (That apple orchard focused on "Pick Your Own Apples" where the gross margins are better, plus they planted a few short trees that could be easily harvested by untrained high school students. The orchard cut down most of the big trees, because those trees required skill to harvest.)
But again, what should we do with very strong, very stupid men? There used to be an abundance of jobs for them, some of which paid well. Nowadays there are no jobs for them.
I can't see how or when this trend reverses. The era of good paying jobs for stupid people has ended, and I don't know how it could ever come back.
You can plainly see that men have been leaving the labor force since the 1950s. Recent events are less influential than the overall trend, which was more dramatic during 1950-1990.
The loss of agriculture was huge, and then later the deindustrialization.
Seriously, it is going to take some real imagination to create a positive vision for stupid people in the future.
Please note, I'm using the word "stupid" here partly to overstate the point. Hopefully everyone is aware that there are many different types of knowing, not all of which resembles the book knowledge taught in schools. But the point is that the economy now favors book knowledge taught in schools. Those other forms of knowing are important, and were shaped by millions of years of evolution, and were once crucial to our survival, but right now we have an economy that does not pay for those other kinds of knowing.
(I have a friend who did poorly in high school and never went to college. He is a fanatic birder and environmentalist. He claims he knows over 2,000 bird call songs. I believe him; I've been in the woods with him and he knows a lot. But he can't get a job identifying bird songs.)
> But again, what should we do with very strong, very stupid men? There used to be an abundance of jobs for them, some of which paid well. Nowadays there are no jobs for them.
Last summer I took a job in construction. Construction fits the bill of what you’re describing. There needs to be more construction in America
I agree, but it won't be possible to expand construction enough to cover all of the jobs that agriculture lost. Back in 1950 that was almost 5% of the work population. Construction might absorb 2% or 3% under ideal conditions. But some creativity will be needed to reabsorb all of what was lost.
> Millions of years of evolution gave us some men who are very strong, but very stupid.
Humans are very adaptable - millions of years of evolution has made human very smart and capable of adapting to large variety of changing circumstances.
> create a positive vision for stupid people
So it's the responsibility of society to educate them into something useful, but it's also partially their own responsibility to learn and become less "stupid" - aka, adapt.
I wonder how much of these developments remain when correcting for factors we don't necessarily deem to be an issue.
For example, between 1960 and today life expectancy in the US grew by 10 years.
If we look at educational attainment, we also see massive positive changes. [0] From 60% completing less than high school in 1960, to 9% today, and those with degrees grew from 4% to 37%.
If we live longer and educate ourselves for longer, it makes sense to delay certain behaviours and milestones in life, such as moving out of your parents' home, marrying, having kids, getting a job.
This would typically not be something to be very concerned about, rather it would typically be something public policy would aspire to achieve.
However, suppose you plot these milestones and behaviours on an age-timeline (from 0 to 100 for example) and the behaviours and milestones all shift 3 years to the right for the abovementioned reasons (5 years more education, 10 years of higher higher life expectancy). If you're a journalist who then selects a range on this age-timeline (e.g. 20 to 30), you'll obviously find that a smaller share of the people in this narrow range will have met those milestones. Taken out of context, it's worrying. Within context, it might be entirely natural.
Of course there are genuine, objective problems as well that I'm not denying. But the issues might be overstated, as well. I'd like to see a more nuanced, more accurate view, correcting for certain factors instead of just selling a one-sided warning piece. If I look at my own generation I feel in many ways much more empowered and independent compared to what my parents (anecdotally), yet I did live at home slightly longer than my mother for example. However I had a better education, started a company at a young age, travelled to four continents by myself as a teenager with my own funds. My mom moved out earlier than I did with financial support from her parents, and married sooner. But she was not as free or independent.
Hah, I thought I'm totally a unique snowflake, guess what, there are A LOT of man that had similarities with me (worth noting that I'm a feminine gay man). I plan to keep becoming like this (living in my parent's home and not working at all) until, either I'm getting kicked out of home, my parents died, or I'm being forced to work. If all the comfort will be gone then I will do suicide (NO please don't lecture me about this. IT'S MY CHOICE).
Is this a new phenomenon in any real sense, I wonder. All through history, haven’t there always been many “surplus men” who didn’t find a place in their surrounding society.
This all exposes the absurd, meathook barbarism encoded by our evolution and why the future rightfully belongs to our eusocial, sexless pod clone successors.
And then their cybernetic successors.
And then their post-biological, pure energy metabolism successors.
These men are not being supported by their wives, they just don't go and form a new family.
Women in that age range are generally more educated than their male counterparts and they earn more, so this statistic makes sense. They also have trouble finding a male partner, especially because one of their requirements is that they should earn more than them.
This sounds like an impending demographics / societal disaster.
I guess if this trends continue we'll get to a point where basic necessities will all raise in price because they can't find workers until some of these men go back to work.
> They also have trouble finding a male partner, especially because one of their requirements is that they should earn more than them.
It's not just the women's requirements: boys, at least those coming from a still somewhat traditional provider/homemaker household (and many effectively are even if she also has a well paying job) tend to be not really prepared for a role other than provider. But unless they are super conservative outliers they also don't expect to end up with a homemaker partner, at least not unless some freak accident makes them end up in trophy wife territory. They believe that women should be modern and all that, but they lack a clear idea of how they themselves would fit into the picture. Many find a way nonetheless, but others are bound for greybeard boyhood.
It sounds like a disaster for running pampered middle class retirements on what is effectively a pyramid scheme, but also like the closest thing we have to a chance for sustaining humanity.
Idle hands are the devil's plaything...
Agreed that the post-war version of work is dated and that maybe we don't all need to get a job. But people need something meaningful to do, at the risk of mental health and other problems. So if the people in the article are all becoming artists or volunteers then great, but if they're sitting around bored it could lead to societal problems.
>The idea that every able bodied person has to work is not supposed to be the way our society functions; at least not in the last 100,000 years.
What? I was under the impression that particularly in agrarian societies, everyone who was able to work, worked. Are you saying that surpluses allowed for a large class of people to just not work at all?
> Are you saying that surpluses allowed for a large class of people to just not work at all?
Apparently this is the case today, since it's happening.
Historically, agrarian societies did require everyone to work - twice a year. During harvesting and planting, as much manpower as possible was needed. The rest of the time didn't require 40h of work 50 weeks out of the year. It left time for leisure, building, crafting, etc.
We're also not really in a traditional agrarian society today; most of the work required to create food is done by a vast minority of society using force-multiplying tools.
Most of the time that building and crafting was actually work. There is always something to do, even between planting and harvesting. Chop wood, split wood, stack wood. Fix things, knit a sweater, expand the farm, make a chair, whatever. It's all work. It's secondary to the primary and mandated work of farming, which is why a nobleman could call in the levies and go to war outside of planting or harvest season - they didn't care as much about the secondary parts - but for the average person that was also work.
Yes, we're not a traditional agrarian society, or a hunter gatherer society - that's why "the last 100,000" years was a surprise. Essentially the op was saying every able bodied person has never been required to work. That ran counter to my understanding of history.
> During harvesting and planting, as much manpower as possible was needed. The rest of the time didn't require 40h of work 50 weeks out of the year. It left time for leisure, building, crafting, etc.
Because fabric for cloth magically appears from nothing and they sew themselves. Same for bedheets and such, they fill themselves.. And candles are gift from Santa, animals dont need care and houses fix themselves. Wood is just there, without preparing and cutting it.
Yo and food also creates itself from grains, just like that. And small kids changed their own diapers and washed them.
Speaking of which, did you tried washing without washing machine and modern chemistry? It used to be huge physically demanding work.
Agrarian societies had cyclic work. Some societies could be especially arduous, but the most successful and populated areas weren't. For large chunks at a time throughout the year the farming population didn't have more than daily chores and personal projects. But of course during planting and harvesting they would work their asses off. A lot of the rest of the time was personal preference. You could make your house bigger, or you could make beer to drink, you could make crafts for fun and sell a couple, or you could just dick around.
You can see the large amount of extra time available in old religious and cultural holidays which were both numerous and often spanned many days or a week or more at a time. Huge chunks of time of the year that many modern workers wouldn't be allowed leave from work nor afford if they could.
You can also see Egyptian pyramid construction which is now thought to have been mostly (but certainly not exclusively) volunteer farm workers in the off season in exchange for booze and "luxury" services like studied dentistry services that otherwise didn't exist in most of the rest of the world yet. If they wanted they could just live off their own share of crops and dick around most of the year though. Working on the pyramids was a bonus, not a requirement, and their scale proves how many free man hours they had to "waste" on stuff like building giant stone mounds and carvings and art and other religious practices. Their success is marked by how many excess man hours people had to dick around with.
It's also the first time women have been allowed to opt out. Working most of the day is the historical norm for all able-bodied people and most not-wholly-able-bodied people.
I think women's experience has been a lot more complex. U til the 1950s they were needed to work in the home most of the time. And it's only really the last 20 years women haven't been REQUIRED to opt out of working once they got married or had kids...
If you look at women employment stats in the past, a lot more of them were employed then people generally assume. Women with small kids would work the least, but younger and older more likely to work.
There is middle class white ideal and then there is reality of people needing to eat. They did not had careers, but they needed money and only other option is stealing.
Men were emplyed more and home required a lot more work then now. But still, lower class women needed jobs.
> U til the 1950s they were needed to work in the home most of the time.
So? Working in the home is also the norm for men. Historically, the norm is that men are self-employed in agriculture and women are self-employed in textile production.
> And it's only really the last 20 years women haven't been REQUIRED to opt out of working once they got married or had kids...
Note that being a hard worker is traditionally one of the highest female virtues. They have never been required to stop working after getting married; they had to work just like everybody else.
Edit: on closer look, it turns out you've been using HN primarily for ideological battle. We ban accounts that do that, regardless of which ideology they're battling for or against, because it's destructive of what this site is supposed to exist for. If you'd please not create accounts to break HN's rules with, we'd appreciate it.
> I don't see why I as a productive member of society should get less than someone who festers in their own bodily fluids.
Do you get less? Because if you're working and you're making less than someone on welfare you have to realize that the solution to that should be lifting you up, not dragging them down, right? As far as I'm aware, welfare isn't exactly comfortable.
Not sure who you represent (i.e. who "we" refers to in your message) but what you all do with your money is your choice, and I don't have any objections to whatever basis you all decide who you give your money to. But thanks for letting me know.
One of my close friends is a NEET because he uses a wheelchair and living in a rural town with his parents provides a floor for higher quality of life than moving to the city and trying to make it on his own (and navigate the various disability services). From what he’s told me, the kinds of jobs suggested by the unemployment and disability empowerment agencies are either hilariously irrelevant or make no logistical sense (long commutes that would require one of his parents to be a de-facto full-time chauffeur).
I haven’t spoken to him in ages. Hopefully the pandemic remote working boom has pushed things in his favor.
The phrase "living at home" made me think of stay-at-home partners as opposed to living with parents, which led me expecting a very different vibe of the article
Staying at home and playing video games/yield farm is the most incentivised activity right now. This liberal-moral capitalism breaks my heart sometimes lol. Reap what you sow!
Pretty much. The economists created this mess using their magic number science, then look down at the broken scramble and are confused? Assuming rational actors...
>The fact that men don't tend to be a socially adept doesn't help.
Men are socially adept in their society and a society of their peers. Just not in this one which seeks to break them down and punishes them for not being women.
This is a bit too reductive. Men have a wider and flatter curve of outcomes than women. The ones who are doing really well are winning the Fields Medal and becoming C-suite executives; the ones who are struggling drop out of higher education, move back in with their parents, or get sent to jail.
A lot of the gender wars happen because what's true for Jeff Bezos is not true for the guy who spraypainted "Let Them Eat Fent[anyl]" around Civic Centre in SF, and the same traits that are rewarded in directed male CEOs are punished in directionless male fast food workers.
This is one of the most interesting insights into gender divides, and years ago I think I recall seeing a link here on HN to an essay by someone who tied this insight into dynamics down to a cellular (ie sperm have a wider and flatter curve than eggs) and genetic level (men seem to have a higher incidence of both genetic defects and beneficial mutations).
I can't seem to find it again (much less speak to its accuracy). Does anyone have an idea what this might be?
There’s a lot of validity to the social struggles of men in a lot of online discourse, but to say “society“ punishes us for not being women flies in the face of almost every useful metric of socioeconomic success.
Women did not create the society that is hurting men emotionally and economically. Buying into that victim complex is a distraction from your own self-development and healing.
Women control or influence 85% of spending, for example.
I would say the amount of goods and services you actually purchase and consume would be a better indicator of socioeconomic success, compared with earnings that may be enjoyed by someone else.
Working really hard to the point of destroying your health in order to provide a good life to your family would show up as "highly successful" by the earnings metric, but I would say the family benefits more than the one who is destroyed.
Assuming a traditional household here with a working dad and stay at home mum, if the woman is mostly responsible for childcare, that's also a huge load. Just because the mother here isn't bringing in money doesn't mean she isn't working. Personally I'd take the employment (and have).
Quality of work too. Like one person may be going to a soul-crushing office job while another is doing something undoubtedly meaningful and enjoyable, if not also stressful.
But the wife of a c suite executive is actually the biggest winner. She gets all the benifits and the au-pair to do the child care not none of the 80 hour weeks and late night phone calls.
Most kids spends their first 15 years mostly surrounded by women. Their doctors, their kinder garden teachers, their school teachers etc. Almost every authority figure is a woman there. If those boys have problem I feel it is ok to say that it is mostly those grownups fault, and they happen to be mostly women.
This is a weirdly sexist take: to give yourself license to blame women, you’re erasing all of the men in those kids’ lives. For example, most of them have fathers and uncles, and while there’s a gender skew teaching in younger grades it’s not absolute and you’re leaving out the skew in the other direction for administrators and older grades - and if you’re talking authority figures you should be talking about principals and deans, not to mention cops.
Kids spends their whole days getting bossed around by teachers. Kids usually doesn't even know who the dean or administrators are, those aren't authority figures to kids. And I choose 15 years as the cut-off since that is roughly when you start seeing male teachers.
You've managed to identify a few of the consequential problems from collective, societal child rearing, and deduced that these problems are the result of a dominant female influence from the years of 0-15. Sexism aside, that is a gross and lazy thought process. I'm curious how else you came to those conclusions?
If every person of race X who is taught by teacher Y fails, does that mean that race X is the problem or that teacher Y is the problem?
Either male children are born bad or were raised incorrectly. If you accept the first option, what is your evidence? If you accept the second option and there are only women raising the child, how can men be the problem?
According to the US Census, 20% of asian, 34% of white, 42% of hispanic, and 66% of black families are single-mother homes.
In 1980, 30% of teachers were men. Today, it's around 15% (a mere 3-6% male for grades K-6). When you remove sports and PE teachers, it's the low single digits overall. The reason for this shift is rather obvious. Society assumes that men are predators. When a single false accusation will ruin not just your career, but your entire life, why take that risk?
That same risk applies to other male role models as well. A 2 year old drowned in England a few years ago (irresponsible daycare let them into the street IIRC). It was noticed that a van was nearby when the child was walking down the road. The driver was found and asked about what happened. They said they saw the child, but a man in a white panel van stopping to help a kid would face accusations of kidnapping. The man had his own family and did't want to put them at risk if anything should happen to him. The child was a victim of society's demonization of men (I'd add that studies of female predators are almost non-existent and what little research has been conducted indicates that there are tons of female predators who society simply refuses to look into).
Children raised by single mothers are much more likely to have learning issues, bad grades, be in trouble at school, not graduate, and have mental health problems. Single mothers are also much more likely to have mental health and anxiety issues. This is just as true for the 20% of asians and the 66% of blacks, so the inverse proposal of the mothers passing these issues on to their children is not likely (if it were true, then the claims of racists would also be true). These rates also track upward over time. Remember that only around 25% of black mothers were single parents in the 1960s (before the civil rights act). It's even notable that the single mother rates under slavery didn't come close to the rates today.
The most notable and undeniable single mother statistic is crime. Somewhere around 85% of all people in prison had no significant father figure. Incarceration rates per capita per race track single mother rates closely (as a surprisingly large fraction of those homes).
Here's the surprise -- this is NOT true for single father households. Is this because fathers are better parents? I think not. Instead, I'd put forward that female role models are everywhere and women are willing to get close to kids while male role models are very scarce and men are forced by society to remain aloof. I haven't seen studies, but I'd be interested to know if societies where the pedo scare didn't happen have the same issues.
Male teachers who are not retirees have been removed from the teaching pool. Why? Schools do not pay enough to build a career or family. You cannot afford to have male teachers who are not retired and doing it for fun.
The absence of men in these fields is part of the problem, as you say! However, the absence of men in these fields are by choice. To place the blame on only those that are present in raising everyones children and ignore the fact that most men choose not to be part in this hugely important societal task is (imo) wrong.
The only way that you can be surrounded by women for your entire upbringing is if you don't engage in sports. Sports are typically hours per day. Coaches are absolute authority figures, and there are very few female coaches.
I can't think of any men that never played sports but are somehow punished for being "so masculine"
"Sports" may be hours per day for boys --- and even this is probably but organized sports definitely aren't, and that's where the coaches are. Unless he's playing AAU basketball or club soccer or something, I really don't think a boy is spending even a few hours per week under an "absolute authority figure" coach.
On reflection, the parent comment jibes with my experience growing up in the suburbs in the early 2000s. Literally all of my elementary school teachers were women. The only man I remember was a PE teacher, and I don't remember ascribing any authority to him at all.
Same era, same experience here. I don't think it's fair to ascribe too much blame on women teachers, though.
The overwhelming majority of them genuinely care about their male students, acknowledge their different learning styles professionally and give them as good an opportunity as any competent male teacher would.
If you wanted to make a big difference, you wouldn't need to change gender ratios through social engineering. The small minority of female teachers that undermine boys' education are all known by the student body and other teachers.
Competitive highschool sports often practice for several hours a day. It's not really a serious sport if you're only going to practice a few hours a week, is it? Maybe badminton club practices an hour on thursdays, but the swim team is going to be swimming for at least two hours every weekday for much of the year. Sometimes we had practice in the morning before school as well, two practice sessions in a day. There were days I spent almost as much time in the water as I did in a classroom.
But to the point raised in comments above, most boys were not participating in sports. Maybe 1 in 4 were at my school.
I think we agree? I was responding to a comment claiming, I think, that the serious sport participation you describe is the norm among boys, and as you observe, it definitely isn't.
As far as I know boys playing sports do far better than those who don't, so this you'd conclude that adding grown men to their lives helps them and that "toxic-masculinity" isn't really the main issue boys have.
"Most" boys play some kind of sport. I have to assume it's the vast majority. My argument is that in those kids' lives, I would wager many of the authority figures that they spend significant time with and respect the most are men.
Most kids doesn't even get the recommended level of physical activity, I doubt they spend that much time playing organized sports. An hour a week isn't really a significant amount of time compared to how much time school takes.
And to add, if you go to less privileged neighbourhoods you'll see sports participation drop significantly, most don't do any sports at all. And the problems are much worse there. It might have been even worse if they did more sports, who knows, but I doubt it.
> According to the National Survey of Children’s Health, only 24% of youth ages 6 to 17 engage in at least 60 minutes of physical activity per day, down from 30% a decade earlier. B
>>>>"Most" boys play some kind of sport. I have to assume it's the vast majority.
There was a TED Talk a few years back from a US Army General about how the terrible physical fitness of America's youth is becoming a national security problem.[1] I think the "low quality" of adolescent males over the past 2 decades is partly behind the push for more women in the military: we have so few physically-fit high-testosterone males that we have to cast a wider net and recruit physically-fit, comparatively-high-T females; they are better than soft fatbody guys. If boys were seriously engaged in sports at the rates that you are suggesting, teen obesity shouldn't be so widespread.
In my experience as an army officer, the “wider net” is cast for positions in the army where that fitness isn’t really necessary; ie, logistics units, cooks, admin, etc. I spent all of my time in infantry units and the people in those physically fit, high T jobs are still almost all men that are physically fit and aggressive. And that’s in normal units, so not even counting special forces and rangers. I also met some guys that looked fat and soft that fought like devils when pressed and would run exactly as fast as they needed to to pass a fitness test.
Well put. I had a much less constructive take on this comment, since deleted, because it wreaks of insecurity that's causing so much of this problem.
My dad was great, but through divorce, I had other great male role models, none of which you'd consider "feminine." However, it helped me understand the plurality of what it means to be a man. There are many ways to embrace your "natural" manhood that are beneficial to society. Animals rape each other, but we're not animals. Don't fall for the naturalistic fallacies.
> Women did not create the society that is hurting men emotionally and economically
The extreme elements of 3rd wave feminism has influcenced society in ways that unfairly and negatively impact boys.
Specifically the concept of "toxic masculinity". Toxic people are toxic. Toxic behaviors are toxic. Toxic people should be shamed and toxic behaviors should be discouraged.
Boys should not be shamed for being masculine, and masuclinity should not be discouraged.
This is not what toxic masculinity means. It's not saying masculinity is toxic, toxic is a qualifier not a description. It's used to talk about those attitudes which are ascribed by some people to be super masculine, but actually are just unhealthy (like hyper aggression, or the idea, ironically, that men shouldn't ask for help or complain about anything)
The way you phrase a word affects its interpretation. Imagine for a minute if the term "neurotic feminity" was a common thing, and described how anxiety, depression, and other negative aspects of stereotypically female behavior are actually just unhealthy. People would be upset because the phrasing implies that feminity itself is bad, which is wrong.
The term "toxic masculinity" creates a subliminal negative association between "male" and "toxicity".
Although you can rationalize the association away, it still exists and influences listeners. It's marketing against men.
If you really wanted to address issues with hyper-agression, you would use the term "hyper-agression", which is gender-neutral.
If you really wanted to address the consequence of not asking for help or compaining, you would perhaps use the term "stoicism", which is gender-neutral.
If you really wanted to address people overly affected by irrational fears, you would use the term "neuroticism", rather than "toxic femininity"
I think it's also been promoted like that as a straw man by vested interests. Like I said in another comment outrage sells wat better than assuming the best.
All these traits together are a subset of those denoted by "masculinity". I would not have a problem with toxic femininity being used in the same context, for example to describe the idea that a woman shouldn't earn her own way, or that one should manipulate men to get ahead or whatever else.
For the record I'd be far happier if the concepts of masculinity and femininity didn't exist at all, I think it just puts us in boxes and makes us insecure, but unfortunately they do.
And it's also wrong. With no other phrase that I can think of does that apply. Yellow birds, American presidents, main road, farmer's field, tall tree.
Yes, and generally when the term "toxic people" is used, few assume that the speaker is saying that "people are toxic" and "people should be shamed for being people."
And yet... you've done pretty much that with the term "toxic masculinity." It's almost as if someone has persuaded you that adjectives are actually appositives.
The phrase "toxic masculinity" no more implies that masculinity itself should be discouraged or shamed than the phrase "toxic food" implies the entire world should fast forever.
And like "toxic food" would suggest there's some subset of foodstuffs one should avoid, it does suggest that there's some subset of masculine-identified behavior that are unhealthy for either those acting those behaviors out, or those on the receiving end of them.
Ok. What phrase would you use? Presumably you do agree that there are elements of masculinity that are harmful, both to men and women. How should we describe these in a way that is impossible to misinterpret?
The difference is that "toxic food" directly implies food that is poisonous.
"Toxic masulinity" has no obvious or direct meaning. It's a made up term. It's marketing. It itself conveys no useful meaning other than to associate masculitity with toxicicity.
To tie such a negative term to any other social/gender group would be called out as the biggotry it is.
I've encountered a lot of it before it had that name. It appears as bullying, talking over people, arrogance, aggression, threats of violence, violence, condescension, etc. Generally, efforts gain dominance over others in ways that harm them rather than being genuinely better at dominating constructively.
I think it's fine to call it toxic masculinity as long as people don't get it confused with healthy masculinity (not the same as femininity) or forget that toxic femininity exists or assume all men have toxic masculinity, or all the other misunderstandings that come with simplistic judgements of popular issues.
There was a study on domestic violence a few years ago. It broke down DV into asymmetric violence (one violent person) and symmetric violent (both people).
It found that the overwhelming bulk of DV was symmetric. In asymmetric cases, it was actually perpetuated by the woman in some 2/3 of cases. Further, in symmetric violence, the women admitted to starting the encounters 2/3 of the time.
Likewise, if a weapon is involved in DV, it was used by a woman in something like 4 out of 5 cases.
In most places, the law is to arrest the bigger party even if they were NOT the aggressor. Further, the law often dictates that an arrest is MANDATORY. This combination makes it easy to arrest large numbers of men which then plays havoc with the DV statistics.
As another data point, DV between gay (male) partners is several times less than heterosexual partners while DV between lesbian partners is several times higher.
In my country, there are 50% more women in colleges than men, and our colleges still work more to attract more women (with eg. girls-only workshops, etc... we used to call this segregation and/or sexism back in my time).
Lets say you have Alice and Bob... they both finished college, both are looking for a job, and they both decide to start their own company - Alice will make plastic spoons, and Bob will make plastic forks. Alice can get 5k eur from our government, because she's a woman.
Men also tend to work more (hours and years), and live less (less years of retirement), but in many countries still get lower pensions than women for the same money paid in the pension fund. In my country this has been equalized now (same payments, same amount of money, only for new retirees), but relatively shorter lives are not accounted for anywhere.
Safe houses for men?
Lets say Alice and Bob meet at a party, get drunk, have sex and a condom pops... we give Alice numerous ways to get rid of the unwanted baby, and Bob just has to hope, she won't want a kid at the moment, so he'll be able to avoid 18-26 years of child support. Paper abortion ideas are laughed at and oposed by "he shouldn't have sex if he doesn't want to take care of the baby"... but the same argument can be used for a normal/real abortion (except in case of rape).
Media treats women more preferably then men, pointing out the greater tragedy in case of women deaths, and even in cases of paedophillia use "nicer words" for women - eg "schoolteacher had sex with 13yo boy" instead of calling it statuatory rape.
In other countries (eg. usa) there are many more cases of casual sexism against men, even some that are illegal in many other countries, eg. women-only scholarships.
The openminded-ness towards how a woman deals with a pregnancy vs the fact that the same anti-abortion thought process is still being applied to only the man is very frustrating.
If she wants to abort, that is certainly her choice. If a woman wants to keep a child, that is wonderful, but the man should not be forced into child support. Moreso because the choice about the child's existence should only be in the woman's hands since she gives birth to the child.
The irony of people who support abortion saying that if a man didn't want to pay child support he shouldn't have had sex is just staggering.
It would appear to be Serbia. His username is supposedly a reference to celebrity, "Vladan Aksentijević, better known by his stage name Ajs Nigrutin, is a Serbian rapper and actor."
From the Statistical Office of the Republic of Serbia[1], a quick glance at the Higher Education statistics would seem to indicate there are 32% more women.
This is the "nicest" image I could find (our statistics bureau has a shitty page, where you cannot directly link to a graph/table, but only to a full dataset where you have to choose 'filters'). The ratio is 60%-40% (which sounds "nicer" than 150% women, but yeah... 15.072 men, 22.802 women (for university of ljubljana, our largest university).
You are probably directing this at men, but I've also heard this directed at women who were surprised to find out that working unpleasant jobs full time is actually not the greener grass they thought it was.
Or women picking a physical fight only to be shocked at a man fighting back.
Or women being surprised at being sentenced to jail when they expected a slap on the wrist.
But why is equality of outcomes necessary? We see worldwide physical and psychological differences between the sexes, and the reproductive strategies typically used are different. Why shouldn't that reflect in broadly different social norms and roles?
Where did I say equality of outcomes? This is just about holding people to the same standards. Equality of opportunity would be nice, but the majority of women (worldwide) don't have that either.
I’m reminded of a joke, which I’m often reminded of when I think about this (excellent) point.
Two revolutionaries, one young and bright-eyed and the other old and grizzled, are sitting together. The older asks the younger what he fights for, to which the latter responds “For there to be no more rich people!” The older one sighs and says “How times have changed! Back in my day, we fought for there to be no more poor people.”
The point of this comment was not that men should be bought down, but that being asked to consider someone else feels like an imposition when you're not accustomed to doing that.
We are not suddenly all equal, but it's becoming more so, and that seems to be a problem. Eventually hopefully anyone will be able to do whatever they like in life without expectations put on them because of things they have no control over. I think there is a communication issue where "mostly men" has been shortened to "men" which is read as "all men"
This sounds like the kind of equality that communism created in the 20th century. The sort where all but a few are miserable and impoverished.
Of course, that’s most of human history. Until very recently life was nasty, brutish, and short. We seem to be trying our best to revert to that condition.
>The parental home can be a refuge, but also a trap that keeps young men from launching their careers.
This took me a while to realize in my own experience, but certainly opened my eyes to how my own parents enabled me in this trap. "Stay at home to save money!" was constantly said to me, only for me to eventually realize, it is in fact stunting me. My dad would occasionally say "go out and do something," but meanwhile, I'd be interrogated for doing said thing so they can know every detail about it. It's why I tended toward videogames and the computers in general. They were things I could do by myself without an inquisition into my own life seeing as I barely was able to do anything privately.
While I personally was only a NEET for a few months at a time for about a year, I never was fully committed to the lifestyle. Ultimately for myself I had massive reality check in how the world worked and I could at least have a modicum of success in it. Partly also to blame is heavy religion not coinciding with the culture as well as not teaching a kid how to adapt to society so I always felt like an outcast. Eventually I became atheist and eventually determining what it would take for me to give up, I finally broke free. It was very much like in Office Space where you just don't care anymore. You don't care if you make a faux pas, don't care if you couldn't meet that deadline, don't care if you disappointed someone.
It snapped me out of it, but also made me into a very bitter on the inside. Knowing my parents didn't exactly want me staying at their house led to further feelings of being resented for existing. So I ended up being pretty sociopathic knowing I can't tell people my true intentions for doing things. I realize it's messed up and wrong, but much like the story of the scorpion and the frog, it's in my nature. I at least am cognizant that it's wrong, but I refuse to change because I've been able to find success in it.
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 be disproportionately the kind of woman who would be interested in having a life-long career.
Just anecdotally, looking at peers who graduated with me, that is not the case. Many are married, and many have chosen to end their careers (where finances allow) to stay at home.
If anything, I would argue the main failing we've committed upon the young generation (regardless of gender) is to provide them an economic framework wherein more than a single-digit percent of wage earners can hope to raise a family on a single income.
In my experience, there are a growing number of men who wish they could be stay-at-home dads if finances permitted.
But instead, most households are dual-income out of necessity.
And beyond that, we've also demonized living with your parents pretty thoroughly, so people are hesitant to save money and get free childcare by living with their extended family.
Something else I want to mention is how poorly we've tailored the current world to making raising a family easier. Letting your kids go further than your lawn unsupervised is tantamount to child abuse now. Childcare is absurdly expensive, low-quality, low-availability (enrollment is headcount-capacity-limited in most places) and low-flexibility (many places either want your full-time enrollment or not at all. You can't just pick some days).
And we've also demonstrated that we're, as a system, willing to totally f** over parents when disasters strike. Covid has been a total disaster for dual-income families with children. I've heard it was not uncommon for it to be "lucky" a partner was laid off because otherwise they would've had to quit, without unemployment benefits, to care for kids full-time.
Anyway, my point is, we've made it really fucking inconvenient to have kids and now there's all this overly-simplistic sexist whinging from a certain segment of the population about how it's somehow all the fault of young women. It's disgusting both from a moral standpoint and in how intellectually lazy it is.
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 think the result for the next generation will be a demographics crash and hopefully what comes next is not reminiscent of the Handmaid's Tale.
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".
> as counter-example ... the kind of woman who would be interested in having a life-long career ... that is not the case ... men who wish they could be stay-at-home dads
You seem to be saying the same thing OP is saying: there are few women who are comfortable being the primary (or sole) breadwinners.
I'm not, your ellipses abbreviate too much. I'm seeing, among a group of people who would theoretically be predisposed to not want to stay at home, people still electing to stay at home. This contradicts the OP's glib remark that less women nowadays want to stay at home.
Here's a more nuanced view: both partners in a marriage should try both full time work and full time parenting. Then both partners will better understand the choices they make and have empathy for the other's situation.
> Improvements in video-game technology help account for young men’s detachment from the labor force, according to a 2017 paper by economists from Princeton, the University of Chicago, and the University of Rochester. It found that an increase in the playing of video games by men 21-30 accounted for somewhere between 38% and 79% of the differential in the decline in their time spent on paid work vs. the smaller decline of work by older men.
Attributing economic trends to video games seems lazy and dumb, given all the other potential factors. The de-facto decriminalization of marijuana isn't mentioned, and as much fun as it might be, there is nothing harmless about it, and drug use appears in pretty much every other explanation of social decline for other groups, but we don't seem to talk about it. It isn't boomer ditch weed shake anymore, it's 25% THC. In Toronto, even illegal dispenseries were given essential service status during lockdowns. That's only in the last 5 years, but those are the critical career years difference between 25 and 30 for one of the biggest demographic boom generations in the last century, and this sets their trajectory. These men just weren't raised well or with adequate tools. It's that simple. Many have been actively sabotaged by parents who used their kids as a source of narcissistic supply. Their dads' heroes were rock stars, who in hindsight were mostly guys who dressed like women and made a spectacle of complaining. Boomer and Gen X men as a cohort weren't much to emmulate. Compared to defeating global totalitarianism or building the internet, those in-between generations of corporate rock and blockbuster movies were a pitiful enterprise.
While I sympathize with the story of these young men, talking about mental illness and drug and alcohol abuse among young women is effectively taboo. Therapist friends tell me that young women are drinking themselves blind to hook up with randoms because they feel pressured to by their peers who encourage it to justify themselves. Sure, some really like it, but the ones who actually do don't challenge their friends to keep up with them. Peaches wrote a great song about how the rest of them feel. (Interestingly, Peaches ultimately became what she truly wanted to be: she is millenial womens' Joni Mitchell. When it lands what that means, you can begin to see.) The article isn't about young women, but they're suffering just as much and they are so much more harmed by the culture because their stakes are higher.
That men need each other with privacy to develop and thrive is an ancient principle, and almost impossible in modern society. However, the solutions are still right here, but they require effort, persistence, and risk - the very things that society makes the most scarce of all. Put simply, men are not meant to look at pictures and representations, we are meant to live in the world and engage it directly. It's time to wake up.
The "not your Daddy's ditch weed" line is basically fake. Cannabis users take enough to get where they want to be and stop, more potent weed just means they smoke less. It's also a partial agonist, so past a point smoking extra is just wasting drugs.
Second point is that cannabis use isn't increasing, if anything it's decreasing: 20-somethings reported higher rates of use in the 90s than they do now.
So really the impact is less people getting entwined with the legal system.
I won't bother engaging with the rest of your ramble, just the egregiously wrong part.
> Cannabis users take enough to get where they want to be and stop, more potent weed just means they smoke less
This is just wildly incorrect, and anyone who has smoked weed more than a few times would know that. No amount of crap weed will ever rival the high of higher quality "chronic."
Please. If you have had a 1g pre roll of anything from the shops, you'd know the difference from the backyard stuff, and THC tolerance is very much a thing, which means the psychological effects that aren't directly euphoric remain while you use more to maintain the euphoric effect.
Decriminalization is fine, but pretending the obvious social effects of an exploding market for higher potency products aren't manifesting is just delusional. There is nothing to indicate cannabis use is decreasing at all, especially given there are two shops per block, and any survey of that demographic is going to be useless because most of them are already unreachable because they have disengaged.
A ramble indeed, perhaps you could make an HN feature request for emoji support?
HN threads are still paginated, so if you want to read them all you'll need to click More at the bottom of the page, or like this:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27473199&p=1
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27473199&p=2
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27473199&p=3
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27473199&p=4
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27473199&p=5
(Comments like this will go away when we turn off pagination. Sorry for the annoyance.)