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Comment by _fq4v | Hacker News Reader

Americans have systematically destroyed / left the various community organizations and ties and/or interpersonal relationships that in the past would have been the place to go for these things. Like, after our seven miscarriages, people suggested a therapist, which we saw. We saw the top rated therapist in our area for pregnancy loss grief, but honestly, she was quite useless in comparison to our two sets of married in-laws (quite a rarity these days), our priest, our deacon, and our deacon's wife, who have been significantly more helpful simply by being there and being close to us.

The thing is that therapy can be bought, and Americans love spending money on things. You can't buy relationships. This is my -- admittedly completely unfounded -- explanation.

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I think there's a lot of truth to your comment, but the other side of it is that voluntary community & interpersonal relationships are all self-selected and reciprocal, and so you get significant selection bias in their advice. Oftentimes, if you have persistent dysfunction in your life, your relationships are part of the problem, but you can't see that because those are the only folks you hang out with.

I can't imagine asking my high-school friends (who were largely potheads with no career ambitions beyond working retail) for advice about getting over my fears about starting a company, for example. Or, later in life, wondering why I didn't have a girlfriend when many of my friends were nerdy workaholic commitment-phobic males. It took a perspective beyond the folks I normally hung out with to break out of my old habits. These are different from acute crises like grief, which can usually be handled through sympathetic relationships.

A therapist's incentives are strictly financial (well, mostly - many of them do also want to help in general) and their time with you is bounded by 50-minute hours, and so they're oftentimes willing to take on clients that they would not be willing to have as friends.

I would agree with you. I would not go to my priest or my parents for business advice.

That being said, I think that calls into importance the civil organizations I mentioned before. How many young people are in any kind of community organization? I'd venture not many. The advantage of these kinds of community organizations is that they contain many kinds of people, united by being in the same place, rather than any common interest. The advent of social media has kind of decimated these organizations, but they're hugely important.

As a point of fact, my wife and I have met many friends through simply being in our local diocesan youth group. While we are both software engineers, most of the people we meet through the group are not. We know plumbers, teachers, entrepreneurs, video techs, etc. If we want perspective outside those of people just like us, we would just go here. If I wanted to start a business, for example, I'd just go to my men's club, and ask one of the older guys who own a business, instead of my parents or my friends. Why hire a therapist, when these guys are perfectly happy to help? All I have to do to get their advice and pick their brains is to take one evening off every month to have snacks, drink beer, and be their friend. I can not tell you how many old people in these organizations are happy to have some young blood show up and participate.

Don't get me wrong... if you don't have any of these in your life, then it makes sense for some situations to pay for it. But I do think it's sad we have all but eliminated these groups.

>Americans love spending money on things

>our priest, our deacon, and our deacon's wife

How much do you tithe per week? Don't kid us by implying they'd give you that support if you weren't a paying customer.

Nothing? At the time they helped us out, we had just joined the parish. Then we went on a six month hiatus because we were too depressed, but the other deacon invited me to drink beer, because he hadn't seen me in a while. Didn't even have to pay for the beer.

Of course, as somewhat active members of the parish, we help out a lot. We volunteer for the marriage prep ministry, and I often help the men's club out with various improvement projects, by contributing brute strength or woodworking skills. Not all 'tithing' is monetary.

FWIW, it helps if you find a parish that is associated with a religious order, where the members are vowed to poverty. Diocesan priests tend to be the ones with the most monetary ambition.

I can only speak for my own religious tradition (Protestantism, Australia) but as the son of a minister and a lifelong churchgoer, I've never seen money come into it. I think the trope about money-hungry evangelists certainly has some truth to it in some parts of Christendom, but when it comes to money the church as a whole really isn't the stereotype that some make it out to be.

Growing up in a church ministry household, the only time I ever heard my father talking about specific individuals and their financial support for the church was in situations such as when someone died and left a bequest they had to sort out. I imagine he probably did get some idea about the generosity or otherwise of some of our parishioners just through knowing them sufficiently well, but I don't think he'd ever let it show.

Of course, if my dad wanted money, he'd have stayed in accounting. As a software engineer, I was earning more only one year out of uni, even with only Australian-level engineer salaries, than he's ever earned at any point in his whole career.

I'm not saying they're money hungry, but it's extremely uncouth to show up every Sunday and not contribute. I was pointing out that these free services aren't actually free.

In my experience as a lay minister, I've generally seen an inverse relationship between contributions (time/effort/involvement, not just financial) and support needs, though there are definitely exceptions.

It may be that the involvement strengthens resilience or strengthens the support network, or an inverted cause and effect, etc.

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