It's too early to tell how this will play out, but we as a society have underestimated the effects and consequences of rapid change. It may be another one hundred years before we can look back and understand what we are currently going through.
It's too early to tell how this will play out, but we as a society have underestimated the effects and consequences of rapid change. It may be another one hundred years before we can look back and understand what we are currently going through.
I just wanted to point out politely how strange this language reads to me. It's ultimately the decision of each person whether to have kids or not. This being "sad" for them is an overreach, morally, IMO--and part of the fight feminism led was to carve out a space for women in society not to be mothers, if that is their choice.
Whether it was her "choice" is hard to say. Very few people get the chance to engineer their lives the way they want. Most people instead play the cards they are dealt. And now that there are many more different types of possible cards in the deck for women, they are coming to the understanding that it is possible to be dealt a bad hand, and not realize it until it is too late.
I wonder, though, if these same women did have kids, and sacrificed their career for it, would they look back and have regrets in that regard, too.
So maybe it's just... given a multitude of options where we can't choose them all, perhaps humans will just naturally have some regrets around the path(s) not taken?
As counterpoint, I know women in their 40s and older who are very pleased with their decision to not have kids.
[1] https://www.raconteur.net/healthcare/fertility-education-sch...
[2] https://unesdoc.unesco.org/ark:/48223/pf0000260770
[3] https://apps.who.int/iris/bitstream/handle/10665/70501/WHO_R...
[4] https://modernfertility.com/modern-state-of-fertility-2019/
This is perfectly possible. Imagine your stereotypical 1950s head of household. Fulfilling job, family is provided for, hangs out with friends on the weekend, etc. Now imagine them being female.
The fact of the matter is that this life doesn't exist for just about anyone anymore. It just never existed at all for women because back when it was possible for large numbers of people to do this they weren't part of the well paid workforce. (It didn't exist for non-whites for similar reasons but I digress)
Part of the problem is that our definition of "having it all" comes from times when circumstances were different. Now, I don't think just giving up and saying we'll never have it that good again and people have to choose between family, work and friends is a good solution but it sure seems more tractable in the short term than recreating that level of prosperity.
Can men “have it all”? Is “having it all” different for men than women?
My experience is that men are able to “have it all” often at the cost of their spouse making sacrifices to stay at home, with the implicit idea that this is the way things are meant to be.
If both people in a relationship try to “have it all”, some sacrifices do have to be made (speaking from experience), but I am not sad about these choices since trade offs are an inevitable part of life :)
While men have longer time, the probability that a man does reproduce is significant lower than a woman. This makes the comparison a bit more complex.
Really? I'm curious how one can justify this statement.
When hiring decisions are made, hiring managers will often prefer men with families, because they will generally stick with the company longer because it's riskier to change jobs with a family to support. This doesn't work for women; hiring managers will be less likely to want to hire a woman of child-bearing age because they're afraid she'll get pregnant and suffer productivity losses as well as take maternity leave. They also assume that a woman with children will be less attentive to work due to child care duties. They assume that men will be less affected by this because, while things are indeed changing, the default assumption is that men will prioritize career over child-rearing, while women will choose the opposite.
In my mental model (note: this is not what I would do, but what I imagine others would do), a woman saying she needs to go home because her baby needs her would be seen as a responsible woman, because a baby needs breastmilk and its mother provides that, whereas, if a man said he needed to go home consistently, the boss would think he's irresponsible, because -- as a man -- his baby doesn't strictly need him, and thus he is better serving his family at work.
But I understand your viewpoint; it just didn't occur to me. It seemed obvious to me that men, due to male biology, were more likely to be forced to work longer hours in order to be seen as being as responsible as an otherwise equivalent woman. Although, I guess today, formula is quite popular. Well regardless, I'm not always the best at understanding how others would react to things.
Better support for working parents.
This is the problem with people who think they know better. You think people should have more kids, what do you propose? Are you going to pay for the diapers, the education, the bigger house, the bigger car, the childcare? Do you want to become our live-in nanny?
After all, you seem so eager for people to have kids, surely you must be volunteering every night to help kids from low socio-economic areas get better grades and break the cycle of poverty or maybe you have adopted 5 unwanted kids already?
My wife and I don't need your sadness and your condescension. Thank you.
Drop the implicit assumption that only the mother needs to give up her career to raise a child.
For some reason, nobody sheds tears over successful entrepreneur, lawyer, and doctor men who are unable to make that work with raising children.
A pregnancy lasts 9 months. Raising a child takes ~200 months.
1. If you're a working mother, you're currently assumed to either be a bad worker, or a bad mother. (Sad corollary: If you're a working father, most people don't assume this about you.)
2. If you're a professional man, and you want children, your wife is expected to compromise her career, to raise them.
Both of these are, of course, complete bullshit.
Ignoring the endgames that come after the cessation of traditional human existence - either robotics replacing organics completely or mastery of genetics leading to the engineering of super-intelligent custom lifeforms to replace us - we are almost always either going to go extinct or refine our genetics to optimized templates. Eventually, we will be manufacturing humans with mathematically weighed balances between genetic diversity for disease resistance and optimized traits and features to make people live longer, stronger, and smarter. Probably going to be codified to be obedient to authority and not deviate from the social order as well, because that just honestly seems borderline unavoidable.
These humans will eventually be manufactured in artificial wombs in automated facilities meant to produce the population because in practice its severely debilitating and economically inefficient to take the females out of operation for so long to reproduce with such high biological risks associated. Cloned gametes from engineered templates grown in factories. The children would probably be mentally implanted with knowledge via brain-computer interfaces and taught everything virtually. Their biology would accelerate their development as much as is possible within our genetic profile. Years of research would have gone into optimizing their environments, interactions (if necessary, organic ones), and development to yield the most potential.
When you start stepping back from there, the closest bridge to that reality is going to be the institutionalization of child rearing. Before we have automated facilities breeding engineered templates we will almost certainly have public institutions dedicated to population replacement - in the optimistic scenario, women would simply "major" in parenting and live their careers as mothers. We will probably already be using engineered gametes by then because the technology is already mostly available, so these women would just have children and raise them as their full time career. Given current understanding of developmental psychology there would probably also be men assigned to play paternal roles in upbringing in full employment at such facilities as well.
I don't think at all this evolution in child rearing would ever happen overnight and its very likely in the same way you can still ride a horse today over owning a car or in the future how some will still drive manual cars in the age of autonomous vehicles some couples will do it "the old fashioned way" because they can. But it will probably, almost certainly, happen a lot less often.
And honestly from my perspective its for the best. Historically raising children is an absolutely full time job. Living on a farm, despite "working" in the fields at all hours of the day, still lets you keep the children at hand and raise them. You are never separated and the family is always together. That seems to be, barring abusive relationships, the optimal way human children develop. We have constructed employment institutions that make that impossible and try to both put pressure on laborers to reproduce but then also to somehow "do the job" of parenting at their own expense and economic disadvantage. It costs tremendous amounts of time to raise children, even more to actually do it well, and its never priced into the economy.
For now, this isn't a problem, and it likely won't be for a long time. We just get the collateral damage of mentally and physically harmed children from parental negligence that society pushes them towards. Eventually the economic pressure not to reproduce drives enough people not to that replacement becomes impossible and then such professional parenting institutions need to start being taken seriously. When it happens, its likely to be a very good thing - children raised by people paid to raise them, whose job is to be the best parent possible, and who will have comprehensive education in the hugely complex fields surrounding human development will be a substantial boon to the first children raised under it. Its just the cost of basically privatizing reproduction has to justify the investment, both culturally and economically, to make it happen.
For now the best thing to do would be to reduce the economic burden of life on adults to let them be more recreational and social and thus less lonely. Trying to force people back into a mold that was already broken to begin with is a violation of liberty with no real corresponding benefit - we aren't going to go back that way ever again, because truthfully we can do much better. We just have to choose to.
That doesn't even touch on the breakdown of community organizations (churches, fraternal orders, what have you).
Unpaid favors to family aren't measured in GDP and can't be taxed. Breaking down extended family into individual workers is good for the economy. Having stay-at-home moms work while sending their kids to group childcare is also more economically efficient.
What's good for the economy may not be good for individual humans though. We aren't homo economicus: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homo_economicus
You see this trend in other areas as well: the gift economy of the early Internet became the advertising economy of today, the open-source economy of the early 90s now has Github etc. offering rewards for creators, the karma economy of early social media contributors is replaced by the Patreon model today, the idea of driving a drunk friend home is replaced by calling them an Uber, the practice of quietly giving a family in need money is replaced by GoFundMe, and so on.
There are pluses and minuses to this: it's certainly been good for the economy, and generates liquidity where previously there was none, but it's done a lot to destroy social relationships and trust.
Sure, grandpa might be a great primary caregiver while mom and dad are at work, but he might also not be. Chances are low he has any training in early childhood education, though he may have raised his own kids -- but he's tautologically not as young as he used to be. But he might have training in law, or medicine, and might plausibly be very valuable as a consultant for the hours that he's instead watching little Ephra.
The licensed daycare in the neighborhood, by contrast, is set up to care for children, and -- depending on grandpa's hourly rate -- might do so at a lower cost. The folks there are (maybe?) trained in early childhood education, and have years of experience handling 1-2 year olds, or 2-3 year olds, or 3-4 year olds, at least compared with grandpa who might only have a year or two of experience with each.
Where has the nuclear family ever been divorced from kinship groups. A nuclear family is by definition part of an extended network, because mom and dad are both parents of one nuclear family as well as children of two others. Without a strong nuclear family there is no kinship, and all nuclear families imply extended kin groups, by definition. I will never understand where this nonsense dichotomy of nuclear family v 'kin' has come from.
Now that I think about it, I'm not sure if I'm agreeing with you or not :) The paradox is that people have the ideals of the past but react in a way that produces the opposite result ("I want to be conservative, but I can't do it so I'll enjoy myself in the meantime").
Most people are alone because they don't prioritize the families they already have (parents, siblings, grandparents, cousins, etc). They graduate high school, attend college in another state, move to another city far away for work, etc. Those are choices and they carry consequences. It's not good by default to follow your dreams if the only way to follow your dreams is to be alone and isolated in a strange place. Career is only a portion of our lives and it is far from the best way to draw meaning and purpose for ourselves. It's much better to draw meaning from something that is more permanent and guaranteed, like your identity and your home, not the job you just so happen to be doing at that moment.
There are exceptions to every rule, but it should be understood that when people graduate from high school, they should pick a trade school or university that is close by, not far away. When they choose a focus/major, they should ask what jobs exist in their area, not what kinds of jobs exist in the whole world. When they graduate college, they should be looking for work near their home, not on the other side of the country. Work and career is unreliable and people fail a lot. It's not the thing you should rely on to make you happy or satisfied.
It's better to have less of a career and more of a family than less of a family and more of a career. Your career accomplishments are not as important or valuable as they seem. If you didn't do them, someone else very probably would, and you will also very probably be forgotten quickly after you retire or quit or die. But more humane pursuits like family, home, faith, and community will always be there if you invest in them.
That's begging the question. Of course, one cannot, "blame the victims of villains," to paraphrase. The vast majority of people are just imperfect, normal people trying to get by. It's the aggregate actions of everyday people we should be looking at, not such outliers.
Most people are alone because they don't prioritize the families they already have
It's like the "Thanksgiving arguments" are engineered precisely to create a rift between generations.
Isolation is a self-perpetuating thing. People hate going home for Thanksgiving and arguing with their relatives because they don't actually know their relatives (their own fault) and they don't belong at home anymore (also their own fault). They isolate themselves, then become indignant when the result is disconnection and conflict. It's absurd.
They're all brainwashed by capital into thinking there should be no negative consequences from following the path that maximizes career success. The idea that we can leave our homes, chase money, and live separate lives without destroying our relationships is the greatest enemy of the traditional family.
The ideology that permeates higher education also teaches this.
Society and culture doesn't grow organically. They are created and manufactured by the people with wealth and power. For the time being, those with wealth and power have decided that the breakdown of the family is in their interest. But it could shift quickly if the people in charge want it to. An extreme example is china where they encouraged women to have lots of children in order to strengthen their country. And not too long after that, they had a change of heart and encouraged the complete opposite - one child policy. Now it seems like they are backing off of it after a few decades of one child policy.
BS. You give them way too much credit. The world is too complex and dynamic for a queen ant to "create and manufacture" the efficiency of the ant hill.
Imaging paying your you and your spouse's student loans, then having two kids and paying their student loans or putting that debt on their shoulders. Much easier before tuition skyrocketed.
Healthcare prices are a consideration too.
So economics is probably a weak explanation. Personal freedoms, especially for women, is probably the root cause of low birthrates.
Granted, my father also took a job that let him stay home most of the day, because he hated working too, so I guess we're one of the few families which seems unaffected by marketing, and instead seek what we actually want. Why in the world would literally anyone want to work a job? I feel only someone who's never worked could want to do it
I'm a big proponent of financial independence & early retirement. It's mind-boggling to me how many people I've talked to about this that thing it's "unnatural" to stop working so early. Some have reasonable questions/concerns about meeting financial needs later in life, and others give an envious/sarcastic "must be nice" sort of response, but by far the majority of negative reactions I get are from people who can't even fathom the concept of not going to work every day.
And then there's always the "won't you get bored?" argument, which... honestly, if I ever get chronically bored in this amazing, rich world we have, simply because I don't have a job, I will consider that a huge personal failing.
Right. Literally, every one of my family members in the United States retired early. They came to this country with nothing -- at the time they emigrated, their country did not allow migrants to take currency over the border. The oldest one to come was almost 45-50, and they retired before most Americans, and have just made do with less, but are otherwise happy.
I cannot fathom the obsession some people have. Even my mother-in-law had a lot of consternation when she decided to quit the job she hated (they have more than enough money to retire). Luckily, that's over now. I do actually get working until you die if you love your job. Most of us are not so lucky though.
At the end of the day, most people (not all though -- some people truly have difficult circumstances) choose to not be wealthy (in the sense of being able to live off their savings), not because circumstance forces them to, but because they are afraid to, for some reason.
That's the fundamental bias of human beings. Alvin Toeffler and other authors have been banging on about that since the 60's and 70's. Vernor Vinge used to talk about this. (He helped popularize the "Singularity.")
we should take a step back and think about what is really happening
Do this, if you want to grab hold of a piece of intelligence which is invisible to the general public. This is something of a corollary to, "What you can't say."
http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html
If one has tried to talk about evolution to an anti-evolutionist, one is familiar with the depth and surprising strength of mental defenses working against evidence. If one wants to have an awareness beyond the ordinary, one has to do self analysis at this level. (While not succumbing even more to one's deeply held biases.)
Similarly, contraceptives aren't the reason people have fewer children. It's the fact we can't afford childcare and housing for a family.
In other words, yes current state is a function of all past states, but recent history has a far higher influence on next state than the far past. At a certain point you have to assume its influence to be close to zero.
In my own family, the American half reproduced earlier and had many more children than the "old country" half, due to economic distress and war. People in my father's generation were not directly affected by World War II, but the economic contractions that gripped Europe in the 1970s really show when you look at the reproductive choices my "old country" family made compared to my US family (which supports your previous post).
It's just weird that this longer conversation posits either idealized 1950s suburban America or an individualist society. Especially as employment configurations evolve, we should be aware that those are not the only options.
Certainly liberated women may be part of the cause, but there are also no shortage of boy-men who are incapable of sacrifice, hard work and the drudgery of responsibility.
The social structures that enforced all that appear to have broken down. And that's not all together a bad thing but certainly it causes societal problems in the short term until things adjust (hopefully better than what they were before).
I would say it's important to look beyond simple labels of "good" and "bad" and think of the situation in terms of trade offs. Feminism has greatly helped some portions of the population and cost others greatly as well. Just like with any other culture or ideology, there really is no free lunch.
[0] https://americanaffairsjournal.org/2019/05/houellebecqs-unfi...
An important factor to consider is the nature and place of work: Men used to inherit their families business or work in the same town. Big families and relatives lived close to each other, so women could use help from other women in the family for child rearing and house chores. Nowadays you have to move to capitals/big cities to find work which deprived women from the assistance they found in extended families. I think this had an impact on gender roles and the increase of feminism and nuclear families.
Few men got to inherit a business but if your father worked a trade then you would probably find going into that trade to be a natural path. The latter part is still very true today.
The studies I'm familiar with didn't mention loneliness, but rather the social responsibility.
If you are talking about the pill sure, but there are forms of birth control that date to ancient Egypt, Mesopotamia, And China. Not to say these methods were effective and the book of Genesis did regress things a little with God slaying Onan for practicing the old pull out method, teaching that procreation is for reproduction only.
But look up Matriarchy. There are lots of shades.
Also, women haven't been liberated from the home [1].
[1] https://www.ft.com/content/0c9f068c-711f-11e9-bf5c-6eeb83756...
Everyone is unhappy, married people on average are happier than unmarried, religious people are on average happier than unreligious people.
The sexual and feminist revolution got some 'splainin to do.
Of course, my view, the answer isn't "liberating women from the bonds of motherhood and family" but empowering women and supporting them in arguably the most powerful and most important thing one human can actually do in this world: bring new life into it.
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/04/happiness-...
A being doesn't want to reproduce in itself, it wants to fulfill needs that compel it to reproduce. A desire for sex, for companionship, for a social role, etc. It's possible to be highly attracted to someone who is infertile because we chase the signs of procreation rather than its actual occurrence. We can rationally plan to make procreation happen but even in this case it is an illusion, we are still chasing some state of mind that leads to procreation.
On the contrary, I am trying to dispel the romanticism here and the hidden additional romantic layer that anthropomorphizes the process of evolution itself by giving it some sort of direction.
There are many reasons I don't want children, but this one in particular has stood out in my mind most of my adult life as the perfect reason not to.
I don't have a definite answer to your question but looking at most of what has happened in history I do wonder if developing opposable thumbs and a frontal cortex was worth it.
Also bus isn't getting full. The issue is two fold: chain smokers in first rows and overcrowding in back rows.
Feminism isnt the search for happiness, its for equity.
It is absolutely possible to have a career and be a phenomenal wife and mother with a happy family. If a person’s priority is family, it may limit career opportunities but that is true of both men’s and women’s careers (for example rejecting a promotion that requires a geographic move to keep kids in the same school or live near relatives will impact both partners).
You see similar modern pulls today in nations like China and India. It's really difficult to separate which came first - the economic pull or feminism. I lean to the economics of factory owners wanting low cost labor being a leading phenomenon of the cycle, and that induces the question of the rights of women who now have income, and practical freedoms going to work and working, and that independence inducing a desire for wider rights.
Once industry gets access to that labor though, they'll pay the minimum amount possible, and that practical acceptable minimum lowers if there are multiple people in the household making income.
If some households are multi-income, then they can pay more for housing.
This bids up the cost of housing. More households decide to become multi-income in order to pay for housing. This of course makes the housing price go up even more.
It's an arms race.
I'd say the strongest factors, at least in the US:
1. Work/career is #1 priority. Career has always been a big deal in the US, but I feel like it's become more extreme in my generation (nearing 40) than it was for my parents or their parents. For them, it was more about putting food on the table and providing a better life for their children than what they had. For us it seems more about intangible things like "being successful".
2. Geographic barriers have broken down a lot. In the mid-/late-1900s, you'd likely grow up in the same place, and more often than not would find a job or go to college nearby, and stick around as an adult. You'd probably meet your future partner through family, local, or church events, and after marriage would probably still live in or near your original hometown. Nowadays, it's much more likely to move hundreds or even thousands of miles from your hometown, often to chase job opportunities (see #1). New adults going to college far from home also makes them realize that living near your hometown isn't the only option.
3. And yes, changing gender norms fit into this: women have caught the bug of #1, and we are still struggling with the "having it all" mentality of women having a strong, ambitious career, but also raising children. I personally don't think there's a universal solution to this; there are only so many hours in a day and so much energy to go around. Child care is expensive and a stretch or out of reach for many couples, even with dual incomes (and the jury's still out as to whether or not pervasive third-party child care is a detriment to early childhood development). In heterosexual couples, many men still resist taking an equal part in child-rearing duties, but I'm not convinced that would completely solve the problem anyway (again, only so many hours in a day); it would just make it more equitable as to bearing the responsibility.
Definitely agree that it may be another few generations before we fully understand the effects of all these societal changes. Some of it may be bad, even if the overall changes are good.
Is the unhappiness that we may be observing with the decline of family a product of this transition period from traditional family structure to individualism? Is our current society just not well equipped yet to handle this mode of living? Maybe in 50 years, this will become the norm and people who choose to live alone will have alternative sources of happiness.
I'm not saying one is better for than the other overall, but one is surely better than the other for certain outcomes. Do we want an equitable society where low status individuals, but particularly males, have a better shot at reproduction and may contribute more to building a society that propagates that "culture" of safety and equity? Or do we go with what is probably more natural? I mean i can guess why and how religions of old and civilizations formed and why they were patriarchal
Your spouse will never move to another city for a new job w/o you. Your kids won’t leave the nucleus, at least not until they’re college ready.
Unlike family, different kinds of arrangements between people result in relationships that are less committed and less durable.
So maybe if you take stability and intimacy into account, it might as well be optimal.
I guess it begs the question, what are we optimizing for? And on what time scale?
What might seem optimal for the time being, could unleash a series of unforeseen circumstances in the future.
But I guess we can keep an open mind, allow people to choose for themselves and then report back after 2-3 generations the consequences of different paths taken.
Thus relative to the current divorce rates, I would wager that “divorce” rates among friends and other social structures are even greater.
There seems to be a pretty good correlation between which countries are most dominant today and those that encouraged monogamy in the recent past.
Maybe the differences in IQ seen between different groups are caused by how well those societies manage to mix up genes and not down to skin colour.
Before social media people had to meet face-to-face in order to date and they had to break up face-to-face in order to end a relationship. This forced people to develop social skills at a young age that are required to form a family.
Now people can date someone they never met and break up by ghosting. They can get to a preliminary relationship without acquiring social skills. There are also online equivalents of a mate that seem good enough if you don't understand the benefits of family.
I try to avoid social media and it makes my life much more sane. It forces me to go out and socialize with people.
Life was harder, but you could lean on friends, family, and congregation. That's where the classic trope of rich people being lonely and surrounded by fake acquaintances while poor people have authentic community comes from. Maybe now that every level of society is relatively richer we're all that much lonelier.
I never viewed feminism as mutually exclusive of having a family or a career. I might just be more mellow than everyone else. Feminism just means that men and women deserve equal opportunity and respect. Why is this the worst thing?
I might have an advantage over everyone else since my parents grew up in the great depression. All of the women in my family worked often because of hardship. One grandmother married a very bad man and ended up becoming a hairdresser and opening a salon to support my mother. Another grandmother had a sick husband and had to take over his business. My father also had an illness and although he continued to work they both agreed that my mother needed to finish her education and go back to work. Nobody made such a big deal about it since the women were also supporting the family. In fact, in most societies the women support the family working or not. This is the norm.
When my husband and I got married we I was still in school so our whole life was ahead of us. We agreed that I would finish school first only because I was only a year from graduation. Then he finished school. We both agreed that having a family was important so we both prioritized children. We both had awesome careers, but I never let go of the fact that family is more important than career. My husband and I are still feminists.
In my daughters case she decided to stay at home with her three boys. Her awesome husband is still very much involved with his boys. They are both still feminists.
However, I don't think it is the sole reason. For example, why then are wealthy people more likely to have families, as the article describes? The fact that wealthier people have families more seems to support the idea that it is at least partially caused by neoliberalism.