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Comment by vixen99 | Hacker News Reader

"Perhaps one should not dwell too long, however, on the question of what type of leisure low-skill young men are engaging in. The more important fact remains that leisure is slowly replacing work in their lives, as immigrants replace them in the labor force."

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That is probably the one part of the article they really should've made more prominent. Yet they didn't. They hammered it home that videogames and young men not getting married and having 12 kids is the problem.

Maybe culturally getting married is incredibly more time consuming and difficult than it used to be? I mean I'm reading George Orwell's Burmese days and the main character was trying to propose (and the girl wanted him to) within 2 weeks of knowing eachother! Granted it's a book, but that doesn't sound outside the realms of normalcy, especially in Burma during the 1920's where there were like 1/1000 ratio of white person to native.

It did used to be normal to marry after extremely short time from our point of view. And divorce was harder.

There were consequences for that through - partner who hate each other, violence, abuse (verbal, emotional, physical). Alcoholism.

>There were consequences for that through - partner who hate each other, violence, abuse (verbal, emotional, physical). Alcoholism.

Yeah, the people who pine for the "good old days" when people married for life always leave this part out.

Yet, they always seem to remember what milkmen and secretaries were for.

Abusive MEN in particular. Especially radical christians where divorce is stigmatized. It's like they take it as a free pass to just be hateful person. Honestly my dad more than anything made marriage seem worse than it could be that I figured if that's the worst case scenario, hoping for the best isn't even worth the gamble.

I totally agree and don't think I'm idolizing the past. It's just a different world today and the culture has not caught up with reality.

Why is this downvoted? Insofar as I understand economics, it’s a factual reality. The middle class and up are benefitting from immigration driving down the price of food and services in this country. If you’re a low-wage-earning-potential male, given our levels of inequality, why would you want to be a wage slave if you don’t have to? You aren’t going to significantly improve your lot in life by throwing 40+ hours a week at a job that barely pays the bills. It makes you feel like a loser doing the work, and you don’t get to bury that feeling in anything, as you spend all your money just getting by.

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