Not Just Nuclear: Families are elders long buried and generations yet unborn
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I've grown up in a typical 3-generational Russian family sharing a rather small apartment, and I can tell you, it gets on your nerves when the grandparents want to watch TV at maximum volume, while the parent is trying to catch some sleep debt and the kid (me) is doing homework in the same room. That was one of the main reasons why I decided to move to the West where having enough private space was considered to be a basic and unquestionable necessity.
Please, don't romanticize it. If our economy is changing in a way where the corporations are getting richer and richer, while the rank-and-file employees are forced to live with their parents forever and will never afford to move out, it's not cool at all. It's a sign of very serious economic troubles and we need to focus on solving them instead of trying to think of the changes in a positive way, and then wondering why is everyone depressed.
It was actually shocking to me because I usually lived with my parents in a small apartment and we were always aware of each other presence. It that big house, we actually had to do something to see each other, we could stay all day in our rooms as if we were alone if we wanted to.
> My parents live about a mile away.
Living with parents is indeed great especially when you're not actually living with them. You live alone. In-laws in another house, parents a mile away.
Living with family means sharing the actual facilities of the house not just technically being on the same property, or in a house where you never have to cross paths. Having parents in another house on the same property doesn't mean "living together" more than a neighbor on the other side of a 30cm wall is living with you.
(That area of living space is almost unimaginable in the UK, I'd have to buy a disused hotel or small castle to get that)
I've had exactly the same experience, and I only now slowly come to realise the amount of emotional abuse that is normalised in such families. Shouting and fighting (physically, with bruises and injuries) on a daily basis, belittling one another, constantly being passive aggressive in any communication, never-ending hostility towards your closest family members — it's just something that is completely normal and expected in many, many families that live like this. Even without alcohol involved.
Comparing this situation with a system without private property or even ability to rent, where apartments are leased by the state through your employer and you have no choice in the matter and have to wait years in order to move is a really, really long stretch.
Why is the soft touch approach of government making housing unaffordable any different, morally?
First, although government has some influence over a market, it's overall influence is much less than in a country without any free market whatsoever - so even if housing would be really unaffordable and it would really be morally bad, the government's responsibility for this still would be less.
Second, as I wrote in my comment above, the fact that housing is unaffordable in the centres of the most desirable cities is not the same as housing being unaffordable at all. Complaining about skyrocketing San Francisco rent prices is like complaining about expensiveness of designer clothes. If you need to shelter your body from the elements, you can always go to the noname retailer store at the mall and buy jeans for $10.
And third point is the most important point in my personal worldview, but the one that people usually don't agree with me on — that's why I base my argument on three points and not just this one. Freedom of choice and control over your fate is more important than just expected value of the outcome. A system that offers more degree of freedom and where your choice has more influence on the outcome is always more moral than a system that gives a better average outcome. So the ability to make that choice, between spacious apartment or location, or whatever, makes all the difference in the world in my eyes — and even if this system would have worse average standard of living the the communist one (which, by the way, is obviously completely the opposite), it would still be better, just for that.
I thought the reason these societies lived together was lack of financial means. It's not very different from where I currently live, but anybody that has enough funds to go on his own does indeed do it. It's not, in my opinion, about culture but rather it's almost impossible for a 30-year old in these countries to strike it on their own. Pay too low, and living is too expensive. They have to make it work together.
The West is doing it in a more subtle way though. There is no National Bureau of Square Foot Planning, but the educated, financially independent suburban family with savings, that is trying to pass their ways to the kids, is no longer the role model. Instead, if your parents nagged your head inside out to do homework + extracurriculars + do STEM or GTFO, instead of watching TV and eating chips, you are privileged and must be ashamed of yourself. And if you represent a culture where packed multi-generational living is OK, you get visibility and a pat on the back to keep your ways, rather than strong pressure to raise your bar and shoot for the stars.
The suitcase's original owner, another aunt, "Aunt" Faye, had lived to be 103 years old but had never had children.
And so I got to work scanning I believe over 500 photos — the earliest a tin-type from 1890 or so. Many were then cleaned up in Photos — levels adjusted, scratches and imperfections "healed" digitally. In time I was able to scan more photos from the family and increase my collection. Likely over 1000 now.
Some photos had something written on either the front or back and I also dutifully added metadata to the digital photo describing the text written.
At this time too, I had begun doing some genealogy on Ancestry.com.
As I pored over the photos, trying to determine who was in the photo, where the photo was taken, I began to "know" the people — family dead even before I was born. I could recognize them then. It became easier to approximate the date of the photos too: looking for young relatives in the photos, guessing their apparent age, knowing when they were born from my genealogy.
Eventually they began to sort: first a young Gertrude standing awkwardly in the tin-type as a child, another studio photo and she's about to become a teen, then with her sisters as a young woman, married, with her own children, in her new dress, with her daughter and her daughter's husband, on vacation, with her grandchildren, white-haired with her daughter - now old herself. Finally her headstone.
Entire lives, captured in photographs. And interleaved with the children they gave birth to, who too grew old in photos and also died — and in one case leaving, as it were, a suitcase of these photos that would come to me.
The connectivity of family back past 100 years has never been made so real to me as it has through photos. Maybe I should have been able to see that continuity in the absence of family photos but there they are.
And as I get older I do consider more and more those not yet born. I suppose this digital legacy is one obvious example. I have been spreading the photos as far and wide as I can, not just to far flung relatives but also to Ancestry.com, Find-A-Grave.com, etc. Surprisingly, I have already had relatives I did not know existed reach out to me having stumbled upon some of these photos on Ancestry and Find-A-Grave.
Family photo calendars I created for a few years were sent to two dozen relatives. I have a "family photo album" I am now assembling — I hope to have it done in a year or so and print a few dozen through Lulu.com or similar and send those out to as many relatives who want them as well.
I’m also not interested in having my photos included in family histories, or indeed being remembered at all. Not in a bitter way, just in the same way that I’m not interested in which mushrooms grow in Botswana. It’s a thing that I think is perfectly reasonable to be interested in.
It occurred to me that my parents would be dead one day and if it were to fall to me to tell the grandchildren the family origins I would be at a complete loss. I had relied on my "elders" to have that knowledge.
Ancestry and the like makes it easy to reconstruct your family tree even if you are starting with almost no knowledge. But there's the oral tradition of "your great grandmother's first husband died in a hotel from the gas lamp fixtures leaking" that would have been a lot harder to have found.
So I did find a sudden interest in genealogy. Or maybe it was a sense of duty or obligation — but that quickly did in fact turn into an interest.
Perhaps if you never do have children you might also never find an interest in genealogy.
I'll say this though, I have not fond any interest in finding genealogical connections to famous people. Nor have I had much interest in going back more than 150 years or so. I think the photos uniquely draw me into the lives of the generations captured in them. And perhaps because they are photos, not wills or marriage licenses, etc., I am come to feel either the futility and brevity of life or, at other times, the wonder and often humble dignity of it.
In late 2017, I grudgingly promised a sibling to piece some of our extended family history together. In 2018 I found a lost sister on Ancestry. And then I found a cousin who pointed me to my last surviving aunt (who I visited in 2019 and who passed 6 weeks ago). I also reunited with another lost sister. The sisters and I talk most days.
By the end of this year I will have added about 10k names in Family Search and 15k-20k in Ancestry (w/ much overlapping). It's safe to say my interests changed. I'm not saying I think yours will. Certainly my genealogy numbers don't represent anything likely.
What I can say is that things change, sometimes unexpectedly.
When I started in high school 20 years ago, it was just a tree of everyone I knew I was related to. Then you get back far enough and have to ask people for help. My grandmother remembered dozens of names and dates, which got me further. Ancestry and similar free websites (findagrave.com) can fill in a lot. Newspapers.com helped me find a ton of obituaries and gossip column entries, which filled in even more.
It's only recently that I got into thinking about the "History" going on around my ancestors when they were alive, and that's been driving my interest for the last year. Person A lived in this place in the 1890s--what was going on there, and how were global events affecting them? Newspapers.com or another archive were very useful for this as well.
Although Ancestry and Newspapers.com are subscription, even one month lets you dig into and download as much as you want, so if money is tighter you can sign up for a single month and dedicate a lot of time to getting as much raw material as possible.
What software tools did you use to organize your archive?
How did you add the metadata?
Get Info in Photos and add all the metadata you need.
For myself I try to set the date for the photo — at least get close to the correct year. I set the day/month/time to something like January 1, 12:00 AM as a sort of indication that I have no idea when during the year. And if I am not even sure about the year I indicate as much in the description for the photo.
I enter a description (on export this will populate either one of the EXIF or IPTC properties or both). I describe what was written on the back and/or front (if any). Describe who I think the photo is of, maybe where the photo came from, etc.
I add keywords. Keywords for each person I recognize in the photo, keywords for the collection the photo came from, keyword "Family Photo" so I can differentiate from all other photos in my library.....
Any decent photo editing app should have a means to set the date, enter a description, add keywords. And all of these are exportable — are part of the EXIF and/or IPTC spec. And, again, a decent photo editing app will preserve these on export.
The beauty of course is that you can then create "smart albums" to show your family photos chronologically where: keyword = "Family Photo", sort by date. Or find all photos of "Faye Coble".
All my resources are kept in a single directory, with subfolders generally using "lastname, firstname m" naming. I don't do as much cross-referencing (shortcutting) as I should, but that's also handled to some degree in the GEDCOM and full-text search of the filesystem.
My parents died when I was 14 & 21 respectively. Decades before, my dad moved my mom away so we grew up w/o any extended family nearby. When my first child was born, my wife and I were on our own - which would surprise zero Americans.
Objectively I was good parent and a terrible parent. With no ongoing guidance, the terrible wound up outweighing the good (because w/o exp, what we have are hunches, anecdotes and ill equipped reasoning). My kids and I will spend the rest of our lives repaving my bad roads. This result would have been different with extended family nearby and - critically - some on hand.
Some American ideals (eg:individualistic independence) come with an unreasonably high price. We would be a far better people if we elevated keeping 3+ generations together and normalized housing that would support that.
While obvious I was not around for previous generations of childrearing and can't comment as to whether the 1950s nuclear family represented a fundamental drop in childrearing support/labor by grandparents and extended family, being a recent parent and being around other recent parents, it does seem like grandparents and extended family aren't as helpful as it "feels" like they should.
Combine that with the massive generational war underway in America between college debt, healthcare costs, home ownership costs, and vastly reduced job market, it really does seem like we need fundamental policy to encourage having kids, starting with child care. Immigration can't serve all of the generational pyramid scheme.
A "retired people child care corps" would be a nice thing to try. Mental and physical activity is key to health in retirement, and childcare is an excellent healthy disruption to retirement. They especially could help out with unscheduled childcare needs.
I don't see how we can - liability. While older means wiser, it doesn't necessarily mean safer. We can offset the risk a lot by mandating minimum 2, non-related caregivers. In families, however, the vetting is so much more complete.
Regardless, I genuinely like and appreciate that line of thinking.
I’ve often reflected on this reality that seems to have been lost for most of humanity. At least urban dwelling folks, although I’m sure it persists in a lot of rural areas. The desire, need, instinct to be in the “in group”, not excluded was a matter of life and death for all of humanities existence. Bullying, cliques, and tribes (political parties, sports fans, programming language zealots, ...) make more sense when viewed from that angle (imo) and not likely something we’ll easily overcome.
The agony in the curtained bedroom, whether of birth or of dying, gathers into itself all the voices of the past, and projects them into the future.
So, while this could work for the average household, it isn't a gospel and needs to be evaluated on a case by case basis.
To be fair to your grandparents, large amount of screen time is not good for children and teenagers. And let's face it, if you were like a typical teenager, your screen time was largely devoted to gaming or other non-academic endeavors. I suspect when you have children of your own, you'll start sounding like your grandparents. I found that after your 20s you start appreciating the advice and experience of older people and the wisdom behind it.
I interpret that to mean he was talking about his childhood.
While I did game a bit during childhood and early adolescence, a large portion of it was spent socialising, I really did not socialise with peers during those years and that is a direct consequence of the overbearing and 'strictness' of the grandparents, so I socialised in the only way they couldn't control, through video games and the internet. Thank god World of Warcraft was a thing, it was my only social interaction that was deliberate.^1
My late adolescence, i.e. 15-18 was spent reading on light gaming, reading and watching documentaries. I also received a lot of expose on the hacker(not cracker) culture and that has shaped me a lot as a person, or perhaps it was inevitable since I was and still am the same curious child that I was back then.
PS. gaming has also helped me in many regards that are not perceptible to an outside observer, such as self discipline and setting goals and theory crafting. All of which have stayed with me and have probably made me a better scientist.
^1 I understand the difference between 'real' social interaction and 'virtual' interaction but I will take it over nothing.
It is impressive to see "where am I from" based on actual people names.
And, it is hard to think of a life investment as good as being good to your family.