A shift in American family values is fueling estrangement
theatlantic.com
theatlantic.com
Some time later there was a period when I would contact my parents every few months or so. Not really on purpose. Simply because other things simply took more of my time and attention, and calling my parents wasn't really high on my list of priorities.
Only when my son was born I started to realize what someone goes through as an individual and as a couple once a child comes into their lives. How it changes things. That not being thrown out of the window at 2 a.m. as an infant is already a blessing. I'm sure that thought has crossed the mind of many a young parent with a screeching infant on their hands in the middle of night. So, I felt ashamed of myself, and grateful to my parents for being there in the first place, and being decent at being parents as well.
Now I've made a point to myself to call them up at least once a week. As in, I have set up a reminder for that. I now know how much they value this. But it's not only for them. I realize very well that one day I will wake up and wish to call my parents to have a chat about something. But there simply won't be anyone to call anymore.
I'm not passing any judgement at all on people who have abusive parents. I have no idea how that feels like. I'm just happy that I didn't end up accidentally getting estranged to the decent parents that I have. At some point it really was going that way.
Sorry for your loss. I'm at the age where I've lost a few of my good friends now, and it never feels like you had enough time.
The calls were pretty consequential and really not verty long, quite often just 20 minutes but over the years they morphed from the being worried about me, to me being worried about them. My eldest daughter goes to Uni this summer. Despite mobile phones, I might see if she would consider doing the same.
I am genuinely curious why "memento mori" never seems to stick. Maybe thats part of it's power.
because simultaneously adults have been inundated with the news of the world and it isn't good, and as a result we're probably genuinely more anxious about our kids than for several generations (my father would be 114 this year, if he could be alive, and his stories of growing up pre Depression in London still make my hair stand on end and thank god for the mercies we do have. Age has made me sentimental and actually interested in what religion is about. But I also recognised both developments as being a deliberate blurring without any definite refocus, of all the accumulated worries into a indefinite emotional haze. If this is necessary for forbearance when my grandchildren err stupidly yet repairably, I'll take it, religion and all. But I don't remember my father in his nineties getting any fuzzier, only sharper. So I hope to overcome the apparent overload.
Still, whatever the reasons, I think we're letting our children's intelligence become too thinly spread across distractions when we are suffering from similar confusion, and I believe it's our job to clear more of the post modern clutter.
I would recommend setting expectations early around weekly calls so they become a habit. Even if you have nothing to talk about you can small talk for a few minutes. I suspect you will have a lot to talk about if your child is starting university.
I'm the oldest of five. This pattern then continued and now my parents and my siblings and their families have that group call with everyone every week.
It's really helped us stay connected. You can't stay close to someone if you never talk to them. And a live interaction is superior to Facebook, etc
But.... there's a gigantic cultural (rural vs suburban), generational (Xenial/Milennial vs Boomer), political (die hard Republicans vs Greenwald-esque progressives) and religious (baptist vs atheist) divide between us.
To complicate matters - they, especially my mother who's suffering depression from chronic illness, can be quite toxic and stress-inducing at times. They're judgemental, my mother can be a tad manipulative - nothing is every enough. I could call every day, i could see them once a week, they freaking moved within a 20 min jog of my house ffs. They're pushy.
To quote Kill Bill Vol 2: "Because he's a very very very old man. And like all rotten bastards, when they get old, they become lonely. Not that that has any effect on their disposition. But they do learn the value of company."
And that's the conundrum of them. They are characters and they are a lot to take in and a lot to ask my wife to habitually tolerate.
But on the flip side, they're incredibly thoughtful, giving, will stop anything at the drop of a hat to help with problems big and small, physical, financial, you name it. (though i never take them up on the $$). They... were incredibly flawed parents and i didn't walk out of childhood without issues.
But man, does being a parent change things. It makes me hypersensitive to just how i'm going to fuck up my kid, what kind of an annoyance i will be to him. The bond i have with my child is already something i can't explain to people who don't have kids and even to a few who do. And the idea that one day he'll just be too busy for me, or even being a teenager and being too cool for me.. it depresses me.
I didn't have him to burden him with me. but it's a relationship that i value higher than anything else.
i'm getting older - i've had medical ordeals, watching my mom suffer medical problems and it's just hit me how short and temporary all this is.
And i dunno. I understand a bit more now, and am tolerant a bit more now. I'm more grateful for what was done for me and less judgmental about differences. Life is hard, life is fragile, relationships are hard but... they're worth the extra effort (on both sides).
I don't have a lot of friends. I just never fit in anywhere. But whether i did or didn't, it really strikes to the core of just how important family is, looking down and up generationally. No one wants to die alone.
No one wants to pour all that effort, love, attention, money, heart-ache, struggle to doing the best you can for a kid, just for that kid to be like "fuck off" (for whatever reason, sans abuse). To dedicate 18-25, sometimes more, of your life to someone and them to just ...be too good for you now?
I was that kid at 25. At 40 with a 5 year old, i am not. And i will not be.
And of course, since she didn't recognize mental illness in herself, she also couldn't see in her children. So we never got care that we needed and are various degrees of fucked up now. We were just force-fed religion instead. We're all atheists now, but those scars never heal, and I'll never forgive my parents for putting us through that.
i'm no less an atheist than i was before anxiety,but i'm certainly less of an asshole about it.
Maybe worth keeping in mind that they were probably doing what they were force fed to believe was the right thing to do. Everyone is just trying their best (usually, and even if they aren’t, it is generally better for your own mental health to go through life assuming they are).
Damaged kids become damaged adults, and if they realize it, they may decide that they wouldn't be good parents and rightly opt-out of it.
Children that didn't have the right opportunities, whether that's their parent's fault or not may not have enough achievement as an adult to take on the burden of being a parent. One can argue whether it is harder being young today than it was 20-30 years ago, but you can't argue that being a parent requires lots of resources in both time and money, and if you don't have both, it's the right choice to not be a parent.
Another layer is that the parents often want grandkids and will use them as an excuse or as leverage to maintain contact despite lack of respect for boundaries or even outright abuse. So there is an element of spite in denying them grandkids, and an element of self-protection in the same.
(this isn't meant to attack you for misclassification - but rather widen the pool of people who fall into this complicated class)
It’s not like I were divorced. I’m precisely never married, never had a long girlfriend, despite not being ugly nor totally stupid, and my loneliness drove me crazy (in the literal sense – since Covid I’ve honestly snapped a few neurons, so it’s quite over for me). But before that, I used to be a fine person, but they didn’t give me any lead on the love life. EVERY father would be happy if the kid plays with girls at school, just not mine because they don’t want me to pump-and-dump - well they don’t have to worry about this for sure. I really don’t get how people succeed at the love life, it’s totally not working for me.
I’m now workaholic and if I stop working, I’ll go insane with ruminations in a few hours only. I’m quite fortunate my worklife offers me the opportunity of working more, I’m a programmer-entrepreneur.
Anyway, if I were successful at life, I’d certainly be happy to call my parents more. It’s just that their opinion led me to a general failure, so I can’t hear more.
Until we can do that, we aren't really adults. That's what sets adults and children apart: responsibility. Children are not responsible for their own lives; rather, they live under the guardianship of adults.
Adults are responsible.
And it is a hate crime that we have probably two generations in the West that have been raised to be actively irresponsible: to reject the mantle of responsibility, and instead spend their time loudly blaming... everybody but themselves.
It doesn't matter how well-deserved that blame might be! Blame itself is toxic.
Look, I get it. My parents did a number on me, too. But I also recognize that they too were broken in many ways, and that they did the best they could with what they had.
Yes, that means they gave me a lot of shitty advice. But it was good advice to their younger selves.
That's why I'm not angry with them anymore. Not for the cheating, or the divorce, or any of the rest. Because I am adult enough to take ownership over my own life.
If a close friend told you that their BF/GF abused them and asked you what was the responsible thing to do, would you not tell them that they should first remove themselves from their abuser? Is it not precisely the responsible and independent choice for a victim to leave their abuser behind and move on?
Blame isn't necessary for estrangement. I broadly agree, blame is often toxic, and it's healthy to have a sense of cosmic empathy towards even people who have wronged you. It's not really clear to me who's ultimately "in the wrong" here, but the person you replied to is clearly taking the reins on their life: evidently, they're now dealing with life without their parents' help.
And yet there are so many levels and shades to abuse. Just like the errors we see in the products and programs we build. We have to ask if it was malicious, neglect or ignorance. The longer we live the more I ask myself whether large swaths of that low level trauma I endured was malicious or their own timeline to grow up, be better, realize their mistakes. Not fair, but also true.
My mother is not the same person she was when I was 12/16/22 and I'm glad we had space, but never truly cut ties despite how painful it was for so many years.
We aren't all afforded the same time, space, community to mature.
- But my mother hates dogs because they’re competing with her in terms of affection (or total lack thereof), and relationships don’t click with me, because most parents develop their child’s socialization and mine acted as if socialization wasn’t a subject. In some sense, their education taught me to rely on my skills, not on socialization (independence as a principle, which became loneliness). I have no example in my 38 years where I could rely on others when I was in need.
- It seems I have the face of someone to be stepped upon (I don’t know, some people have a face you want to slap, perhaps I look weak and people instinctively profit from it).
- In any case, they pushed feminism and helped my sisters more, and either you admit that feminism has an impact and gives women a better life than men, especially in terms of confidence in society, either you admit it doesn’t, in which case why doing it. But as it stands, given women’s experience and expectations, it is not possible anymore for me as a beginner to start a relationship. They do expect a set of societal conventions that I don’t know about (from not-breaking-up-by-sms to saying the right thing when it’s time to split or not split the bill, not even talking about in bed).
I’ll just take a dog, but I’m enraged that people talk so much about helping others and can let people down just next to them when they’re were 99% decent humans before. I mean I’ve donated dozens of thousands to charities in the past, and none of them is able to pay it back to lonely men. I was a decent being until I became insane under the lockdowns.
2020's pandemic and the associated mess with society is a thing. Just look out for yourself. Therapy is fine, you don't have to broadcast to everyone that you've chatted about issues. I've had a few sessions and to be honest, even those few sessions have given me ways to have internal conversations with myself by just imagining what a therapist would say. Just thought I'd offer that.
Still, take care of yourself, we only have one life here on the planet, plus you can't depend on 100 percent of the folks you run into to be on your side, most of us can be pretty self centered but don't let external insanities live in your head rent free. Humans are just not perfect beings.
Look forward to the future, surprises can and do happen. Cultivate friendships where you can.
I strongly disagree with this overbroad generalization.
> you can't argue that being a parent requires lots of resources in both time and money, and if you don't have both, it's the right choice to not be a parent.
I would be happy to argue this. Raising children is the most essentially human experience one can have. A society with fewer parents is a society well on its way to nihilism and extinction.
If that means trauma, then there is this concept of "Transgeneration transmission of trauma" not in terms of epigenetics (as this has not been proven yet), but in terms of behaviour of adults transmits trauma verbally and non-verbally to the child. I think this also applied to a whole range of responses/believes about how we approach life in general which is transmitted from parents to child. Yes, also the child has their own personality and might not be influenced that much, but nurture is pretty powerful especially in the forming years.
Not sure this is a 100% proven mechanisms in psychology (replicated and understood) but I can easily identify in my kid things that I wish I fix for myself and I see this in other parents with kids too.
I also think a child is a very powerful chance to change myself as kids can really be (specially when they are young and copy their parents) mirrors of their parents thus making identifying these mechanisms easily.
I am thankful that I think there are a lot of things that I caught early on, did a lot of work to fix them and managed not to transmit to the child.
I know enough parents doing fine for their kids without much money and even less time that I’ll have to contradict you. It’s infinitely better to be alive than have stuff or even ample parent time. I can attest to that from personal experience. In the short term it’s certainly convenient to avoid having kids as having kids is hard and requires sacrifices. However, it’s a commonly held myth that for many kids are beyond them due to time and money, presumably as a justification for precluding or severely limiting children. One has the ability to make that decision but one shouldn’t lie about the motivation because for many the choice is made to put themselves first and reject the sacrifices of being parents.
In some places kids can play outside and have a village of school connected people / things to get through just fine.
I guess it's also easier to do fine if you have church groups to help, and some places have other community that can help I am guessing. Perhaps that mall in Beverly Hills is a fine babysitter and teacher of life lessons - the malls around other parts of the country stopped being good for that some years ago.
I also feel that fine is also a gamble.
You might get affordable child care that does not abuse your kids and you might get a school system that teaches them life fine.. but you may not, and if you don't have the time to find out, or the money to change things drastically - you are essentially gambling with an innocent's life.
Again I feel this varies quite a bit from location to location and situation to situation. But I don't feel it is right to suggest the choice is putting themselves first - at least not in all circumstances, and I'd guess it's not the main factor in most of these conscious choices.
If your response to child abuse, a lack of affordable childcare, and ok schooling is that the children shouldn't exist, you've lost me.
> you are essentially gambling with an innocent's life.
You lose all bets you don't make. Life is a gamble full-stop so you are always gambling when you bring a life into the world. My main point is that there is a whole lot more room to maneuver for many childless couples from a purely practical point of view before it'd be established that having children were irresponsible for them. People have way too high expectations and a lot of ulterior motives that are the real barriers. One way to look at it is, what would you do to help them if you children already existed? Would you move somewhere cheaper/safer/closer to family? Would you sacrifice your career? Would you lower your standard of living? Would you sacrifice your lifestyle? If the answer to any of those is "no" (be honest now) then you've discovered an important part of your true motivations.
No, the argument is that some children shouldn't exist because some parents cannot afford to be successful parents.
It's odd to see such a pro-gambling position. On any other topic, no one would encourage people to make a risky gamble with someone else's life & happiness as collateral. And by the way, the loss you incur by not making a bet is not even close to the loss you can incur by losing this gamble. Clearly, you've never witnessed fates worse than death. I would never consider a life of misery & abuse preferable to non-existence.
And parental sacrifice is hardly the only factor. We know that children in lower socio-economic groups have significantly worse life outcomes on average. They have lower academic achievement, lower income, higher incarceration and crime rates. Will you pin that all on parenting? Poor parents just don't sacrifice enough? Doesn't matter how much you sacrifice when you can only afford a place in a high crime area and your child runs in with the wrong crowd and begins a generational cycle of incarceration. Doesn't matter how much you love your children when you have to spend most of your time at work away from them to afford basic necessities. Doesn't matter how much you want your child to succeed in school when you have neither the time nor education to even know how to help them. And we haven't even gotten to mental disabilities and neuroses yet. It costs money to manage those issues, more than some parents can possibly afford.
Everyone should have the right to make that choice. Reproductive rights are human rights. But if you believe you lack the basic resources to setup your child for success when the cost of failure literally isn't yours to bear, I could never accept that as an ethical choice. Bad outcomes are always possible regardless of wealth, but your wealth significantly alters risk and the whole equation to the point where one can say "that's a bad/good bet". If you knowingly make a bad bet, that's on you, except now your child has to pay the cost.
- also 'what themacguffinman said' in this portion of this thread!
"lot more room to maneuver for many childless couples from a purely practical point" - I agree, and some may be on a path to success, for many it's you against the world and the world is really good at keeping you down/in debt / out of safer places, etc.
So I have been helping some children, a couple as official fosters for 6 months or so, and another non-official for 10 years or so. We/they have moved to cheaper which is safer in some regards (better schools) - and less safe in others.
In this process I/we have sacrificed career and portions of career (partially 'for the children') - closer to family would not make any of the things better, but that may change around age 16 - to some degrees.
We have lowered our standard of living and sacrificed a previously really fun lifestyle.
My motivations for children has always been to provide a safe environment where they can learn well. This is much easier if you make 250k / year than if you make 50k.
While I know it's possible to sacrifice and ask for help, and certainly there are safe places to raise cheaper, say some towns in Alabama - but it's hard to figure out all about the schools / towns / pollution / etc etc until you are in it.. and moving is expensive.
I was blessed to be raised in a place that had sidewalks and neighborhoods safe enough to walk / bike / bus anywhere anytime. At that time, in that place, it might have been considered abuse to keep a kid inside.
These days we have places where (I believe it's still the case) that you could be arrested for sending your kid to the park (it's not safe).
Being in a safe place is not just about affording childcare. It's about being able to afford good food, go organic as much as you can, avoid BPA, microwaving plastics and more.
It's about safe streets, safe schools, after school safety, and so much more.
Like I said my original comment - in some places for some people this is no problem, yet in many places in the US 'all the things' are less safe these days, and in many cases quite dangerous/toxic truthfully.
I've heard of some interesting safety nets for challenged children in California, and I've witnessed those heartfelt 'the village / church helped X do Y' - but we don't have the same state-paid-for child help here where I am, you even get kicked off food stamps when you get a raise to 11.30 per hour here.
If I had a new kid today I don't know what I would do. Probably look at going to portugal or something like that (much research would be needed to really pick a place). The days of assuming that staying in the US provides top notch safety and education are long gone imho.
15 - 20 years ago I was still cautious about having kids, not knowing where I could afford a safe growing-up environment. 10 years ago I still believed that the basics like safe water and good educators were guaranteed across the US.
Today I know more, and more of the things I worried about back then are less safe today, and the costs associated with escaping those things are higher than ever.
So I still feel that "I don't feel it is right to suggest the choice is putting themselves first - at least not in all circumstances, and I'd guess it's not the main factor in most of these conscious choices." is true.
Surely there is somewhere in the US where these concerns are not so paramount, and for those that have other circumstances with family/church/etc, different for sure.
I'm in a fairly modern, popular, growing city / burbs, and the basics here are not as safe as they should be - and I don't see much of that changing anytime soon - unless you can afford to get to brentwood/franklin, I think you'd be better off moving much further away for child safety.
Sure you could keep them inside 24/7 - homeschool if you have a partner and things like that, rice and beans etc, if you had to, I get it's possible, and so kids should exist.
I still feel it's easier to make that choice when you either make lots of money or have found a small safe community with options - of which I don't think there really are that many for most people here anymore.
We have a good relationship and they re good parents but I cut all attempts at having them take more space in my life than the minimum. It's so common in France we call that killing your dad (I googled and it seems to be a Freudian expression we started using to say growing up) and is part of growing up.
I have a kid now, and I want her to get the fuck out at 19, and start a life of her own with as little need for my involvment.
The funny thing is I moved to Hong Kong eventually and couldnt convince my french gf of 7 years to follow me because she couldnt tolerate being so far from her parents. I then met my current chinese wife, born here, who is in a very fusional relationship with her mom, who talks to her for hours everyday, so much she needs to kill her phone at night to stop it. And they live an hour apart...
It s clear to me there's something in Asia that's different because they all seem just as fusional (I find it unhealthy), but it may be also a girl thing more generally ? I have a sample of 2 so it's hard to know.
In any case, my daughter will be encouraged to "kill her dad" and be on her own. Even if her mom might disagree :D
That got me crying.
When I moved away from home I kinda thought it would be the same with me. After all, not that much happens during the average working week. I worked, I ate with friends. So why call all the time?
Turns out I think they just missed me. To a degree parents live through their kids. Are you enjoying your work? Have you found a girlfriend? It's like living through that age again.
Technology really helped. The last few years before they died they'd call weekly to check on their grandchildren. Often short calls, but still pretty good. In fact my last contact with my mom was via a video chat.
Or maybe they just...you know...cared.
Where it starts being wrong is when people take "living through my kids" as "controlling and demanding my kids live the way I imagine I would have wanted to live, if I was in their shoes now".
Note: when I say "kids", I mean someone's children who are already adults and have their own life to live. I am not trying to say that kindergarten-aged children should be given full freedom to make their own life decisions and that any attempt to infringe on that is wrong.
You post almost made me cry. My father passed away a few years ago and one of the things I regretted the most was that the last time I talked to him was 'a few months ago'. It took me a long time to come to terms with that and to stop beating myself up for it. People, call your parents.
I ve been abroad 7 years myself and I could not survive with such a need for contact. Did you follow someone ?
I'm going to say something controversial. Not everyone is grateful for their life. I've talked to multiple people who preferred to never be born. And event the best parents I know couldn't offer much more honest reason for having children than "we wanted to" which is basically ultimate selfishness.
> [...] and being decent at being parents as well.
That's way more universally good reason for treating your parents well.
I really don't think that's at all objectionable or selfish to be honest. Couples that don't have children exist and bless them for deciding to go with their gut and not feel compelled by society into having a child. A child being born has absolutely no say in the matter - it's solely a decision of the parents and it should be one driven by whether the parents want and can care for a child.
The question of being grateful for life - that's a pretty complex philosophical subject. At the end of the day life is all you've got as an organism, you will experience pain from time to time but without life you simply would not exist. To those who go through severe trauma and pain, my heart goes out to you and I thankfully can't relate to that utter helplessness - but for most people existence is all we've got and if you run across someone that genuinely prefers they were never born I'd hope you can direct them to some therapists to work through their issues with, that can't be a healthy place to be.
You simply are not.
(and sorry if this is a bit deep or morose)
You can't really blame them. It's a consequence of evolution. Genes that make brains that want to have children tend to reproduce better than genes that make brains that don't.
Further I would argue the antihuman sentiment offer by your argument that giving life is selfish only further contributes to the problem.
> I'm going to say something controversial. Not everyone is grateful for their life. I've talked to multiple people who preferred to never be born. And event the best parents I know couldn't offer much more honest reason for having children than "we wanted to" which is basically ultimate selfishness.
> > [...] and being decent at being parents as well.
> That's way more universally good reason for treating your parents well.
I can verify this. I very much wish I wasn't tasked with being alive. Depending on your metaphysical beliefs, I feel like I'm wasting another soul's place in the world. I don't want to be here, maybe if another soul was in this body then it would put it to better use and be happy and fulfilled and desire this life. I have people who want me to be here and for their sake I continue onwards, always wondering why, and always wishing I didn't have to. I used to make the mistake of thinking I could confide in them these feelings I have, but eventually I realized that I cannot. Rather, I should not. My parents wanted to be parents, and they began preparing for me as soon as they found out I was on my way. They kept me from falling off of tall things or licking wall sockets or drinking cleaning fluid as a baby. No matter how you word it, there's no way to explain that you don't want to exist that doesn't tell a parent "everything you defined yourself by for the last few decades is a farce, the thing that you made doesn't want to exist." I am not grateful my parents made me, but I don't hate them so much as to want to hurt them by telling them that.
This made me tear up. My dad had a stroke a couple of years ago and my mom is taking care of him. I dont call them nearly as often as I should. Thank you for the reminder.
Having gone through the same experience, I have to wonder if the simplest explanation for increased estrangement is that people are waiting longer to have children, and having fewer of them, than ever before.
I know that it's never anything like that, but I have really toned down my vignette of a maternal reaction. You just never know how important you are - you said this yourself I only can't emphasise it enough. Emotional telepresence as once advertising had it, belongs to a boomer utopia, in my opinion.
“I just really enjoy your company.”
For years in my teens I was convinced that they didn’t believe my time was as valuable as theirs. Making me wait in a fucking bank.
I have two boys now and I take them shopping even when mom’s home.
I deeply deeply understand my parents so much better now. I’m so thankful for that because I think it lets me love them on a whole different level now. I now understand countless details of why they did what they did.
I have a mentor who told me that he was confused when got married, that his wife didn't come with him when he went to the store, to the bank, or on whatever random errand he was going on. Why? Because his parents (both incredibly highly educated and busy doctors) did everything together. If one was going to the store, the other came along, because they just enjoyed each other's company. I thought it was a beautiful depiction of what a familial relationship could, and perhaps should be like.
The Cat's In The Cradle Harry Chapin 1974
Having your own kid puts into perspective all the failings you thought your parents had.
So when people were having kids at 20 (or earlier), yeah, you don't have two decades of delayed adulthood/extended teenagedom to complain about your parents.
Parents spend their whole lives waiting for their kids to thank you. Kids spend their whole lives waiting for their parent to say "I'm sorry."
That said I've never felt that way about my Mom and Dad. I've faults and problems a plenty but I wouldn't ascribe any of that on them; indeed the best things about me seem to clearly come from them and the worst are just as clearly things they suggested I not do. What are you going to do though, even if all that wasn't true they'd still love me and I'd still love them.
The problem is, not everyone is lucky enough to receive that kind of childhood care, even though it seems like it should be universal. Lots of people are massively fucked up and still have kids anyway, either accidentally or otherwise. And then their kids are put at a massive disadvantage in life and in human relationships.
It's usually difficult for people with decent upbringings to even conceptualize why a child might willingly remain estranged from their family. But there are a lot of people out there with really good reasons to do that.
This is an interesting one, and in direct contradiction to the adage: "Hard times create strong men, strong men create good times, good times create weak men, and weak men create hard times.”
My life experience agrees, tough times mostly produce emotionally damaged people
I don't think dictators are a good example, you only see the PR spin, it's not like you get a chance to meet Putin in person to realise he is actually clueless about whats happening in his own government.
Yes, dealing with adversity can teach us things and make us stronger. But there are limits, and adversity can also do permanent mental and emotional damage. The latter outcome is way more common than some people would like to believe.
People saying it are trying to impart hope on the people that they are saying it to. If you believe that everything happens for a reason, this will be a comforting reminder even though you're going through something awful. It's intended to remind people of the countless stories of individuals and groups of people who have suffered only to find out later that such suffering prepared them to make a difference later in life.
For some, this could mean that a tragedy in your life will leave you prepared to help others who are going through something similar later in life.
It's not intended as a dismissal of your pain. It's only to say that one day, the lessons you learn from this pain may help you to help others or yourself.
Simple examples:
- You lose a loved one to a horrible disease but then organize people to fund research to cure the disease, grow up to become a doctor or help support people coping with it
- You get dumped in a relationship and you're devastated, but on reflection you realize things about yourself that you need to work on, make real changes in yourself and later meet the love of your life
It's not meant to be dismissive.
On the flip side, for people who throw this phrase around you need to know that it gives the impression that God is controlling everything like some type of puppet master without any free will or random occurrences in the world.
The Bible doesn't reflect that perspective at all. It's worth the read to understand it better.
History attests to the terrible condition of the world, and the Bible is very clear about that from the earliest parts of Genesis. There is so much pain, as a constant through the vastness of history and before. Saying everything happens for a reason doesn't necessarily deny that. When applied properly, it acknowledges the cruelty and struggle to find meaning, but that the reality is as it stands. Someone who does not believe may very well reject the notion of meaning, and see only the path of improving the situation as the answer. In the end, both types have among them people of goodwill, and we must be charitable to each other.
A sibling comment to yours mentions Candide, which takes "we live in the best of all possible worlds" very cynically. Voltaire disagreed with Leibniz's premises. But of course "best of all possible worlds" has lots of room for argument as to "best" means, and it certainly does not mean the best of all of _your_ possible worlds. As the joke goes, both the optimist and pessimist believe ours is the best possible.
If you think about it, the bible and other books/religions were created in really hard and tough times and the belief that somehow in some way "it was meant to be and there's a reason behind this terrible thing happening" was helping them through it. This is all in times in which less was known about how the world around us works (and even nowadays we don't really know but our models are much much better - just think of how medicine knows about bacteria causing illnesses and such vs. the whole Yellow Bile, Black Bile, Phlegm and Blood thing - Hippocrates ~460BC-~370BC).
A merchant in the 1300s coming home to find all of his family had died from the plague might find solace in thinking that all of this happened for a reason if he is a very devout believer in such things. I can't personally fathom how you'd find someone today that would see meaning in having a family member getting infected with Yersinia Pestis, nevermind die from it, but that's just me.
So as you can see, personally I absolutely don't believe in the whole reason and other religious stuff but I can see and appreciate how religion can help stabilize society and keep the population under control in tough times, how it can be a moral compass etc. I don't personally need the rest of it all to know that I shouldn't just go about killing other people. And if something bad happens in the world then - from my relatively safe western vantage point - I can just see that the world is still an ugly place and that there are bad people that just do bad things or that are living in bad enough situations that make them do those things (hey, until we're in those situations ourselves, we don't really know what we'd actually do, best intentions not to or not!) and all I can do is to try as best as I can to avoid those people amd situations altogether. There's not much more to it and I don't need to imagine a devil or some other stuff to explain this somehow.
There’s a couple of verses that people have strained to apply that meaning to it, but reading the entire Bible to put things in context you don’t see “everything” happening for a reason. You see some things.
It’s one of the reasons that I try to make this point a lot. I don’t know how many people realize how much that phrase leads non-believers to demonize God by attaching every awful thing that happens to a reason, which then makes those things His doing.
It’s simply not reflected in the text.
I'm intrigued by the "non-believers to demonize God" though. As a thought experiment, replace God by any deity of any religion, such that you would also be a non-believer (I assume you are a believer in the Christian god), which should help with the objective distance.
How about human sacrifices, say Vikings or Aztecs. What are your thoughts on human sacrifice? Would you go as far as to demonize the Aztec god(s) that required a human sacrifice?
Christianity in particular is significantly different in that their god is canonically benevolent while also being omnipotent. It's a pretty fundamental aspect of Christianity, I don't think I've heard any Christian that believes their god is actually kind of a dick. I would imagine that even though "why do bad things happen?" is a classic foundational challenge to Christianity, it's probably irrelevant to Vikings. Christianity isn't really comparable to old school faiths like Vikings/Aztecs.
I don't necessarily think that it matters much for the question though. I'm not sure I can find a different benevolent omnipotent (or close enough) deity to make a straight comparison to that doesn't have a current (large) following that would drag the discussion into geopolitical/georeligious territory. If you do know one I'm all up for a substitution.
I don't know with the parent I was replying to, he seems reasonable, but usually religious discussions "never end well" because of the belief involved. Bringing the discussion to a different non-current religion levels the playing field to both sides discussing something they don't believe in. The "fun part" is where the believer in a current deity knows that "obviously Odin doesn't actually exist, there are no Norse gods". Well that's how I feel about their deity, sorry. But I don't mind that they believe in it as long as they leave me be and don't try to convert me or negatively affect me because of their beliefs.
Some people interpret it to affirm the existence of other gods. In reading, there’s never a point where another god directly intervenes in the lives of men. There are plenty of occurrences of men creating idols to worship of other gods or falling to temptations offered by the gods of other cultures. Asherah poles are the most often called out.
All that is to say, we don’t have any historical context of other gods directly intervening in people’s lives.
What we do know is that if we were to claim to know when God will intervene we would be wrong. We can’t possibly. I have seen in my own life and heard testimony from others which gives me a little bit of a pattern to draw from and gain better understanding to help make some sense of it…but I’m still just guessing.
What we do see in the Bible is that even the biblical heroes are all very flawed and fall in and out of favor with God. Noah, Moses, David, Solomon, etc. The only one who doesn’t is Jesus, but even Jesus became frustrated at times. There’s a story where Jesus curses a fig tree because he’s hungry and there’s no fruit on it. I always thought it was funny because it shows more of his human side…he got hangry.
I appreciate the civil discussion nevertheless and there's the second interesting point.
You never actually say it directly but between the lines I read that you think to have at least an inkling of a pattern that confirms the direct interference of the Christian god in this world. I don't know why that would be relevant to be honest.
In any case, I would bet that the same could be said of people in ancient times for their gods (or even right now people that have different religions might for their god(s)). They probably thought to see patterns as well and attributed them to the gods. Without thinking about any specific religion: if they made a specific sacrifice every year at a specific time to gain favourable weather for example, they probably had a pretty good chance of success by pure luck and pattern observation and any unlucky weather anomalies could easily be attributed to mistakes with making the sacrifice (maybe it was the wrong goat or whatever) for example.
If God is not actively controlling everything, then you have to either admit that He can't control everything (but that clashes with the all-knowing, all-powerful aspect that the church really wants to preserve), or that He can intervene but chooses not to, in which case He is responsible for every awful thing that He lets happen, and you either need to assert that "it's all for a good reason in the end" and letting these awful things happen is not a bad thing, or give up the presumption of benevolence.
So the tricky thing is that you have to give up something of these assumptions; you can keep any of them, but if you want to keep all of them, then there's a contradiction - and the discussion becomes very different depending on which assumption you give up; if you keep omnipotence, then you have to "demonize God"; if you keep both omnipotence and benevolence, then you have to ignore any awful thing in our reality that does not have a plausible good reason justifying the awfulness; if you want to keep benevolence and a common-sense look on our reality, then you get (perhaps, I hope I'm not misinterpreting you) something like your approach - which, IMHO, is quite reasonable, but essentially surrenders omnipotence and thus strongly goes against dogma of many churches that do assert a God that actively intervenes all the time.
However, I think the type of “bad times” conducive to building strength is fairly particular; it only creates strong people if the problems being faced are external and require cooperation to solve, and the people facing adversity are capable of overcoming their own problems when adversity forces them to face them.
If interpersonal problems are the main source of adversity, and there is nothing external to force cooperation, that’s often demoralizing and more conducive to antagonistic forms of competition rather than camaraderie and self improvement.
A community full of emotionally damaged, unhappy people is also generally full of tough, no-nonsense people who know the dangers from personal experience, know how to avoid or eliminate them, do what needs to be done, no matter the cost and then afterwards perhaps drink themselves to death while abusing their family, but many of them also ensuring that their kids have a much better life than they did - slowly creating the good times.
And a few generations later a community of happy, emotionally well-adjusted people haven't had horror in their childhood, and they don't know how to handle real adversity and recognize abusive evil because they don't have the skill and experience for that, and spend their struggle/effort over meaningless trifles and status games; are emotionally principled and don't let ends justify the means - so when eventually push comes to shove (often due to some external circumstance or an interaction with another, exploitative community) they are unwilling or unable to take decisive action and sacrifices (including moral sacrifices) to prevent someone much more violent and unprincipled from taking over and causing hard times for you (and perhaps better times for themselves at your expense).
It's essentially about a cyclic change in the tradeoff between the qualities required to be happy, satisfied and cooperative versus the (very different and often incompatible) qualities required to be effective in the face of brutal adversity. Warrior mindset is harmful in peacetime, and pacifist mindset is ineffective in wartime. And perhaps it makes sense to raise "weak" men - friendly, open-minded, forgiving, sharing, optimistic and perhaps just naively expecting the best in others - whenever we can afford to, because it's just better and more sane, and we raise disproportionally strong, brutal, ruthless, efficient (and also damaged and abusive) men and women when we're forced to by circumstances that would just grind down people like those described in the previous sentence; damaging them until they either become "strong" or just break down.
Perhaps a bit related is the issue of parenting styles. Maximizing potential of kids is often quite abusive and results in unhappy and perhaps "damaged" kids; when looking at biographies of e.g. olympic champions it often (but not always - there certainly are exceptions) seems clear that they would have been much more emotionally healthy without as much early age pressure; but they also wouldn't be champions then, they would be outcompeted by someone just as lucky in the genetic lottery but willing (or, more likely, pressured) to sacrifice more and live a less balanced life.
It is not obvious that being more cruel improves your chances of survival, it might, but maybe it's an abberation.
It was never the strongest guy that was in charge if the tribe of cavemen - becauae the two weaker guys could always gang up on him and kill him. There was always a degree of cooperation and politics involved. Of building a group and austracising your enemies
What I have in mind regarding this saying is what I see (both in relatives, acquaitances, life stories of those who passed away, and general culture) in the generation that were kids during WW2 who had the frontlines pass over them and the disruptions to their families caused by mass conscriptions and ubiquitous violence towards civilians as well. They are very different from their kids and grandkids. It's overwhelmingly a generation of hard, strong people - also clearly a generation of people who afterwards built better times through their attitude towards hardship, in ways that the following generations simply won't tolerate. And at the same time, overwhelmingly a generation of severely emotionally damaged people in many ways.
"Hard times create weak men, weak men create hard times"
I've never believed that adversity creates strength, at least that has not been my experience in life.
Except this is true in the most literal sense.
According to Sapolsky's lecture on depression [1], a stressful childhood experience is 30x more likely to cause depression in individuals with a particular serotonin-related gene variant.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NOAgplgTxfc @ 47:00
No. [1] The context of the whole conversation is traumatic relationships. If anything you are talking about eustress - and traumatic relationships are not beneficial and do not "make you stronger" [2].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hormesis
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eustress#Compared_with_distres...
Saying that adversity filters out weakness - no, adversity pushes people too hard before they're ready to handle it, then they fail. Sometimes they try again, sometimes the damage is too great and they give up. That's not a moral failing though. It just means they were pushed too hard.
That's one of the reasons we need safety nets, to dull the hardship to the point where we can grow through it and not be crushed under it.
The "good times create weak men" I have less of a story for, but it's perhaps something like this:
If you throw a million 8 year olds into the ocean while wearing life-preservers, you will end up depriving some of them the chance to learn to swim, and wrongly teach many of them that there's nothing dangerous about the ocean.
While I believe that, in an individual scale, harsh times can help develop toughness and resilience, most times it seems to lead to resentment, anger and frustration.
[0] https://acoup.blog/2020/01/17/collections-the-fremen-mirage-...
"Strong" in this context means ability to survive, not the ability to thrive. A society of "strong" men and women often results in "good times" of material progress, which masks the negatives in society. Unmasking all the ugliness cause society to lose cohesion, resulting in breakdown via internal or external factors and hence resulting in "hard times".
When things really go to shit, you'll find your purpose and have to rely on others. That creates strength and good times, eventually.
These are not the good times. We have plenty to eat and too much technology but these are not what make the good times.
Inequality sure, but the economy has been on a tear in the US since the 90’s, contrast that with the decade of the Great Depression.
And the riots now are nothing compared to the 60’s riots worldwide.
The last 20-30 years have definitely been easy times for the developed world. Not without challenges (2008 crash) but relatively speaking easy times.
In all times, the great philosophers, engineers, generals, scientists, etc. Were never made up of peoppe that suffered greaters hardship, that starved in the childhood. They were always elites, people with best education or at least middle class.
We've run this experiment, there is zero evidence for it.
Germany or Russia had much harder times around then and that produced some of the most horrific leaders the world has ever seen. Hitler and Stalin weren't the result of easy times.
Eventually, the flames of the furnace of life reaches all of us; some younger than others; some more acutely than others. In skillful hands, it can temper us to become purer, higher quality versions of ourselves. In unskilled hands, it can damage us. All of us acquire wounds, it is a part of being human, being unskilled, and being alive.
Strength is just another word for empathy, love, and kindness. Everyone is capable of that, regardless of their pain. That's what makes humanity beautiful.
The ones with healthy coping mechanisms come out stronger - they have tools to cope with future challenges.
The ones with unhealthy coping mechanisms can come out worse than before.
And the folks that never face those hard times don’t escape the potential trap - they just delay it because hard times come for everyone eventually.
Taleb's whole point was that this is an illusion caused by selection bias. Hard times don't create strong men. Hard times kill everyone who is weak. Hard times make everybody weaker, but they cause those who are weak to begin with to drop out of sample pool, leaving only those who were strong to begin with.
This sums up how I feel about this topic. I read all these accounts of how people's perceptions of parent-child relationships change after they have kids, or how there's still mutual love between them and their parents despite so-and-so, and I understand.
I am well into adulthood with a stable marriage and career; I've been to therapy, and done all things reasonable to heal from whatever it is I came from. By all accounts I've been pretty successful on that front.
But goddammit, when I think about my parents, I move between seething resentment and gratitude that I decided to cut contact. And this is an improvement.
As you say, people with good enough upbringings can't conceptualize why a child might remain estranged from their family; I'd wager they impose perceptions of their own (good enough) parents when making that judgment.
This used to be nigh unto a human universal: your parents raise you up from a helpless infant to adulthood, and this obliges you to love and care for them for the rest of their lives.
I'm as deracinated Westerner as it comes, and yet I'm fairly traditional in this regard. I can think of three acceptable reasons to estrange from parents: sexual abuse, severe physical abuse, and the parents disowning the child. Even the second one leaves a lot of room for reconciliation, since they can't hurt you anymore.
I mean, easy for me to say, my parents easily earned a B+ and I was able to work out my teen angst with my father by my mid twenties. Still: casually abandoning "honor thy father and thy mother" doesn't seem to be working out very well for us.
No sexual abuse or physical abuse in this story, but its pretty clear that he's healthier for leaving his parents.
IIRC, he's an only child as well. I'm not sure if he'll be willing to take care of his parents as they get older.
I spent years of my adulthood trying to find a way to reconcile with them and the conclusion I came to was it's not your burden to suffer for your parents' sins. They will change or won't change of their own volition. But you deserve to survive and thrive in kindness.
So much of ourselves is steeped in the company we keep. Choose the company that fosters the better, kinder, wiser you.
One challenge with abuse on all these fronts is that there is a huge amount of grey area in all of them, and judgement that would need to be drawn on what is and is not abuse. Sometimes/often it is REALLY clear cut (yeah, someone doing munchausen by proxy on their kids, or beating them, or whatever is clearly abuse).
Other times, you'll find a lot of controversy. There was a lot of discussion recently about parents getting cut off from their kids because of rabid Trump support. Is that abuse? From whom? There have also been stories of parents cutting off their kids because of their strongly anti-Trump views during the election. Is that abuse? From whom?
Mental abuse can be incredibly subtle, and a key component of many abusers is their ability to convince others around them that they totally aren't abusing anyone and it's that OTHER PERSONS fault.
Made even worse by the fact that sometimes the person being painted as the abuser IS NOT the abuser, and it really IS the other persons fault!
Sexual abuse and physical abuse can at least be generally judged somewhat accurately from a third party witness/video perspective.
"Clean up your crap" = "You can't make me, that's abuse, my dads a lawyer."
Is asking someone whose had maid service / cleaners to clean up their crap in a group situation abuse?
The other stuff is feeling "uncomfortable" or "unsafe" in situations where you are asked to take the most basic responsibilities (ie, turn in an educational assignment").
Kids will get a school counselor to excuse them from the work because it makes them feel "uncomfortable and stressed".
Asking someone to help clean is clearly not a misuse of power (e.g. abuse), but to an ill informed/molded individual, any request that they do something they don’t want to do (homework, chores, work, etc.) can ‘feel’ like abuse to them (subjectively), even though objectively it is not.
Most of our society is shifting to focusing on subjective well being over objective well being, so we get these confusing situations. (at least this framework helps me parse these issues).
Reality is underneath most kids are good. Get them out of the environment and if you can get peer pressure going the right way, they'll drop right into it. Seriously, their parents wouldn't recognize them (cooking, cleaning, being very physically active etc).
But early days can be a shock to the system. If you've been jetting to paris to shop on weekends, and then are being asked to eat a meal cooked by other kids (no meal choice at all - just one big something) and/or need to cook it, it can really feel like something way out of comfort zone.
None of my kids had this happen, but overseas the tolerance for foreigner bad behavior can be low in some cases if there is a perception of disrespect. Some of the rich kids in another group stole some liquor "as a joke". Hahaha. They were jailed and the locals squeezed cash out of parents before parents had to charter a flight to get them out (program required parents to pay repatriation expenses in these cases).
Only real downer culturally at times was treatment of women - the US kids are used to bikinis and the girls are used to agency / freedom as it should be. Locally dress / behavior etc can send a message that generates a metric ton of harassment - and it can be no holds barred even under age. Only thing I really disliked I think and female counselors doubly so - locals would sometimes not respect even the female counselor push back but need the guy to intervene. For trips that were in part about independence building a bummer. My sense over some time though was that this was changing though so by now I suspect probably much much better.
We did have all the paperwork in place of course. But what really works is actually peer pressure. I mean -> it's insane how powerful that is. Kids that age will do almost anything if it's the thing to do based on peer behavior. So you want to get the dynamic going and you are home free if you can.
In ancient Rome as far as the legal system was concerned, your children were your property. You could literally sell them into slavery, no questions asked[1]:
> The pater familias had the power to sell his children into slavery; Roman law provided, however, that if a child had been sold as a slave three times, he was no longer subject to patria potestas.
Also, your children's property was your property:
> Legally, any property acquired by individual family members (sons, daughters or slaves) was acquired for the family estate: the pater familias held sole rights to its disposal and sole responsibility for the consequences, including personal forfeiture of rights and property through debt.
Isn't that still the case today until the child is past the age of majority?
I'd talk more about the subject, but that's all I'm willing to say in my current state of (mostly) ignorance. The idea of one adult (Britney's Father) literally owning another adult's assets (Britney Spears's stuff) is still around, especially when combined with mental health + court cases of the modern life.
If you are absolutely unable to care for yourself and are in desperate need of help but there is no money to be made, you will probably find yourself living on the street in a major metropolitan area.
Meaning: for a number of children with an absentee parent, they were the reason for one of their parents to abandon the other.
I'm saying this as a child of single parent.
Alternate take on that human universal: your parents had unprotected sex and fulfilled their obligation to raise the offspring produced to adulthood, this obliges you to nothing.
I'm not saying this means everyone should estrange their parents, but the idea that a child has any obligation to their parents for raising them seems misguided at best and damaging at worst, imo. Any attachment between children and parents should be due to mutual feelings of love and respect, like any other relationship - if those are absent on one side, why should the other suffer a relationship with people who they would otherwise remove from their friend group?
(Note that I have a good relationship with my parents, so this isn't coming from a place of personal pain, but rather a dislike for the idea that two humans procreating and fulfilling their obligation to the offspring that comes of it should impose any obligation whatsoever upon that offspring.)
EDIT: I should clarify that I do believe that parents who went above and beyond that obligation to show their children love and respect and receive nothing in return have a right to be upset - however, what about situations where a parent thought they were doing the right thing (based on how they were raised, religious briefs, parenting advice from a friend or magazine, etc.) but the thing they were doing was actually harmful? There's a lot of nuance in this, but I think that a blanket "honor thy father and thy mother [out of obligation]" is a bad idea.
The person you're responding to is referring to how societies worked since time immemorial, prior to the advent of such strong individualism.
One difference now is freely available contraception and a much lower birthrate, combined with more economic stability. (At least for the boomer gen.)
When parents have two children and both are estranged, it's a tragedy. When parents had ten children, five of them made it to adulthood, and two decided to leave, it was acceptable attrition.
The other difference is the absence of extended family and friends who can step in with childcare help. So parents + kids going through adolescence under the same roof becomes a pressure cooker. No one gets much of a break for 4-8 years.
Turns out that’s a bad way to structure a society and being hyper individualistic just ends up in your society collapsing.
The Black Death was pretty horrible and yet European society still exists.
Really though I can’t imagine what you think this pedantic obsession with whether or not everyone gets blown up immediately is adding to the conversation.
We'd be 10 thousand not 10 billion and life would suck but we would survive. And the fallout would clear within a few decades or centuries.
10 000 people is not nearly enough for a modern division of labour - we'd be reverted back to prehistoric technology levels within a generation, with a bonus of fallout and absolute climate dysfunction. Given a sufficiently destructive nuclear exchange literally every single human could die.
The Black Plague is not even a cold compared to what we can engineer.
"Societal cohesion" doesn't do too much to help us survive crop failures and wet bulb temperatures over 35C.
Aside from that, I think you might misunderstand your causal arrows a bit. It is fair more likely that massive industrialization and late state capitalism led to a society that valued the individual over the social unit, rather than that a sudden desire to be individuals sprung up in people's hearts and made a mess of the world.
All that where created by an individualistic approach. Party now and let future generations deal with the dirt.
How so? TFA attributes this modern alienation to changes in the American family structure that took place in the last half of the 20th century. All three of the threats the person you’re responding to listed, nuclear war, (modern) biological warfare, and climate change, were developed or essentially locked in in our society prior to the last half of the 20th century – largely by people born before or right around the end of the 19th century, who were presumably much more attuned to this “dutiful family obligation” mindset, since those are the very people TFA is contrasting these post-1950 changes against.
The plain history of these developments would seem to argue that post-1950 societal changes had nothing whatsoever to do with these threats, unless you’re arguing that the effect preceded the cause.
Let me guess: you are not a parent
It is a bizarre to suppose that love is owed instead of earned or earned once instead of the result of ongoing effort. If you stop feeding your cat or watering your plant it dies same with your relationship.
I would venture to guess that the majority of estranged parents don't know this or in denial about having let the relationship die.
The article says that the majority of parental estrangement is due to divorce especially the non custodial father then successfully segues to some nonsense about identity politics.
I don't see it as a realignment of values so much as a more boring story about parents breaking up and becoming estranged spiced up with a minority becoming estranged because the values they hold are correctly deemed odious and hateful.
If you hate gay people and your kid is either gay or feels strongly about the issue they aren't going to want to be around you.
If you talk about shooting dirty liberals and your kid is a dirty liberal likewise.
If your own kid hates you the first thing you should do is ask yourself why and if you blame it on a lack of family values you are almost certainly the problem.
We both have good relationships with our kids I think you misunderstand why others don't.
Not everybody wants to share details, but I've heard enough stories from friends that I'm shocked what people are willing to forgive from their parents. I shared one story in another comment -- that person has a close relationship with their parents despite it not being a very positive one. Another friend of mine, who is queer, grew up with a father who would frequently say things like all gay people should be executed, they should be locked away from decent people, doctors should have let AIDs finish the job, etc. This person did cut off contact with their parents a couple of times but eventually heard sincere apologies and regret from their father and reconciled. That was almost twenty years ago, and now they speak lovingly of their parents and are helping care for them as their health declines.
Really it comes down to two questions: forgiveness and continuing harm. In my observation, adult children are not stingy with forgiveness for their parents. Not everybody can forgive everything, and it can take a while (I wouldn't bother asking until the kids are at least 25, maybe 30) but people forgive their parents for things they would never forgive anybody else for. They also tolerate a lot of continuing harm for the sake of maintaining the relationship. They draw a sharp line when it starts to affect their own children, directly or indirectly, and I think it's good for everyone that they do so.
I suspect this is because after becoming a parent, most people instinctively recognize the contract between generations: if you want your own kids to maintain a relationship with you in your old age, regardless of the inevitable mistakes you will make as a parent, you probably ought to give them a good example to follow.
People who abuse or neglect their children are often doing so because of their own mental illness or emotional instability and those issues are unlikely to resolve without outside help.
I'm in exactly the same boat. I'm the most hyperindividualist, detached-from-culture, atomized person I know, but my concept of filial (and familial) duty practically makes me an Old Country traditionalist compared to many of my friends.
> I can think of three acceptable reasons to estrange from parents: sexual abuse, severe physical abuse, and the parents disowning the child
I don't think my view is as concrete as this, as I don't want to confidently dismiss someone who claims that estrangement is necessary for their mental health. But I'm a little disturbed by the degree to which the current culture diminishes or occasionally entirely dismisses the existence of any familial obligation at all.
On the one hand I agree children and young adults can be overly entitled or have too high expectations for their human parents on the other I think that framing raising children as a sacrifice is wrong. It is kind of the core point of biological life. In past times children were seen as a blessing now some times in the west they are seen as a burden. This inversion is part of the larger narcissism epidemic distorting modern society IMHO.
Now I know parenting is hard if you do it as religious duty to your god, family, country etc. But if you choose to become parent, like when you choose to pick up a new project or hobby, it is pure joy, even the hard parts. Yes you will be tired running marathon, but you will not say that you made a sacrifice. And unless you are trying to monetize you hobbies, you don't expect anything back.
Childhood as it is seen today is a very recent creation.
It wasn't much later when I had my own child, they finally broke me. Not only they set high expectations for how I will help them have relationship with their grandchild, and criticizing our parenting, but also started criticizing 2 year old. For their part as grandparents, they did bare minimum, that is attend a birthday, ask for pictures because relatives are asking for photos. Never made an effort to come visit us. That is when they broke something in my brain.
Now I resent them more than ever, I wish I had never let them criticize me as an adult. I lost faith in God since they are so religious. I am trying to be complete opposite of them. I have mostly stopped feeling joy. I live mostly to fulfill my duty as a father. I really want to pack everything and move to the other side of the world but wife doesn't agree with that.
And as a father, I realize that there is no sacrifice in parenting. You choose to be a father. That was your choice. My kids are the only things that bring me joy right now. Yes sometimes they push my limits and I am tired, but it was my choice to have them. Thinking that my kids are making me sacrifice will probably make me resentful towards them. When I am playing video games while tired because I am so close to finishing a level, I don't say I made a sacrifice.
EDIT: I want to add that I have lost joy in everything related to my parents like my culture, songs that I grew up with, religious festivals, food, stories, career, etc. I hate it.
My parents modeled and explicitly taught me a judgmental mindset. It became my worst fault. Can you feel the judgement in this comment? Thanks, Dad & Mom.
I started improving after I took a free 10-day meditation course (the Goenka one), four years ago. At the course, I gained the ability to notice changes in my emotions and mental state. Suddenly, I could see when my mind switches to a judgmental attitude. I began intentionally trying to prevent the switch. I also intentionally restrain myself if I do switch into that mode. Changing mental habits is difficult and worthwhile. I have improved a lot in this area in 4 years.
Two years ago, I realized that my parents taught me to be a judgmental jerk. Since that time, I have considerably reduced the bad mental habit. People close to me confirm this. Therefore, my experience contradicts your statement.
Fixing those (forming judgements when they serve no purpose; feeling excessive ill emotions over judgements) is about half of the self-improvement part of stoicism, as in "think the right way, and act the right way". It's most of the "think the right way" half.
It's cool, but sometimes you wanna cry for that child. As an adult, I've heard the mistake is looking at what happened to you through a childs eyes. Ya can't really ever let it go.
I see myself talking to my daughter with the same autoritative tone my dad used on me that I found so "unfair omg". And see her progress from monkey to little girl as a result :D
Parenthood succeed when your kids complain about your failures, as Francoise Dolto (perhaps not a role model herself) liked to write.
"Adult children frequently say the parent is gaslighting them by not acknowledging the harm they caused or are still causing, failing to respect their boundaries, and/or being unwilling to accept the adult child’s requirements for a healthy relationship".
No one is perfect. I still have a great relationship with my own parents despite their failings but not all my siblings do, and as I've told each of my parents, it's on them to work to make that relationship better. Some things my siblings may never forgive or forget and you can do with that what you will, but if you want this person in your life you have to work to make it happen.
In that case, they're the ones that have to work on it.
It matters a lot! First of all, it matters legally. An entirely different set of laws and procedures will be invoked depending on which it was. But, second, it matters because it tells me something about what to expect from you in the future. It tells me something about how you feel towards me. It tells me something about your character, about your capacity for violence.
> You still caused me damage and it's still not crazy for me to hold you accountable.
Obviously it matters in other ways.
I've also saw more than one person disown their parents after being sucked in to the anticircumcision movement - men who had until that moment seemingly normal lives but were then convinced their sex lives would never reach their potential because of a decision their parents had made.
> I've also saw more than one person disown their parents after being sucked in to the anticircumcision movement - men who had until that moment seemingly normal lives but were then convinced their sex lives would never reach their potential because of a decision their parents had made....
That's a really good point. Before the internet, and especially social media, people had weird and arguable toxic ideas, but it was almost always impossible to form a geographically-based community around them, so they'd almost always peter out and their effect was limited. The internet broke geographical limits, allowing intense purely ideological communities to form around almost every idea and validate them, no matter how wrong and misguided. In our very online times that can have serious social consequences, sometimes for good but often for ill.
You are not doing your sons any favors if you circumcise them when it's not necessary.
It remains genital mutilation though.
If someone tells you that everybody around them is always lying they are usually the liar. The same way some people who can't seem to work anywhere without having constant drama are the source of the conflict.
It's fine to disagree with decisions someone (shouldn't have) made on your behalf, but learning to judge people by intent, not result, is part of adulthood.
Punishing someone who loves you for doing the best they knew to do is one of the most cruel things I can imagine.
In other words, disliking someone for something they did to you does not automatically mean they deserve punishment and you should hurt them return. Especially since causing harm to a loved one also already hurts oneself.
They have choice of being estraged and happier, under less stress and less pressure. Or keep contact and have to deal with manipulation, stress and so on.
Finally, adulthood also means that you know that not just intent matter. The people are affected by consequences of your actions regardless if intent. Too many people write about this as if once you have good goal, you dont have to learn more or think what you are doing. As long as you dont care to check whether you might cause harm, you dont get any responsibility dor what you do.
Did it take a lot of sucking into considering that they've been subjected to genital mutilation?
Anyway, it was an example I saw, I had intended to remain neutral on the subject.
How about undergoing a non-essential and medically unnecessary surgery without your consent? Doesn't that bother you at least a little bit?
I was baptised as an infant and most of the people I know were as well, but I recognize it for what it is - roping me into a membership in an organisation which requires me to jump through many hoops to leave, because it needs the numbers (at least on paper) to maintain power.
Fortunately this is reversible, but circumcision isn't.
Nope. My parents were 20 and 21. Family, their Priest and Doctor all pushed them to do it. I have no recollection of any of this. My dick looks like most of the dicks I've seen in the change room and in porn. Why would this bother me? It's so abstract as to be ludicrous.
All sorts of things were done without my consent that have had a much larger impact in my happiness and well being: being raised Catholic for instance, something you brush off as "reversible".
You can't really know how bad it was if you were too young to remember and can never have any bearings. The only way we can really know is from empirical analysis or people that went through it at an older age.
I'm one of those people that people just feel comfortable opening up to.
In college, one friend told me his dad was asking him if he resented his father's decision to circumcise him. His father had to get a medical circumcision due to recurring infection due to difficult sanitary conditions in mandatory military service in his country of origin (where circumcision is uncommon). The father's experience was terrible, decided his son should never go through that, and circumcised his son. Years later, he was second-guessing the decision. My friend wasn't sure how to respond to his father, since it was clearly weighing heavily on his father, but it was totally a non-issue for the circumcised son.
Another friend told me that he was circumcised at 12 due to recurring infections (in a first-world G10 country), and is a big advocate for infant male circumcision.
Anyway, there are statistically significant benefits from male circumcision, though they are often over stated. On the other hand, the downsides to circumcision are also minor for most men. For the average male in a G10 nation, circumcision seems to be low-risk low-reward procedure, though with large fat-tail distribution on both the risks and rewards.
The apple never falls far from the tree.
This is one of those things that is specific to the Jewish religion, in which it serves as an irreversible symbol of membership and has done for about three thousand years ... and also a subset of Americans, who do it for reasons which they suddenly find difficult to explain to their adult children.
If it's important for adult life, but not actually urgent, leave it until the child is old enough to be asked for their meaningful consent.
I think you're underestimating just how many American men are circumcised. The WHO puts it at between 76 and 92%.
I've been tempted to write a blog post "Toxic Considered Harmful"
One of the biggest problems with the toxic label is there isn't anything that can be said in response. Its an attempt to get sympathy and/or end the discussion.
"That's toxic" and well... there's not many places that a conversation can go from there. It is often incredibly difficult to refute someone making a claim that something is toxic - especially when much of the diagnosis of the situation is based on a one sided and often idealized view.
Additionally, applying the label of toxic to a wide range of situations reduces the descriptive nature of the word and the options available within a wider vocabulary selection.
Perhaps a lot of the "toxic things" are subjective based on someones experience, so there is not much to refute.
If someone says the way they were treated by another was toxic, who are you to refute its toxicity? People tend to be able to understand how some thing affects them and if it is good for them.
What would you want to debate against someone who says something makes them feel like shit? There's not a lot to say beyond: "I don't care how you feel", "That sucks you feel that way, what would make you feel better", and "It's unreasonable to ask me to change in ways that make you feel better, so suck it up".
Now imagine one person telling another their behavior is toxic, which means they are telling them that they make them feel like shit. Well the response will dictate what happens to the relationship. If the response is anything but "That sucks you feel that way, what would make you feel better", well the logical move for the person feeling like shit is to find a way to never have to interact with the toxic person again or force them to change their behavior.
What else would you want to discuss?
You can acknowledge that someone's emotions are valid while disagreeing with them on the content. Here's a template: "It sounds like when I said x you felt y, that wasn't my intention, my intention was z."
The most obvious example is a fear of public speaking. Everyone I know who's struggled with it (including myself) has resolved it through the perspective that it's wrong to be afraid and you've gotta figure out tricks to get over your irrational fear. It's hard to see what a more "validating" approach would look like.
With experience and exposure, we learn how to manage risk and what our limits are. Same is true of learning to swim or learning to drive, but it's not true that a fear of swimming or driving is irrational or unwarranted for someone who hasn't done it often or ever. No, it's completely appropriate.
What would this even mean? I don't see the difference with "suck it up"?
The feeling is real, it's a fact, it could be problematic, feeling shitty in general is problematic, and so ya, if the sight of people laughing, of kittens, of blooming flowers, the singing of birds and all that makes you feel shitty, that really sucks for you, and you'll have to figure out a way to cope.
Depression and other issues definitely cause such feelings of shittinines for things that ideally wouldn't make you feel shitty.
But if others are not willing to help you, then it still seems like a "suck it up" response.
And as a person whose behavior is the cause of someone's feeling of shittinines, what do you mean by: "you're wrong to feel shitty about this"? Are you insinuating that the person is in full control of their feelings and can simply choose to have your behavior no longer make them feel shitty, but suddenly makes them feel good and uplifted?
If so, what's this magic, I'm sure lots of people would love to know. Also, what would they? What motivation would they have to adapt to your shittiness causing behavior?
And on this track, do you really think people are wrong to feel shitty for things like sexual pushiness, inuendo and abuse in a workplace or anywhere unexpected. For pressures to do things, work extra, work over the weekend, etc. For racist or sexist comments, comments and actions that denigrate others for how they look or talk or where they come from, what they believe in, etc.
I'm not being totally dismissive, I think you make a good point, some things are a matter of perspective, but this perspective is important and I think often missed. When someone makes a sex joke for example, they might not mean anything bad of it or try to make anyone feel bad. And arguably, sex jokes shouldn't make you feel shitty. But given a reality where for lots of people this joke is not a joke, but something they experienced for real, a past abuse, a constant stigma, etc., well the joke is a reminder of that shitty thing and causes them to feel shitty.
What is often asked is to stop those bad behavior, and if those are stopped, maybe the jokes about it can fly again, because there'd be no one for whom the joke was just salt on the wound.
In those cases, is "you should learn to have these things make you feel good" really an answer? They logically are bad things, instinctively made to make you feel shitty. So I still think the choices are only what I brought up before.
You've got a toxic manager? Leave. That's the only answer. There's nothing else that can be done.
The label of toxicity is used to limit the possible ways to move forward.
Additionally, the overuse of "toxic" diminishes the situations where it actually is a toxic environment that irredeemably pollutes everything that it touches. This is similar to how "Grammar Nazi" or "Soup Nazi" rubs me the wrong way as it trivializes and normalizes a truly horrific philosophy as something to be used to mock people who enforce/follow a particular set of rules.
In looking for examples of the overuse of the word toxic, I found https://www.scarymommy.com/toxicity-calling-everything-toxic... - which, I'm going to say I largely agree with.
> Toxic behavior or a toxic situation exist because of a consistent pattern of destructive behavior. Posting one rude comment is very different from consistently demeaning and trolling someone online. A loved one arguing with you over a disagreement is very different from verbal and emotional abuse. And a work environment where a boss pressures staff to meet a deadline is very different from a boss who consistently bullies employees and promotes a culture of fear to get results.
> But people are quick to grab at the negative connotation of the word without contemplating if it actually applies to the situation. It’s almost as if using the word toxic makes you a part of the “cool kids’ club” or somehow makes you more “woke” (yet another overused word). But throwing toxic out when someone offends you is like a metaphorical way of slamming the door in someone’s face. It’s an immature response that doesn’t solve anything.
Labeling something as toxic means that the only realistic answer to resolving the issue with that toxicity is to cut it out of one's life. With today's use of the word, if we were to do that, we'd likely end up as hermits (and then have someone claim that toxic solitude is infecting the culture).
Not everything that hurts is toxic. Seeing a public display of affection after a breakup may fall in the "makes me feel like shit" category, but it isn't toxic. Walking past a street preacher espousing views counter to my own and seeing people listen to him falls in the "makes me feel angry" category, but it isn't toxic.
Yes, there are toxic workplaces where the combination of bad management, awful coworkers, and unrelenting stress seeps out of the workplace into the rest of life and everyone else's and makes it worse. Labeling it "toxic" is the easy way out for trying to describe what is wrong with it.
The label of toxic ultimately means that we are unable to solve the problem and are thus a victim in the relationship (be it personal, professional, or other). In a world where everything that makes one "feel like shit" is toxic, it subverts our own ability to resolve issues since its the other's fault that they're toxic. Nothing that the individual can do will resolve it and we are powerless in the face of toxicity (other than cutting it out of our lives).
But yet, there are often numerous ways to resolve an issue if it isn't deemed as toxic and the power to resolve it remains with the person.
In the face of toxicity, the classic "change your company or change your company" only has one answer where the other answer is the more desirable one and leads to a better world - if one is willing to put in the effort rather than following the "just leave" advice that is the only answer to something that is toxic.
I personally find that the word toxic is quite apt, because everyone is already familiar with the concept of various degrees of toxicity. Sexual abuse is very toxic, someone who always talks over you and doesn't listen is still toxic but to much lower levels.
And like with all toxins, individuals can choose if there are any redeeming qualities that outweighs the negatives. Alcohol is a good example, pain killers another. Similarly, I think it has this intuition already built, ya there's some toxic behavior at my work, but it pays really well and I'm learning a lot. Ya my brother can be a little toxic, but he's always there to help when it matters and cares a lot about me.
Yet everyone understands that it would always be best without the toxic parts. Which is where for work you can look at other opportunities and see, this other place seems to not be toxic and similarly pays well and has a lot of growth opportunity.
> Labeling something as toxic means that the only realistic answer to resolving the issue with that toxicity is to cut it out of one's life
You seem to insist on this a lot, I don't think I agree.
I mentioned different ways to approach a toxic scenario.
One is to stop your exposure to it. You can do so by leaving or by having the cause of the toxic behavior leave.
Another one is to stop the cause of the toxicity, which you can do so by having the behavior stop (through repremendation, shaming, authority, education, etc).
You can also adapt to the toxicity, develop a thicker skin, or what I called "suck it up". Hopefully making its negative impact on you milder and maybe non-existent over time.
But the ideal pattern in my opinion, is not for the person who already feels shitty to have to deal with trying to figure out a way to avoid or stop the toxic behavior, but for others who are in much better positions to do so to do so.
It's pretty hard for someone bitten by a snake to save themselves from the poison. Once you're already feeling shitty, your courage and energy levels to face people that make you feel shitty about the very topic are low, and doing so can be a risk to face even more toxic backlash.
In a workplace, it's really the responsibility of the company to make sure they deal with toxic behavior preemptively, and offer easy channels for remediation if someone calls it out.
And as decent human beings, it is really all our own responssability to be aware of when and what make others feel shitty and see how we can adapt to make others feel good instead. That's how you can coexist positively with others. It's normal relationship building for trust, comfort and all that.
Now, I see that a lot of people want to be pedantic and point at an edge case which I'd consider is a bit of an absurd call-out, because in practice it's very rare that people call out these kind of toxic but shouldn't be scenarios. That's the case where someone feels shitty about things that for the majority of people do not make them feel shitty and sometimes even a normal person would feel good about.
The thing is, most of the time, in those scenarios we are dealing with trauma. And I think here too, like how you'd help someone in a wheelchair and not slam the door in their face, people with trauma need our help and compassion as well.
> But yet, there are often numerous ways to resolve an issue if it isn't deemed as toxic and the power to resolve it remains with the person
Can you expand here in what you mean by keeping the power with the person? In my mind, "toxic" is a new found power for just that, the ability to name and label a behavior that hurts you as toxic now levies new power to actually make that behavior stop or change or go away, where as before people had often no recourse and could only "suck it up".
What if everyone is a "bad" parent? What if no parent lives up to their child's expectation? Intentional harm or not, people coming of age have to reckon with the gap between their idealized understanding of/hope for their parents, and their increasing understanding of the tradeoffs adult life demands. Personally, I think putting that reckoning front and center is a good thing. Burying our resentments doesn't solve things—talking them through and understanding each others' perspectives does.
* no one cares about your opinions or ideas,
* no one has any actual affection for you; they only appear to when you have something they want,
* in a choice between your physical or mental well-being and their short-term happiness, you take a rather distant second,
* and then you die.
I'm convinced that the world is cleanly divided into two categories of people. People that internalize this early in life, and people that never do at all.
Along with learning to be bored, it's the most important life lesson you can pass on to the next generation to ensure a happy productive life.
"Personally, I think putting that reckoning front and center is a good thing" I really disagree. If you parent was a monster, then absolutely. Otherwise, if they met the 3 points above then what good does calling them out and telling them that what they did was in your mind, harmful? They cant change anything and all it will do is make them react in hurt; they are still just people and you are invalidating their core life achievement. My parents were far from perfect, but they loved me and did their best, what would calling them out on any perceived failures do? I feel like people have lost the ability to just take things in stride these days. I can only speak from the personal experience of me and my siblings of course. My brother and I are very different in almost every way especially politics (He is pro Trump, I am not) but we just assume the other is coming from an honest place and doing what they think is best in their mind for their family and have good conversations and our families hang out often. My sister is unable to take anything in stride and assumes anyone that has different opinions than her is coming from a vindictive place. She has elected to completely remove herself from the family based on us not being far enough left for her (and I am pretty left). I find if one just assumes positive intent on another's actions as long as reality and not being a sucker allows then things are good. I always just assumed positive intent on my parents past actions or simple human flaw and all is good.
Not all parents do that, when a divorce happened at least one of them thought that as well. The thing is: not everything is abuse but things can still be bad enough as also pointed out in the article. That's when you call it toxic I guess. It's this fuzzy new word to describe some hard to grasp behaviour that is maybe only so hard to grasp because it's that outlandish. One time I was with my sister and my father on holiday - my mother gave us a cell-phone so we could call in case he would abduct us. In any case, my mother was completely overwhelmed with raising 2 kids and cut some corners. Also my father did his best to put pressure on my mother, mostly financially. (He moved far away and blames anything bad that happened on my mother or me) And the list goes on. My sister is completely unwilling to talk about any of this. My father is like described in the article saying I'm rewriting history and having a complete lack of empathy. Is this abuse? Probably not, unless you go with a crazy strict definition. But toxic for sure. What upsets me the most that this is just some really fuzzy stuff that happened, I cannot pin-point any isolated root cause. So to come up with a reasonable explanation why I chose estrangement, I would have to tell quite a long story and some details are too personal. Still I'm much happier now.
There are plenty of people in the world who you would better off just staying away from.
It’s more subtle than that. “Toxic” is used as a synonym for “irredeemably harmful”, and that very distinction makes all the difference. If a person is labeled a “jerk”, they are potentially redeemable and able to be reformed, but if someone is labeled as “toxic”, the label itself declares that there is no helping them. The label itself prescribes ostracism.
So, while it is indeed free of connotations of intent, it evokes disgust and, in fact, invites ostracism. If something is so dangerous that it can kill you, there's rarely much wisdom in attempting to talk it out of being lethal. Better to just remove it from your environment.
In any case, I agree that the word is tragically overworked. And don't we all know that overwork can be toxic.
I just meant to say that *to me*, toxic doesn't imply irredeemable. It's just a popular word for harmful.
So really I think "toxic" is appropriate.
I am non-contact with a toxic parent because I know it brings out worse behaviour in myself, and I want to stop that cycle of passive-aggressiveness and judgement towards people I do care about.
I have come to the conclusion that my parents, who of course had their flaws, were damn nigh perfect.
What's the point in having children and raising them as best as you can if the talking heads in society will treat them to focus on your unintentional harms and resent you?
I myself am one of four children and I'm the only one that had a healthy relationship with both our parents because I ignored society's pressure to focus on people's failures and instead consider parents as flawed people doing their best given their upbringing, values, effort and the knowledge/information they had available to them at the time. My three siblings all have have issues with one or both parents and they aren't doing as well I me emotionally and I feel bad for them but also know it isn't entirely their fault since society has fed them toxicity.
That's right: society teaching people to focus on how others are toxic to you can be as toxic as those people are and often is far more toxic than any toxicity you experienced from the people you're been taught to consider toxic. Yet, we never discuss how all these discussions about "toxic people" are more toxic that the people we're discussing.
Sure, not all harm is intentional, but when they get labeled as "lazy, useless, incompetent, etc" by the boomers it's hard to not blame them.
I am lucky to have been relatively successful, but I see that a lot of people (a couple of years) younger than me are really struggling.
Anyways, the lady who posted it got a ton of comments about her shitty parenting style from literally a 6 second video, to the point where she had to make a response video saying "No, I don't just place my newborn on a wooden porch", and explain why her child was on its stomach, and why it cried, etc.
You're spot on. The article coyly makes a mention of the real cause in this clause:
> For most of history, family relationships were based on mutual obligations rather than on mutual understanding. Parents or children might reproach the other for failing to honor/acknowledge their duty, but the idea that a relative could be faulted for failing to honor/acknowledge one’s ‘identity’ would have been incomprehensible.”
Although identity has many, and positive, functions[1], here it stands for "unquestioned affirmation of one's narcissistic self-image", in other words "what I think I am, being reflected to me". Social media can do this almost perfectly, most of them are perfectly fine tuned for our engagement, what we think we are, what we would like to hear, and what we would like to get angry at (which confirms our identity through opposition).
Anything that fails at this confirmation is expelled via the magic word "toxic"[2] and parents take their share for not being able to match this self-constructed, unearned narrative of an identity.
[1] Identity is a useful narrative that explains us to ourselves and others through time and space. But it is only useful to the degree it actually conforms to the reality, else it loses its adaptivity. Which means identity needs to stem from our relationships to the world; it doesn't come from within, it does't come from without, it comes from our genuine relationship with reality as we test it. If the majority of the reality we had to conform to was internet, where we can block, downvote, silence, cancel and get recommended to by an entity that are really interested in us sticking around, our identity becomes seriously self-deceptive and not useful across time and space outside the internet. In a sense, internet replaced the narcissistic, toxic parents we were running away from, except this parent is perfectly, and callously, able to tell us what we want to hear.
[2] Toxic exists. But not everything that pisses us off, or threatens our sense of identity is toxic. Narcissistic family systems are toxic because they put their needs above the needs of the child, that includes the need of the child to hear the harsh truth at times. What I see today is some parents are switching strategies by trying to outcompete with internet in being endlessly accommodating their children and not implementing necessary but unpopular structures their children might need. They couldn't have won anyway.
I'm not willing to be this generous by default. Beyond the basic manslow hierarchy of needs, people choose their priorities. Career, Friends, Family, Children, Recreation, Education, Health -> These are all facets of an adult priorities and they choose how much to allocate to each of these.
Many of those that have children do it out of obligation, ego, legacy, society. Many have unrealistic expectations about how much control they have in shaping their spawn, and do not handle well when this new independent human does not match their expectations.
These people end up causing genuine harm, and when we look back at what they did we should absolutely call out their prioritization and choices as harmful or toxic, and learn from them.
There are and have always been extremely problematic issues in many families, it's just that in the past you would be denigrated for severing ties with your family for those reasons due to a sense of duty.
So we now finally see the elephant in the room. We cannot go back to unseeing it, but we have to deal with it gracefully. To me this is just the continuing process of development of human empathy.
But I think it's worth questioning whether the supposition is true or not, and not in the sense of "can I think of any examples of a dysfunctional family being exposed now that would not have been back then?" because when you're talking about a large population you can find examples of pretty much anything (including that a lot of dysfunction that would not have been tolerated in the past is now flying under the radar).
Rather the right question (according to me) is: what are the broad trends of what is actually happening to hundreds of millions of people and what are some of the factors driving the trends?
1. Coming out. I suspect that gay people always existed, but just didn’t come out.
2. Interracial relationships. Far less common in the past. And society doesn’t view them as negatively now, which changes the power balance.
3. Parental affairs. I suspect this is the one that always happened, but people just lived with it more.
From my anecdotal list the problems are actually new. And except for the third, likely to get better.
Did you mean they aren't actually new?
In 1900, a husband beating his wife wasn't even illegal in most of the world. [1] Beating children and other animals would barely even register as unusual.
[1] It wasn't practically illegal in most of the US, both on the state & federal level until the late 20th century - https://www.cji.edu/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/domestic_abus...
It's hard to make this question grounded in data, but here's an anecdote I do think is accurate.
My grandfather was a horrific man. He died of complications due to alcoholism before I was born. That said, I've heard a lot about just what he was like, including from people outside the family. I've also seen 16mm film footage of him at family holidays, and it's shockingly clear every single other person in the room is straight up terrified of his potential temper. I'm not exaggerating on this point. I think he must have had something going very, very, wrong inside that skull.
My grandmother, who otherwise was a fiercely independent woman, stayed with him despite the abuse. My Dad, hitchhiked to Mexico one summer to escape him, but otherwise still tried to be the good son.
Why? Why not just divorce/disown the asshole?
The norms against that half a century ago were so much stronger. I do think that's an important shift that's happened recently. There's still plenty of people that stay in a bad situation due to loyalty, but the stigma, in the sense of victim blaming, has definitely eroded within my lifetime.
This is a very good thing in my book, even if it looks like a decay of society to some idiots.
Adultery, abuse, and addiction are not new.
They tell everyone they know that she's addicted to drugs and won't talk to them because they want to help her. In reality she's more successful than all of them combined, which she attributes largely to seeking mental health counseling and removing herself from their constant drama.
We're living through a reckoning for abusive people. In the past people were ostracized for cutting off their families for any reason, especially women... but now there's little reason to put up with this kind of bullshit. These cycles of familial abuse reach back generations and it's about time they're addressed.
I recently received a torrent of abuse via WhatsApp from him after a relatively minor disagreement on a news story I wasn't interested in (Harry and Meghan). It happened just as I started a week on-call as the most senior clinician, and I found I couldn't concentrate because of the things that he said echoing in my mind. Stuff that referred to things when I was less than half my current age, and hugely hurtful.
Why should I allow this in my life? An I risking the things I'm responsible for by doing this? My wife has pointed out I'm in a foul mood if I've been arguing with him about something. Is that fair on my wife and children?
However, she's very cyclical and can act normal ~30% of the time. She's told everyone that we're all drug addicts, or child abusers. Lots of people believe her, and think we all abandoned her. I've had family members call me and reduce me to tears with insults, because of the things she's told them.
From what I've seen anecdotally in every single family where the child has cut contact: there's ALWAYS a (good) reason. It almost always boils down to a failure in respecting their children, and treating them with kindness and understanding.
Younger generations are growing up with better mental health care and social awareness (due to the pervasive nature of it these days with social networks) than previous generations. We grew up in an era of public PSAs and school videos on bullying and acceptable behaviour. We know what's "right", can recognize abuse, and prefer to associate with those that treat us well.
Is there a name for this phenomenon? I think many articles could plausibly be "This Bad Thing is Downright Ubiquitous, But We Only Just Realised!".
E.g. One reason ancient Christianity was such a big deal according to historians (and resulted in billions of followers, etc.) was their profoundly different family structure when compared to what was happening in the roman culture and throughout the world.
They brought Jewish traditional family structure to the ‘gentiles’ (read: everyone else who wasn’t omitted by blood line).
It’s possible that a more secular materialistic society will have completely different relationship structures because there is no objective truth saying ‘hey, respect your elders’
First fold: Christendom and its 2,000-year-old siblings/cousins Islam (also Confucianism? Buddhism?) have been around long enough to form a sort of base social reality.
Second fold: These 2,000-year-old cultural regimes are crumbling and we are moving into new cultural regimes.
Third fold: The crumbling is actually, as you said, a reversion to the mean.
Fourth fold part A: This so-called reversion to the mean is itself impossible because cultures from 2,000 years ago were themselves much different from the cultures that came before them, and so on in both time and space dimensions.
Fourth fold part B: This so-called reversion to the mean is impossible also because we don't have enough context about ancient cultures to say that we are reinstantiating them, and things have changed so much (technology, residual effects of the most recent cultural regimes) that, even if we had enough information about the ancient cultures, there's no way we're really doing what they were doing.
50,000 years ago - behavioral modernity. The whole world a primitive communist society of hunter-gatherer bands. Remaining culture is cave paintings and Venus figurines.
10,000 years ago - agricultural revolution. The rise of slave states, polytheistic religions, emperors and high priests with many wives and concubines.
2,000 years ago - the end of the Roman slave latifundias and rise of feudalism. Kings and peasants. The beginning of the Roman Catholic church.
Turn of the 16th century - the beginnings of modern capitalism, bourgeois republics, Protestantism, the rise of the city and universities.
Changes in the forces of production affect the relations of production and culture (hegemony), in this idea.
The idea in Engels crowd was the beginning of the next system was the 1871 Paris commune.
If one were looking for modern changes in production, I would guess programming and media would be two candidates for being at the vanguard of production change. Stephen King and John Carmack can make a lot of money just going into a room, whipping something up, and sending it out to the masses to see millions rolling back in. That's not like a Detroit factory 75 years ago, and is less so a farmer's field 750 years ago.
And those changes in production would affect society, the culture. In that case it would be San Francisco, and/or Shenzhen culture at the vanguard. Also media creation, so that coming out of LA, Mumbai etc.
Every (expired) empire on earth has been a blip on the radar of the oldest continuous organization in recorded history (the Roman Catholic Church).
Most demographers are actually predicting a precipitous drop in the population of ‘non-believers’ since secularists choose to have so few children. It might be an evolutionary dead end, so to say.
Something that this thread reminded me of is the fact that several of my friends (millenial like myself) think that bringing children into this world is a bad thing to do- with global warming and other social problems making it so that this choice is just going to cause more suffering. I wasn't too surprised to hear this from them, knowing their personalities.
When the millenial zeitgeist has drifted in a direction where this is a common opinion, I take it to indicate that our socialization has taught some of us that humans have little inherent moral worth as individuals, the values of a family are subservient to the values of globalism, and all is nihilistic considering that we have a poor shot at solving the worst of our problems(the Nash equilibrium doesn't seem to be working out for global warming).
This observation makes me turn back towards family values. They work better than nihilism for me.
I think many people have trouble with that and just tend to throw their hands up as they don't have a solution. I boils down to economics. If these same millenials could afford the lifestyle they want for their kids, they would have kids. Global warming, overpopulation, etc is an altruistic substitute. (Granted things are more expensive, etc, etc. it still holds true.)
Millennials are way worse off than previous generations by many metrics, that's why so many of them are angry. The tipping point already happened.
I dug into some demographics data and I'm almost certain this is false.
OP said millennials in their 30s. Life expectancy hasn't increased in the USA that much since the 70s. Even if the deaths were completely distributed among adults, you'd expect people in the 30s now and the 70s to have about the same number of parents alive/dead. More importantly, almost all of the increase is due to improved child mortality.
There's a much simpler explanation: Boomers were once-in-a-country's-history lucky. They inherited the spoils of two world wars.
25 years ago, the median car and house didn't have (central) A/C. Cell phones and the Internet were expensive and not widely available. Truly portable laptops, usable tablets, and smartphones didn’t exist. Health food options were limited. The world was not mapped for all to access at street level. Translation was far more difficult. Information was less accessible—Wikipedia and Google didn’t exist. Free public preschool (4K) was uncommon. The death rates and crime rates were higher, life expectancy lower. Cash and checks were the primary payment methods. The list goes on and on.
Does wealth here refer to an individual’s relative share of contemporaneous wealth? Should the generation that built all of the great technology and systems of the past 25 years not reap the benefits of their work?
I’m in my 30s, btw, in case I come across as defensive in this comment. It sounds like my parents’ generation did a better job of building lasting wealth than their parents did (though not my parents lol). Should we find fault in that?
https://www.aei.org/carpe-diem/chart-of-the-day-century-pric...
https://www.cnbc.com/2020/10/09/millennials-own-less-than-5p...
The world doesn't work like that for the vast majority. Hell, I worked in a software role for 10 years and it took me 2 years to find a non contract, full time role elsewhere. I applied for hundreds of jobs, with university education and experience, and got a handful of responses.
The economy is set up so a minority of people live in heaven while everyone else is treated like an expendable cost centre.
This doesn't seem to document OPs claim of mililians owning 1/6 of what their parents did.
When the boomers were 30 there people didn't live as long, so there were fewer old people to own things.
I'd like to know how much milinials own in absolute terms compared to the boomers.
I just looked, and room+board at OSU costs $13,352 per year (http://undergrad.osu.edu/cost-and-aid/basic-costs). Adjusted for inflation, that’s cheaper than it cost 20 years ago. Of course, unsubsidized private or out-of-state schools will cost far more. Many fewer people went to college 40 years ago, too.
The health insurance premiums are higher now, but the coverage is far better. Everyone can have guaranteed health coverage via ACA, subsidized in cases of financial hardship.
Free childcare is still available for many of those who live close to family. Maternity and parental leave and FMLA laws have only improved. Free public schooling generally starts earlier. More wfh jobs are available today than ever before.
My point in all of this, of course, is that I suspect a lot of these differences boil down to optionality and different decision making. I don’t think it’s reasonable for our generation to pursue a more exciting, leisurely, and expensive lifestyle than our parents had (prestigious school, expensive city, travel, white collar job, moving away from a childhood home, delayed commitment), then resent that generation’s boat and lake house.
Can you have it all today? For most, the answer is still no, just like it always was. I suspect that more people than ever before can get pretty close, though, leaving those who can’t even more resentful about it than in the past.
BTW, with one month of SF rent, you can buy yourself a nice used boat. A couple years of that rent will buy you a simple lake house.
everyone else is busy playing calculus looking for solutions that fit into existing logic and political economy, when the truth is that survival and creation irreducibly exist for their own sake.
bringing a child into a dying world might be the ultimate selfish act. it's also the only option that doesn't feel like suicide. and once they're here, there's nothing left to do but devote all your energy into making the world the best it can be.
i think this is what "family values" ultimately missed. family became the default, an inwardly-focused tradition and culture decoupled from praxis, and action was taken for granted.
That's a pretty bleak outlook on the future of our world. Do you really think getting born today is significantly worse than being born at a random time in human history?
i can't imagine surviving something like a famine or civil war in the modern world. and it doesn't look like that kind of risk is growing smaller. could you take on some total disaster like that while caring for a child? what kind of person would you be at the end of it? what kind of person would they be?
and it doesn't even have to be that dramatic. there will be a lot of suffering that doesn't touch us directly, but it will still shape the places we inhabit. could you stand to live in a total police state, even if you're safe (from the outside) and relatively wealthy (compared to a refugee)?
these are the questions on a lot of people's minds. and nobody has good answers, because there are none.
I don't think anybody studying the history of civil wars or famine believe that that is likely to happen.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/civil-war-united-stat...
Besides, even if you talk to people who lived through wars or famines, few of them wish they hadn't been born. People find happiness and meaning everywhere. From interviews I have read, people living through wars find their lives more meaningful rather than less.
> could you stand to live in a total police state, even if you're safe (from the outside) and relatively wealthy (compared to a refugee)?
Probably. But I don't think anything like that is likely. I think there will be fewer police states in the future.
It's odd how people living in poorer and less well-managed countries are much more optimistic about the future than people living in the West.
https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/ng-interactiv...
I wonder if it's just spending too much time on social media and too little time reading history books that make people so pessimistic...
Isn't it flipped? If humans had little moral worth, then there would be no need to worry about the suffering they would experience. It's because they have moral worth that people hesitate to bring new humans into the world.
Humans have moral worth; to remove suffering of humans, make sure they don’t exist to experience suffering.
E.g. “I did not consent”
This type of statement assumes you have a will. If one decides that they have a free will to make decisions, it is useful to note that this is a supernatural belief (because the laws of physics have no room for free will in a stochastic universe).
If there is no free will, and nothing matters, not only did you not consent, but the entire chain of events since the creation of the universe also lacked consent.
In this sense, whatever happens, happens.
(Note: I do not believe this :) )
Now, do you have any thoughts on the actual point of the morality of having a child without their consent since you do believe in free will?
Intention matters.
Is it good to give a gift for selfish reasons? no.
Is it good to give a gift to make others jealous? no.
Is it good to give a gift to help force your will on others? no. (this is the one closest to your consent question)
Is it good to give a gift out of a genuine desire to share the joy you received from said gift? yes.
E.g. the decision to have a child is not a trivial moral decision. It is not necessarily a good to decide to bring a child into the world. We see this clearly play out in the data of NYC for example, where less than half of conceived children in some communities make it to term.
Self examination is required to see where the true motivation comes from. If one feels that their life was more a burden than a gift, that person is probably not in a great state to decide to morally have a child.
Unfortunately, many people think that having a child will fix their issues.
You lost me a little there. How does not wanting kids makes you think that our socialization has taught some of us that humans have little inherent moral worth as individuals?
Doesn't not wanting kids for X reason mean that you consider the moral worth of a new person to be less than X.
I think a lot of people don't consider a new person worth anything at all. Or at least would prefer 9 people at happiness level 10 over 10 people at happiness level 9.
What? No.
Most people who do have children are not doing in order to fulfill some dispassionate abstract moral commitment to the inherent moral worth of human life.
And there are all sorts of examples of people who clearly value human life but choose not to have children. Or are all nuns terrible people?
Whether someone chooses to have children or not has very little to do with your underlying moral commitments or -- more importantly -- behavior. Sociopaths and abusers have children. Mother Teresa didn't have children.
OP was specifically referring to people (including in this thread) who choose not to have children on moral grounds:
>> several of my friends (millenial like myself) think that bringing children into this world is a bad thing to do- with global warming and other social problems
So it seems fair to assume that they consider the value of the new person to be none or negative overall.
...and?
There's nothing at all logically inconsistent about two following two propositions:
P1. All human life has value.
P2. Intentionally creating new human life is unethical.
FWIW, I am not an anti-natalist, and I do not believe P2. However, I do believe it's unethical to purposefully have children you cannot support (financially, emotionally, intellectually, etc.). But that doesn't meant that I think that the children created by people who cannot support a child are worthless or have negative value! Just because "creating X is bad" does not mean "X has no value".
> So it seems fair to assume...
No, it isn't fair to assume that people who believe "creating X in situation S is bad" implies that those same people believe "X has no value". Those are two very, very distinct and different value judgements.
More importantly, I very much doubt people who hold to above position would agree with this characterization of their view of the value of human life.
I think it's worth distinguishing between:
--potential Y < X
--actual Y < X
With Y being the presence of the kid. To me actual Y > X, but potential Y < X.
I'd rather not have kids for a bunch of reasons. If I had kids I'd sacrifice those reasons for them.
Also, for many women, its very hard to juggle motherhood and a career----if they chose to go that route.
There is also a choice now. Women can use a plethora of contraceptives that weren't as common in my parent generation.
Honestly, this whole "antinatalism" thing is all smoke and no fire.
>When the millenial zeitgeist has drifted in a direction where this is a common opinion, I take it to indicate that our socialization has taught some of us that humans have little inherent moral worth as individuals, the values of a family are subservient to the values of globalism, and all is nihilistic considering that we have a poor shot at solving the worst of our problems.
Uhhhh, What?
Even the idea that resentment can be "deserved" or not seems meaningless to me. People don't resent people because they think they deserve it, they resent people because things happened to them. We obviously can't assign blame for such infinitely complex causal chains, hell we can't even assign agency. Who's fault is it that someone's grandfather got brain damage in the war he was conscripted into, then went on to be abusive to his children, who went on to become addicted to alcohol. Who should say if these people then deserve resentment for being bad parents?
Life seems to me too random to comprehend, yet everyday I find people to tell me I should or should not condemn or condone people for their actions.
Maybe shit just happens and we look for reasons afterwards?
I’m honestly terrified of what my children will blame on me some day.
Just an example off the top of my head: “aita for cutting off my parents because they kicked me out of the house when I was 18?”, followed by thousands of comments digitally lynching the parent in question and wallowing in the terrible trauma the OP experienced.
I wasn’t planning on kicking my kids out at 18, but the responses had me crying for the poor parent.
There’s no nuance in internet discussion. People read a sentence, attach their own worst demons to it, then flay them alive for all to see.
My own step sister has gone full q anon now, but before that repeatedly posted about her traumatic childhood with no real specifics. When pressed for details, the worst she could come up with was that her dad yelled sometimes and introduced her to a few too many girlfriends.
I guess my question to you is, what would be a helpful reply for your mental state?
I could say “people like that shouldn’t have kids. They’re lucky you didn’t post their address or I’d go remove their ability to reproduce myself”.
Would that help you?
What if I said “what were their childhoods like?”
We’re all doing the best we can. Sounds like in your parents case that wasn’t very good, but perhaps compassion and acceptance will help you do better if you choose to make the next generation.
My mom is a raging narcissist, and until I accepted that in her, we had real problems. Now I just understand that I’ll never get an apology from her about anything, and enjoy the good parts.
I mostly feel sorry for her that she lost her father to alcoholism at a young age and is sort of stuck at age 13 in some ways. She burdened me with a lot of stuff growing up that she shouldn’t have, but it’s relatively simple to trace that back through history and see that this was inevitable.
Everything is temporary in life and being a parent is a temporary role. A parent's job is to initiate the child to the world, teach them how to navigate it and how to be a functional member of society. In short, the parent's job is to help the child be as independant of them as possible.
When the child is an adult, the relationship must evolve. A lot of people fail to understand that, because being a parent is part of their identity. If you take that away from them, they have nothing left because they haven't cultivated anything else. This is a mistake.
It is good to see people seek counceling on these issues. It show they have the intention to recognize something is wrong and are willing to put the effort to find resolution.
My parents told me early on "I'm not your friend" and has since then always felt that I should be obligated toward them because they're my parents. These exact parents you mention in your comment are also the exact same ones that can't believe their children don't get along and they don't ever talk to them anymore.
My parents told me the same when I was young. It wasn't until about age 25 that the dynamic between us radically changed. There is a fine line to cross between being a primary caregiver and being an onlooker to someone's life. If you were a parent for 18 years it is understandable to have some "growing pains" associated with transitioning to a new type of relationship with your kids but it certainly is doable, even if it takes a while. I still seek advice from my parents (and they me) but it does not have the affect of authority as it did in childhood.
I believe my parents had me because they feel like it was their duty, and they fulfilled their parental obligations fairly well in that regard. The trouble is that they didn't consider what it was like to have an adult son. Now they probably realise that I'm not the sort of person they like (I'm gay, and living in a different country). They don't call anymore, and even when I call them they only talk about themselves. They have no interest in me or my life.
I hope that whomever is having children right now should think very thoroughly about what kind of relationship they want with their kids once they grow up.
I’m sure that they would’ve found faults, but at least they could brag about how good of parents they were.
The article headline suggests there's a "shift" but doesn't really go into enough detail to explain why a shift from relationships based on duty to relationships based on fulfilment would fuel estrangement. A little more data on that would be helpful.
Of course I'm an engineer and know next to nothing about anthropology.
>Of course I'm an engineer and know next to nothing about anthropology.
You're probably wrong here.
>There is no evidence, historical or contemporary, of a society in which barter is the main mode of exchange;[32] instead, non-monetary societies operated largely along the principles of gift economy and debt.[33][34][35] When barter did in fact occur, it was usually between either complete strangers or potential enemies.[36]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_money#Non-monetary_...
I bristle at the implication that parents are owed anything. My relationship with my parents is based upon mutual respect as adults. Had they not at least made an effort to reconcile, we would not be on speaking terms today.
What is your source of information on this claim?
I am reading this and don't see anything. https://www.ncsl.org/research/human-services/homeless-and-ru...
> Sometimes people use “respect” to mean “treating someone like a person” and sometimes they use “respect” to mean “treating someone like an authority”. And sometimes people who are used to being treated like an authority say “if you won’t respect me I won’t respect you” and they mean “if you won’t treat me like an authority I won’t treat you like a person”. They think they’re being fair but they aren’t, and it’s not okay.
I think more people should choose not to have kids and our societies/governments should stop pushing so hard to have more due to traditional values or so economies can grow. It is time for us to focus on quality and not quantity. I think we are approaching 8 billion people in this world: not only is this not sustainable, but we could be better raising our children by having fewer.
Why does this relate to this topic? Because of the concept that many feel they were raised poorly. The people that should not be having kids usually do. One of the reasons I do not want kids is because I do not think I will do a good job. Instead, I think I can better support my friends that want to raise kids. If I feel I'm finally prepared to take on the responsibility, then I like to think I would force myself to adopt. Regardless, I think we could iteratively improve parenting by encouraging (never forcing) those that are mentally prepared to do so.
I think educated, younger generations are already having fewer kids, but guess I wanted to shine light on the good side of this.
I think shrinking population is one thing I would like to see. Until we start moving to other planets, I do not see the benefits of a growing population. Many people still live in poverty and lack a good education, which I believe parenting has the most influence on.
Something I've thought about as well. If I had kids, I doubt they would make it into the college I go to. The acceptance rate for UVA was 60% for my parents generation, 25% for mine, and probably in the single digits if my hypothetical children were to apply.
For example, I can't imagine denying someone the chance to have the joy that is a child, but I'm also not sure there's a lot of benefit in the modern world in people having ten (or twenty) children, where I have a hard time believing they can even have a full relationship with their children because there's so many of them (leaving out the obvious issues with too much population growth). Also, how would we go about changing the status quo? Criminalizing too many children is far too dystopian for my taste, and incentive programs just mean that families with many children have less resources, which hurts the children, not the parents that make that decision.
Honestly, I'm not even sure what's been discussed already on this topic, because it's somewhat taboo to speak about in our society.
A big part is likely just normalizing that it is okay not to have kids: in particular, there is so much social pressure to have them. There is also significant government incentive for a population to grow both for the economy and for retirement programs like Social Security.
I do think the best thing we can do is live by example. We can choose not to have kids. Additionally, being heavily involved with helping our friends or families that have kids may be beneficial as well: not just babysitting, but helping get them curious and engaged in school, save for their higher education, or ensuring the mental well-being of the family in general.
Maybe, but I'm hesitant to say that's a solution, because it implies that we can or should offset the problem (as much as we can assume there is one) by asking some people to have no kids while others continue to have many. It's not a bad thing to do, but it's not really a solution.
> There is also significant government incentive for a population to grow both for the economy and for retirement programs like Social Security.
To some degree, this is a chicken and egg and/or catch-22 problem. Our economy is based on growth, because growth was seen as inevitable, and since our economy is based on growth, we incentivize growth. That works until growth becomes constrained, and then it doesn't. Whether from outside or inside forces, understanding and possible moving towards an economy that is less coupled to growth is an important thing for us to study for the future (even if it only helps us understand our current economy better in the end).
> I do think the best thing we can do is live by example. We can choose not to have kids.
That's not the correct example. If everyone followed the example, the human race would cease to exist. Leading by example should be leading by what we expect people to do. That means leading by some people not having kids, and some people having a sustainable amount. That's not exactly different than it looks like right now if you consider some people to be leading by example, and it doesn't seem to actually do much (but population growth greatly falls off with industrialization and coming out of poverty, so maybe it does?)
If your retirement plan is point blank shotgun than this is sustainable. Otherwise pray for automation, depending on how old you are, it might work out.
That stabilizes the population (technically population goes down due to accidental deaths, diseases, etc. but you get the idea).
Lifespans are increasing and automation claims turned out over optimistic so far - if you are close to retirement the last thing you want to see is a shrinking working population, shortages and inflation.
The further you go back, the easier it was to have excuses to greatly limit contact and only have contact that is very impersonal. The average American is a decendant of adults who were never going to see their parents again. Most would have felt a great deal of social pressure to treat that as a hardship and disguise if it was their primary motivation.
I think hunter gatherers would have been predisposed to finding new groups at adolescence even if their culture lacked a specific rule for which sex does so, and the priorities of agricultural societies to keep land rights are probably not particularly compatible with our evolutionary past.
Just anecdotally, my sister and I have different relationships with our parents. They had different relationships with their own parents, and different from their respective siblings. My adult child is quite close with me. My ex had yet different relationships with each of her parents, which was different from her own siblings. And that's just a small selection. Some of these relationships would be considered strained, some very close, and all sorts of points in-between.
Historically cities were full of people who wanted to get away from where they were before, some for adventure, sure, but also many to get away from family and social relationships.
I don't doubt that there are adults (especially older parents) heartbroken about estrangement from other family members. So for those people sure, it's a problem. But it's quite possible the counterpart in the (non-) relationship is quite satisfied by where things stand. And given that a kid grew up with a parent: how many less tight relationships are satisfactory to all concerned?
And all that leads me to wonder: how much unhappiness about the structure of a given relationship stems simply from its deviation from society's stereotypical model of what an ideal relationship should be? This definitely differs from society to society; the south asian side of my family is full of very close relationships (to say the least) but is also very stifling and unhappy for some members. Certainly people feel heartbreak, and some suffer serious psychological disorders, due to a mismatch between their body and the (then) social ideal. We recognize that as an unfair pathology; why not the same for human relationships which are exponentially more varied than body shapes.
This all reminds me of common surveys of religious prevalence: most of them assume that it's the default state, and often don't even have a way to measure "don't care".
You can see this kind of assumption in the article itself, where the author quotes an academic: "but the idea that a relative could be faulted for failing to honor/acknowledge one’s ‘identity’ would have been incomprehensible." -- Just tell that to, for example, the gay folks, or folks who adopted a different religion, who left their families of wider communities because they needed to be recognized for who they are. The incomprehension by these commentators that these are indeed longstanding factors demonstrates their own biases.
My opinion: less than we think.
Plus, the ideal stereotype is usually there for a reason.
We're social animals. A broken bond is a broken bond, whether it's with parents, community, friends, or our own family. We can pretend that we're fine, but then we don't get to be a society full of self-reported depressed people, with great levels of psychological brokeness, addiction, and so on, and have a big majority lamenting how they are "so lonely".
Is it? Is it true for the body shape stereotypes I mentioned? Those change over time. Is it true for common racist stereotypes?
> We're social animals. A broken bond is a broken bond, whether it's with parents, community, friends, or our own family. We can pretend that we're fine, but then we don't get to be a society full of self-reported depressed people, with great levels of psychological brokeness, addiction, and so on, and have a big majority lamenting how they are "so lonely".
This is a huge leap, that also takes on only one half of the equation. Some bonds are better off broken, and that has surely been true as long as there have been humans. I don't deny there are many self-reported depressed people, but do they constitute a higher proportion today, or lower, now people have more freedom to make their own way?
She used to explode with fury at seemingly random things, screaming and lashing out with a stick. My childhood was often spent just staying out of her way. Yes, I'm a very touch-averse and anxious person.
She denies these things ever happened. She wonders why I moved to the other side of the world and never visit. Nor do I stay in contact more than an email once a month.
I won't miss her when she's gone.
Parents often don't maintain a basic level of decency towards their children. The sooner we move away from the idea of children owing their parents something, the better.
I'm still reading the article, but this bit stuck out like a sore thumb. The definition of the term "gaslighting" seems to have drifted in the last ten years. Previously, it meant something like "intentionally sewing doubt about a true fact in order to force a victim to question their own judgement." Currently, it seems to mean "Someone has failed to fully empathize with me and agree with my take on the situation." This second definition seems very childish, and it's unintentionally quite funny that the article specified that "adult children" felt gaslighted.
Sometimes, their stories are rightfully so and deserve our help. other times they reframe their lives negatively just to win the social game of their generation.
Once they reframe they start to believe thier own narrative creating a vicious cycle.
The older generation, has their own problems in arrogance and ignorance, but they cant even fathom a society of young people who would compete on suffering.
The disconnect will grow.
This is pretty much classic generation gapping, blaming the other side for not understanding How Things Are. I would suggest some of what this is is a change in power dynamics. It used to be society's expectations were such that you didn't talk about your shitty parents or complain about your lot in life. That led to a lot of sadness, it just wasn't visible. Now people are more comfortable talking about these things and it makes you feel icky.
Nuance gets lost anytime generalizations are applied. This is the way of the world. See media labeling of Gen Z or Baby Boomers. The variation in sample greater than the variety across labels.
I don't think that's fair. I don't think those people are doing it to seek attention. What I do see is people get stuck in a spiral of rumination. It's important to understand how your past impacts who you are today, and your base temperament. If you understand that, you can work around your weaknesses. From there, you grow.
I didn't know the meaning of the word so I looked it up. It's related to the plot of a movie I believe.
It's a great word to describe the situation we were in.
Nowadays people use "gaslight" to mean something different and it annoys me. But what do I know, I am not a linguist.
> failed to fully empathize with me and agree with my take on the situation
sounds like a disagreement over whether a fact is true.
It WOULD be gaslighting if someone thought my take on the situation was correct, but claimed that I was wrong in order to sew doubt in me.
[edit]
I suppose I take such a hard line on this because it's childish to think that people will always empathize with you, and agree with your take on things. Quite often, the opposite will happen. This is a regular occurrence, and does not constitute abuse. Sometimes when no one agrees with you, it means you're in the wrong and you need to rethink your take on the situation. Other times, an individual can be in the right while others are wrong. This sort of conflict will be a normal part of someone's life. Further, some situations do not have a strictly "wrong" or "right," and simply constitute competing values and perspectives.
I was going to say something similar to you, that correctly or incorrectly, I do feel like there's this increase over time in people (maybe generational, maybe not) treating their perceptions as real. It's like there's no room for a Rashomon effect or something, and there's this lack of recognition societally that self-identified victims can sometimes have false recollections.
In that case, if you and another person strongly disagree over what happened, in a factual sense, the only room for explanation, if you thought you were a victim, is that the other person is gaslighting you by denying the "reality" of what happened, or lying outright, or has a false memory.
FWIW, I agree the meaning of the term gaslighting has shifted over time, in that I think originally there was more of a connotation that the victim didn't question what was happening, until maybe after everything was so blatantly obvious, and, as has been pointed out, the perpetrator either knew what was happening at some level, or at least didn't truly believe it themselves.
A parent who says "I just loved you the whole time" when they actually traumatized their child is gaslighting in the traditional sense.
It isn't surprising older folk have a hard time treating with a grey notion like that, but that's just another sign of the seachange. See Judge Joe Brown's take on Bill Cosby's release versus that of mainstream Black media.
If there was one that carried the same "doesn't really care just wants to be seen saying a particular thing" connotation without triggering half the left people would instantly adopt it because there are tons of instances where you see that kind of behavior and want to call it out. Grandstanding is also close but carries the wrong connotations of wanting to influence opinions whereas "virtue singling" is toward your own tribe. Bike shedding is also close but implies actually caring about the outcome or wanting to contribute to the discussion in a non bad faith way.
"I never chased you around the apartment with a knife! It was brainwashing!"
I don’t think it’s always a great idea for 2 reasons. One, it’s known that our memories change over time. Traumatic memories can become better than they should (it wasn’t that bad, right?), while frustrating memories can become worse than they should (every reiteration of the memory solidifies just how frustrating it was!). In general, this kind of reflection, unless we have external sources to affirm our recollections (siblings or a parent/adult we trust), seems like it could easily become counter productive.
Two, without understanding ourselves reasonably well in our present state, seeking out past events to construct an explanation of who we are can lead to some very bad science in which we attempt to explain things we poorly understand in ways that don’t make sense.
I’ve had several conversations with friends over the last 5 years or so in which they elaborated on weird stuff their parents did. In some cases it’s simply to acknowledge their influences and why they might be the way they are. In others, perhaps most, they appear to be looking for excuses and ways to apply blame externally.
This is obviously anecdotal. Maybe I hang out with weird people.
In any case I’ve always strongly encouraged people to navigate this kind of thing with a therapist or other family if possible. Doing this in a vacuum is very risky. It seems to lead to exactly what you’re outlining here. Children resenting parents for things that they believe negatively affected them, which the parents don’t even remember - or remember differently.
Of course they remember them differently though. They remember them from different frames of reference, different stages of mental development, and for different reasons!
I’m sorry about your relationship with your dad. I have trouble with mine too, and it weighs on me at times. Relationships can be complicated.
Without meaning to sound judgmental, I see it as part of a general trend -- cancel culture, sensitivity warnings, etc -- that involves some underlying pattern. Maybe it's just more encouraged now than it used to be, maybe it's not really any different, I don't know. But I do get the sense people (liberal and conservative, young and old) are more likely to be absolutist about their viewpoints, political and relational, in a way that leaves less room for "seeing the other side" and change.
It's important to note I think the familial estrangement issue is more complicated than this, and involves other changes in cultural values, but also socioeconomic crises.
I am estranged from my father for a number of reasons, but mainly because my parents divorced when I was young and my father spend the next 15 years trying to destroy my relationship with my mother through basically any means at his disposal. It came to a head when my father called me late one night while I was in college, and he told me "We did it, we won, we beat her". I was very confused and asked him to elaborate, and he told me that he sued my mom in court for child support that she paid while he was paying for my college attendance. He told me that he loved me more than my mom and that he was paying for college because he loved me and that my mom wasn't paying because she didn't love me. He had previously used money as a weapon in my relationships before and we had discussed and agreed that he cannot talk about finances like this with a 19 year old who is (1) needs financial support to make it through adolescence and early adulthood and (2) wants to maintain relationships with both parents. It was impossible for him to get over the anger and resentment he had for my mom and to keep that out of our relationship, so I cut ties with him. Having talked with him about this a lot before cutting ties, he would consistently gaslight me about how (1) my mom never cared about me (2) his remarried family were the only family that cared about me and (3) that everything he did, he did for love of me and not out of spite for my mother and (4) that he never did any of the stuff I specifically asked him not to do to help me maintain my familial relationships.
And sometimes, the parent is experiencing gaslighting. We all have problems and the difference between parent and child fades with time (most of us live both roles).
Without an objective record of fact and an independent analysis, it very well could be either party or more probably both that are guilty of gaslighting. Nothing is wrong with being estranged though unless you want there to be.
[1] https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/21674086.1981.11...
The most extreme example I know of: a woman I know was sexually abused by a teenage neighbor when she was very young. When her parents found out, they told him he wasn't supposed to do that, and when they caught him again, they uninvited him from their house for a few years, then welcomed him back, and scolded her for being "rude" and "dramatic" when she cried and didn't want to be in the same room as him. Now, before you get suspicious, that previous sentence was her parents' version of the story, which she accepted for years. So this guy was in and out of her house almost her whole childhood, treated as part of the family. Her mother even showed her the "very nice" note he sent declining their invitation to the party they were throwing for her college graduation. When they got on Facebook, they immediately friended him, so he got all the family news they posted, including when and where she moved, the new jobs she got, etc. They called her paranoid and self-centered when she asked them to stop sharing all the latest about his life with her and vice-versa. The family narrative growing up was that all of that was perfectly healthy and normal, and she had difficulties with it because she was a difficult, dramatic, and irrational person, the kid with all the problems who spoiled things for her otherwise perfect family.
So that's already gaslighting on an emotional level, but if you want it at the factual level, they covered that, too. As she started talking to her parents about it as an adult, it dawned on them that what they did looked bad by "present-day standards," and they started changing their story about what happened. In their version now, they banned him from the house after the first offense and didn't allow him back until she moved out for college. They never scolded her for being "rude" when she was scared of him; they were sympathetic. Her mother even tried to say she arranged counseling for her, and then backed down and said, "Well, people didn't get counseling back then [the 1980s] but we did the equivalent," by which they meant talking to the priest at her school about her "emotional problems."
That's pretty legit gaslighting when you're in your thirties and suddenly your parents change the story they tell about how they handled your molestation, after sticking to the previous story for a quarter century.
Not only that, the ease and lack of conscience with which her parents changed their story made my friend wonder how much of the version she grew up with and took for granted was fictionalized. She doesn't really remember how many times the abuse happened, what period of time it spanned, who put a stop to it, or how or when her parents found out. She has a few fragmented memories of certain times and circumstances that she mostly trusts, and the rest was secondhand via her parents.
I could tell you other stories about parents misremembering things to their own advantage, probably unwittingly in most cases. I remember my sister screaming and crying and slamming doors about our parents not letting her go to a certain camp one summer that she had been to the previous summer. My mother's memory is that it was my sister's decision and she didn't want to go the second year. I don't think my mother is consciously lying. People's memories change over time, usually in ways that protect and flatter them.
The problem arises if the parent honestly believe in a different set of facts, in which case it is not intentional and hence not gaslighting.
Characterising that point of view as merely “Someone has failed to fully empathize with me and agree with my take on the situation” seems ungenerous, and also to implicitly doubt their understanding of what happened, without a particular reason to favour either the child’s or parent’s interpretation.
The problem is that everyone operates on their own understanding, by definition, so wouldn’t it be better to, rather than say “this isn’t gaslighting”, instead note that it being gaslighting depends upon them being correct about what happened?
Also, you're bringing up the textual source of the term, not its general connotation. The connotation is when an abuser, cheater, or otherwise harm causing individual decides to try to rewrite history or attack the competence of the individual bringing the grievance rather than address the grievance in good faith. There is a big difference between disagreeing on the facts of a situation and trying to invalidate someone's perception of the situation in a manipulative way to avoid blame. If your first instinct when someone says "you hurt me" is to argue why it's not your fault, you should probably talk to a therapist about that. That is how a lot of families work, and will even couch it in terms of "tough love" despite it being frankly abusive behavior. To use the word of the day, that's toxic.
The optimal move is to disengage rather than argue, but I assure you that mandating that people "own" whatever spurious accusation is thrown their way just opens up a rich avenue for passive-aggressive abuse.
Your contrasting the textual source with the general connotation is exactly the concept drift referenced by the post you're replying to.
Typically a quiet, non-escalated discussion can help both parties feel better, clear up misunderstandings, and if apologies are merited (even from the initial accuser) they can be had. But only if you don't get someone's hackles up in the first place, or deny their right to air a grievance.
Again, the fact that you are already considering it a contest to be won or lost (or avoided immediately without discussion, which is a sure indicator to folks how much you don't care) probably says a lot about the lens you view the world through.
Referencing the connotation means that there is a general accepted usage, which is not the hyperbolic "didn't absolutely agree with their grievance" that the original post I replied to was making. In general terms, I think it has come to include unconscious manipulation in addition to the previous, narrow definition of conscious, machiavellian attempts to dispute concrete facts.
My understanding of gaslighting is that it was never about disputing concrete facts; it was about controlling the person by making them doubt their sanity. We already have a word for conscious Machiavellian attempts to dispute concrete facts: "lying."
My whole life my parents don't enjoy actual conversation with me. They get tense and irritated at the possibility of not knowing something, so they only ever want to state things that happened in their lives, and have me do the same. Anything resembling critical thinking is not welcome. Even worse, if the topic even slightly verges into the political realm, they just start spewing whatever line Fox or OANN are shilling that week. And I've learned that all I'm allowed to do in response is be silent or agree, because if I'm critical of them at all, I run the risk of them being so offended that they stop talking to ME for a while.
Another element at play is that my mental recollection of how my parents got along with their parents is nothing like this. From my POV my parents and grandparents always saw things mostly the same, were very supportive of each other, and were very involved in each others' lives up until my grandparents passed away. I just don't feel like I even live in the same world as my parents.
Which is really really hard.
Raising my kids is my purpose. But when they’re adults they will make their own decisions about our relationship as equals.
Anything less would be conditional love: I appear to only love them conditioned on something. Like keeping me from being lonely or fulfilling me in some way. Thats not their job.
Part of the reason a lot of children go no-contact nowadays is similar to why there are so many more divorces -- economic and societal structures now allow people to leave their abusers.
“Will you unconditionally accept me and my lifestyle?”
“Will you accept that I’m not fully capable of understanding your needs, and therefore cannot respect you as you’d like?”
Contemporary expectations ask that estranged parents humble themselves and become emotionally vulnerable to their child, an already difficult task that’s made harder with age and misaligned cultural values. And after already giving up so much of their lives, they may think their children are behaving like overgrown and entitled brats.
Personally, I don’t believe these estranged parents really, truly want their children back in their lives. They may not admit it, but they’re not looking for a stronger relationship as equals — they want their child to behave as the caretaker they had sacrificed so much of their lives for.
If anyone’s interested, I wrote up a personal essay on my own bout with narcissistic family.
https://www.inherentmag.com/opinion-1/splenda-love
Meta: I’ve seen this comment fluctuate up and down 10 points in less than 10 minutes. If I’ve poked your wound, I’d be happy to hear why.
Your parents will never be your equals. Have you considered that your expectations of equality are themselves a misaligned cultural values?
My goodness, my mother was deferential to my grandmother up until the day she died.
Not to be too dramatic, I believe abusive parents will metaphorically poison their families well beyond their own lives. Cutting that rot out of the tree is sometimes a way to save the healthier branches.
Thus, the estrangement as described in the article… I’m one who plans to never pass down any of the parental styles my parents employed and that will be easier due to my somewhat minor version of estrangement. (I pickup the phone every month or three but I never make the call)
Thanks for the reply.
You are labeling any kind of deference towards your parents as abuse. Do you not see the absolutism and extremism in your statement?
Nowhere did I say children should tolerate abuse. I just said they shouldn't see themselves as ever being able to be completely 'equal' to their parents.
Should the law treat them equally at the age of majority? Of course. Should they be able to make independent adult decisions? Obviously.
But should they expect a relationship between them and their parents to ever be 'equal'? No. Parents have looked after you since you were a baby, they're always going to want to give advice, always going to want to help, and always going to remember you as the helpless little infant who needed their bum washed. Accepting this is the first step towards a good relationship with your parents as an adult.
Going back to my mother and grandmother. Yes, my mom would be annoyed when my feeble grandmother would give her detailed advice on what to do that would be inappropriate between 'equals', but she'd take it gracefully, understanding that this is her mother.
In a healthy relationship, the deference isn't abuse. In an unhealthy relationship, deference enables abuse.
Edit: Additionally, decent people can end up poisoning a relationship, if they never get any negative feedback in response to their poor behaviour. (Or if they completely disregard any negative feedback, because their opinion is the only one that must be deferred to.)
You mean, like this statement:
> Your parents will never be your equals.
Sounds pretty extreme and absolutist to me. Are you saying that the mere act of procreation entitles a person to eternal deference from their children regardless of the nature of their relationship to those children?
> Parents have looked after you since you were a baby, they're always going to want to give advice, always going to want to help, and always going to remember you as the helpless little infant who needed their bum washed.
No, many parents have not "looked after" their children in any significant way. And who are you to assert that everyone's parents are motivated by loving memories of their infancy? Are you merely extrapolating from your own experience and applying it to everyone else?
I am giving a social absolute. Your absolute regarded abuse, a crime, and a serious one at that. A statement being absolute is only concerning if it's also extreme. Labeling deference to parents as abusive is extreme.
> Your absolute regarded abuse, a crime, and a serious one at that.
No, there is no crime of "abuse" per se. Take, for example, the constant, relentless degrading and insulting language that one of my friends directed at his son since he was a little boy, which destroyed the kid's self esteem and has now undermined his agency as an adult, resulting in depression and addiction. I continually hear this kid calling himself "stupid", and he's genuinely surprised that he can't stop himself from drinking. Now what crime do you propose his father should be charged with?
My friend now criticizes his adult son for being weak, saying he has only himself to blame for his struggles. Would you advise his son, and all the others like him, to "defer" to his father? Would you apply to this man all the generalizations you've used in this thread, and accuse him of failing to appreciate how his father "looked after" him?
> Labeling deference to parents as abusive is extreme.
The parent comment did no such thing. They said that an abusive parent's expectation of deference can itself constitute abusive behavior. This is not surprising to anyone who's been exposed to abusive relationships: it's common, for example, for abusive husbands to demand deference from their wives, in line with traditional (and often religious) mores. Would you agree with this as well? Or is it only parents who you think deserve unconditional fealty?
A social absolute is something like 'always be nice to people'. This is different from 'any attempt to be nice to someone is abusive'. one relates to human social interactions. The other relates to what is typically considered a serious crime.
> what is typically considered a serious crime
How often do you suppose the emotionally abusive behaviors described in the comment that you orginally objected to rise to the level of criminality? I'll give you a hint if you need it.
I notice you didn't answer any of my other questions. Would I be way off-base to assume, therefore, that your sympathies lie with the abusive father I described?
Deference is earned.
I'm halfway through your essay and it resonates strongly.
My parents constantly fought when I was a child. They eventually went for a divorce. My father tried to get my mother institutionalized through bribes and connections, but ultimately failed. Eventually, he kidnapped me to his home country. My mother didn't pursue me. My teenage years were spent getting berated for everything and being told I will be a weirdo failure. I was ignored for years as my father pursued women. I found refuge in online forums, video games, and a bunch of friends who had bad homes. We helped out each other. I survived this time, counting down the years until I was 18.
Today, I am married to one of those friends and we have created a happy life together. I too wanted to be comfortable and loved.
My father tells me that he did all of this because he loved me. He saved me from growing up a junkie in the spoiled west. My mother tells me how hard it was for her to lose her child, how hard she cried. There is no point at which they ever asked me how I felt or what I experienced. I am merely a background actor in the grand drama of their lives.
I realize that a lot of parents fumble bringing up their kids. Everyone makes mistakes. But what I and others experience growing is not a fumbling. This is HN - imagine you an engineer responsible for a system that produces incidents every day. Management tells you to never fix anything. Actually, they berate you for even suggesting that, saying that you're just complaining and this is normal.
This is what it feels like.
throwaway284534, my thoughts go out to you. You're not alone. There are a lot of people like us. Many don't make it and fall apart in different ways. The lucky ones build a happy life.
I can’t say I’ve totally forgiven my parents, honestly I’m not even sure how one forgives a parent. But I’ve tried to accept them like I said in the story; not as malevolent demi-gods but just ordinary people who did their best.
It sounds like you’re living your best life and making the most of the path your parents started you on. If there’s anything I’ve learned, it’s that some wounds are easier to pick at then move past to finally let heal. I still think about them occasionally, but it’s lesser each day.
They may not mean to, but they do.
And add some extra, just for you.
By fools in old-style hats and coats,
And half at one another’s throats.
It deepens like a coastal shelf.
And don’t have any kids yourself.I have no need for him in my life.
There's lots of discussion of the generational gaps that cause a lot of this friction (many of which I see discussed in this thread):
- Is emotional abuse "real abuse"? Does it "count" for estrangement?
- Do parents owe an apology for mistakes they made?
- Do children own a relationship to their parents?
- Do children owe respect to their parents, regardless of anything the parents have done?
- Is the parent/child relationship one-sided?
Children of divorced parents usually end up staying with a parent that manipulates them into hating the parent that doesn't have custody, because there's no opportunity to tell your side of the story. It's like state-mandated propaganda, except coming from your parent.
Is it any surprise then that if an authority tells you to hate something in your developmental years, that you end up hating it, and thus estranged?
Also, calling it a shift is pretty disingenuous. It's more like a deliberate eradication.
It's exhausting. I'm a co-founder and CEO, I have dozens of spinning plates to manage and keep track of most all the time. I'm also the father of two young children that I adore. Those are the things I decide to spend my energy on. What's fueling my estrangement is that I intentionally decide the kinds of BS that I'm willing to subject myself to, and the kind of curated insanity that tends to originate from my larger family doesn't make the cut.
https://www.salon.com/2014/02/27/i_lost_my_dad_to_fox_news_h... (2014, situation has generally got worse!)
https://captainawkward.com/2020/12/09/1304-fox-news-stole-my...
At family gatherings, find something else to talk about. I mean, people did have conversations 30 years ago, right?
Eventually I gave up on trying to unpack it any further because it was clear I had no means to do much about it regardless of what I could unearth and understand about how it was happening or if I could get ahead of the curve on some facets of it by avoiding topics that could even incidentally be connected to upcoming "hot buttons".
Not sure if you clicked on the links or have any first hand experience with this phenomenon, but that's exactly the problem: conservative family members always find a way to steer the conversation back to politics. They don't live in the real world anymore, everything relates back to their political outrage. And if you do anything but agree with them, they immediately become defensive and act like you started attacking them for no reason. The only option is to pretend you're in a room full of tourettes patients who can't help what they're saying and shouldn't be taken seriously.
That's a pretty gross generalization. I've been privy to my woke relatives just going on and on about Trump.
> find a way to steer the conversation back to politics
Being direct worked for me. Your mileage may vary. "Do you mind if we talk about something else? I'd rather not discuss politics."
Small Child, "I want to build a robot that helps sea creatures by keeping plastic out of the ocean."
Grandparent, "What's the point when Iran is just going to nuke us all anyway."
Parent, "Ugh." (spends 5 min. trying to verbally tap dance out of that 'conversation' and then later 30 min. explaining to the child not to listen to their grandparents without telling them to stop listening to their grandparents)
I get harassed by family about how awful I am for working in “tech” after both platforms axed Trumps accounts. (FWIW, I don’t work for a social media company. I'm extremely proud of my work. It saves lives. There is literally nothing controversial about what I do. But "tech bad" is now a News Max talking point.)
Coming to a thanksgiving near you.
How would you recommend he ignore that?
Or maybe the other way round, uncle lapped up the Fox News "MSNBC bad!" thing...?
Edit: Oh, and how could I forget? Systemic racism.
Jan 6 has seen a lot of criminal charges, including literally "conspiracy"! https://www.npr.org/2021/02/09/965472049/the-capitol-siege-t... (seems to refer to https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/371 )
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/trump-cutting-off-relatives_n...
https://www.nationalreview.com/2016/11/why-left-wingers-cut-...
There is only so much I can take, there are lots of other people in my life who I never view dealing with as someone I have to subject myself to but do not want to.
This was my experience, too. My father used to playfully needle me about our political differences, but after 2016 it was difficult to discuss anything without it becoming a rant. Finally he yelled at me because I said I agreed with mask mandates, and I decided I had had enough.
My dad regularly shit-posts disproven right wing conspiracy theories on FB.
Whenever I call him I get the latest cliffnotes version of whatever Hannity or Tucker are lying about.
Last time he had to let me go because The Five on Fox was starting.
It's like losing him to a cult.
Yet I see none of these things in her today. Every time I call its a pity party about all the wrongdoings done to her either by people or life. I know at some point I am going to have to support her, despite working most of her life and getting a sizable divorce settlement, I am not sure she has any significant nest egg saved. Quite frankly her brain seems to be rotting as she has few friends, hobbies or outlets in general and spends most of her energy getting involved in the near constant squabbles my extended family likes to get themselves into with each other.
On a more generic level though, I read a lot on the internet (well reddit really) about parents falling into Qanon, or even just being slightly cultist Trumpers, or crazy religious, and they just can't deal with them or identify with them at all. Then there is also the resentment of them being out of touch and being critical that they can't buy a house at 23, are having trouble finding a job, or aren't married and having kids, etc... completely oblivious to how much harder it is to do the things they did at their age today.
I do the minimum to keep in touch and literally have to mentally prepare myself each time I call or visit, because I just find the conversation immensely unpleasant. Its not "toxic" but the constant negativity is very draining. Maybe I am just an outlier here, but with 48% of the nation or whatever it is going out and voting red, and it appears that the younger generation having mostly opposing views, the disconnect might be more that they are just avoiding their parents- actively "losing" touch, rather than merely misplacing it.
Go to nearly any church and you'll see the primary demographic is older individuals. In my younger days, it was quite a bit more even.
Millennials and Gen Z have dumped religion and with it a lot of the social norms. For example, homosexuality. Most Millennials and Gen Z have no problem with someone being gay. It's socially acceptable. Yet just a couple of decades ago one of the hardest hitting insults you could throw at someone was suggesting they weren't straight.
I wish more authors/researchers would explore this.
Not that she has any real room to protest here, she deliberately estranged herself in the very complete sense from her parents and sisters, I've never met a single person on that side of the family despite them living an hour away.
In kind of a macro sense I appreciate my parents raising me, but I do not consider continued contact with them obligatory in any way, shape, or form, and certainly not at the level that my parents in particular want that relationship.
This is what I can't understand. I get not wanting a relationship if your parents were abusive. But if you 'appreciate your parents raising [you]', then clearly you think your childhood was 'good enough', so don't you think you owe them something? Anything? MY childhood was hardly perfect. My mother and father are both incredibly flawed individuals who still get on my nerves, to the point of tears many times. But... they're my parents. I mean, I've made them cry before, and I know I have all kinds of negative personality traits. I can't imagine them just leaving me like that. Sounds terrible
IMHO, no. You don't owe your parents anything for doing the job they signed up for. I have a great relationship with my parents and had a great upbringing. It's very difficult for me to imagine cutting off contact. However, I also don't feel like I owe them a single thing and I think they'd agree with me on that.
For example, if my parents someday needed a place to stay (maybe they can't take care of themselves). I'd feel responsible for them. I definitely feel like I'd owe them that and would feel responsible for their well being.
Though, that wouldn't be unconditional. I can certainly envision a bunch of situations that would change that.
I guess what I'm saying is it's complicated to me.
I'm lucky enough to have a decent upbringing and get along with my parents as well, and this comment isn't intended to be combative, but the "You don't owe your parents anything for doing the job they signed up for" is not strictly true in a legal sense. This is a reflection of American family values enshrined in law.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filial_responsibility_laws
However, I also know a lot of people raised like I was who have left as well, and see no problem with it. They had perfectly fine childhoods, but treat their parents like trash.
Sometimes you are 47 years old when you learn about stufd like alcoholism, gambling, violence in own extended seemingly model familly. Pretty heavy stuff and still managed to be quite hidden. Less heavy stuff is even easier to keept away from others.
Plus people who distance or leave parents as adults often react to how relationship looks now and what it does to them. And sometimes it is done to protect your own kids or so that you are not forced to entangle yourself into new dramas.
Invention of the Pill (and similar biotech medical advances) changed everything forever in ways we still don’t understand. And the consequences/reasons don’t cleanly break along Culture War fault lines. (The Culture War was, in many ways, created by The Pill, too.)
But since then there has been a sea change in attitudes. Marriage equality, abortion on demand, an openly gay man as premier. Little backlash against migrants even when the economy tanked in 07-08. But this did not cause much in the way of estrangement. Indeed I have seen the older generations change too, not just put up with things.
I can only speculate as to why. I think partly because people started to travel and see how things were better in other more enlightened countries and imported those values to Ireland. Life was also improving for most people as an amazing rate which leaves little reason to look for people to blame for things. The church destroyed it's own standing by being totally uncompromising in its attitude to change and covering up abuse.
I believe Ireland also looked on in horror at American politics descending into a complete shit-show with scant respect for the principles it once stood for. You must understand that up till the 90s most Irish thought the USA was the pinnacle of western society. We still hold great affection for the people in general and artistic culture and landscape but the toxic politics, uncompromising religious attitudes and so on are something we view as having held us back in the past and once we abandoned that or at least compromised we made progress.
Anyway, this is just a bit of a brain dump of one point of view. Take it as it is ;)
I have to wonder how much the violence of the last few decades impacted ireland and the nations ability to just accept "the other".
The Irish struggled a bit more with immigration from more different cultures and racism is a challenge everywhere but compared to many other European countries Ireland is on a better path I would say.
I'm rambling a little, but to your question about how the troubles shaped Irish attitudes it's worth noting as a result of the Belfast (good Friday) Agreement our constitution does acknowledge every citizens right to define their own identity.
Also, here's an interesting story about how Irish view the "other" today
https://www.theguardian.com/news/2017/jul/14/pitching-up-anc...
Honestly, there's probably a deeper cultural change that's driving both: ever increasing individualism and increasing unwillingness to sacrifice the expression of that individualism for anything.
This from the OP was pretty poignant and struck me as very true:
> ...This freedom enables us to become untethered and protected from hurtful or abusive family members.
> Yet in less grave scenarios our American love affair with the needs and rights of the individual conceals how much sorrow we create for those we leave behind. We may see cutting off family members as courageous rather than avoidant or selfish. We can convince ourselves that it’s better to go it alone than to do the work it takes to resolve conflict. Some problems may be irresolvable, but there are also relationships that don’t need to be lost forever.
2020 with the US election and the spectrum of response to COVID has thrown this into stark relief. As someone in their late 40s, I have been shocked by the selfishness of my fellow citizens.
What we saw building in the last decade or so, and come to a head in 2020 is out-of-control narcissism: Selfishness, entitlement, lack of empathy, this belief that life is a movie and you are the main character. This is the kind of thing that not only estranges one from family, friends, and society, but prevents any sort of collective action for societal good.
But I also think its more than simply the abandonment of religion. It is the abandonment of religion combined with the rise of the internet/social media. It isn't only religion that has suffered participation declines in the previous decades. Local communities of all kinds have crumbled. The internet has provided people with a means of escape from anyone that could possibly disagree with you and allows you to find perfectly insular cultural bubbles. This is immediately more gratifying than real world relationships, but it also conditions people to have zero tolerance for anyone in "meat space" that isn't in complete alignment with them, in which case they simply distance themselves from the relationship. But at the same time, many of these online community relationships tend to be more shallow and superficial than real life ones, which is why so many people report strong feelings of loneliness in their lives.
We've essentially dismantled most of our traditional local sources of community and replaced them with superficial but unsatisfying online ones.
For me personally, what drove me away from my childhood religion was simple research into it's history. Why should I care if my leaders claim homosexuality is a sin when they've done far worse in the past also claiming to come from god?
Yet for my parents, going against the leader's edicts is unthinkable.
All that comes back to my thoughts on estrangement and religion. While that's not a route my parents have taken, it happens a lot from the online stories I've read.
I guess this is a long winded way to say I'm still trying to figure out how much culture causes religion and religion causes culture. How many of these wild generational differences are due to just general cultural shifts from things like media, and how many of these changes came from things like leaving a faith behind? Did A cause B or B cause A or is it too complicated to be answered in a HN comment section.
I mean who doesn't know those self-absorbed people for whom the rest of the world is to be used for their own gains. Such people are never good parents, and the confirmation of this is how they children behave and think as adults. The best of those realize this and create their own life path, in which there is no place for toxic people, parents or not.
Often a string of 'friendships' which is more about we're similar and the rest of the folks are weird/hates us, so lets hang out. Often string of relationships, one messier than the other. Then big regrets when old, since all the fuckery eventually pays back, often big time. Or they just compare their life with somebody living without big failures and not being unlucky when it comes ie to health.
I have endless sympathy for those who did all the right things and still ended up miserably. But those who repeatedly dig their own moral grave and then cry when in it are not worth spending much energy. People generally don't change that much.
Perhaps I'm an outlier but I've gone months without contact and no regrets. And I hope I'll continue to expect nothing back from my children. After all, their existence was our choice as parents. And anything the kids chose to share or give back is an entirely voluntarily gift.
Much like the notion that freedom is something the US has and well the other ~193 countries by implication don't I suspect this is missing the larger picture quite dramatically.
There seems to be a global shift at play here.
something certainly appears to be tearing away the core.
Personally it's not the deteriorating situation that is freaking me out, but rather the fact that I can't pinpoint what is behind this shift. To put it into crude term: It feels like someone is fucking with me and I can't tell who/why
That inherently leads to a mistrust of all social order
The peak in 1992 is especially intriguing.
How would the Victorians have expressed the same relationship?
Second: If you must, "son" or "daughter", and only prefixed by "adult" when necessary for clarity.
To your second point: "son" or "daughter" is not sufficiently general, and it is gendered. What if I wanted to express the idea of adult offspring without knowing (or caring about) the gender of that person?
"Offspring", maybe, but you can look at the differences in use and decide for yourself. It might confound you to find that "adult offspring" is less common than "adult children" but follows the same shifts in use and a similar ngram pattern.
Selfishness, poor communication skills, and a lack of experience - as always - fuels estrangement.
She'll almost certainly have to move to a city and probably utilize computers all day, get a serious education in an engineering field. The fact that the parent was so absorbed in their own life this doesn't occur to them until literally their child exiles them from their life for being toxic is just wild.
What if you don't want to do those two things?
I experienced this myself to a pretty significant degree, and I wouldn't describe my parents' misunderstanding of the modern economy as "toxic" in any way, so my personal data point is not helpful here. Hence my question: what is the mechanism by which this understanding gap is assumed to lead to toxic behavior?
I've befriended a few sane, educated, elderly homeless people.
Turning your back on your parents if they haven't done anything "wrong" would be coldly, cruelly throwing them away like garbage. That's what happened in Korea and the suicide rates are awful. It's disgusting and embarrassing.
In my case, I haven't talked to my father in 25 years because he is very much a petty, unstable, irrational, unforgiving, un-empathetic, pathetic, unreasonable, hateful, venomous narcissist no one likes, my mother escaped, and he browbeat his late parents to take all of their money when my mother (their nearly adopted daughter/daugther-in-law) needed it more. If it weren't for the terrible way he treated people and the terrible things he's done (like molest my cousin), I would at least still want to know him.
I'm close to my mom.
Which supports the argument that such rapid change should be slowed down, because it's anti-human.
I really doubt that, but that's one of the boogeymen that scares us away from questioning a lot of things.
It probably comes from false assumptions like "'we're' smart" or the "market makes the ideal decision", so all other paths except the one taken were inferior, perhaps fatally so.
Let's say Canada banned social media tomorrow. Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, Reddit, etc. are all blocked and go dark. Implementation of the ban is perfect. In exactly what way would this cause Canada to "[fall] behind and [become] an irrelevant province of the earth"?
I agree that macro scale change did fuel a lot of micro social behavor changes like increase in divorce rates, etc.
In the past family was more sacrosanct because it had more utility for example working on farms together, family cottagw industry. With the industrial revolution the individual became relatively more valuable than before.
That's a bold statement, and IMO a very incorrect one. You just can't see it right now because you're too close.
Electric cars, batteries, and solar power in general have taken off. Autonomous driving draws ever closer.
Covid has changed work culture, education, and lifestyles the world over, probably permanently. And mRNA tech could revolutionize healthcare.
SpaceX made great strides in making launches cheaper.
FAANG became a thing. Social media really came into its own, meaningfully affecting the real world at scale.
The Trump presidency set the world on a radically different course, on issues such as climate change, the West's relationship with China and Russia, and NATO.
Gay marriage became legal in a slew of countries.
This is just the stuff I can recall off the top of my head.
True AI is no where near close.
Spacex is a stunt, not something like inventing AC.
Trump was far less significant than Bush II and 9/11, while that was less significant than the fall of communism, and that in turn was less significant than WWI...
IMO the only difference between my examples and yours is the amount of time that has passed, giving us perspective.
Prior to the 2010s, Microsoft was the only tech company consistently on the list of top 10 by market cap (IBM and Intel made fleeting appearances). The top 10 used to be more diverse - telecom, healthcare/pharma, oil and gas, finance.
Now that list is absolutely dominated by tech: Alibaba, Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Microsoft, Tencent, and (sometimes) TSMC.[1] It's not a turn-of-the-century-style dotcom bubble either; all of these companies are highly profitable.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_public_corporations_by...
You might see the entitled “just walk in and apply” from someone who worked their way up into an insulated position at a large Chase branch, but you won’t see it in a modest position in a small town that directly encounters dozens of struggling people every week.
I am 50. I make good money as a software developer in an agrarian community of 50,000. I have 4 children with one left at home.
It IS (and has been) very clear to me that my children are having a harder time enjoying the same opportunities I have. Which makes me profoundly sad and frustrated. The comforts and excess I do enjoy, can't offset that, as much as I am willing to try.
So I'm not sure what the conclusion you're reaching here is? Are you saying that bank managers (and other moderately successful/wealthy people) are inherently self absorbed?
For example, when I was in high school, I was told that just getting any college degree would enable me to get into a good paying career, or talking with older folks about buying a home, they rarely understand how unaffordable homes are now. Lots of older folks also seem to be completely surprised that people in their 20s and 30s don't want kids simply because of the cost. Or student loan debt, how many times have I heard someone in their 50s+ talk about how they worked hard so they didn't have any student loans when they left school while failing to acknowledge how much cheaper school was in the past?
Not all old people are unaware, but a significant amount are oblivious to how much worse the world is today.
The problem is that history does not repeat itself. It rhymes with itself. This means that "do it the way we did it" won't work. And is frustrating for younger generations. But it also means it's stupid to ignore the rhymes and ignore near and present and easily lectured history available. Don't throw the baby out with the bathwater kind of thing.
It's hard to navigate this. A great example of this (to me) is the "getting a job" thing. The boomer advice would be that you "pound the pavement", "call back", etc. Younger people are frustrated with how out of touch this is, because even if they're willing to try, human resources and other forms of automation have rendered this just about pointless. And yet... the value of networking is stronger than ever. The better advice from the boomer would be to realize that the "technique" they used was about networking with and impressing potential employers, admit that those techniques are no longer relevant, but that the value of networking into an organization still has a lot of influence on whether you're going to work there or not.
This is of course generalized, and prone to a litany of counter exceptions. Because all of these "make life better" are rarely absolute, but more stochastic in nature.
Not sure where you're from, but everyone I know in their 50s (and 60s) lived under the constant threat of losing their job to macroeconomic and market forces beyond their control. Many of them did.
Boomers divorced at civilizationally unprecedented rates and are famous for being the "me" generation and "not trusting anyone over 30".
It is unsurprising that they do not have great relationships with their children and grand-children, when compared with the past.
It's just more of the same from the Boomers, or the Me generation. They people who fully embraced the Me generation raised a group of children who make the me generation look like communal hippies.
I work with people who are difficult at work because of their self centered view of the world, but when I listen to them talk about their families I am horrified by what they expect, to and from family members. I suspect that these people are a joy at work because nobody will tolerate their selfish behavior, so they need to behave.
Almost to a person these difficult people have limited interaction with their children, initiated by the children because of the parents toxic self centered nature.
For example, when I was young, my mom stayed home and raised me, fed me health foods, and gave me a head start on education. She was very loving and did a great job, really. These days, she screams at me and says she hopes Trump cancels my research funding because science is all a lie anyway.
She didn't come up with that idea on her own. I think the detrimental effect of corporate and social media polarization cannot be underestimated. It is literally breaking up families.
I remember referencing the incident a couple months ago post Biden winning and she was like "The dinner table isn't an appropriate place to talk about this".
I swear the last 4 years drove the vast majority of everyone insane, in a very literal sense.
TDS is very, very real and when paired with this whole covid thing it only got worse. Peoples deep issues with the last 4 years joined forces with media fear mongering to create a perfect storm resulting in what will be someday be looked back upon as a massive "social engineering" failure.
There is a large group of people I used to know and respect that completely and literally lost their marbles this past year and a half. And I mean that in all sincerity… they are a shell of who they were before. Blindly listening to “experts” coupled with a visceral hatred for “the others” and intense, unexamined fear can land you in a very bad mental state.
Question authority. All authority. Even “the experts”. Always. They do what they are incentivized to do, which often has nothing to do with what is in the best interest of society at large.
Just out of curiosity, would you say that this has ever happened to you?
I'm asking because I also see many people around me going 'literally insane' (and yes, in both the 'left' and 'right' ways. Basically becoming consumed by some drip of outrage pieces and provocative online discourse).
But I also recognize that I 'went insane' at one point too. Being a kid who grew up on the nascent internet, I became addicted to reddit when reddit first emerged, and I can look back to around the Occupy Wallstreet era when I became obsessed with rhetoric that was disconnected from my own lived experience, and repeated certain ideas that were often disconnected from reality or evidence.
It pains me to see friends and relatives go through the same process. But I 'survived', and I do hope many others can too.
Our current situation reminds me of the brain-eating computer on the book Diamond Age that somebody created to crack passwords. It's like a lot of people are simply gone, and some superconciousness too over their bodies, and it's on the controls 24/7.
I still hope this reverses once the simplistic ideas get hit again and again by reality. Those groups are working very hard to shield themselves, but I imagine some portion of them must always be exposed to the real world.
You mean a religion? People host all kinds of superconcioussness, that's part of what we are. But it's not normal for some to be on the controls a lot of time. This is similar to religious zealotry, what is rather rare.
I've read accounts of older children during the rise of European fascism, seeing their parents consumed by bitter hatred until it destroyed everything in their lives except their devotion to the totalitarian state. I was prepared to deal with that. I have no blueprint to deal with a walking embodiment of the Southern Strategy- just complete and utter denial of the core tenets of what they support.
Holy shit, this. I thought I was crazy for feeling emotionally blackmailed by my parents. They effectively told me that if I wasn't a constant part of their lives, they would be miserable - after things like blaming an episode of depression on my poor academic performance. At the same time being callous and judgemental towards me, and each other. I'm just surprised that they expected me to stick around?
When you are a child, parents look after you. But there is an obligation that goes the other way too: parents expect you to do X or Y, parents (in some cases) expect you to look after them (the article notes that sibling estrangement results from caregiving, this happens in other cases too), and they may expect to you be a certain way.
I am a young(ish) adult, my mother looks after my aunt who is disabled, and is now getting ill herself...they are more difficult than I ever was as a kid. I just sat in my room and played Playstation, my mother has keys to a car, she will do X or Y regardless of what you or doctors tell her...it is very difficult. I think about leaving that all the time (my mental health is extremely poor, trying to care for someone when you can't care for yourself is difficult), you have to respect people who have helped you but the relationship with your parents moves on from that stage. Trying to treat adults like they are still in a parent-child relationship makes no sense. Personally, the main challenge I have is that my mother and aunt still view me as a child who understands nothing, so any piece of help I give (no matter how trivial) is challenged as if I was a child...so it works both ways...both parties have to realise that life has moved on. Trying to say: oh, but this person did this three decades ago is...weird, imo. Also, an adult can choose not to have a child, a child can't choose not have a parent...that dynamic is very different.
Tbf though, I think expectations of children in the West are significantly lower so maybe that isn't a huge thing for most people. But I think it is more to it than: entitled millennial whines about his parents who gave him everything...that just makes no sense (no child wants to have a bad relationship with their parents, you don't pick them, it doesn't work sometimes).
But they were fucked up in their turn By fools in old-style hats and coats, Who half the time were soppy-stern And half at one another’s throats.
Man hands on misery to man. It deepens like a coastal shelf. Get out as early as you can, And don’t have any kids yourself.
"This Be The Verse" by Philip Larkin
Philip Larkin. You ought to give credit when you quote something like this.
It’s hard hear an older generation talk about duty and responsibility now, when 40 years ago they divorced to have a happier life.
Appears it was mentioned specifically and in-depth.
People, especially people with children, rarely divorce just because it's Thursday.
But no. it never happened.
People upset about failure to respect an identity are literally soft children who have no fucking idea how well treated they have been.