Also having children changes things quite a bit for all adults.
I wish this article was longer.
I submitted the link because it was the first time I saw this "elephant in the room" clearly defined and identified - not because the article proposed great solutions. Anyway, the author will see the traffic spike.. Let's wait for a longer article.
Really? Is there such a medical condition as "elephant blindness," because I can't see it.
It's unclear to me what the author thinks adulthood is, why we need it, why people aren't (or don't want to) be adults, whether we suffer some kind of societal adult deficit, etc.
This article's message is effectively "you kids get off my lawn - and stop being kids, too!"
I'm not reading that at all. My reading of the article is: "Being an adult sucks." It doesn't really talk about kids at all, and if anything seems like a defense of youth being 'stuck in prolonged adolescence'. The important paragraph (imo):
> For many, adulthood means trading a life entirely devoted to learning for one in which you only read (maybe) two books a year. It means swapping a full schedule of sports, clubs, and music lessons for having exactly zero hobbies (unless watching Netflix counts). It means going from hanging out with peers for the bulk of each day to (maybe) seeing friends a few hours a month. It means shifting from experiencing plenty of firsts to being stuck in a hamster wheel of thousandths.
The author describes a valid “problem” in many western societies:
That many youths are not eager to take over the reigns and responsibilities of adult life. Arguably “western” society suffers from a lack of generational “handing over” of the many important roles and functions that a complex society requires to persist and build a successful future. That however, is probably a whole debate on its own.
IMO, these things count as signs of adulthood: Having a stable relationship, building a family, building a business or being engaged in your community somehow.
In essence giving and contributing, instead of (only) taking and benefiting from society. Kids are allowed that, adults have to be pillars of society.
I know this sounds conservative, but it isn’t. Its just the only way a society can work and persist. The OP argued that we should make adulthood more attractive. I agree. Depending on where you live, life as an adult can be worthwile. I find that the key ingredient is community and social bonds.
Agree on both accounts. To the first point, I had a lot of friends and hobbies before having a kid and it feels that I'm slowly losing control of my time to the point where most of it is gone and I only have like 2 hours to myself. 4 if I want to be sleep deprived the next day.
Two hours of free time to yourself is horrible. The fact that it's expected doesn't change that it's a horrible answer.
We need to reduce the amount of time we spend at work. Ironically, the best way to do that is to spend your early years working 24/7 to try to get wealthy enough that you can spend 4 hours a day doing meaningful work.
Sadly, for the absolute majority even a partial "early retirement" is unachievable regardless of how much or how hard they work
... And have the elder siblings help take care of the younger, but I don't know if that's acceptable at all nowadays in the West or if that's one way to get the CPS involved.
It's way less aplicable because people move so much. Nowadays, not many people live around (say within 1 km distance) their extended family, whereas in pre-modern times it was the absolute norm. What's more, grandparents often lived in the same house and children were raised by multiple adults and not just their parents. The burden on parents was way lower.
I doubt most parents get two hours of free time though.
There's no point in being mindlessly productive at all times.
Saying as someone whose been there
But you actually said "2 hours is plenty to get stuff done if you don't goof off". Now you're changing it to "2 hours a day gives you plenty of time to goof off."
2 hours a day is 14 hours a week. What I'm saying is that goofing off for 2-4 hours a week still gives you 10-12 hours a week to get a lot done.
But if you need to goof off for an hour per day (as many do feel they need to), then there are likely underlying reasons - problems in your life causing distraction, procrastination, etc. If you can address those reasons, you'll get more time to do fun work.
The book The Now Habit addresses similar themes.
I went to a pretty intense university to study computer science with a baby. I had zero free time. It was 100% class, study, kids, and barely any sleep - for FOUR years!
All the people I know who do great things? Zero free time. They work like animals to fulfill dreams and responsibilities.
The people I know who do great things? Seriously, they have free time. They have kids and don't feel bad about spending time with them.
Maybe college isn't the best example for what the real world is like.
Now that I've become an empty nester I have more time to myself than I probably ever had in my entire life! And I have great kids who've turned into awesome people that I can visit and enjoy doing things with.
I would argue you reap what you sow. Put the time and work in now and enjoy the fruits later in life. Don't worry about silly things such as "free time."
2 hours also seems like a lot more than it is, in part because people severely underestimate how much "free" time they had before.
For example, they think they are working from 9-5, but really, most people do lots of little things during that time - browse reddit, whatever.
That time also now can get eaten by kid stuff - scheduling, signups, etc, especially if you have 2+ kids.
It's also rare that it's a single block of 2 hours.
tl;dr: it shouldn’t be time consuming.
So between two people, one is occupied with a kids almost all the time.
> Newborns can’t even move from where they are!
You're right, I was implicitly assuming that you wouldn't leave the baby to just cry because that just sounds cruel to me.
Quite a big caveat here. I’d never let my 1 week or 1 month baby cry at night (or during the day) and in any case, he started sleeping well without any sleep training.
Is this genuinely how you imagine life in the suburbs? You don’t think anyone socialises here or takes part in any culture?
There were coffee shops, bars, restaurants, and the occasional movie theater among the suburbs I grew up in, sure, but they were all spread out and far away, tucked into little strip malls along the main roads - not really part of the neighborhoods people lived in.
I grew up partly in a suburb of New York. The towns around there date back 300 to 400 years, and feel like it. There are walkable town centers with coffee shops and train stations etc.
I also spent a few years in a suburb of Dallas. It was considerably newer, and wedged between a couple of highways. Everything depended on cars.
As I’ve moved around, I’ve seen lots of other points on the suburban spectrum. But for sure, the connotations of “suburb” are nearly uselessly vast.
Yes. From past HN threads, I've come to realize that "suburb" is so undefined that it can mean pretty much anything. We all agree Manhattan isn't a suburb and that remote agricultural land isn't a suburb either. But aside from those, everything else in between is someone's definition of suburb. So it's difficult to talk about it as it could mean any kind of place between those extremes.
From what I hear, time begins to return as they reach some amount of independence around 4-5. If you have more than 1, that’s a pretty big window.
That said, my daughter is incredible, and the issue isn’t that I don’t have any time. It’s that I choose spend as much of it with her as I possibly can.
When I get there, I can see a Walmart, a BestBuy, six pizza places, two dentist offices, three chain sandwich shops and a couple of grocery stores.
Everything I need. Nothing I’d ever be excited to go to. Plus I have to get back into the car.
I’ll just stay home in silence. My neighbours do too.
Having suburban neighbors constitute one’s close friend group is obviously possible, but it would be almost entirely a matter of luck. One has very little control over who their neighbors are, and limited ability to survey a neighborhood before deciding to move in.
Isn't there a quote from Sir Roger Scruton that goes like "Beauty was taken away from the people and now it's being sold back again as a luxury"?
Now, what was your point again?
The point is exactly that: nice things (especially in the public arena) don't have to cost much - and this cost doesn't have to privatized.
The places to live, by themselves, have all the infra we need. The problem is the lack of local jobs.
So, I'm sorry if you are disappointed because I am not giving you a "reason" to state that life in suburbia is so bad. All I can say is that I have (briefly) lived in the Boston suburbs and I've lived in cities of many different sizes before and - looking in retrospect - no place gave me a sense of hopeless dread as much as Newton.
Yes, of course my first statement was "subjective" in the sense that it can not be formally measured or defined.
Thing is, just like "beauty is subjective" but we all can still find things (and beings) with qualities that transcend time and cultures to the point of considering it objectively beautiful, there are some aspects of living in "traditional" urban environments that will never be replicated in American Suburbia, which makes life in Suburbia objectively worse.
What "this" do you mean?
This thread started because of a claim to the effect of "you can only have nice things if you pay for it", as saying that life in the suburbs is "ugly" because it is more cost-effective in comparison with big American cities. That is what I was responding to.
You came after and now you are demanding some "logical" way to establish what's better... what for? My point was only that even (relatively) poor places can be better than suburbs. And yes, "better" in subjective ways. I did not start this claiming I have key metrics that "prove" how life in suburbs is so horrible.
> You need to stop looking at this with emotion
Why?! We are talking about what we value when deciding where to live. Don't you take your emotions in consideration when thinking about this?
> and apply some critical thinking.
If I were applying "critical thinking", I'd be giving you the laundry list of "reasons" against North American suburbia: the car-centric dependency, the "soccer mum" culture that exists because kids can not be independent and are not able to do anything without a parent driving them around, the absurd zoning laws that makes all houses stupidly big and expensive (not to mention ugly), the lack of a "third-place", the classism of most suburbanites, the ever-growing expansion that it requires to keep cities financially solvent...
But this was not what my comment was about. I don't even want to get into this discussion because it is as boring as the people who will try to nitpick and rationalize their life at suburbia...
You clearly have a lot of emotion as it relates to suburbia. Is this politically motivated perhaps? That would explain the vitriol.
- When I don't give "reasons" to explain my distaste of American suburbs, it's "completely subjective".
- When I do give "reasons", it is "vitriol" that you want to dismiss as "politically motivated".
You are acting like someone called your baby ugly, but you really can't argue because you know deep down it's true. In situations like these, it's better to just own it and say that you love it anyway instead of trying to find ways to discredit those who said what you didn't want to hear.
Have a fire in my backyard, because I don't have one Watch my kids ride their ATV around the yard Watch the kids play on the swingset in my backyard, or the trampoline Let the kids run around the neighborhood Wash my car in my driveway Work on my car in my driveway Take a tablesaw out of the shed to make a cornhole set Play cornhole in my yard. Watch the kids play in a sprinkler in my back yard Go stimming in the neighbors pool next door Watch the kids ride a bike outside Not put in a new drivers side window because it gets broken every 6 months Not worry about having a place to park my car Not hear sirens all night long Light fireworks off in my yard Let the dogs around around in my yard *Put a zipline in my yard
If you feel so inclined to respond to those, I'll add more for you. I lived in a city for a while. I got mugged, my car was constantly broken into, at least 1 person dies every from a gunshot wound, many more are wounded. I can't just send the kids to go play outside. Parking is a bitch, and before you jump on that, cars are never, ever going away. I will always own a car.
You must know deep down that you're trying to shove your personal preference down others throats and claim your preferences are objectively better than anyone else.
Not only is it quite arrogant, its very strange. You like living in a city, that's great. I don't, that's great. To try and claim that it's OBJECTIVELY better is the stupidest fucking thing I've come across all day. I never ONCE claimed suburbia was better, not once. I don't have any reason to jam my preferences down your throat.
None of the negative things you mentioned about city life are "transcendental". They might be common in USA cities, but these qualities are far from universal.
IOW, if your baseline is a shitty city, of course the suburbs are going to seem like a good deal. But have you ever considered what life in a good urban space might be like?
> claim your preferences are objectively better than anyone else.
No. What I am saying is that your basis of comparison is very limited and that you were robbed of the opportunity to experience something better. To make an analogy, you want to engage in a "Budweiser vs Miller Lite" argument, while anyone that had the chance to try "proper" beer will tell you that such an argument is pointless.
To repeat: the argument in the beginning was about "taking the beauty away and selling it back as a luxury" in relation to suburbs vs big cities and "having to pay for nice things". My comment was not against "suburbs" as a matter of preference, but merely to point out the historical, FACTUALLY BAD post-WW2 urban development in North America which destroyed its cities and gave people no other choice but suburban sprawl.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Nw6qyyrTeI
https://usa.streetsblog.org/2015/03/05/sprawl-costs-the-publ...