Hacker News Reader

Hacker News

Comment by brindlejim | Hacker News Reader

Full thread

brindlejim

Personal beliefs, and these doesn't apply to all males (live in choice!):

- guys bond when they do things together: build, play, mock fight

- remote work makes it hard to find that building community at the office

- having kids wipes out your leisure time for at least a few years

- and thus you're left with no community of guy peers IRL

- guys need less talk therapy than women, and the institutional solutions that support women won't work as well for the males, on average

- more paternal leave sounds like a recipe for more solitude and dysfunction

- guys probably don't function as well as stay-at-home parents, on average, as women (yes, these are rank generalizations which contradict many modern assumptions). all other things being equal, which of course they never are, the kids will probably get better care if mom stays home during the early years while dad works

- tech has replatformed us all into virtual communities that physically isolate us

View on HN

> more paternal leave sounds like a recipe for more solitude and dysfunction

like that corporate boot harder

plenty of time to meet with friends when you're not stuck on a work schedule, and even when I was on leave I still checked in once a week just to make sure there weren't any fires. 1 hour once a week was enough contact with work colleagues.

Meanwhile the wife and I worked out a decent schedule and I did morning yoga and later took rowing lessons. Fun stuff.

There are fundamental issues to the dissolution of community (in the US):

- People working more hours

- People moving more frequently

- Reduced home ownership rate

- Lack of reciprocal interdependency: people don't "borrow hedge clippers" anymore

- Deference to contractors and service providers over DIY*

- (Discounting religious aspects) Downfall of church as the basis of local community

- Fear of other and strangers promoted by mainstream media

- Status snobbery increases greatly in a society where material needs are satisficed

- It can feel like wasted effort or carrying the relationship to arrange social gatherings and parties when there is a lack of reciprocation

* As far as I know, I'm the only one on the block who can operate wire strippers, soldering iron, backhoe, auger, vehicle jack, air compressor, angle grinder, and sourcing specialty items (sometimes from overseas). Most of the people on my block are introverted game players, TV watchers, and don't have many hobbies. Meanwhile, I'm bugging my second cousin for single prop Cessna engine hours over at thriving aero sales and training school in between doing PPG which doesn't need any licensure in the US.

>As far as I know, I'm the only one on the block who can operate wire strippers, soldering iron, backhoe, auger, vehicle jack, air compressor, angle grinder, and sourcing specialty items (sometimes from overseas). Most of the people on my block are introverted game players, TV watchers, and don't have many hobbies.

I feel like you might be not talking to your neighbors at all. I live in a tech metro area and people are always working on their houses and have many hobbies. A neighbor borrowed a belt sander from me last week.

i have a few hobbies that you wouldn't notice if you didn't spend a significant amount of time with me. even the people who share one of those hobbies have no idea what else i do.

These are all great points.

Would add that wealth separates people. Both in the form of larger houses and lawns, and hiring contractors instead of entering into reciprocal interdependence.

There's a weird gravity to media and entertainment that sucks people out of the old analog forms that include community (church) into new digital forms that impose for distance (games and TV). We have been replatformed for the sake of capitalism.

more paternal leave sounds like a recipe for more solitude and dysfunction

how is that? you can still go out and meet friends. paternal leave is time to bond with the baby. it's not about how good the care is the kids are getting from you, but the relationship that you develop with them while you are at home. i was rather bad at it, and i had difficulty with my time at home with the kids (feeding and changing diapers was not the problem though). but now i have a wonderful relationship with my kids, and i believe that being home with them early one made a big difference. (later i was also working from home which helped too)

Is any of this based on anything? I'm sure I've met lots of guys that think they don't need therapy but really should be in therapy.

What metric are you using to measure need of therapy?

i am not sure if men need less therapy, but i think for men it is more difficult to talk about problems and share their feelings, making talk therapy more difficult and less effective.

Wouldn't that mean they need more rather than less?

If only there were some sort of substance that allowed men to access their feelings and made them talkative.

more of something that is not working? how would that help?

and if you are sarcastically referring to alcohol, then no, please not. while alcohol may make you more talkative, it also robs you from the clarity of mind that you need to actually solve the problems that you are talking about.

For one class of people, let's say talk therapy is totally, 100% effective. After x hours of therapy, they are considered healthy, well-adjusted individuals, and won't shoot up a school or music concert.

Let's say talk therapy is only 20% effective for this other class of people. Given y hours of talk therapy, they recieve only .2 * y benefit.

For this group, they need 5 times as much talk therapy to gain the same benefit. 5 is more than 1. The end goal is the same though; healthy well-adjusted people that don't shoot up schools, don't go online and DM random women with mysogynistic screeds, aren't sad sacks of a human being, and live fulfilling lives. Of course that's up to each individual to decide for themselves as the system is architected, but I think that whole "not shooting up schools thing" bears consideration by society as a goal that's worth pursuing on a wider level.

As for alcohol, you don't even believe in therapy, who are you to tell others how they can make it more effective for them? Obviously black out wasted does no good, but a beer to take the edge off does wonders. A prescribed anoxalytic would do better, but those are far less available.

they need 5 times as much talk therapy to gain the same benefit

this is where i disagree. a friend of mine is a therapist, and she won't take people for more than half a year. if in that time she can not help them, then this most likely means that these people are simply not receptive to the therapy that she was able to provide. so more therapy won't help them.

my reading of therapy being 20% effective means that it is 100% effective, 20% of the time, and completely fails 80% of the time. (well, i suppose there are also cases where therapy is partly effective, but i do not believe the relationship is linear, and that a partly effective therapy can be turned into a fully effective one by simply adding more time)

(and i am aware that 20% is a made up number, we can fill in what actual statistics provide if there are any)

so basically i believe any specific form therapy is effective with some people and fails with other people. that doesn't mean that there is no working therapy for those people, just that they haven't found it yet, or haven't found the right therapist yet. (sometimes the success of therapy depends on the personality of the therapist and the patient)

i agree with the end goals, but the examples you list are the extreme cases, that i hope are actually easier to address because i think they are caused by some very painful experience that a therapist should at least be able to detect. (i don't really know, but i hope anyways)

the cases of concern in this thread are the more subtle ones that prevent people from sharing their feelings, and the cause for that i believe is much harder to detect and address.

Men need a different kind of therapy. Adam Lane Smith explains here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5yyWlp6sTv0

Are you serious right now?

When I say based in something, I mean something tangible. Not the podcast of a reality TV show contestant.

HN is ridiculous. It's absurd how putting a microphone in front of somebody makes everything they say true

He worked for years as a licensed therapist counseling individuals and couples. If you are looking for a source of authority, he's better than nothing, if not as good as a randomized control trial.

I think you vastly overestimate the qualifications required to be a therapist, and it certainly isn't nearly as good as a randomized control trial? What?

That's putting aside any marketing reasons this person has to appear on a podcast and have "the answer" to male loneliness.

i don't know about the qualifications of this guy, or whether what he says about the difference between men and women has any bearing on reality, but what he says about wanting to solve problems and not just feeling good does resonate with me. as does having a purpose.

for me that connects to believing that the purpose of humanity as a whole is to contribute to an ever advancing civilization. that means even if one particular purpose that kept me going disappears, i can find others because there is plenty of help the world needs, and finding a new purpose is much easier if the overall purpose is: do something useful for the world and not: you are supposed to provide for your family. if you can't do that, you are useless.

Men and women have differences, big deal. These include psychological differences which have an impact upon society.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com