Multigenerational Living Often Makes Sense. That Doesn't Make It Easy

Another way that the nuclearization gets reinforced is that learning to get along with people different from us and be comfortable sharing a space with someone and making compromises is a skill that must be learned and practice.

But when everyone's living arrangement is atomized and when consumer corporations tell us that we should have every personal whim catered to, we fail to develop that very important life skill and it becomes much harder to live with people than it would be otherwise.

> The individualism and “nuclearization” of the western family is the root problem.

It's probably not a problem or a root problem, it's just a cultural feature that's experiencing challenges due to changing economic factors and bad regulation. It's ok and normal that the expectation in some countries including the United States is that people are more individualistic and that nuclear families tend to be the norm.

I'd argue that the problem that's evading us here isn't solved by increases in communal living (although boarding houses and single-unit apartments with common spaces could help - but good luck enforcing cleanliness standards since we're a bunch of animals), but instead is solved by building with appropriate levels of density such that regardless of your living arrangement preferences you can still live near enough other people, restaurants, doctors offices, work, etc. and activities that are appropriate for the stage of life you are in.

If you are single you might be renting or living in a small studio apartment. You don't have to hate living alone when you don't have to spend all day cooped up unless you want to drive 15 miles to participate in society. You can walk out your front door.

The married (and obviously wealthy) couple can invite the neighbors over for a BBQ and to hang out by the pool. But you can't do that really in the suburbs.

The four Catholic girls can still live in their long house and probably have an easier time participating in local charity or prayer events since they don't have to drive to go participate in those activities and make them a chore.

Etc.

Collectivism is good because you have a tightly integrated communities that take care of each-other. Outsiders often see those parts and think it looks pretty great. But what they are missing are downsides of collectivism. All real-world collectivist groups have strict rules about acceptable behaviors, lifestyles, clothing, etc. Members who deviate from these rules are punished in various ways to pressure them to change: public shaming, expulsion, etc.

And I don't think this is an accident. How would a community where members are expect to directly support each-other work if a member could just do whatever they wanted? Suppose you and I create a commune and a few months in I decide to just drink beer and play video games all day. Are you going to happily keep working and supporting me?

I think the trend of modern people toward individualism is mostly the result of revealed preferences. People, for better or worse, want to make their own choices about their lives.

> The happiest people I see are the ones who live communally.

I think we should be very careful here. Are you sure this isn't just grass-is-greener syndrome? By which I mean to ask: How have you chosen to live? Are you happy with that? And if not, are you making moves to get into a situation in which your beliefs about happiness (communal living) line up with your actions?

"It assumes that every family wants two parents and the children in the house together as the optimal arrangement"

In the opposite direction, even this is not easily achievable today. Lots of single parent households. The US has the highest rate. It seems difficult to maintain relationships when the primary one that's supposed to be the longest lasting (outside of blood relatives) is failing at such a high rate.

The crazy thing is how hard it is to not live this way.

My suspicion is that people who tend to want to live alone feel that way because of some experience with trauma. The baseline seems to be that people desire some measure of company, whether that be intimacy or conversation or just reassurance that they're not The Sole Survivor. When people say that they're happier without some sort of regular interaction, something has disrupted the natural inclination. Depending on circumstances, that may be optimal: if you're surrounded by abusers and people you can't rely on, self-sufficiency is clearly the approach least likely to see you hurt. However, if what I've described is an accurate model, it does mean that the prospect of an even better quality of life lingers in the background, should the happy-alone person find access to treatment for that trauma and a generally healthier and more pro-social environment.

Maybe I'm wrong though, and there are just people who would rather be alone, and that is their max healthful state. Even if this isn't the case, I think it would be wrong to assume access to those healing resources mentioned above is readily available to any given individual; it's probably not helpful to hound someone to get therapy because they say they don't like company. All of this also doesn't mean that there aren't people who feel the need to shack up BECAUSE of trauma.

> “…homes for a married couple with no kids that have a gym, a pool, a garden…”

And our personal lives are similarly rife isolating differences. Consumer culture makes us into people who like movies and buy projector screens, and sports and exercise so we buy fancy bicycles, and sometimes we are busy so we buy Peloton and we like travel so we buy RVs or touring motorcycles and we like music so we get a guitar and we like hacking so we have a home server and IOT devices.

What living space we do have is filled with the clutter of our free-time consumer/internet passions. I don’t expect these multitudes of distractions make us good housemates (not unlike our mobile phones making us poor dinner dates).

The people who I’ve enjoyed sharing space with shared my interests, but that is impossible selection to make from general public. You have to be in a community, and then select from there. I’m not a college student anymore.

> The individualism and “nuclearization” of the western family is the root problem.

But this is what Capitalism negotiated with them. They said, work hard and you can have the American Dream. Now, Capitalists have become greedy. They wish to renege.

This. My father has been living with me, my partner, and my son since last year, following my mother's death. It's a similar situation to the one described here, where he helped with the downpayment and we pay the mortgage, taxes, and bills.

And, sure, there was some friction and growing pains as we all (re-)learned to live with each other. But it's been fine and good, and it lets me support him in a way I couldn't otherwise. It's definitely a different dynamic to if we lived in separate places, but it's not a bad dynamic at all.

Not really. Problematic relationships between parents and their children are very common. It's a valid point against multigenerational homes.

That's what makes it a good article.

Multi generational living isn't all good, and it isn't all bad. We are culturally trained, in the West, to value our privacy and independence and autonomy, which creates challenges for sharing living space with both your parents and your own children in middle age.

But some of the anecdotes show some of the real benefits, too. Like grandparents picking up children from school and cooking for the family. Like the built in socialization and connections that can get lost when living far apart.

I think this article just shows the good and the bad. In the end, I suspect multigenerational living is something like exercise or flossing or eating healthy. Something that can be annoying in the short term. But has benefits that pay off down the line.

What do you do when the elders don't want to be involved and want to live solo independent lives in their golden years? One of my parents is dead, the other lives with us because of poor financial choices; out of three grandparents my kids have, they are all living their own lives and don't want to be involved.

And before we had children, we asked. Everyone was very enthusiastic about participating and helping until the kids showed up, and then we were on our own. Bamboozled!

> I have a bone to pick when people are inconsistent with themselves, using daycare as an example when people have cheaper alternatives, and then have the gall to complain.

Those aren't inconsistencies. You're just asking clarifying questions and getting more information about their preferences.

"Man, it's hard making ends meet [in their head: without living with my parents or without working at the local coal mine or working overtime or doing all sorts of things I don't prefer]".

"You know, you could work at the local coal mine [or work overtime or do all sorts of things you can insert here]."

"But I don't want to."

"Heh, gotcha. So you don't care about ends not meeting very much!"

You just don't share their preferences and think you have a bone to pick with them over it. Because you prefer something, you might be assigning zero cost to it where others don't.

Protip for people, especially Internet-dwellers: I like complaining. Everyone likes complaining.

Once you realize that 90% of the time it's just a way to bond and let off steam, you can get into the complaining and enjoy being with other people.

Then, you can level up to the master-class where you slowly feed ideas to people while agreeing with their complaints.

>“Would you pay higher taxes to allow the government to set up a network of publicly funded childcares?”

This is a pretty good example of the scaling problem with with transferring voluntary personal work to socialized and financialized government work.

Some activities benefit from economies of scale and others do not.

It is more efficient to hire dedicated garbage man for a curbside trash pickup then if everyone took their trash to the dump. However, it would be terribly inefficient to have garbage men following people around picking up their trash. Half of the population would always have to be on shift following the other half, and 100% of the population would have to work as garbage men.

Is there a economic term for this phenomenon of inverse economies of scale?

I think a very "unAmerican" truth is that sometimes things suck, and they're still the best option and have to be done.

It's The Walurus. It's basically a Canadian knockoff of The Atlantic or The New Yorker.

They all tend to subsist off long form articles heavy on pathos and ethos and less on logos. It helps drive engagement statistics that way

They all basically follow the narrative writing format used in Expos 10 and 20

From a fellow Eastern European, it's the norm only because people are poor.

Even in Eastern Europe you should be aware of the concept of "not everyone's experience is the same". Yes, even here in Eastern Europe there's plenty of people stuck in really toxic and problematic relationships when they live together with parents, many of them leading to divorce.

Don't overgeneralize your small bubble. For anything.

It might be the norm, but that doesn't mean it always works or is the right way to live. Some people have terrible parents or difficult children. You may think it's great, but I was raised in that environment and I did not like it. Ditto for community life that you allude to.

The bit that you don't mention is the pressure to conform or 'go along to get along' that environment breeds. Give me the anonymity and personal freedom in large city any day. Here's another saying: "Hell is other people."

Someone who is truly happy is likely to be happy in any situation.

Someone who is unsatisfied, is likely to be unsatisfied in any situation.

You can't fix internal problems with external solutions.

Your parents likely saw you in less than that multiple times - I think you're in the clear here.

We had perfectly good words for it.

If we added new words someone would come along and claim them too.

This is what happens when you move from a society which values dignity to one that values suffering.

It's true that this distinction is often lost now, where we recognise that words can hurt.

As someone who was rarely touched in a good or bad way in my home, yet ended up thoroughly traumatised and damaged by childhood trauma, I'm the first one to point out how insidious non-violent abuse can be, difficult to prove, and often impossible to escape.

But yes, it would still be useful and helpful to draw distinctions between hands-on, physical violence against persons, and other types. In fact it is commonplace to label vandalism and property damage as violence; sure you may take a sledgehammer and violently attack a statue in the town square, and that's plenty symbolic, but it's not assault and battery.

The idea that physical abuse is the only abuse we need to take seriously needs to die absolutely immediately

Emotional abuse is persistent, real and insidious in ways that physical abuse cannot be because it does not have directly causally induced external symptoms.

I can see when someone’s being physically abused and intervene via established processes. Knowing that somebody is being emotionally abused, however, is so much harder because it requires all of the parties to acknowledge that abuse is happening. Unlike physical abuse, an emotional abuser can totally destroy your life and make you think that it’s your fault and you’re the problem.

As somebody who has dealt with both physical and emotional abuse from family, I feel like long term emotional abuse is way more harmful over the longer term and for society as a whole than physical abuse (which thankfully is almost unheard of because we made such a big deal about it over the last few decades).

Your comment suggests to me that you've never been psychologically abused.

Imagine a brutal beating that lives in your head and never stops.

I tend to agree. There’s too much room for subjectivity in this definition for it to be a useful statistic. Physical violence is relatively unambiguous and severe, but these emotional/verbal boundaries have no clear definition. My mother got insulted the other day when I added mayo to a sandwich she made for me because she finds it distasteful.

While verbal and emotional abuse are absolutely real, there are many parts of aging that inherently feel undignified. Are they really being talked down to or insulted in all these cases, or are they just being made to hear something they don’t want to hear? Like, grandpa, we love you but it’s best for everyone if you stop driving now. Mom, stay out of my bedroom (I’m an adult now and this is my house).

Multigenerational Wealth Often Makes Sense. That Doesn't Make It Easy.

To be fair in Canada that might just be a duplex

Nice catch!

Please don't do this here.

I agree, but there's more to real trauma than the three quoted. Neglect is trauma, emotional abuse is trauma as is physical abuse.

I’ve spoken to my therapist about the definition of trauma and what makes trauma legitimate. At the time she’s responded that trauma isn’t about the event but the emotional response to the event. So for example, there are people with ptsd just from seeing 9/11 on the tv from across the country with no personal loss or knowing anyone personally affected. And there are people who were raped as children but don’t have lingering trauma over it. (Edited to add: this was in context in that as a child I was treated in objectively horrifying manners but I don’t have flashbacks, nightmares, or other signs of trauma about the worst parts of it— actually everything wrong with me stems from shit that is objectively not as bad!)