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Comment by swatcoder | Hacker News Reader

It's not really west vs east. It had been a core value in "western" cultures too, and is changing in "eastern" cultures as we have this discussion.

The change seems to have more to do with the atomization of society that industrialization and contemporary capitalism invite. Relational needs get pegged to currency and become transactional, career becomes a necessary way to fund those transactions, and that necessity then supersedes the actual relationships and responsibilities that had traditionally been taken for granted and free from accounting.

It's a death spiral towards alienation that we stumbled into in modernity and need to collectively address, not a cultural divide between east and west.

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What isn’t mentioned in monideas’ comment is that it is women who do the caring. The change has to do with women being able to not do that. Of course, this might also mean that they might not have a daughter-in-law to take care of them, but if it’s me, I would also choose to avoid that caretaking role.

Assets and income were passed down patrilineally, and hence women were expected to fold into their husband’s family and become the primary caretakers (unless super rich and they had servants).

The problem comes when the government forcefully takes resources from young workers and gives them to old people. You can’t choose independence when young and also choose to depend on someone else. That is trying to have your cake and eat it too, hence all the fretting about unsustainable pension systems around the world.

Thank you for your contribution, you made me engage with your thoughts. As a German born married to an Indian, I can relate with the points

That does make some sense to me! Ty

Could you explain these a bit more (or maybe provide a pointer to they mean):

> "atomization of society that industrialization and contemporary capitalism invite."

How & why exactly do they invite atomization?

> "Relational needs get pegged to currency and become transactional... career becomes a necessary way to fund those transactions"

By this do you mean something like: instead of relying on friends and family for interdependece, we pay for services in a formal economy ?

Not that person but:

> How & why exactly do they invite atomization?

Economies of scale make the commercial services more efficient. Similarly to how my grandma cannot compete in keeping chickens and selling eggs against a huge agricultural corporation, for a working-age person to stay at home and care for their parents is less economical than if this person performs some specialized work at a job, and there are a bunch of other, trained employees taking care of several old people e.g. in a retirement home.

It may have some social functions that get lost, but it gets outcompeted by scalable, specialized, formal-economy alternatives.

Also industrialization made many tasks possible to do alone. With washing machines, microwaves and TV dinners, people can live on their own indefinitely, while this simply wasn't possible before in a farming and manual labor context where you constantly had to ask for and to provide help getting things done. Like building a house, slaughtering a pig, doing field work etc.

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