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>“What’s worrying is the effect this situation is clearly having on young adults.” I wonder if this is a perverse side effect of normalcy bias [0]? For me, a p

• username90 6y ago
  A young person is building their life, lockdown is preventing them from doing that. For example a person looking to build a family will miss out on a few months they could find a partner, and the fertility clock is ticking
  • ithkuil 6y ago
    Arguably the fertility clock is ticking harder for those who in their late thirties just realized perhaps it's ok to stop waiting for full employment stability before starting to consider a family.
    • username90 6y ago
      A large majority of people in their late thirties have already established a family, they wont show up in statistics.
      • ithkuil 6y ago
        Wow. I just checked the average age of motherhood in the USA and it's 26yo. That's 6 years less than in the country I'm living; perhaps my intuitions about what it's normal in a modern society are heavily skewed (and in my social circles it's even worse, with age if motherhood around 35yo, largely due to effects caused precarious work)
        • tayo42 6y ago
          Quick google search says that not true its a bit higher for the us. Its also bimodal https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/08/04/upshot/up-birth-age-gap.html https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/08/04/upshot/up-bir... Edit: I actually think i confused my self with the age of first birth and age of parents, ignore that first line
          • jobigoud 6y ago
            The grand parent comment probably made the same mistake because there isn't any country where the mean mother age at first birth is 32 or 33, that is, 6 years more than US 26.3 or 26.9 (depending on sources).
            • ithkuil 6y ago
              Yes, indeed I took the average age of the mother of any birth and not the average age for the birth of the First child. Official Italian ISTAT report for claims 31.1 for mother age at first birth. Still significantly higher than US fwiw.
    • pjc50 6y ago
      On the other hand, if you don't do that and end up unemployed, an entire faction will be out to condemn you for having a child you can't support.
    • SketchySeaBeast 6y ago
      I'm just entering my late 30's, and this made my decision for me - I didn't feel good about my resources the last few years and now this? It just got A LOT harder to see myself having kids - at this rate the clock is going to run out before I feel good.
    • aszantu 6y ago
      fertility clock was made up by fertility clinics, they say it's declining sharply, doubeling the rate at which bad things can happen to the child if u get it in ur 50ies, but it's going from 0,1 to 0,3 or so, it's really low if someone's healthy in her fifties and still has eggs left
  • rumanator 6y ago
    > A young person is building their life, lockdown is preventing them from doing that. I find this comment utterly mind boggling. The US's stay at home orders were issued when? Mid to end of March? That makes it what? About 1 month? Are we supposed to believe that "young people" suddenly get into a tail spin because they have to endure a whole month of not finding a partner, get to know each other, make life plans, and get pregnant?
    • capsulecorp 6y ago
      Shutdown happened mid March, it's been over 2 months.
    • nmfisher 6y ago
      > I find this comment utterly mind boggling. The US's stay at home orders were issued when? Mid to end of March? That makes it what? About 1 month? Are we supposed to believe that "young people" suddenly get into a tail spin because they have to endure a whole month of not finding a partner, get to know each other, make life plans, and get pregnant? No, but millions have lost their jobs due to the shutdown, and it's very conceivable that many would put off children/marriage/partnership because of that.
      • SketchySeaBeast 6y ago
        I know that the whole "have kids" thing, which we were thinking about, has basically been totally shut down. Nope, this is craziness, time to just survive for the next few years.
        • karatestomp 6y ago
          On the plus side, if you catch a bad case of Covid then a birth this year will probably work out as free because you'll be hitting your out-of-pocket max anyway. Just make sure you time it so the birth doesn't hit on the next year or they'll get you for double. (yes, for international folks, people in the US who've thought it through really do base their family planning in large part on when their annual insurance limits reset, because the difference in costs can be thousands of dollars even with pretty good insurance, if you accidentally land most of the prenatal care on one year and the birth itself on the next)
• adamsea 6y ago
  More than anything it’s a perverse side effect of catastrophe. ;).
  • deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
• asdff 6y ago
  This is a stressful stage of life for a lot of people. The quarter life crisis is very real. Young people tend to have young kids, or roommates, or tiny apartments, and working from home is a larger strain, especially at the entry/junior level which is a stressful rat race in many fields. Plus you don't have much wealth built up if you do get laid off, and little experience on your resume to justify being rehired quickly.
  • ck425 6y ago
    Even if you don't have those living alone is a different but also difficult situation.
  • malandrew 6y ago
    When in human history has life for most not been stressful? If anything life for most today (even the young with kids, roommates or tiny apartments) is far less stressful than for most humans in history. There's a complete loss of perspective today.
    • courtf 6y ago
      I wouldn't be so sure, history is an awful long time and we don't have great records for most of it.
    • rjkennedy98 6y ago
      Stress is not just a matter of the facts of every day life. That's almost like saying all that matters is if you can eat and sleep. That is not what most people want out of life. They want meaning in their life, respect, and love. Those are all things that are way way way more difficult to get today than at almost any time during human history.
      • watwut 6y ago
        I really don't think so. The people in the past were not getting automatic respect and were not getting automatic love. The marriage was often economic transaction and you often had to live among people who did not respected you. The marriage happened after short time of knowing each other and if it turned out mistake, that was it forever, no love. Some people's lives had meaning, plenty of others were basically surviving in routine .
• pengaru 6y ago
  > This seems completely, and sadly, reasonable. You probably couldn't design a situation in a lab that would screw over the poor more than COVID-19. I'm in a very low-income rural community. With most the folks living off food stamps already, their lives were relatively unaffected by COVID-19, it's not like they were working much anyways. If you wanted to maximally screw over the poor, you'd first get them all sitting pretty long enough to start making families while riding on a social system like food stamps, then yank it out from under them. This is something the current administration has been both working on and threatening, and that creates significantly more anxiety from what I've observed.
  • tjs8rj 6y ago
    As someone also from a low-income rural community, I'd say that entire scenario you presented has problems deeper than removal of social systems. If you were to rank worlds from best to worst, I'd say it looks like this: 1. The poor are net positive on the tax/social system. 2. The poor are neutral on the tax/social system. 3. The poor are negative but not dependent on the tax/social system. 4. The poor are negative and dependent on the tax/social system. 5. The poor are negative and have no social system. In your scenario, the poor start at 4. In your view, the current admin trying to move towards 5. In your view, how does one get to 3? I imagine the move to 3 would require scaling back the social system as to prevent abuse and dependency on it. We probably agree that the poor shouldn't remain a negative impact on the tax payer and dependent on the social system (I'm a conservative, you seem to lean more left of center on this). Where we likely disagree is how to get to 3, and I think scaling back social systems is some cold water in the face to help catalyze that change.
• malandrew 6y ago
  I would also add that the main stream media and social media don't help. Everywhere you turn, you're being conditioned to be in fear and social media amplifies that negative message.
• third_I 6y ago
  I'm gonna speak purely anecdotally, and this is personal opinion. I was born in 82 in France, was 19 on 9/11/2001. It definitely shaped my psyche and world view. You just don't grow up as naively when you know 9/11 is an option (the end result, however we got there). I realized last Sept (19) as I visited the Memorial in NYC for the first time that this had had a long, lasting effect on me. I sobbed in the room where you listen to a flight attendant's last call to her husband. Upon exit I saluted the security guard with deep gratitude. We exchanged a timid smile from the eyes. It felt right. The shitshow that occurred in the US in the years following 9/11 (Patriot Act, Iraq conspiracy to bring in my country to war, Obama spying on Merkel and Hollande and condoning PRISM, etc) made me realize, with profound disappointment, how idealistic and naive I had been about the USA, as if their recent suffering made them somehow impervious to be becoming hostile. I now realize how ridiculous my optimism had been, and the truth is I have countless examples right here at home in history and reality. The fact is we get over something like 9/11, we move on, but sometimes we're reminded that this shaped us deeply. I believe COVID will have bigger and more lasting effects on youth, it's just so much bigger and longer. I hope it will help produce the bigger kind of changes that make history move forward. > You probably couldn't design a situation in a lab that would screw over the poor more than COVID-19. This is very true in the US and most countries around the world. If I were poor and I could choose where, I'd certainly prefer to be poor in Western Europe where at least it's not a death sentence thanks to free healthcare and a minimum socio-economic net (it's not perfect, far from it, but if I had to choose... better than the USA certainly under COVID, and that would probably remain true whoever the president is given the lasting social security structure). I feel grateful, in a way, that we're taking care of poor people. I know many rich entrepreneurs today in Europe who, at some point in their life, were poor AF and may have died if it weren't for all the social nets, they might have never become who they are today. Some of them employ 100+ people, others have contributed massively to funding education (lifelong notably, for adults too). This tangent to say: it's worse for the poor and probably always will be, but that's also how some eventually create value beyond mere wealth. The "trick" is to avoid death, whether social or clinical, when people are drowning. In that regard, most rich countries do worse today than 50 years ago (chances for children to do a better job than their parents), and that's deeply, deeply worrying because it's the very fuel of our current wealth and domination over existence (how modern civilizations are so much better at surviving, at thriving, thanks to science, tech, political stability, etc.) Food for thought, and room for improvement, which I'm sure those most shocked by COVID will have no choice but to care about. They will have seen the fall, so they are uniquely qualified to build the next new rise. Edit: math...
• paulddraper 6y ago
  That plays a role, but I'd guess that overall stability (financial, career, friendships) may play an even larger role.
• freeone3000 6y ago
  9/11 happened to me in grade school. Iraq war happened thereafter. Then the financial crash. Then the subprime crash. And now covid. My life is shaped MORE by crises than by stability - not just the current one, but ALL of them.
  • coliveira 6y ago
    Yes, the US looks increasingly more like a 3rd world country. One crisis after another.
    • war1025 6y ago
      Europe was an even worse place crisis-wise for the majority of the 20th century. The sad thing about humanity is our living memory only goes back fifty years or so. Everything past that is just "back in the old days" and we forget how extremely recently all those things were even on a human timescale.
      • coliveira 6y ago
        The US had its share of bad times in the 20th century too, including the largest depression ever, but at least it invested in economic development. Currently, the goal seams to be reducing all social investment and let the financial industry take control of everything.
    • geggam 6y ago
      Yet every crisis the 1% seem to make more... very opportunistic of them to leverage our society and not give back
  • renewiltord 6y ago
    That is interesting, but if you shift ten years back from there, the kids from that time went through: * Operation Desert Storm * The early 1990s post-war recession, and its jobless recovery * The Asian and Russian recessions (and the LTCM collapse) and knock-on effects Go back 10 years from that and you have: * Early 1980s recession * Black Monday