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Family instability fuels rising nihilism among young men

121 points by aminozuur 6y ago

etimberg 6y ago
Not related to the content of the article, but that has to be the worst page scrolling experience I've ever come across. Something steals focus and scrolling breaks until you click on the page.
- aembleton 6y ago
  Works for me on both Firefox 80.0.1 and Chromium 85 without any plugins on either of them. What browser are you using?
kp98 6y ago
Everybody already knows this, so it has become a moot point. Nobody really cares, but they should. The deconstruction of the male's role in society will contribute to the downfall of the west, and that's coming from one of these mistrusting, nihilistic, 4chan contributing males
- inamberclad 6y ago
  I don't see the "downfall" narrative in real life. It seems like it's meant to provoke a defensive response from people the same way certain political language does. I, as a stereotypical guy, have more freedom now than ever to do what I want. No doors have been closed on me by recent societal changes. Yes, maybe cultural attention is elsewhere but that doesn't mean that anything has really changed. In fact the relationships described in this article with kids pulling dangerous pranks on each other sounds more old school than anything I've experienced in my life.
  - tathougies 6y ago
    Of course you don't. Rome never fell that's why the czars of russia were named for caesar. The roman empire never fell by all estimations. It just kinda... Went away.
  - kp98 6y ago
    I have a few questions out of curiosity: what is your age? What is your income? and where do you live? A 35 year old making 350k in the bay area is not prone to the nihilistic struggle that fuels many young men
- nl 6y ago
  > The deconstruction of the male's role in society will contribute to the downfall of the west, and that's coming from one of these mistrusting, nihilistic, 4chan contributing males You should get off 4chan if you actually think any part of what you stated here is real. You are stuck in an echo chamber but those beliefs are by no means universal.
  - kp98 6y ago
    I would say that there is copious evidence of the effort by some to degrade the role of white men in society today, often simply in the name of diversity. The relegation of high achieving men is a hallmark of foundering societies.
    - nl 6y ago
      This sounds a lot like you've been on 4chan too long.
dvtrn 6y ago
Impactful article that sums up something I think a (very comparatively young) friend of mine is going through following a divorce just before COVID hit Except does the title perhaps mean “melancholy” because I’m having a hard time finding the intrinsic nihilism as offered by the depictions within the piece. It simply labels unfortunate outcomes of certain elements of our modern experience as such and offers no epistemology or substantive thoughts for how the author arrived at such. As presented, I think ‘melancholy’ is far more appropriate of an adjective here versus something as layered as ‘nihilism’.
- frank2 6y ago
  Headlines need to be hyperbolic nowadays to maximize clicks, and 'rising [sadness] among young men' doesn't sound nearly as dangerous as 'rising nihilism among young men'. I think the writer of the headline thinks that most of his or her readers are unaware of or uninterested in the philosophical connotations of 'nihilism'; to them it means 'without an enduring source of meaning', 'without enduring emotional connections' or more frighteningly 'without moral compass'. Here is a societal process (family instability), the headline wants to imply, that makes our country more dangerous.
  - dvtrn 6y ago
    Hello! Your point is well met. However, I would challenge this: I think the writer of the headline thinks that most of his or her readers are unaware of or uninterested in the philosophical connotations of 'nihilism'; to them it means 'without an enduring source of meaning', 'without enduring emotional connections' or more frighteningly 'without moral compass'. While respecting that the English language is, and forever shall be fluid and dynamic given the particular zeitgeist a speaker inhabits--rhetorical evolution as an indicator of societal-change is not rhetorical refabrication as a device to give authority to an individualized degree of authorial intent. Which IMO contributes to a real misunderstanding to the beautiful nuance that exists within the various schools of nihilistic study; as I don't know of many that would justly simplify nihilism down to "without a[...]source of meaning' or even 'without moral compass'. We have perfectly cromulent and appropriate terminology existing already that encapsulates these things. At least not any that aren't preoccupied with merely the surface of whatever branch of 'nihilism' the author is supposing lies at the root of their thesis here. I still think 'melancholy' is a far more direct and appropriate description of the machinations that bring about such a sensation of existential malaise, far more than anything that approaches nihilism. THEN AGAIN... I am reminded that Sartre had a lot to say about the duality of meaning between what a thing presents itself to be on the surface, and what a thing is ("Being and Nothingness", Ch1. 'The Pursuit of Being') and this 'rhetorical refabrication' has a long history of precedent in such high falutin studies. The author brings up an interesting point of discussion that can be unpacked in a myriad of ways, I'm just not sure about the one that was chosen.
inamberclad 6y ago
Mistrust indeed. I won't even tell you all what I think on here. Too personal. Edit: that aside, there's not really that much meat to this article. It's more like "We were sad once, and we blame our families." That's not new. What's the solution?
lotsofpulp 6y ago
> This is how my friends and I treated one another, and others. There were other examples of stupidity. Taking baseball bats to taillights in parking lots. Driving around town shooting pedestrians and bicyclists with airsoft guns. Getting blackout drunk and racing down the freeway wearing a blindfold. At no point in my life have I ever wanted to damage someone else or their property for the fun of it, and I wouldn’t call the acts above an example of stupidity. This is just bad parenting or hanging around people with bad parenting. And my parents worked 24/7 trying to survive with their small business and trying to learn English. But I don’t think I had to be told not to go around breaking people’s tail lights. I saw how hard they worked to put food on the table, it would feel disgusting to me to throw all that effort away doing things to harm others for no reason.
- ECA_stax 6y ago
  Did you grow up in a city?
  - lotsofpulp 6y ago
    Mix of suburban and rural. Suburban for high school.
    - ECA_stax 6y ago
      Sorry, I don't know where I was going with this. You'll have to excuse me.
      - BLKNSLVR 6y ago
        I understood your question to be around the potentially commonly held belief (read: what I've heard) that city folk are generally brought up with less responsibility bestowed upon them than rural folks (and the scale that exists between those two extremes). Maybe not entirely "responsibility bestowed" but also the behavioural differences (distractions available, ability to deal with boredom) that come with the density difference of both things and people and space. Edit: replaced the word "fact" for a more appropriate description of the truthiness of the situation.
tick_tock_tick 6y ago
Having two parents greatly reduces the change of a young adult committing a crime.
- taneq 6y ago
  Even when controlled for income? I'd imagine single parent households are strongly correlated with lower socioeconomic status, as is antisocial behaviour.
  - wow_no 6y ago
    Of course not, this is classic white supremacy and heteronormativity
- thaumasiotes 6y ago
  If we break out children who lost a parent to catastrophe vs children who lost a parent to that parent's decision to leave, do they have the same crime rates? "Having two parents" isn't what's generating the effect.
  - avs733 6y ago
    And children who lost a parent to the criminal justice system...which is highly predictive of coming from an over policed community where the child will be targeted by law enforcement and the judicial system.
  - 55555 6y ago
    Very interesting. Have you seen stats showing that this is true? Do you care to speculate on the real causality?
    - tathougies 6y ago
      Broken families and single parents are two separate issues. There are data showing children of single mothers by spousal death do better on lots of metrics. This is likely because the remaining parent arent antagonistic towards the deceased. No matter how you slice or dice it antagonism is necessary in a divorce.
tyrust 6y ago
A lackluster opinion piece that is attempting to disguise as an essay. The thesis of the article [0] is unsupported by any of its content. Statistics for the number of friends people have are adjacent to statistics about suicides, implying a causal connection, but no statistics about the number of friends that suicide victims have are presented. [0] - >The lack of stable families has contributed to the widespread mistrust of others and lack of social relationships among young people. It has, I believe, given rise to a sense of nihilism even in an era of relative material abundance, which has characterized some of the violent upheavals.
- hindsightbias 6y ago
  Same author waxes how his adoptive parents made him conservative: https://www.tampabay.com/opinion/columns/Column-Why-being-a-foster-child-made-me-a-conservative_168442110/ https://www.tampabay.com/opinion/columns/Column-Why-being-a-... I guess this was in-between the baseball bat wielding wildings...
  - tyrust 6y ago
    At least that one is obviously just an opinion piece. I donno how they arrived at the conclusion that having a stable family made him conservative, but that's his business and that's fine. I'm pretty sure both sides of the aisle are aware of the value of a stable family.
    - jkepler 6y ago
      Your point is well made in David Bahnsen's book, Crisis of Responsibility, where he cites multiple studies indicating that higher education and income levels correlate with stable families on the right or left of the political spectrum. I assume that would also hold true for libertarian/independent/3rd party types as well.
dx87 6y ago
This post resonates with me, but I definitely don't think it's hopeless. I'm in my early 30s, and have "no friends". There are people I would consider my friends, but as we grew up, we got adult responsiblities like jobs and family, most moved to different states for work, so I haven't actually been able to see them for years. Recently I've been working to improve my life, so I've been going out for walks around my neighborhood more. Just by leaving my house more often, I think I've talked to my neighbors more in the past 2 months than I have in the 10 prior years I've lived here. Now they ask me to get their mail when they're out of town, they ask if I need any help after my wife's surgery, etc. When I go out, I rarely see anyone else my age, it's normally older people out doing things around the neighborhood. I say older, but I'm not exactly young; I was starting high school when my parents were my age. I really believe that the "loneliness epidemic" is a product of a generation that socializes almost completely online, and has no connection with their community. That's how I used to be, and I realize now how shallow and fake online relationships are.
- frenchy 6y ago
  I think this experience is surprisingly common. Modern society affords us a lot of mobility, but I don't think we realise how much it costs us in terms of stable friendships. I have a young kid, and he's still too young to really have "friends" (when you're young enough, any stranger is a friend), but eventually we'll either have to decide to live in the same place for a long time, or he's going to have get used to constantly switching friends.
  - toomuchtodo 6y ago
    Maybe we don’t need the mobility with the concept of remote working normalizing. Community is underrated.
    - dx87 6y ago
      I think you're right. Not building meaningful relationships with friends, family, and neighbors, is one of my biggest regrets of my 20s. It adds a lot of stress thinking how small my support system is, which prevents me from wanting to take risks that could further my career or life goals. It reminds me of the African proverb "If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together."
RickJWagner 6y ago
I saw in the news today where 8 kids were arrested for breaking windows in the Flatiron district in New York. All are white, apparently from families that had a substantial amount of wealth. I totally agree with the author, broken families lead to broken lives. Broken families aren't necessarily broke.
- phobosanomaly 6y ago
  I would say that plenty of kids break windows, even good kids from good homes. Kids just have a thing for breaking windows. Sounds like somebody needs to give these kids some dirtbikes to burn off that energy. Driving blackout on the freeway with a blindfold, shooting airsoft guns at pedestrians, a 17 year-old with a handgun in his room? That is some broken home stuff.
Barrin92 6y ago
>Many pundits and commentators focus on economic deprivation or sociocultural factors—above all, racism—to explain the recent wave of urban anger, triggered by Floyd’s awful death. But the data show that American society has fewer people in poverty and less bigotry compared with decades past; and police use of force is far less pervasive than it was during higher-crime periods This I think is a really bad argument to disregard those causes. What's relevant for discontent is not deprivation in absolute terms, but treatment in relationship to expectations. Yes, racism is arguably not as bad as it was decades ago, but the expectation of how to be treated, and the voice that common people have now, is much, much larger. The clearest example of this is the MeToo movement. Women obviously have gained a lot of rights and are in many ways much better off than they were merely a few decades ago. But that does not mean progress has been made as fast as people think it should have, and that's what matters, together with the capacity to speak up.
jancsika 6y ago
> But the data show that American society has fewer people in poverty and less bigotry compared with decades past; and police use of force is far less pervasive than it was during higher-crime periods. Nonetheless, it could very well be that poverty, bigotry, and excessive force are still high enough to remain a threat to social stability. And that threat is certainly increased by ubiquitious video evidence of bigotry and excessive use of force which didn't exist in decades past.
- ntsplnkv2 6y ago
  Statistics simply aren't visceral, they don't appeal to most people emotionally. it takes graphic imagery to bring it out. Trump saying a statistic is far more likely to evoke a response than someone reading it in a book. Even if statistically poverty is less and crime is less and abuses are less, if people don't SEE that, is it actually real?
phobosanomaly 6y ago
All of the stats he cites outside of the suicide stuff don't differentiate between men and women. They indicate that everyone (men and women) feels like trash these days. Unless every Ken Burns doc I've ever watched was a deepfake, the overwhelming majority of cannon fodder in major conflict in recent human history has been young men, so maybe there is something to the young men break stuff idea. However, there are plenty of women toting AK-47s in the YPG, so I'm not sure the degree to which this is a cultural thing. As for the suicide stats, I believe that men tend to use guns, and guns are one of the gold standards for this sort of thing. Men are exposed to guns more as a cultural thing, and may feel more confident/comfortable in their ability to commit suicide with one. Characteristics of adult male and female firearm suicide decedents: findings from the National Violent Death Reporting System - BMJ Injury Prevention http://dx.doi.org/10.1136/ip.2008.021162 http://dx.doi.org/10.1136/ip.2008.021162 ^^ DOI for the SciHub folks Here are some graphs this nonprofit made from CDC data that help build the idea that women try to kill themselves more than men, but men are more successful at it. https://www.sprc.org/scope/attempts https://www.sprc.org/scope/attempts
imwillofficial 6y ago
It’s as if we as humans adapted to a certain way of organizing ourselves and now that way is deemed “bigoted” and “old fashioned” Who would have thought that nature designed a better social system than we could.
nl 6y ago
> Still, we had food and cheap cell phones and cheap beer—and we had one another, unlike today’s friendless millennials. What the hell kind of judgemental piece of bullshit is this? > The lack of stable families has contributed to the widespread mistrust of others and lack of social relationships among young people. The whole piece is like this - quote some unrelated stats ("suicides up" - even though they are less than the late 90's, and "out of wedlock births are up" - even though the 40% for "now" means those kids are zero years old so unlikely to be rioting) and then use them to support some blanket social statement unrelated to the "evidence" other than "oh this sounds bad"
motohagiography 6y ago
As a man in my late 30s, I began to see older male relatives of my own and of friends dying of the usual things like cancer and some even of opioids, but the thing that struck me was how many of them depended on hiring the funeral home staff as fill-in pallbearers. I made it a priority to be sure that however things go, I'd like to be able to convene a party of six. One of the things I did was get involved with a fraternal organization, as weird and anachronistic as that sounds, it has been very rewarding, and you get to see what a mixed bag other guys at different ages really are and how you are both similar and different. Another was setting better personal boundaries and committing to owning and prioritizing my own social life in romantic relationships, and made a commitment to a set of long term hobbies that I should be able to do until I am completely incapacitated. I heartily recommend all three things to anyone who felt the original article resonated.
- phobosanomaly 6y ago
  There used to be 'sportsman's' clubs, ham radio clubs, sailing clubs, hiking clubs, bowling leagues, search-and-rescue, jeep clubs etc that have to an unfortunate degree just faded away only to be replaced by meetup groups that just seem to be trying a little...too...hard.... Fraternal organizations, hell, that's what they're for! Men of 30 and up to get together and drink beer and tell war stories. It's not weird and anachronistic at all!
  - SamPatt 6y ago
    Those clubs still exist. I'm in a table tennis league and ham radio club, or at least I was before COVID when my state effectively outlawed them.
    - jkepler 6y ago
      Wait, but you can still radio the folks I'm your ham club, right? Or has government overreach stretched to new lows?
  - keenmaster 6y ago
    I want the old Viennese/Parisian/Arabian intellectual cafe and salon clubs to come back. I would join one in a heartbeat.
boomboomsubban 6y ago
This entire thing is based off the ridiculous premise that the "family life" used to be some universal great bedrock. Have you ever talked to your parents generation about their family life? It often seems pretty shitty too, even if the accident of their birth forced a marriage.
- non-entity 6y ago
  Heh. Growing up with a rough relationship to some of my family, I was always told that I would eventually not feel the way I did. I found it ironic at the time, as both my father and stepmother were estranged from at least one of their parents and siblings and generally did not talk well of them.
- 127 6y ago
  Ridiculous to you, based on your own experience. Completely rational and common sense to others.
  - boomboomsubban 6y ago
    Then provide some compelling non-anecdotal evidence supporting your claim. Out of wedlock births seems like a poor measure, and it's the only one presented in the article. "Common sense" sounds like something you believe without evidence to me.
courtf 6y ago
I expected some level of hand-wringing here in response to this article. Maybe it's something in the water in rural America, but none of this is unusual or extreme, and if this behavior is foreign to you, then you and I grew up in different circumstances. Getting together with the boys and breaking the law, pushing each other to go a little further each time, is a rite of passage all over the world. Maybe it's practice for the kinds of risks adults sometimes have to take to survive. A life without these formative experiences sounds dull and sterile to me. I sometimes wonder whether the outrage and histrionics people sometimes get into over seemingly trivial stimuli aren't caused by a lack of exposure to games with real stakes.
- phobosanomaly 6y ago
  I grew up in a rural area around some sketchy people too, but this stuff seems a little extreme. I grew up around kids who drank and did stupid stuff, but driving blackout drunk down a freeway blindfolded and shooting at pedestrians with airsoft guns? I don't think that's a rite of passage. Growing up, even the kids whose brothers were on meth weren't doing stuff that extreme, usually they caught a charge on something way before they got to that point. Breaking your wrist on a dirtbike? Sure. Catching a juvenile possession charge? Sure. Shooting out windows with a BB gun? Sure. Ghostriding in a parking lot? Sure. Yelling obscenities at people out of a passing car window? Sure.
- lotsofpulp 6y ago
  > Maybe it's practice for the kinds of risks adults sometimes have to take to survive. Shooting pellets at unsuspecting drivers and bicyclists and racing blackout drunk in large vehicles are not risks that one needs to take to survive. They’re not even risks, they’re just blatant acts of disregard for others. I hope my kids don’t live in a community where people routinely break laws that kill people.
- ntsplnkv2 6y ago
  Honestly everyone I know that was like that, that broke the law when they were young, turned out to be unsuccessful. Many are addicted to opiates. Very few have real jobs. None of them are educated beyond high school. Frankly, they're all harshly considered "losers." It doesn't surprise me these things happen in rural America. Small towns, your dad knows the local sheriff, you doing something "illegal" and getting arrested is them taking you to your dad.
r29vzg2 6y ago
The most striking quote to me from this was: > In 1960, the out-of-wedlock birthrate in the U.S. was 3 percent. In 2000, it was about 30 percent. Today, it is 40 percent. No matter how you feel about it, it’s got to be said that change thing large has to have some sort of affect on the population. And those effects are still quite unknown.
- alltakendamned 6y ago
  Not being married does not mean the relationship is not a stable or long term one though.
  - r29vzg2 6y ago
    I agree, marriage isn’t a requirement for a stable and long term relationship. That being said, it’s a pretty good indicator, or at least it used to be, and a shift of 36% is very significant.
- wombatmobile 6y ago
  Yes, adolescent behaviour is a consequence of parenting. Marriage is not a guarantee of good parenting. It's just a legal status that may or may not indicate a capacity and readiness to perform good parenting. So, what is good parenting, and how does it work? It is an inter-generational positive feedback system. All mammals have it. The human parenting lifecycle is longer than most. Securely attached parents have higher baseline oxytocin (OT) and a more pronounced OT response to interactions with their children. OT augments the mesolimbic DA system response to visual child stimuli, enhancing their reward value. It also inhibits AMY and augments anterior insula (AI) responses to infant-cry stimuli, facilitating a more empathic reaction. OTmay also modulate prefrontal cortex activity to suppress negative emotional reactions to infant crying. These neurobiological influences promote responsive, affectionate caregiving, which in turn promotes OT activity in children, along with child attachment behaviors that further engage parental brain systems, resulting in a positive feedback cycle that culminates in a mentally healthy, securely attached child. Genetic influences of the child can also either support or interfere with child attachment behaviors and parent-offspring bonding. OFC, orbitofrontal cortex; PFC, prefrontal cortex. The biology of mammalian parenting and its effect on offspring social development James K. Rilling1, and Larry J. Young https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4306567/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4306567/
ArkVark 6y ago
Banning Instagram and Tinder would be great for America and the world. Get people, relationships, and social networks back to reality.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
reallynever 6y ago
I think the comments here reflect a crowd that doesn’t see the reality of this world. For those without purpose, or those that don’t feel the love from society or that they’re creating value for society, these types of scenarios definitely take place. And then these young people are given records and never get the opportunities that others have because once you have a record that’s the end of everything. And it stems from the lack of exposure to the infinite possibilities life provides that a good parent or mentor could foster. Try to put yourself in the shoes of these people for a second and stop judging. This judgement leads to the punishment vs rehabilitation we take towards these people when we lock them up in the US. Understand the root cause...to some people who’d read this (apparently not on hn) this is quite normal. Instead of criticizing, the better questions would be how to solve challenges like these that are rampant. Oh yea, I used to live int he bay with some programmers who were paid hundreds of thousands a year. Every Friday night they would come home with red bull and jager and get hammered. These were guys in their 30s. And needless to say, they would do some pretty destructive stuff without fail...years later, one of them told me, I’m bored with my job, I feel like I want to contribute - no shit...
elipsey 6y ago
"What has been getting far worse, however, is family life. Stable families have been in free fall over the last few decades. In 1960, the out-of-wedlock birthrate in the U.S. was 3 percent. In 2000, it was about 30 percent. Today, it is 40 percent. (This figure obscures class divisions: for college graduates, only one out of ten children is born out of wedlock. For those with only a high school diploma, six out of ten are born to unmarried parents.) The lack of stable families has contributed to the widespread mistrust of others and lack of social relationships among young people." It is certainly a preciuos story that lack of trust amongst children is caused by lack of marriage amongst parrents, but the author has not furnished evidence that this is a causal relationship. "We didn’t really believe that the adults in our lives cared about what we did. Seth got thrown out of his house and wouldn’t tell us why. Josh and Brandon’s dad had been divorced five times, and he was always traveling for work. My adoptive mother had recently moved to another town." I know many adults today who had abusive or indifferent parents that did all of these things _while married_. The factual claims in this article are not supported by the text. City Journal is operated by Manhattan Institute for Policy Research, a conservative 501(c)(3) tax exempt think tank. They seem to be more interested in promoting their values than showing their work. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manhattan_Institute https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manhattan_Institute
elipsey 6y ago
I spent several years of my life raising someone else's son "out of wedlock" with great care and devotion, while his other male family members have so much family values they have been married several times, but couldn't bother to show up. We are on good terms, and in spite of his having a "single mother" he survived to adulthood, and without the criminal record the author warns of as a consequence. This publisher is operated by a conservative think tank. I am not surprised that they claim that civic unrest following police executions is the result of "out of wedlock" parenting by the poor, but it is paternalistic, condescending, self-serving, personally insulting to myself, and most importantly, totally unsupported by any provided evidence. This is hacker news. What is a hacker if not someone who does what works because it's works, even when it's not conventional, and even when authority figures tell you not to because it's naughty? This article furnishes no evidence that being married forces poor people to be good parents, nor do all the downvotes in world.
- apexalpha 6y ago
  But if you (partly) raised him does that still make him "raised by single mother"? Because I think any male role model invested in a kid will do, it doesn't have to be a biological parent. In my country, despite all government intervention, the strongest statistical correlation whether someone becomes "successful" later on in life is whether they have a male father figure growing up, or not.
  - gnusty_gnurc 6y ago
    This is treacherous discussion. Broaching the idea that there's any biological basis for parenting, child development, etc. is pretty much verboten since it runs askew of idealism.
    - apexalpha 6y ago
      I'm sorry I don't think I fully understand your comment. Are you saying it's bad to point out that it's good to have both parents around?
reportgunner 6y ago
Absolutely shocking.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

121 points by aminozuur 6y ago

Not related to the content of the article, but that has to be the worst page scrolling experience I've ever come across. Something steals focus and scrolling breaks until you click on the page.

aembleton 6y ago
Works for me on both Firefox 80.0.1 and Chromium 85 without any plugins on either of them. What browser are you using?

kp98 6y ago

Everybody already knows this, so it has become a moot point. Nobody really cares, but they should. The deconstruction of the male's role in society will contribute to the downfall of the west, and that's coming from one of these mistrusting, nihilistic, 4chan contributing males

inamberclad 6y ago
I don't see the "downfall" narrative in real life. It seems like it's meant to provoke a defensive response from people the same way certain political language does. I, as a stereotypical guy, have more freedom now than ever to do what I want. No doors have been closed on me by recent societal changes. Yes, maybe cultural attention is elsewhere but that doesn't mean that anything has really changed. In fact the relationships described in this article with kids pulling dangerous pranks on each other sounds more old school than anything I've experienced in my life.
- tathougies 6y ago
  Of course you don't. Rome never fell that's why the czars of russia were named for caesar. The roman empire never fell by all estimations. It just kinda... Went away.
- kp98 6y ago
  I have a few questions out of curiosity: what is your age? What is your income? and where do you live? A 35 year old making 350k in the bay area is not prone to the nihilistic struggle that fuels many young men
nl 6y ago
> The deconstruction of the male's role in society will contribute to the downfall of the west, and that's coming from one of these mistrusting, nihilistic, 4chan contributing males You should get off 4chan if you actually think any part of what you stated here is real. You are stuck in an echo chamber but those beliefs are by no means universal.
- kp98 6y ago
  I would say that there is copious evidence of the effort by some to degrade the role of white men in society today, often simply in the name of diversity. The relegation of high achieving men is a hallmark of foundering societies.
  - nl 6y ago
    This sounds a lot like you've been on 4chan too long.

dvtrn 6y ago

Impactful article that sums up something I think a (very comparatively young) friend of mine is going through following a divorce just before COVID hit Except does the title perhaps mean “melancholy” because I’m having a hard time finding the intrinsic nihilism as offered by the depictions within the piece. It simply labels unfortunate outcomes of certain elements of our modern experience as such and offers no epistemology or substantive thoughts for how the author arrived at such. As presented, I think ‘melancholy’ is far more appropriate of an adjective here versus something as layered as ‘nihilism’.

frank2 6y ago
Headlines need to be hyperbolic nowadays to maximize clicks, and 'rising [sadness] among young men' doesn't sound nearly as dangerous as 'rising nihilism among young men'. I think the writer of the headline thinks that most of his or her readers are unaware of or uninterested in the philosophical connotations of 'nihilism'; to them it means 'without an enduring source of meaning', 'without enduring emotional connections' or more frighteningly 'without moral compass'. Here is a societal process (family instability), the headline wants to imply, that makes our country more dangerous.
- dvtrn 6y ago
  Hello! Your point is well met. However, I would challenge this: I think the writer of the headline thinks that most of his or her readers are unaware of or uninterested in the philosophical connotations of 'nihilism'; to them it means 'without an enduring source of meaning', 'without enduring emotional connections' or more frighteningly 'without moral compass'. While respecting that the English language is, and forever shall be fluid and dynamic given the particular zeitgeist a speaker inhabits--rhetorical evolution as an indicator of societal-change is not rhetorical refabrication as a device to give authority to an individualized degree of authorial intent. Which IMO contributes to a real misunderstanding to the beautiful nuance that exists within the various schools of nihilistic study; as I don't know of many that would justly simplify nihilism down to "without a[...]source of meaning' or even 'without moral compass'. We have perfectly cromulent and appropriate terminology existing already that encapsulates these things. At least not any that aren't preoccupied with merely the surface of whatever branch of 'nihilism' the author is supposing lies at the root of their thesis here. I still think 'melancholy' is a far more direct and appropriate description of the machinations that bring about such a sensation of existential malaise, far more than anything that approaches nihilism. THEN AGAIN... I am reminded that Sartre had a lot to say about the duality of meaning between what a thing presents itself to be on the surface, and what a thing is ("Being and Nothingness", Ch1. 'The Pursuit of Being') and this 'rhetorical refabrication' has a long history of precedent in such high falutin studies. The author brings up an interesting point of discussion that can be unpacked in a myriad of ways, I'm just not sure about the one that was chosen.

inamberclad 6y ago

Mistrust indeed. I won't even tell you all what I think on here. Too personal. Edit: that aside, there's not really that much meat to this article. It's more like "We were sad once, and we blame our families." That's not new. What's the solution?

lotsofpulp 6y ago

> This is how my friends and I treated one another, and others. There were other examples of stupidity. Taking baseball bats to taillights in parking lots. Driving around town shooting pedestrians and bicyclists with airsoft guns. Getting blackout drunk and racing down the freeway wearing a blindfold. At no point in my life have I ever wanted to damage someone else or their property for the fun of it, and I wouldn’t call the acts above an example of stupidity. This is just bad parenting or hanging around people with bad parenting. And my parents worked 24/7 trying to survive with their small business and trying to learn English. But I don’t think I had to be told not to go around breaking people’s tail lights. I saw how hard they worked to put food on the table, it would feel disgusting to me to throw all that effort away doing things to harm others for no reason.

ECA_stax 6y ago
Did you grow up in a city?
- lotsofpulp 6y ago
  Mix of suburban and rural. Suburban for high school.
  - ECA_stax 6y ago
    Sorry, I don't know where I was going with this. You'll have to excuse me.
    - BLKNSLVR 6y ago
      I understood your question to be around the potentially commonly held belief (read: what I've heard) that city folk are generally brought up with less responsibility bestowed upon them than rural folks (and the scale that exists between those two extremes). Maybe not entirely "responsibility bestowed" but also the behavioural differences (distractions available, ability to deal with boredom) that come with the density difference of both things and people and space. Edit: replaced the word "fact" for a more appropriate description of the truthiness of the situation.

tick_tock_tick 6y ago

Having two parents greatly reduces the change of a young adult committing a crime.

taneq 6y ago
Even when controlled for income? I'd imagine single parent households are strongly correlated with lower socioeconomic status, as is antisocial behaviour.
- wow_no 6y ago
  Of course not, this is classic white supremacy and heteronormativity
thaumasiotes 6y ago
If we break out children who lost a parent to catastrophe vs children who lost a parent to that parent's decision to leave, do they have the same crime rates? "Having two parents" isn't what's generating the effect.
- avs733 6y ago
  And children who lost a parent to the criminal justice system...which is highly predictive of coming from an over policed community where the child will be targeted by law enforcement and the judicial system.
- 55555 6y ago
  Very interesting. Have you seen stats showing that this is true? Do you care to speculate on the real causality?
  - tathougies 6y ago
    Broken families and single parents are two separate issues. There are data showing children of single mothers by spousal death do better on lots of metrics. This is likely because the remaining parent arent antagonistic towards the deceased. No matter how you slice or dice it antagonism is necessary in a divorce.

tyrust 6y ago

A lackluster opinion piece that is attempting to disguise as an essay. The thesis of the article [0] is unsupported by any of its content. Statistics for the number of friends people have are adjacent to statistics about suicides, implying a causal connection, but no statistics about the number of friends that suicide victims have are presented. [0] - >The lack of stable families has contributed to the widespread mistrust of others and lack of social relationships among young people. It has, I believe, given rise to a sense of nihilism even in an era of relative material abundance, which has characterized some of the violent upheavals.

hindsightbias 6y ago
Same author waxes how his adoptive parents made him conservative: https://www.tampabay.com/opinion/columns/Column-Why-being-a-foster-child-made-me-a-conservative_168442110/ https://www.tampabay.com/opinion/columns/Column-Why-being-a-... I guess this was in-between the baseball bat wielding wildings...
- tyrust 6y ago
  At least that one is obviously just an opinion piece. I donno how they arrived at the conclusion that having a stable family made him conservative, but that's his business and that's fine. I'm pretty sure both sides of the aisle are aware of the value of a stable family.
  - jkepler 6y ago
    Your point is well made in David Bahnsen's book, Crisis of Responsibility, where he cites multiple studies indicating that higher education and income levels correlate with stable families on the right or left of the political spectrum. I assume that would also hold true for libertarian/independent/3rd party types as well.

dx87 6y ago

This post resonates with me, but I definitely don't think it's hopeless. I'm in my early 30s, and have "no friends". There are people I would consider my friends, but as we grew up, we got adult responsiblities like jobs and family, most moved to different states for work, so I haven't actually been able to see them for years. Recently I've been working to improve my life, so I've been going out for walks around my neighborhood more. Just by leaving my house more often, I think I've talked to my neighbors more in the past 2 months than I have in the 10 prior years I've lived here. Now they ask me to get their mail when they're out of town, they ask if I need any help after my wife's surgery, etc. When I go out, I rarely see anyone else my age, it's normally older people out doing things around the neighborhood. I say older, but I'm not exactly young; I was starting high school when my parents were my age. I really believe that the "loneliness epidemic" is a product of a generation that socializes almost completely online, and has no connection with their community. That's how I used to be, and I realize now how shallow and fake online relationships are.

frenchy 6y ago
I think this experience is surprisingly common. Modern society affords us a lot of mobility, but I don't think we realise how much it costs us in terms of stable friendships. I have a young kid, and he's still too young to really have "friends" (when you're young enough, any stranger is a friend), but eventually we'll either have to decide to live in the same place for a long time, or he's going to have get used to constantly switching friends.
- toomuchtodo 6y ago
  Maybe we don’t need the mobility with the concept of remote working normalizing. Community is underrated.
  - dx87 6y ago
    I think you're right. Not building meaningful relationships with friends, family, and neighbors, is one of my biggest regrets of my 20s. It adds a lot of stress thinking how small my support system is, which prevents me from wanting to take risks that could further my career or life goals. It reminds me of the African proverb "If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together."

RickJWagner 6y ago

I saw in the news today where 8 kids were arrested for breaking windows in the Flatiron district in New York. All are white, apparently from families that had a substantial amount of wealth. I totally agree with the author, broken families lead to broken lives. Broken families aren't necessarily broke.

phobosanomaly 6y ago
I would say that plenty of kids break windows, even good kids from good homes. Kids just have a thing for breaking windows. Sounds like somebody needs to give these kids some dirtbikes to burn off that energy. Driving blackout on the freeway with a blindfold, shooting airsoft guns at pedestrians, a 17 year-old with a handgun in his room? That is some broken home stuff.

Barrin92 6y ago

>Many pundits and commentators focus on economic deprivation or sociocultural factors—above all, racism—to explain the recent wave of urban anger, triggered by Floyd’s awful death. But the data show that American society has fewer people in poverty and less bigotry compared with decades past; and police use of force is far less pervasive than it was during higher-crime periods This I think is a really bad argument to disregard those causes. What's relevant for discontent is not deprivation in absolute terms, but treatment in relationship to expectations. Yes, racism is arguably not as bad as it was decades ago, but the expectation of how to be treated, and the voice that common people have now, is much, much larger. The clearest example of this is the MeToo movement. Women obviously have gained a lot of rights and are in many ways much better off than they were merely a few decades ago. But that does not mean progress has been made as fast as people think it should have, and that's what matters, together with the capacity to speak up.

jancsika 6y ago

> But the data show that American society has fewer people in poverty and less bigotry compared with decades past; and police use of force is far less pervasive than it was during higher-crime periods. Nonetheless, it could very well be that poverty, bigotry, and excessive force are still high enough to remain a threat to social stability. And that threat is certainly increased by ubiquitious video evidence of bigotry and excessive use of force which didn't exist in decades past.

ntsplnkv2 6y ago
Statistics simply aren't visceral, they don't appeal to most people emotionally. it takes graphic imagery to bring it out. Trump saying a statistic is far more likely to evoke a response than someone reading it in a book. Even if statistically poverty is less and crime is less and abuses are less, if people don't SEE that, is it actually real?

phobosanomaly 6y ago

All of the stats he cites outside of the suicide stuff don't differentiate between men and women. They indicate that everyone (men and women) feels like trash these days. Unless every Ken Burns doc I've ever watched was a deepfake, the overwhelming majority of cannon fodder in major conflict in recent human history has been young men, so maybe there is something to the young men break stuff idea. However, there are plenty of women toting AK-47s in the YPG, so I'm not sure the degree to which this is a cultural thing. As for the suicide stats, I believe that men tend to use guns, and guns are one of the gold standards for this sort of thing. Men are exposed to guns more as a cultural thing, and may feel more confident/comfortable in their ability to commit suicide with one. Characteristics of adult male and female firearm suicide decedents: findings from the National Violent Death Reporting System - BMJ Injury Prevention http://dx.doi.org/10.1136/ip.2008.021162 http://dx.doi.org/10.1136/ip.2008.021162 ^^ DOI for the SciHub folks Here are some graphs this nonprofit made from CDC data that help build the idea that women try to kill themselves more than men, but men are more successful at it. https://www.sprc.org/scope/attempts https://www.sprc.org/scope/attempts

imwillofficial 6y ago

It’s as if we as humans adapted to a certain way of organizing ourselves and now that way is deemed “bigoted” and “old fashioned” Who would have thought that nature designed a better social system than we could.

nl 6y ago

> Still, we had food and cheap cell phones and cheap beer—and we had one another, unlike today’s friendless millennials. What the hell kind of judgemental piece of bullshit is this? > The lack of stable families has contributed to the widespread mistrust of others and lack of social relationships among young people. The whole piece is like this - quote some unrelated stats ("suicides up" - even though they are less than the late 90's, and "out of wedlock births are up" - even though the 40% for "now" means those kids are zero years old so unlikely to be rioting) and then use them to support some blanket social statement unrelated to the "evidence" other than "oh this sounds bad"

motohagiography 6y ago

As a man in my late 30s, I began to see older male relatives of my own and of friends dying of the usual things like cancer and some even of opioids, but the thing that struck me was how many of them depended on hiring the funeral home staff as fill-in pallbearers. I made it a priority to be sure that however things go, I'd like to be able to convene a party of six. One of the things I did was get involved with a fraternal organization, as weird and anachronistic as that sounds, it has been very rewarding, and you get to see what a mixed bag other guys at different ages really are and how you are both similar and different. Another was setting better personal boundaries and committing to owning and prioritizing my own social life in romantic relationships, and made a commitment to a set of long term hobbies that I should be able to do until I am completely incapacitated. I heartily recommend all three things to anyone who felt the original article resonated.

phobosanomaly 6y ago
There used to be 'sportsman's' clubs, ham radio clubs, sailing clubs, hiking clubs, bowling leagues, search-and-rescue, jeep clubs etc that have to an unfortunate degree just faded away only to be replaced by meetup groups that just seem to be trying a little...too...hard.... Fraternal organizations, hell, that's what they're for! Men of 30 and up to get together and drink beer and tell war stories. It's not weird and anachronistic at all!
- SamPatt 6y ago
  Those clubs still exist. I'm in a table tennis league and ham radio club, or at least I was before COVID when my state effectively outlawed them.
  - jkepler 6y ago
    Wait, but you can still radio the folks I'm your ham club, right? Or has government overreach stretched to new lows?
- keenmaster 6y ago
  I want the old Viennese/Parisian/Arabian intellectual cafe and salon clubs to come back. I would join one in a heartbeat.

boomboomsubban 6y ago

This entire thing is based off the ridiculous premise that the "family life" used to be some universal great bedrock. Have you ever talked to your parents generation about their family life? It often seems pretty shitty too, even if the accident of their birth forced a marriage.

non-entity 6y ago
Heh. Growing up with a rough relationship to some of my family, I was always told that I would eventually not feel the way I did. I found it ironic at the time, as both my father and stepmother were estranged from at least one of their parents and siblings and generally did not talk well of them.
127 6y ago
Ridiculous to you, based on your own experience. Completely rational and common sense to others.
- boomboomsubban 6y ago
  Then provide some compelling non-anecdotal evidence supporting your claim. Out of wedlock births seems like a poor measure, and it's the only one presented in the article. "Common sense" sounds like something you believe without evidence to me.

courtf 6y ago

I expected some level of hand-wringing here in response to this article. Maybe it's something in the water in rural America, but none of this is unusual or extreme, and if this behavior is foreign to you, then you and I grew up in different circumstances. Getting together with the boys and breaking the law, pushing each other to go a little further each time, is a rite of passage all over the world. Maybe it's practice for the kinds of risks adults sometimes have to take to survive. A life without these formative experiences sounds dull and sterile to me. I sometimes wonder whether the outrage and histrionics people sometimes get into over seemingly trivial stimuli aren't caused by a lack of exposure to games with real stakes.

phobosanomaly 6y ago
I grew up in a rural area around some sketchy people too, but this stuff seems a little extreme. I grew up around kids who drank and did stupid stuff, but driving blackout drunk down a freeway blindfolded and shooting at pedestrians with airsoft guns? I don't think that's a rite of passage. Growing up, even the kids whose brothers were on meth weren't doing stuff that extreme, usually they caught a charge on something way before they got to that point. Breaking your wrist on a dirtbike? Sure. Catching a juvenile possession charge? Sure. Shooting out windows with a BB gun? Sure. Ghostriding in a parking lot? Sure. Yelling obscenities at people out of a passing car window? Sure.
lotsofpulp 6y ago
> Maybe it's practice for the kinds of risks adults sometimes have to take to survive. Shooting pellets at unsuspecting drivers and bicyclists and racing blackout drunk in large vehicles are not risks that one needs to take to survive. They’re not even risks, they’re just blatant acts of disregard for others. I hope my kids don’t live in a community where people routinely break laws that kill people.
ntsplnkv2 6y ago
Honestly everyone I know that was like that, that broke the law when they were young, turned out to be unsuccessful. Many are addicted to opiates. Very few have real jobs. None of them are educated beyond high school. Frankly, they're all harshly considered "losers." It doesn't surprise me these things happen in rural America. Small towns, your dad knows the local sheriff, you doing something "illegal" and getting arrested is them taking you to your dad.

r29vzg2 6y ago

The most striking quote to me from this was: > In 1960, the out-of-wedlock birthrate in the U.S. was 3 percent. In 2000, it was about 30 percent. Today, it is 40 percent. No matter how you feel about it, it’s got to be said that change thing large has to have some sort of affect on the population. And those effects are still quite unknown.

alltakendamned 6y ago
Not being married does not mean the relationship is not a stable or long term one though.
- r29vzg2 6y ago
  I agree, marriage isn’t a requirement for a stable and long term relationship. That being said, it’s a pretty good indicator, or at least it used to be, and a shift of 36% is very significant.
wombatmobile 6y ago
Yes, adolescent behaviour is a consequence of parenting. Marriage is not a guarantee of good parenting. It's just a legal status that may or may not indicate a capacity and readiness to perform good parenting. So, what is good parenting, and how does it work? It is an inter-generational positive feedback system. All mammals have it. The human parenting lifecycle is longer than most. Securely attached parents have higher baseline oxytocin (OT) and a more pronounced OT response to interactions with their children. OT augments the mesolimbic DA system response to visual child stimuli, enhancing their reward value. It also inhibits AMY and augments anterior insula (AI) responses to infant-cry stimuli, facilitating a more empathic reaction. OTmay also modulate prefrontal cortex activity to suppress negative emotional reactions to infant crying. These neurobiological influences promote responsive, affectionate caregiving, which in turn promotes OT activity in children, along with child attachment behaviors that further engage parental brain systems, resulting in a positive feedback cycle that culminates in a mentally healthy, securely attached child. Genetic influences of the child can also either support or interfere with child attachment behaviors and parent-offspring bonding. OFC, orbitofrontal cortex; PFC, prefrontal cortex. The biology of mammalian parenting and its effect on offspring social development James K. Rilling1, and Larry J. Young https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4306567/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4306567/

ArkVark 6y ago

Banning Instagram and Tinder would be great for America and the world. Get people, relationships, and social networks back to reality.

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reallynever 6y ago

I think the comments here reflect a crowd that doesn’t see the reality of this world. For those without purpose, or those that don’t feel the love from society or that they’re creating value for society, these types of scenarios definitely take place. And then these young people are given records and never get the opportunities that others have because once you have a record that’s the end of everything. And it stems from the lack of exposure to the infinite possibilities life provides that a good parent or mentor could foster. Try to put yourself in the shoes of these people for a second and stop judging. This judgement leads to the punishment vs rehabilitation we take towards these people when we lock them up in the US. Understand the root cause...to some people who’d read this (apparently not on hn) this is quite normal. Instead of criticizing, the better questions would be how to solve challenges like these that are rampant. Oh yea, I used to live int he bay with some programmers who were paid hundreds of thousands a year. Every Friday night they would come home with red bull and jager and get hammered. These were guys in their 30s. And needless to say, they would do some pretty destructive stuff without fail...years later, one of them told me, I’m bored with my job, I feel like I want to contribute - no shit...

elipsey 6y ago

"What has been getting far worse, however, is family life. Stable families have been in free fall over the last few decades. In 1960, the out-of-wedlock birthrate in the U.S. was 3 percent. In 2000, it was about 30 percent. Today, it is 40 percent. (This figure obscures class divisions: for college graduates, only one out of ten children is born out of wedlock. For those with only a high school diploma, six out of ten are born to unmarried parents.) The lack of stable families has contributed to the widespread mistrust of others and lack of social relationships among young people." It is certainly a preciuos story that lack of trust amongst children is caused by lack of marriage amongst parrents, but the author has not furnished evidence that this is a causal relationship. "We didn’t really believe that the adults in our lives cared about what we did. Seth got thrown out of his house and wouldn’t tell us why. Josh and Brandon’s dad had been divorced five times, and he was always traveling for work. My adoptive mother had recently moved to another town." I know many adults today who had abusive or indifferent parents that did all of these things _while married_. The factual claims in this article are not supported by the text. City Journal is operated by Manhattan Institute for Policy Research, a conservative 501(c)(3) tax exempt think tank. They seem to be more interested in promoting their values than showing their work. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manhattan_Institute https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manhattan_Institute

elipsey 6y ago

I spent several years of my life raising someone else's son "out of wedlock" with great care and devotion, while his other male family members have so much family values they have been married several times, but couldn't bother to show up. We are on good terms, and in spite of his having a "single mother" he survived to adulthood, and without the criminal record the author warns of as a consequence. This publisher is operated by a conservative think tank. I am not surprised that they claim that civic unrest following police executions is the result of "out of wedlock" parenting by the poor, but it is paternalistic, condescending, self-serving, personally insulting to myself, and most importantly, totally unsupported by any provided evidence. This is hacker news. What is a hacker if not someone who does what works because it's works, even when it's not conventional, and even when authority figures tell you not to because it's naughty? This article furnishes no evidence that being married forces poor people to be good parents, nor do all the downvotes in world.

apexalpha 6y ago
But if you (partly) raised him does that still make him "raised by single mother"? Because I think any male role model invested in a kid will do, it doesn't have to be a biological parent. In my country, despite all government intervention, the strongest statistical correlation whether someone becomes "successful" later on in life is whether they have a male father figure growing up, or not.
- gnusty_gnurc 6y ago
  This is treacherous discussion. Broaching the idea that there's any biological basis for parenting, child development, etc. is pretty much verboten since it runs askew of idealism.
  - apexalpha 6y ago
    I'm sorry I don't think I fully understand your comment. Are you saying it's bad to point out that it's good to have both parents around?

reportgunner 6y ago

Absolutely shocking.

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