4 ms·

Modern life is really, really complicated. We are dealing with a lot of stuff that's new and unprecedented and that breaks a lot of existing expectations and I

Modern life is really, really complicated. We are dealing with a lot of stuff that's new and unprecedented and that breaks a lot of existing expectations and I think we are doing a poor job of addressing that. Individuals take it hard and then we act like they are defective instead of acting like "the world has changed." And there's a lot to that. It's not any one thing, but the institution of marriage is being seriously impacted and that's a biggie. I don't know how the world begins that conversation, but it seems to be a conversation we aren't even having.

epicureanideal 5y ago
You usually post very insightful comments. I'd be interested to hear what you think about the institution of marriage.
- DoreenMichele 5y ago
  The piece under discussion here -- his first big depressive episode was apparently triggered by a breakup in his mid-twenties where they had discussed marriage and it was a long-distance relationship where they were living about three hours apart. Historically, there were a lot of baked in assumptions about people marrying young, about the wife being primarily responsible for the women's work and the husband being primarily responsible for earning a living (and even that it would be a man and a woman -- we now let same-sex couples get married, at least in some parts of the world). And there is just this huge amount of unspoken assumptions there that you can no longer rely on and it creates friction in relationships. Men who think that the key to everything is career success find that women don't necessarily see it that way anymore and women who want careers often don't want to pick up after their man and do all the cooking, etc. That competes with their time and energy and the ability to learn other skill sets. So we have inherited a huge amount of assumptions about how life works and how relationships work and those things aren't necessarily true anymore. To the degree that we imagine they are, we are being set up for failure. This goes double when the two people in question are not seeing eye-to-eye on that. Our entire employment structure is also rooted in this idea that for "serious" jobs, we will be hiring a man with a wife and kids at home and his paycheck and benefits need to provide for a family and his ability to work and focus on the job will be helped by the fact that his wife is handling a lot of tasks like cooking and cleaning that he doesn't ever have to think about or put time and energy into. And we aren't thinking about the fact this doesn't work as an assumption for how to design our jobs anymore and we aren't thinking about how this impacts individual lives. Men who kind of implicitly assume that they need to be "good providers" and then all will be well and some woman will do the cooking and what not are getting the rug pulled out from under them when that same woman says "You are not worth putting up with." because she has career dreams of her own and no longer absolutely must marry to have much hope of some kind of reasonable comfort in life. Marriage used to be something people did as basic survival and we kind of gritted our teeth and put up with each other even when it was really hard. And we are much more free to walk away than we used to be and then we aren't really thinking through a great many things that this change impacts, from the societal level on down to the individual level.
  - epicureanideal 5y ago
    Thanks! I agree that the roles in marriage or other long term relationships are less clear than they have been in the past. Overall that's probably a good thing in terms of creating the potential for each person to self-actualize, but as you point out, exactly what role each person expects to have in a marriage is not known without a very, very thorough discussion about each aspect. What do you think about Suzanne Venker?
    - DoreenMichele 5y ago
      What do you think about Suzanne Venker? I've never heard of her before. So I don't have any opinions about her.
  - JetAlone 5y ago
    Indeed, the shifts in society took away the hope of marriage from most of us. It used to be that to not get married, something had to go unusually wrong with your life. Nowadays, to get married, something has to go unusually right with your life. Because the vain "proto-marriage" of my youth collapsed like the author's, I am cursed to sojourn the earth alone, at least for a time. The bitter taste dissipates when I know that a real wedding hall is set for me. Better still, it may not even be too late to find its typological implementation on the earth. So I'll keep dunetreading.
brokenmachine 5y ago
Our entire society is set up to push people right to the edge. The modern work week is ridiculous and everything costs exactly the maximum you would possibly pay for it, or takes exactly the maximum work you would possibly do to get it done. There's no assistance and it never ends. I don't know how people with less education/privilege/luck do it. I feel like I'm right on the edge and I'm relatively rich/well educated, and have no health problems. It doesn't have to be like this. The 85 Richest People In The World Have As Much Wealth As The 3.5 Billion Poorest. Our elected officials aren't working for the majority. But it seems that people are too tired from work to make guillotines. Things are working exactly as planned.
- DoreenMichele 5y ago
  Things are working exactly as planned. I don't think any of this was planned. I think it's an emergent phenomenon.
  - kmonsen 5y ago
    Perhaps I am wrong, but for me that is super obvious (that it is an emergent phenomenon). Sadly that makes it a lot harder to solve, if it was planned we could find the people planning it and take back control, but when it is just chaos and general greed that makes this happen it is really hard to stop.
    - DoreenMichele 5y ago
      It doesn't make necessarily make it harder to solve. It potentially makes it easier to solve. The hardest part of solving social problems is getting buy-in from the necessary parties. If it caused by guilt and intentional malice, you have little to no hope of getting buy-in from those parties. If you can analyze it and figure out what went wrong without trying to find some scapegoat to pin the blame on, there is hope of something better arising from this. Something better may already be quietly arising from it, just as yet unnamed and not fully understood. Good information would be helpful, sort of like having a midwife attending a birth. The baby is likely to be born anyway, but the right help will make a difference in the health of both mother and child.
MeinBlutIstBlau 5y ago
It wouldn't be an issue if you couldn't get fired as easily as you can nowadays
the_only_law 5y ago
> Individuals take it hard and then we act like they are defective instead of acting like "the world has changed." To me, this feels even more depressing, because now it reads like I can’t even do anything to fix it without having or being able to obtain an insane amount of influence.
- acceptthedukkaa 5y ago
  "I can't do anything to fix it" doesn't have to be depressing. There are plenty of problems in life that nobody can fix yet. It's pithy, but this quote comes from Viktor Frankl, who knew a thing or two about hopelessness: "When we are no longer able to change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves."
- DoreenMichele 5y ago
  The reality is that societal problems are typically solved by individuals solving their own problems. Lucille Ball and her husband created the "I love Lucy" show because they were both entertainers and she was 40 or so and they wanted kids. They were tired of being on the road and on location and not together. That was not conducive to having kids or raising them. If you look up the history, that show was the "Star Wars" of its era in terms of revolutionizing an industry. It is the first TV show made with film and archival quality footage which did not involve live acting twice a day for East and West Coasts with cheap temporary footage shown for the time zones in between. I wish I could be more help, but the reality is that I am currently behind the 8 ball on this issue myself and desperately trying to escape. Posting wisdom for free on Hacker News while everyone tells me I'm a fool for thinking my blog writing should be something that can support me and also tells me my gender is absolutely not a factor in my intractable poverty is one of my biggest beefs in my life. I post less than I used to here mostly because I'm mostly well and it literally doesn't pay and doesn't result in the professional connections I need to develop a career because most men are hesitant to email me unless they are hoping I will sleep with them. And when I say stuff like that, no matter how nice I am about it, I tend to get kicked in the teeth by multiple people. I'm mostly well. I'm tired of the entire world telling me I'm a loon who made up the whole thing about having a form of CF and getting better and I'm tired of thousands and thousands of people watching me starve and acting like I'm some nutcase for not liking it and for thinking it is unjust and so on. I'm doing my best to figure out how to walk away from Hacker News and from blogging entirely and do something the world thinks it's okay for a woman to earn money from, like start a clothing line. I'm trying to solve my own problems and helping others solve theirs for free "out of the goodness of my heart" like the world expects me to do because I'm a woman or a mom or a former homemaker or whatever is one of the really amazingly bad habits I desperately need to break somehow because, no, other people aren't going to see the light and change and treat me better. So I just need to stop doing nice things for other people which are never going to come back to me if one can judge by nearly twelve years of being regularly kicked in the teeth so far, with absolutely no end in sight.
mstipetic 5y ago
There is no conversation and there is no way to have this conversation. Not sure if there ever was a way to have a nation-wide conversation, or was it pushed top-down by some powerful organization like the church.

epicureanideal 5y ago

You usually post very insightful comments. I'd be interested to hear what you think about the institution of marriage.

DoreenMichele 5y ago
The piece under discussion here -- his first big depressive episode was apparently triggered by a breakup in his mid-twenties where they had discussed marriage and it was a long-distance relationship where they were living about three hours apart. Historically, there were a lot of baked in assumptions about people marrying young, about the wife being primarily responsible for the women's work and the husband being primarily responsible for earning a living (and even that it would be a man and a woman -- we now let same-sex couples get married, at least in some parts of the world). And there is just this huge amount of unspoken assumptions there that you can no longer rely on and it creates friction in relationships. Men who think that the key to everything is career success find that women don't necessarily see it that way anymore and women who want careers often don't want to pick up after their man and do all the cooking, etc. That competes with their time and energy and the ability to learn other skill sets. So we have inherited a huge amount of assumptions about how life works and how relationships work and those things aren't necessarily true anymore. To the degree that we imagine they are, we are being set up for failure. This goes double when the two people in question are not seeing eye-to-eye on that. Our entire employment structure is also rooted in this idea that for "serious" jobs, we will be hiring a man with a wife and kids at home and his paycheck and benefits need to provide for a family and his ability to work and focus on the job will be helped by the fact that his wife is handling a lot of tasks like cooking and cleaning that he doesn't ever have to think about or put time and energy into. And we aren't thinking about the fact this doesn't work as an assumption for how to design our jobs anymore and we aren't thinking about how this impacts individual lives. Men who kind of implicitly assume that they need to be "good providers" and then all will be well and some woman will do the cooking and what not are getting the rug pulled out from under them when that same woman says "You are not worth putting up with." because she has career dreams of her own and no longer absolutely must marry to have much hope of some kind of reasonable comfort in life. Marriage used to be something people did as basic survival and we kind of gritted our teeth and put up with each other even when it was really hard. And we are much more free to walk away than we used to be and then we aren't really thinking through a great many things that this change impacts, from the societal level on down to the individual level.
- epicureanideal 5y ago
  Thanks! I agree that the roles in marriage or other long term relationships are less clear than they have been in the past. Overall that's probably a good thing in terms of creating the potential for each person to self-actualize, but as you point out, exactly what role each person expects to have in a marriage is not known without a very, very thorough discussion about each aspect. What do you think about Suzanne Venker?
  - DoreenMichele 5y ago
    What do you think about Suzanne Venker? I've never heard of her before. So I don't have any opinions about her.
- JetAlone 5y ago
  Indeed, the shifts in society took away the hope of marriage from most of us. It used to be that to not get married, something had to go unusually wrong with your life. Nowadays, to get married, something has to go unusually right with your life. Because the vain "proto-marriage" of my youth collapsed like the author's, I am cursed to sojourn the earth alone, at least for a time. The bitter taste dissipates when I know that a real wedding hall is set for me. Better still, it may not even be too late to find its typological implementation on the earth. So I'll keep dunetreading.

brokenmachine 5y ago

Our entire society is set up to push people right to the edge. The modern work week is ridiculous and everything costs exactly the maximum you would possibly pay for it, or takes exactly the maximum work you would possibly do to get it done. There's no assistance and it never ends. I don't know how people with less education/privilege/luck do it. I feel like I'm right on the edge and I'm relatively rich/well educated, and have no health problems. It doesn't have to be like this. The 85 Richest People In The World Have As Much Wealth As The 3.5 Billion Poorest. Our elected officials aren't working for the majority. But it seems that people are too tired from work to make guillotines. Things are working exactly as planned.

DoreenMichele 5y ago
Things are working exactly as planned. I don't think any of this was planned. I think it's an emergent phenomenon.
- kmonsen 5y ago
  Perhaps I am wrong, but for me that is super obvious (that it is an emergent phenomenon). Sadly that makes it a lot harder to solve, if it was planned we could find the people planning it and take back control, but when it is just chaos and general greed that makes this happen it is really hard to stop.
  - DoreenMichele 5y ago
    It doesn't make necessarily make it harder to solve. It potentially makes it easier to solve. The hardest part of solving social problems is getting buy-in from the necessary parties. If it caused by guilt and intentional malice, you have little to no hope of getting buy-in from those parties. If you can analyze it and figure out what went wrong without trying to find some scapegoat to pin the blame on, there is hope of something better arising from this. Something better may already be quietly arising from it, just as yet unnamed and not fully understood. Good information would be helpful, sort of like having a midwife attending a birth. The baby is likely to be born anyway, but the right help will make a difference in the health of both mother and child.

MeinBlutIstBlau 5y ago

It wouldn't be an issue if you couldn't get fired as easily as you can nowadays

the_only_law 5y ago

> Individuals take it hard and then we act like they are defective instead of acting like "the world has changed." To me, this feels even more depressing, because now it reads like I can’t even do anything to fix it without having or being able to obtain an insane amount of influence.

acceptthedukkaa 5y ago
"I can't do anything to fix it" doesn't have to be depressing. There are plenty of problems in life that nobody can fix yet. It's pithy, but this quote comes from Viktor Frankl, who knew a thing or two about hopelessness: "When we are no longer able to change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves."
DoreenMichele 5y ago
The reality is that societal problems are typically solved by individuals solving their own problems. Lucille Ball and her husband created the "I love Lucy" show because they were both entertainers and she was 40 or so and they wanted kids. They were tired of being on the road and on location and not together. That was not conducive to having kids or raising them. If you look up the history, that show was the "Star Wars" of its era in terms of revolutionizing an industry. It is the first TV show made with film and archival quality footage which did not involve live acting twice a day for East and West Coasts with cheap temporary footage shown for the time zones in between. I wish I could be more help, but the reality is that I am currently behind the 8 ball on this issue myself and desperately trying to escape. Posting wisdom for free on Hacker News while everyone tells me I'm a fool for thinking my blog writing should be something that can support me and also tells me my gender is absolutely not a factor in my intractable poverty is one of my biggest beefs in my life. I post less than I used to here mostly because I'm mostly well and it literally doesn't pay and doesn't result in the professional connections I need to develop a career because most men are hesitant to email me unless they are hoping I will sleep with them. And when I say stuff like that, no matter how nice I am about it, I tend to get kicked in the teeth by multiple people. I'm mostly well. I'm tired of the entire world telling me I'm a loon who made up the whole thing about having a form of CF and getting better and I'm tired of thousands and thousands of people watching me starve and acting like I'm some nutcase for not liking it and for thinking it is unjust and so on. I'm doing my best to figure out how to walk away from Hacker News and from blogging entirely and do something the world thinks it's okay for a woman to earn money from, like start a clothing line. I'm trying to solve my own problems and helping others solve theirs for free "out of the goodness of my heart" like the world expects me to do because I'm a woman or a mom or a former homemaker or whatever is one of the really amazingly bad habits I desperately need to break somehow because, no, other people aren't going to see the light and change and treat me better. So I just need to stop doing nice things for other people which are never going to come back to me if one can judge by nearly twelve years of being regularly kicked in the teeth so far, with absolutely no end in sight.

mstipetic 5y ago

There is no conversation and there is no way to have this conversation. Not sure if there ever was a way to have a nation-wide conversation, or was it pushed top-down by some powerful organization like the church.