15 ms·

The Hidden Costs of Living Alone

155 points by lxm 5y ago

ThinBold 5y ago
I can happily live with my parents and save a fortune (assuming the logic in the article is correct), but the mating market wouldn't agree with we. The only way I can compensate living alone is to work extra harder to accumulate more professional currency; even if it means that I am so-called stealing jobs from people with families.
nickff 5y ago
>"Many who live by themselves are effectively penalized at work too. “Lots of people I interviewed complained that their managers presumed they had extra time to stay at the office or take on extra projects because they don’t have family at home...”" This is my concern when parents say they require accommodations (less work and lower expectations of productivity) because they have children (especially when working from home); they implicitly assume that non-parents can and should 'pick up the slack'.
- synergy20 5y ago
  A different perspective, assuming none of us will have kids, now imagine what is going to happen on all the services you must have when you age, who is going to provide them? They will be provided by all the children many parents including your colleagues are busy raising while having a job(or more than one job). We will all benefit from this one way or another, it's vital for any nation to maintain a healthy birthrate(2.3 per couple) for the same reason.
  - another_story 5y ago
    This assumes the rate of deaths stays the same, that we can't automate certain processes and that we also maintain the current economic model which requires growth to sustain retirement funds and government services. “Healthy birthrate” is entirely dependent on the underlying structure of that society. Alternatively, we could adjust and actually require less people over time. I'd argue that in many ways we've reached the point where a growing population is not healthy at all.
- seanmcdirmid 5y ago
  Flexibility is great for everyone, for people with kids and without. I’ve never heard that used as being code for lower productivity before.
- asdff 5y ago
  That shouldn't be the assumption. If there is slack to be picked up, good management should hire more labor rather than stretch existing labor thin and burn out their workers. Companies that grind people right to the deadline are doing it wrong.
  - Digit-Al 5y ago
    I agree. At one company my team had a new manager start and one of the first things he said to us was "if you have to work overtime I'm not doing my job properly". That attitude should be more widespread in my opinion.
- klyrs 5y ago
  I have a family, and I'm very protective of my time because failure to, for example, pick my kid after school would quickly escalate to criminal negligence. If my work demanded that I commit any crime, I would refuse until I got fired (quitting is for losers, in this case: I want my damned severance). I don't assume that non-parents can or should pick up the slack. I expect all of my coworkers to be protective of their work-life balance and I'm dismayed whenever I see them prioritize work in a detrimental way. Said differently, if you're upset at parents putting their children's wellbeing before your team's performance, then you should re-evaluate your relationship with work.
  - jimt1234 5y ago
    > I don't assume that non-parents can or should pick up the slack. Maybe you don't assume that, but the system built around parenting does assume that. A clear example of this is "new parent" time off. At my company, new parents can take 4 months off work (paid). So, if you work on a team of a dozen people, and 10 people on the team have children at some point, that means, at a minimum, 2 people are picking up more of the slack than the others.
    - klyrs 5y ago
      At my work, new parents tend to give 3-6 months notice before that PTO and we hire temporary replacements. What's wrong with your workplace? It's not the parents.
    - willcipriano 5y ago
      Alternatively the firm can take a productivity hit for a couple months.
    - hnaccount141 5y ago
      Let's be clear here, the "system" in question is just exploitative management. If management knows a worker will be taking their leave they can either hire to make up for it or adjust their productivity expectations for a few months. If they don't, that's not the fault of the person taking the leave that they're entitled to as part of their compensation package.
- deleted 5y ago
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- sneak 5y ago
  Seems to me that your supervisor and coworkers should never hear about whether or not you have a family or kids. Surely that sort of information is need-to-know at work?
  - throwawayboise 5y ago
    Yep. Came here to say that this is a consequence of revealing too much about your private life to your co-workers.
    - dvtrn 5y ago
      True story, I once worked with a guy who got out of being "voluntold" to work a weekend long migration project by bringing up "I've got dad duties this weekend, sorry". A few months later he and I were hanging out at a bar, the time gets away from us and I go "hey man don't let me keep you out here away from your family all night, it's cool if you gotta go". He looks at me and asks "what family?" I am confused. That's when he drops it on me: he's been at this company 5 years lying about having a family because it gets him out of doing off-hours work and nobody asked any questions, they'd just assign work to someone else. Whereas when some of the younger, childless, and more impressionable workers try to protect the boundaries of their off-time...well you see where this is going (if not: they would get talked into doing it anyway) It's a kind of malingering that I found...honestly....kind of brilliant in a bastard kind of way.
      - another_story 5y ago
        I've done this before. What one of the earlier posters says about being able to negotiate completely disregards cultural context and what you come to the table to negotiate with. Having the kids excuse allows you to get away certain things while also maintaining your standing in the company.
      - sneak 5y ago
        You can also simply opt out of this sort of additional unpaid work by enforcing strong boundaries with your employer. It doesn't require lying.
- redisman 5y ago
  > they implicitly assume that non-parents can and should 'pick up the slack' Not accurate. I expect management to “pick up the slack”. If the work can’t be finished in a normal work week then that’s not my problem (and it wasn’t before I had kids either)
- Waterluvian 5y ago
  Honestly, I think that my peers without kids who work crazy hours are, simply put, suckers. I don’t expect them to pick up slack. I expect the employer to properly staff and schedule. If they have not learned to stand up for themselves, that’s not on me. And if they choose to work extra (like I did when I was a newbie) then that’s their freedom to.
  - isoskeles 5y ago
    > Honestly, I think that my peers without kids who work crazy hours are, simply put, suckers. I've seen these people get much more work done than their peers (sometimes) and get compensated with higher salary and promotions. They might be suckers, or they might be prioritizing money or experience while they still have a lifestyle that can support it. So passing judgment by calling them "suckers" seems kind of ignorant IMO.
    - tharkun__ 5y ago
      The problem is when these people only get more done because they work more hours for the same money. They basically lower their own salary. I can totally understand this for someone that is paid hourly and wants to get overtime pay to have enough money to fix their car. But our context here is usually highly paid, salaried tech jobs. If I work more hours I can also get more done. I don't want to though and that has nothing to do with children or family. I've never in my life worked more for free. I sometimes work more when something needs doing but then I take extra time off somewhere else. So far no issues with promotions or anything else like that. All my bosses understood that this is a money transaction. They give me flexibility to come in late, leave early, have a dentist appointment in the middle of the day etc and I'm flexible too. Production is burning at 5pm? Of course I don't leave even if I have a date later that night. EDIT for clarity: if someone takes a 40h job for 100k and works 80h weeks they have now effectively lowered the market rate and their own salary to 50k. Why anyone would do that is beyond me especially since I see the same people complain about "H1Bs undercutting them" .
    - Waterluvian 5y ago
      Those people are at the mercy of their employer who gets to decide if all their free work deserves a raise or promotion. It’s not a great system.
- nautilius 5y ago
  So what you're saying is: you're expecting parents to simultaneously work as much as singles do, and 'in their free time' raise the next generation of people that can wipe your ass in 60 years when you expect someone to take care of you? Alternatively, you can vow to never take any service/product/support/technology from anyone of a younger generation. Then it would be fair.
  - l-lousy 5y ago
    Why isn’t it possible for both groups to have an equal work life balance?
    - nautilius 5y ago
      It sure is, if you adjust for that at work. If you don't, you're expecting parents to work (at least) two jobs.
      - arp242 5y ago
        If that's an issue for you then don't be a parent. Or have one of you be a stay-at-home parent. Or get a job with fewer hours. The unspoken assumption here is that people without kids aren't doing anything outside of their work that might be considered "work". They just choose to spend their time on different things. Parents really aren't special.
        sidlls 5y ago
        Raising the next generation of people who pay singeltons' salaries and make their lives possible is different from indoor rock climbing and slamming avocado toast, and relatively at least it very much is special.
        arp242 5y ago
        You have a very curious view of childless/single people. Gosh, this must be the first time I've seen someone use "avocado toast" other than a parody of these kind of views. And ironically, I actually spent many years volunteering as a scout leader and some youth computer initiatives shrug
- sidlls 5y ago
  Even if parents require accommodations the way you suggest, considering that we (parents) are subsidizing the lives of single people, it isn't an unfair ask. However what you suggest is the exception rather than the rule. Instead one or both of the parents tend to work very hard and struggle to juggle career and domestic obligations, often to the detriment of raising their children. It's worse the lower the socioeconomic ladder one goes, too, because of the extreme physical and psychological pressures that build.
  - beebeepka 5y ago
    Who, and how, is forcing parents to subsidize the lives of single people? Either I don't get what you are saying, or that argument was made in bad faith
    - sidlls 5y ago
      Who do you think provides the economic activity that supports our civilization? It's human beings. Who makes these things? Parents, and at great sacrifice, given how abusive and demanding employers are. Single people benefit from having parents make the sacrifices and do the work of raising those human beings. They benefit substantially. And then complain about property taxes and supposed 'special treatment' parents get. It's petty and ignorant of them.
      - nybble41 5y ago
        That economic activity is the product of the kids' choices to work and not the parents' choices to bring more kids into the world. Single people are not being "subsidized" by the parents of the other (perhaps also single) people working for them—they're paying their way in full. If anyone owes compensation to the parents for the cost of raising their kids it's the kids themselves, not the parents' employers or random strangers. The only basis for saying that the parents deserve compensation for the kids' economic activity would assume that parents own their kids (and thus the fruits of their kids' labor) and can force them to work for the parents' benefit, but that sort of slavery is out of vogue in modern society.
- acomar 5y ago
  why the eff are you lot fighting each other? it's your managers putting the expectation on you that you can pick up the slack for your coworkers going home on time. who's really out of line here? the people going home to take care of the rest of their lives, the people staying to "pick up the slack", or the people who insist that it's reasonable to ask you to do that in the first place, instead of, I don't know, hiring adequate numbers of staff or paying you overtime for the extra hours worked?
- dcolkitt 5y ago
  This is just the fundamental nature of human nature. People are hardwired to watch out for the kids in their “tribe”. Ask yourself how you would respond as a manager, on a gut level to two different scenarios. One is a subordinate comes and says “I need to leave early today, my daughter’s the lead in her school play.” The other says, “I’m gonna dip out mid-afternoon. Tryna make the 4-20 celebration at Mission Dolores later”. We can argue till we’re blue about whether this is fair or not, or the burden and benefit of making people for the next generation, and entitlement and so on. But at the end of the day, none of it will matter. You can’t change human nature, and people who care for young children will always be given a certain unique level of respect and accommodation in any society. Period.
  - _t2kx 5y ago
    "Bet. Enjoy!" works for both.
  - bruce343434 5y ago
    > “I need to leave early today, my daughter’s the lead in her school play.” "And you tell me now?" > “I’m gonna dip out mid-afternoon. Tryna make the 4-20 celebration at Mission Dolores later”. "Yeah, no you're not gonna dip out." Note how you phrased "I need to leave early today" vs "I'm gonna dip out". Semantically they mean different things. It's also just bad form to dump these kinds of things on your manager on the day itself.
- vegai_ 5y ago
  So what do you suggest instead? I can see a few options - nobody being a parent - parents being bad parents so they can be good workers - any work dropped on the floor due to parents stays on the floor until they're back Options 1 and 2 lead to worse societies and therefore decreased efficiency in the slightly longer run. I guess the last option would work the best? Overall it should be blindingly obvious to everyone that parents work way more than non-parents, at least for the first ~7 years of their kid's life.
  - KennyBlanken 5y ago
    Option 4: "asking employees to do extra work because they are single constitutes discrimination based on marital/family status. Don't do it. Ever."
    - vegai_ 5y ago
      So that's kinda like my option 3. I kinda agree, although if "asking" includes an option of denying the request, then I think it's perfectly fine to ask those people who have more free time to do more work when needed. Note that where I live, things like this will usually be compensated 1:1 (sometimes better).
- lmsseattle 5y ago
  I'm 58, female, never married, no kids. I'm not raising the next generation but my coworkers with kids are. I want to be supportive of a group of people who have chosen to do something - and someone has to do it - I have chosen not to do. If I stay late at work to finish a project and my coworker with kids leaves to pick up her kids, why is that a problem? When child-free workers fail to understand their responsibility - paying taxes for public schools, supporting parental leave, staying late so a parent can pick up their kid - in helping to ensure that children have parents who are available to them, they fail to understand the role we all need to play in creating and nurturing a community. I would make the same argument for coworkers caring for aging parents.
bserge 5y ago
It's the same in Europe. And likely the rest of the world.
deleted 5y ago
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Nbox9 5y ago
Bella DePaulo Ph.D. has been writing about this for at least 14 years now [0]. This article is actually a good summary of her thesis and perspective which is simply society is biased against single people. Her book titles include Singleism, Alone, Singled Out, and Single with Attitude. [0] https://www.amazon.com/s?i=stripbooks&rh=p_27%3ABella+DePaulo+PhD&s=relevancerank&text=Bella+DePaulo+PhD&ref=dp_byline_sr_book_1 https://www.amazon.com/s?i=stripbooks&rh=p_27%3ABella+DePaul...
makeitdouble 5y ago
> American society has been slow to adapt to people who are single or live alone. The elephant in the room is that most societies actively want to penalize people living alone. It’s not hidden in any way, the centuries old rhetoric is people are supposed to get into cis-gendered couples and have kids. There is cultural lag on allowing LGBTQ to get the same status, but our society will always pay lip service to helping single people, and strongly push for building families, whether it still makes sense or not from the population perspective (I have no idea about that). Single elderly people are tougher problem, but old farts will just blame them for not having kids caring for them (physically or financially).
- ren_engineer 5y ago
  >It’s not hidden in any way, the centuries old rhetoric is people are supposed to get into cis-gendered couples and have kids I mean, society ceases to exist if enough people don't reproduce. From a pure evolutionary perspective the society and culture that prioritizes having kids is going to expand and grow compared to cultures that don't. There are tons of anti-natalist groups that existed and died off because the entire group died off and there wasn't anybody to replace them
  - scollet 5y ago
    You can be anti-natalist and still adopt or foster.
- sli 5y ago
  > The elephant in the room is that most societies actively want to penalize people living alone. This rings very true for me. Where I live, and likely many other places, one bedroom apartments and studio apartments have a huge overlap in rent. Both are way too high, but it's absolutely bonkers that studio apartments are almost every bit as expensive. This is not a large city/tech hub/anything notable.
- nautilius 5y ago
  No shit. It's called survival of the species. Let's call this society A. Now try to imagine a society B where everyone with a kid is penalized. Let's make it as clear-cut as possible: death penalty. Which one do you think will continue to exist after a few generations? Obviously it's not as straightforward for LGBTQ+, but it turns out - if not denied the right by an oppressive society - many are happy to adopt or find other arrangements to take care of and raise children. Win-win.
black_13 5y ago
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kodokushi https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kodokushi
conjecTech 5y ago
The article stretches to portray this as a cost imposed by society, but I think the bulk of it is far more innate than that. There simply are economies of scale to household size. A lot of housing costs are proportional to surface area, and the ratio of surface area to volume drops are structures get larger. Building larger units is more economical. It extends to selling as well - it's going to take less effort to sell/rent one 2-bedroom apartment than it would for two 1-bedrooms. The cost of user acquisition for things like paper towels is lower if the average customer is buying for multiple people too. I totally get the desire to live alone, but I never have because having roommates/cohabitation always seemed like such an obvious economic decision compared to other ways to reduce living expenses. The Onion put out a video[1] in 2009 about an economic recovery plan that amounted to boyfriends finally agreeing to move in together with their girlfriends. I've spent a lot of time researching the housing market and macroeconomic reasons for its current distortion from historical norms. That video often pops into my mind when I do. The overall housing stock in the US has more than kept pace with the growth in population, but the reduction of household size and related growth in housing space per person has created a huge amount of incremental demand. I don't think those are purely bad trends. My parents' generation paired off young and quickly, and the long term effects are easy enough to pick out in divorce statistics. But I do have to wonder how much of the economic woes 20-40 year olds face right now might be alleviated if the pendulum swung back a little in that direction. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ADncN9HIa4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ADncN9HIa4
- 3grdlurker 5y ago
  But in an economies of scale line of argumentation, shouldn’t the cost of building/selling houses for single people go down precisely because plenty enough people (and plenty more are projected to) live alone? It does seem that culture lag is to blame.
- throwawayboise 5y ago
  I think divorce statistics are not related to age of pairing off, which if anything was younger farther in the past than it was even a generation or two ago. Divorce is simply not the social stigma that it used to be, and it's easier to get so it happens more now. Rather than working through their problems, people think it seems easier to just split up.
ice2000 5y ago
The biggest cost of living alone is getting on the housing ladder. Even with a large deposit saved up, on my fairly average UK salary, the amount I can borrow on a mortgage does not get me very far in my area. If I had a partner, even if they were on a minimum wage job, it would change what I could afford from 2 bed terrace to decent 3 bed semi-detached. Not saying it's unfair, just that it kind of sucks.
- sershe 5y ago
  Could it be that your expectations of what housing should be are formed by the "default" households? I think 2 bed is way too much for one person, while 3 bed is barely enough for two, so it looks like you are getting a better deal now :)
jxidjhdhdhdhfhf 5y ago
A lot of these things seem like complaints about reality rather than complaints about the way society is organized. I'm sure there's some social bias against single people in the workplace and out. That seems like a reasonable complaint. On the other hand smaller food packages, for example, require more packaging material, more shipping weight per portion, some fixed organizational overhead per item, etc. Two people sharing a bedroom, kitchen and a bathroom is always going to be more cost efficient than one person in the same bedroom, kitchen and bathroom. Two people sharing a car is more efficient than two single people each buying their own. A family phone plan is more efficient to manage cost-wise for a phone provider since they only need to manage one account.
- bradlys 5y ago
  A family phone plan is cheaper per person purely for capitalistic reasons. It’s not due to some magical overhead issues. After all, managing an account is a trivial amount of expense for those companies when it comes to the monthly income from a customer.
  - jxidjhdhdhdhfhf 5y ago
    The cheapest phone plans tend to be available to singles anyways so maybe that wasn't a good example. Mint Mobile is $15 a month.
aaron695 5y ago
[dead]
singlethrowaway 5y ago
Loners have no claim to the benefits of society. They have no skin in the game. No healthy society should cater to them. Sucks to hear if you've been lead to believe otherwise but its the truth.
karaterobot 5y ago
> These all may seem like small annoyances, but in practice they are regular reminders that American society still assumes that the default adult has a partner and that the default household contains multiple people. Well, it is the default, so it's completely reasonable for society to assume that. It's the default for historical reasons, but it's also currently reflective of the vast majority of people's experiences. If the options are "single household or not single household" and only 28% of households are single, that's not even close to parity. Also, check my math, but: if 28% of households are occupied by people living alone, doesn't that mean that closer to 20% of people are living alone? That's assuming all non-single households have exactly 2 people, which of course is wrong: on average they have more.
- emerged 5y ago
  well we should definitely only consider the “default” of every dimension of human being. says whoever is default in that particular trait.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
werber 5y ago
I texted a group of friends who are in relationships earlier today if they would take bags of garlic powder because the 1.5lbs 9 Dollar container was so much cheaper than another option but I didn’t want to devote like half a shelf in my kitchen to it.
haspoken 5y ago
https://archive.md/0Rx9x https://archive.md/0Rx9x
lazyeye 5y ago
"living separately is about 28 percent more expensive than living together" Only if everybody in the household is in paid employment. Ask a sole breadwinner if living alone is 28 percent more expensive...
KennyBlanken 5y ago
Higher tax rates despite having higher living costs. Your coworkers and boss assume you're cool with off-hours work because you don't have a family. Food packaged in sizes that you can't possibly use before it spoils or molds.
manojsuniverse 5y ago
Thanks for sharing this valuable information.
sershe 5y ago
FWIW, I found it's cheaper per capita to live alone. Almost every non-negligible non-housing cost scales linearly. When I was alone I was happy in a studio; I could work, sleep, exercise, have guests, etc. all in the same room. At most I'd have a small 1-bedroom, to hide the bed from guests :) With 2 people you need to have a separate bedroom in case only one person is sleeping, a living room to have guests (we also use ours for exercise, which has on occasion prevented me from exercising when it was occupied, so ideally we'd need a gym room too), then you need an office for each person in case someone else is in the living (or in case both are working and need space), suddenly it's a whole 3-bedroom house and it feels more confined than a studio did.
kibbleble 5y ago
I think it's really funny that fantasy and DnD artists draw taverns as spacious inns with tons of rooms, when in reality most ancient people were sleeping together in the same room, peeing together in the same bathroom, and generally never alone except if you had the money to afford such a luxury, or you gave yourself alone time by running off into the forest.
bradlys 5y ago
Definitely have much higher costs to living alone. Some hidden - some not. Having mostly lived alone for the last 10 years, all of these things are obvious to me and not-obvious to my partnered, family’d, and roommated peers. The surgery thing is real - part of my not looking into one surgery I should do is because I live alone and won’t have anyone to take care of me. I might be able to get a friend to drive me from the hospital but that’s it. Where I am - I spend more on rent than some of my peers spend in their entire month. I’m not living in a lavish place either - just a 400sqft inlaw unit in the backyard of a 4000sqft lot. This is due to the lack of housing for single people and communities built around it. Unfortunately, many developers out there aren’t interested. After all - why go after a bunch of individual customers when you can target groups of customers just as easily? (Cost is effectively same to get a group of four to purchase than an individual - but now you can sell 4x more) These could be addressed but I don’t think our capitalistic society is willing to do such because the incentive structure isn’t there. They’re always seeking maximum profit and single people will continue to be pointless to cater to - especially since single people often will buy the group thing because there are no other options. So you can now sell 4x the product to just an individual - huge win. Rig the market further and support this fucked up system as much as possible. No reason to ever change this structure because it maximizes draining bank accounts. So while it makes sense for the companies - it completely fucks the consumers. This is where capitalism fails so often in the real world and deserves all of its criticism.
- novok 5y ago
  Part of that lack of 'single person housing' is a zoning issue. It sets minimum sizes and makes building multi-family units literally illegal. Thus with things needing to be a minimum size and multi-family units illegal, developers only go for what is economically viable in an area, which is the SFH. The most capital efficient kind of construction is actually the large wooden house designed as a fourplex. You also get more total rent & $$$ sold from multi-units than you do from a single family house, because multi-units are more land efficient. If developers were not limited, you would see a lot more of them.
  - bradlys 5y ago

155 points by lxm 5y ago

I can happily live with my parents and save a fortune (assuming the logic in the article is correct), but the mating market wouldn't agree with we. The only way I can compensate living alone is to work extra harder to accumulate more professional currency; even if it means that I am so-called stealing jobs from people with families.

nickff 5y ago

>"Many who live by themselves are effectively penalized at work too. “Lots of people I interviewed complained that their managers presumed they had extra time to stay at the office or take on extra projects because they don’t have family at home...”" This is my concern when parents say they require accommodations (less work and lower expectations of productivity) because they have children (especially when working from home); they implicitly assume that non-parents can and should 'pick up the slack'.

synergy20 5y ago
A different perspective, assuming none of us will have kids, now imagine what is going to happen on all the services you must have when you age, who is going to provide them? They will be provided by all the children many parents including your colleagues are busy raising while having a job(or more than one job). We will all benefit from this one way or another, it's vital for any nation to maintain a healthy birthrate(2.3 per couple) for the same reason.
- another_story 5y ago
  This assumes the rate of deaths stays the same, that we can't automate certain processes and that we also maintain the current economic model which requires growth to sustain retirement funds and government services. “Healthy birthrate” is entirely dependent on the underlying structure of that society. Alternatively, we could adjust and actually require less people over time. I'd argue that in many ways we've reached the point where a growing population is not healthy at all.
seanmcdirmid 5y ago
Flexibility is great for everyone, for people with kids and without. I’ve never heard that used as being code for lower productivity before.
asdff 5y ago
That shouldn't be the assumption. If there is slack to be picked up, good management should hire more labor rather than stretch existing labor thin and burn out their workers. Companies that grind people right to the deadline are doing it wrong.
- Digit-Al 5y ago
  I agree. At one company my team had a new manager start and one of the first things he said to us was "if you have to work overtime I'm not doing my job properly". That attitude should be more widespread in my opinion.
klyrs 5y ago
I have a family, and I'm very protective of my time because failure to, for example, pick my kid after school would quickly escalate to criminal negligence. If my work demanded that I commit any crime, I would refuse until I got fired (quitting is for losers, in this case: I want my damned severance). I don't assume that non-parents can or should pick up the slack. I expect all of my coworkers to be protective of their work-life balance and I'm dismayed whenever I see them prioritize work in a detrimental way. Said differently, if you're upset at parents putting their children's wellbeing before your team's performance, then you should re-evaluate your relationship with work.
- jimt1234 5y ago
  > I don't assume that non-parents can or should pick up the slack. Maybe you don't assume that, but the system built around parenting does assume that. A clear example of this is "new parent" time off. At my company, new parents can take 4 months off work (paid). So, if you work on a team of a dozen people, and 10 people on the team have children at some point, that means, at a minimum, 2 people are picking up more of the slack than the others.
  - klyrs 5y ago
    At my work, new parents tend to give 3-6 months notice before that PTO and we hire temporary replacements. What's wrong with your workplace? It's not the parents.
  - willcipriano 5y ago
    Alternatively the firm can take a productivity hit for a couple months.
  - hnaccount141 5y ago
    Let's be clear here, the "system" in question is just exploitative management. If management knows a worker will be taking their leave they can either hire to make up for it or adjust their productivity expectations for a few months. If they don't, that's not the fault of the person taking the leave that they're entitled to as part of their compensation package.
deleted 5y ago
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sneak 5y ago
Seems to me that your supervisor and coworkers should never hear about whether or not you have a family or kids. Surely that sort of information is need-to-know at work?
- throwawayboise 5y ago
  Yep. Came here to say that this is a consequence of revealing too much about your private life to your co-workers.
  - dvtrn 5y ago
    True story, I once worked with a guy who got out of being "voluntold" to work a weekend long migration project by bringing up "I've got dad duties this weekend, sorry". A few months later he and I were hanging out at a bar, the time gets away from us and I go "hey man don't let me keep you out here away from your family all night, it's cool if you gotta go". He looks at me and asks "what family?" I am confused. That's when he drops it on me: he's been at this company 5 years lying about having a family because it gets him out of doing off-hours work and nobody asked any questions, they'd just assign work to someone else. Whereas when some of the younger, childless, and more impressionable workers try to protect the boundaries of their off-time...well you see where this is going (if not: they would get talked into doing it anyway) It's a kind of malingering that I found...honestly....kind of brilliant in a bastard kind of way.
    - another_story 5y ago
      I've done this before. What one of the earlier posters says about being able to negotiate completely disregards cultural context and what you come to the table to negotiate with. Having the kids excuse allows you to get away certain things while also maintaining your standing in the company.
    - sneak 5y ago
      You can also simply opt out of this sort of additional unpaid work by enforcing strong boundaries with your employer. It doesn't require lying.
redisman 5y ago
> they implicitly assume that non-parents can and should 'pick up the slack' Not accurate. I expect management to “pick up the slack”. If the work can’t be finished in a normal work week then that’s not my problem (and it wasn’t before I had kids either)
Waterluvian 5y ago
Honestly, I think that my peers without kids who work crazy hours are, simply put, suckers. I don’t expect them to pick up slack. I expect the employer to properly staff and schedule. If they have not learned to stand up for themselves, that’s not on me. And if they choose to work extra (like I did when I was a newbie) then that’s their freedom to.
- isoskeles 5y ago
  > Honestly, I think that my peers without kids who work crazy hours are, simply put, suckers. I've seen these people get much more work done than their peers (sometimes) and get compensated with higher salary and promotions. They might be suckers, or they might be prioritizing money or experience while they still have a lifestyle that can support it. So passing judgment by calling them "suckers" seems kind of ignorant IMO.
  - tharkun__ 5y ago
    The problem is when these people only get more done because they work more hours for the same money. They basically lower their own salary. I can totally understand this for someone that is paid hourly and wants to get overtime pay to have enough money to fix their car. But our context here is usually highly paid, salaried tech jobs. If I work more hours I can also get more done. I don't want to though and that has nothing to do with children or family. I've never in my life worked more for free. I sometimes work more when something needs doing but then I take extra time off somewhere else. So far no issues with promotions or anything else like that. All my bosses understood that this is a money transaction. They give me flexibility to come in late, leave early, have a dentist appointment in the middle of the day etc and I'm flexible too. Production is burning at 5pm? Of course I don't leave even if I have a date later that night. EDIT for clarity: if someone takes a 40h job for 100k and works 80h weeks they have now effectively lowered the market rate and their own salary to 50k. Why anyone would do that is beyond me especially since I see the same people complain about "H1Bs undercutting them" .
  - Waterluvian 5y ago
    Those people are at the mercy of their employer who gets to decide if all their free work deserves a raise or promotion. It’s not a great system.
nautilius 5y ago
So what you're saying is: you're expecting parents to simultaneously work as much as singles do, and 'in their free time' raise the next generation of people that can wipe your ass in 60 years when you expect someone to take care of you? Alternatively, you can vow to never take any service/product/support/technology from anyone of a younger generation. Then it would be fair.
- l-lousy 5y ago
  Why isn’t it possible for both groups to have an equal work life balance?
  - nautilius 5y ago
    It sure is, if you adjust for that at work. If you don't, you're expecting parents to work (at least) two jobs.
    - arp242 5y ago
      If that's an issue for you then don't be a parent. Or have one of you be a stay-at-home parent. Or get a job with fewer hours. The unspoken assumption here is that people without kids aren't doing anything outside of their work that might be considered "work". They just choose to spend their time on different things. Parents really aren't special.
      - sidlls 5y ago
        Raising the next generation of people who pay singeltons' salaries and make their lives possible is different from indoor rock climbing and slamming avocado toast, and relatively at least it very much is special.
        arp242 5y ago
        You have a very curious view of childless/single people. Gosh, this must be the first time I've seen someone use "avocado toast" other than a parody of these kind of views. And ironically, I actually spent many years volunteering as a scout leader and some youth computer initiatives shrug
sidlls 5y ago
Even if parents require accommodations the way you suggest, considering that we (parents) are subsidizing the lives of single people, it isn't an unfair ask. However what you suggest is the exception rather than the rule. Instead one or both of the parents tend to work very hard and struggle to juggle career and domestic obligations, often to the detriment of raising their children. It's worse the lower the socioeconomic ladder one goes, too, because of the extreme physical and psychological pressures that build.
- beebeepka 5y ago
  Who, and how, is forcing parents to subsidize the lives of single people? Either I don't get what you are saying, or that argument was made in bad faith
  - sidlls 5y ago
    Who do you think provides the economic activity that supports our civilization? It's human beings. Who makes these things? Parents, and at great sacrifice, given how abusive and demanding employers are. Single people benefit from having parents make the sacrifices and do the work of raising those human beings. They benefit substantially. And then complain about property taxes and supposed 'special treatment' parents get. It's petty and ignorant of them.
    - nybble41 5y ago
      That economic activity is the product of the kids' choices to work and not the parents' choices to bring more kids into the world. Single people are not being "subsidized" by the parents of the other (perhaps also single) people working for them—they're paying their way in full. If anyone owes compensation to the parents for the cost of raising their kids it's the kids themselves, not the parents' employers or random strangers. The only basis for saying that the parents deserve compensation for the kids' economic activity would assume that parents own their kids (and thus the fruits of their kids' labor) and can force them to work for the parents' benefit, but that sort of slavery is out of vogue in modern society.
acomar 5y ago
why the eff are you lot fighting each other? it's your managers putting the expectation on you that you can pick up the slack for your coworkers going home on time. who's really out of line here? the people going home to take care of the rest of their lives, the people staying to "pick up the slack", or the people who insist that it's reasonable to ask you to do that in the first place, instead of, I don't know, hiring adequate numbers of staff or paying you overtime for the extra hours worked?
dcolkitt 5y ago
This is just the fundamental nature of human nature. People are hardwired to watch out for the kids in their “tribe”. Ask yourself how you would respond as a manager, on a gut level to two different scenarios. One is a subordinate comes and says “I need to leave early today, my daughter’s the lead in her school play.” The other says, “I’m gonna dip out mid-afternoon. Tryna make the 4-20 celebration at Mission Dolores later”. We can argue till we’re blue about whether this is fair or not, or the burden and benefit of making people for the next generation, and entitlement and so on. But at the end of the day, none of it will matter. You can’t change human nature, and people who care for young children will always be given a certain unique level of respect and accommodation in any society. Period.
- _t2kx 5y ago
  "Bet. Enjoy!" works for both.
- bruce343434 5y ago
  > “I need to leave early today, my daughter’s the lead in her school play.” "And you tell me now?" > “I’m gonna dip out mid-afternoon. Tryna make the 4-20 celebration at Mission Dolores later”. "Yeah, no you're not gonna dip out." Note how you phrased "I need to leave early today" vs "I'm gonna dip out". Semantically they mean different things. It's also just bad form to dump these kinds of things on your manager on the day itself.
vegai_ 5y ago
So what do you suggest instead? I can see a few options - nobody being a parent - parents being bad parents so they can be good workers - any work dropped on the floor due to parents stays on the floor until they're back Options 1 and 2 lead to worse societies and therefore decreased efficiency in the slightly longer run. I guess the last option would work the best? Overall it should be blindingly obvious to everyone that parents work way more than non-parents, at least for the first ~7 years of their kid's life.
- KennyBlanken 5y ago
  Option 4: "asking employees to do extra work because they are single constitutes discrimination based on marital/family status. Don't do it. Ever."
  - vegai_ 5y ago
    So that's kinda like my option 3. I kinda agree, although if "asking" includes an option of denying the request, then I think it's perfectly fine to ask those people who have more free time to do more work when needed. Note that where I live, things like this will usually be compensated 1:1 (sometimes better).
lmsseattle 5y ago
I'm 58, female, never married, no kids. I'm not raising the next generation but my coworkers with kids are. I want to be supportive of a group of people who have chosen to do something - and someone has to do it - I have chosen not to do. If I stay late at work to finish a project and my coworker with kids leaves to pick up her kids, why is that a problem? When child-free workers fail to understand their responsibility - paying taxes for public schools, supporting parental leave, staying late so a parent can pick up their kid - in helping to ensure that children have parents who are available to them, they fail to understand the role we all need to play in creating and nurturing a community. I would make the same argument for coworkers caring for aging parents.

bserge 5y ago

It's the same in Europe. And likely the rest of the world.

deleted 5y ago

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Nbox9 5y ago

Bella DePaulo Ph.D. has been writing about this for at least 14 years now [0]. This article is actually a good summary of her thesis and perspective which is simply society is biased against single people. Her book titles include Singleism, Alone, Singled Out, and Single with Attitude. [0] https://www.amazon.com/s?i=stripbooks&rh=p_27%3ABella+DePaulo+PhD&s=relevancerank&text=Bella+DePaulo+PhD&ref=dp_byline_sr_book_1 https://www.amazon.com/s?i=stripbooks&rh=p_27%3ABella+DePaul...

makeitdouble 5y ago

> American society has been slow to adapt to people who are single or live alone. The elephant in the room is that most societies actively want to penalize people living alone. It’s not hidden in any way, the centuries old rhetoric is people are supposed to get into cis-gendered couples and have kids. There is cultural lag on allowing LGBTQ to get the same status, but our society will always pay lip service to helping single people, and strongly push for building families, whether it still makes sense or not from the population perspective (I have no idea about that). Single elderly people are tougher problem, but old farts will just blame them for not having kids caring for them (physically or financially).

ren_engineer 5y ago
>It’s not hidden in any way, the centuries old rhetoric is people are supposed to get into cis-gendered couples and have kids I mean, society ceases to exist if enough people don't reproduce. From a pure evolutionary perspective the society and culture that prioritizes having kids is going to expand and grow compared to cultures that don't. There are tons of anti-natalist groups that existed and died off because the entire group died off and there wasn't anybody to replace them
- scollet 5y ago
  You can be anti-natalist and still adopt or foster.
sli 5y ago
> The elephant in the room is that most societies actively want to penalize people living alone. This rings very true for me. Where I live, and likely many other places, one bedroom apartments and studio apartments have a huge overlap in rent. Both are way too high, but it's absolutely bonkers that studio apartments are almost every bit as expensive. This is not a large city/tech hub/anything notable.
nautilius 5y ago
No shit. It's called survival of the species. Let's call this society A. Now try to imagine a society B where everyone with a kid is penalized. Let's make it as clear-cut as possible: death penalty. Which one do you think will continue to exist after a few generations? Obviously it's not as straightforward for LGBTQ+, but it turns out - if not denied the right by an oppressive society - many are happy to adopt or find other arrangements to take care of and raise children. Win-win.

black_13 5y ago

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kodokushi https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kodokushi

conjecTech 5y ago

The article stretches to portray this as a cost imposed by society, but I think the bulk of it is far more innate than that. There simply are economies of scale to household size. A lot of housing costs are proportional to surface area, and the ratio of surface area to volume drops are structures get larger. Building larger units is more economical. It extends to selling as well - it's going to take less effort to sell/rent one 2-bedroom apartment than it would for two 1-bedrooms. The cost of user acquisition for things like paper towels is lower if the average customer is buying for multiple people too. I totally get the desire to live alone, but I never have because having roommates/cohabitation always seemed like such an obvious economic decision compared to other ways to reduce living expenses. The Onion put out a video[1] in 2009 about an economic recovery plan that amounted to boyfriends finally agreeing to move in together with their girlfriends. I've spent a lot of time researching the housing market and macroeconomic reasons for its current distortion from historical norms. That video often pops into my mind when I do. The overall housing stock in the US has more than kept pace with the growth in population, but the reduction of household size and related growth in housing space per person has created a huge amount of incremental demand. I don't think those are purely bad trends. My parents' generation paired off young and quickly, and the long term effects are easy enough to pick out in divorce statistics. But I do have to wonder how much of the economic woes 20-40 year olds face right now might be alleviated if the pendulum swung back a little in that direction. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ADncN9HIa4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ADncN9HIa4

3grdlurker 5y ago
But in an economies of scale line of argumentation, shouldn’t the cost of building/selling houses for single people go down precisely because plenty enough people (and plenty more are projected to) live alone? It does seem that culture lag is to blame.
throwawayboise 5y ago
I think divorce statistics are not related to age of pairing off, which if anything was younger farther in the past than it was even a generation or two ago. Divorce is simply not the social stigma that it used to be, and it's easier to get so it happens more now. Rather than working through their problems, people think it seems easier to just split up.

ice2000 5y ago

The biggest cost of living alone is getting on the housing ladder. Even with a large deposit saved up, on my fairly average UK salary, the amount I can borrow on a mortgage does not get me very far in my area. If I had a partner, even if they were on a minimum wage job, it would change what I could afford from 2 bed terrace to decent 3 bed semi-detached. Not saying it's unfair, just that it kind of sucks.

sershe 5y ago
Could it be that your expectations of what housing should be are formed by the "default" households? I think 2 bed is way too much for one person, while 3 bed is barely enough for two, so it looks like you are getting a better deal now :)

jxidjhdhdhdhfhf 5y ago

A lot of these things seem like complaints about reality rather than complaints about the way society is organized. I'm sure there's some social bias against single people in the workplace and out. That seems like a reasonable complaint. On the other hand smaller food packages, for example, require more packaging material, more shipping weight per portion, some fixed organizational overhead per item, etc. Two people sharing a bedroom, kitchen and a bathroom is always going to be more cost efficient than one person in the same bedroom, kitchen and bathroom. Two people sharing a car is more efficient than two single people each buying their own. A family phone plan is more efficient to manage cost-wise for a phone provider since they only need to manage one account.

bradlys 5y ago
A family phone plan is cheaper per person purely for capitalistic reasons. It’s not due to some magical overhead issues. After all, managing an account is a trivial amount of expense for those companies when it comes to the monthly income from a customer.
- jxidjhdhdhdhfhf 5y ago
  The cheapest phone plans tend to be available to singles anyways so maybe that wasn't a good example. Mint Mobile is $15 a month.

aaron695 5y ago

[dead]

singlethrowaway 5y ago

Loners have no claim to the benefits of society. They have no skin in the game. No healthy society should cater to them. Sucks to hear if you've been lead to believe otherwise but its the truth.

karaterobot 5y ago

> These all may seem like small annoyances, but in practice they are regular reminders that American society still assumes that the default adult has a partner and that the default household contains multiple people. Well, it is the default, so it's completely reasonable for society to assume that. It's the default for historical reasons, but it's also currently reflective of the vast majority of people's experiences. If the options are "single household or not single household" and only 28% of households are single, that's not even close to parity. Also, check my math, but: if 28% of households are occupied by people living alone, doesn't that mean that closer to 20% of people are living alone? That's assuming all non-single households have exactly 2 people, which of course is wrong: on average they have more.

emerged 5y ago
well we should definitely only consider the “default” of every dimension of human being. says whoever is default in that particular trait.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

werber 5y ago

I texted a group of friends who are in relationships earlier today if they would take bags of garlic powder because the 1.5lbs 9 Dollar container was so much cheaper than another option but I didn’t want to devote like half a shelf in my kitchen to it.

haspoken 5y ago

https://archive.md/0Rx9x https://archive.md/0Rx9x

lazyeye 5y ago

"living separately is about 28 percent more expensive than living together" Only if everybody in the household is in paid employment. Ask a sole breadwinner if living alone is 28 percent more expensive...

KennyBlanken 5y ago

Higher tax rates despite having higher living costs. Your coworkers and boss assume you're cool with off-hours work because you don't have a family. Food packaged in sizes that you can't possibly use before it spoils or molds.

manojsuniverse 5y ago

Thanks for sharing this valuable information.

sershe 5y ago

FWIW, I found it's cheaper per capita to live alone. Almost every non-negligible non-housing cost scales linearly. When I was alone I was happy in a studio; I could work, sleep, exercise, have guests, etc. all in the same room. At most I'd have a small 1-bedroom, to hide the bed from guests :) With 2 people you need to have a separate bedroom in case only one person is sleeping, a living room to have guests (we also use ours for exercise, which has on occasion prevented me from exercising when it was occupied, so ideally we'd need a gym room too), then you need an office for each person in case someone else is in the living (or in case both are working and need space), suddenly it's a whole 3-bedroom house and it feels more confined than a studio did.

kibbleble 5y ago

I think it's really funny that fantasy and DnD artists draw taverns as spacious inns with tons of rooms, when in reality most ancient people were sleeping together in the same room, peeing together in the same bathroom, and generally never alone except if you had the money to afford such a luxury, or you gave yourself alone time by running off into the forest.

bradlys 5y ago

Definitely have much higher costs to living alone. Some hidden - some not. Having mostly lived alone for the last 10 years, all of these things are obvious to me and not-obvious to my partnered, family’d, and roommated peers. The surgery thing is real - part of my not looking into one surgery I should do is because I live alone and won’t have anyone to take care of me. I might be able to get a friend to drive me from the hospital but that’s it. Where I am - I spend more on rent than some of my peers spend in their entire month. I’m not living in a lavish place either - just a 400sqft inlaw unit in the backyard of a 4000sqft lot. This is due to the lack of housing for single people and communities built around it. Unfortunately, many developers out there aren’t interested. After all - why go after a bunch of individual customers when you can target groups of customers just as easily? (Cost is effectively same to get a group of four to purchase than an individual - but now you can sell 4x more) These could be addressed but I don’t think our capitalistic society is willing to do such because the incentive structure isn’t there. They’re always seeking maximum profit and single people will continue to be pointless to cater to - especially since single people often will buy the group thing because there are no other options. So you can now sell 4x the product to just an individual - huge win. Rig the market further and support this fucked up system as much as possible. No reason to ever change this structure because it maximizes draining bank accounts. So while it makes sense for the companies - it completely fucks the consumers. This is where capitalism fails so often in the real world and deserves all of its criticism.

novok 5y ago
Part of that lack of 'single person housing' is a zoning issue. It sets minimum sizes and makes building multi-family units literally illegal. Thus with things needing to be a minimum size and multi-family units illegal, developers only go for what is economically viable in an area, which is the SFH. The most capital efficient kind of construction is actually the large wooden house designed as a fourplex. You also get more total rent & $$$ sold from multi-units than you do from a single family house, because multi-units are more land efficient. If developers were not limited, you would see a lot more of them.
- bradlys 5y ago