> whatever we're trying to do right now is really far away from the "success rate" of the nuclear family. I think of many social/cultural arrangements as Nash

> whatever we're trying to do right now is really far away from the "success rate" of the nuclear family. I think of many social/cultural arrangements as Nash equilibria. These can be very stable (over centuries even), partly because relative to many immediate deviations from them, they work. However, a big enough change (e.g., a change in productive forces) can be enough to destroy the equilibrium and change can occur rapidly and sometimes violently (e.g., the end of feudalism). So we were in many ways operating in a local minima and I think we've been knocked out of it. Where we are heading is hopefully ultimately better, but it'll probably be bumpy getting there. I don't think ultimately we'll return to a lot of the absurdities you're talking about. I suspect a lot of the speed-run level social changes we're experiencing is a bit of a mad thrash trying to find some new equilibrium but what we have is something that just doesn't work very well as a cohesive system. As an aside, your point about children is particularly salient. They're the ultimate inheritors of the world that is being reinvented and thus far, I don't envy them their inheritance.