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> Men and women alike have been delaying family formation; the median age at first marriage for men recently surpassed 30 for the first time in history. Taggart

> Men and women alike have been delaying family formation; the median age at first marriage for men recently surpassed 30 for the first time in history. Taggart wrote that the men he knew seemed to be forgoing marriage and fatherhood with gusto. Instead of focusing their 30s and 40s on wedding bands and diapers, they were committed to working on their body, their bank account, and their meditation-sharpened minds. Taggart called these men “secular monks” for their combination of old-fashioned austerity and modern solipsism. “Practitioners submit themselves to ever more rigorous, monitored forms of ascetic self-control,” he wrote, “among them, cold showers, intermittent fasting, data-driven health optimization, and meditation boot camps.”

lapcat 2y ago
That wasn't a solution. It was just one of many statistics listed by the article. Also, the comment about secular monks mentions friends before spouses and children. It's about the total lack of other people: > What is most striking about these videos, however, is the element they typically lack: other people. In these little movies of a life well spent, the protagonists generally wake up alone and stay that way. We usually see no friends, no spouse, no children. The article talks about sixth graders, who are kids themselves and obviously can't get married and have kids: > In 1970, just 6 percent of sixth graders had a TV set in their bedroom; in 1999, that proportion had grown to 77 percent. And marriage in itself is obviously not the solution: > Time diaries in the 1990s showed that husbands and wives spent almost four times as many hours watching TV together as they spent talking to each other in a given week. Again, kids and teenagers can't get married and have kids: > American kids and teenagers spend, on average, about 270 minutes on weekdays and 380 minutes on weekends gazing into their screens The article talks about young people meeting friends. Again, this is not about marriage and having kids: > Young people are less likely than in previous decades to get their driver’s license, or to go on a date, or to have more than one close friend, or even to hang out with their friends at all. The share of boys and girls who say they meet up with friends almost daily outside school hours has declined by nearly 50 percent since the early 1990s, with the sharpest downturn occurring in the 2010s. I could go on and on: > The best kind of play is physical, outdoors, with other kids, and unsupervised, allowing children to press the limits of their abilities while figuring out how to manage conflict and tolerate pain. But now young people’s attention is funneled into devices that take them out of their body, denying them the physical-world education they need. It's only in your mind that this article is somehow a "marry and reproduce" message like in the movie "They Live".

lapcat 2y ago

That wasn't a solution. It was just one of many statistics listed by the article. Also, the comment about secular monks mentions friends before spouses and children. It's about the total lack of other people: > What is most striking about these videos, however, is the element they typically lack: other people. In these little movies of a life well spent, the protagonists generally wake up alone and stay that way. We usually see no friends, no spouse, no children. The article talks about sixth graders, who are kids themselves and obviously can't get married and have kids: > In 1970, just 6 percent of sixth graders had a TV set in their bedroom; in 1999, that proportion had grown to 77 percent. And marriage in itself is obviously not the solution: > Time diaries in the 1990s showed that husbands and wives spent almost four times as many hours watching TV together as they spent talking to each other in a given week. Again, kids and teenagers can't get married and have kids: > American kids and teenagers spend, on average, about 270 minutes on weekdays and 380 minutes on weekends gazing into their screens The article talks about young people meeting friends. Again, this is not about marriage and having kids: > Young people are less likely than in previous decades to get their driver’s license, or to go on a date, or to have more than one close friend, or even to hang out with their friends at all. The share of boys and girls who say they meet up with friends almost daily outside school hours has declined by nearly 50 percent since the early 1990s, with the sharpest downturn occurring in the 2010s. I could go on and on: > The best kind of play is physical, outdoors, with other kids, and unsupervised, allowing children to press the limits of their abilities while figuring out how to manage conflict and tolerate pain. But now young people’s attention is funneled into devices that take them out of their body, denying them the physical-world education they need. It's only in your mind that this article is somehow a "marry and reproduce" message like in the movie "They Live".