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So Many Unmarried Men
- CobaltFire 2y agoInteresting article that wears its biases on its sleeve. Based on the comments we are seeing an extremely curated view of the subject, and the lens through which we are seeing it is colored dramatically. For all that the core statement is interesting and valid.
- hmmmcurious1 2y agoTruth be told I also feel sharper when not dating or in a relationship, software engineering takes a lot of mental overhead. Competing in the modern meat market that is the current dating scene increases that mental overhead
- mantas 2y agoStaying single is only one of the ways to get out of the dating market.
- mohsen1 2y agoYour loaded comment reminds me of Sheryl Sandberg's statements. "Look how easy it is to maintain work/life balance if you LEAN IN!" -- ignoring the fact that an army of people supporting her "LEAN IN" lifestyle.
- mantas 2y agoIs it considered „loaded“ to say that starting a family is um… an option? What a time to be alive.
- disgruntledphd2 2y agoTo be fair to her, after her husband died I think she had to re-assess a lot of the Lean In stuff.
- gotts 2y agoWhat are other ways?
- credit_guy 2y agoMaybe getting married?
- goodpoint 2y agoThe only type of marriage that does not require constant effort is a failed marriage.
- SketchySeaBeast 2y agoIt requires effort, but it's not always a chore. It should make your life easier by sharing the load of everyday burdens. I'm thankful to be sharing my life with my wife.
- goodpoint 2y agoI wrote "effort", not "chore", and yet I got downvoted...
- SketchySeaBeast 2y agoI think because it came off as gloomy. I tried to differentiate effort from being and solely negative and emphasize how marriage is a combination of the good and the bad.
- mantas 2y agoLife in general requires constant energy. Unless you’re freeloader. Be it relationship, participating in a society or anything else.
- taddevries 2y agoAre you implying that marriage is, somehow, the end state of relationship building? I can assure you it does not end at marriage.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- fHr 2y agoPretty much feels like a second job to me and currently in the stage of advancing in my career and learning Rust on the side and more devops things and then the actual job as a Java SWE I already do like a 150%/60+ hour week, I can not have a 250% load.
- untrust 2y agoThere are phases of life where it makes sense to prevent preoccupying yourself with romantic relationships (which end up occupying large chunks of your free time), however I believe that long term this is a bad strategy. Focusing on career above all else will not make you happy in the long run unless you define your entire identity as a career professional. In short bursts this is probably fine (and I followed a similar strategy early in my career) but I am personally happy to have not fallen into the trap of focusing on my career to the detriment of my personal life throughout my entire youth.
- closewith 2y agoWell, no-one can decide your priorities for you, but this is a path you want to be sure you want to follow, as your life options narrow more quickly than you might imagine. Advancing your career may seem important now, but will you feel that way on your deathbed looking back?
- karmakurtisaani 2y agoOn my deathbed I'll be fondly remembering all the value I created for the shareholders, and the KPIs my team exceeded.
- red-iron-pine 2y agoi'll pass those KPI metrics down to my children!
- hn_throwaway_99 2y agoLol, you and George Costanza: https://youtu.be/AariEduyb7s?t=56 https://youtu.be/AariEduyb7s?t=56
- pylua 2y agoOnce you are out of the dating game you may get married and start a family. That also has a mental overhead, and it can be hard to keep your kids schedules aligned with demands / timelines from work in tech. I think you learn to bear the load more gracefullly as you age and mature. It also puts life more into perspective. My main point is you learn to handle it, which is actually a good form of personal growth.
- Seanambers 2y agoWork to live or live to work.
- darth_avocado 2y agoDating and relationships add to the mental overhead, but navigating a tough marriage and eventually divorce add a whole layer of mental overhead that I can’t even describe. It’s a miracle people manage to stay employed after going through it.
- red-iron-pine 2y agotoo absorbed in work making money for a corporate overlord to try to breed. I hope you're working at a startup that you own, otherwise you're just helping fund some executive's Disney vacation with his four kids, while you end up an evolutionary dead-end. but maybe you'll write something that everyone will use for a couple years, then replace, right?
- Amezarak 2y agoThe article says: > In the 1950s, the philosopher Mary Midgley did something that, according to philosophical orthodoxy, she wasn’t supposed to do. In a BBC radio script for the Third Programme (the precursor of BBC Radio 3), she dared to point out that almost all the canonical figures in philosophy’s history had been unmarried men. To most, Midgley’s attempt to discuss the relationship status of our most cherished philosophers would have been discarded as irrelevant, even scandalous. I don't have to rack my brains very hard to recall similar observations that are much older: > Thus the philosopher abhors marriage, together with all that might per- suade him to it, – marriage as hindrance and catastrophe on his path to the optimum. Which great philosopher, so far, has been married? Heraclitus, Plato, Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, Kant, Schopenhauer – were not; indeed it is impossible to even think about them as married. A married philosopher belongs to comedy, that is my proposition: and that exception, Socrates, the mischievous Socrates, appears to have married ironice, simply in order to demonstrate this proposition. (Nietzsche, Genealogy of Morality) I have found this to be a very common motif: a news article presents someone saying something so REVOLUTIONARY it had to be suppressed, that nothing before was ever like this said or done...which is almost never the case; it is very popular for some reason to manufacture these examples of suppression above what really did occur. (I recall a similar HN article about the secret suppressed queen Semiramis, who was proverbially famous until we abandoned classics education.) Although the peculiar anglo attitude towards philosophy probably didn't help, maybe she was just not that interesting: the idea that a philosopher's ideas were really just a distillation of his personality, way of life, and physical health weren't novel.
- kasey_junk 2y agoThe article points this out? It describes how this person was outside of the mainstream of a particular time & place, which was noted for being overly restrictive.
- Amezarak 2y agoYes, and it makes the implication that it was because of this she wasn’t more famous. It seems more likely that her ideas just weren’t that great. Another great example is later in the article, where pregnancy is held to refute Cartesian skepticism. Somehow, we are expected to accept that a strong feeling something is true is the same thing as something being true. I am not a Cartesian by any means, but obviously Descartes anticipated this line of argument: this sort of thing is taken care of by his “evil demon” interfering with our feelings and sense perceptions. Even more broadly, we don’t accept this style of argument in general: the testimony of those who have experienced God on acid trips is not taken as confirmation of his existence. The subject of the article just doesn’t seem to have said much novel or interesting, but the author seems insistent that she deserved more attention anyway, and the only explanation is some sort of deliberate oppression as with the BBC example for malicious reasons. (Which itself is overstated: they would have disdained Nietzsche saying the same thing.)
- talles 2y agoNietzsche believed that a philosopher's philosophy boils down to a reflection of his personality and his daily life, and this article seems to assume the same. I don't buy this for a second. I think it's easier to swallow the very opposite.
- taurknaut 2y ago[flagged]
- nickdothutton 2y agoI've always thought the point of philosophy, and of philosophers, was to provide some ultimate salient, some final read-out, at the furthest point of a way of thinking. One can then sample from these positions, or use them as lenses through which to see their various experiences and understanding of the world. Today nobody serious is going to "live as Kant would" or Nietzsche or Wittgenstein. Speaking of Nietzsche, I don't think Midgley was the first to remark on the fact most philosophers were single men. Edit: Typo.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- nthingtohide 2y ago> was to provide some ultimate salient, some final read-out, at the furthest point of a way of thinking. "The aim of philosophy, abstractly formulated, is to understand how things in the broadest possible sense of the term hang together in the broadest possible sense of the term" — Wilfrid Sellars, an American philosopher in the 20th century.
- subjectsigma 2y ago"It's unthinkable that people who are not physically similar to me could understand me or imagine what my life is like, much less have any insight into my condition."
- visarga 2y agoSounds like "people who are not physically similar to me are p-zombies relative to me". By the same rule even our past selves are p-zombies relative to present selves, they could not possibly imagine our feelings as they lack the experience between then and now.
- twodave 2y agoIf there is one thing I’ve learned about philosophy, it is that it is a field full of arrogant know-it-alls who pretend to know what I am thinking better than I do, and who will preen on about how unenlightened I am while treating me like a 3 year old who should be silent while the adults are talking, wielding “philosophy” like some joke I’m missing that gives them an excuse to be socially-inept at my expense. Obviously (to me, at least) this behavior is all centered around bullshit. I think it is somewhat common for those who experience anxiety over a lack of control to try and define or categorize what others are thinking, and to find a mild sense of closure or superiority after having done so. But life just isn’t that simple. So I (rightly or wrongly) think of philosophy as a dead field full of old lifeless straw-men.
- kasey_junk 2y agoHow, where and when in life did you study philosophy? Because that seems like a horrid relationship to a whole field of study.
- __MatrixMan__ 2y agoSeconded, I've certainly met the sort of characters described in this post, but I don't think they're at all representative of the field. One of my favorite philosophy teachers described philosophical criticism as the process of being supremely gracious--of granting your opponent all manner of fanciful and absurd things, and then of peering through the cloud of absurdity and taking small issue with just one thing, preferably a small one, and politely, such that as much as possible of the absurdity collapses. And then you see how big of a thing can be built in such an environment. I can see how people trying to play this game and doing so poorly might end up being cruel, but the core of is making space for each other's thoughts and playing along for a while, which is anything but.
- steve_adams_86 2y agoThis reminds me of a guy I met many years ago who told me he was taking a class to learn how to debate people and break every argument by abusing logic. It turned out he was talking a philosophy class, haha. I can’t imagine how the teacher structured it, but somehow that was his takeaway. Maybe from the Socratic method, I guess.
- myself248 2y agoThe way I read this: Bias is unavoidable. It's a fact of life, every philosopher puts their own bias into their work. You know that, you account for that. Where it's a problem is when someone claims to be free of bias. To present the one true view, and all others are tainted. That's impossible, all they're doing is saying their bias is more valid than others. And the trouble is when people buy that, and forget to question it. Which seems to have been the case for, oh, several decades.
- 52-6F-62 2y agoNow you have also identified the driving force behind every expansionist attitude in history. Rome, British Empire, America (and many others besides) all usurped by an ideal that they are and must be the only true light of life and civilization and no goodness or success can be had outside of their rampantly materialistic perspectives. It hasn’t just been decades, my friend. It’s the perpetual war with an insidious evil that is captured in the aphorism: all that glitters isn’t gold.
- NewUser76312 2y agoWhatever the reasons, modern societies are in a lot of trouble because none of them can stay above the 2.1 replacement birth rate. And every foreign group that comes into a westernized country ends up having their birth rate dropped below replacement within a few generations too (at least that is the trajectory for those that aren't there yet).
- __MatrixMan__ 2y ago[flagged]
- ImHereToVote 2y agoFinancialization of society doesn't account for externalities.
- snowwrestler 2y agoThe dropping birth rate is neutral, a thing that is happening like the orbit of the Earth, or a rain storm. Every population’s growth curve levels out, and so will ours. Why? Who knows, and it’s an interesting topic to investigate. But understanding something interesting doesn’t mean that we can change it. Society will adapt. There are positives to work from. For example the horizon for every exhaustible consumable recedes as population growth slows.
- __MatrixMan__ 2y agoLikely because those species which did not evolve a mechanism for population control went extinct: The parents consumed all of the available resources and their children starved.
- readthenotes1 2y agoThat's what predators provide.
- Jensson 2y ago
- hollywood_court 2y agoI was married for 12 years. We had a reasonably amicable divorce back in October 23. We have 50/50 custody of our son. He's with me 3 nights one week and 4 nights the following week. Since our divorce, I haven't spent any energy pursuing another lady, and I'm unsure if I will ever do so. I have no desire to ever be in a relationship again. I am thriving now career-wise and health-wise. I cooked better than my ex-wife could ever imagine. I keep a cleaner home than my ex-wife could ever imagine. While married, I handled everything in our house except for her laundry. She wouldn't allow me to do her laundry, or I would have done that too. I handled all the automobile and home repairs. Now, I can do that all for myself and my son while having the time and freedom to pursue interests without offending someone else. For a 43-year-old man like myself, I see no benefit in being in a relationship. I spent my formative years running wild in the Caribbean, burning through women as a plow cut through the snow. I'm glad I got all that out of my system as a young man. Now, all I'm focused on is providing my son with all the opportunities and experiences I never had as a child. My mother was married 4 times, and I was forced to live with 3 different step-fathers. There is no way I would ever put my son through something like that.
- chairhairair 2y ago“I spent my formative years running wild in the Caribbean, burning through women as a plow cut through the snow.”
- closewith 2y agoYeah, there's an introspection threshold there that hasn't yet been reached.
- Brian_K_White 2y agoIt seems entirely and obviously self aware to me.
- anthony_d 2y agoWhat is the insight you’re looking for? Or what is the category? Honestly curious what the threshold is and how you think it would exhibit.
- ed-209 2y agoIt's intuitive, that the pursuit of mastery demands sacrifice (in family life and beyond). Unfortunately philosophical mastery would seem to require full participation in life (to fully appreciate the human experience), making this level of sacrifice a potentially self-defeating proposition.
- mantas 2y agoI’d say it applies in a lot of other career paths too. Creating something of quality requires holistic life experience. Otherwise it leads to shallow self-absorbed outcomes. Maybe that’s why enshitification is all the rage nowadays, not just pure shortsighted fast-profit-asap greed.
- ed-209 2y agoThe problem as applied to philosophy is particularly concerning to me since those errors become the framework for thought, but yeah its otherwise not terribly different from the architect who doesnt code, the professor who hasnt spent time in industry, the philanthropist who lives in a bunker, etc.
- mantas 2y agoYes. Philosophy should be read by people who want to deconstruct it and then argue with it. Unfortunately laymen love to take it by face value and try to apply it as-is. I guess sort of as marketing. When people buy fancy brands hoping to repeat what was shown in the ads.
- skirge 2y agoPhilosophy is a wife. Possessive and jealous, demands full focus.
- MrMcCall 2y agoBut if you want your philosophy to encompass most people's lives, it mustshould approach the 'standard model' of family-with-kids, or it's impractical and/or inapplicable. In order for a philosophy to be completely applicable to human life, one has to have lived the experience, not just viewed it from afar. And, as with all comprehensive philosophies, compassion must be at its root, or it's irrelevant nonsense constrained solely to the physical world, not the human world.
- skirge 2y agoif "family with kids" is standard and not product of last 150 years.
- bee_rider 2y ago> But feminist theories of knowledge argue that we shouldn’t think of objectivity in this narrow way. Instead, knowledge should be seen as socially entangled with our emotions, interests, relationships, background beliefs and bodies. And factors such as these should not be discarded as inappropriate or merely subjective. Is this really an accurate description of “feminist theories of knowledge?” It seems to pretty heavily lean on a somewhat stereotypical characterization of women as the more intuitive/less rigorous gender, which doesn’t seem like a trope feminists would be enthusiastic to go along with.
- wryoak 2y agoAlso might be worth noting the idea does not originate in the feminist school of philosophy
- mantas 2y agoYet feminists seem to be happy with „affirmative action“ which has very similar logic.
- bee_rider 2y agoThis is not true or really related to the topic at hand at all, but I’m not going to put more effort into rebutting your post than you put into making it.
- jfengel 2y ago
- casey2 2y agoIf you view governments as technology, which they are, then it makes sense that you would see very few women at the start and as it gets "grandma-proofed" you would see more and more women participating. "Make the easy things hard and the impossible things possible." Women in government was thought to be impossible not just a few thousand years ago, and now it's rule not the exception. Just another example of how simple (in description, not implementation) tech can change social norms.
- justonceokay 2y agoThat’s ridiculous though. It wasn’t “considered impossible” because we hadn’t engineered a solution yet. It was “considered impossible” because of men’s historic tendanxy to view women as incapable.
- ordu 2y ago> In fact, she thinks this Cartesian move is born from the philosophical ‘adolescence’ that Descartes never grew up from. Ouch. It hurts. I'm a terminally unmarried man, and probably a "philosophical adolescent" as she puts it: I see a family as a bad thing for health, all these people at my home, or all these obligations to visit relatives who I do not know really and do not care of. And probably because of this I cannot understand what is she talking about. For example, she talks about Descartes wondering do other people exist: > Now I rather think that nobody who was playing a normal active part among other human beings could regard them like this. But what I am quite sure of is that for anybody living intimately with them as a genuine member of a family … their consciousness would be every bit as certain as his own. Probably they would be be certain, but why does it matter what they are certain of? They can be mistaken. All these relatives always want something from you, or idk like my parents have a great hopes for my life, which I cannot fulfill and I wouldn't even try, but still they will make me feel guilty about it. Of course in such an environment you cannot think straight, and you have no time to think about some abstract things, you'd prefer practical solution to ignore a question from which follows no practical implications. It is even a rational thing to do, but it doesn't make them right automatically. So, it seems, that being an unmarried man I'm not qualified enough to understand what is this about. Yeah, it hurts. Luckily she wrote a book about it, probably the book will have a clearer message.
- cassepipe 2y agoCutting ties with my family and letting in only people I want in my life was the best mental health decision I ever did (forced by events, I don't get any bravery points) Of course plenty of caveats apply, but mostly I have sufficiently good social skills, no handicaps and I am able to provide for myself or : I don't need a the family safety net. I really like the friend relationships I maintain now and I am also happy that what is asked of me is only basic human decency (a standard that is curiously applied to strangers but not always to relatives and parters...). Also I feel able to be much more generous towards others since little is expected of me. Thus I try to model intimate relationships on the basis of friendship as much as my partner emotional needs and cultural norms allow for. Intimate and beautiful relationships are possible outside of marriage. I am not looking forward gettging married nor starting a family. Getting to spend time by myself is amazing too.
- coldtea 2y agoNothing that a breakdown of the economy, welfare system, and productivity wont fix...
- Aloisius 2y ago> Midgley’s observation that ‘none of [the greatest] philosophers … had any experience of living with women or children’ Is this... right? A cursory scan shows a fair number of major philosophers like Aristotle, Socrates, Berkeley, Spinoza, Reid, Hegel, Heidegger, Montesquieu, Husserl, Rousseau, Mill, Bacon and Machiavelli were married. Perhaps none of them are among the greatest though.
- red-iron-pine 2y agoSeveral of those philosophers had kids too. Hegel had 3, for example. Heidegger was with Hannah Arendt for a while, and had several kids from previous relationships. Dude had a few affairs, and one of his kids probably wasn't his. Machiavelli had like 7 children!
- scoofy 2y agoThe concept that we would have "men philosophers" and "women philosophers", or "bachelor philosophers" and "married philosophers", and that their philosophical theories would be tainted by their sex or marital status is as bizarre sounding to me as if someone were to talk about "German science" and "English science" as being inherently different from each other because of their ethnicity. It is very likely that the type of people who actively study and write academic philosophy (especially in pre-modern times), were very likely rather "neurodivergent" at best, but more probably on the spectrum.
- lisadecker21 2y ago[flagged]
- red-iron-pine 2y agoman oh man there is a lot of projection in these posts