
Family instability fuels rising nihilism among young men - aminozuur
https://www.city-journal.org/family-instability-fuels-violence-among-young-men
======
elipsey
I spent several years of my life raising someone else's son "out of wedlock"
with great care and devotion, while his other male family members have so much
family values they have been married several times, but couldn't bother to
show up. We are on good terms, and in spite of his having a "single mother" he
survived to adulthood, and without the criminal record the author warns of as
a consequence.

This publisher is operated by a conservative think tank. I am not surprised
that they claim that civic unrest following police executions is the result of
"out of wedlock" parenting by the poor, but it is paternalistic,
condescending, self-serving, personally insulting to myself, and most
importantly, totally unsupported by any provided evidence.

This is hacker news. What is a hacker if not someone who does what works
because it's works, even when it's not conventional, and even when authority
figures tell you not to because it's naughty?

This article furnishes no evidence that being married forces poor people to be
good parents, nor do all the downvotes in world.

~~~
gnusty_gnurc
> This publisher is operated by a conservative think tank

Ok so I'm glad we're engaging the article on the surface.

> This article furnishes no evidence that being married forces poor people to
> be good parents

I'm not sure that was ever said. What they're arguing is about how societal
institutions like marriage have largely declined and it's happening along with
other large changes in society: lack of trust, friends, etc.

And clearly from what you've said, the legal distinctions of marriage are far
less important than whether there's two adults in a family raising children.

~~~
elipsey
I agree that it's important to have stable responsible male role models. I
object to the state preventing abandoned parents from getting divorced, and
treating them with them various other forms of animus -- something that is
advocated for by conservative think tanks like the one that payed for this
article, and had negative consequences for people I care about.

------
motohagiography
As a man in my late 30s, I began to see older male relatives of my own and of
friends dying of the usual things like cancer and some even of opioids, but
the thing that struck me was how many of them depended on hiring the funeral
home staff as fill-in pallbearers. I made it a priority to be sure that
however things go, I'd like to be able to convene a party of six. One of the
things I did was get involved with a fraternal organization, as weird and
anachronistic as that sounds, it has been very rewarding, and you get to see
what a mixed bag other guys at different ages really are and how you are both
similar and different. Another was setting better personal boundaries and
committing to owning and prioritizing my own social life in romantic
relationships, and made a commitment to a set of long term hobbies that I
should be able to do until I am completely incapacitated.

I heartily recommend all three things to anyone who felt the original article
resonated.

~~~
phobosanomaly
There used to be 'sportsman's' clubs, ham radio clubs, sailing clubs, hiking
clubs, bowling leagues, search-and-rescue, jeep clubs etc that have to an
unfortunate degree just faded away only to be replaced by meetup groups that
just seem to be trying a little...too...hard....

Fraternal organizations, hell, that's what they're for! Men of 30 and up to
get together and drink beer and tell war stories.

It's not weird and anachronistic at all!

~~~
keenmaster
I want the old Viennese/Parisian/Arabian intellectual cafe and salon clubs to
come back. I would join one in a heartbeat.

~~~
phobosanomaly
My nostalgia is for Ed Ricketts' version of that at Pacific Biological
Laboratories in Monterey. Sort of a low-brow early California take on it.

"The lab became a meeting place for intellectuals, artists, and writers,
including Bruce Ariss, Joseph Campbell, Henry Miller, John Steinbeck, Lincoln
Steffens, and Francis Whitaker."

If you ever make it to the Monterey Bay aquarium they have Ed Ricketts'
bookshelf, including a copy of A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pacific_Biological_Laboratorie...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pacific_Biological_Laboratories)

------
dx87
This post resonates with me, but I definitely don't think it's hopeless. I'm
in my early 30s, and have "no friends". There are people I would consider my
friends, but as we grew up, we got adult responsiblities like jobs and family,
most moved to different states for work, so I haven't actually been able to
see them for years.

Recently I've been working to improve my life, so I've been going out for
walks around my neighborhood more. Just by leaving my house more often, I
think I've talked to my neighbors more in the past 2 months than I have in the
10 prior years I've lived here. Now they ask me to get their mail when they're
out of town, they ask if I need any help after my wife's surgery, etc. When I
go out, I rarely see anyone else my age, it's normally older people out doing
things around the neighborhood. I say older, but I'm not exactly young; I was
starting high school when my parents were my age. I really believe that the
"loneliness epidemic" is a product of a generation that socializes almost
completely online, and has no connection with their community. That's how I
used to be, and I realize now how shallow and fake online relationships are.

~~~
frenchy
I think this experience is surprisingly common. Modern society affords us a
lot of mobility, but I don't think we realise how much it costs us in terms of
stable friendships.

I have a young kid, and he's still too young to really have "friends" (when
you're young enough, any stranger is a friend), but eventually we'll either
have to decide to live in the same place for a long time, or he's going to
have get used to constantly switching friends.

~~~
toomuchtodo
Maybe we don’t need the mobility with the concept of remote working
normalizing. Community is underrated.

~~~
dx87
I think you're right. Not building meaningful relationships with friends,
family, and neighbors, is one of my biggest regrets of my 20s. It adds a lot
of stress thinking how small my support system is, which prevents me from
wanting to take risks that could further my career or life goals. It reminds
me of the African proverb "If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go
far, go together."

------
Barrin92
_> Many pundits and commentators focus on economic deprivation or
sociocultural factors—above all, racism—to explain the recent wave of urban
anger, triggered by Floyd’s awful death. But the data show that American
society has fewer people in poverty and less bigotry compared with decades
past; and police use of force is far less pervasive than it was during higher-
crime periods_

This I think is a really bad argument to disregard those causes. What's
relevant for discontent is not deprivation in absolute terms, but treatment in
relationship to expectations.

Yes, racism is arguably not as bad as it was decades ago, but the expectation
of how to be treated, and the voice that common people have now, is much, much
larger.

The clearest example of this is the MeToo movement. Women obviously have
gained a lot of rights and are in many ways much better off than they were
merely a few decades ago. But that does not mean progress has been made as
fast as people think it should have, and that's what matters, together with
the capacity to speak up.

------
r29vzg2
The most striking quote to me from this was:

> In 1960, the out-of-wedlock birthrate in the U.S. was 3 percent. In 2000, it
> was about 30 percent. Today, it is 40 percent.

No matter how you feel about it, it’s got to be said that change thing large
has to have some sort of affect on the population. And those effects are still
quite unknown.

~~~
alltakendamned
Not being married does not mean the relationship is not a stable or long term
one though.

~~~
r29vzg2
I agree, marriage isn’t a requirement for a stable and long term relationship.
That being said, it’s a pretty good indicator, or at least it used to be, and
a shift of 36% is very significant.

------
phobosanomaly
All of the stats he cites outside of the suicide stuff don't differentiate
between men and women. They indicate that everyone (men and women) feels like
trash these days.

Unless every Ken Burns doc I've ever watched was a deepfake, the overwhelming
majority of cannon fodder in major conflict in recent human history has been
young men, so maybe there is something to the young men break stuff idea.
However, there are plenty of women toting AK-47s in the YPG, so I'm not sure
the degree to which this is a cultural thing.

As for the suicide stats, I believe that men tend to use guns, and guns are
one of the gold standards for this sort of thing. Men are exposed to guns more
as a cultural thing, and may feel more confident/comfortable in their ability
to commit suicide with one.

Characteristics of adult male and female firearm suicide decedents: findings
from the National Violent Death Reporting System - BMJ Injury Prevention

[http://dx.doi.org/10.1136/ip.2008.021162](http://dx.doi.org/10.1136/ip.2008.021162)
^^ DOI for the SciHub folks

Here are some graphs this nonprofit made from CDC data that help build the
idea that women try to kill themselves more than men, but men are more
successful at it.

[https://www.sprc.org/scope/attempts](https://www.sprc.org/scope/attempts)

------
dvtrn
Impactful article that sums up something I think a (very comparatively young)
friend of mine is going through following a divorce just before COVID hit

Except does the title perhaps mean “melancholy” because I’m having a hard time
finding the intrinsic nihilism as offered by the depictions within the piece.
It simply labels unfortunate outcomes of certain elements of our modern
experience as such and offers _no_ epistemology or substantive thoughts for
how the author arrived at such.

As presented, I think ‘melancholy’ is far more appropriate of an adjective
here versus something as layered as ‘nihilism’.

~~~
frank2
Headlines need to be hyperbolic nowadays to maximize clicks, and 'rising
[sadness] among young men' doesn't sound nearly as dangerous as 'rising
nihilism among young men'.

I think the writer of the headline thinks that most of his or her readers are
unaware of or uninterested in the philosophical connotations of 'nihilism'; to
them it means 'without an enduring source of meaning', 'without enduring
emotional connections' or more frighteningly 'without moral compass'.

Here is a societal process (family instability), the headline wants to imply,
that makes our country more dangerous.

~~~
dvtrn
Hello! Your point is well met. However, I would challenge this:

 _I think the writer of the headline thinks that most of his or her readers
are unaware of or uninterested in the philosophical connotations of
'nihilism'; to them it means 'without an enduring source of meaning', 'without
enduring emotional connections' or more frighteningly 'without moral
compass'._

While respecting that the English language is, and forever shall be fluid and
dynamic given the particular zeitgeist a speaker inhabits--rhetorical
evolution as an indicator of societal-change is not rhetorical refabrication
as a device to give authority to an individualized degree of authorial intent.

Which IMO contributes to a real misunderstanding to the beautiful nuance that
exists within the various schools of nihilistic study; as I don't know of many
that would justly simplify nihilism down to "without a[...]source of meaning'
or even 'without moral compass'. We have perfectly cromulent and appropriate
terminology existing already that encapsulates these things. At least not any
that aren't preoccupied with merely the surface of whatever branch of
'nihilism' the author is supposing lies at the root of their thesis here.

I still think 'melancholy' is a far more direct and appropriate description of
the machinations that bring about such a sensation of existential malaise, far
more than anything that approaches nihilism.

THEN AGAIN...

I am reminded that Sartre had a lot to say about the duality of meaning
between what a thing presents itself to be on the surface, and what a thing
_is_ ("Being and Nothingness", Ch1. 'The Pursuit of Being') and this
'rhetorical refabrication' has a long history of precedent in such high
falutin studies.

The author brings up an interesting point of discussion that can be unpacked
in a myriad of ways, I'm just not sure about the one that was chosen.

------
inamberclad
Mistrust indeed. I won't even tell you all what I think on here. Too personal.

Edit: that aside, there's not really that much meat to this article. It's more
like "We were sad once, and we blame our families." That's not new. What's the
solution?

------
tick_tock_tick
Having two parents greatly reduces the change of a young adult committing a
crime.

~~~
thaumasiotes
If we break out children who lost a parent to catastrophe vs children who lost
a parent to that parent's decision to leave, do they have the same crime
rates?

"Having two parents" isn't what's generating the effect.

~~~
55555
Very interesting. Have you seen stats showing that this is true? Do you care
to speculate on the real causality?

~~~
tathougies
Broken families and single parents are two separate issues. There are data
showing children of single mothers by spousal death do better on lots of
metrics. This is likely because the remaining parent arent antagonistic
towards the deceased. No matter how you slice or dice it antagonism is
necessary in a divorce.

------
RickJWagner
I saw in the news today where 8 kids were arrested for breaking windows in the
Flatiron district in New York.

All are white, apparently from families that had a substantial amount of
wealth.

I totally agree with the author, broken families lead to broken lives. Broken
families aren't necessarily broke.

~~~
phobosanomaly
I would say that plenty of kids break windows, even good kids from good homes.

Kids just have a thing for breaking windows. Sounds like somebody needs to
give these kids some dirtbikes to burn off that energy.

Driving blackout on the freeway with a blindfold, shooting airsoft guns at
pedestrians, a 17 year-old with a handgun in his room? That is some broken
home stuff.

------
boomboomsubban
This entire thing is based off the ridiculous premise that the "family life"
used to be some universal great bedrock. Have you ever talked to your parents
generation about their family life? It often seems pretty shitty too, even if
the accident of their birth forced a marriage.

~~~
127
Ridiculous to you, based on your own experience. Completely rational and
common sense to others.

~~~
boomboomsubban
Then provide some compelling non-anecdotal evidence supporting your claim. Out
of wedlock births seems like a poor measure, and it's the only one presented
in the article. "Common sense" sounds like something you believe without
evidence to me.

------
jancsika
> But the data show that American society has fewer people in poverty and less
> bigotry compared with decades past; and police use of force is far less
> pervasive than it was during higher-crime periods.

Nonetheless, it could very well be that poverty, bigotry, and excessive force
are still high enough to remain a threat to social stability.

And that threat is certainly increased by ubiquitious video evidence of
bigotry and excessive use of force which didn't exist in decades past.

~~~
ntsplnkv2
Statistics simply aren't visceral, they don't appeal to most people
emotionally.

it takes graphic imagery to bring it out. Trump saying a statistic is far more
likely to evoke a response than someone reading it in a book.

Even if statistically poverty is less and crime is less and abuses are less,
if people don't SEE that, is it actually real?

------
ArkVark
Banning Instagram and Tinder would be great for America and the world. Get
people, relationships, and social networks back to reality.

------
tyrust
A lackluster opinion piece that is attempting to disguise as an essay.

The thesis of the article [0] is unsupported by any of its content.

Statistics for the number of friends people have are adjacent to statistics
about suicides, implying a causal connection, but no statistics about the
number of friends that suicide victims have are presented.

[0] - >The lack of stable families has contributed to the widespread mistrust
of others and lack of social relationships among young people. It has, I
believe, given rise to a sense of nihilism even in an era of relative material
abundance, which has characterized some of the violent upheavals.

~~~
hindsightbias
Same author waxes how his adoptive parents made him conservative:

[https://www.tampabay.com/opinion/columns/Column-Why-
being-a-...](https://www.tampabay.com/opinion/columns/Column-Why-being-a-
foster-child-made-me-a-conservative_168442110/)

I guess this was in-between the baseball bat wielding wildings...

~~~
tyrust
At least that one is obviously just an opinion piece. I donno how they arrived
at the conclusion that having a stable family made him conservative, but
that's his business and that's fine. I'm pretty sure both sides of the aisle
are aware of the value of a stable family.

~~~
jkepler
Your point is well made in David Bahnsen's book, Crisis of Responsibility,
where he cites multiple studies indicating that higher education and income
levels correlate with stable families on the right or left of the political
spectrum. I assume that would also hold true for libertarian/independent/3rd
party types as well.

------
imwillofficial
It’s as if we as humans adapted to a certain way of organizing ourselves and
now that way is deemed “bigoted” and “old fashioned” Who would have thought
that nature designed a better social system than we could.

------
etimberg
Not related to the content of the article, but that has to be the worst page
scrolling experience I've ever come across. Something steals focus and
scrolling breaks until you click on the page.

~~~
aembleton
Works for me on both Firefox 80.0.1 and Chromium 85 without any plugins on
either of them.

What browser are you using?

------
reportgunner
Absolutely shocking.

------
lotsofpulp
> This is how my friends and I treated one another, and others. There were
> other examples of stupidity. Taking baseball bats to taillights in parking
> lots. Driving around town shooting pedestrians and bicyclists with airsoft
> guns. Getting blackout drunk and racing down the freeway wearing a
> blindfold.

At no point in my life have I ever wanted to damage someone else or their
property for the fun of it, and I wouldn’t call the acts above an example of
stupidity. This is just bad parenting or hanging around people with bad
parenting.

And my parents worked 24/7 trying to survive with their small business and
trying to learn English. But I don’t think I had to be told not to go around
breaking people’s tail lights. I saw how hard they worked to put food on the
table, it would feel disgusting to me to throw all that effort away doing
things to harm others for no reason.

~~~
dx87
I think you're the exception, not the rule. I've never done anything like what
the author wrote, but being involved in mischief is something every male I
know did. You can even see it in animals, where the young males try to push
boundries with authority figures.

~~~
lotsofpulp
My point was those examples weren’t mischief. Waking up their friend with
firecrackers is mischief. Shooting people with airsoft guns and driving
blackout drunk easily putting them in harms way is not mischief, at least not
in the “kids will be kids” way.

~~~
ideals
Maybe it's a difference in location, that quote was all stuff myself and my
shitty friends did growing up, and most other people I went to school with.
Also in a large midwest city.

It's interesting to read these bad hot takes on _why_ while plugging your ears

~~~
dguaraglia
That's not the 'why' though. Plenty of people across the world grow up in
similar situations as kids in the Midwest and they don't go around destroying
other people's property.

I honestly think there's something really messed up about American culture. I
believe you can draw a direct correlation between what I think it is - people
being indoctrinated into selfishness from an early age - and behavior like
that.

For context, my wife grew up in a small town in the Midwest. She used to tell
me horror stories about high school and I used to dismiss them as maybe be it
just being _her_ experience and nobody else's. I changed my mind when one day
we went to the wedding of a high school friend and we were sat on the same
table with some people who were 'popular' in high school. Their recollection
of those years were as bad as my wife's. One woman, when asked about her
experience literally told me 'honestly, I try not to think about that time'.

These people grew up in a location that was _by far_ better than my own
upbringing in every possible metric: affluent town, very low crime, infinite
resources when compared with my developing country schools, access to studying
abroad, etc... And they fucking _hated_ high school. That blew my mind.

~~~
lopmotr
But did their parents consistently love them and have a stable relationship
with each other? It's well known that lack of those factors causes lifelong
psychological problems in children which manifests as criminal behavior, teen
pregnancy, drug abuse, and suicide, as well as perpetuating the problem to the
next generation.

~~~
dguaraglia
Actually, that's my point!

As you can imagine, my wife and me have had several conversations about how
different our experiences going through school were. I've spotted a couple of
things in particular that couldn't be more different:

1) Kids in the US tend to move around a lot 2) Schools classes are designed so
that kids are with different groups every year/subject 3) Kids who want to go
to college are under _a lot_ of pressure from age 14 or so to perform
_flawlessly_ or risk their whole live plans being derailed 4) The obsession
with popularity ('Prom King/Queen', etc.)

I think all of those lead to very poor bonding between kids. Sure, here and
there you'll have kids that'll become life-long friends, but the vast majority
of Americans I've met barely talk to high-school friends (they tend to form
long-term bonds in college).

I have a theory that's one of the reasons school bullying is so prevalent in
the US. Don't get me wrong, there were bullies in my school in South America
too, but they were few and far apart and they usually grew out of it by 6th
grade. It's easy for a bully to pick individual victims out of a school full
of individuals... it's not the same when the kid they try to pick on has been
friends _for years_ with the same 10 to 15 people.

In any case, the conclusion we've come to is we don't want our kids to go
through the American school system.

------
reallynever
I think the comments here reflect a crowd that doesn’t see the reality of this
world. For those without purpose, or those that don’t feel the love from
society or that they’re creating value for society, these types of scenarios
definitely take place. And then these young people are given records and never
get the opportunities that others have because once you have a record that’s
the end of everything. And it stems from the lack of exposure to the infinite
possibilities life provides that a good parent or mentor could foster. Try to
put yourself in the shoes of these people for a second and stop judging. This
judgement leads to the punishment vs rehabilitation we take towards these
people when we lock them up in the US. Understand the root cause...to some
people who’d read this (apparently not on hn) this is quite normal. Instead of
criticizing, the better questions would be how to solve challenges like these
that are rampant.

Oh yea, I used to live int he bay with some programmers who were paid hundreds
of thousands a year. Every Friday night they would come home with red bull and
jager and get hammered. These were guys in their 30s. And needless to say,
they would do some pretty destructive stuff without fail...years later, one of
them told me, I’m bored with my job, I feel like I want to contribute - no
shit...

------
elipsey
"What has been getting far worse, however, is family life. Stable families
have been in free fall over the last few decades. In 1960, the out-of-wedlock
birthrate in the U.S. was 3 percent. In 2000, it was about 30 percent. Today,
it is 40 percent. (This figure obscures class divisions: for college
graduates, only one out of ten children is born out of wedlock. For those with
only a high school diploma, six out of ten are born to unmarried parents.) The
lack of stable families has contributed to the widespread mistrust of others
and lack of social relationships among young people."

It is certainly a preciuos story that lack of trust amongst children is caused
by lack of marriage amongst parrents, but the author has not furnished
evidence that this is a causal relationship.

"We didn’t really believe that the adults in our lives cared about what we
did. Seth got thrown out of his house and wouldn’t tell us why. Josh and
Brandon’s dad had been divorced five times, and he was always traveling for
work. My adoptive mother had recently moved to another town."

I know many adults today who had abusive or indifferent parents that did all
of these things _while married_.

The factual claims in this article are not supported by the text. City Journal
is operated by Manhattan Institute for Policy Research, a conservative
501(c)(3) tax exempt think tank. They seem to be more interested in promoting
their values than showing their work.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manhattan_Institute](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manhattan_Institute)

------
nl
> Still, we had food and cheap cell phones and cheap beer—and we had one
> another, unlike today’s friendless millennials.

What the _hell_ kind of judgemental piece of _bullshit_ is this?

> The lack of stable families has contributed to the widespread mistrust of
> others and lack of social relationships among young people.

The whole piece is like this - quote some unrelated stats ("suicides up" \-
even though they are less than the late 90's, and "out of wedlock births are
up" \- even though the 40% for "now" means those kids are zero years old so
unlikely to be rioting) and then use them to support some blanket social
statement unrelated to the "evidence" other than "oh this sounds bad"

------
courtf
I expected some level of hand-wringing here in response to this article. Maybe
it's something in the water in rural America, but none of this is unusual or
extreme, and if this behavior is foreign to you, then you and I grew up in
different circumstances.

Getting together with the boys and breaking the law, pushing each other to go
a little further each time, is a rite of passage all over the world. Maybe
it's practice for the kinds of risks adults sometimes have to take to survive.
A life without these formative experiences sounds dull and sterile to me. I
sometimes wonder whether the outrage and histrionics people sometimes get into
over seemingly trivial stimuli aren't caused by a lack of exposure to games
with real stakes.

~~~
TheSpiceIsLife
On the one hand society expects people to be _" just, upright citizens"_.

And on the other hand society expects the military to fill the ranks of
infantry and enlisted sailors, including the reserves.

From at least some perspectives this is confusing: we're all only here because
our, overwhelmingly male, ancestors went to war and won.

Conjecture: a society that _doesn 't foster risk-taking behaviour_ in young
males may soon find itself extinct.

~~~
ntsplnkv2
This doesn't make sense. The losers of those wars were risk takers as well -
and they lost.

In fact, for an EXISTING nation, risk taking males are more of a threat to
social order. Risk taking, non-conformist males make terrible infantrymen -
that's why they beat out the risk taker and make you follow orders. The
military doesn't want a cosplaying rambo cocking everything up.

~~~
dx87
> In fact, for an EXISTING nation, risk taking males are more of a threat to
> social order. Risk taking, non-conformist males make terrible infantrymen -
> that's why they beat out the risk taker and make you follow orders.

That's 100% wrong. One of the main advantages of western militaries is that
they encourage independent thinking. In the Marines, one of the things leaders
are told is that they should tell their troops what needs to be done, and let
them decide how to get it done.

~~~
ntsplnkv2
Please - this is nonsense.

No one commands you to raise and aim your weapon every time - that doesn't
mean western military forces are a bastion of free thinking. They're reliant
on chain of command and soldiers acting on their own is not good for an
military.

