When I was around twenty my Mom used to call me every other day or so just to have a chat. One day, after she asked me how my day was, I shot back something along the lines of: "I don't have anything to tell you, really. You're calling so often that nothing new manages to happen in between the calls." So, she stopped calling. I would go home every other week as usual and everything seemed fine. It was only much later that I found out that she basically cried for three days straight after that call.
Some time later there was a period when I would contact my parents every few months or so. Not really on purpose. Simply because other things simply took more of my time and attention, and calling my parents wasn't really high on my list of priorities.
Only when my son was born I started to realize what someone goes through as an individual and as a couple once a child comes into their lives. How it changes things. That not being thrown out of the window at 2 a.m. as an infant is already a blessing. I'm sure that thought has crossed the mind of many a young parent with a screeching infant on their hands in the middle of night. So, I felt ashamed of myself, and grateful to my parents for being there in the first place, and being decent at being parents as well.
Now I've made a point to myself to call them up at least once a week. As in, I have set up a reminder for that. I now know how much they value this. But it's not only for them. I realize very well that one day I will wake up and wish to call my parents to have a chat about something. But there simply won't be anyone to call anymore.
I'm not passing any judgement at all on people who have abusive parents. I have no idea how that feels like. I'm just happy that I didn't end up accidentally getting estranged to the decent parents that I have. At some point it really was going that way.
When I went to university, my parents simply asked me to call them once a week on Sunday at around 10am, which I did pretyt much every week and carried on doing for the rest of their lives until they died a couple of years ago in their 90s.
The calls were pretty consequential and really not verty long, quite often just 20 minutes but over the years they morphed from the being worried about me, to me being worried about them. My eldest daughter goes to Uni this summer. Despite mobile phones, I might see if she would consider doing the same.
I'm beginning to think that mobile phones and technology for young people is a horrible experience of being answerable without notice to unlimited opportunities for more powerful people to impose themselves on still incredibly experienced just lately still minors.
because simultaneously adults have been inundated with the news of the world and it isn't good, and as a result we're probably genuinely more anxious about our kids than for several generations (my father would be 114 this year, if he could be alive, and his stories of growing up pre Depression in London still make my hair stand on end and thank god for the mercies we do have. Age has made me sentimental and actually interested in what religion is about. But I also recognised both developments as being a deliberate blurring without any definite refocus, of all the accumulated worries into a indefinite emotional haze. If this is necessary for forbearance when my grandchildren err stupidly yet repairably, I'll take it, religion and all. But I don't remember my father in his nineties getting any fuzzier, only sharper. So I hope to overcome the apparent overload.
Still, whatever the reasons, I think we're letting our children's intelligence become too thinly spread across distractions when we are suffering from similar confusion, and I believe it's our job to clear more of the post modern clutter.
When I left for college, we did a weekly Sunday 30 min Skype call.
I'm the oldest of five. This pattern then continued and now my parents and my siblings and their families have that group call with everyone every week.
It's really helped us stay connected. You can't stay close to someone if you never talk to them. And a live interaction is superior to Facebook, etc
It's much better to communicate that you'd like a routine like this than to try to have irregular contact that you'll both have to think about and plan for. I have a weekly video call for my mom and it's very good for us.
Speak for yourself. My family is busy, and we don't like to plan -- we just decide to do something and do it. So a scheduled routine would feel like a horrible anchor to us.
While I'm definitely not going to say that it would benefit everyone, I think it's almost everyone while the relevant kid is in college. It's a lot easier to plan for a slot in your calendar as "Dad time" than to constantly reevaluate whether Dad is more important than XYZ random thing you have on the docket.
My son went off to college a few years ago and we've established a pattern of having him call us every Sunday. TBH I don't have a ton to talk about (and am not really a talker), I just want to make sure he's ok and everything else is pretty inconsequential.
I would recommend setting expectations early around weekly calls so they become a habit. Even if you have nothing to talk about you can small talk for a few minutes. I suspect you will have a lot to talk about if your child is starting university.
I had a strange relationship with the keeping-in-touch thing. When I was a kid my parents' generation was scattered all over the world, and long-distance calls were expensive. Plus there were a lot of them, and a lot of kids. So they developed a no-news-is-good-news attitude. You'd get the occasional call for life events, or you'd phone them if you heard there was an earthquake where they lived.
When I moved away from home I kinda thought it would be the same with me. After all, not that much happens during the average working week. I worked, I ate with friends. So why call all the time?
Turns out I think they just missed me. To a degree parents live through their kids. Are you enjoying your work? Have you found a girlfriend? It's like living through that age again.
Technology really helped. The last few years before they died they'd call weekly to check on their grandchildren. Often short calls, but still pretty good. In fact my last contact with my mom was via a video chat.
Imo there is nothing wrong with it, but only if you are truly "exploring the world" in a sense of being an observer and trying to take in what your kid is experiencing, while providing advice and guidance if needed.
Where it starts being wrong is when people take "living through my kids" as "controlling and demanding my kids live the way I imagine I would have wanted to live, if I was in their shoes now".
Note: when I say "kids", I mean someone's children who are already adults and have their own life to live. I am not trying to say that kindergarten-aged children should be given full freedom to make their own life decisions and that any attempt to infringe on that is wrong.
I think a lot of the negative connotation comes from the type of parent that's trying to live out old glory years or missed opportunities through their child by forcing them into a particular sport or activity instead of allowing their child to grow as an individual.
Every once in a while I read something the so obviously resonates with me as how things should be with me, but not how things are, that it's depressing and humbling. That's good though, because that's how change happens. Excuse me, I need to go make some calls and set some alarms now.
Do it. I lost both my parents in my late 20s. I didn't have the level of contact with them the last few years that I wish I had, partially because I assumed I've have time for that when they retired. They didn't make it.
Already did! :) Yeah, way past my 20's, which is all the more reason to make sure I keep in touch. They're both getting up there in age (although admittedly my dad is probably in better shape than me...)
Sorry for your loss. I'm at the age where I've lost a few of my good friends now, and it never feels like you had enough time.
The love for a child will always be more than the love for a parent.
From the day of birth the child detaches himself from the parent. Every day a little more than the day before.
This is a good thing and makes live bearable.
> Only when my son was born I started to realize what someone goes through as an individual and as a couple once a child comes into their lives. How it changes things.
Having gone through the same experience, I have to wonder if the simplest explanation for increased estrangement is that people are waiting longer to have children, and having fewer of them, than ever before.
Many people cry, shout or even try to manipulate you when you tell them their behavior (based on excessive attachment or dependency of some kind) is an issue for you. Many of the same people's loved ones realize that and are in a clinch: do I distance myself, hurting them? do I not distance myself, hurting self? It's not something you can just ask about: "I'm not as attached to you as you are to me, what do we do?"
There was no attempt to manipulate here - as the author stated, they didn't find out about the mother's crying for a long time. It was never made known.
I wasn't suggesting OP's mother wanted to manipulate. I wanted to express that it's a very common situation in relationships of all kinds that there's assymetry in desired closeness and it's difficult / non obvious what to do there (i.e. no easy solution).
It's definitely not a coincidence, but it is certainly complicated.
Damaged kids become damaged adults, and if they realize it, they may decide that they wouldn't be good parents and rightly opt-out of it.
Children that didn't have the right opportunities, whether that's their parent's fault or not may not have enough achievement as an adult to take on the burden of being a parent. One can argue whether it is harder being young today than it was 20-30 years ago, but you can't argue that being a parent requires lots of resources in both time and money, and if you don't have both, it's the right choice to not be a parent.
Another layer is that the parents often want grandkids and will use them as an excuse or as leverage to maintain contact despite lack of respect for boundaries or even outright abuse. So there is an element of spite in denying them grandkids, and an element of self-protection in the same.
Long story short, I don’t call my parents precisely because I’m childless. Failing my love life has everything to do with them.
It’s not like I were divorced. I’m precisely never married, never had a long girlfriend, despite not being ugly nor totally stupid, and my loneliness drove me crazy (in the literal sense – since Covid I’ve honestly snapped a few neurons, so it’s quite over for me). But before that, I used to be a fine person, but they didn’t give me any lead on the love life. EVERY father would be happy if the kid plays with girls at school, just not mine because they don’t want me to pump-and-dump - well they don’t have to worry about this for sure. I really don’t get how people succeed at the love life, it’s totally not working for me.
I’m now workaholic and if I stop working, I’ll go insane with ruminations in a few hours only. I’m quite fortunate my worklife offers me the opportunity of working more, I’m a programmer-entrepreneur.
Anyway, if I were successful at life, I’d certainly be happy to call my parents more. It’s just that their opinion led me to a general failure, so I can’t hear more.
At some point, we have to stop looking to our parents, and take responsibility for our own lives.
Until we can do that, we aren't really adults. That's what sets adults and children apart: responsibility. Children are not responsible for their own lives; rather, they live under the guardianship of adults.
Adults are responsible.
And it is a hate crime that we have probably two generations in the West that have been raised to be actively irresponsible: to reject the mantle of responsibility, and instead spend their time loudly blaming... everybody but themselves.
It doesn't matter how well-deserved that blame might be! Blame itself is toxic.
Look, I get it. My parents did a number on me, too. But I also recognize that they too were broken in many ways, and that they did the best they could with what they had.
Yes, that means they gave me a lot of shitty advice. But it was good advice to their younger selves.
That's why I'm not angry with them anymore. Not for the cheating, or the divorce, or any of the rest. Because I am adult enough to take ownership over my own life.
These children, now adults, have stopped looking to their parents. They've estranged them. I'd say in many cases, that's the responsible thing to do.
If a close friend told you that their BF/GF abused them and asked you what was the responsible thing to do, would you not tell them that they should first remove themselves from their abuser? Is it not precisely the responsible and independent choice for a victim to leave their abuser behind and move on?
Blame isn't necessary for estrangement. I broadly agree, blame is often toxic, and it's healthy to have a sense of cosmic empathy towards even people who have wronged you. It's not really clear to me who's ultimately "in the wrong" here, but the person you replied to is clearly taking the reins on their life: evidently, they're now dealing with life without their parents' help.
I agree with you. Abuse is a serious allegation and a traumatic experience.
And yet there are so many levels and shades to abuse. Just like the errors we see in the products and programs we build. We have to ask if it was malicious, neglect or ignorance. The longer we live the more I ask myself whether large swaths of that low level trauma I endured was malicious or their own timeline to grow up, be better, realize their mistakes. Not fair, but also true.
My mother is not the same person she was when I was 12/16/22 and I'm glad we had space, but never truly cut ties despite how painful it was for so many years.
We aren't all afforded the same time, space, community to mature.
- So you are telling me I should take responsibility because no-one in society should have responsibility ;) (half-badly rephrasing with humor). On one side, it burns the claim that it’s a society, it means we’re just independent units with no love for each other; On the other it’s assuming that I didn’t try everything first. I’ve lived in 4 countries, went across the world, participated to a dozen charities (>200hrs each), took my friends out regularly, did sports, I mean I did go around the block and tried everything I knew how to try and took my fair share of ownership.
- But my mother hates dogs because they’re competing with her in terms of affection (or total lack thereof), and relationships don’t click with me, because most parents develop their child’s socialization and mine acted as if socialization wasn’t a subject. In some sense, their education taught me to rely on my skills, not on socialization (independence as a principle, which became loneliness). I have no example in my 38 years where I could rely on others when I was in need.
- It seems I have the face of someone to be stepped upon (I don’t know, some people have a face you want to slap, perhaps I look weak and people instinctively profit from it).
- In any case, they pushed feminism and helped my sisters more, and either you admit that feminism has an impact and gives women a better life than men, especially in terms of confidence in society, either you admit it doesn’t, in which case why doing it. But as it stands, given women’s experience and expectations, it is not possible anymore for me as a beginner to start a relationship. They do expect a set of societal conventions that I don’t know about (from not-breaking-up-by-sms to saying the right thing when it’s time to split or not split the bill, not even talking about in bed).
I’ll just take a dog, but I’m enraged that people talk so much about helping others and can let people down just next to them when they’re were 99% decent humans before. I mean I’ve donated dozens of thousands to charities in the past, and none of them is able to pay it back to lonely men. I was a decent being until I became insane under the lockdowns.
Its a bad look to blame feminism honestly, women are just looking out for themselves and its just healthy in a way. If you're irretrievably redpilled on this then not much I can say there.
2020's pandemic and the associated mess with society is a thing. Just look out for yourself. Therapy is fine, you don't have to broadcast to everyone that you've chatted about issues. I've had a few sessions and to be honest, even those few sessions have given me ways to have internal conversations with myself by just imagining what a therapist would say. Just thought I'd offer that.
Still, take care of yourself, we only have one life here on the planet, plus you can't depend on 100 percent of the folks you run into to be on your side, most of us can be pretty self centered but don't let external insanities live in your head rent free. Humans are just not perfect beings.
Look forward to the future, surprises can and do happen. Cultivate friendships where you can.
I won’t claim to understand your situation but as someone whose parents both died before I hit puberty, I can assure you it’s possible to find love on your own — I say this as someone currently happily married and expecting a child. I wish you the best of luck, you have the power to change your own life :)
It's very possible. You probably won't see how it's possible until you've been to therapy. But you should 100% seek therapy. Your first and last paragraphs imply being a success at life means having children, which points to self-worth issues that HN commenters aren't qualified to address.
I would avoid going straight to damage as a source. I personally am very uncomfortable with some kinds of emotional expression and as a result it's difficult for me to reach out to make small talk. I wouldn't say my upbringing was in any way abusive either - I've lived a quite privileged life. Neurodiversity is I think also a thing you need to take into consideration on this topic.
(this isn't meant to attack you for misclassification - but rather widen the pool of people who fall into this complicated class)
> but you can't argue that being a parent requires lots of resources in both time and money
I know enough parents doing fine for their kids without much money and even less time that I’ll have to contradict you. It’s infinitely better to be alive than have stuff or even ample parent time. I can attest to that from personal experience. In the short term it’s certainly convenient to avoid having kids as having kids is hard and requires sacrifices. However, it’s a commonly held myth that for many kids are beyond them due to time and money, presumably as a justification for precluding or severely limiting children. One has the ability to make that decision but one shouldn’t lie about the motivation because for many the choice is made to put themselves first and reject the sacrifices of being parents.
My first thought was to disagree and push the small datapoint thing - but I suppose it varies greatly based upon location in the world, and what the definition of 'fine (for their kids)' is.
In some places kids can play outside and have a village of school connected people / things to get through just fine.
I guess it's also easier to do fine if you have church groups to help, and some places have other community that can help I am guessing. Perhaps that mall in Beverly Hills is a fine babysitter and teacher of life lessons - the malls around other parts of the country stopped being good for that some years ago.
I also feel that fine is also a gamble.
You might get affordable child care that does not abuse your kids and you might get a school system that teaches them life fine.. but you may not, and if you don't have the time to find out, or the money to change things drastically - you are essentially gambling with an innocent's life.
Again I feel this varies quite a bit from location to location and situation to situation. But I don't feel it is right to suggest the choice is putting themselves first - at least not in all circumstances, and I'd guess it's not the main factor in most of these conscious choices.
> You might get affordable child care that does not abuse your kids and you might get a school system that teaches them life fine.. but you may not
If your response to child abuse, a lack of affordable childcare, and ok schooling is that the children shouldn't exist, you've lost me.
> you are essentially gambling with an innocent's life.
You lose all bets you don't make. Life is a gamble full-stop so you are always gambling when you bring a life into the world. My main point is that there is a whole lot more room to maneuver for many childless couples from a purely practical point of view before it'd be established that having children were irresponsible for them. People have way too high expectations and a lot of ulterior motives that are the real barriers. One way to look at it is, what would you do to help them if you children already existed? Would you move somewhere cheaper/safer/closer to family? Would you sacrifice your career? Would you lower your standard of living? Would you sacrifice your lifestyle? If the answer to any of those is "no" (be honest now) then you've discovered an important part of your true motivations.
> If your response to child abuse, a lack of affordable childcare, and ok schooling is that the children shouldn't exist, you've lost me.
No, the argument is that some children shouldn't exist because some parents cannot afford to be successful parents.
It's odd to see such a pro-gambling position. On any other topic, no one would encourage people to make a risky gamble with someone else's life & happiness as collateral. And by the way, the loss you incur by not making a bet is not even close to the loss you can incur by losing this gamble. Clearly, you've never witnessed fates worse than death. I would never consider a life of misery & abuse preferable to non-existence.
And parental sacrifice is hardly the only factor. We know that children in lower socio-economic groups have significantly worse life outcomes on average. They have lower academic achievement, lower income, higher incarceration and crime rates. Will you pin that all on parenting? Poor parents just don't sacrifice enough? Doesn't matter how much you sacrifice when you can only afford a place in a high crime area and your child runs in with the wrong crowd and begins a generational cycle of incarceration. Doesn't matter how much you love your children when you have to spend most of your time at work away from them to afford basic necessities. Doesn't matter how much you want your child to succeed in school when you have neither the time nor education to even know how to help them. And we haven't even gotten to mental disabilities and neuroses yet. It costs money to manage those issues, more than some parents can possibly afford.
Everyone should have the right to make that choice. Reproductive rights are human rights. But if you believe you lack the basic resources to setup your child for success when the cost of failure literally isn't yours to bear, I could never accept that as an ethical choice. Bad outcomes are always possible regardless of wealth, but your wealth significantly alters risk and the whole equation to the point where one can say "that's a bad/good bet". If you knowingly make a bad bet, that's on you, except now your child has to pay the cost.
You're not exactly wrong, but accepting that some people should simply give up their claimed right to reproduce means you can easily genocide people by not paying them enough.
"that the children shouldn't exist, you've lost me." - I'm not saying children should not exist. I am saying in many locations for many people, I think it's more of a choice against putting children in harms way.
- also 'what themacguffinman said' in this portion of this thread!
"lot more room to maneuver for many childless couples from a purely practical point" - I agree, and some may be on a path to success, for many it's you against the world and the world is really good at keeping you down/in debt / out of safer places, etc.
So I have been helping some children, a couple as official fosters for 6 months or so, and another non-official for 10 years or so. We/they have moved to cheaper which is safer in some regards (better schools) - and less safe in others.
In this process I/we have sacrificed career and portions of career (partially 'for the children') - closer to family would not make any of the things better, but that may change around age 16 - to some degrees.
We have lowered our standard of living and sacrificed a previously really fun lifestyle.
My motivations for children has always been to provide a safe environment where they can learn well. This is much easier if you make 250k / year than if you make 50k.
While I know it's possible to sacrifice and ask for help, and certainly there are safe places to raise cheaper, say some towns in Alabama - but it's hard to figure out all about the schools / towns / pollution / etc etc until you are in it.. and moving is expensive.
I was blessed to be raised in a place that had sidewalks and neighborhoods safe enough to walk / bike / bus anywhere anytime. At that time, in that place, it might have been considered abuse to keep a kid inside.
These days we have places where (I believe it's still the case) that you could be arrested for sending your kid to the park (it's not safe).
Being in a safe place is not just about affording childcare. It's about being able to afford good food, go organic as much as you can, avoid BPA, microwaving plastics and more.
It's about safe streets, safe schools, after school safety, and so much more.
Like I said my original comment - in some places for some people this is no problem, yet in many places in the US 'all the things' are less safe these days, and in many cases quite dangerous/toxic truthfully.
I've heard of some interesting safety nets for challenged children in California, and I've witnessed those heartfelt 'the village / church helped X do Y' - but we don't have the same state-paid-for child help here where I am, you even get kicked off food stamps when you get a raise to 11.30 per hour here.
If I had a new kid today I don't know what I would do. Probably look at going to portugal or something like that (much research would be needed to really pick a place). The days of assuming that staying in the US provides top notch safety and education are long gone imho.
15 - 20 years ago I was still cautious about having kids, not knowing where I could afford a safe growing-up environment. 10 years ago I still believed that the basics like safe water and good educators were guaranteed across the US.
Today I know more, and more of the things I worried about back then are less safe today, and the costs associated with escaping those things are higher than ever.
So I still feel that "I don't feel it is right to suggest the choice is putting themselves first - at least not in all circumstances, and I'd guess it's not the main factor in most of these conscious choices." is true.
Surely there is somewhere in the US where these concerns are not so paramount, and for those that have other circumstances with family/church/etc, different for sure.
I'm in a fairly modern, popular, growing city / burbs, and the basics here are not as safe as they should be - and I don't see much of that changing anytime soon - unless you can afford to get to brentwood/franklin, I think you'd be better off moving much further away for child safety.
Sure you could keep them inside 24/7 - homeschool if you have a partner and things like that, rice and beans etc, if you had to, I get it's possible, and so kids should exist.
I still feel it's easier to make that choice when you either make lots of money or have found a small safe community with options - of which I don't think there really are that many for most people here anymore.
I strongly disagree with this overbroad generalization.
> you can't argue that being a parent requires lots of resources in both time and money, and if you don't have both, it's the right choice to not be a parent.
I would be happy to argue this. Raising children is the most essentially human experience one can have. A society with fewer parents is a society well on its way to nihilism and extinction.
Damaged kids become damaged adults which will raise damaged kids. Of course we can add a word to express that this should not be applied to individual but only to a group: like "Majority of damaged kids become ..." and of course it really depends what people mean when they say "damaged".
If that means trauma, then there is this concept of
"Transgeneration transmission of trauma" not in terms of epigenetics (as this has not been proven yet), but in terms of behaviour of adults transmits trauma verbally and non-verbally to the child. I think this also applied to a whole range of responses/believes about how we approach life in general which is transmitted from parents to child. Yes, also the child has their own personality and might not be influenced that much, but nurture is pretty powerful especially in the forming years.
Not sure this is a 100% proven mechanisms in psychology (replicated and understood) but I can easily identify in my kid things that I wish I fix for myself and I see this in other parents with kids too.
I also think a child is a very powerful chance to change myself as kids can really be (specially when they are young and copy their parents) mirrors of their parents thus making identifying these mechanisms easily.
I am thankful that I think there are a lot of things that I caught early on, did a lot of work to fix them and managed not to transmit to the child.
Though it’s unclear if they are no contact because they have no appreciation for what their parents might be going through (since they don’t yet have kids) or if their parents are just too toxic to deal with at all (perhaps contributing to their not having kids).
I disagree a bit. I trained my parents early to expect a cut, and at 19 I moved with a girlfriend and never looked back.
We have a good relationship and they re good parents but I cut all attempts at having them take more space in my life than the minimum. It's so common in France we call that killing your dad (I googled and it seems to be a Freudian expression we started using to say growing up) and is part of growing up.
I have a kid now, and I want her to get the fuck out at 19, and start a life of her own with as little need for my involvment.
The funny thing is I moved to Hong Kong eventually and couldnt convince my french gf of 7 years to follow me because she couldnt tolerate being so far from her parents. I then met my current chinese wife, born here, who is in a very fusional relationship with her mom, who talks to her for hours everyday, so much she needs to kill her phone at night to stop it. And they live an hour apart...
It s clear to me there's something in Asia that's different because they all seem just as fusional (I find it unhealthy), but it may be also a girl thing more generally ? I have a sample of 2 so it's hard to know.
In any case, my daughter will be encouraged to "kill her dad" and be on her own. Even if her mom might disagree :D
Which do you think is the causal effect: not having children causes it easier to break from the parents, or having terrible parents that cause estrangement makes people less inclined to have their own children?
Why not both? It is much easier to make a case for causation with the former though; an overwhelmingly common experience among new parents is to reconsider past resentments now that they know what their own parents actually went through.
“Why do you take us on errands like the bank if mom was home?”
“I just really enjoy your company.”
For years in my teens I was convinced that they didn’t believe my time was as valuable as theirs. Making me wait in a fucking bank.
I have two boys now and I take them shopping even when mom’s home.
I deeply deeply understand my parents so much better now. I’m so thankful for that because I think it lets me love them on a whole different level now. I now understand countless details of why they did what they did.
This made me tear up. I totally understand that sentiment on both sides.
I have a mentor who told me that he was confused when got married, that his wife didn't come with him when he went to the store, to the bank, or on whatever random errand he was going on. Why? Because his parents (both incredibly highly educated and busy doctors) did everything together. If one was going to the store, the other came along, because they just enjoyed each other's company. I thought it was a beautiful depiction of what a familial relationship could, and perhaps should be like.
yeah happens to me too and about 15 years for me. I also get that "but I thought you died" and "I got better" dream. I am thinking that's convenient, but still, something seems wrong.
Much of what seems to have held parents and adult children together used to be grandchildren; with fewer people having children of their own, and waiting until later in life, that might be a lot of cause of the estrangement. Anecdotally, I've noticed a lot of people in their 20s or 30s get much closer to their parents when the first kid arrives.
> Some time later there was a period when I would contact my parents every few months or so.
You post almost made me cry. My father passed away a few years ago and one of the things I regretted the most was that the last time I talked to him was 'a few months ago'. It took me a long time to come to terms with that and to stop beating myself up for it. People, call your parents.
Yea, how much of the article is basically that people are putting off having kids MUCH longer than they used to? I had one in my 40s.
Having your own kid puts into perspective all the failings you thought your parents had.
So when people were having kids at 20 (or earlier), yeah, you don't have two decades of delayed adulthood/extended teenagedom to complain about your parents.
I relate to your story, I definitely got to be that self-centered twenty-something for a good long time. Would love to be able to call my dad right now.
I realize very well that one day I will wake up and wish to call my parents to have a chat about something. But there simply won't be anyone to call anymore.
This made me tear up. My dad had a stroke a couple of years ago and my mom is taking care of him. I dont call them nearly as often as I should. Thank you for the reminder.
...I've long since retired, my son's moved away
I called him up just the other day
I said, I'd like to see you if you don't mind
He said, I'd love to, dad, if I can find the time
You see, my new job's a hassle, and the kids have the flu
But it's sure nice talking to you, dad
It's been sure nice talking to you
And as I hung up the phone, it occurred to me
He'd grown up just like me
My boy was just like me...
When my son was born I finally realized that my dad is just a bad person and he won’t change. I used to try to rationalize the things he did. My mom refuses to leave or do anything that might cause trouble. I decided to just cut the relationship to my parents off. For me, at best, family are just people I happened to know when I was younger.
Maybe its just me...I have been staying away from my parents in a different country since the last 13 years. With a wife and a toddler, I still feel uneasy if I don't speak to my parents twice a day. Even though we don't have much to talk about every day, it's just the feeling of seeing them and hearing their voice which calms me down.
Not sure what you mean by follow someone. Everyone is different though. I am very close to my parents and now since they are getting old, I feel I should at least talk to them every day if not meet them.
possibly the typical reaction of the mothers I know to their son reacting defensively to their calling, would be petrified what horrors are going on bad enough to make their precious child and light of their lives not want their mother to hear.
I know that it's never anything like that, but I have really toned down my vignette of a maternal reaction. You just never know how important you are - you said this yourself I only can't emphasise it enough. Emotional telepresence as once advertising had it, belongs to a boomer utopia, in my opinion.
My parents...are a mixed bag. They weren't or aren't abusive. At least, not physically or sexually or anything like that. Emotionally...that depends on how you want to interpret events and what your perspective is.
But.... there's a gigantic cultural (rural vs suburban), generational (Xenial/Milennial vs Boomer), political (die hard Republicans vs Greenwald-esque progressives) and religious (baptist vs atheist) divide between us.
To complicate matters - they, especially my mother who's suffering depression from chronic illness, can be quite toxic and stress-inducing at times. They're judgemental, my mother can be a tad manipulative - nothing is every enough. I could call every day, i could see them once a week, they freaking moved within a 20 min jog of my house ffs. They're pushy.
To quote Kill Bill Vol 2: "Because he's a very very very old man. And like all rotten bastards, when they get old, they become lonely. Not that that has any effect on their disposition. But they do learn the value of company."
And that's the conundrum of them. They are characters and they are a lot to take in and a lot to ask my wife to habitually tolerate.
But on the flip side, they're incredibly thoughtful, giving, will stop anything at the drop of a hat to help with problems big and small, physical, financial, you name it. (though i never take them up on the $$). They... were incredibly flawed parents and i didn't walk out of childhood without issues.
But man, does being a parent change things. It makes me hypersensitive to just how i'm going to fuck up my kid, what kind of an annoyance i will be to him. The bond i have with my child is already something i can't explain to people who don't have kids and even to a few who do. And the idea that one day he'll just be too busy for me, or even being a teenager and being too cool for me.. it depresses me.
I didn't have him to burden him with me. but it's a relationship that i value higher than anything else.
i'm getting older - i've had medical ordeals, watching my mom suffer medical problems and it's just hit me how short and temporary all this is.
And i dunno. I understand a bit more now, and am tolerant a bit more now. I'm more grateful for what was done for me and less judgmental about differences. Life is hard, life is fragile, relationships are hard but... they're worth the extra effort (on both sides).
I don't have a lot of friends. I just never fit in anywhere. But whether i did or didn't, it really strikes to the core of just how important family is, looking down and up generationally. No one wants to die alone.
No one wants to pour all that effort, love, attention, money, heart-ache, struggle to doing the best you can for a kid, just for that kid to be like "fuck off" (for whatever reason, sans abuse). To dedicate 18-25, sometimes more, of your life to someone and them to just ...be too good for you now?
I was that kid at 25. At 40 with a 5 year old, i am not. And i will not be.
The aversion to mental health care in the older generations is really tiresome. My mom has pathological anxiety and probably depression, but has never gotten any sort of treatment for it. It radiates out and affects everyone around her.
And of course, since she didn't recognize mental illness in herself, she also couldn't see in her children. So we never got care that we needed and are various degrees of fucked up now. We were just force-fed religion instead. We're all atheists now, but those scars never heal, and I'll never forgive my parents for putting us through that.
> I'll never forgive my parents for putting us through that.
Maybe worth keeping in mind that they were probably doing what they were force fed to believe was the right thing to do. Everyone is just trying their best (usually, and even if they aren’t, it is generally better for your own mental health to go through life assuming they are).
side topic: the funny part about going through anxiety myself, as an atheist, is it really made me appreciate certain aspects of religion - from the comfort and wisdom people get from faith in something bigger than themselves, to even appreciating services from organized religion itself, therapy services for those who can't afford therapy otherwise, to the mental benefits of social/communal gatherings and belonging.
i'm no less an atheist than i was before anxiety,but i'm certainly less of an asshole about it.
It's the contract between generations. I make sure my son hugs his grandmother when he visits her, because my wife is owed a lot of hugs from her grandchildren one day and I'm going to make damn sure she gets them.
> So, I felt [...] grateful to my parents for being there in the first place
I'm going to say something controversial. Not everyone is grateful for their life. I've talked to multiple people who preferred to never be born. And event the best parents I know couldn't offer much more honest reason for having children than "we wanted to" which is basically ultimate selfishness.
> [...] and being decent at being parents as well.
That's way more universally good reason for treating your parents well.
> > So, I felt [...] grateful to my parents for being there in the first place
> I'm going to say something controversial. Not everyone is grateful for their life. I've talked to multiple people who preferred to never be born. And event the best parents I know couldn't offer much more honest reason for having children than "we wanted to" which is basically ultimate selfishness.
> > [...] and being decent at being parents as well.
> That's way more universally good reason for treating your parents well.
I can verify this. I very much wish I wasn't tasked with being alive. Depending on your metaphysical beliefs, I feel like I'm wasting another soul's place in the world. I don't want to be here, maybe if another soul was in this body then it would put it to better use and be happy and fulfilled and desire this life. I have people who want me to be here and for their sake I continue onwards, always wondering why, and always wishing I didn't have to. I used to make the mistake of thinking I could confide in them these feelings I have, but eventually I realized that I cannot. Rather, I should not. My parents wanted to be parents, and they began preparing for me as soon as they found out I was on my way. They kept me from falling off of tall things or licking wall sockets or drinking cleaning fluid as a baby. No matter how you word it, there's no way to explain that you don't want to exist that doesn't tell a parent "everything you defined yourself by for the last few decades is a farce, the thing that you made doesn't want to exist." I am not grateful my parents made me, but I don't hate them so much as to want to hurt them by telling them that.
Hey, in case you aren't aware, it sounds like you might be depressed. I highly recommend finding a therapist, or if you can't, consider what would need to change in your life for you to feel more active and engaged. Are you eating/sleeping/exercising too little or too much? Is your job/commute/locale draining you? Do you feel like you just need to find a direction/purpose? There's no other soul out there that would take your spot, and even if one could they'd face the same challenges as you.
There's such thing as dysthymia (persistent depressive disorder). About 1.5% of people have it. Treatment is supposedly as effective as treatment for depression (it's the same treatment). You have to feel like that for at least 2 years to get a diagnosis. Since it's not severely handicapping people suffering from it, it may go undiagnosed for decades and even after diagnosis people might choose to forgo treatment because of its hit and miss nature and side effects.
> I know couldn't offer much more honest reason for having children than "we wanted to" which is basically ultimate selfishness.
I really don't think that's at all objectionable or selfish to be honest. Couples that don't have children exist and bless them for deciding to go with their gut and not feel compelled by society into having a child. A child being born has absolutely no say in the matter - it's solely a decision of the parents and it should be one driven by whether the parents want and can care for a child.
The question of being grateful for life - that's a pretty complex philosophical subject. At the end of the day life is all you've got as an organism, you will experience pain from time to time but without life you simply would not exist. To those who go through severe trauma and pain, my heart goes out to you and I thankfully can't relate to that utter helplessness - but for most people existence is all we've got and if you run across someone that genuinely prefers they were never born I'd hope you can direct them to some therapists to work through their issues with, that can't be a healthy place to be.
I've lived about as good a life as it is possible to live, and I still totally understand someone who prefers the void. Sometimes I prefer the void, especially when I contemplate what is likely to transpire in the next few decades given current trends, particularly with respect to climate change.
But the void isn't peace or existence - it's just nothingness. You are able to, at least, helplessly curse the world you see in front of you - without life there is absolutely nothing, there is no you to contemplate the changes or appreciate the peace of not living through them.
Yes, I get that. We all know what the void is like: it's the state we were all in before we were born. It's not at all clear to me that that will be worse than witnessing the collapse of civilization, which is not at all unlikely to happen in the lifetime of many of the people hanging out here on HN.
Our culture offers very little in the way of making life meaningful, especially for those who suffer. I don't diminish the suffering of the people who's life no longer feels worth it. In fact, many people's lives are truly unhappy. But an unhappy life can still be a meaningful one.
Further I would argue the antihuman sentiment offer by your argument that giving life is selfish only further contributes to the problem.
You can't really blame them. It's a consequence of evolution. Genes that make brains that want to have children tend to reproduce better than genes that make brains that don't.
Parents spend their whole lives waiting for their kids to thank you. Kids spend their whole lives waiting for their parent to say "I'm sorry."
That said I've never felt that way about my Mom and Dad. I've faults and problems a plenty but I wouldn't ascribe any of that on them; indeed the best things about me seem to clearly come from them and the worst are just as clearly things they suggested I not do. What are you going to do though, even if all that wasn't true they'd still love me and I'd still love them.
In therapy circles and attachment theory land, this is exactly what's supposed to happen when you receive "good enough parenting". Good enough parenting means your parents actually tried and either worked through any of their issues preventing them from giving care to their children, or didn't have those issues in the first place. So the idea goes, you end up developing a relationship based on mutual respect, love, and level-headedness.
The problem is, not everyone is lucky enough to receive that kind of childhood care, even though it seems like it should be universal. Lots of people are massively fucked up and still have kids anyway, either accidentally or otherwise. And then their kids are put at a massive disadvantage in life and in human relationships.
It's usually difficult for people with decent upbringings to even conceptualize why a child might willingly remain estranged from their family. But there are a lot of people out there with really good reasons to do that.
> "Lots of people are massively fucked up and still have kids anyway, either accidentally or otherwise. And then their kids are put at a massive disadvantage in life and in human relationships."
This is an interesting one, and in direct contradiction to the adage: "Hard times create strong men, strong men create good times, good times create weak men, and weak men create hard times.”
My life experience agrees, tough times mostly produce emotionally damaged people
This reminds me of a friend who has gone through some bad life experiences. She once told me that "everything happens for a reason" is the kind of garbage only said by people who have never had bad things happen to them.
Yes, dealing with adversity can teach us things and make us stronger. But there are limits, and adversity can also do permanent mental and emotional damage. The latter outcome is way more common than some people would like to believe.
Just as a couple of counter points to that phrase (to people who say and and those who hear it), because I know a lot of people hate hearing it.
People saying it are trying to impart hope on the people that they are saying it to. If you believe that everything happens for a reason, this will be a comforting reminder even though you're going through something awful. It's intended to remind people of the countless stories of individuals and groups of people who have suffered only to find out later that such suffering prepared them to make a difference later in life.
For some, this could mean that a tragedy in your life will leave you prepared to help others who are going through something similar later in life.
It's not intended as a dismissal of your pain. It's only to say that one day, the lessons you learn from this pain may help you to help others or yourself.
Simple examples:
- You lose a loved one to a horrible disease but then organize people to fund research to cure the disease, grow up to become a doctor or help support people coping with it
- You get dumped in a relationship and you're devastated, but on reflection you realize things about yourself that you need to work on, make real changes in yourself and later meet the love of your life
It's not meant to be dismissive.
On the flip side, for people who throw this phrase around you need to know that it gives the impression that God is controlling everything like some type of puppet master without any free will or random occurrences in the world.
The Bible doesn't reflect that perspective at all. It's worth the read to understand it better.
I don't think I would say "everything happens for a reason" to someone who is suffering, but all the same for me and other people of faith it's a simple reality. But for people who disagree or struggle with the premise, it will offer no solace. They would probably feel like it dismisses and trivializes their suffering, and worse, they might attach other, unintended meanings.
History attests to the terrible condition of the world, and the Bible is very clear about that from the earliest parts of Genesis. There is so much pain, as a constant through the vastness of history and before. Saying everything happens for a reason doesn't necessarily deny that. When applied properly, it acknowledges the cruelty and struggle to find meaning, but that the reality is as it stands. Someone who does not believe may very well reject the notion of meaning, and see only the path of improving the situation as the answer. In the end, both types have among them people of goodwill, and we must be charitable to each other.
A sibling comment to yours mentions Candide, which takes "we live in the best of all possible worlds" very cynically. Voltaire disagreed with Leibniz's premises. But of course "best of all possible worlds" has lots of room for argument as to "best" means, and it certainly does not mean the best of all of _your_ possible worlds. As the joke goes, both the optimist and pessimist believe ours is the best possible.
Like you said, it can probably console people that believe in that sort of stuff and probably is meant like that but you gotta be careful with it if you ask me. I can easily be damaging.
If you think about it, the bible and other books/religions were created in really hard and tough times and the belief that somehow in some way "it was meant to be and there's a reason behind this terrible thing happening" was helping them through it. This is all in times in which less was known about how the world around us works (and even nowadays we don't really know but our models are much much better - just think of how medicine knows about bacteria causing illnesses and such vs. the whole Yellow Bile, Black Bile, Phlegm and Blood thing - Hippocrates ~460BC-~370BC).
A merchant in the 1300s coming home to find all of his family had died from the plague might find solace in thinking that all of this happened for a reason if he is a very devout believer in such things. I can't personally fathom how you'd find someone today that would see meaning in having a family member getting infected with Yersinia Pestis, nevermind die from it, but that's just me.
So as you can see, personally I absolutely don't believe in the whole reason and other religious stuff but I can see and appreciate how religion can help stabilize society and keep the population under control in tough times, how it can be a moral compass etc. I don't personally need the rest of it all to know that I shouldn't just go about killing other people. And if something bad happens in the world then - from my relatively safe western vantage point - I can just see that the world is still an ugly place and that there are bad people that just do bad things or that are living in bad enough situations that make them do those things (hey, until we're in those situations ourselves, we don't really know what we'd actually do, best intentions not to or not!) and all I can do is to try as best as I can to avoid those people amd situations altogether. There's not much more to it and I don't need to imagine a devil or some other stuff to explain this somehow.
That was really my point. In the Bible, you see God directly intervening in certain situations but you don’t see Him actively controlling everything. Moses even argues with Him at one point.
There’s a couple of verses that people have strained to apply that meaning to it, but reading the entire Bible to put things in context you don’t see “everything” happening for a reason. You see some things.
It’s one of the reasons that I try to make this point a lot. I don’t know how many people realize how much that phrase leads non-believers to demonize God by attaching every awful thing that happens to a reason, which then makes those things His doing.
This comes more from the early Catholic theology dogmas of an all-knowing, all-powerful benevolent god, which creates a contradiction.
If God is not actively controlling everything, then you have to either admit that He can't control everything (but that clashes with the all-knowing, all-powerful aspect that the church really wants to preserve), or that He can intervene but chooses not to, in which case He is responsible for every awful thing that He lets happen, and you either need to assert that "it's all for a good reason in the end" and letting these awful things happen is not a bad thing, or give up the presumption of benevolence.
So the tricky thing is that you have to give up something of these assumptions; you can keep any of them, but if you want to keep all of them, then there's a contradiction - and the discussion becomes very different depending on which assumption you give up; if you keep omnipotence, then you have to "demonize God"; if you keep both omnipotence and benevolence, then you have to ignore any awful thing in our reality that does not have a plausible good reason justifying the awfulness; if you want to keep benevolence and a common-sense look on our reality, then you get (perhaps, I hope I'm not misinterpreting you) something like your approach - which, IMHO, is quite reasonable, but essentially surrenders omnipotence and thus strongly goes against dogma of many churches that do assert a God that actively intervenes all the time.
I'm intrigued by the "non-believers to demonize God" though. As a thought experiment, replace God by any deity of any religion, such that you would also be a non-believer (I assume you are a believer in the Christian god), which should help with the objective distance.
How about human sacrifices, say Vikings or Aztecs. What are your thoughts on human sacrifice? Would you go as far as to demonize the Aztec god(s) that required a human sacrifice?
(I'm not the person you're replying to) A bit of a tangent: I don't know that much about the Aztec gods but AFAICT, the Vikings didn't really deny that their gods can be pretty terrible. There are a lot of Norse myths that basically describe a really dysfunctional and bitter family, but with superpowers. Betrayal, infidelity, pettiness, arrogance, and stupid mistakes are all reflected in stories about their gods. They might as well be demons but they weren't as bad as other things so you'd worship them all the same.
Christianity in particular is significantly different in that their god is canonically benevolent while also being omnipotent. It's a pretty fundamental aspect of Christianity, I don't think I've heard any Christian that believes their god is actually kind of a dick. I would imagine that even though "why do bad things happen?" is a classic foundational challenge to Christianity, it's probably irrelevant to Vikings. Christianity isn't really comparable to old school faiths like Vikings/Aztecs.
Also fair enough :) and to add to your tangent AFAICT though Viking human sacrifices are described it seems like they weren't the common place standard type of sacrifice.
I don't necessarily think that it matters much for the question though. I'm not sure I can find a different benevolent omnipotent (or close enough) deity to make a straight comparison to that doesn't have a current (large) following that would drag the discussion into geopolitical/georeligious territory. If you do know one I'm all up for a substitution.
I don't know with the parent I was replying to, he seems reasonable, but usually religious discussions "never end well" because of the belief involved. Bringing the discussion to a different non-current religion levels the playing field to both sides discussing something they don't believe in. The "fun part" is where the believer in a current deity knows that "obviously Odin doesn't actually exist, there are no Norse gods". Well that's how I feel about their deity, sorry. But I don't mind that they believe in it as long as they leave me be and don't try to convert me or negatively affect me because of their beliefs.
The Bible often talks about not honoring other gods, avoiding idols, etc. Even Solomon built many shrines to other gods for his wives.
Some people interpret it to affirm the existence of other gods. In reading, there’s never a point where another god directly intervenes in the lives of men. There are plenty of occurrences of men creating idols to worship of other gods or falling to temptations offered by the gods of other cultures. Asherah poles are the most often called out.
All that is to say, we don’t have any historical context of other gods directly intervening in people’s lives.
What we do know is that if we were to claim to know when God will intervene we would be wrong. We can’t possibly. I have seen in my own life and heard testimony from others which gives me a little bit of a pattern to draw from and gain better understanding to help make some sense of it…but I’m still just guessing.
What we do see in the Bible is that even the biblical heroes are all very flawed and fall in and out of favor with God. Noah, Moses, David, Solomon, etc. The only one who doesn’t is Jesus, but even Jesus became frustrated at times. There’s a story where Jesus curses a fig tree because he’s hungry and there’s no fruit on it. I always thought it was funny because it shows more of his human side…he got hangry.
Interesting. In two ways, you brought the discussion back to the Christian god instead of coming onto the "we both don't believe in those gods" playing field.
I appreciate the civil discussion nevertheless and there's the second interesting point.
You never actually say it directly but between the lines I read that you think to have at least an inkling of a pattern that confirms the direct interference of the Christian god in this world. I don't know why that would be relevant to be honest.
In any case, I would bet that the same could be said of people in ancient times for their gods (or even right now people that have different religions might for their god(s)). They probably thought to see patterns as well and attributed them to the gods. Without thinking about any specific religion: if they made a specific sacrifice every year at a specific time to gain favourable weather for example, they probably had a pretty good chance of success by pure luck and pattern observation and any unlucky weather anomalies could easily be attributed to mistakes with making the sacrifice (maybe it was the wrong goat or whatever) for example.
Repeating annoying phrases that casually dismiss suffering seem to be human nature. It likely irritated Voltaire so much he wrote the tragic novel Candide in 1759. In that book the phrase is "everything is for the best in this best of all possible worlds" is thoughtlessly repeated during times of unspeakable cruelty and horror.
After reading "The Fremen Mirage Collection" [0], I can't read that adage/meme without feeling snarky.
While I believe that, in an individual scale, harsh times can help develop toughness and resilience, most times it seems to lead to resentment, anger and frustration.
I've been estranged from my family since my teens due to an unpleasant childhood and young adulthood.
Eventually, the flames of the furnace of life reaches all of us; some younger than others; some more acutely than others. In skillful hands, it can temper us to become purer, higher quality versions of ourselves. In unskilled hands, it can damage us. All of us acquire wounds, it is a part of being human, being unskilled, and being alive.
Strength is just another word for empathy, love, and kindness. Everyone is capable of that, regardless of their pain. That's what makes humanity beautiful.
That's survivor bias. If you throw a million 8 year olds into the ocean, you'll create hundreds of swimmers.
The "good times create weak men" I have less of a story for, but it's perhaps something like this:
If you throw a million 8 year olds into the ocean while wearing life-preservers, you will end up depriving some of them the chance to learn to swim, and wrongly teach many of them that there's nothing dangerous about the ocean.
There was a discussion of this in Nassim Taleb's Fooled by Randomness, where he was critiquing the "crucible experiences" chapter of Jim Collin's Good to Great.
Taleb's whole point was that this is an illusion caused by selection bias. Hard times don't create strong men. Hard times kill everyone who is weak. Hard times make everybody weaker, but they cause those who are weak to begin with to drop out of sample pool, leaving only those who were strong to begin with.
I mean, that adage about hard times, while entertaining, has zero truth to it. It's not something supported by history. It just sounds cool to say is all.
I disagree. I think the reason combat veterans often feel like their squad is a second family and rich country club members often feel like the other members are competitors is the difference in the adversity of each situation.
However, I think the type of “bad times” conducive to building strength is fairly particular; it only creates strong people if the problems being faced are external and require cooperation to solve, and the people facing adversity are capable of overcoming their own problems when adversity forces them to face them.
If interpersonal problems are the main source of adversity, and there is nothing external to force cooperation, that’s often demoralizing and more conducive to antagonistic forms of competition rather than camaraderie and self improvement.
Arguably, "hard times" are pretty much defined by serious external or environmental problems threatening normal life, and only in good times you're left with interpersonal problems as the main source of adversity.
I'm not sure it is contradiction, both the strong and weak alike can be emotionally damaged. Many see dictators, or want to be dictators as strong men, yet they are often obviously damaged people.
Surely this is a contradiction in terms? A strong boxer who is missing a leg is a weak boxer.
I don't think dictators are a good example, you only see the PR spin, it's not like you get a chance to meet Putin in person to realise he is actually clueless about whats happening in his own government.
I always thought that saying applied more to economics and politics than personal relationships. Look at the leaders who came of age during the Great Depression, then took the US through WW2 and the subsequent postwar boom. Many of them were massively fucked up in their private lives but still managed to perform well in public.
Even then, I'm not sure it holds. The US's situation then was the worst by 20th/21st century American standards, but by global or historic standards it was really not that bad.
Germany or Russia had much harder times around then and that produced some of the most horrific leaders the world has ever seen. Hitler and Stalin weren't the result of easy times.
There is truth in the original saying. Adversity creates the conditions and provides the motivation that spur people to develop strength they would not have needed otherwise. However, adversity is a very blunt instrument, and it is also a matter of degree. People don't always respond positively to adversity. And if the hardship is too great, it doesn't lead to opportunities for growth, just trauma.
That's one of the reasons we need safety nets, to dull the hardship to the point where we can grow through it and not be crushed under it.
That statement comes with the implication that strength is something intrinsic and static. That's not true - you get strong when you train, but you have to train gently and gradually enough to not get injured. You train yourself to be physically fit, but if you push too hard you will sprain tendons and break bones. You can also train yourself to be gentle, and if you push it too hard, you'll be taken advantage of. You can train yourself to be assertive, but if you push too hard you'll end up being aggressive and alienating people. That's part of growth.
Saying that adversity filters out weakness - no, adversity pushes people too hard before they're ready to handle it, then they fail. Sometimes they try again, sometimes the damage is too great and they give up. That's not a moral failing though. It just means they were pushed too hard.
i.e. they were too weak. strength/weakness in this sense has little to do with morality. someone who can't rise to the occasion or hasn't grown enough isn't a bad person or anything, just unprepared or ill suited.
e.g. a natural selection even doesn't care if an organism was still growing and learning. They either survive (strong) or die (weak). And that's the same definition of strong being used here.
It's called hormesis. Yes, there is a range beyond which further stress causes permanent and serious damage, but within the hormetic range "adversity" is basically the proximate cause of growth.
Stress impact also varies per individual biological differences.
According to Sapolsky's lecture on depression [1], a stressful childhood experience is 30x more likely to cause depression in individuals with a particular serotonin-related gene variant.
No. [1] The context of the whole conversation is traumatic relationships. If anything you are talking about eustress - and traumatic relationships are not beneficial and do not "make you stronger" [2].
> This is an interesting one, and in direct contradiction to the adage: "Hard times create strong men, strong men create good times, good times create weak men, and weak men create hard times.”
"Strong" in this context means ability to survive, not the ability to thrive. A society of "strong" men and women often results in "good times" of material progress, which masks the negatives in society. Unmasking all the ugliness cause society to lose cohesion, resulting in breakdown via internal or external factors and hence resulting in "hard times".
I don't see the contradiction there, it's pretty much the thing that saying is talking about.
A community full of emotionally damaged, unhappy people is also generally full of tough, no-nonsense people who know the dangers from personal experience, know how to avoid or eliminate them, do what needs to be done, no matter the cost and then afterwards perhaps drink themselves to death while abusing their family, but many of them also ensuring that their kids have a much better life than they did - slowly creating the good times.
And a few generations later a community of happy, emotionally well-adjusted people haven't had horror in their childhood, and they don't know how to handle real adversity and recognize abusive evil because they don't have the skill and experience for that, and spend their struggle/effort over meaningless trifles and status games; are emotionally principled and don't let ends justify the means - so when eventually push comes to shove (often due to some external circumstance or an interaction with another, exploitative community) they are unwilling or unable to take decisive action and sacrifices (including moral sacrifices) to prevent someone much more violent and unprincipled from taking over and causing hard times for you (and perhaps better times for themselves at your expense).
It's essentially about a cyclic change in the tradeoff between the qualities required to be happy, satisfied and cooperative versus the (very different and often incompatible) qualities required to be effective in the face of brutal adversity. Warrior mindset is harmful in peacetime, and pacifist mindset is ineffective in wartime. And perhaps it makes sense to raise "weak" men - friendly, open-minded, forgiving, sharing, optimistic and perhaps just naively expecting the best in others - whenever we can afford to, because it's just better and more sane, and we raise disproportionally strong, brutal, ruthless, efficient (and also damaged and abusive) men and women when we're forced to by circumstances that would just grind down people like those described in the previous sentence; damaging them until they either become "strong" or just break down.
Perhaps a bit related is the issue of parenting styles. Maximizing potential of kids is often quite abusive and results in unhappy and perhaps "damaged" kids; when looking at biographies of e.g. olympic champions it often (but not always - there certainly are exceptions) seems clear that they would have been much more emotionally healthy without as much early age pressure; but they also wouldn't be champions then, they would be outcompeted by someone just as lucky in the genetic lottery but willing (or, more likely, pressured) to sacrifice more and live a less balanced life.
In your entire paragraph the only way you were able to characterise strength is by associating it with cruelty and voilence. You have not come up with any other characteristic, where we could pick a random person and test how strong they are.
It is not obvious that being more cruel improves your chances of survival, it might, but maybe it's an abberation.
It was never the strongest guy that was in charge if the tribe of cavemen - becauae the two weaker guys could always gang up on him and kill him. There was always a degree of cooperation and politics involved. Of building a group and austracising your enemies
Yes, sure, that's why "strong" and "weak" pretty much need to be in airquotes as that's a narrow and niche aspect of that word, as there are many quite different and better aspects of strength - but those don't apply to that quote. Perhaps that sentence would be more accurately phrased as "Hard times create hard people, hard people create good times, good times create soft people, soft people create hard times" or something like that.
What I have in mind regarding this saying is what I see (both in relatives, acquaitances, life stories of those who passed away, and general culture) in the generation that were kids during WW2 who had the frontlines pass over them and the disruptions to their families caused by mass conscriptions and ubiquitous violence towards civilians as well. They are very different from their kids and grandkids. It's overwhelmingly a generation of hard, strong people - also clearly a generation of people who afterwards built better times through their attitude towards hardship, in ways that the following generations simply won't tolerate. And at the same time, overwhelmingly a generation of severely emotionally damaged people in many ways.
Most emotional damage that I've seen comes in the good times phase. That's when genx's parents were born. In the good times everyone is free to do as they please and have to find their own meaning, this creates weak men. Weak men create hard times. We're entering the really hard times now.
When things really go to shit, you'll find your purpose and have to rely on others. That creates strength and good times, eventually.
Think about most hostile places, in the midst of civil war- do they produce the greatest people?
In all times, the great philosophers, engineers, generals, scientists, etc. Were never made up of peoppe that suffered greaters hardship, that starved in the childhood. They were always elites, people with best education or at least middle class.
We've run this experiment, there is zero evidence for it.
That's not a particularly impressive list, Steven Hawking was born in the 40's, Bill Gates was born in the 50,s, Bezos in the 60's. I am not seeing how 30's was a particularly 'strong' decade.
This is super obvious but I'll say it anyway. We have been living in the good times phase for many decennia now, so it's no surprise that you don't see emotional damage from the bad times phase.
We've had perpetual war for the last 20 years. We've had increasing inequality. The temperature is rising, wages are stagnating, riots in major urban areas are becoming more common.
These are not the good times. We have plenty to eat and too much technology but these are not what make the good times.
I am not sure that is true. As an outside observer of the US I see a lot of highly trained, potentially dangerous veterans who came home to a pile of broken promises with broken psyches and sometimes broken bodies. There are now decades worth of these guys milling around in a society awash with firearms and blitzed with misinformation. It's a powderkeg that might just go off unexpectedly. Of course there are side effects to those middle east adventures.
I don't think the quote was meant to describe individual experiences, but rather society. Similar to the saying "only the strong survive". Hard times are also a defining function as to what a "strong" person is, and of course the saying says nothing about a "strong" persons emotional troubles.
It seems that there are specific kinds of difficult experiences that promote growth and others that inhibit it. There are certain kinds of widely felt hardships like economic downturn that can unite communities and help bring out the best in people. There is a definite silver lining. There's no upside to shitty parenting.
We are still reeling from WW2 that wiped out massive numbers of (mostly) men who were then missing fathers. All the down-stream effects of that are fascinating.
> It's usually difficult for people with decent upbringings to even conceptualize why a child might willingly remain estranged from their family. But there are a lot of people out there with really good reasons to do that.
This sums up how I feel about this topic. I read all these accounts of how people's perceptions of parent-child relationships change after they have kids, or how there's still mutual love between them and their parents despite so-and-so, and I understand.
I am well into adulthood with a stable marriage and career; I've been to therapy, and done all things reasonable to heal from whatever it is I came from. By all accounts I've been pretty successful on that front.
But goddammit, when I think about my parents, I move between seething resentment and gratitude that I decided to cut contact. And this is an improvement.
As you say, people with good enough upbringings can't conceptualize why a child might remain estranged from their family; I'd wager they impose perceptions of their own (good enough) parents when making that judgment.
I agree, and you can see this pass down through the generations. It's even possible to recognize it in yourself and still have trouble because you don't know what else to do. So called default mode behaviors etc...
Yes, but for many of us in the West, without the tradition common to East and South Asians of reciprocal obligation.
This used to be nigh unto a human universal: your parents raise you up from a helpless infant to adulthood, and this obliges you to love and care for them for the rest of their lives.
I'm as deracinated Westerner as it comes, and yet I'm fairly traditional in this regard. I can think of three acceptable reasons to estrange from parents: sexual abuse, severe physical abuse, and the parents disowning the child. Even the second one leaves a lot of room for reconciliation, since they can't hurt you anymore.
I mean, easy for me to say, my parents easily earned a B+ and I was able to work out my teen angst with my father by my mid twenties. Still: casually abandoning "honor thy father and thy mother" doesn't seem to be working out very well for us.
> This used to be nigh unto a human universal: your parents raise you up from a helpless infant to adulthood, and this obliges you to love and care for them for the rest of their lives.
Alternate take on that human universal: your parents had unprotected sex and fulfilled their obligation to raise the offspring produced to adulthood, this obliges you to nothing.
I'm not saying this means everyone should estrange their parents, but the idea that a child has any obligation to their parents for raising them seems misguided at best and damaging at worst, imo. Any attachment between children and parents should be due to mutual feelings of love and respect, like any other relationship - if those are absent on one side, why should the other suffer a relationship with people who they would otherwise remove from their friend group?
(Note that I have a good relationship with my parents, so this isn't coming from a place of personal pain, but rather a dislike for the idea that two humans procreating and fulfilling their obligation to the offspring that comes of it should impose any obligation whatsoever upon that offspring.)
EDIT: I should clarify that I do believe that parents who went above and beyond that obligation to show their children love and respect and receive nothing in return have a right to be upset - however, what about situations where a parent thought they were doing the right thing (based on how they were raised, religious briefs, parenting advice from a friend or magazine, etc.) but the thing they were doing was actually harmful? There's a lot of nuance in this, but I think that a blanket "honor thy father and thy mother [out of obligation]" is a bad idea.
Wrong. Societies have dealt with far worse situations and managed to survive. Societal cohesion is what prevents anarchy in the long run, not avoiding natural disasters.
Precisely none of “climate change, nuclear war, biological warfare” constitute a natural disaster, nor has this quasi-neo-confucian conception of societal cohesion via filial piety historically triumphed over anything worse than any of these modern extinction scenarios.
Many scholars have posited that a global thermonuclear war with Cold War-era stockpiles, or even with the current smaller stockpiles, may lead to human extinction. This position was bolstered when nuclear winter was first conceptualized and modelled in 1983. However, models from the past decade consider total extinction very unlikely, and suggest parts of the world would remain habitable.[25] Technically the risk may not be zero, as the climatic effects of nuclear war are uncertain and could theoretically be larger than current models suggest, just as they could theoretically be smaller than current models suggest. There could also be indirect risks, such as a societal collapse following nuclear war that can make humanity much more vulnerable to other existential threats
The phrase I used was actually “extinction scenario” rather than a singular event, and “most people die immediately, an unlucky few eke out lives of unspeakable horror and pestilence for a handful of generations before the species collapses entirely” was basically what I had in mind.
Really though I can’t imagine what you think this pedantic obsession with whether or not everyone gets blown up immediately is adding to the conversation.
We're incredibly resilient. We can eat anything and we have technology that can be used in some of the worst environments on the planet and that allow us to get shelter and food.
We'd be 10 thousand not 10 billion and life would suck but we would survive. And the fallout would clear within a few decades or centuries.
No, we wouldn't. The fallout could feasibly kill everyone without WMD protection within a few years.
10 000 people is not nearly enough for a modern division of labour - we'd be reverted back to prehistoric technology levels within a generation, with a bonus of fallout and absolute climate dysfunction. Given a sufficiently destructive nuclear exchange literally every single human could die.
Can you please list some of this "far worse situations" than nuclear war and climate change as we are currently facing?
"Societal cohesion" doesn't do too much to help us survive crop failures and wet bulb temperatures over 35C.
Aside from that, I think you might misunderstand your causal arrows a bit. It is fair more likely that massive industrialization and late state capitalism led to a society that valued the individual over the social unit, rather than that a sudden desire to be individuals sprung up in people's hearts and made a mess of the world.
Absolutely not, not even close. 99.9% of the population dying within a few years is not comparable to a disease that killed ~10% of the population and a series of invasions that killed at most a single percent.
> All that where created by an individualistic approach.
How so? TFA attributes this modern alienation to changes in the American family structure that took place in the last half of the 20th century. All three of the threats the person you’re responding to listed, nuclear war, (modern) biological warfare, and climate change, were developed or essentially locked in in our society prior to the last half of the 20th century – largely by people born before or right around the end of the 19th century, who were presumably much more attuned to this “dutiful family obligation” mindset, since those are the very people TFA is contrasting these post-1950 changes against.
The plain history of these developments would seem to argue that post-1950 societal changes had nothing whatsoever to do with these threats, unless you’re arguing that the effect preceded the cause.
You'll have to go back a very long way to find stable families that didn't have children leaving because they were bored, ambitious, abused, angry, or - in royal families - literally wanted to kill either or both of their parents and perhaps also their siblings so they could take over.
One difference now is freely available contraception and a much lower birthrate, combined with more economic stability. (At least for the boomer gen.)
When parents have two children and both are estranged, it's a tragedy. When parents had ten children, five of them made it to adulthood, and two decided to leave, it was acceptable attrition.
The other difference is the absence of extended family and friends who can step in with childcare help. So parents + kids going through adolescence under the same roof becomes a pressure cooker. No one gets much of a break for 4-8 years.
Reciprocal obligation is the key. I've heard people spin it so that children owe their parents an infinite debt that justifies anything, but that is not reciprocity. Reciprocity means equivalent behavior on both sides. People get a chance as adults to discuss what happened in their households as children, and some people find out that their stories are radically outside the norm. Usually all they want is some acknowledgment from their parents that mistakes were made and it wasn't ideal. Denial and justification are the things that trigger estrangement. Or continued exploitation: people who cared for their drug-addicted or otherwise needy parents for years starting in childhood and decide that however much their parents still need them, they have to separate themselves from that pathology so they can have their own healthy life.
Not everybody wants to share details, but I've heard enough stories from friends that I'm shocked what people are willing to forgive from their parents. I shared one story in another comment -- that person has a close relationship with their parents despite it not being a very positive one. Another friend of mine, who is queer, grew up with a father who would frequently say things like all gay people should be executed, they should be locked away from decent people, doctors should have let AIDs finish the job, etc. This person did cut off contact with their parents a couple of times but eventually heard sincere apologies and regret from their father and reconciled. That was almost twenty years ago, and now they speak lovingly of their parents and are helping care for them as their health declines.
Really it comes down to two questions: forgiveness and continuing harm. In my observation, adult children are not stingy with forgiveness for their parents. Not everybody can forgive everything, and it can take a while (I wouldn't bother asking until the kids are at least 25, maybe 30) but people forgive their parents for things they would never forgive anybody else for. They also tolerate a lot of continuing harm for the sake of maintaining the relationship. They draw a sharp line when it starts to affect their own children, directly or indirectly, and I think it's good for everyone that they do so.
> people forgive their parents for things they would never forgive anybody else for
I suspect this is because after becoming a parent, most people instinctively recognize the contract between generations: if you want your own kids to maintain a relationship with you in your old age, regardless of the inevitable mistakes you will make as a parent, you probably ought to give them a good example to follow.
> This used to be nigh unto a human universal: your parents raise you up from a helpless infant to adulthood, and this obliges you to love and care for them for the rest of their lives.
In ancient Rome as far as the legal system was concerned, your children were your property. You could literally sell them into slavery, no questions asked[1]:
> The pater familias had the power to sell his children into slavery; Roman law provided, however, that if a child had been sold as a slave three times, he was no longer subject to patria potestas.
Also, your children's property was your property:
> Legally, any property acquired by individual family members (sons, daughters or slaves) was acquired for the family estate: the pater familias held sole rights to its disposal and sole responsibility for the consequences, including personal forfeiture of rights and property through debt.
I don't fully understand the legal issues myself. But it appears that when Brittney Spears was put into a mental ward in 2008, her father + lawyer was granted "Conservatorship" and therefore was placed in charge of Britney Spears and all of her assets. There's a court case going on right now about whether or not this conservatorship should end.
I'd talk more about the subject, but that's all I'm willing to say in my current state of (mostly) ignorance. The idea of one adult (Britney's Father) literally owning another adult's assets (Britney Spears's stuff) is still around, especially when combined with mental health + court cases of the modern life.
My layperson's understanding of conservatorship: if there is any possible doubt about your ability to care for yourself and money can be made from the conservatorship, you are very likely to find yourself in a conservatorship and will have great difficulty in getting out of it.
If you are absolutely unable to care for yourself and are in desperate need of help but there is no money to be made, you will probably find yourself living on the street in a major metropolitan area.
This is what caused me to cut the cord with my parents. My father is a massive criminal, got himself into prison for a large part of my formative years, never said I love you. Mother is untreated borderline, was emotionally abusive my entire life.
I spent years of my adulthood trying to find a way to reconcile with them and the conclusion I came to was it's not your burden to suffer for your parents' sins. They will change or won't change of their own volition. But you deserve to survive and thrive in kindness.
So much of ourselves is steeped in the company we keep. Choose the company that fosters the better, kinder, wiser you.
Ex: I have a (former) coworker who told me his life story. He's homosexual and his parents sent him multiple times to gay conversion therapy. Learning to accept himself for who he is required him to leave his parents: because they would not accept a homosexual child.
No sexual abuse or physical abuse in this story, but its pretty clear that he's healthier for leaving his parents.
IIRC, he's an only child as well. I'm not sure if he'll be willing to take care of his parents as they get older.
Considering the posters background, they may have just not taken it into account.
One challenge with abuse on all these fronts is that there is a huge amount of grey area in all of them, and judgement that would need to be drawn on what is and is not abuse. Sometimes/often it is REALLY clear cut (yeah, someone doing munchausen by proxy on their kids, or beating them, or whatever is clearly abuse).
Other times, you'll find a lot of controversy. There was a lot of discussion recently about parents getting cut off from their kids because of rabid Trump support. Is that abuse? From whom? There have also been stories of parents cutting off their kids because of their strongly anti-Trump views during the election. Is that abuse? From whom?
Mental abuse can be incredibly subtle, and a key component of many abusers is their ability to convince others around them that they totally aren't abusing anyone and it's that OTHER PERSONS fault.
Made even worse by the fact that sometimes the person being painted as the abuser IS NOT the abuser, and it really IS the other persons fault!
Sexual abuse and physical abuse can at least be generally judged somewhat accurately from a third party witness/video perspective.
If you've ever worked as a camp counselor for rich kids - the term abuse can work out as follows:
"Clean up your crap" = "You can't make me, that's abuse, my dads a lawyer."
Is asking someone whose had maid service / cleaners to clean up their crap in a group situation abuse?
The other stuff is feeling "uncomfortable" or "unsafe" in situations where you are asked to take the most basic responsibilities (ie, turn in an educational assignment").
Kids will get a school counselor to excuse them from the work because it makes them feel "uncomfortable and stressed".
This is an interesting example of subjective versus objective well being.
Asking someone to help clean is clearly not a misuse of power (e.g. abuse), but to an ill informed/molded individual, any request that they do something they don’t want to do (homework, chores, work, etc.) can ‘feel’ like abuse to them (subjectively), even though objectively it is not.
Most of our society is shifting to focusing on subjective well being over objective well being, so we get these confusing situations. (at least this framework helps me parse these issues).
It's interesting - because if you work with really rich / spoiled kids, they are sometimes being sent on these summer / camp type programs as a punishment. So some kids have been mowing lawns to try to pay for the program (thinking of it as something super special - which it is), and other kids are being sent as punishment.
Reality is underneath most kids are good. Get them out of the environment and if you can get peer pressure going the right way, they'll drop right into it. Seriously, their parents wouldn't recognize them (cooking, cleaning, being very physically active etc).
But early days can be a shock to the system. If you've been jetting to paris to shop on weekends, and then are being asked to eat a meal cooked by other kids (no meal choice at all - just one big something) and/or need to cook it, it can really feel like something way out of comfort zone.
Actually - I was working internationally. What these kids didn't realize is that where I was - I really was in charge from the locals point of view. Local law enforcement was sometimes a wack and a "spot fine" or pre-trial / charge detention (formal judicial cases took forever/unreliable so this method of on the spot justice/corruption was tolerated).
None of my kids had this happen, but overseas the tolerance for foreigner bad behavior can be low in some cases if there is a perception of disrespect. Some of the rich kids in another group stole some liquor "as a joke". Hahaha. They were jailed and the locals squeezed cash out of parents before parents had to charter a flight to get them out (program required parents to pay repatriation expenses in these cases).
Only real downer culturally at times was treatment of women - the US kids are used to bikinis and the girls are used to agency / freedom as it should be. Locally dress / behavior etc can send a message that generates a metric ton of harassment - and it can be no holds barred even under age. Only thing I really disliked I think and female counselors doubly so - locals would sometimes not respect even the female counselor push back but need the guy to intervene. For trips that were in part about independence building a bummer. My sense over some time though was that this was changing though so by now I suspect probably much much better.
We did have all the paperwork in place of course. But what really works is actually peer pressure. I mean -> it's insane how powerful that is. Kids that age will do almost anything if it's the thing to do based on peer behavior. So you want to get the dynamic going and you are home free if you can.
The thing about abuse is that it has to be excessive or misuse of some power. Generally, mental abuse should require that the person being abused say that they don't like whatever is being said and for what is being said to be objectively meant to harm them (serve no legitimate purpose, phrased vulgarly). If it does serve a legitimate purpose and was delivered in a decent way, then I don't see how that could be abuse. That is protected speech. Forcing someone else from expressing their views just because someone else doesn't like it would then also fall under mental abuse and restriction of of their protected speech.
Objectivity is really just society's collective subjectivity as far as determining what is protected, unprotected, reasonable, who is "wrong", etc. I don't see how societies can exist without this (even anarchists would implicitly be subscribing to the collective rules and interpretations, or lack there of).
I think you presuppose that the abuse is in the past and not the present. My dad actively emotionally abused me, regularly insulted my wife, and tried to destroy my relationship with my mother. By necessity he made it a choice between a relationship with him and a relationship with my mom. My estrangement wasn't about something I remembered, it was about him being terrible to me when I was 25 and didn't need him for support or money anymore.
This view seems predicated on the idea that people who estrange their parents do so because of past actions. I'd argue that in my personal experience and my experience with other such adult children the reasoning is more often about the current behavior of the parent or parents than past behaviors.
People who abuse or neglect their children are often doing so because of their own mental illness or emotional instability and those issues are unlikely to resolve without outside help.
> I'm as deracinated Westerner as it comes, and yet I'm fairly traditional in this regard. I can think of three acceptable reasons to estrange from parents: sexual abuse, severe physical abuse, and the parents disowning the child. Even the second one leaves a lot of room for reconciliation, since they can't hurt you anymore.
I'm in exactly the same boat. I'm the most hyperindividualist, detached-from-culture, atomized person I know, but my concept of filial (and familial) duty practically makes me an Old Country traditionalist compared to many of my friends.
> I can think of three acceptable reasons to estrange from parents: sexual abuse, severe physical abuse, and the parents disowning the child
I don't think my view is as concrete as this, as I don't want to confidently dismiss someone who claims that estrangement is necessary for their mental health. But I'm a little disturbed by the degree to which the current culture diminishes or occasionally entirely dismisses the existence of any familial obligation at all.
Why would someone giving birth to you oblige one to forgive severe physical abuse merely because you are too big to beat up at this point?
It is a bizarre to suppose that love is owed instead of earned or earned once instead of the result of ongoing effort. If you stop feeding your cat or watering your plant it dies same with your relationship.
I would venture to guess that the majority of estranged parents don't know this or in denial about having let the relationship die.
The article says that the majority of parental estrangement is due to divorce especially the non custodial father then successfully segues to some nonsense about identity politics.
I don't see it as a realignment of values so much as a more boring story about parents breaking up and becoming estranged spiced up with a minority becoming estranged because the values they hold are correctly deemed odious and hateful.
If you hate gay people and your kid is either gay or feels strongly about the issue they aren't going to want to be around you.
If you talk about shooting dirty liberals and your kid is a dirty liberal likewise.
If your own kid hates you the first thing you should do is ask yourself why and if you blame it on a lack of family values you are almost certainly the problem.
We both have good relationships with our kids I think you misunderstand why others don't.
Asia also has a western end. And being from West Asia, I can assure you that "reciprocal obligation" (dare one call it love and respect?) is very much a thing at those coordinates as well.
For me personally there are aspects I don't like about myself that are clearly a result of how my parents raised me. As a much younger man I was bitter about this, but I came to realize that my parents are human and made some mistakes, but over all did sacrifice a lot for my and my sister's well being. I also realized we didn't do a lot to make raising us any easier. So rather than remain resentful towards them, I just let it go and started working to fix the things about me I didn't like.
Sadly, when I was young adult, I knew my parents were not perfect and was happy with everything they did for me. They, like typical Asian parents, were always criticizing but I learned to ignore it.
It wasn't much later when I had my own child, they finally broke me. Not only they set high expectations for how I will help them have relationship with their grandchild, and criticizing our parenting, but also started criticizing 2 year old. For their part as grandparents, they did bare minimum, that is attend a birthday, ask for pictures because relatives are asking for photos. Never made an effort to come visit us. That is when they broke something in my brain.
Now I resent them more than ever, I wish I had never let them criticize me as an adult. I lost faith in God since they are so religious. I am trying to be complete opposite of them. I have mostly stopped feeling joy. I live mostly to fulfill my duty as a father. I really want to pack everything and move to the other side of the world but wife doesn't agree with that.
And as a father, I realize that there is no sacrifice in parenting. You choose to be a father. That was your choice. My kids are the only things that bring me joy right now. Yes sometimes they push my limits and I am tired, but it was my choice to have them. Thinking that my kids are making me sacrifice will probably make me resentful towards them. When I am playing video games while tired because I am so close to finishing a level, I don't say I made a sacrifice.
EDIT: I want to add that I have lost joy in everything related to my parents like my culture, songs that I grew up with, religious festivals, food, stories, career, etc. I hate it.
Stay positive! This is a good incentive to break out of this toxic tradition/behaviour. Now you have a good idea of what not to do. You might even tell your parents this conclusion.
That's a good, healthy way to look at things in general. When I was younger, I also was more bitter about life circumstances, especially with family, as we were poor, but beyond family as well. As I got older, I realized finding the blame and feeling angry might feel good, but it doesn't actually improve the situation. It's really best to just find out how to accept things and find corrective actions, regardless of fault.
On the one hand I agree children and young adults can be overly entitled or have too high expectations for their human parents on the other I think that framing raising children as a sacrifice is wrong. It is kind of the core point of biological life. In past times children were seen as a blessing now some times in the west they are seen as a burden. This inversion is part of the larger narcissism epidemic distorting modern society IMHO.
I agree. My parents held their “sacrifice” over our head and I don’t think I really got over it and I think it’s why I never wanted kids until fairly recently. I used to respond to that by saying that I never asked them conceive me in the first place which made me feel like poo. Now being a parent myself, I can see why parents would feel like they made a sacrifice, but I am never going to hold that “sacrifice” over my child’s head because I also see how that felt terrible as a kid.
My parents did same thing, they made parenting seems like such a horrible thing. Made me wonder why anyone would ever have any kids. I never wanted any kids until my wife convinced me after 10 years.
Now I know parenting is hard if you do it as religious duty to your god, family, country etc. But if you choose to become parent, like when you choose to pick up a new project or hobby, it is pure joy, even the hard parts. Yes you will be tired running marathon, but you will not say that you made a sacrifice. And unless you are trying to monetize you hobbies, you don't expect anything back.
My parents modeled and explicitly taught me a judgmental mindset. It became my worst fault. Can you feel the judgement in this comment? Thanks, Dad & Mom.
I started improving after I took a free 10-day meditation course (the Goenka one), four years ago. At the course, I gained the ability to notice changes in my emotions and mental state. Suddenly, I could see when my mind switches to a judgmental attitude. I began intentionally trying to prevent the switch. I also intentionally restrain myself if I do switch into that mode. Changing mental habits is difficult and worthwhile. I have improved a lot in this area in 4 years.
Two years ago, I realized that my parents taught me to be a judgmental jerk. Since that time, I have considerably reduced the bad mental habit. People close to me confirm this. Therefore, my experience contradicts your statement.
Despite my half century and having repeatedly listened to and ruminated about "being judgemental", I can't fully fault "making judgements", for without judgement we have no comparison of worse vs better, and without that we have no basis for improvement. At issue mostly is _hasty_ judgement, uninformed, and without humility of all the potential and unknowable errors in judgement. But we definitely must judge, or stagnate.
Judging pointlessly is a big one, too. Especially if unhelpful levels of ill emotions are all wrapped up with judging things to be bad, which is so common I think it's fair to call that most people's default state, unless they've taken effort to change that.
Fixing those (forming judgements when they serve no purpose; feeling excessive ill emotions over judgements) is about half of the self-improvement part of stoicism, as in "think the right way, and act the right way". It's most of the "think the right way" half.
As someone who was abandoned as a child and still maintains a pretty good relationship w both parents, I'm sure they are oblivious to the effect that had on me as a child. Nor are they willing to talk about it now. They feel what's done is done and in the past, and don't want the awkwardness of that conversation.
It's cool, but sometimes you wanna cry for that child. As an adult, I've heard the mistake is looking at what happened to you through a childs eyes. Ya can't really ever let it go.
You are allowed to and should grieve for that child. There's therapy based on attachment theory where you learn to how to be the parent to that (inner) child.
I think the grand reveal is when you slap your own kid the first time :D
I see myself talking to my daughter with the same autoritative tone my dad used on me that I found so "unfair omg". And see her progress from monkey to little girl as a result :D
Parenthood succeed when your kids complain about your failures, as Francoise Dolto (perhaps not a role model herself) liked to write.
Wonder how much of this is driven by social media and the internet today. The word 'Toxic' is just thrown around now and everything is 'Toxic'. Its a word that has ceased to have any real meaning but virtually every behavior that used to just be normal every day activity is Toxic. Everyone has flaws and no one has all the answers. Parents are just people doing the best they can and for the most part making what they think are the best decisions in the moment while struggling with everything that everyone else struggles with. Children want to put their parents on a pedestal and assume that all decisions; and any harm caused was intentional. There are of course bad parents and bad people and I don't mean to discount the effect that those people have on their kids. Social media is quick these days to tell you that your parents are narcissists when in reality they are just distracted trying to figure out what happened to their lives and trying to get by. At the end of every day I look back and see choices I made that were probably not great or see where I ignored my kid as I was trying to get something done for work. These things pile up and then are focused through the lens of the internet and suddenly you are a bad parent.
Here's the thing though. If you hit me with your car, it doesn't matter whether it was an accident or whether you intended to. You still caused me damage and it's still not crazy for me to hold you accountable. I may have more empathy in one case than another but if you refuse to accept responsibility for the harms you caused then yeah that empathy is likely going away. And this is what the author refers to near the beginning of the article:
"Adult children frequently say the parent is gaslighting them by not acknowledging the harm they caused or are still causing, failing to respect their boundaries, and/or being unwilling to accept the adult child’s requirements for a healthy relationship".
No one is perfect. I still have a great relationship with my own parents despite their failings but not all my siblings do, and as I've told each of my parents, it's on them to work to make that relationship better. Some things my siblings may never forgive or forget and you can do with that what you will, but if you want this person in your life you have to work to make it happen.
> Here's the thing though. If you hit me with your car, it doesn't matter whether it was an accident or whether you intended to.
It matters a lot! First of all, it matters legally. An entirely different set of laws and procedures will be invoked depending on which it was. But, second, it matters because it tells me something about what to expect from you in the future. It tells me something about how you feel towards me. It tells me something about your character, about your capacity for violence.
Yes, my first objection addresses that part directly. Of course you're still accountable, but you're accountable in totally different ways. It matters a lot even just in how one should be accountable. Even if the topic is limited to accountability, there's no possible way to say it doesn't matter. It informs every aspect of that discussion.
"Toxic" is just a catchier-sounding synonym for "harmful." It doesn't imply intent — in fact, that's one of its strengths, and one of the major components in the shift in the way we collectively talk about things over the past couple decades. Part of the conversation around race, for example, has been an awareness by more and more people that unintentional harms are far more prevalent than intentional ones, and in total are something to be taken seriously.
What if everyone is a "bad" parent? What if no parent lives up to their child's expectation? Intentional harm or not, people coming of age have to reckon with the gap between their idealized understanding of/hope for their parents, and their increasing understanding of the tradeoffs adult life demands. Personally, I think putting that reckoning front and center is a good thing. Burying our resentments doesn't solve things—talking them through and understanding each others' perspectives does.
> "Toxic" is just a catchier-sounding synonym for "harmful."
It’s more subtle than that. “Toxic” is used as a synonym for “irredeemably harmful”, and that very distinction makes all the difference. If a person is labeled a “jerk”, they are potentially redeemable and able to be reformed, but if someone is labeled as “toxic”, the label itself declares that there is no helping them. The label itself prescribes ostracism.
It's more than harmful—prior to the latest common usage, toxic usually meant potentially lethal for sufficient dosage.
So, while it is indeed free of connotations of intent, it evokes disgust and, in fact, invites ostracism. If something is so dangerous that it can kill you, there's rarely much wisdom in attempting to talk it out of being lethal. Better to just remove it from your environment.
In any case, I agree that the word is tragically overworked. And don't we all know that overwork can be toxic.
I understand it to be harmful, but in a way that contaminates the environment around it. A bad colleague can be a dick, in isolation, whereas a toxic colleague would be someone whose behaviours poisons their surrounds and brings out bad behavior in other people in their team.
I am non-contact with a toxic parent because I know it brings out worse behaviour in myself, and I want to stop that cycle of passive-aggressiveness and judgement towards people I do care about.
Since “harmful” isn’t generally used to describe people, it’s not generally an issue. “Toxic”, on the other hand, I see applied to people all the time.
It's not "just" anything and it's definitely not just catchier. Toxic is a far more forceful word that is often used to convey more force than is deserved for the situation. It steals discussion territory without justifying its claims. It's a bit like a clickbaity headline.
Resentment arises from a gap between expectations and reality. Maybe the problem is the idealized expectations. And talking about things doesn’t help that. Kids need to learn that life sucks and then you die and really internalize that in order to bring expectations in line with reality.
Agreed. Except now, idealization doesn't only apply to "white picket fence" experiences or "going to college." Now it applies to inner identity, and sometimes aggressive or even militant external identities. It's an impossible situation for a parent. Sometimes, the only way for the parent to survive emotionally is to allow the child to fail and hopefully learn from the failure.
> Kids need to learn that life sucks and then you die and really internalize that in order to bring expectations in line with reality.
I'm convinced that the world is cleanly divided into two categories of people. People that internalize this early in life, and people that never do at all.
Along with learning to be bored, it's the most important life lesson you can pass on to the next generation to ensure a happy productive life.
If all you focus on are the harmful aspects, you're dismissing the beneficial aspects. All parents will both benefit and harm their child. Hopefully in most cases, the former will be intentional and the latter be unintentional. The extreme focus lately on the latter, harm, has led many to ignore if not outright dismiss the former. That's not healthy.
What's the point in having children and raising them as best as you can if the talking heads in society will treat them to focus on your unintentional harms and resent you?
I myself am one of four children and I'm the only one that had a healthy relationship with both our parents because I ignored society's pressure to focus on people's failures and instead consider parents as flawed people doing their best given their upbringing, values, effort and the knowledge/information they had available to them at the time. My three siblings all have have issues with one or both parents and they aren't doing as well I me emotionally and I feel bad for them but also know it isn't entirely their fault since society has fed them toxicity.
That's right: society teaching people to focus on how others are toxic to you can be as toxic as those people are and often is far more toxic than any toxicity you experienced from the people you're been taught to consider toxic. Yet, we never discuss how all these discussions about "toxic people" are more toxic that the people we're discussing.
What happens if one party, either parent or child, will not "understand the other's perspective"? What happens if "talking them through" just turns into another replay of the same argument?
I have come to the conclusion that my parents, who of course had their flaws, were damn nigh perfect.
I think if your kid grows up knowing you love them and you do your best to educate and teach them right from wrong then you are probably a good enough parent.
"Personally, I think putting that reckoning front and center is a good thing"
I really disagree. If you parent was a monster, then absolutely. Otherwise, if they met the 3 points above then what good does calling them out and telling them that what they did was in your mind, harmful? They cant change anything and all it will do is make them react in hurt; they are still just people and you are invalidating their core life achievement. My parents were far from perfect, but they loved me and did their best, what would calling them out on any perceived failures do? I feel like people have lost the ability to just take things in stride these days. I can only speak from the personal experience of me and my siblings of course. My brother and I are very different in almost every way especially politics (He is pro Trump, I am not) but we just assume the other is coming from an honest place and doing what they think is best in their mind for their family and have good conversations and our families hang out often. My sister is unable to take anything in stride and assumes anyone that has different opinions than her is coming from a vindictive place. She has elected to completely remove herself from the family based on us not being far enough left for her (and I am pretty left). I find if one just assumes positive intent on another's actions as long as reality and not being a sucker allows then things are good. I always just assumed positive intent on my parents past actions or simple human flaw and all is good.
> My parents were far from perfect, but they loved me and did their best
Not all parents do that, when a divorce happened at least one of them thought that as well. The thing is: not everything is abuse but things can still be bad enough as also pointed out in the article. That's when you call it toxic I guess. It's this fuzzy new word to describe some hard to grasp behaviour that is maybe only so hard to grasp because it's that outlandish. One time I was with my sister and my father on holiday - my mother gave us a cell-phone so we could call in case he would abduct us. In any case, my mother was completely overwhelmed with raising 2 kids and cut some corners. Also my father did his best to put pressure on my mother, mostly financially. (He moved far away and blames anything bad that happened on my mother or me) And the list goes on. My sister is completely unwilling to talk about any of this. My father is like described in the article saying I'm rewriting history and having a complete lack of empathy. Is this abuse? Probably not, unless you go with a crazy strict definition. But toxic for sure. What upsets me the most that this is just some really fuzzy stuff that happened, I cannot pin-point any isolated root cause. So to come up with a reasonable explanation why I chose estrangement, I would have to tell quite a long story and some details are too personal. Still I'm much happier now.
People estranged from parents are often reacting to parents still doing harm. It dont stop when kid grow - the narcisstic or controlling or abusive parent dont change when kid grows.
I’m not so sure about blaming social media. I really wish the article had included any sort of concrete data on whether estrangement has actually become more common over time. In my family, my grandfather didn’t talk to his parents because they were alcoholic money-grubbers. My grandma didn’t talk to her dad because he’d left their family to start another family. My aunt didn’t talk to my grandma because my grandma discouraged her from having a career. Reading biographies and history books, it seems like there have always been shitty, “toxic,” or difficult parents, and there have always been disowning, abandonments, and silent treatments. Add to that the fact that our social support structures (babysitting help, end-of-life care) can be paid for in cash, rather than social favors, and you have some pretty normal and understandable dynamics. People barely have time for friends these days. What are the odds that both parents are fun, awesome people you really want to hang out with and spend extra time with? FWIW, I get along great with my parents. But I also recognize that they were better, healthier, more supportive, more present parents than what most of my friends had growing up.
A few years back there was a movement on Facebook with groups called "Survivors of Narcissistic Parents" and similar that encouraged people to cut off their parents. It seemed wildly popular and had tons of engagement. People would diagnose their parents with Narcissistic Personality Disorder, discuss how every problem in their lives could be traced to their parents, and that was that.
I've also saw more than one person disown their parents after being sucked in to the anticircumcision movement - men who had until that moment seemingly normal lives but were then convinced their sex lives would never reach their potential because of a decision their parents had made.
> A few years back there was a movement on Facebook with groups called "Survivors of Narcissistic Parents" and similar that encouraged people to cut off their parents....
> I've also saw more than one person disown their parents after being sucked in to the anticircumcision movement - men who had until that moment seemingly normal lives but were then convinced their sex lives would never reach their potential because of a decision their parents had made....
That's a really good point. Before the internet, and especially social media, people had weird and arguable toxic ideas, but it was almost always impossible to form a geographically-based community around them, so they'd almost always peter out and their effect was limited. The internet broke geographical limits, allowing intense purely ideological communities to form around almost every idea and validate them, no matter how wrong and misguided. In our very online times that can have serious social consequences, sometimes for good but often for ill.
What's weird is some of these communities aren't even wrong, a lot of people do have parents with personality problems or whatever, it's just their nature to go off the rails and have unpleasant real world effects.
Also their congregation creates the conditions for other similar types of thinking and cross pollination of other niche ideas which explains Q-like, super-conspiracy groups that are like a rotating prix fixe menu of paranoid nativist memes and fit neatly adjacent to neo-nazi, sovereign citizen, and even incel movements.
This is one of those things that is specific to the Jewish religion, in which it serves as an irreversible symbol of membership and has done for about three thousand years ... and also a subset of Americans, who do it for reasons which they suddenly find difficult to explain to their adult children.
If it's important for adult life, but not actually urgent, leave it until the child is old enough to be asked for their meaningful consent.
It is very much not specific to the Jewish religion. Jews make up 0.2% of the world population while ~33% of the worlds males are circumcised. Its very much a part of the Islamic religion as well; being nearly universal in the middle east. In addition ~80% of American men are circumcised.
True but 78% of South Korean 20 year old men are circumcised, a relatively new phenomenon in the country but something that has clearly taken hold and appears to be a new normal. 90% of the Philippine's are circumcised so its not a strictly non Asian tradition.
Considering that I'm circumcised and every male I know is, and none of us even give it a second thought or feel that our genitals have been "mutilated", I would say it requires a bit of sucking. There has to be some existing dissatisfaction or disorder for someone to get so up in arms about that.
Anyway, it was an example I saw, I had intended to remain neutral on the subject.
> There has to be some existing dissatisfaction or disorder for someone to get so up in arms about that.
How about undergoing a non-essential and medically unnecessary surgery without your consent? Doesn't that bother you at least a little bit?
I was baptised as an infant and most of the people I know were as well, but I recognize it for what it is - roping me into a membership in an organisation which requires me to jump through many hoops to leave, because it needs the numbers (at least on paper) to maintain power.
Fortunately this is reversible, but circumcision isn't.
> How about undergoing a non-essential and medically unnecessary surgery without your consent? Doesn't that bother you at least a little bit?
Nope. My parents were 20 and 21. Family, their Priest and Doctor all pushed them to do it. I have no recollection of any of this. My dick looks like most of the dicks I've seen in the change room and in porn. Why would this bother me? It's so abstract as to be ludicrous.
All sorts of things were done without my consent that have had a much larger impact in my happiness and well being: being raised Catholic for instance, something you brush off as "reversible".
I've really always thought of it as akin to cutting my nails. Its never bothered me and while a small benefit, I appreciate the cleanliness aspect of it; although, that can of course be mitigated by proper washing by those that are uncircumcised. My parents made the decision they thought was right and I am pretty happy with the results.
The fact that other people went through it too is a horrible, horrible metric for something being okay, and I think buying into that is its own form of sucking.
I am circumcised and pretty happy with it, has nothing to do with it happening to other people. It is not a horrible thing that happened to me, its just my penis and me and everyone else that has encountered it seem to like it. The fact that you are determined to think that I and others like me (the majority of American, middle eastern, south korean and other men) should feel assaulted or upset about it is an issue in and of itself. You appear to have a narrative you are trying to push.
I haven't determined as much, just poked a hole in your argument.
You can't really know how bad it was if you were too young to remember and can never have any bearings. The only way we can really know is from empirical analysis or people that went through it at an older age.
Circumcision can be delayed until a man can consent, but it's much more traumatic if done after infancy.
I'm one of those people that people just feel comfortable opening up to.
In college, one friend told me his dad was asking him if he resented his father's decision to circumcise him. His father had to get a medical circumcision due to recurring infection due to difficult sanitary conditions in mandatory military service in his country of origin (where circumcision is uncommon). The father's experience was terrible, decided his son should never go through that, and circumcised his son. Years later, he was second-guessing the decision. My friend wasn't sure how to respond to his father, since it was clearly weighing heavily on his father, but it was totally a non-issue for the circumcised son.
Another friend told me that he was circumcised at 12 due to recurring infections (in a first-world G10 country), and is a big advocate for infant male circumcision.
Anyway, there are statistically significant benefits from male circumcision, though they are often over stated. On the other hand, the downsides to circumcision are also minor for most men. For the average male in a G10 nation, circumcision seems to be low-risk low-reward procedure, though with large fat-tail distribution on both the risks and rewards.
It's fine to disagree with decisions someone (shouldn't have) made on your behalf, but learning to judge people by intent, not result, is part of adulthood.
Punishing someone who loves you for doing the best they knew to do is one of the most cruel things I can imagine.
In other words, disliking someone for something they did to you does not automatically mean they deserve punishment and you should hurt them return. Especially since causing harm to a loved one also already hurts oneself.
It sounds like a lot of those people are cutting those parenta off to make their own lives better. Not to punish parents.
They have choice of being estraged and happier, under less stress and less pressure. Or keep contact and have to deal with manipulation, stress and so on.
Finally, adulthood also means that you know that not just intent matter. The people are affected by consequences of your actions regardless if intent. Too many people write about this as if once you have good goal, you dont have to learn more or think what you are doing. As long as you dont care to check whether you might cause harm, you dont get any responsibility dor what you do.
Continuing to let someone degrade you because “they’re doing the best they can do” is equally cruel. All relationships take work, if one party isn’t willing to work on it then thats not a relationship worth putting energy into.
I would take any post on a "Survivors of Narcissistic Parents" or similar group with a grain of salt. While many of the stories are true, sometimes the speaker is the narcissist.
If someone tells you that everybody around them is always lying they are usually the liar. The same way some people who can't seem to work anywhere without having constant drama are the source of the conflict.
There's a Christian book called "Wild at Heart" which had a whole chapter on wounds from fathers. I bought into it for years. In hindsight I think books like that can lead people into exaggerating imagined or downplaying real problems. IME it's best to talk to a professional, or at least get a variety of other perspectives before passing judgement.
I doubt there's much science behind this. Only adult males can really A/B test this, and circumcision of an adult penis may very well risk damage. There's no reason to think uncircumcised males enjoy sex more than those circumcised in infancy.
In parent it was about the "potential", which you can't reach anymore if you are circumcised. Whatever "potential" means. Could just be not having to use lube.
The statistical apple can only fall so far from the statistical tree. Some apples may roll down hillsides or into rivers but it's unwise to bet on any one apple doing so.
> Parents are just people doing the best they can.
I'm not willing to be this generous by default. Beyond the basic manslow hierarchy of needs, people choose their priorities. Career, Friends, Family, Children, Recreation, Education, Health -> These are all facets of an adult priorities and they choose how much to allocate to each of these.
Many of those that have children do it out of obligation, ego, legacy, society. Many have unrealistic expectations about how much control they have in shaping their spawn, and do not handle well when this new independent human does not match their expectations.
These people end up causing genuine harm, and when we look back at what they did we should absolutely call out their prioritization and choices as harmful or toxic, and learn from them.
> The word 'Toxic' is just thrown around now and everything is 'Toxic'. Its a word that has ceased to have any real meaning but virtually every behavior that used to just be normal every day activity is Toxic.
I've been tempted to write a blog post "Toxic Considered Harmful"
One of the biggest problems with the toxic label is there isn't anything that can be said in response. Its an attempt to get sympathy and/or end the discussion.
"That's toxic" and well... there's not many places that a conversation can go from there. It is often incredibly difficult to refute someone making a claim that something is toxic - especially when much of the diagnosis of the situation is based on a one sided and often idealized view.
Additionally, applying the label of toxic to a wide range of situations reduces the descriptive nature of the word and the options available within a wider vocabulary selection.
Replace usage of "Toxic" by "makes me feel like shit" and I think you'll understand better.
What would you want to debate against someone who says something makes them feel like shit? There's not a lot to say beyond: "I don't care how you feel", "That sucks you feel that way, what would make you feel better", and "It's unreasonable to ask me to change in ways that make you feel better, so suck it up".
Now imagine one person telling another their behavior is toxic, which means they are telling them that they make them feel like shit. Well the response will dictate what happens to the relationship. If the response is anything but "That sucks you feel that way, what would make you feel better", well the logical move for the person feeling like shit is to find a way to never have to interact with the toxic person again or force them to change their behavior.
The obvious fourth possibility is "you're wrong to feel shitty about this and should find a way to feel good instead". But of course, that's precisely the possibility that the framing of toxicity excludes, because both "you're wrong to feel this way" and "it's unreasonable to ask me to change" can only be expressed as "that's not toxic".
"You're wrong to feel this way" is a ridiculous notion, one I had to personally unlearn. Emotions aren't right or wrong and you can't control them. Disregarding someone's emotions as wrong has exactly one result, resentment, which leads to heightened conflict.
You can acknowledge that someone's emotions are valid while disagreeing with them on the content. Here's a template: "It sounds like when I said x you felt y, that wasn't my intention, my intention was z."
I'm not sure I'm fully understanding what you mean by "valid" here, because there's lots of emotions that seem obviously wrong and controllable.
The most obvious example is a fear of public speaking. Everyone I know who's struggled with it (including myself) has resolved it through the perspective that it's wrong to be afraid and you've gotta figure out tricks to get over your irrational fear. It's hard to see what a more "validating" approach would look like.
Public speaking carries real potential for negative outcomes. I don't think fear of it is irrational.
With experience and exposure, we learn how to manage risk and what our limits are. Same is true of learning to swim or learning to drive, but it's not true that a fear of swimming or driving is irrational or unwarranted for someone who hasn't done it often or ever. No, it's completely appropriate.
What would this even mean? I don't see the difference with "suck it up"?
The feeling is real, it's a fact, it could be problematic, feeling shitty in general is problematic, and so ya, if the sight of people laughing, of kittens, of blooming flowers, the singing of birds and all that makes you feel shitty, that really sucks for you, and you'll have to figure out a way to cope.
Depression and other issues definitely cause such feelings of shittinines for things that ideally wouldn't make you feel shitty.
But if others are not willing to help you, then it still seems like a "suck it up" response.
And as a person whose behavior is the cause of someone's feeling of shittinines, what do you mean by: "you're wrong to feel shitty about this"? Are you insinuating that the person is in full control of their feelings and can simply choose to have your behavior no longer make them feel shitty, but suddenly makes them feel good and uplifted?
If so, what's this magic, I'm sure lots of people would love to know. Also, what would they? What motivation would they have to adapt to your shittiness causing behavior?
And on this track, do you really think people are wrong to feel shitty for things like sexual pushiness, inuendo and abuse in a workplace or anywhere unexpected. For pressures to do things, work extra, work over the weekend, etc. For racist or sexist comments, comments and actions that denigrate others for how they look or talk or where they come from, what they believe in, etc.
I'm not being totally dismissive, I think you make a good point, some things are a matter of perspective, but this perspective is important and I think often missed. When someone makes a sex joke for example, they might not mean anything bad of it or try to make anyone feel bad. And arguably, sex jokes shouldn't make you feel shitty. But given a reality where for lots of people this joke is not a joke, but something they experienced for real, a past abuse, a constant stigma, etc., well the joke is a reminder of that shitty thing and causes them to feel shitty.
What is often asked is to stop those bad behavior, and if those are stopped, maybe the jokes about it can fly again, because there'd be no one for whom the joke was just salt on the wound.
In those cases, is "you should learn to have these things make you feel good" really an answer? They logically are bad things, instinctively made to make you feel shitty. So I still think the choices are only what I brought up before.
The issue is the framing (as noted in the other comment) and the limitation that the label of "toxic" places on the possible solutions.
You've got a toxic manager? Leave. That's the only answer. There's nothing else that can be done.
The label of toxicity is used to limit the possible ways to move forward.
Additionally, the overuse of "toxic" diminishes the situations where it actually is a toxic environment that irredeemably pollutes everything that it touches. This is similar to how "Grammar Nazi" or "Soup Nazi" rubs me the wrong way as it trivializes and normalizes a truly horrific philosophy as something to be used to mock people who enforce/follow a particular set of rules.
> Toxic behavior or a toxic situation exist because of a consistent pattern of destructive behavior. Posting one rude comment is very different from consistently demeaning and trolling someone online. A loved one arguing with you over a disagreement is very different from verbal and emotional abuse. And a work environment where a boss pressures staff to meet a deadline is very different from a boss who consistently bullies employees and promotes a culture of fear to get results.
> But people are quick to grab at the negative connotation of the word without contemplating if it actually applies to the situation. It’s almost as if using the word toxic makes you a part of the “cool kids’ club” or somehow makes you more “woke” (yet another overused word). But throwing toxic out when someone offends you is like a metaphorical way of slamming the door in someone’s face. It’s an immature response that doesn’t solve anything.
Labeling something as toxic means that the only realistic answer to resolving the issue with that toxicity is to cut it out of one's life. With today's use of the word, if we were to do that, we'd likely end up as hermits (and then have someone claim that toxic solitude is infecting the culture).
Not everything that hurts is toxic. Seeing a public display of affection after a breakup may fall in the "makes me feel like shit" category, but it isn't toxic. Walking past a street preacher espousing views counter to my own and seeing people listen to him falls in the "makes me feel angry" category, but it isn't toxic.
Yes, there are toxic workplaces where the combination of bad management, awful coworkers, and unrelenting stress seeps out of the workplace into the rest of life and everyone else's and makes it worse. Labeling it "toxic" is the easy way out for trying to describe what is wrong with it.
The label of toxic ultimately means that we are unable to solve the problem and are thus a victim in the relationship (be it personal, professional, or other). In a world where everything that makes one "feel like shit" is toxic, it subverts our own ability to resolve issues since its the other's fault that they're toxic. Nothing that the individual can do will resolve it and we are powerless in the face of toxicity (other than cutting it out of our lives).
But yet, there are often numerous ways to resolve an issue if it isn't deemed as toxic and the power to resolve it remains with the person.
In the face of toxicity, the classic "change your company or change your company" only has one answer where the other answer is the more desirable one and leads to a better world - if one is willing to put in the effort rather than following the "just leave" advice that is the only answer to something that is toxic.
I personally find that the word toxic is quite apt, because everyone is already familiar with the concept of various degrees of toxicity. Sexual abuse is very toxic, someone who always talks over you and doesn't listen is still toxic but to much lower levels.
And like with all toxins, individuals can choose if there are any redeeming qualities that outweighs the negatives. Alcohol is a good example, pain killers another. Similarly, I think it has this intuition already built, ya there's some toxic behavior at my work, but it pays really well and I'm learning a lot. Ya my brother can be a little toxic, but he's always there to help when it matters and cares a lot about me.
Yet everyone understands that it would always be best without the toxic parts. Which is where for work you can look at other opportunities and see, this other place seems to not be toxic and similarly pays well and has a lot of growth opportunity.
> Labeling something as toxic means that the only realistic answer to resolving the issue with that toxicity is to cut it out of one's life
You seem to insist on this a lot, I don't think I agree.
I mentioned different ways to approach a toxic scenario.
One is to stop your exposure to it. You can do so by leaving or by having the cause of the toxic behavior leave.
Another one is to stop the cause of the toxicity, which you can do so by having the behavior stop (through repremendation, shaming, authority, education, etc).
You can also adapt to the toxicity, develop a thicker skin, or what I called "suck it up". Hopefully making its negative impact on you milder and maybe non-existent over time.
But the ideal pattern in my opinion, is not for the person who already feels shitty to have to deal with trying to figure out a way to avoid or stop the toxic behavior, but for others who are in much better positions to do so to do so.
It's pretty hard for someone bitten by a snake to save themselves from the poison. Once you're already feeling shitty, your courage and energy levels to face people that make you feel shitty about the very topic are low, and doing so can be a risk to face even more toxic backlash.
In a workplace, it's really the responsibility of the company to make sure they deal with toxic behavior preemptively, and offer easy channels for remediation if someone calls it out.
And as decent human beings, it is really all our own responssability to be aware of when and what make others feel shitty and see how we can adapt to make others feel good instead. That's how you can coexist positively with others. It's normal relationship building for trust, comfort and all that.
Now, I see that a lot of people want to be pedantic and point at an edge case which I'd consider is a bit of an absurd call-out, because in practice it's very rare that people call out these kind of toxic but shouldn't be scenarios. That's the case where someone feels shitty about things that for the majority of people do not make them feel shitty and sometimes even a normal person would feel good about.
The thing is, most of the time, in those scenarios we are dealing with trauma. And I think here too, like how you'd help someone in a wheelchair and not slam the door in their face, people with trauma need our help and compassion as well.
> But yet, there are often numerous ways to resolve an issue if it isn't deemed as toxic and the power to resolve it remains with the person
Can you expand here in what you mean by keeping the power with the person? In my mind, "toxic" is a new found power for just that, the ability to name and label a behavior that hurts you as toxic now levies new power to actually make that behavior stop or change or go away, where as before people had often no recourse and could only "suck it up".
The correct response is not to refute the label, it's to explore the feeling and ask what makes them feel that way. I'm sure some people will shut you down at that stage, but most people will open up if they actually want resolution.
But that's exactly the concern, that "toxic" is both hypercharged with negative affect and can't be disputed. Similar labels don't have that problem - I would and do tell friends things like "she's not contrarian, she just has strong beliefs you haven't fully understood".
> It is often incredibly difficult to refute someone making a claim that something is toxic
Perhaps a lot of the "toxic things" are subjective based on someones experience, so there is not much to refute.
If someone says the way they were treated by another was toxic, who are you to refute its toxicity? People tend to be able to understand how some thing affects them and if it is good for them.
Imagine if HN supported downvote reasons and "toxic comment" was one of them. Would I even be able to see your downvoted comment? I have "show dead" turned on in my settings, FWIW.
I think that if its not single-handedly causing this, its by far the biggest factor. The ways in which our world has been altered by the rise of the internet are things we haven't even begun to comprehend. I think most of our modern societal "ills" that we frequently lament about today seem to all trace back to extreme individualism and narcissism, both of which are fueled largely by the internet and social media.
> Wonder how much of this is driven by social media and the internet today. The word 'Toxic' is just thrown around now and everything is 'Toxic'.
You're spot on. The article coyly makes a mention of the real cause in this clause:
> For most of history, family relationships were based on mutual obligations rather than on mutual understanding. Parents or children might reproach the other for failing to honor/acknowledge their duty, but the idea that a relative could be faulted for failing to honor/acknowledge one’s ‘identity’ would have been incomprehensible.”
Although identity has many, and positive, functions[1], here it stands for "unquestioned affirmation of one's narcissistic self-image", in other words "what I think I am, being reflected to me". Social media can do this almost perfectly, most of them are perfectly fine tuned for our engagement, what we think we are, what we would like to hear, and what we would like to get angry at (which confirms our identity through opposition).
Anything that fails at this confirmation is expelled via the magic word "toxic"[2] and parents take their share for not being able to match this self-constructed, unearned narrative of an identity.
[1] Identity is a useful narrative that explains us to ourselves and others through time and space. But it is only useful to the degree it actually conforms to the reality, else it loses its adaptivity. Which means identity needs to stem from our relationships to the world; it doesn't come from within, it does't come from without, it comes from our genuine relationship with reality as we test it. If the majority of the reality we had to conform to was internet, where we can block, downvote, silence, cancel and get recommended to by an entity that are really interested in us sticking around, our identity becomes seriously self-deceptive and not useful across time and space outside the internet. In a sense, internet replaced the narcissistic, toxic parents we were running away from, except this parent is perfectly, and callously, able to tell us what we want to hear.
[2] Toxic exists. But not everything that pisses us off, or threatens our sense of identity is toxic. Narcissistic family systems are toxic because they put their needs above the needs of the child, that includes the need of the child to hear the harsh truth at times. What I see today is some parents are switching strategies by trying to outcompete with internet in being endlessly accommodating their children and not implementing necessary but unpopular structures their children might need. They couldn't have won anyway.
There was a viral video I saw yesterday of a baby crying, and a deer rushing out of the woods probably trying to protect it.
Anyways, the lady who posted it got a ton of comments about her shitty parenting style from literally a 6 second video, to the point where she had to make a response video saying "No, I don't just place my newborn on a wooden porch", and explain why her child was on its stomach, and why it cried, etc.
Social media invites all sorts of low effort "you ought to" or "look I know about X" comments. These people don't really care about her baby. They care about getting virtue points for pretending like they care. It's a twilight zone at the intersection of virtue signaling and bike shedding.
There's a meme going around that says something to the effect that people are just meat with electricity inside. It's obviously a simplistic joke but there's something about it that really resonated with me. I'm trying to keep that in mind now, have compassion for others more, and to basically lower my expectations for the human animal. Sure, we can and do overcome our limitations sometimes, but that's something to be grateful for, not something to be expected.
Not sure if you have kids or not, but once I had them it really made me understand where my parents were coming from and forgive their flaws. I literally know nothing about raising kids and am just making it up as I go along. I feel like I get it right a lot but also often get it wrong. There is no manual for being a parent or a person, we are all just flawed beings doing the best we can in a situation we have very little control over.
The news, court rooms, congress floor, board rooms, hiring committees, college admissions, and yes on social media. But let's be honest here. We have two subsequent generations whose economic outlooks have been substantially harmed by the previous generation being blamed for not being successful and it's in more or less all corners of the world that imply power.
I don't think false centrism or compromise for the sake of compromise is beneficial here.
Let's take the most clear example.
Who legitimately won the 2020 US Presidential Election?
Did Biden win the election fairly and legitimately or not?
Does your position permit "splitting the difference"? How would that work? Are you advocating that we meet in the middle and say Biden won but not legitimately? Or that Trump lost but it wasn't a fair election?
Some positions just don't work like that. OAN won't simply say that Biden is the legitimately elected President. What do you propose is the appropriate "compromise" solution in this case?
The way you're presenting the "both sides" of "FOX/OAN" vs everyone else sounds like you are presenting the FOX/OAN perspective that the media has a liberal bias and they are the counter.
Most of your listed 'left' news sources only "skew left" but focus mostly on "fat reporting". Compared to FOX/OAN who are "hyper partisan right" and focus on "selectve, incomplete, unfair persuasion, propaganda, and other issues"
When the most important facts of the day (electoral fraud, climate change, pandemic health and safety, vaccinations) have a "liberal bias" - in that the left is on the side of factual reality, and the right is on the side of unfounded conspiracy theories, you simply can't compare the news media the way you have.
I think if anything, the "shift" is more like an unveiling.
There are and have always been extremely problematic issues in many families, it's just that in the past you would be denigrated for severing ties with your family for those reasons due to a sense of duty.
So we now finally see the elephant in the room. We cannot go back to unseeing it, but we have to deal with it gracefully. To me this is just the continuing process of development of human empathy.
Yeah I mean, this is the claim / supposition: this isn't new, it's just not hidden anymore.
But I think it's worth questioning whether the supposition is true or not, and not in the sense of "can I think of any examples of a dysfunctional family being exposed now that would not have been back then?" because when you're talking about a large population you can find examples of pretty much anything (including that a lot of dysfunction that would not have been tolerated in the past is now flying under the radar).
Rather the right question (according to me) is: what are the broad trends of what is actually happening to hundreds of millions of people and what are some of the factors driving the trends?
It's hard to make this question grounded in data, but here's an anecdote I do think is accurate.
My grandfather was a horrific man. He died of complications due to alcoholism before I was born. That said, I've heard a lot about just what he was like, including from people outside the family. I've also seen 16mm film footage of him at family holidays, and it's shockingly clear every single other person in the room is straight up terrified of his potential temper. I'm not exaggerating on this point. I think he must have had something going very, very, wrong inside that skull.
My grandmother, who otherwise was a fiercely independent woman, stayed with him despite the abuse. My Dad, hitchhiked to Mexico one summer to escape him, but otherwise still tried to be the good son.
Why? Why not just divorce/disown the asshole?
The norms against that half a century ago were so much stronger. I do think that's an important shift that's happened recently. There's still plenty of people that stay in a bad situation due to loyalty, but the stigma, in the sense of victim blaming, has definitely eroded within my lifetime.
This is a very good thing in my book, even if it looks like a decay of society to some idiots.
It was more socially normal because an entire generation experienced the horrors of WW2. I'm not saying that makes the behavior ok, but it sure made it a lot easier for families to empathise. My grandpa wasn't an alcoholic but he was a giant asshole until about mid-70s when he started softening up.
It's probably because baby boomers were the generation most effected by lead poisoning. Their children don't have the associated brain damaged that causes the impulse control, lack of reasoning and irrational anger, and they see their parents as damaged goods and interacting with them has too many negatives to make it worth while.
I think they meant that their examples are things that would have been "shoved under the rug" or hidden in the past and are no longer taboo. If you were gay in 1900 you hid it, if you are gay in 2020 you are out (usually). Abuse may consist of a lot of things, but using physical abuse as an example. If you beat your kids (more than just spanking) in 1900 it was still taboo (but maybe less so)
I think your view of the past is colored by 21-st century social norms.
In 1900, a husband beating his wife wasn't even illegal in most of the world. [1] Beating children and other animals would barely even register as unusual.
But beating your kids or wife - again, in the "more than just spanking" sense of physical abuse - was often punished informally. Working-class communities had clear senses of the relevant boundaries (though again those wouldn't be the same as our boundaries necessarily) and institutions like the Charivari to support them. (Google "Rough music".)
E.g. One reason ancient Christianity was such a big deal according to historians (and resulted in billions of followers, etc.) was their profoundly different family structure when compared to what was happening in the roman culture and throughout the world.
They brought Jewish traditional family structure to the ‘gentiles’ (read: everyone else who wasn’t omitted by blood line).
It’s possible that a more secular materialistic society will have completely different relationship structures because there is no objective truth saying ‘hey, respect your elders’
I like this perspective. There are so many folds to it, though.
First fold: Christendom and its 2,000-year-old siblings/cousins Islam (also Confucianism? Buddhism?) have been around long enough to form a sort of base social reality.
Second fold: These 2,000-year-old cultural regimes are crumbling and we are moving into new cultural regimes.
Third fold: The crumbling is actually, as you said, a reversion to the mean.
Fourth fold part A: This so-called reversion to the mean is itself impossible because cultures from 2,000 years ago were themselves much different from the cultures that came before them, and so on in both time and space dimensions.
Fourth fold part B: This so-called reversion to the mean is impossible also because we don't have enough context about ancient cultures to say that we are reinstantiating them, and things have changed so much (technology, residual effects of the most recent cultural regimes) that, even if we had enough information about the ancient cultures, there's no way we're really doing what they were doing.
I would add that the ‘crumbling’ is a matter of perspective.
Every (expired) empire on earth has been a blip on the radar of the oldest continuous organization in recorded history (the Roman Catholic Church).
Most demographers are actually predicting a precipitous drop in the population of ‘non-believers’ since secularists choose to have so few children. It might be an evolutionary dead end, so to say.
In Engels's Origins of the Family, Private Property and the State, he traces shifts in culture and family to shifts in the forces of production, and makes a pretty convincing argument. Some have followed on this work. The modern version would be:
50,000 years ago - behavioral modernity. The whole world a primitive communist society of hunter-gatherer bands. Remaining culture is cave paintings and Venus figurines.
10,000 years ago - agricultural revolution. The rise of slave states, polytheistic religions, emperors and high priests with many wives and concubines.
2,000 years ago - the end of the Roman slave latifundias and rise of feudalism. Kings and peasants. The beginning of the Roman Catholic church.
Turn of the 16th century - the beginnings of modern capitalism, bourgeois republics, Protestantism, the rise of the city and universities.
Changes in the forces of production affect the relations of production and culture (hegemony), in this idea.
The idea in Engels crowd was the beginning of the next system was the 1871 Paris commune.
If one were looking for modern changes in production, I would guess programming and media would be two candidates for being at the vanguard of production change. Stephen King and John Carmack can make a lot of money just going into a room, whipping something up, and sending it out to the masses to see millions rolling back in. That's not like a Detroit factory 75 years ago, and is less so a farmer's field 750 years ago.
And those changes in production would affect society, the culture. In that case it would be San Francisco, and/or Shenzhen culture at the vanguard. Also media creation, so that coming out of LA, Mumbai etc.
Had a friend who told the story of her aunt: Her aunt's mother married a man and had several children, including the aunt. Her aunt's mother left her husband as he became an abusive alcoholic and returned to her family. Who proceeded to treat the aunt's mother like a pariah for deserting her husband. The aunt grew up living in a converted chicken coop and being completely ignored by her extended family.
I came here to say this. My step-sister's family sticks to the concept of family despite all the women being raped and beaten by their father. They will not address the problem, their mother will not address the problem, and the only way to live in reality is to leave them. They violently attacked her for trying to discuss it on multiple occasions. Their mother continues this even after the death of their father.
They tell everyone they know that she's addicted to drugs and won't talk to them because they want to help her. In reality she's more successful than all of them combined, which she attributes largely to seeking mental health counseling and removing herself from their constant drama.
We're living through a reckoning for abusive people. In the past people were ostracized for cutting off their families for any reason, especially women... but now there's little reason to put up with this kind of bullshit. These cycles of familial abuse reach back generations and it's about time they're addressed.
This is a great comment. My story isn't nearly as bad as this. I just happened to be born the son of an asshole. I really don't take responsibility for this or his behaviour - but I was brought up being made to believe it was my fault.
I recently received a torrent of abuse via WhatsApp from him after a relatively minor disagreement on a news story I wasn't interested in (Harry and Meghan). It happened just as I started a week on-call as the most senior clinician, and I found I couldn't concentrate because of the things that he said echoing in my mind. Stuff that referred to things when I was less than half my current age, and hugely hurtful.
Why should I allow this in my life? An I risking the things I'm responsible for by doing this? My wife has pointed out I'm in a foul mood if I've been arguing with him about something. Is that fair on my wife and children?
Exactly. Most of my family and I cut ties with a family member as she went batshit insane and started thinking the secret police were after her. Started yelling and screaming at all of the family members that eventually cut contact, usually calling them at odd hours in the night. Nothing we did could convince her to get help, and there's no way to force her into care even though she's called the police constantly to report false crimes. (Such as the janitor breaking into her house and rearranging her furniture).
However, she's very cyclical and can act normal ~30% of the time. She's told everyone that we're all drug addicts, or child abusers. Lots of people believe her, and think we all abandoned her. I've had family members call me and reduce me to tears with insults, because of the things she's told them.
From what I've seen anecdotally in every single family where the child has cut contact: there's ALWAYS a (good) reason. It almost always boils down to a failure in respecting their children, and treating them with kindness and understanding.
Younger generations are growing up with better mental health care and social awareness (due to the pervasive nature of it these days with social networks) than previous generations. We grew up in an era of public PSAs and school videos on bullying and acceptable behaviour. We know what's "right", can recognize abuse, and prefer to associate with those that treat us well.
I am seeing a lot of resentment in this thread. My best guess is that some of it is deserved and some of it isn't.
Something that this thread reminded me of is the fact that several of my friends (millenial like myself) think that bringing children into this world is a bad thing to do- with global warming and other social problems making it so that this choice is just going to cause more suffering. I wasn't too surprised to hear this from them, knowing their personalities.
When the millenial zeitgeist has drifted in a direction where this is a common opinion, I take it to indicate that our socialization has taught some of us that humans have little inherent moral worth as individuals, the values of a family are subservient to the values of globalism, and all is nihilistic considering that we have a poor shot at solving the worst of our problems(the Nash equilibrium doesn't seem to be working out for global warming).
This observation makes me turn back towards family values. They work better than nihilism for me.
I think the US tradition of leaving next generation better off than the last (whether true or not) is somewhat to blame. There is a societal "failure" to not providing for your kid the same or better than your parents provided for you. Many millennials are the tipping point for; they got the most, and it's down hill for future generations. The great American pyramid scheme is falling apart or so it seems.
I think many people have trouble with that and just tend to throw their hands up as they don't have a solution. I boils down to economics. If these same millenials could afford the lifestyle they want for their kids, they would have kids. Global warming, overpopulation, etc is an altruistic substitute. (Granted things are more expensive, etc, etc. it still holds true.)
This cannot be accurate in any absolute sense. How is wealth defined in this context?
25 years ago, the median car and house didn't have (central) A/C. Cell phones and the Internet were expensive and not widely available. Truly portable laptops, usable tablets, and smartphones didn’t exist. Health food options were limited. The world was not mapped for all to access at street level. Translation was far more difficult. Information was less accessible—Wikipedia and Google didn’t exist. Free public preschool (4K) was uncommon. The death rates and crime rates were higher, life expectancy lower. Cash and checks were the primary payment methods. The list goes on and on.
Does wealth here refer to an individual’s relative share of contemporaneous wealth? Should the generation that built all of the great technology and systems of the past 25 years not reap the benefits of their work?
I’m in my 30s, btw, in case I come across as defensive in this comment. It sounds like my parents’ generation did a better job of building lasting wealth than their parents did (though not my parents lol). Should we find fault in that?
This is pretty well documented. The main point is that older generations had access to much cheaper housing, they bought it instead of rented it, and it went up in value. Millenials by and large rent instead of own, and the rent increases have been outpacing wage gains for a while. Along with housing, education has vastly increased in price increasing student debt a lot, which was basically non existent in my parents generation. Medical expenses have grown an extreme amount relative to inflation as well as childcare. The net of it is that your boomer uncle can buy a new boat for the lakehouse he bought 30 years ago, but you're spending all of your money on daycare.
Did more millennials also opt to live in city centers, which had hollowed out during the previous generation? You can still buy suburban and rural housing for $1xxK, or even five figures if you’re willing to compromise.
I just looked, and room+board at OSU costs $13,352 per year (http://undergrad.osu.edu/cost-and-aid/basic-costs). Adjusted for inflation, that’s cheaper than it cost 20 years ago. Of course, unsubsidized private or out-of-state schools will cost far more. Many fewer people went to college 40 years ago, too.
The health insurance premiums are higher now, but the coverage is far better. Everyone can have guaranteed health coverage via ACA, subsidized in cases of financial hardship.
Free childcare is still available for many of those who live close to family. Maternity and parental leave and FMLA laws have only improved. Free public schooling generally starts earlier. More wfh jobs are available today than ever before.
My point in all of this, of course, is that I suspect a lot of these differences boil down to optionality and different decision making. I don’t think it’s reasonable for our generation to pursue a more exciting, leisurely, and expensive lifestyle than our parents had (prestigious school, expensive city, travel, white collar job, moving away from a childhood home, delayed commitment), then resent that generation’s boat and lake house.
Can you have it all today? For most, the answer is still no, just like it always was. I suspect that more people than ever before can get pretty close, though, leaving those who can’t even more resentful about it than in the past.
BTW, with one month of SF rent, you can buy yourself a nice used boat. A couple years of that rent will buy you a simple lake house.
Rents, education, childcare costs, and healthcare costs have been rising everywhere, not just in city centers. OSU is way more expensive than it was 20 years ago. My mom graduated from OSU in the 80s and paid for her self with a summer job working retail, you cannot do that now. Most flagship state universities now cost 35k+ for in state residents, and they used to cost 5-8k for in state residents. They have increased tuition expenses because the state legislatures cut funding during the great recession. Today a much larger portion of the cost of state uni education is borne by the student and less is borne by the state. Maybe 20 year ago, for some people it made financial sense to "opt out" and move back near your parents, and with the rise of remote work, it might make sense today for a small slice of workers. The large majority of millenials do not, and never will work at jobs that can be done remotely. They include huge industries like medical staff, retail, home healthcare, food service, etc.
And there is no such thing as a guaranteed job, or job for life. My parents are boomer generation, and their friends insist that their kids are too lazy to work and should just march into a business and speak to the boss for work.
The world doesn't work like that for the vast majority. Hell, I worked in a software role for 10 years and it took me 2 years to find a non contract, full time role elsewhere. I applied for hundreds of jobs, with university education and experience, and got a handful of responses.
The economy is set up so a minority of people live in heaven while everyone else is treated like an expendable cost centre.
>> In 1989, when baby boomers were around the same age as millennials are today, they controlled 21% of the nation’s wealth. That’s almost five times as much as what millennials own today.
This doesn't seem to document OPs claim of mililians owning 1/6 of what their parents did.
When the boomers were 30 there people didn't live as long, so there were fewer old people to own things.
I'd like to know how much milinials own in absolute terms compared to the boomers.
> The dual of this is that many more millennials have living parents than their parents did at the same age.
I dug into some demographics data and I'm almost certain this is false.
OP said millennials in their 30s. Life expectancy hasn't increased in the USA that much since the 70s. Even if the deaths were completely distributed among adults, you'd expect people in the 30s now and the 70s to have about the same number of parents alive/dead. More importantly, almost all of the increase is due to improved child mortality.
There's a much simpler explanation: Boomers were once-in-a-country's-history lucky. They inherited the spoils of two world wars.
This is ridiculous. If you look at the totality of the situation, the average person is living an easier more comfortable life than the top 1% 120 years ago.
What, before electricity? How about comparing middle class american with a middle class american from 30 years ago. That's where you see some stratification.
That's essentially what I meant. Millenials are first generation to be effected economically worse than their parents. However, they got the most from their parents in terms of a "nice" upbringing (eg. spoiled). And, they can't afford to spoil kids of their own and it's manifesting as not having kids at all
I'm pretty sure millennials don't want kids because children are expensive. I think this has more to do with the phasing out of the middle class than anything. You can't buy a house on a blue collar paycheck anymore.
Also, for many women, its very hard to juggle motherhood and a career----if they chose to go that route.
There is also a choice now. Women can use a plethora of contraceptives that weren't as common in my parent generation.
Honestly, this whole "antinatalism" thing is all smoke and no fire.
>When the millenial zeitgeist has drifted in a direction where this is a common opinion, I take it to indicate that our socialization has taught some of us that humans have little inherent moral worth as individuals, the values of a family are subservient to the values of globalism, and all is nihilistic considering that we have a poor shot at solving the worst of our problems.
>When the millenial zeitgeist has drifted in a direction where this is a common opinion, I take it to indicate that our socialization has taught some of us that humans have little inherent moral worth as individuals, the values of a family are subservient to the values of globalism
You lost me a little there. How does not wanting kids makes you think that our socialization has taught some of us that humans have little inherent moral worth as individuals?
> How does not wanting kids makes you think that our socialization has taught some of us that humans have little inherent moral worth as individuals?
Doesn't not wanting kids for X reason mean that you consider the moral worth of a new person to be less than X.
I think a lot of people don't consider a new person worth anything at all. Or at least would prefer 9 people at happiness level 10 over 10 people at happiness level 9.
> Doesn't not wanting kids for X reason mean that you consider the moral worth of a new person to be less than X.
What? No.
Most people who do have children are not doing in order to fulfill some dispassionate abstract moral commitment to the inherent moral worth of human life.
And there are all sorts of examples of people who clearly value human life but choose not to have children. Or are all nuns terrible people?
Whether someone chooses to have children or not has very little to do with your underlying moral commitments or -- more importantly -- behavior. Sociopaths and abusers have children. Mother Teresa didn't have children.
> there are all sorts of examples of people who clearly value human life but choose not to have children. Or are all nuns terrible people?
OP was specifically referring to people (including in this thread)
who choose not to have children on moral grounds:
>> several of my friends (millenial like myself) think that bringing children into this world is a bad thing to do- with global warming and other social problems
So it seems fair to assume that they consider the value of the new person to be none or negative overall.
>>> several of my friends (millenial like myself) think that bringing children into this world is a bad thing to do- with global warming and other social problems
...and?
There's nothing at all logically inconsistent about two following two propositions:
P1. All human life has value.
P2. Intentionally creating new human life is unethical.
FWIW, I am not an anti-natalist, and I do not believe P2. However, I do believe it's unethical to purposefully have children you cannot support (financially, emotionally, intellectually, etc.). But that doesn't meant that I think that the children created by people who cannot support a child are worthless or have negative value! Just because "creating X is bad" does not mean "X has no value".
> So it seems fair to assume...
No, it isn't fair to assume that people who believe "creating X in situation S is bad" implies that those same people believe "X has no value". Those are two very, very distinct and different value judgements.
More importantly, I very much doubt people who hold to above position would agree with this characterization of their view of the value of human life.
> humans have little inherent moral worth as individuals
Isn't it flipped? If humans had little moral worth, then there would be no need to worry about the suffering they would experience. It's because they have moral worth that people hesitate to bring new humans into the world.
This is the question inmy mind: an unborn/un conceived child has not experienced any suffering. Is it morally just to expose someone to suffering, even if the alternative is non-existence (or whatever state they are in prior to life)? I did not consent to exist, to think/feel/hurt, but two idiots made that choice for me 37 years ago and now I have to deal with it.
For me it is illuminating to meditate on some underlying assumptions here.
E.g. “I did not consent”
This type of statement assumes you have a will. If one decides that they have a free will to make decisions, it is useful to note that this is a supernatural belief (because the laws of physics have no room for free will in a stochastic universe).
If there is no free will, and nothing matters, not only did you not consent, but the entire chain of events since the creation of the universe also lacked consent.
The morality of gift giving is a good starting point.
Intention matters.
Is it good to give a gift for selfish reasons? no.
Is it good to give a gift to make others jealous? no.
Is it good to give a gift to help force your will on others? no. (this is the one closest to your consent question)
Is it good to give a gift out of a genuine desire to share the joy you received from said gift? yes.
E.g. the decision to have a child is not a trivial moral decision. It is not necessarily a good to decide to bring a child into the world. We see this clearly play out in the data of NYC for example, where less than half of conceived children in some communities make it to term.
Self examination is required to see where the true motivation comes from. If one feels that their life was more a burden than a gift, that person is probably not in a great state to decide to morally have a child.
Unfortunately, many people think that having a child will fix their issues.
People on HN speak their armchair sociology with such confidence it astounds me.
Even the idea that resentment can be "deserved" or not seems meaningless to me. People don't resent people because they think they deserve it, they resent people because things happened to them. We obviously can't assign blame for such infinitely complex causal chains, hell we can't even assign agency. Who's fault is it that someone's grandfather got brain damage in the war he was conscripted into, then went on to be abusive to his children, who went on to become addicted to alcohol. Who should say if these people then deserve resentment for being bad parents?
Life seems to me too random to comprehend, yet everyday I find people to tell me I should or should not condemn or condone people for their actions.
Maybe shit just happens and we look for reasons afterwards?
i think as we see crises accelerate, the only ones with true freedom to act and make the world they want to be in will be the nihilists.
everyone else is busy playing calculus looking for solutions that fit into existing logic and political economy, when the truth is that survival and creation irreducibly exist for their own sake.
bringing a child into a dying world might be the ultimate selfish act. it's also the only option that doesn't feel like suicide. and once they're here, there's nothing left to do but devote all your energy into making the world the best it can be.
i think this is what "family values" ultimately missed. family became the default, an inwardly-focused tradition and culture decoupled from praxis, and action was taken for granted.
> bringing a child into a dying world might be the ultimate selfish act.
That's a pretty bleak outlook on the future of our world.
Do you really think getting born today is significantly worse than being born at a random time in human history?
today doesn't have to be the worst day ever to generate anxiety about the future. knowing that cavemen got ate by dinosaurs wouldn't make it any nicer to pitch a tent under i5. but i think it's pretty clear that barring some kind of unexpected radical change, and maybe even in that case, many of us are going to experience deprivation and terror unlike anything we've known before. at previous moments in history, if it got too bad and all else failed, you could just start walking and live off the land on your way to someplace nicer. it sucked and was often violent but people had the skills and the world had the space. that's not an option now.
i can't imagine surviving something like a famine or civil war in the modern world. and it doesn't look like that kind of risk is growing smaller. could you take on some total disaster like that while caring for a child? what kind of person would you be at the end of it? what kind of person would they be?
and it doesn't even have to be that dramatic. there will be a lot of suffering that doesn't touch us directly, but it will still shape the places we inhabit. could you stand to live in a total police state, even if you're safe (from the outside) and relatively wealthy (compared to a refugee)?
these are the questions on a lot of people's minds. and nobody has good answers, because there are none.
Besides, even if you talk to people who lived through wars or famines, few of them wish they hadn't been born. People find happiness and meaning everywhere. From interviews I have read, people living through wars find their lives more meaningful rather than less.
> could you stand to live in a total police state, even if you're safe (from the outside) and relatively wealthy (compared to a refugee)?
Probably. But I don't think anything like that is likely. I think there will be fewer police states in the future.
It's odd how people living in poorer and less well-managed countries are much more optimistic about the future than people living in the West.
I feel nauseous when I accidentally stumble into Reddit shame and pity fests.
I’m honestly terrified of what my children will blame on me some day.
Just an example off the top of my head: “aita for cutting off my parents because they kicked me out of the house when I was 18?”, followed by thousands of comments digitally lynching the parent in question and wallowing in the terrible trauma the OP experienced.
I wasn’t planning on kicking my kids out at 18, but the responses had me crying for the poor parent.
There’s no nuance in internet discussion. People read a sentence, attach their own worst demons to it, then flay them alive for all to see.
My own step sister has gone full q anon now, but before that repeatedly posted about her traumatic childhood with no real specifics. When pressed for details, the worst she could come up with was that her dad yelled sometimes and introduced her to a few too many girlfriends.
I guess my question to you is, what would be a helpful reply for your mental state?
I could say “people like that shouldn’t have kids. They’re lucky you didn’t post their address or I’d go remove their ability to reproduce myself”.
Would that help you?
What if I said “what were their childhoods like?”
We’re all doing the best we can. Sounds like in your parents case that wasn’t very good, but perhaps compassion and acceptance will help you do better if you choose to make the next generation.
My mom is a raging narcissist, and until I accepted that in her, we had real problems. Now I just understand that I’ll never get an apology from her about anything, and enjoy the good parts.
I mostly feel sorry for her that she lost her father to alcoholism at a young age and is sort of stuck at age 13 in some ways. She burdened me with a lot of stuff growing up that she shouldn’t have, but it’s relatively simple to trace that back through history and see that this was inevitable.
The social structures are slowly disintagrating because their foundations were weak anyways. Religion and culture only masked it for a while.
Everything is temporary in life and being a parent is a temporary role. A parent's job is to initiate the child to the world, teach them how to navigate it and how to be a functional member of society. In short, the parent's job is to help the child be as independant of them as possible.
When the child is an adult, the relationship must evolve. A lot of people fail to understand that, because being a parent is part of their identity. If you take that away from them, they have nothing left because they haven't cultivated anything else. This is a mistake.
It is good to see people seek counceling on these issues. It show they have the intention to recognize something is wrong and are willing to put the effort to find resolution.
>If you take that away from them, they have nothing left because they haven't cultivated anything else.
My parents told me early on "I'm not your friend" and has since then always felt that I should be obligated toward them because they're my parents. These exact parents you mention in your comment are also the exact same ones that can't believe their children don't get along and they don't ever talk to them anymore.
> My parents told me early on "I'm not your friend" and has since then always felt that I should be obligated toward them because they're my parents.
My parents told me the same when I was young. It wasn't until about age 25 that the dynamic between us radically changed. There is a fine line to cross between being a primary caregiver and being an onlooker to someone's life. If you were a parent for 18 years it is understandable to have some "growing pains" associated with transitioning to a new type of relationship with your kids but it certainly is doable, even if it takes a while. I still seek advice from my parents (and they me) but it does not have the affect of authority as it did in childhood.
I was estranged from my parents, and I am also in the process of adopting a child. This led me to think a lot about the sort of relationship I want with my children, versus what my parents and I have.
I believe my parents had me because they feel like it was their duty, and they fulfilled their parental obligations fairly well in that regard. The trouble is that they didn't consider what it was like to have an adult son. Now they probably realise that I'm not the sort of person they like (I'm gay, and living in a different country). They don't call anymore, and even when I call them they only talk about themselves. They have no interest in me or my life.
I hope that whomever is having children right now should think very thoroughly about what kind of relationship they want with their kids once they grow up.
You’re almost living my life! My parents were less than thrilled with who I grew up to be. I think they would’ve been mildly happy if I married the first person I met and settled in their neighborhood, living out a life that fit into theirs.
I’m sure that they would’ve found faults, but at least they could brag about how good of parents they were.
I have a specific memory of visiting home in my early 20s and going to get groceries with my mom. In the checkout line was another mother with her grown son, but he had some kind of developmental disability and clearly still relied on her. My mom made some comment about how that would be nice which always cracked me up. She didn't just want me to settle down close to her but wanted some sort of eternal-child she could core for forever. That said she was an ok mom, just had kids in her late teenage years and never developed a strong identity outside of being a parent.
I don't think parent-child relationships were fundamentally better in the past, just read some Dickens or George Eliot or Henry James and you'll find plenty of agonizing both ways.
The article headline suggests there's a "shift" but doesn't really go into enough detail to explain why a shift from relationships based on duty to relationships based on fulfilment would fuel estrangement. A little more data on that would be helpful.
I would have thought that the lack of technology would distance kids from parents more. My great grandparents hopped on a boat to another country and never saw their parents again. The lack of cheap air travel would have made visiting family cross country impractical for most in decades past, but I would fly back to see family on mere long weekends.
Good point. Unless you were the first-born and inherited the family farm you were probably forced to find your luck elsewhere and even 20 or 30 miles would mean effectively being separated from your parents for all but special occasions.
I would be curious to know when the median human in each century saw their parents for the last time in Western society. As there were so many events where soldiers went off to war and settled where they conquered or colonists sailed off around the world never to return or conquistadors decided to just stop somewhere and marry a local woman.
The context and interpretation is always shifting and different. The human condition is always the same. So much comes back to simple communication. Things people often struggle with that are required for honest communication: listening, empathy, vulnerability, patience. It isn't some great unsolved puzzle in most relationships. I have often found it only takes one side to start bridging the gap to start truly communicating. It is when both parties insist on being right and aggrieved and conceding nothing that estrangement happens. Of course there are many complex situations, mental illness, etc. It works the same way in business. Everything is so much easier when you can listen and empathize with people. Actually empathize, not just empathize with the goal of making a point or convincing someone of decision, etc.
I think the article really under-emphasizes the role of capitalism in this. If I need help with my kid, I don’t call my mom, I hire a babysitter. If my mom needs medical help, she won’t call me, she’ll pay a nurse. Goods and services that used to be procured through social bonds are now procured with cash - which creates a feedback loop where people then neglect their social bonds to acquire more cash.
>Of course I'm an engineer and know next to nothing about anthropology.
You're probably wrong here.
>There is no evidence, historical or contemporary, of a society in which barter is the main mode of exchange;[32] instead, non-monetary societies operated largely along the principles of gift economy and debt.[33][34][35] When barter did in fact occur, it was usually between either complete strangers or potential enemies.[36]
“Barter” may not be the best term for it, but until the 18th/19th century (varied a lot by location), most people procured the physical goods they needed through their own family’s effort (subsistence); through in-kind payments and mutual exchange (old contracts used to specify that people would be paid in firewood, or candles…); and through favors. The switch from that model to a model of surplus and specialization, where people were paid in cash which could then be exchanged for any number of products, procured from distant places and from strangers, was indeed one of the most dramatic transformations in human history. I think we still don’t appreciate how much it shook up our old systems, and we blame things like divorce rates or child estrangement on newfangled values or bad morals when in fact they are a natural result of structural changes.
In a lot of ways having a close family or network of close friends brings you back into this gift economy. Sometimes you can do the job yourself but you just need an extra set of hands, and you return the favor in time.
Indeed. In Marxist theory this is called Alienation, or rather, this is one aspect of alienation. Humans no longer engaging in productive labor for the common good and providing what they can to their community, but existing as atomic economic units existing to produce and consume.
The divorce rate is higher and it's easier to be comfortable living independently, both of which are stated in the article and are unquestionable. There might be other reasons, but these are definitely breaking down relationships.
This article doesn't go far enough to hold parents accountable for their actions IMHO. It's completely justified to go 'no contact' with a parent who was physically abusive, who is homophobic, etc.
I bristle at the implication that parents are owed anything. My relationship with my parents is based upon mutual respect as adults. Had they not at least made an effort to reconcile, we would not be on speaking terms today.
My thoughts exactly. The article seema to intentionally taboo homophobia (maybe dismissing it under the category of "identity") when that is one of the biggest sources of homeless youths in the US. I refuse to see parents who disown their gay kids as victims.
I don't remember where I read it, but this is a big description of my childhood experience:
> Sometimes people use “respect” to mean “treating someone like a person” and sometimes they use “respect” to mean “treating someone like an authority”. And sometimes people who are used to being treated like an authority say “if you won’t respect me I won’t respect you” and they mean “if you won’t treat me like an authority I won’t treat you like a person”. They think they’re being fair but they aren’t, and it’s not okay.
I will try not to complain about my parents, but one of the big side-effects is that I do not want kids and have had a vasectomy to prevent that. Not the only reason, but a relevant one.
I think more people should choose not to have kids and our societies/governments should stop pushing so hard to have more due to traditional values or so economies can grow. It is time for us to focus on quality and not quantity. I think we are approaching 8 billion people in this world: not only is this not sustainable, but we could be better raising our children by having fewer.
Why does this relate to this topic? Because of the concept that many feel they were raised poorly. The people that should not be having kids usually do. One of the reasons I do not want kids is because I do not think I will do a good job. Instead, I think I can better support my friends that want to raise kids. If I feel I'm finally prepared to take on the responsibility, then I like to think I would force myself to adopt. Regardless, I think we could iteratively improve parenting by encouraging (never forcing) those that are mentally prepared to do so.
I think educated, younger generations are already having fewer kids, but guess I wanted to shine light on the good side of this.
This is an important topic that I think it unfortunately too taboo to discuss in most places and instances. On the one hand, the blanket belief that reproductive rights are core and cannot be curtailed is so ingrained in some subcultures that even broaching it immediately makes people think of human rights, and on the other, overcrowding is a thing and planning for the future is important.
For example, I can't imagine denying someone the chance to have the joy that is a child, but I'm also not sure there's a lot of benefit in the modern world in people having ten (or twenty) children, where I have a hard time believing they can even have a full relationship with their children because there's so many of them (leaving out the obvious issues with too much population growth). Also, how would we go about changing the status quo? Criminalizing too many children is far too dystopian for my taste, and incentive programs just mean that families with many children have less resources, which hurts the children, not the parents that make that decision.
Honestly, I'm not even sure what's been discussed already on this topic, because it's somewhat taboo to speak about in our society.
First and foremost, I strongly believe in educating or encouraging, but am strongly against forcing/coercing.
A big part is likely just normalizing that it is okay not to have kids: in particular, there is so much social pressure to have them. There is also significant government incentive for a population to grow both for the economy and for retirement programs like Social Security.
I do think the best thing we can do is live by example. We can choose not to have kids. Additionally, being heavily involved with helping our friends or families that have kids may be beneficial as well: not just babysitting, but helping get them curious and engaged in school, save for their higher education, or ensuring the mental well-being of the family in general.
> A big part is likely just normalizing that it is okay not to have kids
Maybe, but I'm hesitant to say that's a solution, because it implies that we can or should offset the problem (as much as we can assume there is one) by asking some people to have no kids while others continue to have many. It's not a bad thing to do, but it's not really a solution.
> There is also significant government incentive for a population to grow both for the economy and for retirement programs like Social Security.
To some degree, this is a chicken and egg and/or catch-22 problem. Our economy is based on growth, because growth was seen as inevitable, and since our economy is based on growth, we incentivize growth. That works until growth becomes constrained, and then it doesn't. Whether from outside or inside forces, understanding and possible moving towards an economy that is less coupled to growth is an important thing for us to study for the future (even if it only helps us understand our current economy better in the end).
> I do think the best thing we can do is live by example. We can choose not to have kids.
That's not the correct example. If everyone followed the example, the human race would cease to exist. Leading by example should be leading by what we expect people to do. That means leading by some people not having kids, and some people having a sustainable amount. That's not exactly different than it looks like right now if you consider some people to be leading by example, and it doesn't seem to actually do much (but population growth greatly falls off with industrialization and coming out of poverty, so maybe it does?)
You seem very thoughtful and set in your calculus. It's probably no help, but for what it's worth, two kids is less than replacement value. Were every couple to have only two kids, the odds are some would die and you would have a shrinking, not growing, population. Having kids, at least in my experience, is a true blessing, and something that I think will bring me great joy for many decades. To each their own, but I wouldn't worry too much about environmental impacts or global carrying capacity.
I do not want to take away any positives from having kids; however, I do think we should strongly consider whether we would actually be good parents and if we would be able to prepare them to live in a world where the bar is raising exponentially. Even if we find fulfillment in children, I question if it is really the best option for them in the long-term or if we may be selfish in our desires to have them.
I think shrinking population is one thing I would like to see. Until we start moving to other planets, I do not see the benefits of a growing population. Many people still live in poverty and lack a good education, which I believe parenting has the most influence on.
> in a world where the bar is raising exponentially
Something I've thought about as well. If I had kids, I doubt they would make it into the college I go to. The acceptance rate for UVA was 60% for my parents generation, 25% for mine, and probably in the single digits if my hypothetical children were to apply.
>I think more people should choose not to have kids and our societies/governments should stop pushing so hard to have more due to traditional values or so economies can grow.
If your retirement plan is point blank shotgun than this is sustainable. Otherwise pray for automation, depending on how old you are, it might work out.
It is a pyramid scheme though, each generation needing to be bigger than the last to support the previous generations retirement. It has to end at some point.
Not really - you can increase productivity, the end game of that being full automation.
Lifespans are increasing and automation claims turned out over optimistic so far - if you are close to retirement the last thing you want to see is a shrinking working population, shortages and inflation.
Each generation doesn't have to be bigger than the last. Two people create two children, those two children create two children, the grandparents die, the grandchildren create two children, etc.
That stabilizes the population (technically population goes down due to accidental deaths, diseases, etc. but you get the idea).
I'm not sure I believe this diagnosis. I think communications has made for more formal estrangement since it's pretty hard to find a lifestyle that explains why you can't video chat from anywhere anytime and the cost of even trans-continental travel is rarely a quarter of a year's salary.
The further you go back, the easier it was to have excuses to greatly limit contact and only have contact that is very impersonal. The average American is a decendant of adults who were never going to see their parents again. Most would have felt a great deal of social pressure to treat that as a hardship and disguise if it was their primary motivation.
I think hunter gatherers would have been predisposed to finding new groups at adolescence even if their culture lacked a specific rule for which sex does so, and the priorities of agricultural societies to keep land rights are probably not particularly compatible with our evolutionary past.
I suspect some of this is just how hard it's gotten to avoid people. People used to just get on a boat or train, move to the other side of the country, and then all they had to deal with was letters and the occasional Christmas visit. Now, with the ease of travel and communications, you actually have to tell people you don't want to see or talk to them.
I really wonder how much of this actually is a problem, how prevalent it is, how new it is, and how much of the problem is socially induced.
Just anecdotally, my sister and I have different relationships with our parents. They had different relationships with their own parents, and different from their respective siblings. My adult child is quite close with me. My ex had yet different relationships with each of her parents, which was different from her own siblings. And that's just a small selection. Some of these relationships would be considered strained, some very close, and all sorts of points in-between.
Historically cities were full of people who wanted to get away from where they were before, some for adventure, sure, but also many to get away from family and social relationships.
I don't doubt that there are adults (especially older parents) heartbroken about estrangement from other family members. So for those people sure, it's a problem. But it's quite possible the counterpart in the (non-) relationship is quite satisfied by where things stand. And given that a kid grew up with a parent: how many less tight relationships are satisfactory to all concerned?
And all that leads me to wonder: how much unhappiness about the structure of a given relationship stems simply from its deviation from society's stereotypical model of what an ideal relationship should be? This definitely differs from society to society; the south asian side of my family is full of very close relationships (to say the least) but is also very stifling and unhappy for some members. Certainly people feel heartbreak, and some suffer serious psychological disorders, due to a mismatch between their body and the (then) social ideal. We recognize that as an unfair pathology; why not the same for human relationships which are exponentially more varied than body shapes.
This all reminds me of common surveys of religious prevalence: most of them assume that it's the default state, and often don't even have a way to measure "don't care".
You can see this kind of assumption in the article itself, where the author quotes an academic: "but the idea that a relative could be faulted for failing to honor/acknowledge one’s ‘identity’ would have been incomprehensible." -- Just tell that to, for example, the gay folks, or folks who adopted a different religion, who left their families of wider communities because they needed to be recognized for who they are. The incomprehension by these commentators that these are indeed longstanding factors demonstrates their own biases.
>And all that leads me to wonder: how much unhappiness about the structure of a given relationship stems simply from its deviation from society's stereotypical model of what an ideal relationship should be?
My opinion: less than we think.
Plus, the ideal stereotype is usually there for a reason.
We're social animals. A broken bond is a broken bond, whether it's with parents, community, friends, or our own family. We can pretend that we're fine, but then we don't get to be a society full of self-reported depressed people, with great levels of psychological brokeness, addiction, and so on, and have a big majority lamenting how they are "so lonely".
> Plus, the ideal stereotype is usually there for a reason.
Is it? Is it true for the body shape stereotypes I mentioned? Those change over time. Is it true for common racist stereotypes?
> We're social animals. A broken bond is a broken bond, whether it's with parents, community, friends, or our own family. We can pretend that we're fine, but then we don't get to be a society full of self-reported depressed people, with great levels of psychological brokeness, addiction, and so on, and have a big majority lamenting how they are "so lonely".
This is a huge leap, that also takes on only one half of the equation. Some bonds are better off broken, and that has surely been true as long as there have been humans. I don't deny there are many self-reported depressed people, but do they constitute a higher proportion today, or lower, now people have more freedom to make their own way?
My mother never once hugged me. She told me she loved me once, when I was in hospital after a road accident almost tore my left leg off.
She used to explode with fury at seemingly random things, screaming and lashing out with a stick. My childhood was often spent just staying out of her way. Yes, I'm a very touch-averse and anxious person.
She denies these things ever happened. She wonders why I moved to the other side of the world and never visit. Nor do I stay in contact more than an email once a month.
I won't miss her when she's gone.
Parents often don't maintain a basic level of decency towards their children. The sooner we move away from the idea of children owing their parents something, the better.
I had the same relationship with both my parents. I got so little positive reinforcement in my life that I had to practice thanking people giving me praise because it was so odd to me. Part of me doesn't want to get married or have kids just because I've seen the horrible ball and chain it can be with both my parents.
>Estranged parents often tell me that their adult child is rewriting the history of their childhood, accusing them of things they didn’t do, and/or failing to acknowledge the ways in which the parent demonstrated their love and commitment. Adult children frequently say the parent is gaslighting them by not acknowledging the harm they caused or are still causing, failing to respect their boundaries, and/or being unwilling to accept the adult child’s requirements for a healthy relationship
I'm still reading the article, but this bit stuck out like a sore thumb. The definition of the term "gaslighting" seems to have drifted in the last ten years. Previously, it meant something like "intentionally sewing doubt about a true fact in order to force a victim to question their own judgement." Currently, it seems to mean "Someone has failed to fully empathize with me and agree with my take on the situation." This second definition seems very childish, and it's unintentionally quite funny that the article specified that "adult children" felt gaslighted.
I think it is easy to look at this and say "wow, look at these dumb young people". But when I look around at people I know who are in this spot, the responses from parents has been truly awful. I know people whose parents have physically beaten them yet the parents still insist they were loving and cannot understand why their child broke the relationship. I know people whose parents raised them to be racist and are now shocked that their kid is cutting them off after finding an interracial relationship that their parents think is wrong.
A parent who says "I just loved you the whole time" when they actually traumatized their child is gaslighting in the traditional sense.
Agreed. When you are trying to communicate in an empathic/emotional way and the other party does not understand how to do this and defends themselves in an intellectual/unemotional way, your emotional need is profoundly unmet. This falls short of intentional gaslighting, but to critique the party seeking empathy as childish misses the point.
It's an example of a human universal that humans believe what's convenient for them. It's convenient to be a terrible person and still believe you were a great and loving parent. Not so convenient to realize you made mistakes and weren't perfect.
The children who are estranged from their parents are experiencing the traditional gaslighting, and not the more recent thing you bring up.
I am estranged from my father for a number of reasons, but mainly because my parents divorced when I was young and my father spend the next 15 years trying to destroy my relationship with my mother through basically any means at his disposal. It came to a head when my father called me late one night while I was in college, and he told me "We did it, we won, we beat her". I was very confused and asked him to elaborate, and he told me that he sued my mom in court for child support that she paid while he was paying for my college attendance. He told me that he loved me more than my mom and that he was paying for college because he loved me and that my mom wasn't paying because she didn't love me. He had previously used money as a weapon in my relationships before and we had discussed and agreed that he cannot talk about finances like this with a 19 year old who is (1) needs financial support to make it through adolescence and early adulthood and (2) wants to maintain relationships with both parents. It was impossible for him to get over the anger and resentment he had for my mom and to keep that out of our relationship, so I cut ties with him. Having talked with him about this a lot before cutting ties, he would consistently gaslight me about how (1) my mom never cared about me (2) his remarried family were the only family that cared about me and (3) that everything he did, he did for love of me and not out of spite for my mother and (4) that he never did any of the stuff I specifically asked him not to do to help me maintain my familial relationships.
> The children who are estranged from their parents are experiencing the traditional gaslighting, and not the more recent thing you bring up.
And sometimes, the parent is experiencing gaslighting. We all have problems and the difference between parent and child fades with time (most of us live both roles).
Without an objective record of fact and an independent analysis, it very well could be either party or more probably both that are guilty of gaslighting. Nothing is wrong with being estranged though unless you want there to be.
I’ve noticed a trend amongst other 30-somethings I know to adopt this sort of pop psychology which encourages people to look very, very closely at their childhoods. It’s a great idea to understand your upbringing, but it’s not a trivial effort to do it properly.
I don’t think it’s always a great idea for 2 reasons. One, it’s known that our memories change over time. Traumatic memories can become better than they should (it wasn’t that bad, right?), while frustrating memories can become worse than they should (every reiteration of the memory solidifies just how frustrating it was!). In general, this kind of reflection, unless we have external sources to affirm our recollections (siblings or a parent/adult we trust), seems like it could easily become counter productive.
Two, without understanding ourselves reasonably well in our present state, seeking out past events to construct an explanation of who we are can lead to some very bad science in which we attempt to explain things we poorly understand in ways that don’t make sense.
I’ve had several conversations with friends over the last 5 years or so in which they elaborated on weird stuff their parents did. In some cases it’s simply to acknowledge their influences and why they might be the way they are. In others, perhaps most, they appear to be looking for excuses and ways to apply blame externally.
This is obviously anecdotal. Maybe I hang out with weird people.
In any case I’ve always strongly encouraged people to navigate this kind of thing with a therapist or other family if possible. Doing this in a vacuum is very risky. It seems to lead to exactly what you’re outlining here. Children resenting parents for things that they believe negatively affected them, which the parents don’t even remember - or remember differently.
Of course they remember them differently though. They remember them from different frames of reference, different stages of mental development, and for different reasons!
I don't think this is what is going on in the article and in these cases of estrangement though. In my experience with myself and my friends estrangement isn't the result of someone who is 35 looking back and misremembering a slight in their childhood, its the result of a long and ongoing issue with a family member that degrades the relationship over time and that impacts them in the current moment today. I am estranged from my father and I want to have a relationship with him BUT I know that if I reopen ties with him, he will emotionally abuse me in the present day.
Good point, I’m glossing over that part. I’d agree that this likely only happens in situations where there are ongoing tensions or worse. That’s definitely been the case with people I know. As a result, the exploration of childhood isn’t objective at all. It’s occurring within the frame of present conflict.
I’m sorry about your relationship with your dad. I have trouble with mine too, and it weighs on me at times. Relationships can be complicated.
I don't think this is unique to familial relationships. I think this is maybe a trend with all sorts of relationships. I'm not sure if there's any way of quantifying it, because I think it's something that's always happened, but I get the sense it's more common than it used to be.
Without meaning to sound judgmental, I see it as part of a general trend -- cancel culture, sensitivity warnings, etc -- that involves some underlying pattern. Maybe it's just more encouraged now than it used to be, maybe it's not really any different, I don't know. But I do get the sense people (liberal and conservative, young and old) are more likely to be absolutist about their viewpoints, political and relational, in a way that leaves less room for "seeing the other side" and change.
It's important to note I think the familial estrangement issue is more complicated than this, and involves other changes in cultural values, but also socioeconomic crises.
Psychologists talked about unintentional gaslighting at least 40 years ago. "The motivation may be conscious, although it is usually unconscious; and almost invariably the conscious motives are rationalizations and/or distortions of deeper, more complex, and less acceptable motives."[1]
I mean, there's probably a lot of actual classical gaslighting going on to. My interactions with my mother definitely fall into the old film definition of the thing.
"I never chased you around the apartment with a knife! It was brainwashing!"
From the perspective of a child who believes something happened, mightn’t a parent “not acknowledging the harm they caused or are still causing” seems very much like “intentionally sowing doubt about a true fact”?
Characterising that point of view as merely “Someone has failed to fully empathize with me and agree with my take on the situation” seems ungenerous, and also to implicitly doubt their understanding of what happened, without a particular reason to favour either the child’s or parent’s interpretation.
The problem is that everyone operates on their own understanding, by definition, so wouldn’t it be better to, rather than say “this isn’t gaslighting”, instead note that it being gaslighting depends upon them being correct about what happened?
The younger generation get social value by being the saddest person in the room.
Sometimes, their stories are rightfully so and deserve our help. other times they reframe their lives negatively just to win the social game of their generation.
Once they reframe they start to believe thier own narrative creating a vicious cycle.
The older generation, has their own problems in arrogance and ignorance, but they cant even fathom a society of young people who would compete on suffering.
>The younger generation get social value by being the saddest person in the room.
This is pretty much classic generation gapping, blaming the other side for not understanding How Things Are. I would suggest some of what this is is a change in power dynamics. It used to be society's expectations were such that you didn't talk about your shitty parents or complain about your lot in life. That led to a lot of sadness, it just wasn't visible. Now people are more comfortable talking about these things and it makes you feel icky.
Ha, yes. With all of the unrest in the US, I've found myself wishing the "other side" would at least reintroduce leaded gas so we'd raise kids unafraid to throw bricks again.
>The younger generation get social value by being the saddest person in the room.
I don't think that's fair. I don't think those people are doing it to seek attention. What I do see is people get stuck in a spiral of rumination. It's important to understand how your past impacts who you are today, and your base temperament. If you understand that, you can work around your weaknesses. From there, you grow.
That’s true, the article in question does the same.
Nuance gets lost anytime generalizations are applied. This is the way of the world. See media labeling of Gen Z or Baby Boomers. The variation in sample greater than the variety across labels.
Gaslighting seems to have entirely lost its original definition. I now see it being used to describe almost any kind of disagreement or abuse. It's unfortunate, because it does disservice to actual victims of gaslighting.
Also, you're bringing up the textual source of the term, not its general connotation. The connotation is when an abuser, cheater, or otherwise harm causing individual decides to try to rewrite history or attack the competence of the individual bringing the grievance rather than address the grievance in good faith. There is a big difference between disagreeing on the facts of a situation and trying to invalidate someone's perception of the situation in a manipulative way to avoid blame. If your first instinct when someone says "you hurt me" is to argue why it's not your fault, you should probably talk to a therapist about that. That is how a lot of families work, and will even couch it in terms of "tough love" despite it being frankly abusive behavior. To use the word of the day, that's toxic.
I guess you've never had someone accusing you of hurting them when you didn't?
The optimal move is to disengage rather than argue, but I assure you that mandating that people "own" whatever spurious accusation is thrown their way just opens up a rich avenue for passive-aggressive abuse.
Your contrasting the textual source with the general connotation is exactly the concept drift referenced by the post you're replying to.
I have indeed been accused when I didn't agree with the objective harm caused. Thankfully, I typically didn't further escalate the situation and act like a jerk by denying their perception of the issue. Just because you don't immediately mount a fiery defense doesn't mean that you own their position, their feelings, or have to agree with them. This is emotional intelligence 101.
Typically a quiet, non-escalated discussion can help both parties feel better, clear up misunderstandings, and if apologies are merited (even from the initial accuser) they can be had. But only if you don't get someone's hackles up in the first place, or deny their right to air a grievance.
Again, the fact that you are already considering it a contest to be won or lost (or avoided immediately without discussion, which is a sure indicator to folks how much you don't care) probably says a lot about the lens you view the world through.
Referencing the connotation means that there is a general accepted usage, which is not the hyperbolic "didn't absolutely agree with their grievance" that the original post I replied to was making. In general terms, I think it has come to include unconscious manipulation in addition to the previous, narrow definition of conscious, machiavellian attempts to dispute concrete facts.
> narrow definition of conscious, machiavellian attempts to dispute concrete facts
My understanding of gaslighting is that it was never about disputing concrete facts; it was about controlling the person by making them doubt their sanity. We already have a word for conscious Machiavellian attempts to dispute concrete facts: "lying."
The difference would be the good faith of the argument. It's not gaslighting if someone believes I have my facts wrong, or my take on the situation is wrong.
It WOULD be gaslighting if someone thought my take on the situation was correct, but claimed that I was wrong in order to sew doubt in me.
In the original definition, a "gaslighter" would have to know and agree on the same facts as the victim, and then intentionally lie about them to sew doubt in the victim's mind. In your scenario, the "jerk" (for lack of a better term here, since he is not a classical gaslighter) honestly believes that the victim is incorrect, and is arguing from good faith. Good faith arguments can certainly be wrong, and can certainly be awful.
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I suppose I take such a hard line on this because it's childish to think that people will always empathize with you, and agree with your take on things. Quite often, the opposite will happen. This is a regular occurrence, and does not constitute abuse. Sometimes when no one agrees with you, it means you're in the wrong and you need to rethink your take on the situation. Other times, an individual can be in the right while others are wrong. This sort of conflict will be a normal part of someone's life. Further, some situations do not have a strictly "wrong" or "right," and simply constitute competing values and perspectives.
I actually think this is an interesting exchange, as I think this issue -- the boundaries of real versus perceived reality -- and the use of the term "gaslighting" reveal a lot about the psychology of the parties involved.
I was going to say something similar to you, that correctly or incorrectly, I do feel like there's this increase over time in people (maybe generational, maybe not) treating their perceptions as real. It's like there's no room for a Rashomon effect or something, and there's this lack of recognition societally that self-identified victims can sometimes have false recollections.
In that case, if you and another person strongly disagree over what happened, in a factual sense, the only room for explanation, if you thought you were a victim, is that the other person is gaslighting you by denying the "reality" of what happened, or lying outright, or has a false memory.
FWIW, I agree the meaning of the term gaslighting has shifted over time, in that I think originally there was more of a connotation that the victim didn't question what was happening, until maybe after everything was so blatantly obvious, and, as has been pointed out, the perpetrator either knew what was happening at some level, or at least didn't truly believe it themselves.
I first learned the definition of "gaslight" like 10 years ago from a Project Manager friend who said I was "gaslighting" her because I secretly fixed a bug she complained about and pretended it was never a bug to begin with.
I didn't know the meaning of the word so I looked it up. It's related to the plot of a movie I believe.
It's a great word to describe the situation we were in.
Nowadays people use "gaslight" to mean something different and it annoys me. But what do I know, I am not a linguist.
I disagree. I don't like the way the power of the word has been eroded either, but gaslighting in the original sense does happen, and I think parents are frequent offenders, because they become accustomed to the power they have over their kids' perception of reality.
The most extreme example I know of: a woman I know was sexually abused by a teenage neighbor when she was very young. When her parents found out, they told him he wasn't supposed to do that, and when they caught him again, they uninvited him from their house for a few years, then welcomed him back, and scolded her for being "rude" and "dramatic" when she cried and didn't want to be in the same room as him. Now, before you get suspicious, that previous sentence was her parents' version of the story, which she accepted for years. So this guy was in and out of her house almost her whole childhood, treated as part of the family. Her mother even showed her the "very nice" note he sent declining their invitation to the party they were throwing for her college graduation. When they got on Facebook, they immediately friended him, so he got all the family news they posted, including when and where she moved, the new jobs she got, etc. They called her paranoid and self-centered when she asked them to stop sharing all the latest about his life with her and vice-versa. The family narrative growing up was that all of that was perfectly healthy and normal, and she had difficulties with it because she was a difficult, dramatic, and irrational person, the kid with all the problems who spoiled things for her otherwise perfect family.
So that's already gaslighting on an emotional level, but if you want it at the factual level, they covered that, too. As she started talking to her parents about it as an adult, it dawned on them that what they did looked bad by "present-day standards," and they started changing their story about what happened. In their version now, they banned him from the house after the first offense and didn't allow him back until she moved out for college. They never scolded her for being "rude" when she was scared of him; they were sympathetic. Her mother even tried to say she arranged counseling for her, and then backed down and said, "Well, people didn't get counseling back then [the 1980s] but we did the equivalent," by which they meant talking to the priest at her school about her "emotional problems."
That's pretty legit gaslighting when you're in your thirties and suddenly your parents change the story they tell about how they handled your molestation, after sticking to the previous story for a quarter century.
Not only that, the ease and lack of conscience with which her parents changed their story made my friend wonder how much of the version she grew up with and took for granted was fictionalized. She doesn't really remember how many times the abuse happened, what period of time it spanned, who put a stop to it, or how or when her parents found out. She has a few fragmented memories of certain times and circumstances that she mostly trusts, and the rest was secondhand via her parents.
I could tell you other stories about parents misremembering things to their own advantage, probably unwittingly in most cases. I remember my sister screaming and crying and slamming doors about our parents not letting her go to a certain camp one summer that she had been to the previous summer. My mother's memory is that it was my sister's decision and she didn't want to go the second year. I don't think my mother is consciously lying. People's memories change over time, usually in ways that protect and flatter them.
This anecdote is a good example of gaslighting because it appears that the parents are aware of the facts, but intentionally deny them, making her question reality.
The problem arises if the parent honestly believe in a different set of facts, in which case it is not intentional and hence not gaslighting.
If you could demonstrate with evidence the intent and factual occurrence of a harm, it wouldn't be gaslighting, it would just be factual lying. No one has ever confused those two things. People use the term gaslighting primarily in contexts where the truth is a matter of perspective and 'objectivity' is irresolvable but the claimant has subjective confidence the alleged did indeed exact the harm.
It isn't surprising older folk have a hard time treating with a grey notion like that, but that's just another sign of the seachange. See Judge Joe Brown's take on Bill Cosby's release versus that of mainstream Black media.
Using zeitgeist terms like "gaslight" and "toxic" immediately makes me take someone less seriously. They are words for social media virtue signaling and nothing more.
What other word can be used to describe that behavior?
If there was one that carried the same "doesn't really care just wants to be seen saying a particular thing" connotation without triggering half the left people would instantly adopt it because there are tons of instances where you see that kind of behavior and want to call it out. Grandstanding is also close but carries the wrong connotations of wanting to influence opinions whereas "virtue singling" is toward your own tribe. Bike shedding is also close but implies actually caring about the outcome or wanting to contribute to the discussion in a non bad faith way.
There are plenty of specific phrasing that can be applicable. "Feigning outrage." "Speaking in bad faith." "Muttering meaningless shibboleths." Virtue signaling itself has become a virtue signal, an empty jargon that denotes the user as a particular tribe.
As a 30-something who moved 2000 miles away from their parents and mostly only talks to them on holidays, I could see how it seems like I am the one neglecting them. But from my POV I feel like I am the one who is neglected.
My whole life my parents don't enjoy actual conversation with me. They get tense and irritated at the possibility of not knowing something, so they only ever want to state things that happened in their lives, and have me do the same. Anything resembling critical thinking is not welcome. Even worse, if the topic even slightly verges into the political realm, they just start spewing whatever line Fox or OANN are shilling that week. And I've learned that all I'm allowed to do in response is be silent or agree, because if I'm critical of them at all, I run the risk of them being so offended that they stop talking to ME for a while.
Another element at play is that my mental recollection of how my parents got along with their parents is nothing like this. From my POV my parents and grandparents always saw things mostly the same, were very supportive of each other, and were very involved in each others' lives up until my grandparents passed away. I just don't feel like I even live in the same world as my parents.
There’s that saying “to truly love someone you have to be willing to let them go”.
Which is really really hard.
Raising my kids is my purpose. But when they’re adults they will make their own decisions about our relationship as equals.
Anything less would be conditional love: I appear to only love them conditioned on something. Like keeping me from being lonely or fulfilling me in some way. Thats not their job.
Did anyone else grow up with an OK family life, but barely stay in touch with their parents? And they don't seem that fussed about it either? I appreciate what everyone's saying but it seems like "maybe once every few months" is a fine contact cadence for everyone involved in my case. We must be a bit on the spectrum or something.
The other side of this essay is that there are a lot of abusive parents out there.
Part of the reason a lot of children go no-contact nowadays is similar to why there are so many more divorces -- economic and societal structures now allow people to leave their abusers.
IMO, these parents are often narcissistic people who aren’t prepared or even capable of recognizing what their grown children want from them. Ironically, both sides want the same kind of acceptance from one another:
“Will you unconditionally accept me and my lifestyle?”
“Will you accept that I’m not fully capable of understanding your needs, and therefore cannot respect you as you’d like?”
Contemporary expectations ask that estranged parents humble themselves and become emotionally vulnerable to their child, an already difficult task that’s made harder with age and misaligned cultural values. And after already giving up so much of their lives, they may think their children are behaving like overgrown and entitled brats.
Personally, I don’t believe these estranged parents really, truly want their children back in their lives. They may not admit it, but they’re not looking for a stronger relationship as equals — they want their child to behave as the caretaker they had sacrificed so much of their lives for.
If anyone’s interested, I wrote up a personal essay on my own bout with narcissistic family.
I'm halfway through your essay and it resonates strongly.
My parents constantly fought when I was a child. They eventually went for a divorce. My father tried to get my mother institutionalized through bribes and connections, but ultimately failed. Eventually, he kidnapped me to his home country. My mother didn't pursue me. My teenage years were spent getting berated for everything and being told I will be a weirdo failure. I was ignored for years as my father pursued women. I found refuge in online forums, video games, and a bunch of friends who had bad homes. We helped out each other. I survived this time, counting down the years until I was 18.
Today, I am married to one of those friends and we have created a happy life together. I too wanted to be comfortable and loved.
My father tells me that he did all of this because he loved me. He saved me from growing up a junkie in the spoiled west. My mother tells me how hard it was for her to lose her child, how hard she cried. There is no point at which they ever asked me how I felt or what I experienced. I am merely a background actor in the grand drama of their lives.
I realize that a lot of parents fumble bringing up their kids. Everyone makes mistakes. But what I and others experience growing is not a fumbling. This is HN - imagine you an engineer responsible for a system that produces incidents every day. Management tells you to never fix anything. Actually, they berate you for even suggesting that, saying that you're just complaining and this is normal.
This is what it feels like.
throwaway284534, my thoughts go out to you. You're not alone. There are a lot of people like us. Many don't make it and fall apart in different ways. The lucky ones build a happy life.
Thank you so much for the kind words, and for taking the time to read my long-winded article. I had to cut so much of it for length, but I think you can fill in the blanks given our similar upbringing.
I can’t say I’ve totally forgiven my parents, honestly I’m not even sure how one forgives a parent. But I’ve tried to accept them like I said in the story; not as malevolent demi-gods but just ordinary people who did their best.
It sounds like you’re living your best life and making the most of the path your parents started you on. If there’s anything I’ve learned, it’s that some wounds are easier to pick at then move past to finally let heal. I still think about them occasionally, but it’s lesser each day.
Hey, thanks for replying. I can’t say I agree with your reasoning though. I’ve seen first hand what kind of damage a generational chain does to a family. Daughters hating their mothers until their dying breath, only to carry that same trauma into a strained relationship with their children. The cycle repeats until a grown child decides to either consciously change this behavior with their own children, or distance themselves from their parent.
Not to be too dramatic, I believe abusive parents will metaphorically poison their families well beyond their own lives. Cutting that rot out of the tree is sometimes a way to save the healthier branches.
> Not to be too dramatic, I believe abusive parents will metaphorically poison their families well beyond their own lives. Cutting that rot out of the tree is sometimes a way to save the healthier branches.
Thanks for the reply.
You are labeling any kind of deference towards your parents as abuse. Do you not see the absolutism and extremism in your statement?
Nowhere did I say children should tolerate abuse. I just said they shouldn't see themselves as ever being able to be completely 'equal' to their parents.
Should the law treat them equally at the age of majority? Of course. Should they be able to make independent adult decisions? Obviously.
But should they expect a relationship between them and their parents to ever be 'equal'? No. Parents have looked after you since you were a baby, they're always going to want to give advice, always going to want to help, and always going to remember you as the helpless little infant who needed their bum washed. Accepting this is the first step towards a good relationship with your parents as an adult.
Going back to my mother and grandmother. Yes, my mom would be annoyed when my feeble grandmother would give her detailed advice on what to do that would be inappropriate between 'equals', but she'd take it gracefully, understanding that this is her mother.
> Do you not see the absolutism and extremism in your statement?
You mean, like this statement:
> Your parents will never be your equals.
Sounds pretty extreme and absolutist to me. Are you saying that the mere act of procreation entitles a person to eternal deference from their children regardless of the nature of their relationship to those children?
> Parents have looked after you since you were a baby, they're always going to want to give advice, always going to want to help, and always going to remember you as the helpless little infant who needed their bum washed.
No, many parents have not "looked after" their children in any significant way. And who are you to assert that everyone's parents are motivated by loving memories of their infancy? Are you merely extrapolating from your own experience and applying it to everyone else?
I am giving a social absolute. Your absolute regarded abuse, a crime, and a serious one at that. A statement being absolute is only concerning if it's also extreme. Labeling deference to parents as abusive is extreme.
> Your absolute regarded abuse, a crime, and a serious one at that.
No, there is no crime of "abuse" per se. Take, for example, the constant, relentless degrading and insulting language that one of my friends directed at his son since he was a little boy, which destroyed the kid's self esteem and has now undermined his agency as an adult, resulting in depression and addiction. I continually hear this kid calling himself "stupid", and he's genuinely surprised that he can't stop himself from drinking. Now what crime do you propose his father should be charged with?
My friend now criticizes his adult son for being weak, saying he has only himself to blame for his struggles. Would you advise his son, and all the others like him, to "defer" to his father? Would you apply to this man all the generalizations you've used in this thread, and accuse him of failing to appreciate how his father "looked after" him?
> Labeling deference to parents as abusive is extreme.
The parent comment did no such thing. They said that an abusive parent's expectation of deference can itself constitute abusive behavior. This is not surprising to anyone who's been exposed to abusive relationships: it's common, for example, for abusive husbands to demand deference from their wives, in line with traditional (and often religious) mores. Would you agree with this as well? Or is it only parents who you think deserve unconditional fealty?
A social absolute is something like 'always be nice to people'. This is different from 'any attempt to be nice to someone is abusive'. one relates to human social interactions. The other relates to what is typically considered a serious crime.
So, "social absolute" is a concept that you invented, which allows you to use absolutist language while claiming otherwise. Is that about right?
> what is typically considered a serious crime
How often do you suppose the emotionally abusive behaviors described in the comment that you orginally objected to rise to the level of criminality? I'll give you a hint if you need it.
I notice you didn't answer any of my other questions. Would I be way off-base to assume, therefore, that your sympathies lie with the abusive father I described?
Deference-all-the-time is an incredibly convenient fig leaf for 'take whatever abuse I feel like subjecting you to'.
In a healthy relationship, the deference isn't abuse. In an unhealthy relationship, deference enables abuse.
Edit: Additionally, decent people can end up poisoning a relationship, if they never get any negative feedback in response to their poor behaviour. (Or if they completely disregard any negative feedback, because their opinion is the only one that must be deferred to.)
> The cycle repeats until a grown child decides to either consciously change this behavior with their own children, or distance themselves from their parent.
Thus, the estrangement as described in the article… I’m one who plans to never pass down any of the parental styles my parents employed and that will be easier due to my somewhat minor version of estrangement. (I pickup the phone every month or three but I never make the call)
My father was never there, and when he was I has to manage all the horrible feelings of dread and downfall for him, me and my siblings because he was always on the brink of living on the street. As I grew up I saw him deteriorate. He is stubborn. I asked him once if me and my brothers could help clean his home so my kids could visit safely, but he started yelling about how I always complain to him.
I got estranged from my parents because my wife and they did not get along well. Towards the end, I would call my mother once a week. I could never make my wife get along with my mom. One day , my mother said something that annoyed my wife. I called my mother and had an angry conversation and hung up the phone. She had high fever but did not call for about 10 days. She died of stomach cancer two weeks later. To this day I am unable to forgive myself for it and regret what I did. My life is so full of such regrets that it becomes unbearable and wish I were dead.
There's no mystery here, at least as far as the article describing divorce.
Children of divorced parents usually end up staying with a parent that manipulates them into hating the parent that doesn't have custody, because there's no opportunity to tell your side of the story. It's like state-mandated propaganda, except coming from your parent.
Is it any surprise then that if an authority tells you to hate something in your developmental years, that you end up hating it, and thus estranged?
Also, calling it a shift is pretty disingenuous. It's more like a deliberate eradication.
24/7 bombardment with conspiracy theories and partisan political nonsense through television and the internet has turned the relationships and bonds in my extended family into weird factions of outrage addicts that are basically impossible to interact with for any extended amount of time unless you similarly develop a fondness for their flavor of outrage or for their passive aggression for when you don't.
It's exhausting. I'm a co-founder and CEO, I have dozens of spinning plates to manage and keep track of most all the time. I'm also the father of two young children that I adore. Those are the things I decide to spend my energy on. What's fueling my estrangement is that I intentionally decide the kinds of BS that I'm willing to subject myself to, and the kind of curated insanity that tends to originate from my larger family doesn't make the cut.
I think the outrage culture is prevalent with pretty much all the news networks starting with CNN and on down the list. You can replace %foxnews% with any of them.
At family gatherings, find something else to talk about. I mean, people did have conversations 30 years ago, right?
For my part, in an effort to try to understand where the deterioration was coming from, I tried to trace the lineage of the different seemingly pre-packaged outrage nuggets. Trying to see if I could make sense out of the respective roles that things like 8Chan, weird PACs and foundations, Facebook, Twitter, email chains, online news, and television news were playing in ultimately crafting the "junkie" that used to be a person I could talk to about rafting, or skiing, or cars, or whatever. Where every possible topic of conversation would inevitably devolve into looking for any opportunity to inject some sound bite or meme. Anecdotally what I found was that the television media part of it was never the progenitor, it was always the legitimizer. A narrative was always seeded first through other preliminary means (e.g. Facebook or astroturfed email chain), and then eventually that narrative would be confirmed through some corner of television media, and then this acts as a legitimizing function seemingly due to the role that broadcast media used to play in their lives historically.
Eventually I gave up on trying to unpack it any further because it was clear I had no means to do much about it regardless of what I could unearth and understand about how it was happening or if I could get ahead of the curve on some facets of it by avoiding topics that could even incidentally be connected to upcoming "hot buttons".
Not sure if you clicked on the links or have any first hand experience with this phenomenon, but that's exactly the problem: conservative family members always find a way to steer the conversation back to politics. They don't live in the real world anymore, everything relates back to their political outrage. And if you do anything but agree with them, they immediately become defensive and act like you started attacking them for no reason. The only option is to pretend you're in a room full of tourettes patients who can't help what they're saying and shouldn't be taken seriously.
Technically, from a strict neuroscience perspective, no one really lives in the real world. Rather we perceive and conceptualize reality through our senses and a complex "biological AI", where much of the processing is beyond our perception or understanding. Likely many things you consider normal or acceptable would be considered otherwise by reasonable people from other cultures, and they would perceive you as being the wrong one, although these things vary in magnitude and kind.
I haven't even had close family members involved with this stuff. But of the now-ex-friends who jump into conspiracy-theory-politics, there's no finding neutral ground. They seek out the topics and things can't ordinary. I'd imagine families have the same problem.
30 years ago, we didn't have Fox News and the associated persecution-complex outrage machine (altho the 'silent majority' evangelical nonsense of the 70s/early 80s provided the manual)
Is it really that hard to just ignore these things when your parents say them? I have Republican parents and I just smile and nod whenever they say something crazy. It's extremely easy.
That’s fine and dandy if the “crazy” things they say aren’t directly attacking ones way of life or values. My parents seem to have viscerally negative physical reactions to even the sight of black people and gay men (lesbians seem to be fine!?) and it’s disgusting. If conservative news were just about foreign policy and taxes we could have our disagreements but it is more insidious than that because identity politics are strong and getting stronger. There isn’t any room in my life for bigotry against myself and my friends.
Or — relevant to this forum — personal attacks. It doesn't even have to be about normal identity politics stuff.
I get harassed by family about how awful I am for working in “tech” after both platforms axed Trumps accounts. (FWIW, I don’t work for a social media company. I'm extremely proud of my work. It saves lives. There is literally nothing controversial about what I do. But "tech bad" is now a News Max talking point.)
That really depends on how persistent they are and/or who else is around when they say them.
Small Child, "I want to build a robot that helps sea creatures by keeping plastic out of the ocean."
Grandparent, "What's the point when Iran is just going to nuke us all anyway."
Parent, "Ugh." (spends 5 min. trying to verbally tap dance out of that 'conversation' and then later 30 min. explaining to the child not to listen to their grandparents without telling them to stop listening to their grandparents)
You're describing the difference between treating them like a life-long friend and treating them like a dementia patient. Yeah, I can just nod and ignore them, but mentally I have to acknowledge that the person I once knew and understood so well is fading away or completely gone. This is not an easy acknowledgement to make.
I'm guessing OP is centrist or right-wing, and the uncle watches MSNBC and thus don't eat up the conspiracy theories that increasingly make up the right-of-center political sphere?
Or maybe the other way round, uncle lapped up the Fox News "MSNBC bad!" thing...?
Would you mind sharing the exploit you have that allows you to determine GP flagged your minute old comment? I’m sure the technical details would be fascinating.
I just posted something very similar, and was surprised to see there were not more comments along this line. My family isn't red, but just in general dealing with them is kind of exhausting. The extended is fine to spend time with, but they are constantly in petty fights with one another and trying to align others to their "side" when I just want to find out who is coming for Thanksgiving and what I should bring. Some of them continue to make the same exact poor decisions over and over and then bitch about ~~the consequences~~ their lives.
There is only so much I can take, there are lots of other people in my life who I never view dealing with as someone I have to subject myself to but do not want to.
Yes, absolutely that's a constant component of the "factioneering" as well. My spouse points out that my family tries to use me as Switzerland to broker between their respective dysfunction whenever there's a crisis (e.g. death in the family, financial problems, etc.). There was a point in time where I took that on willingly and dutifully because I'd think, "Well, somebody has to do it." But, as they never took these moments as teachable ones to sort out their own issues with themselves and then consequently with others, I just hit points where I was sacrificing what I loved for what I didn't, and I stopped. It turns out that, nope... somebody actually doesn't have to do it. As long as you can get yourself outside the blast radius, life goes on. I suppose, unfortunately, that then becomes the goal and challenge... how to stay outside the blast radius. Hence, estrangement.
> I intentionally decide the kinds of BS that I'm willing to subject myself to
This was my experience, too. My father used to playfully needle me about our political differences, but after 2016 it was difficult to discuss anything without it becoming a rant. Finally he yelled at me because I said I agreed with mask mandates, and I decided I had had enough.
I am surprised to hear there is no mention of children who just don't like what their parents have become. My mother did a good job raising me, even if it was very heavy on the "I am your mother not your friend" philosophy and tough love. But in general, it was a lot about hard work, taking education seriously, being reliable and self reliant, etc.
Yet I see none of these things in her today. Every time I call its a pity party about all the wrongdoings done to her either by people or life. I know at some point I am going to have to support her, despite working most of her life and getting a sizable divorce settlement, I am not sure she has any significant nest egg saved. Quite frankly her brain seems to be rotting as she has few friends, hobbies or outlets in general and spends most of her energy getting involved in the near constant squabbles my extended family likes to get themselves into with each other.
On a more generic level though, I read a lot on the internet (well reddit really) about parents falling into Qanon, or even just being slightly cultist Trumpers, or crazy religious, and they just can't deal with them or identify with them at all. Then there is also the resentment of them being out of touch and being critical that they can't buy a house at 23, are having trouble finding a job, or aren't married and having kids, etc... completely oblivious to how much harder it is to do the things they did at their age today.
I do the minimum to keep in touch and literally have to mentally prepare myself each time I call or visit, because I just find the conversation immensely unpleasant. Its not "toxic" but the constant negativity is very draining. Maybe I am just an outlier here, but with 48% of the nation or whatever it is going out and voting red, and it appears that the younger generation having mostly opposing views, the disconnect might be more that they are just avoiding their parents- actively "losing" touch, rather than merely misplacing it.
As someone that was raised in a highly religious home, I have to wonder how much of estrangement has to do with the younger generation's abandonment of religion.
Go to nearly any church and you'll see the primary demographic is older individuals. In my younger days, it was quite a bit more even.
Millennials and Gen Z have dumped religion and with it a lot of the social norms. For example, homosexuality. Most Millennials and Gen Z have no problem with someone being gay. It's socially acceptable. Yet just a couple of decades ago one of the hardest hitting insults you could throw at someone was suggesting they weren't straight.
I wish more authors/researchers would explore this.
I grew up in Ireland and it was still very conservative and religious back in the late 70s to the late 80s of my youth. We only legalised divorce in 1997!
But since then there has been a sea change in attitudes. Marriage equality, abortion on demand, an openly gay man as premier. Little backlash against migrants even when the economy tanked in 07-08. But this did not cause much in the way of estrangement. Indeed I have seen the older generations change too, not just put up with things.
I can only speculate as to why. I think partly because people started to travel and see how things were better in other more enlightened countries and imported those values to Ireland. Life was also improving for most people as an amazing rate which leaves little reason to look for people to blame for things. The church destroyed it's own standing by being totally uncompromising in its attitude to change and covering up abuse.
I believe Ireland also looked on in horror at American politics descending into a complete shit-show with scant respect for the principles it once stood for. You must understand that up till the 90s most Irish thought the USA was the pinnacle of western society. We still hold great affection for the people in general and artistic culture and landscape but the toxic politics, uncompromising religious attitudes and so on are something we view as having held us back in the past and once we abandoned that or at least compromised we made progress.
Anyway, this is just a bit of a brain dump of one point of view. Take it as it is ;)
It must surely have had an effect. Hard to really say what though. However, in the Republic the troubles were almost always a thing that happened "up north" and didn't really have any bearing on day to day life in the south for the vast majority of the people. To illustrate how little people of the Republic cared about religion; I was raised Catholic and my best friend in high school was an Irish protestant and I didn't even know that about him for 3 years! And not because it was taboo, but because it was uninteresting to us. In my experience by the early 90s, religion or nationality was just not high up the list of things that defined people. E.g. lots of English people moved to Ireland in the 90s as it became a more desirable place to live and found themselves welcomed. (I'm speaking generally, I'm sure some people had negative experiences and don't wish to diminish that).
The Irish struggled a bit more with immigration from more different cultures and racism is a challenge everywhere but compared to many other European countries Ireland is on a better path I would say.
I'm rambling a little, but to your question about how the troubles shaped Irish attitudes it's worth noting as a result of the Belfast (good Friday) Agreement our constitution does acknowledge every citizens right to define their own identity.
Also, here's an interesting story about how Irish view the "other" today
On mobile so I can’t look now, but from what I recall the people who have looked into it (and quite a few have) find that the causal relationship goes in the other direction, at least in the US —- young people have abandoned religion because of religions treatment of homosexuals, women (including access to abortion), and, for white evangelicals, their treatment of racial minorities. Religious organizations in the US have persecuted their culture war at great expense. IIRC they’re currently replacing those lost young people with people who are attracted to their movement specifically because of these various bigotries, so I think they’re holding about even, but given demographic shifts I don’t know how long that will be sustainable.
Isn't that abandonment of religion exactly the same estrangement that the article is talking about? The sexual revolution is all about realizing an identity built around personal growth and happiness; the young people who have bought into that idea have high expectations of religion, but get disillusioned with these organizations' failings and cut them off.
'The' sexual revolution (i.e. the big one) started in the 60s and pretty much stopped in the early 80s (you can probably guess the reason; it's usually spelled with 3 or 4 letters, depending). That's far enough ago that children born afterwards are old enough to have estranged children of their own. (For an anecdote, which is of course the singular of 'data', I have a close relative born in the late 70s who is already a grandparent).
Sexual revolution started really with the Boomers, and I believe it is technologically driven.
Invention of the Pill (and similar biotech medical advances) changed everything forever in ways we still don’t understand. And the consequences/reasons don’t cleanly break along Culture War fault lines. (The Culture War was, in many ways, created by The Pill, too.)
I'm unsure if its related to estrangement, but I don't think its farfetched to assume its a big factor. Its interesting to me that for many who consider themselves non-religious often have taken up something else (overwhemingly, politics it seems) to fill the hole, often with the same zeal and dogmatic outlook that they look down on in traditional faith-based belief systems.
But I also think its more than simply the abandonment of religion. It is the abandonment of religion combined with the rise of the internet/social media. It isn't only religion that has suffered participation declines in the previous decades. Local communities of all kinds have crumbled. The internet has provided people with a means of escape from anyone that could possibly disagree with you and allows you to find perfectly insular cultural bubbles. This is immediately more gratifying than real world relationships, but it also conditions people to have zero tolerance for anyone in "meat space" that isn't in complete alignment with them, in which case they simply distance themselves from the relationship. But at the same time, many of these online community relationships tend to be more shallow and superficial than real life ones, which is why so many people report strong feelings of loneliness in their lives.
We've essentially dismantled most of our traditional local sources of community and replaced them with superficial but unsatisfying online ones.
> As someone that was raised in a highly religious home, I have to wonder how much of estrangement has to do with the younger generation's abandonment of religion.
Honestly, there's probably a deeper cultural change that's driving both: ever increasing individualism and increasing unwillingness to sacrifice the expression of that individualism for anything.
This from the OP was pretty poignant and struck me as very true:
> ...This freedom enables us to become untethered and protected from hurtful or abusive family members.
> Yet in less grave scenarios our American love affair with the needs and rights of the individual conceals how much sorrow we create for those we leave behind. We may see cutting off family members as courageous rather than avoidant or selfish. We can convince ourselves that it’s better to go it alone than to do the work it takes to resolve conflict. Some problems may be irresolvable, but there are also relationships that don’t need to be lost forever.
> Honestly, there's probably a deeper cultural change that's driving both: ever increasing individualism and increasing unwillingness to sacrifice the expression of that individualism for anything.
2020 with the US election and the spectrum of response to COVID has thrown this into stark relief. As someone in their late 40s, I have been shocked by the selfishness of my fellow citizens.
I think people confuse individualism with narcissism. There's nothing inherently bad about individualism: Self-reliance, independence (vs. interdependence), etc. I think these are mostly seen as good traits, at worst neutral.
What we saw building in the last decade or so, and come to a head in 2020 is out-of-control narcissism: Selfishness, entitlement, lack of empathy, this belief that life is a movie and you are the main character. This is the kind of thing that not only estranges one from family, friends, and society, but prevents any sort of collective action for societal good.
I agree... I don't relate to these articles at all. My parents are religious, and yeah, in some ways they're out of touch, but they're not so out of touch as this article makes them out to be. All old people tend to be slightly out of touch with the younger generation. My grandparents didn't always understand my parents. Such is the way of the world.
I think the article is talking about estrangement proper, where children and parents do not talk to each other at all, not that they engage but sometimes don't understand one another. The former is more serious, the latter is expected.
I think some young people don't view family as obligatory if it negatively affects them. My sister and I would certainly classify ourselves as such. My sister rather intentionally after graduating college cut contact with my mom to a very minimal amount, and I remember vividly my mom being in tears on a frequent basis because my sister had blocked her facebook account and wasn't responding to her daily emails about rather invasive topics that frankly, were none of her damn business. One time my mom asked me to do some chore, and after I came in I realized by looking at my browsing history that she had snuck into my room to use my facebook to snoop on my sister. It's absolutely mental.
Not that she has any real room to protest here, she deliberately estranged herself in the very complete sense from her parents and sisters, I've never met a single person on that side of the family despite them living an hour away.
In kind of a macro sense I appreciate my parents raising me, but I do not consider continued contact with them obligatory in any way, shape, or form, and certainly not at the level that my parents in particular want that relationship.
> In kind of a macro sense I appreciate my parents raising me, but I do not consider continued contact with them obligatory in any way, shape, or form, and certainly not at the level that my parents in particular want that relationship.
This is what I can't understand. I get not wanting a relationship if your parents were abusive. But if you 'appreciate your parents raising [you]', then clearly you think your childhood was 'good enough', so don't you think you owe them something? Anything? MY childhood was hardly perfect. My mother and father are both incredibly flawed individuals who still get on my nerves, to the point of tears many times. But... they're my parents. I mean, I've made them cry before, and I know I have all kinds of negative personality traits. I can't imagine them just leaving me like that. Sounds terrible
> don't you think you owe them something? Anything?
IMHO, no. You don't owe your parents anything for doing the job they signed up for. I have a great relationship with my parents and had a great upbringing. It's very difficult for me to imagine cutting off contact. However, I also don't feel like I owe them a single thing and I think they'd agree with me on that.
Hmm, I have a hard time relating precisely with this.
For example, if my parents someday needed a place to stay (maybe they can't take care of themselves). I'd feel responsible for them. I definitely feel like I'd owe them that and would feel responsible for their well being.
Though, that wouldn't be unconditional. I can certainly envision a bunch of situations that would change that.
I guess what I'm saying is it's complicated to me.
Humble opinions aside, if your parents live in one of 26 U.S. states, then yes you do owe your parents what amounts to basic needs at minimum [1]. Even if you and your parents are in agreement that you owe each other nothing, about half of U.S. states disagree, and they have the legal mechanisms in place to make you responsible for their needs, should they be impoverished.
I'm lucky enough to have a decent upbringing and get along with my parents as well, and this comment isn't intended to be combative, but the "You don't owe your parents anything for doing the job they signed up for" is not strictly true in a legal sense. This is a reflection of American family values enshrined in law.
Neither me nor my parents live in any of those states. Even if I did, legal obligation is not what this conversation was about. I spend time and share resources with my parents because I love sharing with them. If that dynamic changes, then it'll stop.
It sounds like you had a decent family, but are you able to see that your experience isn't universal? Can you imagine that many other people have vastly worse families, with a wide range of abusive and predatory behaviors?
Yes, I have considered that. I know many people who rightly rejected their own family. It is sad and very tragic and scary.
However, I also know a lot of people raised like I was who have left as well, and see no problem with it. They had perfectly fine childhoods, but treat their parents like trash.
You dont see into other families unless you are really really close. Neither into their childhoods nor into their adult relationships. People and kids are kept away from internal conflicts and issues, whether abusive or non abusive.
Sometimes you are 47 years old when you learn about stufd like alcoholism, gambling, violence in own extended seemingly model familly. Pretty heavy stuff and still managed to be quite hidden. Less heavy stuff is even easier to keept away from others.
Plus people who distance or leave parents as adults often react to how relationship looks now and what it does to them. And sometimes it is done to protect your own kids or so that you are not forced to entangle yourself into new dramas.
Rather than religion, I would expect the real driver in this is just a shift in culture between the generations, with religion being one of the fault-lines. If one looks at the boomers or gen X, for all the countercultural ideals they may have experimented with, they have turned out to be remarkably conservative once into later life, following closely in their parent's cultural footsteps. I feel the millenials and gen Z are legitimately different people, much more willing to live a lifestyle and hold values extremely different than their parents. Your example of gay acceptance is just one in a long list of genuine cultural differences between the older and younger generations.
It may be my upbringing, but it's really hard for me to pull the two apart. In my small home town, religion was (and to a large extent is) the local culture. Everything revolved around the local religion. 90% of the town practiced the same faith, so edicts from that faith's leadership would invariably effect everything. Cultural acceptability was measure by the standards of the faith. Granted, that was a VERY controlling faith.
For me personally, what drove me away from my childhood religion was simple research into it's history. Why should I care if my leaders claim homosexuality is a sin when they've done far worse in the past also claiming to come from god?
Yet for my parents, going against the leader's edicts is unthinkable.
All that comes back to my thoughts on estrangement and religion. While that's not a route my parents have taken, it happens a lot from the online stories I've read.
I guess this is a long winded way to say I'm still trying to figure out how much culture causes religion and religion causes culture. How many of these wild generational differences are due to just general cultural shifts from things like media, and how many of these changes came from things like leaving a faith behind? Did A cause B or B cause A or is it too complicated to be answered in a HN comment section.
> 26. Present homosexuality, degeneracy and promiscuity, as "normal, natural, healthy."
When Stalin came to power, homosexuality became a topic unfit for public depiction, defense or discussion. Homosexual or bisexual Soviets who wanted a position within the Communist Party were expected to marry a person of the opposite sex, regardless of their actual sexual orientation
The Khrushchev government believed that absent of a criminal law against homosexuality, the sex between men that occurred in the prison environment would spread into the general population
The first Khrushchev-era sex education manual...described homosexuals as child molesters: "...homosexuals are aroused by and satisfy themselves with adolescents and youngsters, even though the latter have a normal interest towards girls
....
Thousands of people were imprisoned for homosexuality and government censorship of homosexuality and gay rights did not begin to slowly relax until the early 1970s
....
In 1984, a group of Russian gay men met and attempted to organize an official gay rights organization, only to be quickly shut down by the KGB
....
On 27 May 1993, homosexual acts between consenting males were legalised
> 40. Discredit the family as an institution. Encourage promiscuity and easy divorce.
The 1944 Edict... sought to preserve the family unit by making divorces even more difficult to obtain
You'll have to provide some evidence that your list is anything to do with McCarthyist Commumism fears
Tying everything you don't like to communism, like Skousen LOVED to do, is a pretty poor argument. EVERYTHING that these quacks and racists didn't like was tied to communism [1].
If you can explain to me how government controlled production has ANY relationship to culture or the acceptance/rejection of homosexuality, I'm all ears. Bare in mind, communist governments have routinely banned homosexuality. [2]
To the likes of Skousen, everything that isn't accepting mormonism as the one true religion is a communist plot.
This is just warmed-up McCarthyism. Reading a rant from a right-wing source isn't actually evidence of anything. And the Soviet Union has been dead for thirty years.
It is the same warzone though. But the people fighting it from the right look increasingly like the one Japanese guy who refused to acknowledge the surrender until the 1960s.
I'd say that you really have to look back farther to the enlightenment for the source of basically all of those bulletpoints. It's not communism that came up with any of those ideas, it just happened to find them useful/worthwhile.
I'd say if mentally sound and healthy child repeatedly accuses their own parents of fucked up childhood so much they are cutting all ties, then they really had one thanks to them. If parents refuse to even acknowledge this and seek amendments, what other course is there? Let them poison even your adult life and your kids?
I mean who doesn't know those self-absorbed people for whom the rest of the world is to be used for their own gains. Such people are never good parents, and the confirmation of this is how they children behave and think as adults. The best of those realize this and create their own life path, in which there is no place for toxic people, parents or not.
Often a string of 'friendships' which is more about we're similar and the rest of the folks are weird/hates us, so lets hang out. Often string of relationships, one messier than the other. Then big regrets when old, since all the fuckery eventually pays back, often big time. Or they just compare their life with somebody living without big failures and not being unlucky when it comes ie to health.
I have endless sympathy for those who did all the right things and still ended up miserably. But those who repeatedly dig their own moral grave and then cry when in it are not worth spending much energy. People generally don't change that much.
It's difficult because some people do face horrific abuse and are very justified in cutting off contact. Others seem to be narcissists themselves who enjoy being cruel to their parents. It's impossible to know who is who as an outsider.
One dynamic I think gets overlooked is that parents chose to have the children, even if just in the heat of a moment. Children have little to no say about much of their lives for the first 18 years. So even relatively benign parents may struggle to understand their children's perspective when the children choose to reduce or cut off contact.
Perhaps I'm an outlier but I've gone months without contact and no regrets. And I hope I'll continue to expect nothing back from my children. After all, their existence was our choice as parents. And anything the kids chose to share or give back is an entirely voluntarily gift.
Much like the notion that freedom is something the US has and well the other ~193 countries by implication don't I suspect this is missing the larger picture quite dramatically.
There seems to be a global shift at play here.
something certainly appears to be tearing away the core.
Personally it's not the deteriorating situation that is freaking me out, but rather the fact that I can't pinpoint what is behind this shift. To put it into crude term: It feels like someone is fucking with me and I can't tell who/why
That inherently leads to a mistrust of all social order
"Grown children" is interesting if you look at google books cites - it more typically meant children older than infants than someone's children that have reached adulthood.
"Offspring", maybe, but you can look at the differences in use and decide for yourself. It might confound you to find that "adult offspring" is less common than "adult children" but follows the same shifts in use and a similar ngram pattern.
please note that the y-axis is scaled, I compared it with the words 'transgender' or 'hacker' and the "intriguing peak" you mention flattened out. Which raises the question of at which point is a change significant in that graph.
Yes, it's not as common as those words. But going from zero use outside of legal documents - as a contrast to "minor children" or less precisely "small children" - to a post-seventies psychobabble and recovery movment term of art is easy to read off that graph.
First: Why should there be a term at all? Stop thinking of yourself and others in generic bureaucratic or therapeutic terms from a particularly dire era of mass self-absorption.
Second: If you must, "son" or "daughter", and only prefixed by "adult" when necessary for clarity.
To your first point: there should be a term because it is clearly a useful idea that people want to communicate. The ambiguity or inelegance of what current exists to express the idea means we should at least desire a better way of expressing it - that is, a term for it.
To your second point: "son" or "daughter" is not sufficiently general, and it is gendered. What if I wanted to express the idea of adult offspring without knowing (or caring about) the gender of that person?
The world became big and complicated while the older generation was already fat on their success. It's very hard for a 55 year old manager of a small town bank to understand his daughter literally will not have the same opportunities he had as globalization eats all of the small town opportunities.
She'll almost certainly have to move to a city and probably utilize computers all day, get a serious education in an engineering field. The fact that the parent was so absorbed in their own life this doesn't occur to them until literally their child exiles them from their life for being toxic is just wild.
> It's very hard for a 55 year old manager of a small town bank to understand his daughter literally will not have the same opportunities he had as globalization eats all of the small town opportunities.
I am 50. I make good money as a software developer in an agrarian community of 50,000. I have 4 children with one left at home.
It IS (and has been) very clear to me that my children are having a harder time enjoying the same opportunities I have. Which makes me profoundly sad and frustrated. The comforts and excess I do enjoy, can't offset that, as much as I am willing to try.
So I'm not sure what the conclusion you're reaching here is? Are you saying that bank managers (and other moderately successful/wealthy people) are inherently self absorbed?
From my experience it's that moderately well-off to well-off older folks rarely recognize that the opportunities that enabled their lifestyle don't exist anymore.
For example, when I was in high school, I was told that just getting any college degree would enable me to get into a good paying career, or talking with older folks about buying a home, they rarely understand how unaffordable homes are now. Lots of older folks also seem to be completely surprised that people in their 20s and 30s don't want kids simply because of the cost. Or student loan debt, how many times have I heard someone in their 50s+ talk about how they worked hard so they didn't have any student loans when they left school while failing to acknowledge how much cheaper school was in the past?
Not all old people are unaware, but a significant amount are oblivious to how much worse the world is today.
Great points. I know I've experience miscommunication going both ways with this.
The problem is that history does not repeat itself. It rhymes with itself. This means that "do it the way we did it" won't work. And is frustrating for younger generations. But it also means it's stupid to ignore the rhymes and ignore near and present and easily lectured history available. Don't throw the baby out with the bathwater kind of thing.
It's hard to navigate this. A great example of this (to me) is the "getting a job" thing. The boomer advice would be that you "pound the pavement", "call back", etc. Younger people are frustrated with how out of touch this is, because even if they're willing to try, human resources and other forms of automation have rendered this just about pointless. And yet... the value of networking is stronger than ever. The better advice from the boomer would be to realize that the "technique" they used was about networking with and impressing potential employers, admit that those techniques are no longer relevant, but that the value of networking into an organization still has a lot of influence on whether you're going to work there or not.
This is of course generalized, and prone to a litany of counter exceptions. Because all of these "make life better" are rarely absolute, but more stochastic in nature.
> It's very hard for a 55 year old manager of a small town bank to understand his daughter literally will not have the same opportunities he had as globalization eats all of the small town opportunities.
Not sure where you're from, but everyone I know in their 50s (and 60s) lived under the constant threat of losing their job to macroeconomic and market forces beyond their control. Many of them did.
My interpreting of the use of the word “toxic” is that there is an unbridgeable communication and understanding gap between generations when it comes to professional opportunities. In 2009, I had someone in the older generation tell me that success is simple, just have to get a temp job like they did in finance and rent an apartment.
I'm willing to bet that one of the largest contributing factors to a child's resentment is the gap in expectations between generations (My parents would say to apply for a job in-store, but then I would be told to apply online). I'd tell them that asking in-store doesn't work but my parents just didn't seem to understand that things operate differently now.
I agree to some degree, but what I don't get is the mechanism by which that's assumed to translate into toxicity, let alone enough toxicity to engender estrangement. Parents not understanding their children's world is as old as time, or at least as old as industrialization.
I experienced this myself to a pretty significant degree, and I wouldn't describe my parents' misunderstanding of the modern economy as "toxic" in any way, so my personal data point is not helpful here. Hence my question: what is the mechanism by which this understanding gap is assumed to lead to toxic behavior?
Perhaps, but it's different enough in meaning that I'm not convinced hyperbole is plausible, and I don't want to accidentally dismiss an interesting claim by assuming it was just incoherent.
Sure, I got that. I just don't see how it obviously follows that the parent's assumed ignorance about the modern economy would automatically lead to toxic behavior. I think that step needs some spelling out.
I understand this even less. A child being forced by the economy to be a white collar urban worker would automatically cause their parents to behave toxically towards them? Again, I feel like steps are being skipped here. I'm not saying it's wrong, just that I don't understand the connection and would appreciate elaboration.
I know middle-aged managers of small town banks. They are encouraging their children to take their careers completely differently.
You might see the entitled “just walk in and apply” from someone who worked their way up into an insulated position at a large Chase branch, but you won’t see it in a modest position in a small town that directly encounters dozens of struggling people every week.
due to the exponential nature of progress, the span between ourselves and our kids will be greater than between us and our parents.
whenever I read about how evil the boomers are, I imagine how we will be getting it one day for reasons nobody would have thought of today
> due to the exponential nature of progress, the span between ourselves and our kids will be greater than between us and our parents. whenever I read about how evil the boomers are, I imagine how we will be getting it one day for reasons nobody would have thought of today
Which supports the argument that such rapid change should be slowed down, because it's anti-human.
good luck slowing it down though. It might work in one country, but the result will only be this one country falling behind and becoming an irrelevant province of the earth.
so not unless we have a world government one day. Then indeed we could end up in a society that is balanced and stable for indefinite time, like a isolated tribe in the amazonas, with thousands of years at the same stage of progress, just at a larger scale.
This is btw one of the possible explanations of Fermi's paradox
> It might work in one country, but the result will only be this one country falling behind and becoming an irrelevant province of the earth.
I really doubt that, but that's one of the boogeymen that scares us away from questioning a lot of things.
It probably comes from false assumptions like "'we're' smart" or the "market makes the ideal decision", so all other paths except the one taken were inferior, perhaps fatally so.
mmh, but really. You can pass laws forbidding certain stuff. But you cannot enforce that globally. Bans on certain weapons do work to some extent, but there are still people creating and using them. And these things are not only unethical, but also not really useful. Every attempt to use them ended badly for those who tried.
Now imagine ruling out a technology that is effective and profitable and not so obviously unethical.
You're focusing too much on technology, but OK, let's go with that:
Let's say Canada banned social media tomorrow. Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, Reddit, etc. are all blocked and go dark. Implementation of the ban is perfect. In exactly what way would this cause Canada to "[fall] behind and [become] an irrelevant province of the earth"?
Rapid change already has slowed down. Not too much significant has happened over then past decade. The period of greatest change is already behind us in the early 20th century. Technological and social change can not be ever accelorating. It follows a logistic curve.
I agree that macro scale change did fuel a lot of micro social behavor changes like increase in divorce rates, etc.
In the past family was more sacrosanct because it had more utility for example working on farms together, family cottagw industry. With the industrial revolution the individual became relatively more valuable than before.
I hope you’re right. Maybe in the future we’ll look back on the 20th century as a time of Great Change and the 21st was when we had to figure out how to make it all work.
> Not too much significant has happened over then past decade
That's a bold statement, and IMO a very incorrect one. You just can't see it right now because you're too close.
Electric cars, batteries, and solar power in general have taken off. Autonomous driving draws ever closer.
Covid has changed work culture, education, and lifestyles the world over, probably permanently. And mRNA tech could revolutionize healthcare.
SpaceX made great strides in making launches cheaper.
FAANG became a thing. Social media really came into its own, meaningfully affecting the real world at scale.
The Trump presidency set the world on a radically different course, on issues such as climate change, the West's relationship with China and Russia, and NATO.
Gay marriage became legal in a slew of countries.
This is just the stuff I can recall off the top of my head.
Market cap and size relative to the rest of the market.
Prior to the 2010s, Microsoft was the only tech company consistently on the list of top 10 by market cap (IBM and Intel made fleeting appearances). The top 10 used to be more diverse - telecom, healthcare/pharma, oil and gas, finance.
Now that list is absolutely dominated by tech: Alibaba, Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Microsoft, Tencent, and (sometimes) TSMC.[1] It's not a turn-of-the-century-style dotcom bubble either; all of these companies are highly profitable.
most of these things, in my studied opinion, are either insignificant or overhyped. To pick a few examples driverless cars as a usable transportation commodity are no where near close.
True AI is no where near close.
Spacex is a stunt, not something like inventing AC.
Trump was far less significant than Bush II and 9/11, while that was less significant than the fall of communism, and that in turn was less significant than WWI...
People with different values and living situations can understand each other if they want to. It is factually true that after the age of majority, family relationships technically become optional. Burning bridges for petty reasons or annoyances would be a terrible idea: there's no one like family.
I've befriended a few sane, educated, elderly homeless people.
Turning your back on your parents if they haven't done anything "wrong" would be coldly, cruelly throwing them away like garbage. That's what happened in Korea and the suicide rates are awful. It's disgusting and embarrassing.
In my case, I haven't talked to my father in 25 years because he is very much a petty, unstable, irrational, unforgiving, un-empathetic, pathetic, unreasonable, hateful, venomous narcissist no one likes, my mother escaped, and he browbeat his late parents to take all of their money when my mother (their nearly adopted daughter/daugther-in-law) needed it more. If it weren't for the terrible way he treated people and the terrible things he's done (like molest my cousin), I would at least still want to know him.
Selfishness and Narcissism are IMHO the driving force for many of these estrangements.
It's just more of the same from the Boomers, or the Me generation. They people who fully embraced the Me generation raised a group of children who make the me generation look like communal hippies.
I work with people who are difficult at work because of their self centered view of the world, but when I listen to them talk about their families I am horrified by what they expect, to and from family members. I suspect that these people are a joy at work because nobody will tolerate their selfish behavior, so they need to behave.
Almost to a person these difficult people have limited interaction with their children, initiated by the children because of the parents toxic self centered nature.
In my particular case, the rift is due to Rupert Murdoch's media outlets destroying my parents' logical reasoning ability coupled with a particular kind of boomer narcissism.
For example, when I was young, my mom stayed home and raised me, fed me health foods, and gave me a head start on education. She was very loving and did a great job, really. These days, she screams at me and says she hopes Trump cancels my research funding because science is all a lie anyway.
She didn't come up with that idea on her own. I think the detrimental effect of corporate and social media polarization cannot be underestimated. It is literally breaking up families.
For a politics shifted perspective of this, sometime late last year before prayer before meal, my mom was talking happily about how she hoped Jeff Bezos got the guillotine. Just before "Bless us O Lord and these thy gifts...", "Boy wouldn't it be funny if a mob necked Bezos". Her main news sources are Salon and Twitter threads of various left (Bernie or more) wing writers.
I remember referencing the incident a couple months ago post Biden winning and she was like "The dinner table isn't an appropriate place to talk about this".
I swear the last 4 years drove the vast majority of everyone insane, in a very literal sense.
> I swear the last 4 years drove the vast majority of everyone insane, in a very literal sense.
Just out of curiosity, would you say that this has ever happened to you?
I'm asking because I also see many people around me going 'literally insane' (and yes, in both the 'left' and 'right' ways. Basically becoming consumed by some drip of outrage pieces and provocative online discourse).
But I also recognize that I 'went insane' at one point too. Being a kid who grew up on the nascent internet, I became addicted to reddit when reddit first emerged, and I can look back to around the Occupy Wallstreet era when I became obsessed with rhetoric that was disconnected from my own lived experience, and repeated certain ideas that were often disconnected from reality or evidence.
It pains me to see friends and relatives go through the same process. But I 'survived', and I do hope many others can too.
> I swear the last 4 years drove the vast majority of everyone insane, in a very literal sense.
Our current situation reminds me of the brain-eating computer on the book Diamond Age that somebody created to crack passwords. It's like a lot of people are simply gone, and some superconciousness too over their bodies, and it's on the controls 24/7.
I still hope this reverses once the simplistic ideas get hit again and again by reality. Those groups are working very hard to shield themselves, but I imagine some portion of them must always be exposed to the real world.
What an amazing analogy. I doubt there is a solution short of severe changes in how most people use the internet and media. Attention stealing apps and their consequent dopamine addictions seem to have killed rational thinking, so much that people will refuse to believe facts and evidence. It feels better to be part of a group that believes a thing than to process a conflict and adapt your worldview. Hmm, what else does that sound like? :-)
You mean a religion? People host all kinds of superconcioussness, that's part of what we are. But it's not normal for some to be on the controls a lot of time. This is similar to religious zealotry, what is rather rare.
> I swear the last 4 years drove the vast majority of everyone insane, in a very literal sense.
TDS is very, very real and when paired with this whole covid thing it only got worse. Peoples deep issues with the last 4 years joined forces with media fear mongering to create a perfect storm resulting in what will be someday be looked back upon as a massive "social engineering" failure.
Oh dude… believe me I had TDS big time. Watching the last 17 months of medical fascism cured me of that real quick. Now I’m not on anybody’s team.
There is a large group of people I used to know and respect that completely and literally lost their marbles this past year and a half. And I mean that in all sincerity… they are a shell of who they were before. Blindly listening to “experts” coupled with a visceral hatred for “the others” and intense, unexamined fear can land you in a very bad mental state.
Question authority. All authority. Even “the experts”. Always. They do what they are incentivized to do, which often has nothing to do with what is in the best interest of society at large.
Big +1 to this. My parents weren't abusive at all, they love me and have always done their best. But my relationship with my dad is extremely strained- it was a strange and painful realization that I wouldn't associate with him, at all, if we weren't related. And it's entirely because of his radical right-wing beliefs, which have only escalated in the era of Trumpism.
I've read accounts of older children during the rise of European fascism, seeing their parents consumed by bitter hatred until it destroyed everything in their lives except their devotion to the totalitarian state. I was prepared to deal with that. I have no blueprint to deal with a walking embodiment of the Southern Strategy- just complete and utter denial of the core tenets of what they support.
And sometimes children feel too much responsibility for their parents’ happiness. I often hear estranged adult children request better boundaries from their parents as a condition of reconciliation. As Andrew Solomon wrote in Far From the Tree, “There is no contradiction between loving someone and feeling burdened by that person. Indeed, love tends to magnify the burden.”
Holy shit, this. I thought I was crazy for feeling emotionally blackmailed by my parents. They effectively told me that if I wasn't a constant part of their lives, they would be miserable - after things like blaming an episode of depression on my poor academic performance. At the same time being callous and judgemental towards me, and each other. I'm just surprised that they expected me to stick around?
I think this article is fairly ungenerous to children (whether adult or not).
When you are a child, parents look after you. But there is an obligation that goes the other way too: parents expect you to do X or Y, parents (in some cases) expect you to look after them (the article notes that sibling estrangement results from caregiving, this happens in other cases too), and they may expect to you be a certain way.
I am a young(ish) adult, my mother looks after my aunt who is disabled, and is now getting ill herself...they are more difficult than I ever was as a kid. I just sat in my room and played Playstation, my mother has keys to a car, she will do X or Y regardless of what you or doctors tell her...it is very difficult. I think about leaving that all the time (my mental health is extremely poor, trying to care for someone when you can't care for yourself is difficult), you have to respect people who have helped you but the relationship with your parents moves on from that stage. Trying to treat adults like they are still in a parent-child relationship makes no sense. Personally, the main challenge I have is that my mother and aunt still view me as a child who understands nothing, so any piece of help I give (no matter how trivial) is challenged as if I was a child...so it works both ways...both parties have to realise that life has moved on. Trying to say: oh, but this person did this three decades ago is...weird, imo. Also, an adult can choose not to have a child, a child can't choose not have a parent...that dynamic is very different.
Tbf though, I think expectations of children in the West are significantly lower so maybe that isn't a huge thing for most people. But I think it is more to it than: entitled millennial whines about his parents who gave him everything...that just makes no sense (no child wants to have a bad relationship with their parents, you don't pick them, it doesn't work sometimes).
> Why would divorce increase the risk? In my clinical work I have seen how divorce can create a radical realignment of long-held bonds of loyalty, gratitude, and obligation in a family. It can tempt one parent to poison the child against the other. It can cause children to reexamine their lives prior to divorce and shift their perspective so they now support one parent and oppose the other. It can bring in new people—stepparents or stepsiblings—to compete with the child for emotional or material resources. Divorce—as well as the separation of parents who never married—can alter the gravitational trajectories of a family so that, over time, members spin further and further out of one another’s reach. And when they do, they might not feel compelled to return.
Appears it was mentioned specifically and in-depth.
I agree the impact of divorce on children is often over looked. In many cases the damage is far worse to the developing child than to the people actually getting divorced. The parents get freedom, the child gets a broken family where the top priority is not as it should be biologically, raising a well adjusted child into a competent adult, but rather with the parents meeting their own needs at the expense of the child. Then when the child is an adult and not well adjusted, often in large part due to consequences of the divorce and idiosyncratic needs that were overlooked by parents prioritising themselves, the parents can not understand why the divorce had such a large impact on the child. What they miss in their narcissitic myopia is that while mom and dad already had grown up into stable well balanced person the child had not and the process was interrupted by the divorce and sequelae.
As a child of divorced parents, I'm glad they didn't stay together. For as far back as I can remember, it's been very uncomfortable being around while they're interacting with each other. Most marriages don't end for no reason, and I question the implication that unhappily married parents are necessarily better for a child than happily divorced ones.
but it is mentioned, more then once. And it does increase the risk of estrangement, which you would expect. Whatever. One way ore another, once we grow old we become more dependent, physically and psychologically. Finally, we die. This last step we make alone no matter what happened before
My perception of gaslighting is more of the outright denial that randomly beating the shit out of me ever happened, or forcing me to take drugs when I was a child and didn't want to, over and over and over.
But no. it never happened.
People upset about failure to respect an identity are literally soft children who have no fucking idea how well treated they have been.
Religion & culture keeps most people out of trouble most of the time... "the absence of religion... replaced by all kinds of crazy beliefs... you realize there's no religious fundamentalism that's more irrational than an atheist's primitive use of probability" http://bit.ly/2Hi4pNK
I mean not all atheists believe in probability as the definer of someone's life. Even if you pray to God and think he said yes or you shake a magic 8 ball and it says yes, the decision is still the same.
Some time later there was a period when I would contact my parents every few months or so. Not really on purpose. Simply because other things simply took more of my time and attention, and calling my parents wasn't really high on my list of priorities.
Only when my son was born I started to realize what someone goes through as an individual and as a couple once a child comes into their lives. How it changes things. That not being thrown out of the window at 2 a.m. as an infant is already a blessing. I'm sure that thought has crossed the mind of many a young parent with a screeching infant on their hands in the middle of night. So, I felt ashamed of myself, and grateful to my parents for being there in the first place, and being decent at being parents as well.
Now I've made a point to myself to call them up at least once a week. As in, I have set up a reminder for that. I now know how much they value this. But it's not only for them. I realize very well that one day I will wake up and wish to call my parents to have a chat about something. But there simply won't be anyone to call anymore.
I'm not passing any judgement at all on people who have abusive parents. I have no idea how that feels like. I'm just happy that I didn't end up accidentally getting estranged to the decent parents that I have. At some point it really was going that way.