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Yeah it's a little wild sometimes, innit? How much common ground we've got? Even to the point of going west and ending up in the same couple of states.
I'm actually starting therapy tomorrow. I put it off for years, but this year I've been trying to work on catching up overdue medical things, and a situation with one of my sons has had me stressed to a point it's hard to function. For most of my life, I neglected my own needs and self for other people, and I'm trying to get away from that. I hope that this works out...at least I was fortunate to find someone in walking distance of home who takes my insurance!
I sometimes feel guilty for the mixed feelings (often negative leaning) about my kids. I don't really blame THEM for the problems. Not like you blame a person you see as having fault for a thing. And I acknowledge that there's every chance that if I hadn't had them, my life could have gone worse just as easily as it could have gone better. I was not in a good place nor heading anywhere good before, during, or for a couple of years after having them. Maybe having them did make me "grow up." Or maybe I would have grown up anyways, and this just meant that I had a harder life than I needed to have. If they were OK now, my sons, I could say I have no regrets. But they are not. And no matter how much I wreck my budget trying, I can't save them. And that breaks my heart every day.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Mike from back east
- You must spread some Reputation around before giving it to Sonic_Spork again.
- You must spread some Reputation around before giving it to Ellis Bell again.
I see some of my family experiences in your various postings, which are much better writing than my own efforts and go a long way to make this forum so widely enjoyable.
I've written on here before that I grew up with some degree of poverty, a father who drank heavily and often abusive, his incapacitation from a stroke, job loss, near zero income, home foreclosed, frequent evictions, bill collectors at our door, Mom working seven days a week to try and make ends meet, people leaving bags of groceries on Mom's porch for us, pregnant sisters marrying drinkers, and a lot more; pretty much the whole poverty playbook. Poverty like that WILL scar you. I made it out of that scene about 50 years ago, but no matter how well we do financially, or how far west we move, I will always run from "it."
Part of my response to "it" is to never have kids, never risk having my back to a wall like my Mom, who, like a saint, soldiered her way through the hell of it all, fifteen years of hell, finally coming out the other side into stability. So, now, I donate to food banks, food drives and refuse to judge the victims caught up in the miasma of all the various shades and permutation of "it."
I think that the part that's hard here...is when the victims perpetuate the cycle and become the offenders, and victimize others. It can be hard not to judge that.
But, to the point of what I'm dealing with as a parent, having ties to loved ones who seem to insist on dwelling in "it" keeps me feeling tethered to "it" in a way that has me sometimes feeling frantic like a bird in a trap. My present/second husband never had kids of his own, and he often says that what he sees me dealing with is constant validation of his choice not to reproduce.
Quote:
I deeply fault the axis of evil (religion, patriarchy and greed) for much of the mess mentioned in many postings. The despicable lies that keep feeding these beasts, lies like "that's just the way the world is" or "you just have to love the sinner" or "boys will be boys" and so many more lies. One of worst lies we've heard a lot is "it's a man's world." Religion feeds off that lie, relegating women to second class, powerless status. Lies made all the worse when no one ever FIXES the damned sinners or incarcerates them for raping pre-teen nieces or daughters or beating a wife black and blue in a drunken rage. Forty years ago I sat in meetings for Adult Children of Alcoholics (ACOA) and heard one woman relate of watching her father shoot her mother and other people who also saw or suffered horrific things.
Even your family doctor could be a moron perpetuating lies. I read an article on Endometriosis and several of the responding women reported being told by doctors that the extreme pain of Endo was "just part of being a woman," but Endo is very treatable. More lies. Lies without end.
No way in hell was I going to bring kids into this FUBAR world. Many of the younger generation see through the lies and recognize just how FUBAR things are and want no part of it. Many won't work for crap wages, many now fight to unionize for a fair share of the pie, many won't get on the treadmill of owning a car, many won't live in distant, sterilized suburbia and opt for walkable in-city living.
Many people in the better-educated developed world apparently feel the same way. They note that the rapacious greed of a global economy, increasingly controlled by the obscenely wealthy, has made a stable life with a family an increasingly distant possibility. That understanding is reflected in lower birth rates.
Yeah, I hear you on that. And it drives my anger, which can be heard in my posts about policies from authoritarian leaders trying to force the human herd to breed more livestock to feed their power. Part of that, too, is that if I have one moral position (not ethical, moral) it is abhorrence of needless suffering. But I think that to some of these "ranchers" of humanity, suffering isn't needless at all. Suffering drives people to religion. More than anything I can think of. And a religious person is a "believe what authority figures tell you to believe" person. Really your axis of evil is just one of authoritarian power structure. But yeah, a loathing of that drove me to reject the triad of its expressions that you enumerated.
I take issue with religion...not necessarily with faith.
As, too, I don't have any problem at all with those having children who long to do so, and who do it of their own free will and endeavor to raise their kids with love. I do object to setting people up to be deprived of choices in the matter. But then...if the Earth fries to a crisp due to climate change, who will be left to debate whether it was caused by humanity or it was God's magical Armageddon? What will it matter? Maybe several millennia into the future, the descendants of the volcano snails or the tardigrades or the cockroaches can hammer out the answers.
- You must spread some Reputation around before giving it to Sonic_Spork again.
- You must spread some Reputation around before giving it to Ellis Bell again.
I see some of my family experiences in your various postings, which are much better writing than my own efforts and go a long way to make this forum so widely enjoyable.
I've written on here before that I grew up with some degree of poverty, a father who drank heavily and often abusive, his incapacitation from a stroke, job loss, near zero income, home foreclosed, frequent evictions, bill collectors at our door, Mom working seven days a week to try and make ends meet, people leaving bags of groceries on Mom's porch for us, pregnant sisters marrying drinkers, and a lot more; pretty much the whole poverty playbook. Poverty like that WILL scar you. I made it out of that scene about 50 years ago, but no matter how well we do financially, or how far west we move, I will always run from "it."
Part of my response to "it" is to never have kids, never risk having my back to a wall like my Mom, who, like a saint, soldiered her way through the hell of it all, fifteen years of hell, finally coming out the other side into stability. So, now, I donate to food banks, food drives and refuse to judge the victims caught up in the miasma of all the various shades and permutation of "it."
I deeply fault the axis of evil (religion, patriarchy and greed) for much of the mess mentioned in many postings. The despicable lies that keep feeding these beasts, lies like "that's just the way the world is" or "you just have to love the sinner" or "boys will be boys" and so many more lies. One of worst lies we've heard a lot is "it's a man's world." Religion feeds off that lie, relegating women to second class, powerless status. Lies made all the worse when no one ever FIXES the damned sinners or incarcerates them for raping pre-teen nieces or daughters or beating a wife black and blue in a drunken rage. Forty years ago I sat in meetings for Adult Children of Alcoholics (ACOA) and heard one woman relate of watching her father shoot her mother and other people who also saw or suffered horrific things.
Even your family doctor could be a moron perpetuating lies. I read an article on Endometriosis and several of the responding women reported being told by doctors that the extreme pain of Endo was "just part of being a woman," but Endo is very treatable. More lies. Lies without end.
No way in hell was I going to bring kids into this FUBAR world. Many of the younger generation see through the lies and recognize just how FUBAR things are and want no part of it. Many won't work for crap wages, many now fight to unionize for a fair share of the pie, many won't get on the treadmill of owning a car, many won't live in distant, sterilized suburbia and opt for walkable in-city living.
Many people in the better-educated developed world apparently feel the same way. They note that the rapacious greed of a global economy, increasingly controlled by the obscenely wealthy, has made a stable life with a family an increasingly distant possibility. That understanding is reflected in lower birth rates.
I just finished watching a video about China and their birth problem. It's the flip side of your story with the same result.
For the past 30 years, fortunes were made in China, by people who only had one child. Now, young adults have trouble finding jobs. Unemployment among the young adult class is 20%.
But a great many of them do not need to work because their family will provide for them. So they don't. They "lie flat" as they say in China.
But it goes further. They do not work, and they do not get married. Those two activities go hand-in-hand. Get married; go to work. Stay single; never get serious about work. Or having children.
In China, these are called "professional Children".
Wow, professional children, love that term. I think we have a good deal of that here, all those dudes living in Mom's basement, playing video games all day, smoking weed, life is sweet. Modern version of the Peter Pan Syndrome, boys that never want to grow up. The Chinese president is pulling his hair out over how to spur procreation, I don't think he ever suspects that the brutality of the global economy creates pessimism sufficient to quash all those Hallmark Channel rosy visions of a happy, abundant, STABLE life.
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One thing I can see driving some of this "paradigm shift"...
The family members I knew and knew of in previous generations, put up with a lot of hardship from one another. I have mentioned it before...the men in generations past in my family were all alcoholics. Some of them were violent. At least one molested girls in the family. It was all tolerated and swept under the rug by everyone. In the name of "family" and "this is the way it is." And it's not just the men behaving badly. The connections my Mom has had with various family members are all based on guilt and obligation and putting up with things from people because of "blood." She is constantly miserable that none of us, her kids, want to move ourselves or our families near to her so she can "be part of our lives" but she has so many times made the worst decisions and her life has been and always will be a mess. She takes advantage of others whenever she can, then spins it all into a tale of woe, of how badly everyone treats her.
Now I, at 44 years old, find myself utterly sick of people who make bad choices and expect me to pay for them, beyond any rational duty of care. I will not take care of my Mom, she never had the ability to take proper care of me, not even when I was a child. I don't want to be too close to the various alcoholics and addicts on my Dad's side of the family. I've worked to a point of leaving my messed up first husband and securing peace and happiness for myself, and I'm getting tired of supporting my mooching young adult sons, too. Modern people are either still stuck in and perpetuating various dysfunctions, or else if they are working to break free of them, they find themselves having to leave dysfunctional relatives behind. Those who are decent and not dysfunctional...still have those family bonds. My brother's wife comes from a good, loving family, and so they are close to those people and visit them often.
But I don't think that being isolated in little bubbles has to be the consequence of letting go unsavory bonds with messy people. I think that one can find "chosen family" who are closer to where one is at and where one wants to be. Some communities manage this pretty well, but I think that a lot of people are not willing to try. I guess I just believe that there is a LOT more bad behavior going on out there than many people are willing to admit, and always has been. And we used to cover for those folks but part of the "paradigm shift" is a matter of not doing that anymore.
idk ... I kind of like my bubble. (less worries at Christmas time, I'm telling ya lol)
Quote:
Originally Posted by Mike from back east
- You must spread some Reputation around before giving it to Sonic_Spork again.
- You must spread some Reputation around before giving it to Ellis Bell again.
I see some of my family experiences in your various postings, which are much better writing than my own efforts and go a long way to make this forum so widely enjoyable.
I've written on here before that I grew up with some degree of poverty, a father who drank heavily and often abusive, his incapacitation from a stroke, job loss, near zero income, home foreclosed, frequent evictions, bill collectors at our door, Mom working seven days a week to try and make ends meet, people leaving bags of groceries on Mom's porch for us, pregnant sisters marrying drinkers, and a lot more; pretty much the whole poverty playbook. Poverty like that WILL scar you. I made it out of that scene about 50 years ago, but no matter how well we do financially, or how far west we move, I will always run from "it."
Part of my response to "it" is to never have kids, never risk having my back to a wall like my Mom, who, like a saint, soldiered her way through the hell of it all, fifteen years of hell, finally coming out the other side into stability. So, now, I donate to food banks, food drives and refuse to judge the victims caught up in the miasma of all the various shades and permutation of "it."
I deeply fault the axis of evil (religion, patriarchy and greed) for much of the mess mentioned in many postings. The despicable lies that keep feeding these beasts, lies like "that's just the way the world is" or "you just have to love the sinner" or "boys will be boys" and so many more lies. One of worst lies we've heard a lot is "it's a man's world." Religion feeds off that lie, relegating women to second class, powerless status. Lies made all the worse when no one ever FIXES the damned sinners or incarcerates them for raping pre-teen nieces or daughters or beating a wife black and blue in a drunken rage. Forty years ago I sat in meetings for Adult Children of Alcoholics (ACOA) and heard one woman relate of watching her father shoot her mother and other people who also saw or suffered horrific things.
Even your family doctor could be a moron perpetuating lies. I read an article on Endometriosis and several of the responding women reported being told by doctors that the extreme pain of Endo was "just part of being a woman," but Endo is very treatable. More lies. Lies without end.
No way in hell was I going to bring kids into this FUBAR world. Many of the younger generation see through the lies and recognize just how FUBAR things are and want no part of it. Many won't work for crap wages, many now fight to unionize for a fair share of the pie, many won't get on the treadmill of owning a car, many won't live in distant, sterilized suburbia and opt for walkable in-city living.
Many people in the better-educated developed world apparently feel the same way. They note that the rapacious greed of a global economy, increasingly controlled by the obscenely wealthy, has made a stable life with a family an increasingly distant possibility. That understanding is reflected in lower birth rates.
When I took philosophy and humanities in college I walked away from those classes with an understanding, that since the dawn of civilization, there really has not been much of a change. Humans are still the same barbaric creatures that lived during the medieval times and before. The rape, the murder, the alcoholism, the abuse --- you know it's like leave it up to people to find the worse possible way to treat a person and do that. I'm sure there were those that thought, it's a horrible world. There may have been some that killed the baby at birth, just so the child didn't have to endure it.
But even through all of those worst of times, people within the communities found a way to find happiness, with shared values that produced families. We wouldn't have great aunts and uncles if it wasn't for those values. And those families went on to create the world we live in today, with all the modern conveniences anyone could ask for ...
The sentiments you two have shared, I know of 'em. I dated a man that his experience is similar to Mike's. His mother had seven boys, three of which she put into a boys home, because she couldn't care for them on a waitress's salary. His father was a nasty drunk. Times changed and so did they and it all worked out in the wash ... However, the time that they were young and all having to endure, was an era divorce was much harder to come by and would be judge by society. I thought of the strength his mother had to have had to divorce a man in that time. I was impressed.
So no, it's not a perfect world. It never has been. What's changed are the shared values that produced families, have been replaced with the desire for opportunities, instead. Not just individuals, like ourselves, but masses of populations all headed the same direction.
I'm going to be the outlier in this discussion. I came from a long line of loving families with a few divorces thrown in. The women in my family rejected the lazy abusive drunks who were their first husbands and remarried good men who were the wonderful fathers and grandfathers in the family.
I've always gone by the motto, you only know what you know, so you're going to typically make choices based on what you know.
In our families, the men usually brought in most of the money and the women worked part time while raising the children. That has mostly continued because that's what we all saw. The women go back to full time as the kids get older. None of us have been wealthy, most never went to college but worked in the trades. I was the first one and only one in my generation to go to college. Half of the generation after us have college degrees.
Because all we know is a family life, that's what we've all done. It has nothing to do with religion. And I'll say that in general, the women in our family have been the ones to run the show, along with their husbands.
That's what we know. And our children are making similar choices to recreate similar family lives just tweaking it a bit.
I'm going to be the outlier in this discussion. I came from a long line of loving families with a few divorces thrown in. The women in my family rejected the lazy abusive drunks who were their first husbands and remarried good men who were the wonderful fathers and grandfathers in the family.
I've always gone by the motto, you only know what you know, so you're going to typically make choices based on what you know.
In our families, the men usually brought in most of the money and the women worked part time while raising the children. That has mostly continued because that's what we all saw. The women go back to full time as the kids get older. None of us have been wealthy, most never went to college but worked in the trades. I was the first one and only one in my generation to go to college. Half of the generation after us have college degrees.
Because all we know is a family life, that's what we've all done. It has nothing to do with religion. And I'll say that in general, the women in our family have been the ones to run the show, along with their husbands.
That's what we know. And our children are making similar choices to recreate similar family lives just tweaking it a bit.
Unfortunately, what you describe was the old normal, and not just in the US. Educated women lead the decline in Total Fertility Rate.
There will always be a cadre of educated, aware people who choose to have large (3+ children) families, but for the most part those people are disappearing. Large families have become the norm for less aware less educated families.
In terms of Fertility Rate, the traditions of our various families appear to be less and less of a factor. The fertility rate has done nothing but decrease for a great many years, but has only recently begun to approach or cross the threshold where population decline is inevitable.
Where will it end?.... I, personally, don't think it will ever end, with this never-ending population decline creating a less educated, less optimistic world that will in turn drive a forever decreasing fertility rate.
That's not to say the human race will become extinct, but I do believe there will be wide swaths of the earth that are virtually uninhabited. The fertility rate numbers make it inevitable.
Unfortunately, what you describe was the old normal, and not just in the US. Educated women lead the decline in Total Fertility Rate.
There will always be a cadre of educated, aware people who choose to have large (3+ children) families, but for the most part those people are disappearing. Large families have become the norm for less aware less educated families.
.
And yet because we still live a family centered life, all we see are other families doing family things, sports, school, amusement parks, vacations, etc. When you can't find parking at the soccer fields on a Saturday morning because 1000 people are there watching the kids play, you don't feel that "those people" are disappearing. Living a family life is still the normal for many educated women.
I'm not disputing the statistics, just pointing out that families are alive and well even in educated communities across America.
And yet because we still live a family centered life, all we see are other families doing family things, sports, school, amusement parks, vacations, etc. When you can't find parking at the soccer fields on a Saturday morning because 1000 people are there watching the kids play, you don't feel that "those people" are disappearing. Living a family life is still the normal for many educated women.
I'm not disputing the statistics, just pointing out that families are alive and well even in educated communities across America.
"To a worm in an apple, all the world is an apple"
I expect what you are experiencing will be the case for many years to come, particularly in America, with its vibrant economy.
But something will happen as a direct result of global population decline. Our supply chain is too complex and involves too many countries for it to survive a massive contraction of people in other countries. The supply shortages we saw during Covid were, I think, a precursor of what is to come.
Consider the fact that it takes the input from 29 countries to assemble and ship an iPhone. Assembled in China, yes, but parts from 29 countries. The box comes from the Czech Republic.
"Those people" would virtually disappear in 10 years without a vibrant economy. Wither fewer babies being born, there would be only 2 baseball teams instead of 10; only 200 people to watch; only 1 of the 5 fields being used.
Here's a great example of what they are talking about.
Follow THIS LINK to the population pyramid of Republic of Korea. If you look to the right of the chart, you will see where you can add or subtract years, so toggle back to 1975. That's a perfect pyramid. Lots of working class and lots of babies.
Now toggle in 5 year increments to present day. 2020. It's no longer a pyramid at all! Now, there are progressively fewer and fewer members of each age group. The 45 to 55 age group is loaded up and they will soon retire. The question is, then what?....
The most optimistic of us believe there will be robots and automation and so forth to do work that must be done, and life will be better. The pessimists - and I confess to being one - believe society, having lost its survival skills and self-sufficiency, will decay.
But no one believes the population of the world will not decline and life will go on as it is now.
Listener2307, I love that graphic. I went to the USA page and dialed it back to 1950, close to when I was born in 1948 (it was a dark and stormy night). Note the post WW-2 baby boom is starting to show in the very bottom row. But look above it for several rows, note how the pyramid is pinched inward for people ages 10-24. Those were the years of the Great Depression, when people thought the world was crashing down around them so they stopped reproducing. It indicates that economic conditions shape birth rates. The developed nations, and much of the world, has just been through 40 years of trickle down economics, 15 years of the Great Recession and 3 years of a pandemic, which when added to the rigors of a brutal global economy, will further impact birth rates. We see it in the stories coming out of China and elsewhere that people are just scared stiff about procreation.
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Last edited by Mike from back east; 12-09-2023 at 11:08 AM..
Listener2307, I love that graphic. I went to the USA page and dialed it back to 1950, close to when I was born in 1948 (it was a dark and stormy night). Note the post WW-2 baby boom is starting to show in the very bottom row. But look above it for several rows, note how the pyramid is pinched inward for people ages 10-24. Those were the years of the Great Depression, when people thought the world was crashing down around them so they stopped reproducing. It indicates that economic conditions shape birth rates. The developed nations, and much of the world, has just been through 40 years of trickle down economics, 15 years of the Great Recession and 3 years of a pandemic, which when added to the rigors of a brutal global economy, will further impact birth rates. We see it in the stories coming out of China and elsewhere that people are just scared stiff about procreation.
*Mike from back east must spread rep for this post and that one too.
According to Stephen J Shaw (author of Birthgap, and data scientist) financial shocks are not the direct cause, but the trigger for 'unplanned childlessness'. In the 60s it was common for women to have children in their early 20s, in the 90s their late 20s; these days it is common for women to wait until their 30s. (even late 30s)
"It turns out that with fertility windows closing, often with people not having a partner at the right time, or going through divorce or breakups at the wrong time, that we end up with a world where it becomes a social norm just to have children a little bit later."
Several years back I came across an article where young girls were being interviewed in India, about their expectation for their future. The young girls expressed their desire for going forward with college and a career, putting marriage off, and/or not even marrying. That opinion is being carried by many (men and women) all around the world, where as in the pre and post WW2, it would have not been the case, at all.
So economics may have some play in this, the social norm in the priorities men and women have conceived of their lives, plays a part in it, as well. It isn't that they do not want children, because they do. However, it has become the social norm to reverse priorities and put off having children and they do, often not realizing they can not reverse that course, because of the closing of the fertility window. (masses of populations all headed the same direction)
More about Stephen J Shaw and how he came to his conclusions and the data he gathered from the many interviews from around the world, found here ...
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(less worries at Christmas time, I'm telling ya lol)
