It gets better - and worse - and better. Little kids are really exhausting.
My son is thirteen, my daughter twelve. We don’t have them in a zillion activities, they have friends - we have ALMOST all our free time back and have entire weekends where its “where are the kids?” - sleepovers…I’m heading into the hell of teen years (you did what with the car? And “Give me a little credit, I DO know what pot smells like.” )
I like his ‘marriage’ weasel wording. ‘40% of people think marriage is outdated’, then going on to redefine the word as meaning any long-term relationship, then using that to claim 40% of people agree with him.
He has a few good points- though they’re buried in a rather large amount of crap.
I think he has some points, but generally the article is ill-considered and trollish. There are lots of jobs that are not office related, or even boring. Of course those jobs are not often in nice, comfortable, air-conditioned and heated places. They often require significant physical discomfort or stamina. Some of them require very specialized skills, or lots and lots of schooling. What the author misses, is that some people enjoy their work. I do, but I wouldn’t do it for nothing; and that is how the world works. He is basically glorifying begging; which depends on the labor of others to produce his share. If he wanted to go and live in the woods or something, i’d be right there with him, but his position is just silly. Even wild animals spend a good portion of their day “working” to find enough to feed themselves.
As to marriage, There are a lot of different relationships than the standard totally monogamous, completely exclusive model. Many people have semi-open or open marriages, the commitment to each other lying primarily in the emotional and romantic sense. That the author fails to even mention this shows that either he has a very narrow view of the world, or simply is trolling for attention. While men might have more desire for variety in partners generally speaking, variety alone is not the greatest height of pleasure. After a few trips around the block, one finds that there isn’t that much difference from one partner to another.
This is going to sound potentially silly, against the spirit of the whole thing, and a result of my being brainwashed by the school system all my life, but… how does one go about becoming “qualified” for non-rat race subsistence? What are the steps to make the transition from unemployed, unmotivated post-university slacker to a cool self-supporting alternative-economy lifestyle liver? Are there at least a couple decent guide books?
What if depressed people actually ARE the only ones who see the world for how it really is? I don’t think there’s anything inherently impossible about that hypothesis. For example if depressed people are more likely to see having children as a waste of time, and rightly so, then evolution would naturally favour the average person having a non-depressed personality even if the non-depressed worldview was less justified by evidence.
I’m in your position exactly, so I read up on it some more. Happiness is devided, by those who study it, into several kinds. Here’s a Cracked articlenicely summing it up.
Children cost you happiness type one, but the payout is in happiness type 2: connecting with other people.
It depends on how alternative you want to be.
There are still communes out there. Some are religious, some are not.
There are people who live off the grid, although usually they make a good living on the grid for some time so they can save up for their cool, solar-powered, quaint tiny houses tucked out in the middle of nowhere.
Local community colleges often offer survivalist training, to go an extreme route.
Learning hobbies like bee-keeping or horticulture or trades like carpentry or speciality home-building are also useful.
But all of this takes hard work and money. Everything does. The best strategy is to find a tolerable job and intentionally not get sucked into the “rat race”. There’s nothing to stop anyone from working a menial part-time job and then spending the rest of the day catching waves, playing the guitar, writing poetry, doing pottery, or sleeping. There are no laws that say you must work a 9-to-5 job that requires a suit and tie…that you must drive a vehicle and live out in the suburbs…that you must be “normal”.
It’s just that the trade-offs of an uber simple-lifestyle are harsh. It’s easy to romanticize the life of a hapless wanderer, but what does such a person do when they have a killer toothache or they are sick/injured? When it’s 5 degrees below zero and they have no warm place to stay? When the rabbits keep eating at the plants in their garden, which are already sickly because of blight? When the mud house is crumbling to pieces because of torrential rains? When the van you live in has a busted windshield and a flat tire and an empty gas tank, and there are no couches left to crash on?
There are studies that show depressed people have a more realistic view of themselves compared to non-depressed people. And to this I say, and? All the truth in the world isn’t going to change anything, unless you follow up that truth with respectable action (like trying to improve the things you rail against).
Life is meaningless and absurd. But the strategy isn’t to withdraw from it, but to somehow work within it, always remembering that none of it is really that big a deal.
Possibly there are guide books. The thing I’ve seen work though is 1) Friends who do it and/or are supportive of it and 2) an exit strategy in case it isn’t a life you are cut out for.
The steps my friend took - as well as another friend who lived for several years as a travelling musician before executing the exit plan - as I understand them…
Spend several years building up a network - you’ll want couches to go sleep on from time to time, people who need temporary labor, friends in a lot of places.
Develop a labor skill set and the physical and mental capability to do what is functionally hard, low paying labor. She might spend two weeks working ten hour days in an organic strawberry patch under the sun. She then might spend six weekends working for a potter at a RenFaire somewhere.
Save some money before you start. The van will break down. You’ll pick up a stray dog and need to pay vet bills. When your emergency fund is low, settle in to build it back up. It should always be enough to get you to…
Your exit plan. Mom and Dad’s basement, your best friend, your ex boyfriend.
I could never do it. My idea of financial security is a six figure investment portfolio. Plus - well - it sounds like way to much work.
That sums it up nicely.
Kinda wondering who he thinks is going to pay for his social security when he retires.
Retires from what?
There are a bunch of books out there now about various ways to live differently. I hated Radical Homemakers for it’s “history” section but it does offer portraits of people, and from there you can find book after book. Or if you want to go the urban farming route there are books for that (I read Farm City). My brother has a bunch of handbooks on things like dumpster diving, there’s a small press run by a guy who specializes in that sort of thing.
I’m going with “giant douche”.
And the thing is, I don’t disagree with him all that much on the larger points. Marriage doesn’t work out well for a lot of people. A lot of people who have kids would be happier if they didn’t (though they’re understandably reluctant to say so). And going to a soul-crushing job every day with no end in sight wouldn’t be worth it to me no matter what the cost.
But marriage has worked out very well for me. (I like having a co-conspirator who can’t be compelled to testify against me.) And I have a career that I genuinely enjoy and that more than supports the life I want to live. So it turns out that if you put some thought into picking and choosing the aspects of adulthood that you want to embrace, and the way in which you embrace them, you can be a grown-up without being a soulless, miserable drone. Shocking!
I’ve written and talked a lot about being happily childfree, and it’s hard not to come off as a little douchey. People tend to be really sensitive about it, and a lot of people really believe that their lives would be meaningless without their children, so my very position seems like a denial of their experience. But I have no problem acknowledging that having kids has made a lot of people happy, including many who went into parenthood reluctantly. Hell, I acknowledge that having kids might make me even more deliriously happy than I already am, but I’m sure as hell not going to crank out a couple just to find out.
I think I speak for everybody when I agree that this guy shouldn’t get married or have kids, but he does need to make an effort to support himself. I’ve always believed that by the age of 30 a person should be pretty much self-sufficient and by 40 he should have an idea of how he’s going to support himself from that point on. I think it can be valuable to spend much of your 20s in the wind, but my anecdotal experience is that people who don’t have their shit together by age 40 probably never will, so your 30s are a good time to establish yourself as much as you can.
What really pisses me off, in a way, is that five years from now this guy will probably be working in a cubicle somewhere with pictures of his toddler tacked up on the wall. And he’ll be one more example for people to relate to me: “Oh, I knew this guy who said he didn’t want kids, and now he can’t even imagine his life without little…” I bet he even writes a column about it.
If you can develop a functional philosophy and stick to it, then that is great. I was recently listening to a 60 minutes podcast about a guy who likes to climb mountains for a living. He lives in his van and just drives from mountain to mountain all over the US (I’m guessing he goes to Canada too). His living expenses are low and he loves what he does.
Or Garrett Lisi who got a PhD in physics and decided to become a surfer instead and eventually created a theory on subatomic physics that I don’t pretend to understand. Awesome story, he has a better education than 98% of the public but decided to do something else with his life.
etc. I know of a guy who set himself up financially to the point that now he is in his 50s and only needs to work 3-4 hours a day to pay his bills. Good for him. My only criticism of him is that he depends on a government plan for his health care and I think it was just cut due to budgeting issues (had he lived in any other OECD nation this wouldn’t be a concern though). Although to be fair most people who think they have amazing health insurance are just one illness away from losing their job or losing their insurance. That is where I want to be in my late 40s, to have myself set up well enough that I can work seasonally (6-9 months a year) and take the rest of the time off to travel and still have living expenses met.
If you can afford to buy the necessities of life, then do what you want. I admire people who have the tools to be functional, respectable adults but go a different route. I don’t have the courage or knowhow to do it myself, but hopefully I will someday.
I don’t see what all the criticism of the guy is about. If you don’t like marriage, children or a workaday world combined with rampant consumerism that adjusts to whatever income you are earning at the moment, then there is nothing wrong with taking a step back and not partaking in those things.
Realistically, I think part of that article is just the fact that people ‘can’t’ break into the monotonous settled down life anymore. The concept of marriage, children, home and career require a good paying and stable job. Those are harder and harder to find, jobs are scarce and the ones that do exist are not stable or good paying. I’m no sure how much of this guy’s philosophy is just self justification due to the fact that even if he wanted a good paying job with a future he probably couldn’t find one. But I’m sure it plays a role.
This doesn’t seem to be douchey to me at all. However, I’ve always been of the opinion that until there is an easy return counter for children, the last thing you should do is have them unless you are sure you want them. What a miserable life for you AND the children if it turns out you don’t!
Yeah, the deal is that you don’t get forever to figure out how you are going to retire. Its amazing how many slackers I know who are in their 40s, with little or nothing saved towards retirement, and on track to have enough social security quarters to qualify - but they will have a lot of low paid years when their benefit is figured (assuming, of course, it exists at all). A few are at the point where Mom and Dad are retiring - and they can’t really support themselves yet. Three people living off Dad’s social security income = no fun. Also, if you are going to have kids, its nice to get them out of college before you retire. Delaying your “adult” life puts you behind the eight ball as the end of your “adult life” and the start of your “senior life” comes into play.
Whining. I just assumed the people chipping into the the tent cities were also paying the protestor’s social security taxes.
Definitely not brilliant insight–I’d say it’s superficial and immature. If he doesn’t want to get married and have kids and a career, that’s fine, but other people do have good reasons for doing all of those, and their lives aren’t any worse than single people who have meaningless but fantastic sex, no kids, and no careers.
I’m a little unclear on what he’s suggesting as the alternative to growing up and getting a job. Unless you want to live on the streets, you have to earn a living somehow, if you didn’t happen to be born into a rich family.
I do agree with him on one point–there are a lot of jobs that actively make the world a worse place. I wonder how people in those kinds of jobs can justify what they’re doing. So, basically he has one good paragraph, and the rest is narcissistic rambling.
Life isn’t perfect. No matter what choices you make, you’re going to be limited in some way, but on the other hand, those choices enhance your life and give you the chance to have deeper relationships.
I guess the idea that life is mainly about connecting deeply with other people and finding a way to contribute to your community is obsolete. Huh.
Let’s argue about the forms.
No, there isn’t. But I think there is something wrong with saying all those things are inherently stupid and meaningless and the people who engage in them are idiots who are not doing anything meaningful with their lives. And the fact that he says working is stupid, but he doesn’t seem to have a solution for the part where people need to eat and live is kind of aggravating.
I like being married. I enjoy my kids. I think my job is pretty meaningful and I try to help people. It’s fine if he doesn’t want to do that stuff–I don’t care as long as he isn’t in my basement–but that’s no reason to say that I’m wrong in living my life the way I want.
Yeah, sorry, of the cites I had collected that was not the best. At any rate, I’m not going to google-vomit you unless you ask; the studies are out there and easy to find.
Even aside from merely being an anecdote, all that implies is:
Neither of these things really addresses the point. There are an infinite number of children which you didn’t have, but if you had, you would be equally devastated if they were taken away. Same goes for the hypothetical spouses you didn’t meet. Of course, it would be ridiculous to say that you are missing out because you don’t have as many wives and children as possible.
To paraphrase a dude: We’re all against marriage. Some of us just choose not to marry one more person than everyone else.
Maybe you’re not the target audience. Seems to me like the likely target is those individuals who have been conditioned to believe that marriage/children/career is a necessary part of growing up, and those individuals which are not so tolerant as you and subtly or not-so-subtly communicate this same message.