I don’t know what’s up with your particular neighbor. I do know that there are disabilities that don’t show, and that some of them would just about allow feeding oneself and doing a little gardening at one’s own pace.
Reads to me that she is working. She’s just not working at anything she’s getting paid for; other, I suppose, than the artwork, which you also don’t seem to think counts.
And presumably has never heard women talk when the men aren’t around.
My beloved Aunt is 13 years older than me. She basically raised me. She’s my best friend. Part of us growing beyond the mother/daughter or little sister/big sister role is my realization, over time, that she is not infallible, or perfect, and indeed, that she never was. At times it looked like a direct causal relationship between her decision to leave paid employment and the decline of her mental and physical health. I was motivated not by judgment, but by the desire to identify the cause of her suffering and end it. The more I talk to her, though, the more I get the sense that she’s always struggled, it just didn’t show as much externally, and certainly not to me when I was a teenager worshipping the ground she walked on. I think the first shock was when she told me that she was bulemic for basically my entire adolescence and I never knew. I lived with her and I never knew.
I think part of what I found so jarring about it is that for a very long time she was aggressively single and very financially independent (and very poor, I’ll add. She prefered poverty to being married to an asshole.) Then after shooting down man after man for most of her 20s and 30s, she fell in love, got married to a man with serious earning potential, moved for his career and quit working, falling into this dramatically different role than she had previously occupied.
Since we’ve brought her up, she’s the reason I am so, let’s say, sexually outspoken. She modeled to me the role of a woman empowered in her sexuality. Now I’ve had a lot of personal issues and hangups through no fault of my own, but the idea of being free to articulate my desires (or not desires) to a partner, to be comfortable talking about sex, even to make smutty jokes, 100% comes from my Aunt and to an extent her friends modeling this to me. And in a world where some women struggle to communicate about sex with their partners, and many have never even had an orgasm, I think it might be the biggest gift she gave me.
I hate to tell you this, guys, but there’s a nonzero chance your significant other has described your penis in detail to her friends.
Not that I ever would. That crosses a line, IMO. But it’s certainly a thing that some women do.
I guess if you can support yourself or can find someone who will support you. Otherwise most people have to find jobs so they can eat and pay their rent/mortgage.
“Poor is when you work for the money. Rich is when the money works for you.”
Or at least when you’re young, healthy and hopefully well-directed in life, you’re working to acquire the capital that will “work for you” that won’t fail you by the time employers view you as a spent force.
But if you blow it instead on the empty signifiers of manhood: bimbos and bachelor pads and being the life of the party, then you looked like a man, maybe. But you were just playing the part.
Exactly like the example given.
Emphasis on the spousal consent, though. If one partner is just unilaterally deciding not to work for pay any longer while the breadwinning partner isn’t really happy about that, as @snowthx described, that’s an ethical issue.
Sure.
I mean, I’ve been there, dropping my career to spend time as a primary caregiver. My wife was happy to do it because she wanted to focus on her career.
But if I’d just done it because i was burned out, and my wife was still happy for it to happen, I know I definitely wouldn’t consider myself any less manly for it.
Sounds like inane internet hustle-culture BS. Like all those posts lambasting the poor and working class for wasting all their money of food and commuting to their jobs instead of REIT ETFs.
When I was a young man, it seemed like it was possible for a man to strike off to live on their own (or maybe with some room mates), go out for drinks with their buddies on the weekend (which started Thursday), take a girl out on a date after hitting on her in a bar, maybe an occasional trip to Vegas or wherever until they finally found someone to settle down with, buy a house, raise some kids, and put up with some boring corporate job until they retire.
These days it feels like men are pushed into two extremes. One group who says all these activities are no longer “ok” but it is ok to just be an unemployed childless bachelor pursuing their inane hobbies for the rest of their life. The other who aggressively take the other extreme and think that a mans role is to be some sort of roided-up meathead Andrew Tate wannabe with no greater purpose than pursuing various get rich quick hustles so they can life a hedonistic lifestyle of expensive cars and women who are effectively prostitutes.
And that’s the sad state of where we are today, where “work hard and live within your means” is so easily confused with YouTube conmen pitches.
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Here’s a few things about disability: disabling conditions can be variable, intermittent, and invisible to others. This means that not only do you, an observer, not know for sure if someone has a disability, but it also means they might not know. It’s incredibly easy to gaslight yourself in the culture we live in – you feel tired because you’re lazy, or that pain is just weakness leaving your body, etc etc.
I am diagnosed (genetic test and all, for you weirdos demanding doctor notes) with a condition like this. My brother, mom, and paternal grandfather almost certainly have/had it as well. I’m the only one actually diagnosed, because it resulted in an acute injury (arm paralysis) that forced me to to get it checked out, and I lucked out in getting referred to a neurologist who was familiar with the condition.
Before that diagnosis, I had decades of symptoms. I assumed most of them were a) laziness, or b) normal body problems, because that’s how it works in my local culture (and given it’s genetic, they were pretty normal body problems in my family). That type of thinking led me not only into damage I could have avoided, but it nearly got me killed at least once because my internal sense of body calibration was so off (I went hiking when I was severely anemic, because I brushed off the fatigue as mere laziness).
My granddad, and now my mom, were miserable in their old age. The disability didn’t prevent them from working, it just made them hard to deal with when they worked, and physically and mentally broken after they retired. I don’t want that to be my future.
I say all this because it’s really easy for me to imagine being driven to making life choices by a combination of undiagnosed health issues and masculinity aspirations that could come off as outright bizarrre to an outside viewer. And I wouldn’t be able to explain them very well in that case, because I would probably feel a lot of defensiveness and shame.
Not everyone understands themselves well. Self understanding doesn’t seem to be part of either traditional masculinity or femininity, and I don’t think it needs to be gendered, but I do feel like it should be considered a more important aspect of adulthood.
I heard an ADHD commentator use the phrase “dynamic disability” and I think it speaks to the fact that some of us have conditions that aren’t always disabling but sometimes really are. And having a condition like that is often not conducive to a typical 40 hour work week.
I have a number of conditions that are periodically disabling. I also have a job that accommodates this because I am very, very lucky. I also have the fortune to be the kind of person who can get a ton of high-quality work done in a short period of time. This compensates for the days I’m useless. But there are days I’m only able to do the bare minimum of self and child care and they are more frequent than ever now that I’m in perimenopause.
That is an excellent point.
Nobody is perfect at it. But folks who are at least decent at it have a very hard time comprehending how the exterior world and the interior self look to someone who lacks that ability.
I’ve been thinking about it, and I would even venture to say that one of the traditional uses of gender roles is as a substitute for self-knowledge and self-determination. In other words, I hypothesize that people with poorly developed self-knowledge are more likely to both want and conform to clearly defined external roles so that they have something to define themselves with.
I haven’t kept up with the whole thread. Is it still about “The Male Inequality Problem”?
If so, this article in WaPo today seems relevant.
I think it would be very hard to be a teenage boy today. Are there role models/mentors showing them how to be men? There are very few of them in public life. One can only hope that a boy has someone like that in his private life.
What makes a man? The internet is defining it for teen boys.
A new study examines the nature of masculine content online and how it is affecting adolescent boys.
Many parents have specific concerns when it comes to their sons and the internet, with access to explicit imagery and sextortion often topping the list. But researchers have been examining a different sort of material that is affecting tween and teen boys: It’s called “digital masculinity” content — messages about making money, building muscle, using weapons and attracting women, among other things — and a new study reveals the extent to which boys are encountering it during a critical period of their development.
The study, published Wednesday by Common Sense Media, found that a majority of boys are regularly seeing this type of content online and that boys with the highest levels of exposure to it are more likely to experience loneliness and lower self-esteem.
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That’s not what you said though. You said “Poor is when you work for the money. Rich is when the money works for you.” That sounds a lot like the sort of hustle culture rhetoric I see online that blames poor people for their situation.
The standard online marketing pitch tends to be structured along the lines of “Most people are fucking idiots who do stupid shit which causes their lives to suck. I have the inside track on the secret to making your life awesome, Pay me money and I’ll sell it to you.”
It’s not “hustle culture,” it’s economics. Acquire capital while you can. I and my SO did it, our parents did it before us, and so did previous generations of our families. In our case there wasn’t significant generational wealth passed down, so we had to make choices and some sacrifices. Some of those sacrifices meant not getting sucked into consumer culture “gotta-haves” like Disneworld vacations or other things that I can really live without. No “hustle culture” or blaming avocado toast about it, just old fashioned middle class resilience.
[quoting an article] The study, published Wednesday by Common Sense Media, found that a majority of boys are regularly seeing this type of content online and that boys with the highest levels of exposure to it are more likely to experience loneliness and lower self-esteem.
To be fair boys have been seeing this shit forever, and the loneliest and lowest self esteem boys have always seen it out the most. Ads in magazines and comic books once upon a time. The algorithm is delivering it to many of them but the algorithm isn’t random.
Yes. Their dads more than anyone else and more have dads in their lives than in decades. Cite already provided. And some data from the study the article cites:
A majority of boys “embrace caring behaviors”, parents are their first choice for support, and 88% have had conversations with their parents about “what it means to be a man.”
Honestly mostly good news there.
Call it what you will. Maybe “hustle culture” isn’t the right term, but I still think it’s a mentality that goes beyond simple “live within your means”. I think it’s more of a symptom of the eroding old fashioned middle class.
Growing up, the mentality was more like you go to college, get a good job, and you should be able to reasonably afford a sustainable lifestyle where you could buy a home, raise a family, go out to dinner occasionally, and take the kids to Disney World now and then. Make sure to put a bit away for retirement. That’s what “middle class” is IMHO. The vast majority of people with normal every day jobs doing normal every day work.
I think the current state of affairs with constant corporate layoffs and waves of structural economic instability (eg: the dot.com /Enron/Arthur Andersen crash of 2000, the housing bubble/subprime mortgage crisis of 2008, COVID in 2020, whatever bullshit Trump and the AI hype bubble are doing to the economy now) and the general private equitization and hedge fundification of everything has led to where people are in a constant state of economic insecurity.
So IOW, unless you make so much money you don’t know what to do with it, any non-critical expense from avocado toast at your local coffee chain to a family trip to Disney World feels like an ill-advised luxury that would be better spent squireling away in some investment that beats inflation so that you have something to fall back on at the next economic disaster.
Agree that economic insecurity has now reached a wider (and higher income) fraction of the populace. Given the old saw that happiness is the excess of reality over expectations, a lot of people are finding their supposedly reasonable expectations are not being fulfilled. And are unhappy as a result. Which unhappiness also manifests as feeling lost, wandering an unexpected and baffling wasteland with no map.
As well, you’ve touched on the idea that one hell of a lot of people have come to believe, or have been told to believe, that it’s all a crooked game. The only way to win is with some con or trickery loophole that hasn’t yet been closed by the fatcats or over-exploited by all your peers to your detriment.
The term Precariat - Wikipedia was coined for a reason.
All the above is purely economics, not sociology. But as long as the standard conception of “male” includes “at least earns a living and ideally a darn good one”, precariat men, or boys looking forward to a life stuck in the precariat will be dislocated and nervous. Which mental state is easy to mold into anger.
See also Disconnected youth - Wikipedia.