Gaashk
3d ago
Fair. The main other platform I use is Instagram, mostly for arts and crafts ideas. I am extremely sick of the videos with people slowly turning their canvases around, then cutting off just as the painting is revealed, as though it were a strip tease, but that seems to be what Instagram thinks I like. I'm considering quitting. It doesn't seem worth retraining the algorithm.
Facebook is also pretty good as a local newsfeed for basic restaurant, weather, construction, etc news, and neighborhood group of largely Gen X and above. Lots of attractive neighborhood sunset pictures. But yeah, the reel clickbait stuff has been gettin gout of hand lately, and it just doesn't show me some of my actual friends, which is annoying.
Gaashk
3d ago
We still use FB to post for the grandparents and their friends. It seems basically fine for that.
Gaashk
6d ago
I grew up reading the kinds of novels that are popular with homeschool girls. Ann of Green Gables, Little House on the Prairie, George Macdonald, the Bronte Sisters, the kind of novel where the girl's only friend is a horse, and it's not even her own horse. Solitude seems intrinsic to whatever culture it is my family belongs to. It's the class of pastors, teachers, and the kind of farmers who moved to the Western US. When I read novels and hear accounts from older relatives, it sounds like people were mostly reading books in their leisure time. My father recounts playing wall ball with himself in the sweltering summer heat, but mostly reading Tarzan novels that summer. My mother recalls trying to learn to write in Elvish. She didn't have school friends, due to bussing, despite the city not having black kids or ghettos. My grandmother recalls reading Les Miserables in elementary school. Maybe according to the article they weren't alone, because it would be two or three teens and their mother silently reading in the same room.
According to data gathered by the online reservations platform OpenTable, solo dining has increased by 29 percent in just the past two years. The No. 1 reason is the need for more “me time.”
This is interesting. Why do these alienated, lonely people want more "me time?"
Was going to a theater ever actually social? I used to go to movies, and the norm was to sit there quietly, and not engage with anyone, even the people you came with, in a dark room. It's more social to watch TV in my house with my family. We talk to each other and interact.
My grandparents didn't go to restaurants alone because they couldn't go to restaurants more than once a month, and it was an occasion. Take out was an occasion, even when I was a kid. I can't think of anyone I knew in real life who met up in bars.
Because I'm from a long line of bookish but high openness introverts, it's unsurprising that I'm posting on my online culture war club instead of arranging play dates and attending potlucks.
My parents still keep in touch with their five college friends, even though they've all moved to different cities. I just met up with a friend from youth group I haven't seen in four years, and it was nice.
As I write this, my husband has been talking to me about joining a lapidary club, and taking our kids to look for local rocks at a nearby wash. It has taken me most of an hour to write this post, as I made cookies, put the kids to bed, and discussed going to the mineral show.
I'm not saying that there isn't a problem, but perhaps it's a recurrent problem. Or a problem that's always with us.
Gaashk
6d ago
This is what Turkey has. I found it basically fine, it took about once for me to notice that I needed to carry a certain amount of change.
Gaashk
7d ago
Yeah, I've become significantly worse at contributing to church events since having a family. In my experience, it's the stable single adults, and couples with older children who hold things together.
Gaashk
7d ago
I really liked Scott's Different Worlds post, and wish that he (or someone) would investigate that further.
De Becker seems to think there are people who are always being stalked, and have to be super cautious all the time, and may often be in dangerous situations. He worked with celebrities and abuse victims, so maybe that's true for them.
I'm not that far in, but de Becker just mentioned that if someone is jogging in the park and gets an uncomfortable feeling, they shouldn't try to use peripheral vision, they should take their headphones off, stop for a second, turn, and make eye contact with anyone looking at them. I'm not subtle at all, and probably give off that vibe anyway.
Gaashk
7d ago
I wasn't very far in and probably haven't described it very well. Maybe I'll try again next week when I've read more of it.
Gaashk
7d ago
There are definitely people that I don't particularly like or get along with, who seem to be doing the best they can, and them and I clashing is not due to anything nefarious on their part. I might use words like annoyed, irritated, clashing, or something but not afraid, apprehensive, or nervous.
Conversely, there is no shortage of people who are likable on an interpersonal level but completely lacking in moral fibre (e.g. charming con artists who'll butter you up before absconding with your life savings).
I think de Becker agrees with this, to some extent. He talks about people who are trying to get something their mark doesn't want to give, and describes various strategies of being extra nice, offering unsolicited help, using "we" a lot, and being generally nice and charming. The main difference is that he says that people feel apprehensive anyway, but try to explain it away because "he's so nice and helpful." I'm not sure how to evaluate that claim, he seems to be mostly be making it based on his own experience and interviews.
I'm probably misrepresenting him somewhat, since I had read less than a quarter of the book at that point (and still less than half). Not dealing with fake "repressed" memories does seem like a weakness -- what if they just made some of the details up subconsciously? I haven't read far enough to know if he deals with this.
He says things like: if you are a woman putting groceries in your car or something, and a man comes up to help you, and you feel even a little bit uncomfortable about it, stand up, face him, and say "no" definitively and forcefully. If he's a decent guy, his feelings will be a bit hurt, and you will get no help. If he isn't, he'll keep testing your boundaries, be very firm about them, insisting and not just going away is a sign that he's up to no good. There's probably someone who needs to hear that? I don't really have opinions about it, but am a bit curious to see where he's going.
Gaashk
8d ago
The Gift of Fear by Gavin de Becker (1998). The main premise is that if you have a negative gut feeling about a person or situation, go ahead and follow it out of the situation, don't try to come up with a bunch of justifications for why things are actually alright, there's no reason to worry. There probably is a reason to worry, you're picking up on something, even when you aren't able to articulate what or why in the moment. He says he's spent a lot of time interviewing victims, or close misses after violent incidents, and they usually eventually tell him details that explain some of the signals that made them nervous after the fact, and sometimes do manage to get out before the going gets bad -- for instance a man who asked into a convenience store, and then immediately out again shortly before a shooting.
It seems plausible enough. I've never been in a really bad situation, but every time I haven't liked someone immediately, tried to make up excuses for them in my head, thought and thought about it, tried to like them, it turned out that, no, we actually could not live or work together. Probably most people, most of the time, do really have reasonable instinctive boundaries.
It's all about the head and neck support. Holding a baby upright on your lap while aggressively driving a car is a terrible idea. Holding them flush with your torso is better. Car seats that have three point harnesses and appropriate angles for the back and neck are better. Babies have very weak necks, and their brains can slosh around when shaken hard, because their necks aren't controlling the motion.
Some cultures practice rather aggressive rocking, where they tie the baby into the cradle and operate it like an amusement park ride. They might notice if those who did that more had more brain damaged children.
makes me think every girl ought to take part in a balance-based activity
There's a reason almost nobody goes hiking with a front pack. I have gone hiking in the ice and snow with a baby in a front pack, and it is very, very slow going. Balancing normally doesn't help all that much, since it's specifically the front weight creating the imbalance, and the main thing to do is things like not walking down steep hills, not walking on slick surfaces, holding a hand for stability, putting one's feet sideways so you can see them, etc. This isn't really helped by, for instance, learning to use a balance beam in conditions where you can see your feet. Not being able to see one's feet is destabilizing.
Gaashk
12d ago
Yeah, the devil's in the details. Firefighting, like all fighting, should probably continue to be mostly male. There are a lot of ponytails on that website, suggesting they would really like more women, which seems unlikely for physical reasons. Who's the girl in the overalls and headband supposed to be? The local police force here hired a woman with beautiful long hair and her bouvier or some such animal to give presentations, such as at elementary schools. She starter out as a vet tech, and now brings the dog around and lets the children pet it while teaching them a bit about safety. That's fine, sure, but not very central.
Of course there doesn't seem to be a reason English speaking mestizo men wouldn't be firefighters. In a heavily hispanic state like California, I'm surprised they're not, and I suppose worth reaching out to?
Gaashk
12d ago
I remember doing Sing, Spell, Read, and Write, and it worked well -- I still remember several of the songs -- but don't know what an updated version might be. We did Saxon math, for some value of "doing," but I much prefer Khan Academy. Some school districts have an official Homeschool Liaison, who will recommend something. Also, kids can often take electives at their local public school for free or very cheap. I took swimming, and was no good at it, but it was a positive experience.
Also, any resources on being an effective homeschool teacher without formal training in education.
This is the absolute last thing you should worry about. Don't bother even thinking about this at all. I have a degree in education, and education courses are entirely useless for homeschooling. They don't really teach classroom management, but if they were going to teach a useful skill, it would probably be that one. There was an entire semester long class about teaching philosophies, where we would look at a teaching philosophy, such as the one with an ideal tutor following an ideal child around and making everything a learning opportunity for him, and would invariably conclude each time "but we're training to be public school teachers, so while interesting, this has pretty much nothing to do with us." There was an entire semester long class on specific educational acronyms. We learned to think-pair-share 28 times. None of it would be useful to you at all.
How do the kids feel about the change?
Gaashk
15d ago
It makes sense when most things become performative, rather than -- I want to say liturgical.
Liturgy was Greek for "work of the people," in a ceremonial sense. It's great if whoever is performing the liturgy is an excellent chanter or something, but it isn't fundamentally important. It's important to celebrate the occasion, to perform the rites, for everyone to believe and say and experience the same things. But most of postmodern society is profoundly nonliturgical.
The reason to be an average dancer is so that you can attend a folk dance. It's fun to swing, or blues, or square, or circle dance, and a person, especially the man if it's the kind of dance with a lead, should be about average for it to actually be fun, and not just awkward, or an initial class. But, currently, we mostly do performative dances, or break off into little high skill niches, as has been discussed elsewhere. Which is too bad.
Gaashk
18d ago
It sounded like a substantial part of the problem is finding a woman willing to have children together.
Gaashk
18d ago
I work for a hedge fund that is buying lots of small engineering companies. Most of these companies have pretty terrible IT people. [...] Half of them within a year have left to take senior admin jobs. One of them even got a job at Google.
I suppose it's piling on at this point, but, yes, it absolutely sounds like you are devaluing them both monetarily, and personally in quite an adversarial way. So while I can see why you might want to get workers with fewer options, I am not convinced that it's at all beneficial for anyone else. If they were making something incredibly useful, you could probably treat them better for it.
Gaashk
19d ago
My father did a job like that for several years. They didn't have air conditioning, and he complained about it being about 90 degrees most of the time, and they only gave him little pixie cups of water. He eventually left after they switched the kitchen language to one he didn't know, and got a job teaching high school math, because he was a grown adult with a college degree, a clean background check, and family at the time. In retrospect, I have no idea what he was doing there, and it's good he was pushed out.
Gaashk
19d ago
The new SSC post looks like something you would be interested in, even if it doesn't address family formation directly.
Gaashk
19d ago
That makes sense. It looked like previous copyright questions turned on how much power Disney could amass with which to buy politicians.
Gaashk
19d ago
I intend to paint more, and especially figure out how to paint while the children are awake. I've been looking into cold wax and oil painting, and have bought supplies to make some. It's especially good for abstracted landscapes, and has a nice smooth body to it, that's good for scratching through layers and spreading with pallet knives. It is more child friendly than hot wax painting (encaustic), which I like a bit more, but haven't done in years, since I need an actual studio space and several consecutive hours, but has a similar wax finish that refracts light nicely, and allows similar carving techniques.
Gaashk
19d ago
It's good you're at least thinking about whether you want marriage and family in your mid twenties, rather than trying to ignore and put off the question as sometimes happens.
Midwit remote tech worker, upper-mid 6 figure net worth
Materially, you are better off than the vast majority of people who have ever lived. Maybe the next generation will do worse, maybe not, but unless something really apocalyptic happens, they will still be materially well off by historical standards. Even if you have to retrain into a more working class job, that's not the end of the world, or even your world. If you have a good and reasonable wife, she will work with you on whatever ends up happening. My father was a not particularly successful night baker and then cook, despite having a college degree from the 70s; these things happen. He still didn't have a bad life, and got to indulge his intellectual preferences in his books clubs and with his family.
I don't necessarily practice what I preach, but you and your (potential) family aren't simply pawns in the games of elites, but also actors who are subtly pushing civilization in some direction, to be determined by your own values. Shall we let the machines do all the email jobs, and pay other people to walk each others' dogs and raise each other's children? That seems like kind of a silly economy, but I'm sure I have ancestors who were household servants, and I guess if that's what my grandkids are doing, it's not ideal, but basically acceptable. Shall we enlist in the Butlerian Jihad? I'd rather not (and wouldn't be able to do much of the work), but it's probably better than just kind of giving up. Shall we join a cult in Alaska? Maybe! I had some friends who were doing something like that, and they formed this beautiful a cappella choir that was touring the country and some other countries, singing everywhere. Maybe it's worth joining a cult to wander around creating random acts of choral music! Yesterday, I visited Saint Anthony's Monastery in Florence, Arizona. They have 50 monks from all over the world, making an unusually beautiful monastery in the middle of the Sonoran Desert. They planted a new olive orchard, and built a small aviary. They won't have children, but it's so interesting that they're doing that, and the grounds are so beautiful! They have these Byzantine style mosaic icons with quarter inch glass tesserae. I want to be able to do that! They're so beautiful, and will continue to be beautiful for perhaps hundreds of years. Perhaps I should plant grape vines this spring, and a new apricot tree.
These are half baked thoughts, which I don't have energy to develop further just now. Basically, living a certain kind of constrained lower middle class knowledge worker lifestyle is probably just a tiny blip, sure, but you and your potential family can outlive it, and find other interesting and potentially beautiful things to do, even with a rather dull and low status day job.
Gaashk
26d ago
Who was your main carer as a baby?
I do know a decent number of families where a grandparent or father is the main carer. I've seen situations with the father as main carer when the wife is in a stable job with family insurance, such as teaching, and the husband is in a high variance job without benefits and with odd hours, such as professional musician or small business owner of a somewhat irregular business. My family is in that category. It's kind of stressful, but better than newborn daycare.
I guess you said "a few," which could, technically, mean more than two or three. I wouldn't generally interpret a few as six, the age at which commercial daycares will usually accept newborns. But, also, most people don't like sending a six week old to a commercial daycare, they feel bad about it. The last daycare I sent kids to has no early morning (before 8) coverage of children below four, and no coverage of babies that cannot yet walk. Another that I looked into did accept six week olds, but previous employees thought it not a very good environment, so we're continuing with the current arrangement until about a year.
Gaashk
26d ago
Only if you're thinking of very high SES women, who are likely to have the number of children they want already. But they still choose not to, because going back to work two weeks postpartum is awful.
It's possible that more of the benefits accrue to society in general than to the specific man, in a way that benefits defectors as long as society as a whole doesn't unravel (as it has been lately). For instance, having an involved father is a benefit to a boy and young man, as part of living in the kind of society where marriage is the norm.
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