Gaashk
10hr ago
People’s comfort music is usually reminiscent of what they listened to as teens. Not sure why they’re so over the top about it, but the preference is unsurprising.
Gaashk
11hr ago
Not really. We went to one with a wooden ship play fort in Louisiana, and it was lovely until we got rained out. I think Chick fil-a has them here.
Gaashk
22hr ago
I don't think personally cooking one's own meals was ever the standard for men living in cities. Or women with money, running a moderate household. I'm not sure how meaningful it is that they would hire a cook directly, rather than a courier. But Freddie, at least, is a communist, and probably opposed to the ways of wealthy households.
Gaashk
22hr ago
I find that - Michelin starred restaurants aside - I can do better in thirty minutes in my own kitchen than pretty much anyone available on the apps.
I'm not in a position to have food delivered, but I find that almost any pre-prepared Costco meal is better than one I cooked (they keep up with the trends; they have birria now). We still cook from raw meat and root vegetables about half the time, but unless it's a taco or something, there's a marinade, some kind of eggs and crumbs or else cooked in a pan and deglazed, then some kind of roasting for one to six hours. The tacos are not bad, but also not better than from a food truck, and with less variety. I absolutely cannot cook proper beans, but I think it takes 8 hours and a piece of pork fat. We can't bring ourselves to eat enough beans to justify that.
Gaashk
22hr ago
I think this is inadequately handled.
https://www.thecut.com/article/gen-z-ipad-kids-generation-screen-time.html I just clicked through to his first link about iPad kids. On the issue of raising children in a big city like New York, my impression is that in the past the norm was to live near relatives and trusted acquaintances (co-religionist or co-ethnic, for instance), and let bands of roving kids wander the neighborhood with little parental involvement, to be called back for dinner. Now, they know people from different parts of town, meet up at a park, then go out to lunch together at a restaurant. That is not inherently lower effort than the previous arrangement. They might not have to keep their apartment clean or cook lunch, but now they have to keep children quiet in a restaurant, which doesn't really allow adult conversations.
The kids don't have permission to do what they would prefer, such as playing a game, so they settle for the permission they can get, to watch a show on a phone, which is still better than fidgeting and getting dirty looks. That is not necessarily permissive, though, since their first choice of running around, playing, and exploring is denied them. I don't get the impression that kids are eager for permission to watch more shows. They're much more eager for permission to take small risks. I offered some kids the opportunity to look at stuff on their chrome books or chip away at little pieces of soapstone. They strongly preferred the stone, but I stopped because it's too loud for the adults. That is not permissive. There is no permission to make noise and accidentally hurt a finger. It would be more permissive in the case of the restaurant to give them a little playground like fast food places used to have.
As a teen and young adult, I read Classics. Lately, I've been reading Brandon Sanderson novels. This is because I had a lot of free time then, and don't have it now. The Motte and Sanderson novels are compatible with brain fog from waking up every few hours to feed an infant, and interacting with other young children every few minutes, while Kant is not. I don't really have a good model of what's going on with Taylor Swift or Marvel fans (are there still Marvel fans left?). As I recall, Don Quixote was basically a spoof about a man who read a lot of Star Wars novels, thought that Jedi were real, and then decided that he was one. I gave up because the second hand cringe was too strong, not something that I can recall happening with any other novels.
I'm not sure that it makes sense to talk about reading Sanderson instead of Dostoyevsky as permissiveness. The latter is, of course, better, but I'm tired and my memory is bad. I'm unable to read it after working and caring for children. My parents are retired, and reading Dostoyevsky again. They have a little book club. They have permission to spend time on good books, permission to spend the best part of the day on that, instead of on working.
Again, a lot of people don't seem to feel permission to be an ordinary person, doing a slightly below average 9 - 5 job, sending their kids to the ordinary public school, to themselves become an average person living an average life. Who can work a stable job at Kodak for 30 years? "Many people have lamented that kids these days say they want to be famous YouTubers instead of astronauts." Sure. The only astronauts I know anything about are the ones that got stranded because Boeing messed up bringing them back. Which was a story entirely about how unreliable Boeing now is, and not at all about the astronauts themselves.
I was chaperoning a kids' dance party this week. The kids don't know how to dance, even things like the Cupid Shuffle, where they literally call out the moves. Some attempts were made to do that dance where they squat, bounce, and throw their legs out, kind of like in Russian dancing. The dance they attempted was harder than normal folk dancing, but at least known. This was because they don't know how to dance, not because we're so permissive we let them dance however they want. They probably want to be taught how to dance. The adults might even prefer to teach them a dance, but didn't necessarily have permission to do so, or knowledge of how to go about it.
On clothing, I likewise don't necessarily find the mess that is our current clothing choices to be permissive, so much as burnt out or depressed. People mostly aren't dressing in clothing that they love and find beautiful for their own idiosyncratic reasons. Straight men don't seem to have a ton of choice for what to wear in public, outside of special interest clubs. They're dressing in jeans and hoodies because that's the cultural norm, to which they are dutifully adhering. I like Uniqlo clothing and follow their collaborations. There was a surprising amount of buzz this fall about slightly less terrible looking sweatpants. They sold out! They come in not only grey and black, but wine! So exciting. Theoretically, people have permission to wear all sorts of things. Actually, they are so confused and guilt ridden, they wear the same dress a hundred days in a row. That is not a sign of permission.
I'm not sure what's going on with the adults eating exclusively chicken nuggets and Mac & cheese, but it sounds like depression again? Or an eating disorder? It certainly doesn't sound enjoyable.
Gaashk
3d ago
Mine is lower than last year, we are involved with fewer childcare situations and got everything last year. Currently I have a cold, but this is the first one and fairly mild.
Gaashk
6d ago
I’m from Arizona, and mildly prefer no DST. The swamp cooler is/was on all day either way, and Abq can’t even upgrade form swamp cooling to AC in their schools due to old roofing and such.
This is tangential. But I'm Eastern Orthodox, my husband is open to it, and we have not managed to get past the standing quietly for two hours part of being to church with young children. I want the children to have godparents! I keep aspiring to take them. St Nicholas day was last weekend! But I still haven't managed to make it work. I suppose I should embrace church-as family-social-project, vs church as opportunity to sing and pray, as I experienced it before (I was the Christian hobbiest type before, going to vespers and akathists and studies and everything).
I would still go to my church acquaintances first if I needed help, though. Despite failing to attend, they still found me a place to live, free furniture, and let me borrow a car for a week.
Gaashk
12d ago
It would certainly depend on what the attempts to fit in with women consist of.
Gaashk
13d ago
The sentiment among Christian Syrians when I visited a decade ago was "we're worried America will get in solved and make things even worse." They seem to have been more correct than not.
Gaashk
20d ago
That’s basically the status quo for traditional multi generational households, except the mother in law actually provides physical benefits, like a floor of the house, pooled cooking, and childcare.
Gaashk
20d ago
I think Russia is actively working on something like that, so maybe we’ll get another chance to see how it works out.
Gaashk
20d ago
How far back do I have to go for a water-cooler chit-chat to still be a thing? 90's?
Before 1890s, probably. It sounded like everyone was reading Dickens for water cooler chit chat reasons.
canceled / retired your student loans
I did not take out loans. They have so far offered $0 payments to my husband for having children in his household. We will be in bad shape if they rescind that, but it's not like we can take the kids back.
mortgage debt
Maybe! But that sounds like the sort of thing that wouldn't be long term sustainable, due to the market adjusting.
No income tax for the rest of your life?
I'm pretty sure I'm net negative in this respect already. And to the extent that in the future I make more money while having less children at home, this will not be good for them. If they're going to subsidize me later, it should be directly, not through the government.
The elderly giving up their seats for you on public transit
That sounds embarrassing and awful. But, also, my area doesn't have functional public transport.
boy scouts, police and other public servents saluting you?
Ugh, no, that sounds like a negative thing
You get the veterans and first responders discount at Lowe's?
Meh. I don't consider things to be on sale until they're at least 30% off, but also I don't think we've bought anything from Lowe's in years, and don't have any plans to do that. I bought a bag once with a Peace Corps discount of 40% off or something. Best bag I've ever bought, I still use it every day. Apparently there are already teacher discounts that I don't bother using.
Gaashk
20d ago
That’s more succinct than what I was going to say, but yes. More than half of women are still having children.
It’s a bit odder in Korea, which still has mandatory conscription for men, but fewer than half of women are having babies. Seems related to almost their entire childhood being stressful, not just a year here or there.
Gaashk
20d ago
But while women might have had the same legal rights for a while now, their social and economic power continues to increase.
That's one way to look at it.
Another way to look at it, however, is that as wages are equalized, the wife's income is more likely to be essential to the household budget, such that she is expected and needed to go back to work as soon as possible.
Also, the prenatal programs are pushing breastfeeding. So she's expected (not able, I mean expected) to work until she gives birth, then breastfeed for a month or two, then drop her infant off at daycare and pump at work, and still get up in the middle of the night to feed her infant, while also working a full day outside the home. Even elementary teachers are struggling with this, with a generally easy schedule/ They hide their children in windowless offices on "professional development" days, for instance, because they aren't allowed to organize childcare amongst themselves.
Gaashk
20d ago
On the other hand, birth rates have been dropping especially fast over the past decade, when women have had choices for generations, and things like ultrasounds, epidurals, prenatal testing, formula, c-sections for the convenience of the doctors, and whatnot have been improving. Childbirth is less bad than before. Even feeding babies is less bad than before. Freedom of women is about the same, at least in the anglosphere. Yet birth rates continue to drop.
Gaashk
21d ago
Yeah. I had a second partly because I wanted someone to eventually play with my older daughter. But I'm living in a 2500 sq ft mobile home on a half acre, with a wagon/SUV that fits three child car seats already, so have different costs/benefits than someone in a dense city with expensive housing.
Gaashk
21d ago
It would be less weird, but much, much more expensive.
I'm not sure what the government could do at this point to get me to have another child. Maybe a year of maternity leave at my full salary and a vehicular upgrade. I absolutely did not like going back to work with a month old newborn, and having to hand deliver a check to pay back their side of my insurance for that time.
Gaashk
22d ago
It's probably related to America not generally having many meaningful awards outside of the military, so it would kind of feel like it was coming out of left field. It would seem less weird to be part of some sort of ceremony involving the Georgian patriarch, even as an American, since he already belongs to an extremely ceremonial church (and culture more generally).
Gaashk
22d ago
Oh yeah, that one is positive.
Along those lines, I guess a female boss or CEO sounds neutral to me, and like something I might say.
Since stay at home dad is even less a long term plan than stay at home mom, it comes across as non sequitur in the context of school. Kids know that by 9, even four old boys all say things like "firefighter" or "policeman" (the girls said "princess" at my child's pre-K). So they must be odd in some way, possibly effeminate or gay?
Interesting, I wonder what's going on there? And whether social pressure would get him to eat more variety, or just cut him off socially? It seems like it might be a problem if they have kids, though now the schools offer free lunches even on breaks I guess.
My uncle once talked my father (baker at 5 star restaurant, foodie of the French and James Beard tradition) into eating more wasabi with his sushi than he preferred. He talked for several days about how much he regretted it, and how annoyed he was.
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