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Treating people as individuals is one of those secret sauce things that the modern Anglosphere takes for granted but which isn't that common globally or historically and which is part of what makes modern society work.
In terms of establishing democracy and capitalism, individualism has been great. And clearly more clannish attitudes haven't stopped birth rate declines elsewhere (looking at you Southern Europe, nobody's having kids when you live with your momma until you're 32). That said, I think a little intergenerational responsibility can be a good thing. Sam Kriss' excellent feature describes elderly retirees in Florida 'absconding from their duty as old people, which is too be a link between the past and the future'. I think old people sticking around to care for children and give them a sense of belonging is something tragic to lose, of course, that requires the young people to stick around too, which can't be taken for granted any more.
I skimmed the piece. I read the first few paragraphs, already starting to doze. Then I got to this line:
So guy goes to the Villages, already having made up his mind, and then just riffs on his own confirmation bias for 10 dreary pages.
I guess it's well-written, if you like that sort of Atlantic Monthly/New Yorker style. But it comes off as that most self-righteous and common form of virtue signal – the worry that someone, somewhere might actually be happy.
The Villages is a pretty interesting place from the perspective of urban development, and contains a lot of the things that liberals say that they want. We need more interesting experiments like it, and less sneering from depressed would-be novelists.
I've got a young child and my parents live interstate in the Australian equivalent of a Floridian retirement community.
We're fortunate to have the resources between us to enable visits back-and-forth with minimal stress, but I do definitely feel that it makes it hard to ensure the grandkids have as deep a bond with their grandparents as I'd ideally like. Also in my case my parents moved away a few years ago before grandkids were 'on the table', and as an unfathomably young parent in my demographic of 29 years old, that has to be somewhat increasingly common these days. I'm pretty sure if grandchildren were an ongoing concern prior to the move that it would have been enough to change the plans.
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