The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:
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Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.
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Notes -
I've been thinking about this topic a lot recently. My fiancee basically lost her entire 20s having to be a stay-home caretaker for her grandmother, who had (and has) Alzheimer's. While she frames it as a choice that she was happy to make, from talking to her family, I really get the impression that she was basically the one who was sacrificed so that nobody else would have to address the situation. Honestly - I think it's an atrocity, and I can't listen to her talk about those years without boiling up with anger.
I love my parents, and when they get to that point, I want them to be safe and well cared-for; however, I'm not going to value their wellbeing above the wellbeing of the other members of my family. I grasp that there will be sacrifices to make, but the rest of us deserve a chance to live too. Furthermore, I don't see that any of the adults on either side of my family are making the appropriate preparations for their old age, and I intend to defend my nuclear family from potential consequences of this.
I am aware that my attitude about this is very hard and negative these days, and it may soften with time. I can't say I have a specific plan. I try to cultivate my material prosperity and physical strength all the time, because I think I will end up needing them.
This comment resonates with me. I come from a culture where elders are respected almost to a fault, and people are expected to defer to the whims of the oldest people in the family at all times.
This kind of setup was probably fine and maybe even made sense for most of human history, but now that people are being kept alive into their 80s and even 90s with ease, it leads to a lot of material and emotional burden on the rest of the family.
To give an example, I live in an apartment with my wife and my mother is the landlord. My mother charges me MARKET-RATE RENT with the stated reason being to help her support my grandfather and pay for his rent and living expenses. In a previous post I mentioned family planning with my wife, and the fact that we’re paying rent to support my grandfather is a non-trivial stressor on our discussions about having kids. Now what kind of fucked-up arrangement is this? The family unit is sacrificing its future material prosperity to care for somebody who probably shouldn’t even be alive except for modern medicine and is an active burden on the rest of the family?
Until me and my generation, essentially nobody in my family has had to worry about supporting their grandparents in old age (not just financially, but emotionally and in the sense of having to defer to their wishes and antiquated opinions) and often their own parents would be dead by the time they became productive members of society ready to build wealth.
At least from my anecdotal perspective this kind of absurd arrangement of transferring wealth from the young to the very old and infirm (I haven’t even mentioned social security and medicare) is a major cause of declining birth rates. How many more families would we have if people died at a natural age, they passed on their wealth and estate, and the next generation could focus on building wealth and supporting their own children?
Ugh this boils my blood. We are going through a similar situation with my future Father-in-Law, had to argue tooth and nail to get below market rate rent at the house we're moving into.
Despite the fact that my fiance has put in literally hundreds of hours of unpaid work helping him renovate that damn house. All because he 'needs to be able to retire this year'. He just turned 60.
Makes me furious too, and she wants to care for him if or when he gets dementia. I'm a hard no on that one.
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