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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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