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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Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.
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Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.
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Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).
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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.
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.
Thank you: this was a beautiful post, I feel it has helped me a fair bit.
You're absolutely right, and I should make efforts to be more grateful for this. I'll confess I have some anxieties around being forced into poverty from being brought up by parents who grew up "third world poor" without adequate nutrition or modern healthcare and who passed down very similar anxieties. Rationally I do agree that outside of the really apocalyptic timelines I cannot control neither I nor my family are ever going to experience that sort of real material deprivation.
This is true as well. I think it's easy to get caught up as thinking of your job title as your identity in modern society: internally I can't deny that a lot of my identity is centered around being a "tech guy", which is probably something I should work on. It does seem likely to me that either "I'm not competitive in the blue-collar labour market" or "my current capital is insufficient to support my family" are possible outcomes, but if I'm no longer fit to unclog a toilet likely society will be wildly productive enough to keep my children fed and housed at least.
I looked up some pictures, and it really does look sublime. I'd like to visit some day as well, life permitting.
I think I would be happy if my children could find something they wanted to do, even if that does end up being joining a cult or a monastery. My father considered his job complete if I survived to eighteen having been fed three meals a day and without a criminal record, perhaps I need to take some lessons from him.
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The new SSC post looks like something you would be interested in, even if it doesn't address family formation directly.
I did read it, but didn't find it too interesting. Speculating about space colonisation post-singularity is so far out of society's current frame of reference it feels largely like navel gazing. I find myself more concerned with the more realistic short-term outcomes that might occur.
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