50 sats \ 6 replies \ @Undisciplined OP 6 Apr \ parent \ on: Rant: Young People are Getting Terrible Advice and it's Destroying Our Culture culture
I think that might be a fair characterization.
I feel like the bill of goods 60-80 years ago might have been the pretty intense gender essentialism that pervaded and what you describe was a consequence of that.
What I'm not sure about, since I wasn't there, is whether they had abundant evidence to know this was bad messaging.
If you don't mind me asking, does your wife work? I thought you mentioned before that she didn't is the reason I bring it up and I wanted to comment that I think many women are now choosing to have a life more akin to what was thrust upon them as an expectation 60-80 years ago.
My wife works part time now because I am not really doing much but when I had my business and was working 50-60-80 hours a week depending on the week, she never worked and didn't really want to. She was happy to stay home and take care of the kids.
I know a number of women who are choosing this life. I am not saying many gen Zs will also choose this life but we do change as we get older.
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When I was in grad school my wife worked to help support us. One of my goals was to earn enough that she wouldn't have to take a job for the money. So far, she's been taking care of all the household stuff and childcare, but she's keeping an eye out for attractive jobs.
She's also long wanted to write a novel and recently she really got back into writing, to the point that it's like a job.
I've also noticed a lot women in our social circle who are less attached to the labor force than our mothers were. I take that as a positive development, since it seems aligned with what they want, rather than being imposed on them.
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That's great that your wife is pursuing her passion while also taking care of the house and little one. I do think things are shifting a bit. The other homeschool family we know in our area the wife does all kind of baking, canning, preserving, has a small garden. This is stuff she is passionate about and her and my wife were talking about putting together a little business to sell some this stuff at local farmers markets etc. I think there can be a balance where it doesn't have to be all career or all homemaker mindset.
Let's be honest, bitcoin will break your brain on the career thing. When you get into bitcoin and learn how "fucked" the fiat system is, chasing the next dollar isn't that thrilling anymore.
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I also think we're living through the early stages of a radical reorientation of work-life balance.
One of the things we talk about in labor economics is that women lead a lot of labor market trends, because they tend to be more marginally attached to the workforce. It's one of the reasons we study female employment more than male. Men basically just work as much as they can until they die. Boring.
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I think this makes sense in a society where the overwhelming majority of people are mercenaries. There is something romantic about the idea of working tirelessly when you are building something to pass on to the next generation (the family farm, or ranch, or family business). It seems a lot less romantic when it is sitting in a cubicle for endless hours for a megacorp with 100,000 other cogs in the machine to earn a bunch of fiat so you can buy a house and a car and put some money away for retirement and your epitaph reads "He worked for Dupont optimizing packaging costs for 50 years."
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That might be why we're seeing men beginning to work less than full-time for the first time ever. It's one of the emerging open questions.
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