Gaashk
11mo ago
My father did a job like that for several years. They didn't have air conditioning, and he complained about it being about 90 degrees most of the time, and they only gave him little pixie cups of water. He eventually left after they switched the kitchen language to one he didn't know, and got a job teaching high school math, because he was a grown adult with a college degree, a clean background check, and family at the time. In retrospect, I have no idea what he was doing there, and it's good he was pushed out.
Gaashk
11mo ago
The new SSC post looks like something you would be interested in, even if it doesn't address family formation directly.
Gaashk
11mo ago
That makes sense. It looked like previous copyright questions turned on how much power Disney could amass with which to buy politicians.
Gaashk
11mo ago
I intend to paint more, and especially figure out how to paint while the children are awake. I've been looking into cold wax and oil painting, and have bought supplies to make some. It's especially good for abstracted landscapes, and has a nice smooth body to it, that's good for scratching through layers and spreading with pallet knives. It is more child friendly than hot wax painting (encaustic), which I like a bit more, but haven't done in years, since I need an actual studio space and several consecutive hours, but has a similar wax finish that refracts light nicely, and allows similar carving techniques.
Gaashk
11mo ago
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.
Midwit remote tech worker, upper-mid 6 figure net worth
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.
Gaashk
1yr ago
Who was your main carer as a baby?
I do know a decent number of families where a grandparent or father is the main carer. I've seen situations with the father as main carer when the wife is in a stable job with family insurance, such as teaching, and the husband is in a high variance job without benefits and with odd hours, such as professional musician or small business owner of a somewhat irregular business. My family is in that category. It's kind of stressful, but better than newborn daycare.
I guess you said "a few," which could, technically, mean more than two or three. I wouldn't generally interpret a few as six, the age at which commercial daycares will usually accept newborns. But, also, most people don't like sending a six week old to a commercial daycare, they feel bad about it. The last daycare I sent kids to has no early morning (before 8) coverage of children below four, and no coverage of babies that cannot yet walk. Another that I looked into did accept six week olds, but previous employees thought it not a very good environment, so we're continuing with the current arrangement until about a year.
Gaashk
1yr ago
Only if you're thinking of very high SES women, who are likely to have the number of children they want already. But they still choose not to, because going back to work two weeks postpartum is awful.
Gaashk
1yr ago
That makes sense. American Orthodoxy selects heavily for people with Byzantine preferences. When I was Evangelical, some that stood out are Peter, Christian, Bethany -- the Johns that spring to mind are from my parents' generation
Gaashk
1yr ago
We went with a moderately common girl's name from my ethnic background, a variant of a common girl's name that is itself uncommon in the US from my husband's background that we like the sound of, and a fairly common boy's name associated with a historical figure we like. Middle child will have to tell everyone how to say her name, because it isn't obvious from the spelling, but it's only two syllables so I don't expect a problem. There are names we ruled out because we don't like the sound, for instance Olga. Their last name is Polish, but short and easy enough to not sound notably foreign.
We did not consider any names that the same as immediate relatives for first names (though we do have some middles). We're both very high in personality trait openness, and generally don't like anything to be the same; we like visiting new places, moving, making things we haven't before, new foods we've never tried, and are more attracted to names that are new to our respective families. We didn't consider anything like John, George, or Mary because they were overused in our parents' generation. I think there's some kind of cycle there, and maybe someday we'll have a grandchild named Mary and it will seem right again. Baby boy has a common enough name he could conceivably end up in a class with another boy of the same name, but apparently that's a risk we're willing to take.
The departure from traditionally common names like Mary/John/Peter in my lifetime obviously has a lot to do with falling religiosity
I'm not sure they're related. The very religious people I know are naming their kids things like Euphrosynos or Xenia or something.
Gaashk
1yr ago
I've heard it referred to as an "eating the seed corn" situation at a societal level. A civilization can get high growth by having all its potential mothers do other things instead, but then in addition to not having enough children in the next generation, you also don't have as much social cohesion, because when the kids aren't absolute babies, those were the women volunteering for the churches, organizing social occasions, running the children and youth clubs, sending out cards to recognize everyone's birthdays and holidays and so on. Now, if you want those services, you get to pay market rate for it -- and the market rate is high!
Technological change is busy clearing out a bunch of female heavy positions just now, anyway. Society will lose nothing by a bunch of graphic designers running a household instead, for instance. If they want to. Running a household is harder than graphic design, and as there has been much opining about lately, harder to get status from. Some of the things making women not want to marry the men that would be willing to marry them seems a more pressing issue.
Gaashk
1yr ago
But they also have better teachers(more experienced mostly, but also higher percentage of in-subject graduate degrees for high school teachers)
This reminds me that it's probably a good idea to optimize for different things in primary vs secondary education. As far as I can tell, in lower elementary it's fine to do Montessori or Waldorf or unschooling or whatever else will deliver a pretty good childhood experience. The teachers should teach phonics, but otherwise it's mostly important for them to be able to get all the kids settled and not constantly bothering each other. There are a few elementary students who are so wild even a decent teacher can't get them to cooperate, but it's pretty rare.
Then in high school the quality of peers and academic ability of teachers becomes a lot more important.
Gaashk
1yr ago
I was homeschooled, and... it depends. In general, I liked it. My mom is disposed to be a decent teacher, and went on to teach lower elementary in the public schools. I ended up very well educated in literature, because a Kierkegaard and Dostoyevsky book club is my parents' idea of a good time. Math didn't go so well. This is fine, since I don't necessarily want to be a Woman in STEM, but also very common among homeschoolers I know, even with engineer fathers. I think math just inherently requires more structure and pushing for a lot of teens than reading and writing do.
Gaashk
1yr ago
On the issue of property taxes and school funding, this varies by state. The state I'm in puts everything into one budget, subsidized with oil taxes, and funds the Title I (low income) schools more, but the better off schools make some of it up in better parent-teacher associations and less need for things like social workers.
There's probably a dynamic where better teachers like teaching better students, and will move to the charter or private or high income schools disproportionately. I'm not sure how big the effect of that is. The teachers having to spend all their energy on disruption and children who are behind is something that happens, and I'm not sure how big of an affect it has at normal ranges of children.
Mainly because id like to give my offspring the best advantage possible, and select the optimal school district and educational system for him/her.
This probably varies a fair bit by child. There are some children (I've heard it's about 40%) who will learn to read competently based on the kind of exposure that it's almost impossible to avoid in the current society. My mom says she learned to read at three by her father reading the newspaper to her. There are other children who need explicit instruction in phonics, though I think most schools are back to teaching that so it's probably alright. I am not sending my own child to the school I work at because I am involved in workplace drama there, and don't want to get my kids pulled into that. But they'd still make friends and learn to read and add there, probably.
There are schools that are kind of a drag on kids' natural curiosity, which might be more of a long term problem, though I'm not sure if there's any research on that, or how to go about researching it.
Gaashk
1yr ago
Many companies discriminate by having separate lines for standard and plus size. The brands I shop from regularly stop at XL or XXL, and people larger than that have to buy from a different brand altogether. When I looked into it, that seems to have as much to do with certain styles not even working as intended on larger figures, as much as amount of fabric used. That makes it hard to compare costs, since many items are simply unavailable in larger sizes, but brands that cater to explicitly carrying all sizes at the same price point, such as Universal Standard, are pretty expensive for what you get.
Yeah, even in the 90s that take was significantly behind the times in the US, when Christians were adopting toddlers from Korea, Africa, and former USSR countries, but then there were scandals about how many of those children weren't actually "unwanted" either, their relatives were lied to by adoption agencies.
I've known several families try to adopt, and one ended up with a toddler after many years in the process, another ended up with a surrogate carrying an IVF fetus from another family, and one still hasn't succeeded at adopting, despite being willing to adopt older kids, siblings, and go through the court process with parents who are unable to keep them.
Gaashk
1yr ago
I don't know what pro-life people Pastor Barnhart knows, but the ones I've known are the same people doing a bunch of stuff to help out single mothers ("widows," lol), and adopt or foster abandoned children ("orphans" would be way easier to help, there's a lot of court input around the kids that is a huge drag on these relationships. My impression is that actual orphans are usually immediately adopted, often by relatives).
Balancing the needs of the current community and the needs of lawbreakers is indeed complicated, and I'm not surprised that what is mostly a coalition of mothers or would be mothers doesn't have a good solution for that.
Once I tried going to an Arab church, where the pastor spent the whole homily complaining about men who prefer to smoke hookah with their friends, rather than going to church. He didn't seem to be addressing them directly, so I suppose they were not there that morning, either. Did he think their wives and daughters would go home and shame them, and they would start coming again? Seems unlikely. We didn't go back. This feels like that. Somewhere, there are probably some people who might be like he describes. It's a big country, with a lot of different flavors of hypocrite in it. But aiming sermons at someone, somewhere, hoping it'll be shared on social media until they find it seems... bad. Immoral, maybe. In dereliction of his duty as a pastor. My impression of him as a pastor, based on this, is very, very poor.
Gaashk
1yr ago
Interesting, I wonder what's going on there? And whether social pressure would get him to eat more variety, or just cut him off socially? It seems like it might be a problem if they have kids, though now the schools offer free lunches even on breaks I guess.
My uncle once talked my father (baker at 5 star restaurant, foodie of the French and James Beard tradition) into eating more wasabi with his sushi than he preferred. He talked for several days about how much he regretted it, and how annoyed he was.
Gaashk
1yr ago
People’s comfort music is usually reminiscent of what they listened to as teens. Not sure why they’re so over the top about it, but the preference is unsurprising.
Gaashk
1yr ago
Not really. We went to one with a wooden ship play fort in Louisiana, and it was lovely until we got rained out. I think Chick fil-a has them here.
Gaashk
1yr ago
I don't think personally cooking one's own meals was ever the standard for men living in cities. Or women with money, running a moderate household. I'm not sure how meaningful it is that they would hire a cook directly, rather than a courier. But Freddie, at least, is a communist, and probably opposed to the ways of wealthy households.
Gaashk
1yr ago
I find that - Michelin starred restaurants aside - I can do better in thirty minutes in my own kitchen than pretty much anyone available on the apps.
I'm not in a position to have food delivered, but I find that almost any pre-prepared Costco meal is better than one I cooked (they keep up with the trends; they have birria now). We still cook from raw meat and root vegetables about half the time, but unless it's a taco or something, there's a marinade, some kind of eggs and crumbs or else cooked in a pan and deglazed, then some kind of roasting for one to six hours. The tacos are not bad, but also not better than from a food truck, and with less variety. I absolutely cannot cook proper beans, but I think it takes 8 hours and a piece of pork fat. We can't bring ourselves to eat enough beans to justify that.
I suppose it's piling on at this point, but, yes, it absolutely sounds like you are devaluing them both monetarily, and personally in quite an adversarial way. So while I can see why you might want to get workers with fewer options, I am not convinced that it's at all beneficial for anyone else. If they were making something incredibly useful, you could probably treat them better for it.
More options
Context Copy link