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I’m extrapolating because she’s your n=1, or within your n=5. How else can I respond to your sample? I have to infer from what I know about American life because I have no details.
Yes. But not every moment of it. But that are major moments of relaxation. And traditional cultures find ways to make it relaxing. You don’t think rocking a child to sleep with a lullaby is relaxing to women? Or seeing them jump in puddled in a cute raincoat? Or telling a fun story to make them either behave out of fear or out of reward? I’ll grant it’s also stressful for traditional women, at times, but they have the training that makes it more enjoyable.
Yes but these things often bring relaxation, too. There’s relaxation after a hard bike ride, and you are more relaxed on the whole than never biking. So on the whole, an experience with stress can be relaxing. But not if you’re multitasking two huge stressors, or one huge stressor without previous training. If you told me to unicycle while juggling it would be horribly stressful, but if I mastered it in childhood then I would be a very relaxed clown indeed, happy to show off my neat skills. This is Csikzentmihalyi’s flow state: optimal human mood occurs when doing a challenging thing around the limits of our skill. (The lowest mood is on Sunday mornings when someone lacks a challenge to do). This is the most anxiolytic human state. Alex Honnold is relaxed despite free-soloing mountains all day because he mastered that skill, and I suppose he tells himself that is has “purpose”, but it’s not exactly raising up new life.
There’s only one other way to gain wisdom about this without reading: going around conducting polls. I have not gone around conducting polls in these communities. There’s not another way, as far as I know. Not one that’s reliable.
No, you're engaging in Bulverism. You assume that I'm wrong and work back to reasons why.
That's rather a weaker claim. Almost everything has moments of relaxation. Even the most stressful job you can imagine probably has coffee breaks.
You wouldn't know this since you've never raised a child, but raising a child does in fact involve multitasking a bunch of stressors. This is all squared with multiple children. Again, I strongly recommend you raise a child before forming opinions about what it is like.
In fact, there is a way to acquire true knowledge about the world without symbolic manipulation, and that's by gaining firsthand experience.
I don’t know, I’m just not convinced that your anecdota is valuable here as a generalized principle. There’s no reason for me to think that you have insight into female happiness, nor your wife or female friends. Neither do I think that women have strong insight into their own happiness, because humans are bad at predicting what makes them happy, both male and female. Hence why someone like Csikzentmihalyi can come in and totally revise how we understand peak emotional experiences. And why papers like the Paradox of Declining Female Happiness are important. Imagine how crazy it would be to think that humans can decide nutrition for themselves by taste? So I will err on the side of the Amish. The study indicates their lifestyle make women pretty relaxing even though they babymax.
I'm not talking about happiness. I'm talking about whether they find a particular activity to be relaxing or not.
To whatever extent you doubt my anecdata, consider that you have even less. You don't even have a wife or children of your own!
The study doesn't measure 'relaxation.' As I already stated:
Women of all categories (married, unmarried, kids, no kids) have fewer psychosocial hassles in the Amish population. There's no indication that having kids actually changes psychosocial hassles in either population.
Maybe if the psychosocial hassle score increased for genpop women with children vs genpop childless women you'd have something, but as is you're just grasping at straws to support a conclusion you really want to believe in.
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