I heard this was one of the social functions filled by the Japanese postal workers. Their official job was to deliver the mail, sure, but they were also encouraged to spend a few minutes talking with everyone as they delivered the mail.
That's a much less efficient way to get mail delivered, because each stop takes 5-10 minutes, and thus it became discouraged.
Efficiency. Short term optimization for the wrong output.
One memorable instance of this sort of thing from back when I was an EMT in Virginia --- rural mailman noticed that an elderly gentleman hadn't picked up their mail from the previous day, so prevailed upon the folks at the next house to allow him to use their phone to call the County Sheriff's Department --- when the Deputy arrived, it was found that the unfortunate had had the seat in their outhouse collapse, trapping them in it.
I don't blame you for the downvotes. The gentleman's gender was clear, there was no logical need to neutralize the following sentence. Even more confusing if you're learning English, its language rules are hard enough without additional ideology rules.
If an older person doesn’t have a whole lot going on, they often look forward to these sorts of routine daily interactions. Missing one could easily be a red flag.
if the older person wants it, yes. On the other hand "welfare check" in lots of areas is a justification to break rules of privacy and it is increasing.
This article starts with an obviously disturbing topic - dying alone as an elderly person. Yet the Japanese are super nosy people with very little privacy in my experience there. Somehow, there are customs that are deeper around privacy that are not obvious.. and perhaps a growing society that is not changing well.
Expectation of privacy, territory and associated manners and legal actions.. are being examined here. The wildly-downvoted comment stands.
Driving along the (not gated) driveway of a home, walking around the perimeter of the property (which did not have a privacy fence, the legal terms here are "curtilage", public right of way, and easement) and hearing a cry for help and acting on it are not an invasion of privacy.
All of this was of course, a long time ago, and a further consideration was that the family whose phone was used were on a party line with the neighbor in question and specifically mentioned that a phone call for that neighbor went unanswered the previous evening which added some urgency to the matter.
If anything, Japan has a culture of privacy and respect of individuals which make this originally noted societal problem more likely.
An important detail that makes this possible: in Japan, the postal worker is allowed to enter your house.
Every Japanese home has a little square area near the front door called a "genkan", where guests are supposed to remove their shoes when entering. Postal workers also occupy this area when delivering mail.
In Ireland there were two stories making the rounds recently of a woman who was only found 2 or 3 months after passing, and another man who was found more than two years after dying.
Ireland has a penchant for derelict buildings (at least where I am). Combine that with unwillingness to impose anything on anyone, and you have a recipe for modern era mummies.
Except mummies were respectfully cared for throughout the embalming process. Don’t tar ancient civilizations with our own inhuman neglect of both living and dead.
A human or animal corpse that was accidentally mummified is still called a mummy. It's a technical term. A lot of mummies are just people who died in a peat bog, desert or ice cave.
Many mummies were also made cruelly rather than respectfully. The Maori mummified the fallen as trophies of war. The Inca would leave sacrifices to be mummified by the mountain ice.
So yes, somebody who dies in a derelict building and dries out is a mummy.
Except it has been found that female mummies usually began the process in a greater state of decomposition than males with the _raison d’être_ being that it discouraged necrophilia on the part of the workers doing the mummification.
It seems like it’s easier to just let them decompose than to get rid of the necropheliacs.
I think this is a situation if “of course no one wants necropheliacs, but we’re all ears as to how you drum them out” so the practical hack of just letting the bodies sit for a bit so perverts don’t like them any more is much more effective.
This comes up a ton in software development where people fixate on what users SHOULD do (eg, rtfm, click this button, register this way) instead of what they actually do. I’m old enough now that I can’t afford the luxury of time spent trying to change users psychology and just want to adapt.
If China really shrinks by 300,000,000 over the next 50 years, visiting empty cities filled with mummified remains might be commonplace(economies can’t pivot fast enough to handling such a high death rate per active worker).
I'd guess the answer to the question is yes (if someone is 70 with no children, it isn't a stretch to see how they might have no visitors for a month).
However industrial societies are very efficient so I don't know what you mean by "can’t pivot fast enough to handling". China could easily handle high death rates per average worker, practically speaking there isn't an upper limit to how many deaths can be handled. Corpses are generally fairly cooperative and theoretically they'll even go away by themselves if left alone. It is caring for old living people that is the hard part.
I think "getting eaten by vultures" is (from our vantage point at least) pretty much the same as "going away by themselves if left alone". That is, it's not like you need to spend money or resources to deal with the problem, you just let nature take its course.
All you need to do is not poison 99% of your vulture population, which is what India did. They learned their lesson, and based on your Wikipedia link, the poison is now banned and populations are starting to recover.
“ The opposite of a civilization in this context, where people neglect the elderly and let them be eaten by vultures without care or concern, could be described as barbarism or a dystopia. These terms often carry connotations of societal decay, where moral and cultural norms have broken down, and the community fails to uphold basic human dignity. “
That’s too simplistic. The situation depends on multiple parameters, including rate of children (future workers) being added, rate of automation advancement, energy supplies, and changes in length of non productive years due to technological advances.
It is obviously possible for old people to live too long so as to become a net cost to society, which means the resources used to keep them alive take from resources that could be spent elsewhere (such as on the young). In fact, that is the top political problem in almost all modern democracies, even though it is not stated that plainly.
> However industrial societies are very efficient so I don't know what you mean by "can’t pivot fast enough to handling".
I wonder how social norms could change if faced with a very large number of such cases. Perhaps people will relax social norms around mourning. Like, eventually becoming acceptable to have unclaimed bodies bagged and left in the curb to be collected by the same truck that collects municipal solid waste, to be landfilled.
When predicting changes in attitudes, it's always safer to assume changes will happen to behaviors that started recently than behaviors that started long ago. In the case of mourning, we've done it since before we could write, and many animals do it too, so it is unlikely we'd stop.
> In the case of mourning, we've done it since before we could write, and many animals do it too, so it is unlikely we'd stop.
We and other animals tend to mourn those that we personally knew and were dear to us. This situation is a bit different, as it involves a surging share of dying people that were left with no close people to mourn them, or even simply notice their absence.
Guess it will become much worse in South Korea, with their 0.7 fertility rate. Many people going single childless today will become lonely elders 30 years from now. It will compound for all the single children, that will have almost no collateral relatives to check on them (no siblings, no nephews/nieces, et cetera).
The current population of China in 2024 is 1,425,178,782, a 0.03% decline from 2023. I don't know where you're getting your alarmism from. If you bother to work out deaths per day in your scenario I suspect it's only a fraction of a percent higher.
(People go absolutely bananas about fertility dipping briefly below replacement, as if this isn't a contingent phenomenon that can and will be changed as circumstances and population change)
There is a demographic pyramid. Once the trend sets in, it’s almost impossible to reverse. You can see the pyramid now and get an idea how their population will look like. Current year growth is not informative.
According to UN projections, by 2060 China's population will be shrinking by approximately 15 million people from one year to another. This is a lower bound estimate on the number of deaths/year there by then, as it includes the effect of births partially offsetting deaths. See https://population.un.org/wpp/Graphs/Probabilistic/POP/Popul...
China dipped below replacement rate over 30 years ago. This means that there are now half as many people even capable of having children than there were then. This is exponential.
People go bananas about it because reversing below replacement birth rates is extremely difficult, basically has not been done in the modern era, and is one of the things that can lead to our economy and society collapsing, a la Japan.
It seems like you're saying that 6 million excess deaths a year in a country has been the norm throughout history, but I don't think that's the case. Even if we just think about it as a percentage of the total population, 300MM into 1.4B is ~21% of total population dead in 50 years, which would be catastrophic for a country's ability to maintain its economy, among other things. It's not exactly as bad as the bubonic plague, but much worse than Covid in any country, and much worse than any wars I can think of, so I think it would have a pretty large effect.
> 300MM into 1.4B is ~21% of total population dead in 50 years
This is old age we're talking about. All of those three hundred million people are going to die anyway over that time period.
> much worse than any wars I can think of
The Taiping rebellion killed somewhere between 20 and 30 million people, approximately 5-10% of the population of China at the time. See if you can spot it on this graph: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_history_of_China - it's lost somewhere in the steep vertical climb on the right.
For a part of that period of dramatic population growth, China famously had a (badly enforced) one child policy.
(also, I guarantee you that there's some maniac in the Chinese ministry of defence looking at a prediction of deaths in a nuclear exchange with the United States that runs into the hundreds of millions, and declaring it winnable. There certainly were on both sides of the US-Russia Cold War, fortunately ignored all the time)
They would, but the ‘support staff of the dying’ to ‘dying of old age’ ratio is going to change by orders of magnitude. It will be a difference of kind.
> catastrophic for a country's ability to maintain its economy
Productivity of 10s of new STEM every few years > productivity of 300m of subsistence farmers / low skill workers in informal economy. Having a lot of surplus people helps in some domains of development / consumption, it's a drag in others, i.e. per capita food/energy security. Thinking about PRC being just 20% less crowded during holidays/events is still pretty stressful.
Around 25% of china population is rural and working on agricultural. They can lose 300m and be completely unaffected if they succeed to move people around. You only need 1% of the people to feed the 99%.
It is sad, but it is what it is. If you end up in a position where you don't have kids or close family, friends, or social workers that visit you, you could very well end up laying there until the stench affects your neighbors, bills go unpaid, or similar stuff.
In this day and age, many people - myself included - have bills on auto pay. So if money comes in, bills get paid, and no one knows you, it could take months to years before someone discovers you.
Her in Norway we had one case, where a man laid dead for 9 years in his apartment. He didn't have anyone, and people assumed he had moved or gone to a care facility. A janitor found him by chance.
Japan has only just begun its implosion. Population dropped by about 0.5 million last year but that will 3x within a decade given their population pyramid.
Losing 1-2% of your population per year is catastrophic and exponential.
Totally different circumstance because the population pyramid even after black death looked great. Tons of incoming young people every generation. In fact it improved the pyramid! The black plague disproportionately killed old people.
This is going to end up in a top heavy pyramid with a ton of old people relying on fewer and fewer young people. Simply because fewer and fewer are being born every year.
I think people who say this did not have the misfortune of growing up in a society where there are few jobs that don't pay well and basically your entire existence is to subsidize a much larger class of elderly whose values, desires, etc. always trump your own
that's already an extremely loaded framing from the point of view of an individualized society. For a lot of people there is meaning in taking care, and listening to their elders.
There's quite a bit of misfortune too in communities where your old family members are treated with the dignity of a used sofa cushion and shoved into the nursing home out of sight out of mind so you can self actualize and have a lot of fun.
same concept. Japan is a nation of people who share a common bond. Thinking your responsibility ends at your houses fence is already adopting an atomized, American view. When Fukushima happened there were elderly volunteer groups who demanded that they be sent to clean up the waste to spare the youth, not just their own grandkids, everyone's. It's why when an earthquake levels a city there's no panic and looting in the streets.
There is a whole national responsibility from young to old and the other way. This transactional language of talking about old people as a political class, of support as "subsidies" is already being stuck in an entirely different economized, weird mindset.
I am talking from experience. I love my family and my elders and will spend everything for them. I don't have the same love for random elders I'm unrelated to even slightly who basically occupy all the top spots and jobs and ensure that young people have no chance at ascending.
It depends who you are tbh. AFAIK they have a large problem dealing with mental health, and LGBT rights there aren't as good as a lot of other places. I understand they're getting a bit better about these kinds of things more recently but they've still got a way to go
Japan is already known for its aging population plus a low birth rate. The article mentions many of them were old, and of course older people have their friends and family die off, and move around less frequently. The low birth rate means fewer connections to a younger generation.
So for japan, and later the world, yeah - this might go up.
Sad, very sad, but a sign of our times (for some years now). Life around us has/is changing and there are more people interested in their careers and bank accounts than life itself and the supporting environment of family, friends, colleagues, relatives...
We're going to be seeing this more and more in the coming years :-(
Sometimes I wonder with all our great progress what did we do wrong if it caused us to stop having kids at replacement rate? I know we can not turn back the clock, but if it were a game of Sims or Civilization, what are the set of choices and progresses we could have made to avoid this outcome
As sibling comment says, this is the outcome of what we did right, and decades of policy programme.
We spent the 20th century changing the norm from "women will, from teenagerhood, roll the dice on pregnancy approximately five times with a 2% maternal mortality rate, with the expectation of at least one child not making it to adulthood, and a reasonable chance of experiencing famine at least once in your life" to .. not that. From the 1.65 billion people who entered the 20th century to the approximately 8 billion today.
We averted the Malthus catastrophe. With tremendous effort we got the line to dip below replacement rate. Now people are panicking that it will never go up again?
How many people do you think they should be on Earth? 8 billion, sixteen, a hundred billion? What does the average megacity look like at that level?
How can it be the outcome of what we did right when it is leading to shrinking, aging populations struggling to pay for less and less used infrastructure? The only way we are avoiding becoming Japan 2.0 in the West is by immigration, and that's leading to the resurgence of far right politicians in Europe, which turned out very well the first time around.
I don't think we should grow the population forever. I also don't think we should shrink so smaller and smaller generations are burdened to pay for the life of older and larger ones.
Japan's population decline is due to the collapse of the "bubble economy" in the 90s. This resulted in the "Lost Decades" where household incomes fell. This is especially shocking to Japan that had promoted the myth of the "salary man" where you worked for one company for life and are rewarded with lifetime employment. This break of the Japanese social contract left a deep scar on the Japanese psyche. To further complicate things, married women in Japan face social pressure to drop out of the work force after having children. They face an impossible choice of not having children or poverty.
What I find so weird about this whole situation that it has been coming for decades. Like at least 20, but probably lot more. And no one has found effective solution.
It's not what we did wrong, it's what we did right: education, contraception, women's rights, new forms of entertainment that are quite literally better than sex.
If we wanted to avoid this outcome we'd need to make the world a much worse place than it already is, and if that's really the case then we frankly deserve to go extinct.
The game is rigged and has always been, but through the entire human history people were too stupid to realize this, and the survival instinct made them, well, survive. Now is the first time ever that common man asked himself the question "Wait what?". We need a new social contract wherein the society actually does take care of an individual, instead of saying "git gud"
> what did we do wrong if it caused us to stop having kids at replacement rate?
Gave people freedom via women’s rights, a somewhat peaceful society, and birth control. The previously high fertility rates were entirely a consequence of Mother Nature giving men more physical power than women, and women not being able to control their fertility.
As a person that has almost no contact with other people beyond the daily stand-up meeting I'm forced into... I kinda have to
> press x to doubt
The reason why some people (including myself) avoid social interactions is because of previous interactions that likely happened in their teens. But it's still objectively a very unhealthy thing. It's like being overweight, drinking alcohol or smoking. It's fine, but definitely not healthy.
So I have to concur: we're social animals, even if some of us choose to avoid social interactions. Just like some people succumb to other unhealthy habits
Yeah, good point. I find most social situations and interactions tiresome and sometimes avoid them. But I do enjoy interactions with some people a lot, so maybe you're onto something.
I always feel hopeful when I read stories like this. It’s apparently still possible to live a life where no one bothers you for months at a time, even on this overcrowded planet.
I don't think dead people care how long they've been dead before they're found. It's unpleasant to think about dead bodies sitting around, but ultimately not their biggest problem.
If your argument is "have children so someone will check on you when you're old", I'd argue that bringing sentient beings into the world for just that purpose is a bit overkill. Other options include: being part of a strong community, living in some sort of communal place for elderly folk, or even just some sort of basic health monitoring that can alert emergency services if something looks off.
Adopting is also an option if you're really sold on the "sentient beings" thing.
> I don't think dead people care how long they've been dead before they're found. It's unpleasant to think about dead bodies sitting around, but ultimately not their biggest problem.
I think one unspoken assumption is that if someone is checking in with you regularly, they might actually find you before you die, and either call an ambulance to help you, or notice that something might be a problem before it becomes severe.
> The US and other individualistic Western countries are probably the exception.
It's probably because the areas of greatest economic opportunity keep shifting, so children don't end up in the same city as their parents to care for them.
I always thought the main issue this was exposing is that if it takes months for anybody to notice you’ve died, then you must have been living a rather sad life at the time.
I’ve lived alone, and I’ve lived with the right people, and I’ve lived with the wrong people. Living with the right people was good. Living alone was perfectly fine. Living with the wrong people was hellish.
I'm not sure if you realize what it seems like you're advocating for: solitary life and dying alone. Having biological children because you want biological children is not as nuts as you seem to imply.
If you live a life so isolated from other people that you can die and nobody notices for months, you are either living a sad life, or you’re highly socially dysfunctional.
Agreed. It's not exactly a nice thing to say or think about but it's obviously true in the general case. I'd be curious about the perspective of those that disagree.
I've never understood this argument. Caregivers are paid; it's a job. No one is forced to go into elderly care.
Having kids isn't even a guarantee that they'll be around to care for you in your old age. My grandparents had four and still needed to be moved to a home with a full time carer at the end because none of their kids were able to move back home to take care of them.
It probably still holds on the level of the whole society. Modern society and division of labour means it doesn't have to be specifically your kids who care for your, but it still need to be somebody's kids. If nobody had kids any more, nobody would be left to provide any care, paid or not.
Plus it's not just about really literal full-on elderly care, but also simply keeping society running even when you're old enough that you can no longer actively contribute your share as much.
It's not about caring for you, it's, in cynical terms, about building the future tax base to maintain the infrastructure you will utilize in your old age. Every Western society has the elderly using more resources than they contribute, esp. regarding healthcare. Some even use more resources than they ever earned in life.
I know it's horribly cynical, but if you don't have kids then go on Medicare then rack up a huge bill, you've basically burdened a smaller next generation with a higher tax bill and basically are setting up a Japan 2.0
I can't have kids. Dying alone is my fate, nothing I can do about it.
____
It's something I think about a lot. I have siblings and niblings, but I live in a 3rd world country and my goal in life is to escape to some first world country.
If I escape, I will die alone abroad; but while I live, I'll be able to make my life and the life of my loved ones better.
If I stay, I might be able to count on my nephews/nieces to check on me in old age...but depending on how life goes and what the economic conditions are, it's much more likely that...
Not only do I live a terrible life, but when I am old and my siblings dead, my niblings will ignore me, unable to take care of another burden, nor would I want to be such a burden on them.
Which lends me back to option 1: go abroad... then maybe retire back here? But then I would have no connection, and nor would they have one with me.
_____
I'v seen this happen here a lot. A lot of people I know lived their lives in the Gulf... used to a certain standard of living and having barely any connection to the relatives back home.
They educated their kids and sent then to uni in 1st world countries, while they retired to big palatial homes here.
But now they are alone, their kids have no reason to come back after uni to the big 3rd world homes their fathers built... and the relatives here have no connection to the uncle/aunt from the gulf they saw once every three years.
The kids are alone abroad, the parents are alone here. No one wins.
How familiar are you with adoption in the first world? Single, older gentleman do not usually get approved or have the resources to adopt. Being an immigrant probably doesn't help, either.
My great aunt had 6 children, and arguably raised them alright. They had all moved on with their lives and she died alone. My grandma and I were the only family that spent even a little time with her.
Yeah, a lot of people will talk about being afraid of dying alone, but I'm pretty much just afraid of dying. The circumstances of my death are really just a light seasoning compared to the main fare that is the terror of that death itself.
I was under the impression that the fear of death is a near universal instinct amongst living things, but humans, given our unique intelligence may know the fear of it better than any other animal because we understand that it is coming for us all.
Personally, I was around seven years old when I realized that there was no god and it meant that death would be the end of my consciousness. It probably didn't help that I had an operation about that time using general anesthesia which effectively turned my brain off for a few hours and showed me what it might mean to be dead for a short time - a period in which I was not present and formed no memories, and what it would mean to be dead for an infinite time. I was not a particularly easy-going child after that.
I had no fear of death at all till my 40s, and I wouldn't call what I have now a fear, a slight sadness maybe, just about how many more bats I can swing or whatever, this life has been a great one, so it will be annoying to end it, still it's not fear.
I really appreciate you sharing your story, helps me think about my own thoughts and feelings. :) <3
While I would like to live essentially forever, I wasn’t ever really terrified of death. It’s more like a regret or melancholy that that’s how physical reality works. Maybe readings like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8579608 could improve your coping with the outlook.
“A coward dies a thousand times before his death, but the valiant taste of death but once. It seems to me most strange that men should fear, seeing that death, a necessary end, will come when it will come.” - Shakespeare, Julius Caesar
Diversify your portfolio! Don't rely on just your kids, who are likely to move abroad, start families of their own, etc. Make sure you have friends and local people in your community who value your time as well.
I've been trying, but it turns out that finding a woman willing to marry and have children (aka "postpone her career goals") with an introverted immigrant who hates bars is not as straightforward as I thought.
Various businesses provide paid service called 見守りサービス to have someone (or a machine) check up on you. The idea is to detect health emergencies early enough and act on getting help, in case family members and neighbors can't. Not that that is the best option, but at least money can help to some extent.
What does it matter if someone finds you in a day or a month?
People don't always go from fine to dead in an instant. There can be a period of days when you are still alive, but incapable of calling for help. If you were found in that period you wouldn't necessarily have to end up dead.
It took roughly 3 weeks until the death of my neighbor was finally detected. Granted, it smelled a little odd to my rather non-functional nose, but the staircase of this house has smelled of weird a lot while we had this old lady with the bladder control issues. Long story short, his immediate neighbor finally called the police since the smell seeped into her apartment. Why did it take so long? He had aggression issues, and was basically kept sociable through a nice mixture of drugs. When he forgot to take them, he would randomly threaten other people from our house, sometimes with death, sometimes just screaming at them. He was a problem, to be honest. Younger women coming visit our apartment building sometimes left in fear, because he would randomly verbally attack them. I got a straigt death threat to my face. "I am going to kill you." Turns out, if you call the police, they tell you "And what am I supposed to do now?" Taught me a lot about "the system". Anyways, when he passed away, and didn't make any useless nose anymore, nobody cares. Social isolation is a complex mix of a lot of things. And its a feedback system...
It looks like Japan sees 1.5 million deaths/year, so 4000 deaths in half a year is about 0.5%. So this is outlier data, and it would not be at all surprising if the overwhelming majority of them were childless. Whatever remains really cannot be enough to judge a society by.
This is not just Japan. I've seen two stories in Romania of a village with a single inhabitant: a 70+ year old man. One of them has three dogs. When he dies there might not even be remains to be found.
Previous studies have revealed some differences between canine and feline scavenging. Dogs tend to eat the face and throats of humans, then break the ribs and chew on bones. Cats, on the other hand, often strip skin from the nose, upper lip, and fingers (the same places, Rando notes, that they nip at when playing with a living owner). Scavenging is more common with dogs than cats, Byard adds, “but I don’t trust either of them.”
Why do so many people online report having poor relationships with their parents? Is this real? I don't know anyone in real life who talks like this about their parents. Am I in a bubble or what?
Parenting, like life, is the accumulation of the consequences of decisions/actions.
Unless a child has the grace to grant a parent forgiveness for their (forgivable) failures, and unless a parent was able to create a safe and loving environment in which a child could grow up with such a mindset, estrangement is inevitable.
Usually, the crux which this revolves around is the realization that each child is a unique person with their own potential, and hopes, and dreams, and that it is not fair to the child if the parent does not make providing the best possible environment for that child a central focus of their life.
Many people who are (rightly or not) disappointed by their parents and troubled by aspects of how they were raised will view this as something private and will only open up in therapy, or some other private interaction --- some folks consider the anonymity of online intercourse to have a privacy of/distance from their real life that it is safe to mention things --- I guess in my day it was the "bartender effect".
Consider your question as coming from a position of grace/luck and count your blessings.
I'm not sure making children the "central focus" of the lives of the parent will turn out to be as healthy as we think it in the current moment. I would agree if this qualified "[one of] the central focus[es]" and what you mean by "best possible" in terms of the cost the parent makes for the "best possible" instead of "adequate".
- children are god’s future army and their entire purpose in life is to prepare for an afterlife by expanding that religion
- children are inherently sinful; nothing they can do is good enough in god’s eyes; the most important thing in existence is to believe in this particular story and to dedicate one’s life to this belief
I truly believe it was love for their kids that drove my parents to instill such an extreme and harmful worldview. Primarily because of some pretty major unresolved Traumas with a capital T in both of their lives. Decades later, I’m still unwinding what remains a complex relationship in therapy.
The point of this anecdote was just that there’s a subset of us who had parents extremely focused on their kids and who really did invest the time into focusing on what’s “best”.
They just saw the world very differently, in ways that turn out to be extremely harmful, and I’m a messy product of that.
Love is not love when it does not realize that the person being loved is their own unique individual self. Moreover, as I tried to express, that the function of a parent is to help that child become the best version of themselves, hence my noting:
>...realization that each child is a unique person with their own potential, and hopes, and dreams...
That your parents labeled how they treated you as "love" does not make it an act of lovingkindness (to pull from my wife's Master's thesis) --- it is important that people should evaluate things without considerations for labels applied by others, and then arrive at a reasoned, impartial perception which is valid in terms of logic and correlation with the facts of the past. (Q: How many legs does a dog have if you call a tail a leg? A: Four, calling a tail a leg doesn't make it a leg.)
The drunken and enraged parent who claims, "This will hurt me more than it does you." as he unstraps his belt is lying to himself and to the child, and it is important for the child to realize that --- understanding the self-deception which makes such an act possible may be helpful, but it is more important to understand the facts of the matter --- by way of contrast, the toddler who bites another person has to be slapped because their intellectual engagement does not yet admit of other people having feelings (which is why they are able to inflict pain since they do not realize that others will feel pain), and since they are on the cusp of that realization, explaining afterwards along with some natural consequence will help guide them to that realization.
> the realization that ... it is not fair to the child if the parent does not make providing the best possible environment for that child a central focus of their life
Unwise of you to state "realization of" to a statement that is not broadly agreed upon. I bet you also believe "you didn't choose to be born"?
What's not to agree with "I didn't choose to be born"? Is there a child who asked to be born? Is there a child who consciously decided to be, or not to be, born? There's no "believing" here; it's just a biological fact: people don't get born because they want to. I really don't get what you're trying to say.
It has to do with you disassociating yourself from your biological being.
When the sperm and egg fused, thus you began, and you very much wanted to be alive: it is literally programmed into your genetic makeup. It was you who decided to divide and divide continually at that point.
My point is that when you use the word "I" you seem to imply only the little bit of yourself which exists in your prefrontal cortex is you, and the rest is !you.
If you regret being alive, that is different from claiming you didn't want to be alive at one point. Wasn't it you who suckled on milk? Who cried for care and love?
I'm sorry, I don't talk to people who think a single cell is a person. I'm too old now to waste time pointing out fanaticism and trying to correct it in random Internet encounters. Good day to you.
It is interesting, even, "you were the one who chose me before birth" in new-age spiritual belief terms was used as posthoc rationalization for things that were committed against me growing up by a parent, that I still deal with now. Unarguable because it's just my belief, see. I have trained myself to see people espousing it as a red flag.
If you think providing for a child is not appropriate as a central focus of a parent's life, please take that into consideration before doing anything which might involve a child.
While politics are something I prefer not to discuss, I hope that every woman who has ever found herself in need of a tampon, and every person with a concern for how laws requiring that society investigate every reported miscarriage as a potential crime shows up to vote in the next election, and that that coalition then puts in place a legal framework which makes giving birth a free and uncoerced choice.
Unfortunately that doesn't really help with the right for straight men to not be fathers. Obviously it's a difficult topic considering once the deed is done, it's done. But it does take two to tango.
I won't need any later; I'm gay. But yes, men do need more birth control options to both share in the responsibility for it as well as to empower them to proactively make a decision before it can be taken away from them.
Or, one can make a conscious decision to only be sexually intimate with a person with whom one has a sufficient emotional connection that raising a child together is a reasonable premise.
My relationship with my parents is extremely complicated at best. Therapy is literally why I have a relationship with them at all.
This is fairly common in the particular circle I grew up in (deeply religious and very conservative), and I didn’t see a healthy parent/child relationship until I started dating someone from a very different background. It was eye opening.
You're in a (probably upper middle class) bubble. Think about all the bad/rude/shitty/sick/criminal/awful/miserable people you've interacted with in your life or read about online/on TV. Odds are, those people have kids because most people have kids. Odds also are their public behavior is their best behavior and their private behavior is much worse. Bad people are actually MORE likely to have children and have more children because they don't care about the welfare of their children and having children increases your social standing in life.
I am someone who has truly horrible people as parents; they abused me physically and mentally/emotionally, neglected my needs, broke me down, told me they hated me and wished I was never born, and told me I ruined their life for existing. Nothing I ever did or said was "right," I was always criticized. There was also severe mental illness, domestic violence, criminal activity, and substance abuse going on my entire childhood. It's not hyperbole to describe my childhood as 18 years of torture. I've been diagnosed with PTSD due to my childhood experiences.
I talk about it openly online with stranges, I talk about it with my various mental health providers over the years. However, most of my friends don't really know the full extent of the terror I experienced and I'll never talk about it with stranges or just acquaintances.
It doesn't really come up in conversation very often and it's kinda hard to talk about in person. It's hard enough telling my therapists about it. It's also just really embarrassing and I have to REALLY trust you before talking about it IRL.
We have an extremely pronatalist society and nobody really casually wants to hear about the victims that produces. It's not socially acceptable outside an extremely close relationship.
I don't feel the same typing about it semi-anonymously online. I also REALLY feel that I need to correct the cultural idea that "all parents are inherently good."
We'd have to do a point by point comparison to know for sure if you had it worse than me (I'm leaning towards yes), but otherwise all of this is very familiar! In particular,
> Odds also are their public behavior is their best behavior and their private behavior is much worse.
They had very clear rules about how we (bro and I) weren't supposed to talk to other people about our home life, and they went full personality cult propaganda on how amazing they were
as parents, and how other people wouldn't understand. And yes, they were shitty to service workers, anyone socially below them really. And they were worse at home.
>We'd have to do a point by point comparison to know for sure if you had it worse than me (I'm leaning towards yes), but otherwise all of this is very familiar!
You might not realize this on a conscious level, but the reason you're reluctant to tell your friends about your parents is because they'll assume you're a bad person too, due to how you inherited their codebase. If my parents were abusive, I'd want to hide that fact, similar to how I'd want to hide a past felony conviction for abuse. Because I believe people can change and deserve the opportunity to rise above their circumstances and make themselves into something better than where they came from. Having that opportunity is more important than the emotional catharsis of oversharing, wouldn't you agree?
It's definitely not rare. Many people have negative relationships with their parents. Sometimes, however, it's not even a poor relationship but being unable/unwilling to deal with the stress of exposing yourself to their mental and physical degradation.
You may be in a bubble, I know plenty of people with no/minimal relationship with parents. But it may not be a bad thing overall. Historically when people didn't go far away from home they had more "forced" contact with parents; now, not as much. In the same way that it's good that we get more divorces now (people, mostly women, are able to leave bad relationships without the community/church getting in the way), it's also good that people can live independent lives and are not bound to their families.
Of course it's better if the relationship is healthy, but both sides need to work on that. There are subreddit of estranged parents too and communities like https://www.rejectedparents.net/forums/ but often the stories turn out to be "we're so alone, why are the kids so bad and don't talk to us anymore? (oh yeah, we did try to force them to do X, but that's irrelevant)"
Even that depends on what people you are putting first.
Putting the individual first and it will likely make sense to put little value in family structures and community connection.
Putting community first, or specifically the people who are in a stage of life that really need help day to day, and valuing family connections makes more sense.
Neither are an absolute fix to everything. Like everything else, a mix of both likely makes the most sense.
The thread here is talking about it as a very common occurrence.
If you really think that a large percentage, or even a majority, of parents have fucked up their kids we have much bigger problems to deal with than how many elderly people may be living alone.
It's something that seldom comes up in conversation due to politeness and the strong likelihood that it will cause discomfort, but a few friends I know intimately have reported bad relationships and questionable parenting only after long personal conversations when we're alone.
A causal factor is the tendency to normalise early experiences, even if they are neglectful or abusive. This means many are unaware or reluctant to realise their upbringing wasn't that good when they are older. Without critical examination the early experiences and the assumptions you had as a child are carried into adulthood. So a lot of people will say their parents are 'loving' even if they were far from it.
If you are in a bubble, stay there. It is a happier place.
Yes, young adults today are more willing to "cancel" their parents. Often enough it is for issues which a generation ago would have been seen as the child not accepting adult responsibility; suddenly the parent is the bad person for doing what their parents considered made them a good person.
>Often enough it is for issues which a generation ago would have been seen as the child not accepting adult responsibility; suddenly the parent is the bad person for doing what their parents considered made them a good person.
My sperm provider literally said that his dad treated him like shit, so he gets to treat me like shit, and that as a reward some day I'd get to treat my own son like shit.
I fired both of them 8 years ago and haven't missed them even one time. They were always an emotional cost center. Whenever I had one problem, if they found out, I'd have two: the original problem and providing emotional support to them for having upset them.
When I first moved to uni, I was utterly confused by everybody saying they were looking forward to going home for Christmas - why on earth would you want to go back to that? I remained baffled for another 12 years until I finally realised what had happened. I drew a poor hand.
Calling this decay is an incredibly short sighted view of the actual changes that are happening. Kids used to grow up in toxic households with parents fighting and hating each other. Just look at old TV shows like Married with Children and The Honeymooners.
Now they grow up with an absent parent. I'm the latter and I'm really happy my parents chose divorce over keeping up appearances and giving me a shitty life. Domestic abuse in general has also been on a pretty steady decline because of the decrease in societal pressure to stay married.
Well... Duh. I would've loved to have two parents who loved each other and took me on fun family trips!
But that wasn't an option, since they had an awful relationship. So the options were either divorce or doubling down on a shitty relationship. They chose divorce and I'm happy for it.
Also, your study doesn't seem to have any comparison to the impact of abusive relationships vs. father absence, which is what I was talking about. If you can find anything about that, I'd love to see it.
No, they definitely haven't replaced them. But divorce being more common has certainly opened up doors for plenty of women to escape abusive relationships. That doesn't mean that they can all find that open door or all have an open door.
There are still plenty of people in religions where divorced is frowned upon (to put it lightly) and there are also plenty of people who are mentally unable to pull out of a toxic relationship. But the reduction in societal pressure that 'marriage is forever' definitely has an impact.
Divorce laws indeed had some good outcomes like you wrote, but it also allowed people to make carefree choices when choosing a mate - something that should be a well thought out, very long-term deal - and as we all know, we're now in the realm of perverse incentives on the subject.
And don't get me started on the vicious interactions between the "soft deprecation" of fault divorce, the abolition of adultery laws and economic aids for single parents. Clearly not the best mixture of choices.
> it also allowed people to make carefree choices when choosing a mate
Lets flip that coin... Religion/tradition forces people to get married before they actually knew each other well. Then they move in together, have kids and must stay together forever. I feel like 'we need to get married to live together' is way more in the realm of perverse incentives.
In the 70's, people on average married around age 22. Right now that's closer to age 29. Which one seems more carefree to you? To me it's the getting married at 22 without having lived together.
Speaking from experience there is also another case of parents who have an outwardly affirming relationship between each other but not necessarily to (all of) their children. Sort of like co dependents but only certain people close enough in proximity to both people bear emotional abuse/golden child-type selective behavior. The rest of the public are deceived by the outward appearance of a stable family.So the relationship between the parents is firm but they both treat the child harsh.
This is a bad position to begin with because neither parent stands up with the child. A single parent could be a friend the child would not otherwise have. And on top of that it could fall below the threshold for outright removal of child by support services if there is no "obvious" problem (divorce, physical abuse, abandonment). Because a certain degree of emotional abuse for a young child is near totally invisible to others if the child thinks they're the one in the wrong and doesn't defend themselves (which both parents agree on so it is stronger). And invoking those services can severely damage one's working future due to material concerns about college the parents would not have paid otherwise.
That in turn creates a sense of entitlement to opinion (we did everything for you, this is all you do to pay us back, etc...), feeling of creating debt/attachment to that past, and so on. Because they didn't hit or spank, but merely taught an important lesson in a more subtle way, they're not abusive like everyone else, so there is no problem, so on.
I know I'm just venting by now but these sorts of issues take years or decades to come to light after venturing into an adult life and might not be easily quantifiable in the way "this couple divorced" or "this child was removed from the household" would. There are grey areas in between, some of which still have some support by the public (like some types of corporal punishment being acceptable to an undefined degree)
I know a lot of people who have issues with their parents/family/spouses in one way or another. In part because I'm not a very judgemental person, but probably a big part is that I have a lot of unrelated friendships, so people can tell me anything without a chance of that thing ending up as gossip. The internet is like that, you can tell anyone anything from your anonymous account without it ever coming back to you.
Honestly, I know only a few people who have near zero issues with their parents and would happily have them move in when they get older.
People with issues from horrible upbringing are often going to be far more vocal than happily raised kids from loving families. Nothing wrong with that; they have valuable opinions and experiences to share. But you mustn't draw statistical conclusions from people talking online, ever.
Paraphrasing, "All happy families are the same; all broken families are unhappy in their own unique way."
You see a lot more talk of poor parental relationships online because those people have something concrete to talk and complain about; in contrast anyone who's relationship with their parents is just generically "fine" don't really have anything to comment on. You can see the same phenomenon in the reviews of a lot of things, not just relationships
There was an interesting article about how much more common it is for people to cut off ties with their parents over things like politics or whatever else, things the parents did not understand as a big deal. I do think it's increasing. The ones I know who do it and I'm close enough to know the family, I think it's entirely resolvable and sad
Yes it's real. And some aspects of those relationships I have found are unsolvable problems, dead ends. For all of the things I feel good about accomplishing and creating, I can't heal that relationship. Some people are just set in their ways, it is a fact of life, and there is no solution to be pursued. It was an important lesson.
There are a lot of other problems in the world people bicker about here and elsewhere like urban planning or regulation. Things that seem like solutions can be enacted if only big movements are made, people cooperate.
Narcissistic parents are best cut off at first realization. That is a black hole of effort. You were dealt a bad hand and no social safety net would have helped (they were even tricked by the propaganda). No entrepreneur or startup is going to meaningfully address the root of people who are simply born to the wrong parents, only the aftermath. Because the parents are always right and won't be told otherwise, until it's too late. And there is no crucially important meaning behind this happenstance. It just is.
Better to spend the effort undoing the years worth of damage on yourself instead.
Of the people that I know that are either in a similar situation (of having gone 100% no-contact) or even those that meet their parents for Christmas and Easter but otherwise keep them on an information diet about their own lives (so about a dozen, let's say), not a single one of them told me their situation first. They only opened up after I casually mentioned that I fired my parents in response to a much smaller parent-related complaint on their part.
I've wondered about this too. Seems 90% of people on the internet have abusive narcissistic relationships with their parents, while 90% of the people I know in real life love their parents very much.
>...while 90% of the people I know in real life love their parents very much.
Wait hold on. Let's not conflate a strained family relationship with not loving them. Both my parents had an extremely abusive relationship with their parents, to the point where they could not be around them (And by extension neither was I), but they always loved them — And so did their parents, they were just extremely flawed.
I get along well with mine, but completely understand how complicated family relationships are.
That's a much less efficient way to get mail delivered, because each stop takes 5-10 minutes, and thus it became discouraged.
Efficiency. Short term optimization for the wrong output.