This is the outcome of everyone working. There's no alternate, complementary system (mostly women) of interesting, society-strengthening activities. Everyone works because they have to, because otherwise they won't afford a house when competing against two-income households, so everyone's busy, so everything's a rush and far more activities that used to be done are now monetised.

No time for baking treats; just buy some perma-plastic-wrapped ultra processed sugary snack. No time for being a governor at the local school or taking turns looking after each others' kids. No time to look after aging parents. Just don't do it or buy it in.

No way to teach the next generation how to run a home on a budget or cook healthy for for their kids, the boss needs coffee.

The only winners are boomers and banks, for whom the second person works half their lives to pay back for the inflated house price.

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Aurornis an hour ago | parent | next [-]

> No time for baking treats

> No time for being a governor at the local school

The way the internet talks about employment is so foreign compared to real life.

Does anyone really believe that having a job precludes baking treats? Or volunteering at a school? My kids' school and all of my friends' kids' schools have parent-run boards and other organizations where most of the participants also have jobs.

Outside of the accounts I read on the internet, the many people I know in person have lives outside of their jobs. Having a job is the default state for most people, yet we're out here doing things and interacting with each other.

> No way to teach the next generation how to run a home on a budget or cook healthy for for their kids, the boss needs coffee.

You people know that kids go to school during the workday, right? And that people teach their kids how to cook while also having jobs during the day?

This is all so weird to read as a parent. Like I'm reading about a different world where everyone is working 100 hours per week

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WarmWash 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

But it's all just work, all the ways down.

What you are describing is working for someone else, but the alternative, working for yourself, is definitely not the dreamy image all the people working for someone else thinks it is. Working for yourself is work + risk, albeit you get to chose (read: try to correctly identify) the work.

So no matter what, unless you want blob on the states dime, you are going to spend most of your life doing work.

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ElevenLathe 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I think what we've shed are more things like chairing a committee for the VFW, selling snacks at little league games, or being active in a lowers voice, looks over shoulder union. These are things that would traditionally take up the social slack left by not punching a clock every day, and we've eliminated them systematically to make room for more marketized activities. Today's retirees are "richer" than their parents were, so they can take cruises, travel, pursue expensive hobbies, etc. but they largely don't have a social context to make those things satisfying, and there are fewer grandkids to take care of than ever.

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hallole 3 hours ago | parent [-]

In what way have we "eliminated them systematically"? Maybe I haven't paid close enough attention, but it feels like those activities have (unfortunately) disappeared largely naturally.

	▲	Moomoomoo309 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Take this question a step further and ask _why_ those activities disappeared. What are those people who would previously have been doing that, now doing instead? Usually, the answer is working. For the unions, decades of policy have systematically eliminated them, but for the other points, it's more of a "between the lines" thing.

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strifey 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

They're not describing working for yourself? At least in terms of financial compensation. A job and some form of communal/familial uncompensated labor are extremely different in this context. Calling them both "work" in this context is muddying the waters.

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wholinator2 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I emphatically disagree. Baking treats is working for yourself? Taking care of the neighbors kids in turns is working for yourself? Are you saying that spending time having hobbies and participating in the local community is "work" and thus must also be as soul crushing as a 9-5 pushing pointless word documents?

None of this is "working for yourself", it's called having a life with friends and hobbies.

	▲	WarmWash 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I'm saying the community you envision in your head doesn't exist without the "crushing" 9-5. Every society ever has been people doing "crushing" work (albeit with some brief pockets of living comfortably on societal stockpile). Our comforts are the fruits of others "crushing" 9-5. And sure, you can find a group of like minded people and go fully off grid, and live that life of "leisure". But your idea of leisure better be farming all day, being hungry with bland food all winter, and a gash on your toe being life threatening. Usually when people conceptualize stuff like this, they do it on a personal level without consideration for what society on a whole would look like if everyone did it. If you keep digging, you find that 99% of people actually just want benefits of others work without working themselves. What a revelation!

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AlecSchueler 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> But it's all just work, all the ways down.

> What you are describing is working for someone else

That's completely true and important to remember, especially because it's historically been easy to force especially women into that kind of work.

But I think the salient thing here is that that particular kind of work of facilitating personal relationships has been lost, and that's as worrying--indeed more worrying--as if we suddenly started losing all the train drivers or all the surgeons or all the grain harvesters.

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jltsiren 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

It's an outcome of the expectation that people earn their living. People work less today than they used to, but a larger fraction of that work is paid.

And it's a consequence of making divorce legal and socially acceptable. Traditional marriage was primarily an economic contract. The wife assumed the responsibility for running the household, and the husband had a lifetime obligation to support her.

But if you stay away from paid work long enough, your ability to get a decent job diminishes. If you want to make being a stay-at-home partner a viable choice in a society, where divorce is available, you need a safety net of some kind. Maybe the working partner has to continue supporting their ex after divorce, regardless of what led to it. Or maybe we socialize the responsibility, meaning higher taxes and welfare benefits.

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hallole 3 hours ago | parent [-]

> "Traditional marriage was primarily an economic contract."

I don't buy this. You can, for the purposes of your argument, reduce marriage to being something like an economic contract, that's fine; but, in reality, that's not what marriage is/has been primarily about.

Also, solving the burden of work for one sex isn't a solution. Granted, it's better than nothing.

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JumpCrisscross 3 hours ago | parent [-]

> that's not what marriage is/has been primarily about

Ancient societies' marriages we have records about were principally about economics and politics.

Maybe the poor were having love marriages. We don't know because most of our sources couldn't be bothered with them. But to the degree we have evidence, it's in even poor landowners preferring to marry children off to the owners of adjoining plots. Like, maybe that's a coïncidence. But probably not.

	▲	monocasa an hour ago \| parent [-]
		I mean, your kids also just didn't travel much farther than your neighbor's plots for the vast majority of their life. If anything, political marriages are defined by a marriage outside your economic sphere of influence (which for ancient agricultural workers would generally be about a three day journey due to the ox problem), and to someone you don't know. These couples probably grew up together and went to social events like church together from birth.