Just got “over the hill” here. It’s…complicated, but not at all surprising on the whole.

My friends who are older are pessimistic as fuck. Several have been unemployed for lengthy stretches due to ageism in American hiring practices, which has resulted in their life crumbling around them as they lack the resources for basic upkeep anymore. I see that and shudder for myself, wondering if we’ll finally get this sorted before I hit my 50s or if this is just going to be a shitty fucking thing for the foreseeable future.

Social activity is hard for middle-aged men. We spend several hours a day commuting to and from work, which eats into our social budgets. Hard to host dinners, attend game nights, or go on dates when 80% of your day is spoken for work alone in some capacity (preparing for, getting to, performing, commuting home), which leaves us isolated. Most of our peers have paired off, so they have a stronger support structure - yet they too disappear at alarming rates.

At every conceivable intersection for the past fifty years, we’ve chosen to make life more hostile and less comfortable. I’m tired of feigning surprise at what, at least to me and my circles, is so sickeningly obvious.

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jimbokun 19 hours ago | parent [-]

How did previous generations working similar number of hours manage to have much richer social lives?

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nemomarx 19 hours ago | parent [-]

Wives organizing social events, I think is part of the conventional wisdom? And more communal work and eating together after work etc.

	▲	stego-tech 19 hours ago \| parent [-]
		This. And also commutes were radically shorter than they are today, with more commuter services in many smaller cities than exist today. We shifted from a sole-provider/homemaker model of couples to a dual-income-required model, at the same time our choices on car dependency and suburban sprawl came back to bite us in the ass. The working from home era was great for socializing because we could agree on small group nights if we were all feeling well, knowing we didn’t have huge commutes ahead of us after work and with the extra money in our pockets from lowered work costs; RTO mandates killed that again, as did the sudden jump in real estate costs, inflation, and stagnating wages in the face of AI investment. That’s just the average, too. For edge cases like me in unorthodox households or living arrangements, it’s even harder.