Everyone can't be a plumber.

In fact one of the worst "trade offs" of the trades is they can very much be a young mans game.

It gets real hard to sling water heaters up/down tight stairs or pull cable in a 100+ degree attic into your 50s.

It's a spectrum, with "physical" and "mental" at each end.

Some of Software folk i know move to repairing electronic devices for living. He still works in AC-room, but instead of holding mouse and keyboard most of the time, now he holds meter probe and soldering iron.

Physical jobs will drop in demand and increase in supply too. Unemployed "mind" workers don't have much to spend to drive much demand in manual work, and they might even try to pivot themselves to manual work, making things worse for manual workers.

I guess being soldiers in the war against robots and their owners is a kind of physical job

yeah, you're down to like 3/4 a career left, it makes sense that you feel that way. Less runway ought to feel different.

I do agree that a safe 'next' is unclear. But I also think if ai truly hits all knowledge work as hard as it might we're looking at up to 50% unemployment. Frankly there is no point career planning at all in that scenario. We will all have much larger problems.

And if it doesn't, then pivoting to some field with a combination of rewarding work and 'enough' pay seems sensible enough.

I think you need to separate these issues. Economic pressure is a separate concern that doesn't stem from a more arbitrary source. A society can and should shield you from it, but doing so will always create societal expectations on someone else.

If you cannot provide for yourself, someone else has to do so. That someone else technically might be subjected to societal expectations to not leave you behind because he has the means to do so. Mothers still have large expectation on them on how they have to treat their children. If those run around freely, you will get a lot pressure in the US. Quite a silly country. But I believe this is an exception to the general development.

I separate purely economic pressure from the moral and ethical requirements you have today and these are clearly declining in my opinion. These were always subjected to change, but usually expectations get exchanged for new ones and old ones are done away with.

Weird gender science, middle eastern war or domestic politics experts are loud and they do indeed put forward expectations. But their ambitions aren't generally awarded by society, on the contrary. Sometimes for very good reason, sometimes not. But generally there are far less expectations for behaviour, expression, opinions. Also sometimes for good reason and sometimes not.

I think most societies lost expectations and care less about their environment (no in the ecological sense, but that too...).

> The examples you give implies people are ok with being bums on the street (and if you think that life is "easy", boy, you're massively detached from reality).

Which part of the comment implies this?

those things are evidence of that societal pressure relaxing...they simply weren't an option before.

He means for normal people, sure if you go around assaulting people like you could in the unenlightened times you get more pressure. What you both mean by "pressure" is oversocialization you are just looking at 2 sides of the same coin. Well his point is more about people feeling uncared for, I doubt that drives people to suicide. One explaination is that is could this mental l strain could increase the liklihood for mental illness, but that's flat for men in the articles age bracket. You posit that people kill themselves because they have a tough life, again that isn't born out in the data. Indeed collecting data for this is akin to hitting a dartboard while drunk and skydiving and the board is 2 miles away.

The point of society you can increase "true freedom" by restricting people's ability to act arbitrarily, so called "naive freedom". If people can't accept that then they can go live in the woods (not anymore), the ocean, the moon? mars? or end it.

From time immemorial the winners shaped society what do you think happened to the losers? Just because we leave them alive now doesn't mean they can live in the new world.

Also "highest ever" among some specific arbitrary demographic isn't very meaningful enough to draw out anything beyond free association.

Yes, men who have children do go through nihilistic existential mid life crises too. That age has their biggest risk of cheating on their partners, fathering new children with work colleagues, walking away from marriage, developing drug and alcohol dependency, developing serious gambling problems and other worse things. Parenthood reduces but does not eliminate the risk of suicide in middle aged men, and parenthood plus long term joblessness is a common cause.

Midlife anxieties are real and nothing in particular prevents it.

I can imagine having kids is super rewarding, but also amplifies the pressure of being a provider probably 100x. In uncertain times, I think a lot of us aren't sure how we'll provide for ourselves in ~5 years, let alone a tiny dude, which plays into the decision to not have kids.

I'm still gainfully employed, and business is ripping, but a huge part of my value as a professional got totally vaporized over the last year. So part of me is extremely glad I don't have kids right now, and part of me is really angry that everything feeling so unstable is leading to our decision to not have them. I know that even in the best time it's a scary decision, but the general vibe is flipping people (like my wife and i) who are at the margin.

I don't dismiss or discount your perspective but based on my social circle: Your experience of fatherhood is not the median. The variance is pretty high too.

I would think those with kids at that age that wanted them worked backwards from that mission, and if they have a midlife crisis it's some version of having spent too much time working and on their kid and start spending their money on low-impact possibly expensive hobbies they'd have liked to do in their younger years, somewhat in denial of the fact that they sold their whole life to the man despite raising a kid.

that's what I felt about moving to a different country, too, until I didn't.

I think these things are less consistent than is often stated, we just see them occur consistently among people with similar lives. The "mid life crisis" is also debunked and replaced by "existential crisis" since it can actually occur at any age, from teenager to elderly, and zero, one, or multiple times. Only in the classic life progression of a certain era, it typically occurred worst at around 40-45 so it got that label.

Kids will not always be kids.

Kids loose interest in you as they age and do their own stuff. You are necessary for their survival, but they prefer company of peers. And then they leave.

All of that is normal, but you are left alone and if taking the kid somewhere was your only thing, you have nothing.

Yes. Come on, I love my kid, but you can't seriously be asking this question. Fatherhood is in fact sometimes part of what they're so dissatisfied with.

No, we don't have kids and that's the problem.

More: Every time we point to this situation, we get insulted as incels. Sorry, I'm a multi millionaire, so I can provide, muscular, so I don't look too bad and have my health in order, CEO so I have some social status, and my love life has been terrible, I'm thinking of going to prostitutes to close the loop on being treated like shit.

Clearly there's something wrong in the dating market, women don't want to make families anymore, they literally don't want kids, and those who do, it's with wifeveaters. I know, "it must be you", "all men find women so you're probably a cunt" — I get it, I get it. We're truely the lost souls of today's world.

The only thing keeping me alive is the idea of revenge against the people who insult us like this.

Don't forget that social security has been raided and won't even be available for those of us reaching middle age right now and the people we keep electing who say they will do something about it have shown over and over and over that they actually won't.

Anomie plus helplessness plus a feeling of a rug pull of the laws/equality/character of our country. I am not suicidal but wow I get it.

I thought it was possible a generation could have it worse off through an economic crisis or period of 70s style malaise, but I at least thought the government would attempt to improve the lives of its citizens. I didn't expect the ruling political party to be so aggressively trying to make our lives worse.

You never heard of people who kill their kids and then off themselves?

Mental illness finds a way.

I have enough money to live a relatively meagre existence. Anything on top of that is welcome.

Okay. Can you think of some groups which have a low sense of agency/few options, yet have a high suicide rate because of their lack of purpose and identity?

I'm looking for evidence against this theory, so I'm very interested if you can find it. But I think it's going to be hard, because they're going to be correlated: if you have a weak sense of self and purpose, then very likely your options will all seem bad too. And even if you have a strong sense of who you are and what your purpose is, failing to live up to the identity society and yourself assign to you (because all the options you have fail at living up to it) then you could well call that "having your identity taken away from your".

Opinions are great and all but do you have actual data to back it up ?

We can separate the table clearing from how we treat the players of the previous game.

We don't have many coal miners any more. How do we treat the people who used to be coal miners, when we get to 100% clean power? If we are running society well, we give them a hero's sendoff and a nice comfortable retirement life. If we are running society poorly, we take away their homes and healthcare to punish them for not having jobs any more.

IME cycling a recumbent can ease stress on the back. https://sheldonbrown.com/org/greenspeed-index.html

Sure its a little off putting but if you've the time and money it could be worth trying.

Are you me? My old motorbike injuries are a little more distributed but -- like yours -- almost entirely crippling from the perspective of doing anything joyful; we're in the same bucket yearwise; and it sounds like we always visit the doctor with just the one bullet in the chamber.

Mostly just posting to say, hey, there's others out here like you. Hang in there, Almost-Me. If not, see you on the other side.

A hurting back on a bike might be an issue of bike fit. Bicycle touring is a hobby regarded as accessible to even the elderly, and indeed one often comes across people age 50-80 on popular routes. Many of them will complain about a bad back off the bike when doing other things like camping or carrying panniers, but a fitted bike should not strain one's back.

Deadlifts helped my chronic congenital back pain that is probably some combination of DDD and scoliosis and multiple herniations. Yes sometimes it pisses off the disks and I'm pretty useless for a day or two. And yes it has added some other problems. But overall I went from constant sharp pain nearly unable to remain seated, to occasional dull pain I can ignore, and rarely some really bad pain. Overall it's much better of a life.

Have you tried drinking cherry juice? I heard moving to Washington can help due to the air there.

For most people, the real physical deterioration doesn't have to kick in until age 65 or so (plus or minus). But you do have to show up every day and hit it hard. In the last triathlon I raced there were men in that age group still finishing with fast times. And they're not genetic freaks either, just consistent.

FWIW, you can remain in pretty extraordinary physical shape through your 50s as a matter of biology. You do have to put in the work though.

I agree for SWE specifically that AI is changing the career dramatically, and in a way that makes life less predictable. But I don’t know how the definition of success has changed - at least in America it still seems to be good professional job plus family.

Right. Has that changed? Asking genuinely.

I'm a bit of an AI pessimist, but creating new prime locations is one thing I do think AI could feasibly do. I have been involved in regeneration projects for 30 years and so many of the limiting factors could theoreticslly be eliminated by AI.