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Comment by Barrin92 | Hacker News Reader

replacing a wide and healthy social net with the family is probably one of the largest cultural diseases of American life of the last few decades

In a less abstract sense, roughly 50% of my close friends who did the the whole "move to the burbs, ditch the social life, start a family" and who seemed to go missing for years are now divorced. Roughly in line with the statistics I suppose.

I'd go as far as saying that in the majority of cases when people in their 20s or 30s do this it's some sort of mix of social pressure and biological clock panic than an actual authentic decision.

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The number of friends you can count on as much as family is abysmally small. How many of your wide social net friends will be there for you in old age? Often times just a little move or a job change is enough to completely shake up your friend group, but family is a constant. That constancy is crucial for a fulfilling life.

>The number of friends you can count on as much as family is abysmally small. How many of your wide social net friends will be there for you in old age?

I personally hopefully a lot because I pay a lot of attention to cultivate them. My grandparents throughout their entire life had a rich social life up until the very end with friendships lasting decades, they even lived entirely autonomously in a cooperative community for the elderly.

It's my parents, who are now 60-ish, who have no friends. Because unlike my grandparents they grew up in what was peak nuclear family era. I'm not repeating that mistake and it's pretty sad that people here don't even seem to be able to imagine authentic communal life.

> “A wide and healthy social net”

On the contrary, we’ve never been more lonely and distant as a society. Family gives you a chance of a more permanent safety net and nuclear community. Friends and community are important, but today’s version of these things appears flimsy at best.

https://today.yougov.com/topics/lifestyle/articles-reports/2...

https://www.vox.com/science-and-health/2019/8/1/20750047/mil...

https://www.hrsa.gov/enews/past-issues/2019/january-17/lonel...

>On the contrary, we’ve never been more lonely and distant as a society.

yes, because all communal institutions have been disbanded before millennials were even born, that was the point?

Millenials are lonely because they're the offspring of what was the peak of the nuclear family generation. They're growing up without any communal connection, increasingly without religious communities, Gen Z probably doesn't even have military experience and has largely replaced physical with digital connections and seems to be even more isolated than Millenials.

The nuclear family isn't safety but the last escape hatch in the absence of institutions that should enrich people's personal life beyond the family.

That's weird because the nuclear family is as old as civilization and the idea of wide social nets that span long distances is relatively new. For vast majority of human history we lived in small tribes and then the family became the tribe to belong to within a civilization. Virtually any institution you could point to is less than a few generations from being mainstream meanwhile family is timeless. I get that some people come from dysfunctional families but that does not discount the rule that by and large they are the strongest source of emotional support and stability. And really, as I've gotten older I've come to appreciate that more and more.

This isn't actually true at all. The extended family is the historically most long lasting form of organisation, people banding together in communities of about 100-150 people, sharing responsibility and living in multi-generational environments.

This was the case until very recently in fact. The nuclear family is largely an abberation brought on by the commercialisation of what used to be the job of a village. David Brooks wrote an excellent piece on the development (in the US in particular) not long ago:

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2020/03/the-nuc...

The dysfunction you're speaking about is actually a result of that very same dynamic. Largely affluent upper-middle classes have replaced the extended family with professional services and shrunk the family unit down. It's poor people and minority communities who, lacking those resources, have suffered the most from the breakdown of the extended family.

The "nuclear family" is an extremely modern concept.The extended family is what is old as civilization itself.Sure, nuclear families existed 5000 years ago. But, it was far more common to live with your extended family.

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