Comment by zaphar | Hacker News Reader

Comment by zaphar | Hacker News Reader

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    Like... barely anybody my age is having children and the ones who do have  
    this look on them when I have a real conversation with them where they are 
    vulnerable that they love their kids more than anything but that having kids 
    is destroying what little quality of life they could scrape by with before. 
    Having kids has always been hard I imagine but the look on people's faces... 
    it says a lot about how cruel society is that it grinds people down so much 
    that having kids hurts them like that (even when they have good jobs and 
    stable relationships and "should" be able to handle it).

See this is part of my disconnect right here. I have 5 kids. For much of their childhood I was working day labor at minimum wage. I scraped by and sometimes had to live with relatives because I couldn't afford to put a roof over their heads. It was definitely hard and stressful but I had the necessary mental tools to avoid going postal or killing myself. I guess part of what I lament is that we have somehow reduced the number of people with those mental tools.

I'm not saying it's great that there are people who have to go through the same things I went through. Nor am I saying that I'm amazing for having survived and made a solid career for myself. But I am saying that given the realities we have it's a really sad that more people aren't as equipped as I was and that seems like something worth fixing as well as all the other stuff.

Look, I am sure your life was very hard, it sounds like you worked your ass off... but things can get much worse. Also you could have health complications or get hit by a car getting to work one day and have everything come crashing apart at the snap of a finger for no fault of your own. That doesn't mean you had it easy or that there werent other people around you that you succeeded over because you worked harder.

Your anecdotal experience of your life is just that, anecdotal. If you look at the numbers things are genuinely getting much worse for people (well there has been a blip up in workers organizing in some industries for better treatment, but compared to 30 years of careful dissassembly of the social safety net in the US it is still just that.. a blip.).

You HAVE relatives that had the capacity to house you and your kids!?!? Is your survivorship bias really stunting your empathy that much that you can't see how much worse it would be if you had literally no one to turn to? One mistep and stumble leads quickly to another too, if you were unhoused it would have been far harder to convince a landlord to allow you to rent then being able to say you were staying with relatives, no you have been branded with "homeless" and society deems you as deserving to be homeless because you must have done something to cause it.

You gotta work on your empathy bud

I'm very much calling out that my experience is different. But you are also making assumptions that may not be what you expect. Most wouldn't have said that my relatives had capacity to house my family. They did it any way. This is in part what I think might be different.

A lot of the support structures for people appear to have disappeared and broken down. That's on us as a society not on the individual. I have a lot of empathy. I've since done the same thing for others that my relatives did for me. I've taken in people who had no place to go and gave them a place to get back on their feet.

It feels a little bit like you and I are in violent agreement.

My wild guess is that it's paradoxically due to life being more comfortable for people than ever before. The most resilient people I know came from rough-and-tumble upbringings like you describe.

"The most resilient people I know came from rough-and-tumble upbringings like you describe."

This is such a casually violent thing to say. You know why the most resilient people you know came from rough-and-tumble upbringings? Because they had to or their life would have spiralled out of control... and guess what there are innumerable people who's lives did spiral out of control and they aren't there for you to meet and judge. They are dead or shoved into one of societies ditches somewhere as an ignored homeless person who has no social connections with housed people because they essentially have pariah status. Do you think that is ok?

It is called survivorship bias and it is honestly a little embarassing that you aren't cognizant of that even while it shapes your broad outlook on others

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias

I don't think this is at all correct. I am resilient not because I had a rough patch. I'm resilient because I had a safety net when that rough patch hit. Without that safety net the story would have been much much worse.

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