It's absolutely not forgotten in India. Maybe openly talking about in terms of 'caste', sure. But I just visited India for over a month and it was extremely clear they bucket each other into groups. And it's also very alive here in the US. Recently a friend at an ivy league mentioned that an 'upper class' Indian refused to work with a lower class one for their lab's research. Just straight up said he would not interact with him. And this was at a western University!
Impossible to prove tho. You can always just claim you don't like the person for other reasons. That's why this whole 'banning caste' stuff is mostly performative imo. People will just be hostile to each other but not be open with the reason.
> You can always just claim you don't like the person for other reasons.
That's true. It's also true that there are plenty of professional contexts where people have to work together regardless of their personal feelings toward each other. Sometimes lives depend on it.
No. I want kids but I don't want them until I can afford stable housing. And if that's hard for me as an overpaid tech worker, then I understand why most people are delaying kids or not having them at all. If most young people are still living with parents or roommates well into their 30's, then it's not a mystery why my generation isn't having kids. Nothing to do with 'life is so good kids aren't desirable anymore'.
Then why does the birth rate steadily go down as you move up the income curve? My experience is that my wealthy adult peer group just has almost no interest in having children while my high school friends, many struggling badly financially, all already have families.
Higher standards. The person you are replying to wants stable housing on some of the most desirable land in the world. The conditions for upper middle class people to have kids are exceedingly high by any standard.
I don't think it is an absurd or even high standard to want reasonably priced (30% of income) shelter (whether owned or rented) within a reasonable commuting distance (30 mins one-way) of a job.
You're solving for this with the constraint being your job. If you tried to solve this problem with family being the constraint and the job and financial situation being more variable, all of a sudden your options open up. Your constraints show your priorities.
You don't want just a job. You probably want an elite and interesting job, which for a dev to be paying out a large percentage of their salary is probably in San Francisco or Seattle or New York.
You could take a boring remote job with more average pay out in Kansas if family were a priority and pay off a house in a year or two.
Yea, pretty much this. I'm half of a two person couple well into the upper middle class - we live in a one bedroom condo that costs more than half a million dollars... kids are not a realistic financial decision.
You and I are probably in similar situations (I rent a 1-bedroom apartment in an upscale-ish area) and you probably earn more than me but I live very comfortably.
I've personally never had any interest in having kids. Whatever it is that makes kids appealing, I've never had it.
But I think I agree with you and I don't understand why I think I agree with you.
Kids do seem like a crazy financial decision today. But if we wanted to, we could for sure have a kid and get by. Plenty of people have plenty of kids on a lot less money.
Is it that we want to maintain our standard of living more than people did in the past? Plenty of poor people have plenty of kids in 1 bedroom apartments. Do we just demand more comfort today? Are we just more picky? Are kids just not worth what they used to be?
I don't think any of these answers are bad. I just think it's interesting.
> Is it that we want to maintain our standard of living more than people did in the past? Plenty of poor people have plenty of kids in 1 bedroom apartments. Do we just demand more comfort today? Are we just more picky? Are kids just not worth what they used to be?
I find it interesting that this is almost the only post in the entire thread that arrives at the need to do a little introspection.
Apparently, the ability to do that is much rarer these days than I thought.
It's not ability it's just willingness. Go to the recent Scrum threads or any discussion of remote work. It's all just these incredibly strongly held opinions that people feel the need to share over and over.
I think this is a big part of it. As much social pressure as there is to have kids today, it seems reduced from how it was even a single generation ago.
Raising kids is expensive[1], time consuming, and in general a pain-in-the-ass. With reduced social (and even legal) pressure to stay married, and increased expectations of a career for women (without any accompanying reduced expectations for men), it's entirely unsurprising to myself that many opt-out of it.
Indeed, most of my daughter's friends in early elementary school lived with their parent in a 1BR, studio, or a rented bedroom. One of them had 3 siblings, making 5 people in a 1BR apartment.
I guess maybe parents had fewer expenses when I was a kid (I was born in 1983)? No cable bill, no cell phones, fewer video games, no streaming services?
IIRC, housing, child-care (especially if you include after-school activities), and health-care (If you are un- or under-insured with your job) dominate the increased expenses. Housing is a strange one because a lot of parents will try to move to a better school district, so parents may end up paying more for otherwise similar housing than non-parents.
FWIW, the things you give as examples are rounding-errors in our budget (though only two of our kids have cell phones so far); we don't have cable, pay $22/mo for streaming services, buy used video games, and pay an average of $60/mo for our phone bill. We spend over $300/mo on groceries for comparison.
No but I replied to your comment before it was updated I think. It only said 'life is maybe too good for kids anymore' when I saw it but now I see more text.
Cheaping out in food is not uncommon and honestly a great way to save a lot. It's also super easy to decide to do. My wife and I literally don't eat out anymore. Haven't been to sit down place in many months. The value of the experience has degraded so much and the price is so absurd, that every time we used to go out in the past 2 years we questioned why we even bother anymore. And the money we save is used for travelling or the things we choose not to cheap out on (our hobbies).
If the value has degraded so much then you're not giving up anything by sticking to groceries, right? That's a bit different from buying a lower quality phone.
For you, maybe a better analogy would be buying cheaper food at the grocery store.
(I see a lot of restaurants serving outstanding food so it does feel like a sacrifice when we don't eat there, plus we do shop carefully and buy in bulk. I also have an iPhone.)
Family member is. And it's a massive burden on their time and all their coworkers. More than you could imagine. So yeah, it has real world implications that we have to 'accept' the fact that half our population is killing themselves or making their existing conditions much worse because they're so overweight. The member of my family member estimated that easily 50%+ of their time is used dealing with issues stemming from their weight (think special sized beds, extra manual labor for patient transportation, extra resources needed for surgery, extra resources needed for long term hospital stays, etc). So it's a bit annoying that you casually sweep this away as an 'online only' problem when its a massive drain on our limited healthcare resources but you can't even question why we put up with it or God forbid people should lose some weight to make dealing with all the other health issues less costly.
Forgive me, but are that many people that morbidly obese and adamant that it's not their responsibility when they're in the dang hospital? I'm carrying around a few dozen extra pounds, but I don't need special-sized anything.
The bitter truth is that people don't lose weight because it's goddamn fucking hard.
Few dozen extra pounds is not what is causing the issues like making surgery or care hard. It's not that there's that so so many (quick search shows 20% of ICU patients are morbidity obese) but that caring for that percentage takes larger amount of the resources. From what my family member tells me, the situation is like this: for issue X you might stay in an ICU bed for Y days. For a morbidly obese patient, the care or operation can take an extra day (need special resources) but worse, they take much longer to heal or be in good enough shape to leave the bed. So they stay in the beds much longer. Basically the same issue we saw with covid: when people stay in the ICU beds longer and longer it quickly sucks up all available resources. Add up all the extra complications needed to care for the obese and that it's becoming more and more common, you start to see the issues pile up.
This is really out of touch. 99% of teens doing this don't have the disposable income to rent an Airbnb to have sex. And also bc each partner probably lives with their parents still (which btw is now common up to age 30). So in the car at night is by far the simplest solution.
I agree that it helps, but with the express intent to develop your playfulness.
This has to be developed in conjunction with going on actual dates or cold approaching people (I prefer approaching women in the day time, a year ago I needed to do it again, it still feels like hell but being alone feels like a special kind of hell, so I know what poison I prefer).
Other than improv classes, I'd suggest to take bachata classes (explicitly bachata, not salsa, not anything else). Do not try to find your girlfriend there, it simply makes you more attractive to be with on the psychological side but also on the "I can dance a bit" side (former more important than the latter).
Final skill I'd suggest: learn how to tell a simple story. No hero's journey required, nothing grand. More on the tune off: I woke up today as usual and went running about as usual, I felt like a well oiled engine today. My mom called, and she was like "how do I turn on the computer?" And I love my mom, I really do, but I just get sooooo tired of her asking that for EVERYSINGLEDAY! It's fine, it's fine. I know it's fine. I guess I am not as well oiled of a machine as I thought, lol.
Or: I saw a cat cross the road really quick. I know cats are like that, but it still took me by surprise.
Basically the key is to express how you emotionally felt about whatever happened. The thing is, I feel things, I just never expressed them. The moment I learned how to do that, I was a lot more relatable to many people, all of a sudden.
Final thing: dare to say you think someone is cute or attractive, without needing anything from her. It should be shared as a "this is simply how I feel, interesting isn't it?" To feel this vibe more I recommend to read non-violent communication. Though, for the purposes of saying this particular thing, that book is way overblown. Still a good book though.
If these ideas seem appealing but you don't know how to implement them, I coach very low-key on the side (1 person at a time, for a few days to 3 months). I call it a hobby job. Feel free to email me.
Google Maps has a speed trap warning feature. Not sure if it's the same or as good as Waze. But I get a warning about 2-3x per long drive (like 5 hours) and it's decently accurate.
