i find it extremely ironic that he said he built 3 of these things in a weekend, and expects me to pay 100$/mo for one of them. You've just basically stated how dead simple it is to build it, I'm certainly not paying you that and instead going to build my own (although I didn't need an article to tell me this).
Matter of fact, the broader point of this entire article and my experience with AI so far as a veteran in the industry, I lean towards quickly building things now rather than paying for SaaS products, unless it's far too complex and not worth it.
A lot of cost of mature SaaS products come from security, scaling, expensive sales teams, etc. For me, if I have something sandboxed, not available to the public, and only powerful enough to serve only _me_ as a customer, then I don't need to pay those extra costs and I can build something a lot simpler, while still maintaining the core feature that I need.
I think this gives further evidence that these huge campaigns and marches/protests/street graffiti are very deliberate manipulation by certain groups and a lot of money.
Read the Wikipedia page for the Internet Research Agency. This was a Russian propaganda outfit that organized half a dozen Black Lives Matter protests, one of them attended by Michael Moore.
Troll farms were found to control half of the largest ethnic and religious Facebook groups before the 2020 election.
The tactic here is to use social media as a weapon to stoke every possible division in society.
> half a dozen Black Lives Matter protests, one of them attended by Michael Moore.
A whole half dozen, you say? And who could forget those iconic Michael Moore protest videos from 2020.
For anyone who wasn't paying attention somehow, these protests happened day after day for weeks in many major cities. And many smaller cities and towns had protests and vigils as well. This statistic is so unimpressive it makes this sound irrelevant.
Organizing protests is one thing, but troll farms to agitate and turn the population on itself is the story here too. It helps explain the daily protests.
The troll farms can't hold a candle to the first-party algorithmic engagement farming/rage baiting being conducted out in the open by Alphabet/Meta/X/etc.
You don't need a conspiracy theory to explain the social dysfunction being created and monetized as part of these firms' core business strategy.
And a government run identity verified social media would solve both those problems. Let the government build the digital town square, not the tech billionaires.
Precisely! They were leveraging said algos and the troll farms couldn't exist without your social media list. It's definitely not a conspiracy, but part of the logic of the tactic.
At what point do we ever ask ourselves -- "what kind of culture do we want to create for the future of our country?" I don't think a pro soccer player is comparable to an onlyfans contributor. I would much prefer my future kids to be inspired by Cristiano Ronaldo than someone baring themselves on camera.
What's wrong with an OnlyFans contributor? It's a self-employed job that services a demand within the economy and pays taxes. It's pretty close to the ideal job an immigrant can have since the product is already globalized but the revenue is not - i.e. an OnlyFans influencer with an American audience who moves to America is now bringing that income back into the economy via taxes and spending, or if they have an international audience they are attracting foreign dollars into your economy and strengthening your currency position.
Extracting money from horny young men with an illusion of intimacy/friendship just doesn't seem ethical. Or good for society as a whole.
Especially when you've got streamers using sites like Twitch, aimed at younger gamers, promoting their OnlyFans porn.
The regular porn industry is bad enough (https://traffickinghub.com/), but at least the content is non-interactive, there's no pretence of friendship/connection.
Sex work (OF or otherwise) is unsavory, that's what. You can't stop it but there's zero reason we should be going out of our way to grant visas to sex workers.
The comment you are replying to articulated, I think rather clearly, one reason why maybe we should.
I think what you actually mean is that the reasons not to ("sex work is unsavory") outweigh the reasons to ("sex work is going to happen anyway and if some of the people doing it move to the US then they will spend their money and pay their taxes in the US and contribute to the economy there").
Maybe you're right, maybe you're not, but I don't think you should say "there's zero reason" when in fact there obviously are reasons and you just think other countervailing reasons matter more.
If what you’re just concerned about people “baring themselves on camera” then they can continue to do that without emigrating to America and it would still affect your culture. The internet is global after all.
Also, it’s going to take more than a few thousand immigrants a year to affect the culture of a country as populous as America.
The internet is global, but having folks in our midst who make a living that way has more of an effect on our culture than if they are just on the internet.
I actually worked in the adult industry earlier in my career so have a better insight than most. and I can tell you that these models are just normal people like you an I. They aren’t interested in corrupting your children nor throwing wild sex parties in public spaces.
Just because they don't have ill intent doesn't mean the fact that some of the most highly paid members of our society being sex workers sends a message about what kind of skills and assets are valuable, and which aren't as valuable.
Unfortunately that ship has already sailed and immigration wasn’t the reason.
It turns out that American citizens can work in the adult industry too and it’s not just immigrants who are capable of earning money from getting naked on camera. ;)
> They aren’t interested in corrupting your children nor throwing wild sex parties in public spaces.
RFK Jr., the current top health official in the US, is not interested in harming children either, and thinks he is doing a good public service: what is the reality though?
Last time I checked, “cam girls” don’t run the country. So I don’t think you can make a comparison there.
Plus the issues with JFK Jr are specific to him. It’s a bit of a stretch to imply that his view points are in any way related to his exposure pornography. That is unless “brain work” is some kind of euphemism I’m unaware of ;)
> One's intentions and the results of one's actions can be two different things.
Those articles mention just as many positives as negatives.
Porn isn’t inherently bad. It’s like alcohol, exercise, and other past times: moderation is the key.
Humans can get addicted to any kind of behaviour. The absolute worst thing you can do is make a topic a taboo because then you cannot keep people safe. This is as true for pornography as it is for weightlifting.
And frankly, hadn’t you got better things to do than worry about what consenting adults do in their private lives? It’s all a bit silly and prudish don’t you think?
i mean you said it yourself, the internet is global. those few thousand can have impressions of hundreds of millions. whether they do their cam shows abroad or local matters little. it's the inherent incentivization approved by a government that leads to deeper cultural erosion. if you're in a poor country with no access to education, and your only way into the US is porn, then that's what will ultimately win, rather than incentivizing higher education, etc. And before an argument is made that this will just be a way to get in and then those folks will go and seek PHDs and be productive members of society--i have a bridge to sell you.
If a person immigrates to the USA due to success with onlyfans, are they not productive members of society by virtue of having taxable & disposable income from the fruits of their labor? They don't need a PHD to be productive anymore than a soccer player, mentioned earlier. In reality we already have American citizens in the US paying for their college degrees via onlyfans.
Sex sells and everybody knows that. Why should the government use antiquated-at-best moral codes to discriminate against people who will increase the global influence of the country? Cultural exportation and exploitation have been key to US soft power for nearly a century.
crack also sells, amongst many other things that are inherently horrible for broad modern society.
> Why should the government use antiquated-at-best moral codes to discriminate against people who will increase the global influence of the country
this is a very loaded statement that assumes that everyone is in agreement that proliferating and rewarding cam models is some kind of inherent good. there's nothing antiquated morally with simply not rewarding it. i'm not stating to ban it outright. there's always use in it at the long tail of society
> The problem with social taboos is rarely a moral one, and usually more that people feel embarrassed or scared to be open and honest.
And usually that stems from others being unreasonably judgmental.
You're using broad sweeping statements to argue with a point that I'm not even making.
First off, you're only assuming I'm making this argument because I don't have an interest in adult entertainment. I just don't believe it needs to be shoved into every facet of society. The industry certainly _does_ exist in the long tail, because there's literally nothing interesting in it aside from the fact that people use it to get off and move on with their lives. It's like taking a dump. Everyone does it, but I don't need to sit around a dinner table discussing it as if it's some high brow art. And I certainly don't want people to be treated extra specially because they excel at taking dumps.
I see no difference in Cristiano Ronaldo and a porn star and an influencer and whatever you name it. They are all idols that sell stories for people to project their own thoughts and desires onto and get emotional. I would be more worry about my kid believing in celebrities, regardless of who they are.
And the American mainstream culture is filthy anyway. As the old French joke once said the difference of yogurt and the us is that if you leave yogurt for a coupled of hundred years they would develop culture.
You do aware of being best in sport and what I just said are hella two different things right?
I wish my kids aware that *hell is other people*. Otherwise being a porn star or being a sport star makes not so much difference. Both can give you mental struggles and physical injuries.
I think the another comment articulate it well too.
Edit: And sure It's concerning that the society being shallow but OF and porn are just consequences not the cause. Without them we would have something else to turn important human experience(ie sex) into a commercial show and twisted it. Turn humans into tradable goods. Body commodification is just moral decay and the end of civilization! I think we already have such a thing called ... sports?
Edit: professional sports
I mean, this is purely for socially constructed morality reasons.
In actuality, both require you to sell your body, and both can have long standing health effects. If anything, I would say the typical OF model sells their body much less than an athlete. I mean, I don't think they're going to tear their ACL.
And also, both offer no real tangible value to humanity. Sports do not produce anything, neither does porn, they're purely for entertainment. A cashier at McDonalds is providing more absolute value to the world than even the most esteemed athlete.
That's not to say that athletes are bad, entertainment and games are important. But you can't just say one form of mindless entertainment is more valuable than another form.
I don't know if you'd want to marry a porn star, and if not, that should tell you what he difference is. This is one of those things which is "freedom" in theory but has many second order effects in practice.
As much as I don't want to marry a porn star I don't want to marry a professional sports player.
And you know what? Just because these people are allowed into a country doesn't mean the local residents want to marry them.(The reverse ironically works tho)
The point is either reject all of them or treat them all equally.
It's certainly a very profitable industry, I don't see why they wouldn't want it. Outside of "eww icky" type reasoning, which as I've said, I don't think is important or worth humoring.
Everyone thinks rome will fall because of promiscuity. I just don't buy that weak morals, whatever that may mean, has a negative effect on society. Ultimately, these people do not hurt anyone and they push a lot of money into the economy.
It's just mindless entertainment. And, on the topic of skills: skills mean nothing. Being skilled is not enough, you have to be skilled at the right things.
Think of it this way: the skill of putting a ball through a hoop is one that is, objectively, worthless. There's no situation in modern life, or frankly even prehistoric life, where that skill would help you or create value.
It has value because we say so. We say "people want to watch this". If you take away the people watching, then the skill is beyond worthless. Worth less than even talking. Now, parallel this to porn, and you will see it's the same situation.
> A cashier at McDonalds is providing more absolute value to the world than even the most esteemed athlete.
Do you actually believe this or are you just ragebaiting?
> That's not to say that athletes are bad, entertainment and games are important. But you can't just say one form of mindless entertainment is more valuable than another form.
Sport isn't mindless entertainment--that's just objectively false. The "dumb" entertainment you're speaking of is built _around_ sports (e.g gambling) while physical competition is as old as time. Porn is also the exact opposite of this. It's just a byproduct of entertainment and boredom/vice. For sports, humans have pushed themselves to the extreme limit through discipline for a millennia--which inspires many, creates stronger people, gets some out of poverty, or depression, or countless other things. The fact that you're comparing porn to sports or the most esteemed athletes to random low level cashiers at McDonalds in value creation for society tells me you're an advanced troll and I already just spent too much time replying.
I'm not a troll, we just disagree. Sports and games are mindless entertainment.
Yes, competition is important - but it doesn't produce anything. If I win a game, I haven't won anything other than the ability to say I've won the game. I didn't produce a good, I didn't cook food or blow glass.
Now, entertainment does create value around it. Taking attention can be used for advertising and admission. But the exact same thing is true of porn, and to the same if not greater extent.
I also don't buy the whole "discipline" angle. Yes, sports are hard and take practice. But you're making a morality argument. Just because something takes blood, sweat and tears doesn't mean it's good. Eating a couch takes discipline, too, just ask that one guy on My Strange Addiction.
The only reason, and I do mean only reason, we view porn as less valuable is because we think it's icky. That's it. But I don't particularly think that's a strong argument for anything.
just entertainment? Aton of people just watch sports to shout at the TV (or field) and drink beer. A lot more than are genuinely interested in the physical performance.
And really, we absolutely glorify entertainment in our society. People look up more to Kim Kardashian or a Will Smith than a king. Athletes also but more because they bring in the "win" which is more entertainment. It's all about making you feel good about winning or the chance of it, and the Idea that you're part of it.
Well I don't know much about French aside from the joke but Cannes obviously has way better taste than Hollywood.
The neat part is, with social media and global internet, culture are generally degenerating regardless of countries. If I were American citizen(gladly Im not) I might as well just let them in to get some tax money, and potentially see if the industry can be used as a soft propaganda machine. Just like Hollywood.
There are hundreds of small film festivals all over the United States each year. The biggest that I know is probably Sundance Film Festival. They have just as much "taste" (whatever that means) as Cannes (Film Festival). France also produces lots of shitty French language films that never leave the French-speaking world. Canal+ is the gold standard for French language film production.
film nerds gonna films nerds. What I mean was Plame vs Oscar since bro was asking mainstream sorry for the confusion. And just bcz French do shit movies too doesn't invalidate the statement sadly. Don't get me wrong. Nor do I think French is that superior.
The other replies to this show a form of argumentation that's always fascinated me.
You say "We should encourage X over Y" and the retorts are
* "Y will still exist"
* "Y can still be encouraged separately"
* "You should tell me the difference between X and Y"
* "Hey, I found an X that sometimes acts vaguely similar to Y!"
None directly disagree with the original point, but they do imply fault in the original reasoning without providing any proof or requiring any effort.
The third one is a classic, the straw man. A concise implication of error in which a good-faith response would be long-winded and boring comparatively.
To what end?
What are they hoping to get out of disagreeing with someone trying to encouraging our future culture to be one of relative wholesomeness?
... Why take the time out of one's day to say "well... encouraging X is great and all but you know what's better? passive-aggressively working against anyone that suggests it."?
It is disappointing that it is so easy to bamboozle HNers with a straw man argument.
The original poster was clearly not making an analogy between professional soccer and only fans creators.
To be explicit, the comparisons were:
Cinematic actors -> TikTok creators
Victoria’s Secret model -> only fans creator
Pro soccer -> esports
I fail to see how the culture of our country will be negatively impacted by any of those changes. Comparing Cristiano Renaldo to OnlyFans is a straw man because that specific comparison was never suggested, except by the “rebuttal”
I don't believe the rigidity of the comparisons matter within the broad context of my point. Regardless of whether OP didn't directly compare pro soccer to OF, the point is that allowing the degradation of expectations of Visas will only incentivize low effort crap. And yes, one can sit here and argue all day that OF fans, or TikTok creators are the same thing as Victorias secret models or Cinematic actors (and I would argue that's far from true) but I think most of us can all feel societal erosion happening and the decline of average IQs and the fact that a huge generation of growing young adults can barely read. Let's not pretend this has nothing to do with multiple epidemics like porn addiction, gambling, and general disregard of trying to better yourself because 90% of people are using 80% of their days staring at said TikTok creators
> but I think most of us can all feel societal erosion happening and the decline of average IQs and the fact that a huge generation of growing young adults can barely read. Let's not pretend this has nothing to do with multiple epidemics like porn addiction, gambling, and general disregard of trying to better yourself because 90% of people are using 80% of their days staring at said TikTok creators
None of this is true, but boy, it sure does feel good to believe.
I wish you, and people in general, would be more willing to look for something like truth instead of whatever feels good at the moment.
I think before we suggest whether policy is good or bad, we need to agree on the meaning of vague terms like "societal erosion." What about society is eroding? You mention IQ and literacy. What about tolerance, open-mindedness, compassion, equality, financial success... Some of these things are going up and some are going down. Are there other dimension to "societal erosion?"
i do think it's important to define what a healthy society looks like, but I'm going to guess everyone will have a very different answer. It's a topic that likely doesn't have any kind of straightforward response with unanimous agreement.
I would argue that beyond basics like food, shelter and protection of human rights, we should strive for more noble pursuits as society. I'm not even religious whatsoever, but I think the proliferation of certain vices like sex/gambling/drugs is probably a net negative for society. They certainly have their roles in the long tail, but overall a society that is caught up in rampant dopamine chasing is a distracted, doomed society. We should always be yearning. We should be paving a road that is a better one for our future generations. Societal erosion is creating short term profit/happiness at the expense of long term thinking. America has become the king of this. You can see it everywhere, from the types of businesses people create (e.g pyramid schemes in the form of courses, or the shovel makers that create businesses to proliferate said pyramid schemes) to what is currently valued by the growing generation. I can keep going and going, but I'll leave it here. I hope I somewhat made my point. I'm sure many will disagree, and that is why this country is on its way downwards. The few smart will own and create a lot of value for themselves, we'll likely have a few trillionaires, and the majority will be bumbling idiots that can barely read. We're not there yet, but we're well on the way there
it's low iq pedantry/contrarianism that pervades the tech industry that i refuse to engage with. it's exactly the same people that will bikeshed every feature into the abyss. i agree and appreciate your sentiment.
For the love of all that is holy, I cannot read another 5 page AI post that could've been like 200 words. Just make it a paragraph or two and write using your brain, people. Does everything have to be ran through an AI? I'm sure there's some decent ideas in here, but I'm not wasting my time reading this slop.
but i don't understand, how is more words better? people already barely read anything. how is writing 4 pages of slop a better brand builder? wouldn't succinct articles be better?
There's nothing naive about it. Most doctors work off of statistics and probabilities stemming from population based studies. Literally the entire field of medicine is probabilistic and that's what angers people. Yes, 95% chance you're not suffering from something horrible but a lot of people would want to continue diagnostics to rule out that 5% that you now have cancer and the doctor sent you home with antibiotics thinking it's just some infection, or whatever.
wow never thought this would make the front page of HN. My great grandfather learned this method from Konstantin himself to help manage his debilitating asthma (back in the Soviet Union) and he kept it up daily into his 80s once we moved to the US. He did it daily for so long that he was able to hold his breath for almost 10 minutes if I remember correctly. He taught it to my grandma who then taught it to me when I was a kid but neither she nor I do it anymore unfortunately. Imagine an 11 year old sitting in a bedroom with his grandma doing breathing exercises. I honestly can't believe she got me to sit still longer than 5minutes to do it.
this is where LLMs could actually help. create spam filters that an LLM can parse and deny if it looks close enough. but then again, hallucinations would be kind of terrible.
I agree this would be a good use of an LLM (assuming that it was running locally). I wouldn't put one in charge of deleting my messages, but I could see one being used to assign a score to messages and based on that score moving them out of my inbox into various folders for review.
I'd be really interested to see a comparison between LLM spam scoring and a traditional spam scoring algorithm because an LLM is essentially a spam generator. Can that be used to make a better spam detector?
Same can be achieved with a catch all domain and a sub for every service you use. Cost $13/year. Extra protection: now if you lose access to your email provider, you still have access to future emails.
yeah i just meant like it's mostly the same time between days, but shifts heavily seasonally. I suppose one season might be worse for you than another based on your internal circadian clock
this always gets brought up, but realistically no one ever cares or brings this up from the perspective of celebrating American origins, but rather just a reminder to be thankful for things in your life that matter to you. I don't see the problem with this
I've always thought that I'm just extremely late to mature. I'm 36 now and haven't really felt like I sort of "get" things until my early 30s. My 20s were full of learning experiences, failures, and addiction to doing whatever the hell I wanted. I got a puppy with my wife at 29 and it felt like my life was over. This all really makes a lot of sense to me. It also makes me wonder why the human body rewards young parents when their brains are just simply not fully finished cooking. I couldn't have imagined raising a child at 22 with the way I acted and how important freedom was to me. I would've simply been a miserable father.
Thousands of generations of parents had children much younger than today. I think we’re too worried about having everything perfect and de-risked these days. Also realize that parenting is what grew me up. I don’t think people are ever “ready”
It’s a lot more complicated financially for people. You used to not have to rely on dual incomes just to survive. Wealth inequity, housing affordability, and healthcare have all changed. This is why many are choosing to have kids later in life or not even at all because of those reasons and even the environment with climate change it’s a hard decision to make to bring new life into this world to suffer in it.
It's always been financially complicated for most people. The notion of a nuclear family prospering with a single income was mostly only possible for a limited slice of the US population during a few decades post-WWII. If you take a broader historical view that was a brief anomaly.
And it's really weird that anyone would think of something amorphous and uncertain like climate change as a reason not to have children. Even the unlikely worst case scenarios are still going to have less impact than the major wars and plagues that our species has lived through. Some people just lack a sense of perspective.
The family used to tax the grown or mostly-grown children in the form of farm labor. The government in many prior centuries taxed like 2-5% total and the rest was intrafamilial support.
Now it is flipped on its head. Everyone else's families tax your child for their social security, socializing the benefits while still you retain most the costs privately.
Thus tragedy of the commons situation. Why make that investment when you can just tax everyone else's kids and rest assured of your own social security, if they don't pay it you can just have them tossed in a cage or their assets seized, no need to have children yourself.
What you write is the mathematical fact of societies with flattened and upside down population pyramids and wealth transfers from young to old, not sure why you are downvoted.
I don’t know about that. My great grandmas and grandmas didn’t have lots of kids for the labor, they had them because they didn’t have a way to not have them. The grandpas might have though.
Coincidentally, my aunts did not have to have more than 2, and almost every single one had 2 kids.
It feels more like people [used to] have kids because they fucked and hadn't made the connection between that and having children. Them working at whatever you worked at was just necessary so you can help them grow, keep an eye on them, and pay for their upbringing.
> It’s a lot more complicated financially for. You used to not have to rely on dual incomes just to survive.
This is a toxic myth and acts as excuse to blame extrinsic factors that won't see change by the time you'll need them to, even if they can be fixed. Economic life today can be a lot more complicated for middle class professionals and skilled laborers, but they were only ever a fraction of the population in the first place, and families in tougher circumstances than today's middle class folk figured out how to navigate the cards they were dealt.
Emotionally, it legitimately sucks if you come from a comfy middle class background, and have a career that you believed should have been good enough to deliver the life you remember your parents or grandparents having and now doesn't seem to be. It feels unfair and disorienting, maybe. But the fact is that middle class lifestyle is gone for now, and if it does manage to get restored, that restoration will take a generation or two to come.
In the meantime, you have to figure out how to adapt and live that more modest and "more complicated financially" lifestyle. It can be done. Lots of people have been doing it for a long time. Along the way, you'll probably discover that lower class folk who never had the luxuries of your parents and grandparents in the first place were not seeing the world as something they had to "suffer in": they lived in homes, but often with more people in them. They traveled, but more infrequently, less glamorously, and with more pragmatic rationale like "visiting family" than "seeing the world". They had parties, but served simpler dishes on less fancy platters. They had "child care" when two parents worked, but got it by exchanging favors with family or neighbors instead of sending half a paycheck to a prestigious daycare. They laughed, they drank, they had kids. It's not a world of suffering to just not have some luxuries.
Yes and I think many of us remember childhood with rose-colored glasses. My 1970s "middle-class" parents had one car. My mom had to drive my dad to work and pick him up so that she could have a car during the day. When my brother and I were older and in school she worked part time. We lived in a simple ranch-style house. We almost never ate out or went anywhere out of town. Entertainment was going outside and finding something to do. Something like going to a movie was a rare treat. I think of it all fondly today, never with a sense that I had missed out on anything.
Today many young people would consider that life to be stifling, boring, or "suffering" but it was fine. Kids really don't care as long as they feel secure.
> Today many young people would consider that life to be stifling, boring, or "suffering" but it was fine.
There’s major inflation in middle class expectations. People earning median income are expecting a very upper-middle-class lifestyle. A house bigger than their parents owned with nicer finishes, two new cars, frequent travel, eating out constantly, etc.
My parents were on the upper end of middle class when I grew up and we lived in a home with carpet and laminate countertops. Now everyone wants hardwood floors and quartz and more square footage, too. A lot of folks are driving cars that cost a year of their take home pay. Cost of living is too high but expectations seem to have risen even faster.
> Now everyone wants hardwood floors and quartz and more square footage, too.
What you’re sensing is that things that were luxuries are now not. It’s not a big deal to pay $500 for the quartz countertops when your house is $800k.
What has gone up is the cost of essentials and the base level of goods to participate in society: housing, transportation, medicine, and education.
So yeah a TV you thought was untouchable is 3 days of minimum wage work. But it’s orthogonal to why people feel economically disposssed.
This comment is harsh, but I think important to remember for a lot of people who don’t realize that yeah maybe the hand we’re dealt sucks, but you can find joy regardless. People dance, sang, drank and found life and love through all of history, it won’t stop now.
I suspect it's a cultural thing as well, with most (all?) wealthy cultures veering towards individualism and working. Whereas with previous generations, the grandparents and environment would be more involved in raising children and educating the new parents.
But I also feel like people grew up or had to grow up earlier back when. My parents were married, bought a house and had kids on the way by their mid 20's, when I was that age I had just about finished my education and started my first fulltime job, it'd take another decade to buy a house. Buying a house / getting a mortgage is a major commitment, and I think you'd get a big boost of adulthood / personal development if you do that in your mid 20's.
Early twenties family formation bring the norm was more of a postwar thing. The guys that came back from the war really did have to grow up fast (seeing your best friends getting blown up at 18 will do that), and they essentially had zero desire to have racous twenties filled with dating around and traveling and soul searching. They'd had enough chaos already, and were all extremely eager to settle down into a peaceful family life immediately upon their return home. The age of family formation has slowly crept back upward since then, and historically, in normal peaceful times it's usually been late twenties.
I agree. Having children does make ones priorities very cut and dry. I found it a lot easier to "adult" once I had children. My Friends, at the time often asked, "Is having children hard?" I often replied, in the beginning at least, "Children are easy, it's everything else that is hard."
Indeed, it is society's expectations that are hard.
I moved to the middle of nowhere after my kids were born. One day I let my child walk home "alone" from school, for the portion that is on our own property, and of course as soon as you do that a fucking Karen will randomly pop out of nowhere, and start interrogating the child. It is like clockwork. You could be 100 miles from civilization and as soon as you do something someone somewhere disagrees with, a fucking Karen (and even in a minivan, down rugged rural dirt roads, how the fuck did she get there?) will magically be there that exact second with a cell phone at the ready to call CPS. Thankfully I was able to stop her before that happened, as I was actually watching from behind the bushes, which in itself is shameful but saved my ass.
Exactly that. It's not an arbitrary dated threshold that lead to "growing up". It was the event of having kids. I'm still able to look at my current life through the lenses of a 25 year old me and hell, that looks bleak. But I can say with confidence that I'm content. Of course there are little things here and there but mostly everything is fine.
I only wonder if there is going to be a next stage, the magical "midlife crisis", where I'm going to question all my decisions up to that point and I'm curious how I'm going to handle that.
Maybe also because the life spent leading up to the child having was much different earlier - I mean society, jobs, distractions... I'm sure this has an important role as well in setting up expectations and kicking up responsibilities.
People that tell you you need to be ready are lying. The only thing you need to be able to sustain is feeding them, and the rest mostly works itself out. As it has for millennia.
The only reason this would not be the case is if you have specific requirements for the life of your child.
I would encourage you to look at the medical costs of children in the US. My children's braces alone will cost ~$7k-10k over the life of each of them, with insurance, and to do without will cause irreparable oral damage into adulthood. Certainly, this doesn't apply to other developed or developing countries, but to say "you just need to feed them" wildly differs from reality. You're just ignoring suffering at scale by saying "it'll work itself out." It doesn't, and I can provide pages of citations, grounded in data, to support this assertion. Also, having served a short stint as a Guardian ad Litem to advocate for children going through family court, I have anecdotal observations as to failure scenarios of failures to adequately provide for children, both materially and emotionally.
Maybe the "rewarding the young" in the top comment is from the genes of savanna humans when they collected fruit, hunted and didn't care about expensive medical procedures because the latter simply didn't exist?
Perhaps. Genetics doesn't reward rationality, empathy, suffering reduction desire and self awareness, etc, only biological line go up and reproduction fitness. A bug to patch.
> The only reason this would not be the case is if you have specific requirements for the life of your child.
If humans could do without 2000 years ago, if the kids in africa can do without now, then clearly the same is true for your own children. God knows they don’t need $7000 braces, which are unaffordable to 99% of the US population too.
> I've always thought that I'm just extremely late to mature. I'm 36 now and haven't really felt like I sort of "get" things until my early 30s.
I'm 43 and I'm still not convinced that I'm not three kids stacked in a trench coat.
I remember being 33 and buying a house and thinking "Someone call the cops, this banker is letting a child sign mortgage papers".
When I put on nice clothes for a fancy dinner, I feel like I'm cosplaying as a functional and responsible adult, despite having a great career (Staff-level engineer that will likely be promoted to Principal in a few months). I fly First Class and feel out of place, like First Class is reserved for people that have their shit together.
Someone said that this feeling goes away when your same-gendered parent dies, but my dad passed in 2019 and it's still pervasive.
"Everything before 40 is research" I once heard, and every day, I find it to be more true.
I'm a great parent because it is what is necessary and my children had no choice or consent in existing, but I also tell anyone younger that unless they are absolutely sure they want kids and are ready for decades of suck, don't do it [1] [2] [3]. Live your best life, be true to yourself, find your passion and joy exploring and being curious; one can do this without children. If one needs kids to mature or become a better human, find a therapist first. Also, maturity is optional. You have to grow old, you don't have to grow up (take on responsibility unnecessary to take care of yourself, broadly speaking). Religious beliefs aside (potential reincarnation and whatnot), enjoy life, you only get one run through your part of the timeline. Don't waste it on the expectations or belief systems of others.
[1] (lack of support systems, both social and familial, ~$380k in 2025 dollars to raise a child 0-18 in the US not including daycare and college, etc; n=1, ymmv)
If it makes you feel any better, that's about the age I started functioning mostly like an adult. It started around 30 but took a good decade to take hold.
Just because people can physically, biologically have children does not automatically imply that they can - or should - be the only ones to raise the children. Children used to be a community effort; the US strayed from this a long time ago. Of course it would be much harder to raise a kid at 22 (or 16, or) than 40!
Yet our physiology is tuned to become parents at 16 rather than 40.
I think nature doesn't care whether it's easier or better or whatever. It only cares for _more_ children to survive until their own time to have children.
you just restated what i said. perhaps i could have been more clear.
by whatever mechanism, humans can breed at a much younger age than they can feasibly take care of their offspring. Up until maybe 75-100 years ago, "it takes a village" wasn't just a trite canard, it was actually how you raised children. I just finished watching a youtuber explain that raising children after having had to move away from your extended family because of affordability is suck and "maybe that's why young people are waiting to have kids, because there's no village anymore."
We used to have grandparents around and extended family. Think about how different life was 50,100 or, 500 years ago. Not enough time for evolution to respond
And we have to guess that evolution didn't "respond".
Sooooo, we have some lack of fit, evolved over 10s of thousands of years for life as it was then and for the last ~5000 years in selected cultures faced with something quite different, powerful governments and armies, metals, weapons, tools, sailing ships, agriculture, domestic animals, ....
Supposedly for those 10s of thousands of years in parts of Europe people formed tribes and had some communal living, that is, in a long house, maybe 50-100 yards long 10-20 yards wide, with walls and roof forming a semi-circle. So, women and children got their socialization, security, lessons, skills, not merely from a couple, a bonded husband and wife living just as a couple, but from the tribe as a whole. I.e., now, for a lot for a person to learn and have, including shelter, we are depending heavily just on the mother and father.
A lot of cost of mature SaaS products come from security, scaling, expensive sales teams, etc. For me, if I have something sandboxed, not available to the public, and only powerful enough to serve only _me_ as a customer, then I don't need to pay those extra costs and I can build something a lot simpler, while still maintaining the core feature that I need.
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